MONTPELIER — From the proliferation of license plate readers to the installation of face-identification software at the Department of Motor Vehicles, state and local government in recent years has invested significant sums of money in technology that can be used to track citizens. Now one Vermont organization is saying enough is enough and will launch a campaign next week aimed at illuminating the scope of taxpayer-funded surveillance activities that have cropped up in the wake of 9/11. The Vermont chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union will unveil a report Tuesday highlighting the evolution in recent years of the state’s information-gathering apparatus. As the organization says in a YouTube video released this week announcing its efforts, “We used to be a state where both the notion and the reality of privacy were true.” “But over the last dozen years, Vermont has been transformed into a state where we’re being watched,” the video says. Allen Gilbert, executive director of the ACLU of Vermont, said residents here have largely been caught off guard by the cumulative effect of the new technologies. “Many of these have crept in rather slowly, and I don’t think anyone realized the scope of the individual pieces, and the power of the system when all those pieces are aggregated,” Gilbert said. Components of the state and federal surveillance program include: license plate readers that aggregate driver data for use by law enforcement personnel; cellphone-tracking technology that allows police, often without a warrant, to determine the location of […]

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