Vigilant Solutions is a private company that is in the business of collecting and storing high resolution pictures of license plates. It has taken around 2.2 billion of these license plate photos to date, according to this January 27th article from The Atlantic. When a picture of a license plate is taken, the location of that plate, as well as the time, is also stored. Vigilant captures around 80 million new images per month, and it is selling this information to the police. 3,000 law enforcement agencies are the happy customers of Vigilant Solutions, according to the Atlantic article. That’s 30,000 police officers that have access to that database. Instead of obtaining a warrant from a judge to install a tracking device on your car, they can just access a database that has continually-updated information on your whereabouts via Vigilant’s photos.
Now, according to this Reason article, Vigilant Solutions is installing its cameras on certain Texas police cruisers that syncs with a government warrants database and lets the cop know who has an outstanding warrant. The cop has a credit card reader conveniently installed in his cruiser so those with outstanding traffic fines can pay immediately. Oh, and the reader has a 25% service charge, payable to Vigilant Solutions.
