Wyden presses White House drug office to release its 2024 MITRE review of plate-reader surveillance

The HIDTA database mirrors city plate-reader data onto federal databases, 404 Media reported last month ^[1]. Whatever retention and access limits a city sets on its own system, the federal copy falls under HIDTA's practices. Those practices are the subject of the privacy report Wyden says ONDCP commissioned ^[7].

The federal channel is documented in press reporting. Wyden wrote his letter in response to 404 Media's investigation and cites that reporting directly ^[4]. "404 Media has reported that the HIDTA program is being used to aggregate location data on Americans derived from Flock, Axon, and other vendors' ALPRs," Wyden wrote ^[3].

On the MITRE study, he wrote: "This review was conducted by MITRE and completed in 2024, but ONDCP refused to provide it to my office and has subsequently not made that report public. I urge you to make this review public." ^[11] The reporting does not include a reply from the office or the vendors, or the text of any city agreement.

HIDTA sits under ONDCP ^[5]. That is the office that ran Hemisphere, a secretive cell phone data surveillance project ^[6]. On this record, plate collection is one part of a sustained line of surveillance run from that office ^[6][8]. Wyden describes several such programs: "There is currently limited transparency into these HIDTA-funded surveillance programs, but ONDCP has commissioned an assessment into the privacy practices of these programs that should be released to the public," he wrote ^[8].

For a city or agency that contracts for plate-reader data, the agreements that move it run between HIDTA and cities and towns across the country ^[2]. Whether signing one creates legal exposure for a city is unsettled on this record. The federal government's own account of how the mirrored data is handled is in a review the office has not released ^[9].