IN RESPONSE to your May 13 editorial “Newton: Call off the parking dogs,’’ the mayor’s office would like to clarify that the new Automatic License Plate Reader system will be used only in free, time-limited parking areas in Newton. Metered parking spaces will not be monitored using this technology, and the way the city enforces those areas will remain unchanged.
The new technology will help us monitor the non-metered parking spaces in and around our villages. Often these areas are fringe areas between business centers and residential neighborhoods, several of which are near MBTA stations or bus hubs where commuters are parking all day. In the past, city parking officers have had to manually write out the license plate numbers for each car in these areas and return later, checking against their notes. Needless to say, this is a slow method. The new technology will speed this process and allow officers to monitor more of these areas more frequently.
The use of this system is a prime example of helping our law-enforcement officers work in smarter, more efficient ways. The editorial states that “the basic goal of parking enforcement . . . is to promote the regular turnover of spaces.’’ We want to do this in the metered and non-metered areas, and this is the tool to ensure that we can effectively monitor both.
Sarah C. Ecker
Director of community relations City of Newton
Surveillance’s shadow
WITH ENOUGH state-of-the-art technology, even a meter maid could be on the front lines of domestic surveillance.
Your May 10 front-page article “Video eye to scan for Newton parking lapses’’ highlights Newton’s fancy new toys for robotically raising revenue, but that’s only half the story. In other places, automatic license plate recognition technology is being used for invasive intelligence purposes, trolling the streets, scanning and capturing one plate every second, and comparing that info against state and federal national security databases.
I don’t begrudge Newton its parking tickets (well, maybe just a little), but techno-surveillance that presumably tracks not only license plates but location and can indefinitely store that info in state and federal databases is more than a wee bit creepy.
Before Newton goes too far, let’s make sure we know some basics: What data are they collecting, how long is it stored, and with whom is it shared?
Gavi Wolfe
Legislative counsel
American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts
Boston 
