Big Brother Will Be Watching You In Florida

An anonymous reader submits "The Florida Times Union is running a story about the city of Manalapan putting up cameras and an automatic optical recognition system to check the license plates of every car to drive through town. As usual the article spins the system as something positive to battle crime. Just one step close to Eric Arthur Blair's vision of 1984."

Comments

beat the system

[Anonymous Coward]

www.phantomplate.com

Re:beat the system

[commodoresloat]

Some moron moderated the parent offtopic. Check it out: phantom plates for your car. The spray on is the coolest; you spray the license plate and it doesn't show up on the cameras.

Re:beat the system

[AHumbleOpinion]

If it doesn't work, then why would you be in a world of shit?

To be prosecuted intent is required, not success.

Re:beat the system

[squidinkcalligraphy]

Don't worry; before too long there'll be RFID tags embedded in the number plates. Hell, there probably already are in some places, they jsut haven't told you.

On a different note, the other interesting numberplate blocking system I read about used a fast LCD display which very rapidly flashes between covering the left half and right half of the numberplate. To the naked eye, invisible. But to a camera, they only get half the number. If you ask me, with half the number and the model and colour of the car, they've probably got you anyway. But it's a cool idea all the same. But by that stage you may as well get one of those rotating thingies Night-Rider had.

Eric Arthur who?

[lambent]

I was about to ask, until I discovered that George Orwell is a pen-name.

Allready happens in UK

[linuxpoweredtrekkie]

In London we have cameras which recognise numberplates to check if people have paid the congestion charge to enter city centre. Numberplate recognition is also used on speed cameras to automatically send speeding tickets to offenders.

Re:Blocking the cameras

[morcheeba]

I doubt it's pure infrared cameras - that would be expensive. It's probably a normal camera that is panchromatic and is illuminated with IR light - the advantage there is that it is also sensitive to what the eye sees, while not blinding drivers at night.

One solution is to take advantage of the limited exposure range of the camera by illuminating your license plate with lots and lots of infrared light - it'll look normal to people, but not the camera. Hopefully you can make it appear to be just a white blob. Actually, you don't even need to do the whole plate, just a letter or two.

One better...

[Cyno01]

linkey

Quantitative difference in expectations of privacy

[geekotourist]

Previously in public I might not have had a full expectation of privacy, but I had an expectation of humanity. We all did. A policeman glances at you. Unless he knows you, he doesn't have your name. Even if he does, unless he writes it down he won't remember much more than "I saw Fred earlier this week, perhaps near Crispy Cream?"(1) He knows nothing about where you were or where you're going if you're out of his view.

A camera tapes you. If one tape-reviewer doesn't know you, he can ask until he finds someone who does. The tape can be matched with other tapes to see where you were and where you're going. The tape will be stored and reviewed by ever better automatic recognition tech, and those results stored in ever larger and cheaper databases.

I think this is a quantitative change in the "expectation of privacy" one has in public.

We are getting very close to "P-day" (coined by Brad Templeton): the last day of privacy, because from then on all our actions will be tracked retroactively if not currently. Or, as he puts it: "So you're already being watched. The computer that is watching you just hasn't been born quite yet."

Two good essays on why this type of surveillance hurts society and violates our rights:

• From the Best Essay Ever on why privacy is a fundamental right: [Its not too long- just go read it]

  "[Talking about Canada...] If these measures are allowed to go forward and the privacy-invasive principles they represent are accepted [then before long] our movements through the public streets will be relentlessly observed through proliferating police video surveillance cameras. Eventually, these cameras will likely be linked to biometric face-recognition technologies ... [indentifying] us by name and address as we go about our law-abiding business in the streets... I am well aware that these scenarios are likely to sound, to most people, like alarmist exaggeration. Certainly, the society I am describing bears no relation to the Canada we know. But anyone who is inclined to dismiss the risks out of hand should pause first to consider that the privacy-invasive measures already being implemented or developed right now would have been considered unthinkable in our country just a short year ago."

  The place to stop unjustified intrusions on a fundamental human right such as privacy is right at the outset, at the very first attempt to enter where the state has no business treading. Otherwise, the terrain will have been conceded, and the battle lost...

  Imagine, then, how we will feel if it becomes routine for bureaucrats, police officers and other agents of the state to paw through all the details of our lives: where and when we travel, and with whom; who are the friends and acquaintances with whom we have telephone conversations or e-mail correspondence; what we are interested in reading or researching; where we like to go and what we like to do...

  If we allow the state to sweep away the normal walls of privacy that protect the details of our lives, we will consign ourselves psychologically to living in a fishbowl...Anyone who has lived in a totalitarian society can attest that what often felt most oppressive was precisely the lack of privacy.

• A Watched Populace Never Boils "People often ask why a loss of privacy... is a restriction on freedom. ... Some welcome it, feeling that the extra surveillance will cut down on crime, and provide some increased level of safety or imagined safety. But the truth is that invasions of privacy invade our freedoms quite directly. This is true even if the surveillance isn't abused by the watchers, even though history shows that it always is.

  When we feel watched, we feel less free. We censor ourselve

Re:ONE good thing

[ewhac]

You know what hapens when you do a lookup on a plate that has no crime associated with it?

• Name
• Address
• Zip code
• Social Security Number (mandatory since 1994 to obtain CA license; true in FL?)
• Automobile particulars:
  • Make
  • Model & year
  • Engine number
  • Financing institution (if loan not yet paid off)
• All past offenses, including speeding and parking infractions.

So the real question is, what will the computer (and the human reviewer) actually be shown when they run the query on my license plate? If the computer only shows, "No outstanding warrants," then I'm fine with that.

Something tells me, however, they'll be shown a lot more.

Schwab