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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."
Over there, cars are installed with a fare-paying device which automatically pays road-toll depending where and when you're driving on which section of the road.
It's bad, but nothing shocking.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
aren't there covers you can put on license plates so cameras can't read your digits?
This coming from the same state that also tails rappers when they come to shoot their music videos.
The only reason that I'm really worried is that I like to drive without my pants on sometimes.
Are you so blind as to not see the implications related to states having the possibility to take pictures of your plate? They've been testing it around here (France) and i'll tell you, i think you may change your mind the day you get a speeding ticket in the mail, along with that picture as proof.
There's a big difference between what a normal human can see, keep track of, and correlate and what an automated system monitoring every car that drives through town.
Automated systems that try to analyze driving patterns and find "suspicious behavior". People then get watched, searched, harassed, etc because some data mining program put out by PerpAnalysis thinks they're a criminal.
Automated traces on political groups. Find the license plates of some political group the government doesn't like and make detailed analyses of their comings and goings. Who talks to who, who's fucking who, where and when do they eat, etc. Do they go to the drugstore a lot? Doctors office? I'd guess once you do all the traffic analysis you'd get a pretty good picture of just about anyone and any group you wanted.
Does this break privacy? I don't know, maybe not. I still find it frightening as hell.
AccountKiller
They installed red light cameras in several intersections on the premise that it would make things safer.
Many of the tickets issued ended up being thrown out because there was a financial incentive to cheat. The company that was contracted to put the cameras in and calibrate them got a fixed amount per ticket, actually much more than the cut the city would get. Some of the timings on the lights were questionable.
The cameras generated millions of dollars. Do you really want to trust a system like this? I would have more confidence if there was no fine attached to the infraction.
Do you really think this will make things safer? It doesn't help when the ticket arrives weeks later.
Also, California laws have been changed to ticket the owner of the car, regardless of who was really driving. In other words, you can be financially responsible for someone elses infraction.
Automated justice systems cannot be trusted.
Exactly what does it take to be on the 'special monitoring' list? There are already protections about in what ways you can be harassed by following and surveillance, but they aren't mentioned by this article. My pessimism suspects that they aren't considered by the system.
This automated system is akin to having a police officer in each location with a camera, whose sole responsibility is to record license plates. How would you feel about living in that society?
Even if it takes a warrant to be put on this 'lookout' list, do you really trust giving up the rest of this data for the "three months" they'll allegedly have it? Who is allowed to access it while it's there? What kind of accesses are allowed? Where is the line between privacy and security? To take it a step further, how would you feel about having your every move within the whole town recorded?
I'd say that this system has too much potential for abuse.
-Zipwow
I don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.
At 2 AM. With the house surrounded, and police ready to sneak into the house. Fortunately, something else had woken her up, and while she was walking down the hall she heard the cops or saw the flashlights.
Took an hour to explain to the police that the dealer no longer lived there, moved around the corner, they left but didn't entirely believe my co-worker or her husband that they weren't the subjects of the search.
Your MA experience is just good old fashioned profiling.
..what possible belief could they have that it would actually help fight crime? It's far more believable that they would see it contributing to the traffic fine trough.
Frankly, I see local policemen and governments as only being selectively interested in fighting crime anyway. Not once ever has a policeman taken any interest in any buglary reports I've filed throughout my lifetime but they're interest every day in the speed in which I drive. One makes money and the other costs money. Seems clear to me.
Manalapan is basic the south, richer end of Palm Beach. Palm Beach County. The only thing in Manalapan is ~200 $4 million+ homes, all situated on a thin strip of land between Lake Worth (the lake) and the ocean. Basically the residents want to turn their town into a gated community. This policy would allow the police to identify traffic into and out of the community as desirable or not, just as any gated community. With the synergies of information from the PATRIOT act, they can easily identify who is a "worker" "resident" or potential thief (or worse, a real estate agent).
The police in Manalapan are already looking at what color the people are who are driving, but it's difficult to tell if brown people are working there, instead of (naturally) robbing houses. As far as I'm concerned, the residents of Manalapan are a bunch of well-back rich bastards with nothing better to do than whine and complain. This is just another in a long line of questionable governmental actions/decisions coming out of Manalapan.
As far as my credibility, I've lived most of my life in Jupiter, FL (about 20 miles north).
For those who don't know, a "well-back" is a derogotory term for a transplanted New Yorker/New Jerseyite.
For instance --
Well, back in New Jersey, we got good deli...
I think you are close to the truth. Don't be surprised when a black driver ends up in a car that spontaneously lands on the "be on the lookout" list.
In theory if we were to require all U.S. citizens to carry GPS chips in their heads at all time, kidnapping crimes would plummet. On the other hand, you'd have people pointing out that the government could use this to monitor and invade our privacy.
Same thing with this report. In theory the government could seriously crack down on reckless driving (at least running red lights) with a few software adjustments. That way they could just send a letter to the red light runner saying 'we know you ran a red light at X street on Y day. Do it again and the next letter will contain a traffic ticket.' Etc. On the other hand, (again in this case) as the parent post pointed out, the government could just 'quietly' turn 'three months' into 'three decades' and no one would be the wiser. Ultimately leading to, yes again, privacy issues.
You people seriously need to stop playing Illuminati!
I write software that does similar things to this, except way more indepth than just a license plate scan.
You know what hapens when you do a lookup on a plate that has no crime associated with it? Nothing! No one is reading your biography or analyzing your porno rentals just because you drove through their town. The only info that will pop up is if the Vehicle is actually the subject of an alert. These alerts are generated one of two ways. #1 The vehicle was witnessed at a crime scene, or #2 the owner called 911 and reported the vehicle missing. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who commits a crime just voluntarily exposed themselves to public inquiry. And if it was your car that was stolen, I'm sure you'd be quite happy that the plates were being scanned. The only people who have anything to fear are those that are trying to hide something.
Just last week, our software allowed all the police officers in Utah to have access to the citations history of the highway patrol...including warnings given out. The very next day after we activated it, a kid got pulled over doing 94 in a 65 and gave the patrollman the usual BS story of "honest officer, I've never been pulled over...I was just trying to pass someone." Turns out he had been warned twice in the past month for 76 in a 65 and 82 in a 65. Tell me how he didn't deserve the reckless driving citation they gave him after seeing his apparent complete disregard for speeding AND BEING WARNED TWICE about it.
1984 My A$$! God forbid the folks who risk their lives to provide for the public safety actually have some decent tools to help them out.
I've dirtied my hands writing poetry, for the sake of seduction; that is, for the sake of a useful cause. --Dostoevsky
Want to explain how? The government is exempt from the Data Protection Act so asking the government for "your file" and getting anything back seems like fiction. Care to explain just exactly how he went about it?
Frankly, what you're suggesting seems so unlikely that I'm inclined to call "bullshit".
Either way, my original post stands: the government doesn't have a network of cameras tracking the individual. If they did, crime would be non-existant: the fact that it isn't only further proves my point. In fact, the majority of CCTV cameras that you'll come across in the UK are privately operated, in stores, car parks, on public transport systems, etc. And I can tell you from experience that these aren't networked in any meaningful way.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Not on a public street, you don't.
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
April 04, 2004
YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK (FOR THEMSELVES):
It's bad enough that they do this, but it's even worse that they brag about it. But wait, it gets worse:
So much for political oversight. So a doctor en route to an emergency is the same as a cop who's just driving too fast? Sheesh. Are these people for real?
UPDATE: Rand Simberg observes:
Indeed.
Posted by Glenn Reynolds at April 04, 2004 04:27 PM
They can read the plate, because that reflector shit doesn't 100% work. Thes use some software and can still read your license plate. Of course, since they had to go through all that extra hassle, they're now pissed and will indeed place you in a world of shit.
What that web site doesn't tell you is that most license plate recognition systems do not require special lighting in daylight hours. If its visible to the naked eye, it can be visible to cameras.
Why is it that we think ignorance is some God-given right and get mad when anyone disspells it.
The point here is that the extra information wasn't really relevant, and merely appeared to be inserted to boost the submitter's ego. It becomes more obvious if you rephrase it:
"Just one step close to George Orwell's vision of 1984. Oh, and George Orwell was actually a pen name for Eric Arthur Blair."
His real name DOESN'T MATTER here. It would matter if you were talking about his life rather than his books, but since the only reason for mentioning Orwell was the (tediously obvious) Nineteen Eighty Four reference, it was completely extraneous. I'd prefer less pretentious crap and more careful typing (he writes "close" for "closer").
I eagerly await the next YRO story -- I'm hoping for something like:
"Is this just one step closer to a Jughashvilian state? Oh yeah, Jughashvili was Stalin's real name, by the way. I'm pretty fucking smart, me."
Sure, it's an invasion of privacy! Just think about it! Your car gets stolen... you call the local police department and they tell you "No problem, sir, our OCR camera system will find your car in no time!"
Then you remember you put a phantomplate on it... and you're SCREWED!
They'll be shown nothing. You don't want an automated system giving you millions of "no problems found" messages. You certianly don't want it to also include personal data with that. You'd never be able to hire the staff it would take to sort through that and it would be stupid to boot. What you care about are problems, so the system only pops up a report when it picks up something wrong, like a car that is stolen.
It's like a packet sniffer. We have one at work to look for net problems. Now nothing is more useless than turning it on and just logging everything that goes in or out of the building. It's just a bunch of random shit, almost all of which is perfectly normal. We'd need 1000x our staff to stand any chance at sorting through it all. So the sniffer has rules for things it ought to look for (like Phatbot scanning). If that happens, we get an alert on it.
I'm not seeing any real problem here. A right to privacy isn't a right to ba anonymous. The government, or anyone else for that matter, is welcome to watch and identify you in public. Their right ends at your door, however. That is what the right to privacy entails, that you can't be monitored in your home. It does not mean that you can always be totally anonymous when in public.
"You ain't from around here? are ya boy?"
This is just great! An automated way to harass people from...
(insertstatethatbeatgators)
Yehaw! dagnabbit we got them there city slickers with this here dumbfouled thinking machine. mebee it wants a sippa hooch?
*_bzzzzzzt_*
Like xs650 said, all digital cameras are sensitive to IR light (the ccd is more sensitive to the lower end of the spectrum). All digital and video cameras have filters to "fix" this, and have been getting vastly better in the last few years. Thats why those straight to video titles which you sometimes watch alone at night seem to have a different color balance (more green) and veins can often been seen through skin (hotter than surrounding skin, especially on the actresses which perform in various states of undress in all kinds of conditions = lower skin temp) I once demod an exceptionally sensitive video camera which saw through thin clothing (in night mode), especially thin, blak dresses. The clothes looked like a shadow, and you could see the skin and details underneath. The camera was just a standard model you can buy in most stores (should of course be called PVC Pervmaster3000)
Completely wrong.
London has a congestion charging system that requires drivers travelling into a centrally-located zone. The cameras are located at the zone boundary and track only the registration numbers (licence plates) of those vehicles that enter the zone between 7.00am and 6.30pm, Monday to Friday, excluding public holidays. This is done only to record which vehicles need to pay the charge on any given day; nothing more, nothing less.
All data, except in the case of vehicles that do not pay the charge within the alloted time (for which data is kept as evidence until payment is resolved), is deleted within 24 hours. This, together with other information on the scheme can be found on its official web site.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Precisely. If I had a nickel for everyone who conflates the issue of how the law is with how the law should be, I'd be Bill Gates-rich ;)
You do not have a right to privacy in public. But you do have a right not to be surveilled by the police without some sort of check by the judiciary.
But that's not a blanket protection against all forms of surveillance - that right isn't absolute. Generally, the judiciary only comes into play when the police want to go somewhere where you have some reasonable expectation that what you're doing is not something that the public at large is privy to - your house, your place of business, your telephone, and so forth. The police don't need a warrant from a judge to simply follow you around all day and take notes on where you go as you're out and about on your daily business. Should they? I'm not so sure - walking through the mall, your presence is obvious to anyone who cares to look, but essentially we'd be asking the police to ignore that which is directly in front of their faces.
The important question to ask about these sorts of things is not whether they are permitted by the constitution, but whether the Founding Fathers would have forbidden them if they had any idea that they were possible. With the advance of technology, it is important to reevaluate our principles frequently. I just can't imagine Jefferson, for instance, being in favor of this sort of thing. It just doesn't sound like him.
Perhaps. But I'm not so sure they would have endorsed a blanket right to what we might call "public anonymity", where one is not, say, speaking or writing anonymously - that I think they would have understood, with the probable exception of John Adams ;) - but rather having anonymity retrofitted on to your actual physical presence. I don't think the concept of "disappearing in the crowd" had quite as much meaning for them then as it does for us now - the crowd was a lot smaller back then, and it was just harder to be anonymous in public. Nowadays, we enclose ourselves in our metal boxes as we travel, and like to think that the feeling of insularity that this engenders is something we're somehow entitled to. But historically speaking, that insularity never really existed as it does now - if you wanted to travel from New York to Boston in 1789, you were most likely either walking or riding a horse, but either way, your face was out there for the world to see as you did it. And even if you'd never been to Boston before, I don't think the Founders would have signed on to the notion that nobody in Boston, including the local authorities, should have the ability to find out more about you.
It may have been slower and less formal than it is now, but I have trouble believing that they would have had serious objections to the Boston authorities writing a letter to the New York authorities, one that says that a shifty, suspicious looking fellow who calls himself "freejung" and says he's from New York just showed up in town, and do you know anything about him. And that is, in essence, a background check, the nature of which is not so far removed from what we do now - the only real difference is that such inquiries are both faster and more accurate now than they were in the past, and something makes me doubt that the Founders would see speed and accuracy as inherently bad things.
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
In the UK (in London, at least), the police have these devices in their cars. They check the numberplate of every car that goes past in the opposite direction against car tax databases and suchlike, and if the police are good enough drivers, I guess they can identify a criminal realtime and then go off and chase them. I've also heard there are cameras with a similar purpose in petrol stations - and to catch people who have previously driven off without paying for their petrol.
heh, well if that's your attitude towards invasion of privacy then I suggest you never visit Mexico until you're at least over the age of 45. It's quite routine here in Guadalajara for the police to simply randomly stop young people walking around late at night and completely search them. I've been here 3 months and I've been lucky as it's only happened to me once. Couple of my friends down here have had it happen 4 or 5 times each. Course then again bribing the police if they find anything is routine here as well so...
Basically, cameras dotted around the place capture the registration number of the car and stored in a database. You can then pay at petrol stations, shops, by SMS using a system which is linked back to the database.
--
This sig is inoffensive.
What do you do when the car hit and runs you?
Writhe in pain. That's what I usually do.
More seriously, you hope someone else witnessed the whole thing; you shouldn't be craning your neck to see who hit you.
Even more seriously, I was hit-and-run from behind in my van on the freeway a few years back. I saw him coming and was able to prepare and maintain control. (I was going 55; he must've been going 80 or more.) He kept control, passed me and took off. I had the presence of mind to write down the plate number, car model and description and driver description--we looked at each other as he passed. I called the police; I was rattled and gave them the wrong highway, so they had to call back and ask me where I was, and it was the next city over--a diferent department. So I had to wait about 45min to an hour because of my gaff, but the point is that after getting all that info the investigator wrote me back a month later saying the license plate was expired and nobody was at the address given for that plate. Case closed.
Yep, them license plates really help catch those criminals.
(By the way, this was a 3-lane freeway that was empty except for me in the middle lane and a truck I was passing on the right; that's when I saw him coming really fast from behind; he made half a move to the left lane but looked as if he wasn't going to make it there before hitting me. My options were to speed up (dangerous because I was more likely to lose control if he hit me; besides I was a loaded van and couldn't accellerate quickly), slow down (bad idea because that closes the distance faster) or try to change lanes, but the truck was blocking my escape right and the vehicle behind was straddling the middle and left lanes and had made a half-assed effort to get in the left shortly before hitting me. It was a bright sunny day.)