Slashdot Mirror
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."
www.phantomplate.com
I was about to ask, until I discovered that George Orwell is a pen-name.
They say they'll destroy the data after 3 months. While this whole thing reeks evil to me, at least [they say] they're not going to be storing all this info in perpetuity.
-PM
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
All you have to do is drive into town in reverse!!!
For a slashdotter, that means not buying anything from an ebay seller who lives there.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
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?
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.
if they want to catch people running red lights they could just do photos at intersections. this would not be helpful for tracking people, because cars don't neccessarily mean that the owner is in it.
Normally, I would be against "big brother", but in this case aren't cameras basically able to see only what the general public would be able to see anyway?
Computers obviously are less discriminatory and hopefully more reliable than a human, if the software is done right. However, the issue is privacy, so I digress. But, computer vs. policeman aside, what difference does it make if a police officer was stationed looking for people?
If a camera was focused on private property (like on a house), then that would certainly be an invasion of privacy (that kind of survellience is hopefully illegal), or the government had "special" means that cannot be easily monitored such as those security blimps then I would agree it's a loss of privacy.
I'm certainly for as little government as possible. But in this case is privacy really being lost? The same thing can be done with humans, afterall, and no one complains about loss of privacy by seeing a police officer legally on public land looking for criminals.
---
Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
Manalapan has a population of 321. It's probably just some guy with a pair of binoculars.
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.
From the submitter:
"Just one step close to Eric Arthur Blair's vision of 1984"
Sir, CCTV being used to monitor traffic is nothing new and being a slashdot reader muchless, lucky article submitter, I'd advise you to check the fastenings of your cranial mindwave protection device.
All who got the memo know quite well that 1984 conditions will have arrived in full when the TiVo records you.
Good day.
How is this NOT something helpful in the fight against crime? How is this an invasion of privacy?
ie, "Courts have ruled that in a public area, you have no expectation of privacy,"
System scans license plate --> finds license plate is for a stolen car --> police notified of location in real time.
How is that a bad thing, again?
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
Fortunately, in Florida, Big Brother is 87, confined to a Rascal scooter, and has very poor eyesight.
You know what?
of a story my brother told me (my big brother as it happens) about a speed camera that was put on the road somewhere in england. It was pointed against the traffic and took pictures of speeding vehicles from the front. Some pictures showed motorcyclists going through at 110mph with the middle finger sticking up!
Drill baby drill - on Mars
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.
So now that they have these cameras set up to "protect our rights", who is going to stop them from pointing them into your homes? Are you going to? I doubt it, they'll put a guise over it and say there have been cat burglers or something and they are trying to catch them. Pretty soon you will be under surveillance in your own home.
It's not what they're doing right now, but what they CAN do. This is just one step towards that direction.
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.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
linkey
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Really, why must there be a single standard for everyone?
Let them be.
There's a big difference between being in public and having everything you do systematically logged by the government. The potential for abuse of such a system is very high. To consider one scenario, say your spouse hires a sleazy private detective to check up on you, who has a contact in the Ministry of Privacy (obOrwell), who finds out that you drove your car to Ogdenville about six months ago while you were supposed to be at a conference in Capital City.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
There are two problems with this, and they are both problems that require looking backwards and forwards simultaneously, something that is extremely difficult.
/.ers will disagree) that mandatory instruction on gun safety should be a prerequisite to purchase a firearm or a hunting license. But this is a subject that reasonable people can disagree on; those against argue that it will lead to an abuse of power in the form of the government collecting our guns.
/.er to a Nazi!) did not go from election to Final Solution overnight; it took a gradual dehumanization of the Jews to get there. But if it's cameras checking our cars today, will we have to have RFID chips in our drivers licenses tomorrow to monitor our movements? Those could help catch speeders -- but at what cost?
Problem 1: ABUSE. Every example wherein more power has been given to the "authorities" has led to abuse, either personal (as in Bill Clinton's use of FBI files) or institutional (the FBI keeping many of those files to begin with). Certainly, giving up some power is necessary and good; this is the basis of democratic theory for everone from Locke to Mill. But every new power taken by the authorities must be met with a benefit-cost analysis of the risks involved versus the potential rewards. I think we will mostly agree that letting the state enforce rules about who may drive is generally a good thing; it means that you have to show competence in driving before being set loose to potentially hurt innocent people. I believe (tho' many
Problem 2: SLIPPERY SLOPE. This is somewhat overused as a cliche, but it's a valid point. Once we are desensitized to one thing, it becomes that much easier for the next thing to happen. The Third Reich (Godwin's law does not apply; I am not comparing any
The adage that "if you're not doing bad, you have nothing to fear" only works if 1) there is never any abuse of police power, and 2) the criminals all obey the rules.
Unfortunately, these two conditions are never possible.
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.
Most digital cameras are somewhat sensitive to IR. On some it is filtered out.
Take a look at you TV remotes LED though the viewfinder and a digital camera. Chances are you will be able to see the remotes LED light up.
http://www.echeng.com/photo/infrared/
..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.
... installs some cameras and suddenly it's the Feds giving you a "rat hat".
Put down the bongs, people.
Radar clocks Mini at Mach 3
Wait just a damned minute! Your wife has headlights?
What do you mean councilman Jones never shows up for work on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays? Let's have a talk with him
could be useful
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Apparently half the readers don't live in Florida...
They have a HUGE problem with people running lights here. I mean, HUGE. It's not a one or two car going through lights...it's like FIVE going through the lights. It's not like it's at one intersection either. Happens all the time.
Maybe this will finally cut down on that from happening, and the accidents it's been causing.
It's ironic to me that many people who are afraid of the coming "1984", could care less about the coming "Brave New World". I think it's up to decent folk to stop both.
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:
"[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.
When we feel watched, we feel less free. We censor ourselve
Government agents could theoretically follow me around everywhere I go without breaking any rules; however, I have not given them a reason to do so, and they can't follow everyone around without spending so much money they'd break the entire economy. The reason why things like this scare people is because it implies that eventually it will be technologically feasible to collect large amounts of data about large amounts of people with little to no manpower. This results in a net decrease in privacy for everyone because things that used to be private only by difficulty lost their only protection.
Member of Orkut? Annoyed with spam?
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
How is this different from a cop with a laptop sitting at the gates?
We've come to falsely expect privacy because our world has grown so large. In older days, you would be recognized if you walked into town - without any biometric ID or other technology but common knowledge.
Interesting that you mention dehumanization. One of the things to remember is that today we live in far larger cities than the Germans of then did, and we know fewer of the people we interact with. People around us are perceived as anonymous actors.
The other thing to remember is that people dislike one class of person "getting away with" something they can't, or just breaking the law in general.
As you said, it's easier to pass laws and violate the rights of people you've dehumanized, so consider: whom are we told to dislike as lawbreakers?
Quick list off the top of my head:
Consider all the laws that have been passed against this anonymous group of people. Now consider what protests regarding the violation of their civil rights are usually met with: "they're guilty. They can't avoid that."
Being able to automatically catch more bad guys will probably lead to more "bad guy" crimes. More people dehumanized, and "unpersoned."
So, ask yourself: if you got 20 people in a room and took one of the above criminals and said their rights were being violated, how many of them do you think you could get to protest? Yes, some categories are easier than others.
But several of these categories of people could arguably be doing nothing "wrong." Speeding isn't dangerous, deviating more than 5 MPH from the average speed of traffic is. Ask an actuary. Drug dealers aren't killing people, it's the turf wars and the surrounding problems. Quite a few high school dealers are pretty innocuous. Child-support delinquency isn't cut-and-dry, it's case-by-case. Drug users aren't hurting anyone but themselves.
But it's far easier to dehumanize an entire class of people.
Just something to think about.
Seems like this takes the approach that everyone is guilty until they are proved, by a police scan of the license plates, to be innocent.
When they started doing random seatbelt and sobriety tests, they skirted the issue by making it "random", i.e. every 10th car or something, instead of based on "perception" by the officers. Since they were not checking everyone, it wasn't guilt until proven innocent, and since it was random, it wasn't targetting any specific group based on outside appearances.
Of course, in our post-9-11 loss of sensibility, I doubt anyone will seriously challenge this.
Benjamin Franklin has a couple of appropriate quotes:
All human situations have their inconveniences. We feel those of the present but neither see nor feel those of the future; and hence we often make troublesome changes without amendment, and frequently for the worse.
And most appropriate of all:
Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
. 62,400 repetitions make one truth -- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Next phaze.. Barcode tattoos for all..
Ok.. Barcode tattoos for some.. Miniture american flags for the rest!
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
He managed to get into the car with his ass exposed above the steering wheel and drive through the intersection with the license plate covered up. How he managed to steer the car is beyond me.
Can anyone confirm if this story is true or bogus?
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
Leading to a police state in what used to be the USA. The "Patriot" Act and similar nonsense merely nibbles away at a few rights. Just a minor annoyance or inconvenience, right? Then there are "minor" annoyances like the Prez being able to willy-nilly label someone an "enemy combatant" whether you were actually picked up on some field of battle somewhere and tossed in a cell indefinitely with no recourse. No contact with family, lawyers, judges, newspapers, nothing. Oh yeah, and it is only during "wartime". A "war" defined such that it NEVER ends (the "War on Terror"). Then there are minor plantings of surveillance cameras here and there as in the story. Nothing big. Just watching for "evil doers" with warrants out on them...then it is for minor traffic/parking infractions...then it is for odd or "suspicious" behavior. In any case, just a minor adjustment in each case. Just baby steps. Problem is, eventually we get backed into a deep, deep hole and think, "How the HELL did we get here?"
In psychology, it is termed "successive approximation". You can't get someone to outright do some thing or agree to something so you merely walk them towards the desired end by having them take innocuous, minor "baby steps" toward the desired goal. The person has no real problem taking these "minor" steps. On their own they are nothing. In the end, you have them doing something or going along with something that they NEVER would have agreed to if you'd put it to them outright.
Baby steps. Thousands of baby steps can carry us a long distance in a direction we do NOT want to go.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
Er, what about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? "Article 12. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy..."
Rights are given to you by the governing body
Not according to the Declaration of Independence. "...they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights..." It says that governments only exist "to secure these rights," not to bestow them, implying that the rights themselves exist outside the framework of any governing body.
But oh, yeah, I forgot, it's about time we stopped basing our society on these outdated ideas and moldy old documents and converted to pure, unadulterated Social Darwinism, right?
My site: Free Nature Pictures
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...
(Florida local news, approximately 2 weeks from now)
Newscaster: "And in other news, Manalapan local commerce has apparently dried up due to a sudden and prolonged lack of incoming traffic. Commuters are seemingly going out of their way to avoid the town completely, and speculation is rampant that Manalapan is about to become a ghost town. Ongoing negotiations with Wal-mart developers have been stalled for the past 3 days, and rumors of a mass exodus due to newly-proposed tax increases are running wild..."
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
In fact it's utterly trivial to beat the cameras, and the criminals do it every day, in their *thousands* in the UK.
We have what can only be described as comprehensive coverage by CCTV and speed cameras here, including automatic numberplate recognition cameras for the congestion charging zone in London.
If you want to get round the cameras, simply copy down the numberplate of a car of similar make, model and colour, have a plate made and put it on yours. Simple.
Thousands of people in the UK are now automatically being issued invalid speeding tickets (and having their licenses removed) from cloned cars and are being charged for driving in London when they were never there. And it's up to you to prove your innocence because they have photos of "your" vehicle.
Static, automatic camera systems are useless, it needs police on the ground manually checking license plates and even that only catches a miniscule fraction of them.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
The presumption in Manalapan is that everyone passing through the rare ethers of this wealthy preserve is a criminal. That is why it is outfitting its police with the technology of presumptive guilt: until you come up clear on the scope, you're just another creep to Manalapan's finest.
This is the M.O. of the Stasi or KGB. That it's happening in America in 2004 isn't terribly surprising, even if it's depressing. Fattened on freedom they imagine will last forever, Americans in recent years have become absurdly lax about their rights--not to mention stupidly ignorant of how they were obtained. We scarcely had any significant applications of privacy in our case law until the major 20th century expansion of civil liberties by the courts in the 1950s and 1960s. Prior to this era, the cops did damn well what they pleased. It's no secret that powerfule forces want to turn back the clock, or that you can turn on talk radio and hear some fool damning "activist judges" for elaborating the Bill of Rights.
Since the 1980s, Americans have learned to do as we are told. We have been trained to pee in a cup as a condition of employment. We have made nary a noise as our health records have been divulged to corporations. We have meekly submitted to increasing searches of our persons and cars (and, in a hideous irony, have even been sold back these humiliations on TV in shows like "COPS"). We have sheepishly allowed the weed of the Patriot Act to take root and spread. And we have even eagerly, in the thousands, volunteered to help John Ashcroft spy on our neighbors. Poll after poll in the past twenty years has shown a majority willing to give up its rights for the latest crusade, whether the "war on drugs" or lately, against terrorism. But what does it profit a nation to win these "wars" when its society ends up resembling the miserable failures of totalitarianism?
As demonstrated by its abusive new surveillance, Manalapan holds passersby in rich contempt. Maybe they're right.
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.
Why do so many Slashdotters think that Bush and his minions would be the ones to abuse this type of system?
Ever think it might be the crowd who wants the "village" to raise your child?
Population (year 2000): 321
Males: 156 (48.6%), Females: 165 (51.4%)
Elevation: 4 feet
County: Palm Beach
Land area: 0.5 square miles
Zip code: 33462
Median resident age: 61.3 years
Median household income: $127,819 (year 2000)
Median house value: $943,200 (year 2000)
It's a small town on the Florida east coast where about 0.05% of you would ever travel through. Actually, you can't even travel "through" the town, looking at the map shows that it's an island seperated by some intercoastal waterway from the mainland.
Now if they implemented this in Miami, Orlando, Tampa, or Jax, then I'd be worried...
Sounds like a bunch of old paranoid geezers (Median resident age: 61.3 years).
I only mod up parents of "mod parent up" posts...
The point isn't to identify every innocent person who drives by. The point is to find a car bearing a known tag as soon as possible. There aren't many cops on the streets looking for that car, so this is all to the good. A license plate is, in fact, a method of ID, so this fits within your rather odd paramaters.
Or, do you think cops chasing criminals is just a cute little game?
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"