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License Plate Tracking for the Average Citizen
Wired News is reporting that big-brother license plate tracking systems may soon be available to the average citizen. Privacy advocates, however, worry that personal information and associated movement could be used inappropriately by marketing companies. From the article: "Bucholz, who designed some of the first mobile license plate reading, or LPR, equipment, gave a presentation at the 2006 National Institute of Justice conference here last week laying out a vision of the future in which LPR does everything from helping insurance companies find missing cars to letting retail chains chart customer migrations. It could also let a nosy citizen with enough cash find out if the mayor is having an affair, he says."
Wow. This is really big brother. Essentially they put these on top of cop cars an the thing just starts searching 360 for license plates and drops them in the system. The trick would be to have enough police cars fitted with them to give back good data. Also it would not help track the car if it were in someone's garage.
Good Excerpt from the article:
LPR cameras, which are usually around the size of a can of tomato sauce, can be mounted on police cruisers and powered by cigarette lighters. As the car moves, the camera bounces infrared light off other vehicles' license plates. The camera reads the plates and feeds them to a laptop in real time, where information from an FBI or local database can tell an officer if the car is hot. Some systems can read up to 60 plates per second, and they work at highway speeds and acute angles.
Free Windows Admin Tools
I saw a picture of a Florida plate that read "A55 RGY". The fruit Orange in the middle of the plate made it look like it read "ASS ORGY".
And for stalkers out there, make it easy to establish a victims common route. I can't see how finding a stolen car here and there could possibly outweigh the negative implications of this technology.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Your license plate number is currently being broadcast TO THE WORLD!
Punch the monkey to find out how to protect yourself.
On the plus side, the idea of this keeping the number of uninsured vehicles off the road is a good idea. Maybe I am just missing the overly scary big brother aspect of this. If it allows police cars to do a plate lookup on everything they drive past, I dont see why I should really care. I seem to remember some outcry in the past about RFID chipped license plates, atleast now you dont need to worry about that any more
I had no idea LPR had such capabilities. Let's see HP JetDirect do this!
Now if only someone can code an extension that will tell me where I left my car keys...
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
As you (or the vehicle licensed to you) move though public places, your movements may be noted. That's all there is to it.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
I see this moreso being used by places like McDonalds. They could track who buys what when going through the drive thru. Then they could see you ordering and using your past history target you on foods you've ordered before and may be more likely to order again.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
I love this kind of stuff. Right now, power to snoop is in the hands of the rich and powerful. If the mayor of Dallas gets a bug up his butt about a neighbor he doesn't like, or a competing politician bothers him enough, he has a lot more resources at his control than the neighbor or opponent. But when things like this become available to the average joe, there's will be a lot more people interested in where the mayor's car goes than the other way round.
Same with public cameras. Once we get cameras all over the place, whether controlled by private citizens, or whether public cameras which everyone can see instead of just the cops, a lot more ordinary joes will be observing the rich and powerful than vice versa.
The Colt revolver was the great equalizer of the 1800s, making the average person just as deadly as those who had the time to practice swordsmanship. Computer cameras like these license plate readers and public webcams will be the great equalizer of the 2000s. I relish the equalization of power these will bring.
Infuriate left and right
All it would take is for someone to start offering info on license plates for price. Buy a couple of these and just cruise around, collecting plates and GPS coordinates (with a date/time stamp).
See a cute girl in a bar? Just get her plate number when she leaves. The cough up the cash and you can find where her car is normally seen. Like where she lives and where she works.
You know, I'd rather take my chances that my car won't be recovered (most of them are stolen for "joy rides" anyway and the most of the rest are chopped) or that someone without insurance will crash into me.
And yes, once the technology is available, SOMEONE will sell the info it gathers.
CFO: You dumbass! The mayor is the guy who signs the check! You just terrified our entire customer base! ...b-but I said "with enough cash". It's not like just any citizen could use i-
Bucholz:
CFO: NO! Remember your mantra. "Citizen is to sheep as Mayor is to farmer." Nothing more. Nothing less. Go now. Do not speak to me again until you've meditated upon your mantra for another week.
I prefer going to the outhouse to take a dump before heading to the strip club. Something about doing groceries just makes me want to go to the bathroom.
That, and I wouldn't like to fart in front of a beautiful chick while she's giving me a lapdance.
The point of TFA is that these are becoming cheap enough to allow ordinary people to set them up, not just the cops.
I want this stuff made available to the general public. I don't want it to be the private data of the cops, or the politicians who control the cops. I want everybody to be able to snoop on those politicians just as they snoop on the people they want to control.
Infuriate left and right
I must admit I didn't RTA, but couldn't this system be defeated by louvres? Particularly those made of tin foil?
Or, if you don't want to get too technical, how about some dirt?
I would hold these on the same regard as I do radar/laser speed detectors. The purpose is to remove unwanted occurences. Stolen cars, uninsured drivers, Repeat DUI offenders, etc. These are all things noone whats to see, they simply add to the burdens of other around them. While the world isn't always fair, why should technology be condemned on that principle?
My ignorance is a perfect shield against your logic.
Five years ago, I was working for an insurance company. One of my more boring jobs was entering registration plates / number plates as they're called here, into a massive database that was to be shared among all the insurance companies, the police, and the government agencies. It contained the VIN (Vehicle Identity Number - engraved on the chassis and engine I believe), the number plate, make, model and colour.
Not quite public information, but I remember doing a few searches on friends and relatives cars. And there's a lot of people working for insurance companies with access to that information.
And if there were someone hanging out in a public place, making notes of what vehicles he sees, that would be one thing. Someone would be sure to call the cops to report a "possible terrorist" who is casing the place.
But with this technology, someone can record the plate numbers without his actions being noticed.
And once you remove the possiblity of the surveillance being observed, you open a whole new set of issues.
- Two maps of the county: one showing the ownership of land parcels, the other showed residences (with the names of the current occupants)
- A complete listing of license plates in that county.
The license plate listing section of theses books went away because of privacy concerns. I guess that didn't last very long...Sweet.... I wonder if I can have my plate # pressed similar to a captcha. Let them scan all they want....
I believe that in England they have spread these things everywhere there is a traffic light. The idea is to make sure that people pay local road use taxes and obey traffic rules, such as speed limits and traffic lights.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
"The next step is connecting the technology to databases that will tell cops whether a sexual offender has failed to register in the state or is loitering too close to a school, or whether a driver has an outstanding warrant. It could also snag you if you're uninsured, if your license expired last week or even if your library books are overdue."
...or if members of your church started going to the local mosque. Or if your employees started shopping at the competition. Or if a pastor spent a little too time consoling the local widows....
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Vote Quimby!
From the article:
Some systems can read up to 60 plates per second, and they work at highway speeds and acute angles.
The next step is connecting the technology to databases that will tell cops whether a sexual offender has failed to register in the state or is loitering too close to a school, or whether a driver has an outstanding warrant. It could also snag you if you're uninsured, if your license expired last week or even if your library books are overdue.
Ok, I don't have a problem with this being used to see if a license matches something in a database where the person has commited a significant crime and/or shouldn't be on the road (uninsured, no drivers license for the person the vehicle is registered to), but I do have a problem with it being used for minor violations such as a very recently expired license plate or an extreme like they mentioned such as library books overdue. I think it should only be allowed to be used in situations that keep the community safer (such as to find possible robbery suspects, child crime offenders, people with warrants) as well as against repeat/excessive offenders (parking tickets, a license plate that has been expired 1-2 months or longer), and not just to get everyone for any type of violation no matter how small. I know it most likely will be used for any violation just because of the added revenue and that is pretty pathetic. I am glad I almost exclusively use mass transit nowadays.
Hey, there is only one Return and it's not of the King, it's of the Jedi.
License plate information is already used inappropriately by police officers. This past weekend, 3 Boston Police officers were arrested on a string of charges. One of them includes, "In conversations with his associates, he was proud of his ability to spot easy marks for identity theft: He ran the license plate numbers of expensive cars he encountered in routine traffic stops through police systems to get to the owners' private information. With the help of a worker at a local bank, he picked off those with the best credit ratings." (Article found at http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/art icles/2006/07/22/pulidos_club_offered_sex_drugs_pr osecutors_say/).
I can't see this information becoming more easily accessible the least bit comforting or reassuring.
We have standard plates and conservation plates otherwise known as moose plates because they have a picture of a moose. Some of the cost of them goes towards conservation programs.
I've learnt that you can have exactly the number on a standard and a moose plate, different cars, different owners. Is that normal in other states? I always thought that the state and number was enough for uniqueness. Obviously not in NH.
On the plus side, this might just encourage more people to take public transit. All this system would see would be your car going back and forth between your home (if you don't have a garage) and the closest park and ride station. Or, if you're close enough, you could just take the bus into the main arteries of the transit system.
Incidentally, this would be how criminals would stay off the radar.
Of course, the LPR will save the children from the myspace terrorist perverts who try to cut and run so we don't have to fight them here in the asymmetric war on terror. Sounds great!
When they came for nmap, I did not protest because I did not use nmap.
When they came for p2p, I did not protest because I never used p2p.
When they came for the private encryption keys, I did not protest because I could never get ssh set up on my machine.
When they came for Windows XP, I did not protest because frankly, I was glad they took it.
When they came for Slashdot, there was no one left to cause slashdot effects on websites, freeing up bandwidth for the rest of the net.
So yeah, I guess the LPR is a great idea.
Yep. And the cops have SOME oversight on their actions. And we've all heard the reports of cops going bad.
Now, this technology will be in the hands of people without ANY oversight.
Sure, some people will track the vehicles of politicians.
Who knows? You might be able to catch the mayor driving to a site where he'll be accepting a huge box of money as a bribe. Not likely, but it's possible.
More likely is that this data will be collected by people without any oversight and used for stalking victims.
We have other means of dealing with political corruption. We don't need to make it easier for the stalkers.
More people can tell you who their favourite celebrity was last seen kissing than can name their Congress Critters. These will be used almost exclusively to track private individuals.
Bolded for your reading ease.
Just because we CAN create something, doesn't always mean we SHOULD create something. 1984 here we come.
My humor is probably your flamebait
WALK for short distances! Or use public transportation, and in the meanwhile, keep your car in your garage. The problem in this country is that you have to fight for your privacy, if you want any privacy at all you have to become paranoid.
If people started walking, using bicycles, rollerblades or any other form of transportation besides cars, then there would be a massive problem for the marketing people: their data wouldn't hold up, and stalkers would find other ways anyway. Stalkers are not the problem, marketing people are. Stalkers you let the cops know about. Marketing people are doing things legally though...
The only difference between a stalker and marketeers is that marketeers do it by the thousands and make lots of money doing it, so it has to be legal...
---- I am certain of only one thing : I know nothing else.
Is there anything that is invisible to the naked eye that would block these cameras?
So where is the open source software that does the license plate tracking with commodity hardware? Surely we can beat $25,000 and put this in the hands of nerds everywhere, right?
When the DC sniper was running around killing 10 people in 2002, it crossed my mind that tech like this could have helped catch the killers very quickly. Simply setup license plate monitors at strategic points around the beltway and other highways, then compare the data (which cars were in the vicinity of multiple killings).
The government used this tech to catch people running red lights in Falls Church, VA. How about saving some lives? I wonder if they are using this technology in Indiana to catch the sniper who is on the loose there?
slashsearch.org - slashdot search. powered by google.
Can someone explain to me in simple English what is happening here? Does the camera just take pictures and then cut out what it 'believes' to be a license plate. then parse out the plate information? or does it reply on what is on the plate itself to determine it's target? does the officer have to aim it? or does it just read a location? like set it facing an intersection and read all the cars coming through?
just curious as the article doesn't say much beyond being able to read at acute angles. thanks!
I forgot what I wanted to say, but honestly, it was important.
It's obviously illegal to fit a fake license plate to your car, but what about shopping carts, walls, pets etc.?
Could I "frame" the mayor with going to a strip club if I wear a t-shirt with his license plate number?
Reduce, reuse, cycle
I can't wait until someone sets up a bounty system for this. Essentially people would buy and mount one of these on their cars and drive around "interesting" areas. License plates would be tracked and sent to a central database with a GPS and time stamp. You could then purchase tracking information for certain license plates, with a portion of the proceeds going back to the original owner.
Essentially you'd end up with "bounty hunters" cruising bad parts of town looking for stolen vehicles and the like. On the other end, you'd have people driving around L.A. and New York, trying to figure out which celebrity is staying and whose home for the night.
Think of it as Little Brother.
I have seen IR polymer films with the ability to reflect IR wave lenghts but allow the visible spectrum to pass through mostly unobstructed. A piece of this stuff could be easily trimmed to fit in your plate frame. Sounds like it would render your plate invisible to this reader.
~CrnbrdEater
I'm not worried yet. If they tried to run even just 20 plates a minute for every patrol car out there, most state's network and query servers would colapse into a molten ruin.
Isn't this technology all over the place in the form of red light and speed zone cameras? It was just a matter of time until they put these units in the actual police cruisers. Anyways, its not like they cant already see the picture of a postage stamp on the sidewalk from spy satelites.
We'd be sitting here marvelling at their innovation and wondering how we ever lived without it.
- Driving a car is a privilege, not a right.
- Driving a car is a public act, so no one can have any expectation of privacy.
It's time to start cracking down on car usage, given how much ecological damage cars do. When driving becomes less and less attractive, maybe the people will see the light and demand practical public transit!
Or perhaps not just yet in US. But it will come when GB twigs (or asks his butler Tony).
Here in the UK the Government is an "automatic number plate" reader (ANPR) on every major route, into and out of every major city in the UK. There are also several ANPRs spaced along most (soon all) major roads at regular intervals. They were originally put in around London to track IRA bombers (after the fact) but were found to be good (and latterly, cheap) enough to deploy nationally. It has proved itself "in action", afterall.
The Government claim that it is to catch criminals and road tax / insurance / MOT dodgers. I even have a letter signed by a Government minister claiming that it will not be used for tracking vehicles or speeding offences.
The fact that these ANPR are recording number plates and speed and the data is going to be kept by police for one year and then "archived" (for an unspecified period that is at least "two years") means that someone can, at any time in the future, do some simple data mining and track or prosecute for speeding later.
There is also a long tradition here in the UK for people to "bung" someone with access to the Police National Computer to find out stuff about someone they are interested in. Very occasionally a police minion gets caught, but it has no real effect and you can be certain that enough money applied in the correct place will obtain information.
I suppose we are just going to have to get used to it. It has happened here, it will happen all around the world soon. It seems that this is the price of "freedom".
>But when things like this become available to the average joe,
>there's will be a lot more people interested in where the mayor's
>car goes than the other way round.
I'm sure the people in power will make sure that certain license plates are exempted from being displayed.
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
What if someone sat in the back of the parking lot of your local adult entertainment company and started tracking the regular customers? What if someone set up a camera in the parking lot of a planned parenthood facility?
My concern is (slightly) less about the government using this technology to identify cars for criminal investigation/prosicution (the sex offender's car in front of a school for example). But what about social groups that have strong opinions and motivation that do not directly corellate to local laws? Could these "socially deviant" databases of vehicle information be used for blackmail or harasment?
And what if someone set up shopw right infront of a police department, or a FBI complexe or other agency? They could quickly determine vehicle patterns and identify daily employees, visitors, and even monthly visitors. Let's say a person where to do something like this, and noticed that their dealer's buddy Jimmy stops by the ATF office twice a month for 2 hours? Does Jimmy just happen to have to stop by the ATF for assorted reasons, or is Jimmy a field agent? In either case, Jimmy's livelihood may have just taken a serious turn for the worse.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Maybe even include an option to opt-out of (or opt-in to) tracking. If you opt out of being tracked, you can't track anyone else. If you want to track someone else, you have to opt in for at least a day before and cannot opt out for at least a week after. The more often you track someone else, then longer the waiting period would become.
General info about what is in an area (like car models, colors, state of origin, etc) could be viewed in aggregate by anyone, but searches for specific plates would require an account.
Only then would I be comfortable with this. The way things are now, only the government (and probably a few of the more wealthy people who are interested) has access to this info. Ideally, even the police would only have access when pursuing a specific crime. But, if companies are going to be able to get access for marketing, then everyone should have access.
Edward Burr
Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.
Great! A new tool to allow ex-husbands, psycho-girlfriends, angry drivers, etc. track down or profile their victims.
Pardon me while I move of the planet. Paging Mr. Bezos...
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Without marketing information, we blanket-market... that is, put flyers/posters, web banners, use pay-per-clicks etc, *everywhere*. It's a gamble, and most people who see the ads aren't going to be interested in them, but it's all you can do.
However, with better marketing information, we cut out all the places we know people aren't going to be interested. The result: less pointless adverts everywhere.
I wouldn't get car insurance circulars through my door, millions of pizza delivery ads, or loads v14gr4 spam, -if only- they knew I wasn't interested in them.
Proper marketing information helps *all parties involved*. Unfortunately so many people have a deluded sense of grandure and think "omg they're watching *me*" like there's someone with a telescope watching and giggling everytime you fart. No company has that much time! It's usually done statistically.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
When does the question "Should we do this?" override the "We can do this!"? Privacy doesn't have the weight of the mighty $ in things like these. But at least we can use it to spy on our Representatives! Actually, I think they will make it illegal to spy on just them in this way in the next year and screw the rest of us! They have rights you know, and think what would happen if The Terrorists © use it against them?
David Brin did a very wonderful essay called "The Transparent Society". Where basically he argued that all camera's like stop light camera's, street corner camera's, and all of this big brother stuff should be open to the public to view. His idea was "Who Watches the Watchers" in order to keep government honest. Not to mention the theory that more people watching technically means more chance to be caught doing something wrong which increases the deterrent factor. Ofcourse I know if a criminal has thier mind set on a crime, not amount of deterrent will stop him. Also, just for fun, here's David Brin's Wiki article.
"Does your computer have IP on it?"
It's been done:i cproducts
http://www.trafficmaster.co.uk/page.cfm?key=traff
(never used their products, bought their stock or worked for them, but I've driven past their cameras plenty of times).
My first reaction to this is, "Great! Now I can finish that project I've been wanting to do all this time." See, I've been living in a European country where there are far too many people who drive to work. It almost reminds me of America. I had wanted to use digital photography and analysis to take pictures of everyone's license plate, identify the cars with only one person in them during rush hour, and then send these guilty parties a nicely worded letter informing them of the ecological destruction they're haphazardly causing and a list of alternatives, such as buses and car-pooling.
(See, the climate, and the ecology, and the air polution is much too important to consider that people have a right to a private life when they drive. Individuals should be held as accountable for polluting the air as they are for polluting a stream or the ground. (Note: this is not to read that everyone who drives a car should be pulled out of their car and shot (Except for SUV drivers who should be.) (Just kidding. SUV drivers don't deserve such a quick death. )(Not that I'm advocating violence)(Except against SUV drivers), just that we need to consider the effects of pollution as a general destruction of the public good. Tragedy of the Commons, and all that.). But I digress.)
My second reaction is that, yes, this is going to happen, and there's not a damned thing we can do about it, aside from from change the laws. And then how? How can I differentiate between what's good usage and what's bad? In France, it's illegal to have a database with personal information in it except under certain circumstances. When a few years back I made a small wireless network in my dormitory and then charged fellow students a small fee for access, I was told that my spreadsheet with 1) Name, 2) Room #, and 3) MAC Address was technically illegal. It's going to be very difficult-- perhaps impossible-- to balance an individual's right to do something Good (TM) against a business's desire to do something Evil (TM). How do we draw the line between a small spreadsheet to keep accounting straight and a large database to track, monitor, survey, and sell, sell, sell?
At the least, we should start menacing all these corporations now. "You want to collect information on me? Ooooooookay, but if you get hacked, we're going to ask for $10,000 per person in indemnification. Non-negotiable. What? You don't want that financial risk and exposure? Okay, just delete all those files and the problem will go away."
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
Would heating up your plate to a certain temp make it appear as a square only? Or I am off track here? I'd be the first to patent license plate warmers if this was the case.
-- Brought to you by Carl's JR
I got rid of my car in 1998 and have gotten by well without. I use a bike or rollerblades or public transit. The transit system here uses a paper pass system; no swiping in a reader. The pass does not show a name and can be bought with cash.
The few times I need a car I rent one. Sure, the credit card company knows that I rented a car. The car rental company probably has GPS for all I know, but I am most likely going to a state park for camping for with I have made a reservation on a government computer besides.
Every other trip that I make is most likely anonymous.
The few solicitations I get from marketers don't give a hint they are from tracing my movements.
When I am traveling by bike; the most likely purchases I make during my trip (for food) are done by cash.
I don't think these marketers/stalkers/papperaze are aware of 95 percent of my life.
Luv
Cleara
Cleara
.... license plates recognize cameras.
Pigs watching you: pigs say "cool". You watching pigs: Terrorist! Terrorist!
1. Setup a wireless camera with solar power that takes pictures at the entrance in the local pig police station parking pen.
2. Scan and autopost plate number to USENET with tor.
3. Enjoy freedom!
Great for tracking that person that cuts you off on the freeway so you can find out exactly where they park.
Then, you can write up a polite note about how they should consider improving their driving skills.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
So you are saying that because a potentially useful technology (compare it to Handguns) should not be developed because of the potential for abuse (continued comparison, Handgun Crimes)?
All development on computers should be stopped because computers can be used for scamming, identity theft, hacking, virus construction, and other potentially bad things?
I realize that it is a scale, and everything must be weighed properly.. but virtually anything has the potential for being abused and misused.
Couldn't you just set up a few IR LEDs around the plate (or one big one drilled into the center of the plate) to flood out the picture? I'm guessing these systems use a camera that normally records in the IR spectrum by default. It can't be that easy but ...
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
What you meant to say is "Citizen is to mayor as sheep is to farmer."
Citizen, while it may be like a sheep, has no relationship to sheep the way a sheep has a relationship with a farmer and a citizen has a relationship with a mayor. Unless you're referring to how citizens have been known to eat or fuck sheep, in which case you're saying the Mayor eats or fucks a farmer, which is just weird and irrelevant.
These days the automated systems are fast and cheap, and don't be surprised if tollbooths and similar locations have license-plate readers. And don't be surprised if they start correlating cellphone numbers with license plates. San Francisco Bay Area currently has traffic cameras mounted on most of the major highways, and new automated signs saying things like "Time to downtown: 17 minutes". I don't know if they're just looking at average traffic speed at multiple points, or tracking license plates as they go from Point A to Point B, or reading cellphone signals, but all of them are fairly practical methods for getting timing.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
David Brin's book "The Transparent Society" (1998, online excerpts) talks about the effects of cheap computing/camera/database technology on privacy. It's a pre-9/11/2001 look at what societies and governments can do with Moore's Law kicking technology. A major point was that either society forces the government to be open about what it's doing and allow the public to watch it, or else the government will use all the same technology _without_ anybody watching it. Now, of course, we've got the Bush Administration, so all the happy 90s-boom speculation about "Well, what if another president as evil as Nixon got elected?" "No way, the public wouldn't let that happen again!" is moot, and we didn't get the transparency locked down when we could.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
While the police can do a lookup they are not, currently in posession of total tracking information. The issue is not that the licence plate is there it is whether you want the police, jelous lovers, or worse yet, hellfire and damnation crusaders to be nosing about your activities, and be amassing this kind of data.
Think about it from an investigation standpoint. If you take your car out for a drive along some highway and some "incident" happens in the same area. If the police then go back and troll for this info and find you. People in this country have been executed for crimes where the only "evidence" was their proximity to an event. The temptation of this tool to "clear up" or find suspects for hit crimes could lead to far too many weak cases being brought in. You may also find yourself being hauled in for one then and then threatened with others (e.g. old parking tickets) stranger and more nefarious things have happened.
Additionally consider the abuse route. While the data may be collected "to catch stolen cars" or "stop underage drinking" (filming all the cars that go to a bar or strip club) once it is collected it exists. It can be used for anything. In the past would be moral crusaders have abused police records or even supposedly private records (like video store rentals) to harrass and stigmatize people for behaviors they do not like. Do you really want everyone to know where your car has driven or to have that information accessible when they want to embarass you.
Once this data is there it will be supoenad for divroce cases, tax, cases, or just checked by those who see their role as enforcing "higher" laws.
And then there are the errors. In any data-intensive process like this errors can and will creep in. A misread plate here, a faked one there, and pretty soon the data cannot be relied upon, or should not. Yet, people will treat it as gold, they do that with ChoicePoint's data even though it is full of holes. And pretty soon you or another peson may find yourselves on some "watch list" for visiting a site that you never went to, or for being in two places at once.
In a world where people are finding themselves on "no fly" terrorist watch lists for having names that sound kind of like others' or for reasons that cannot be explained, this is dangerous. Unlike Ted Kennedy not everyone is a senator with the power to have their name cleared. Not everyone can even find out who put them on the list.
The surest way, the only way, to ensure that this data isn't abused is to ensure that it is never collected in the first place.
Frankly, nobody has any business surveilling the whereabouts of my car with such an automated system. I don't mind if a physical person can look up my plate in a database, but when technology has advanced to the point where I can be virtually tailed everywhere I go, its time to put and end to that. Lets abolish license plates and regain a little privacy!
I've spoken to a police officer that had one of these systems installed in his cruiser. He said the system can only recogonize the letters & numbers on the plate, not the issuing state. This creates false alarms when, for example, Michigan plate "123XYZ" passes by the cruiser, and Colorado plate "123XYZ" is flagged in the database for some reason.
The software throws up a flashing red window whenever it detects a "hit". The officer is then supposed to visually confirm the state of the flagged plate w/ the state of the scanned plate.
To oppose ALL government licensing schemes. Doctors, cars, ALL.
So many comments... so little wisdom.
No matter whether you like it or not, everyone is going to have to accept the fact that these systems will become extremely inexpensive and totally prevalent. It may be $25,000 now, but it won't be for long. It will either be free or cheap.
... most are relatives and can be tracked on the freeways etc even retroactively. This could save lives! ... if one of your long-lost friends is driving on a sidestreet, adjacent to you, or in the opposite direction while driving at high speed down the freeway or in the parking lot you are going around, you can be alerted.
Governments and citizens will put readers on major highways and streets and onboard cars, they will also surely capture the faces of the drivers too. Citizens near major highways may put cameras on their houses to record cars as the pass by. While you might be able shame people into not sharing it, it's hard to believe why this data won't become as available as aerial photographs or street photos ala amazon's projects. If you are in the picture, you should have worn a mask.
Here are some interesting benefits (as despicable as the bad things may be...) :
1. You can be warned when a friend or enemy arrives at your door, or is on the way. If you have a restraining order, even better.
2. Gates, front doors can be opened upon arrival of gardeners etc. You can be warned if there is an APB for the car coming into your driveway.
3. Looking for a missing child?
4. Driving down the street, freeway
5. You can track your children etc. If you have an emergency, you can find them. (Even if their cellphone is off)
6. Your spouse is on the way home, you can get the martini, green tea, or dinner ready.
No way benefits outway the chilling effects, but you can't put the genie back in the bottle. If it is possible, it will be shared and available to all. Get used to it. Sorry. You really didn't think there was privacy anyway, did you?
I have read through the responses and take issue with a few of the comments.
#1) If you do not like it use public transit, bicycles, rollerblades, etc.
This is not always feasible. For example, the area I am in has a population of 5.7 million and covers an area of 8,991 sq. mi. There is only a limited public transit system and I would have to drive 20 miles to get to the nearest bus or train terminal. Only to ride the bus a total of 2 miles to work. If they upped the public transit system then it may work but that takes more taxes to fund the upgrade and to subsidize the public transit system as most are not profitable.
#2) Who cares, as long as you are legal it is no big deal.
I wish this was true. Lets face it, if the system can be abused it will be. Here is what I see.
Joes insurance: Yes Mr. Bill, your insurance did go up 900$ this month.
Mr. Bill: Why?
Joes Insurance: We are now linked with the LPR system and your insurance has been adjusted to meet your usage.
Mr. Bill: What do you mean by "To meet my usage?"
Joes Insurance: Well when we ran you through the system we found that every Friday you stop at the bar around the corner from your house and spend 3 hours there. Statistics show that you have an 85% change of getting a DUI. We also found that you are spending 2 hours every evening teaching your 15 year old son to drive, So we added the student driver rate. There is also the fact that in all you're driving, 95% of the time you are with in 20 miles of your house. Statisticly you are more likely to have an accident with in 20 miles of your home. This has forced us to move you into the high risk bracket.
All of this is just the tip of the ice burg. My guess is that they will find ways to abuse it that we never thought about!
And for stalkers out there, make it easy to establish a victims common route. I can't see how finding a stolen car here and there could possibly outweigh the negative implications of this technology.
Let's consider this from a different point of view. You're and asshole. Every time you go out in your car everyone should get the f**ck out of your lane. The should issue special driving permits to skilled, self-centered pricks like you who like to drive fast and have a car/pickup/SUV which can go fast and a paycheck which allows the luxury of burning through petrol at the speeds you prefer to travel. You change lanes without a turn-signal, cut cars off not to save a second, but because you can. When anyone uses their horn you respond with the middle digit.
Now, let's consider that everyone on the road who decides they're ready to get up front and personal with you or simply create an hommage to you on the internet. They collect your plate and find out where you live, where you work, etc. Now you don't just have a stalker, you have someone out to get even.
There's a theory that if everyone carries guns then everyone would be more polite. How about a theory that your anonymity inside your vehicle, behind those numbers and letters, is gone. Would it make you a more courteous driver?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
...the usual suspects have already had much to say:
o vement_database/9 818,00.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/11/15/vehicle_m
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-186
Unfortunately, there isn't any serious political opposition to it at the moment. If I could vote for a Lettice I would - we only seem to get turnips at the moment.
FTFA: "It could also let a nosy citizen *with enough cash* find out if the mayor is having an affair, he says."
Privacy concerns, in my opinion, are hogwash if all is equal. If everybody could know the precise altitude, latitude, and longitude of everybody else's vehicle, then there's no issue. It's a zero-sum equation. It's when somebody with money or connections or whatever has access to this information and John Q. Public doesn't that there's a problem.
Jesus told him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. - John 14:6 NLT
Having just lost a car to an uninsured motorist, I can assure you it SUCKS.
Had I not had another car to fall back on, the ensuing 3 month hassle with State Farm to reach a value on my vehicle would have left me totally lost.
At least now that this stuff is available to the public, the public can push for better regulations and controls over what is allowed to pass.
If it exists, criminals will already have it. If it's public, it's a larger priority for those that (sometimes) represent us.
Less Talk. More Stab.
could you not stalk the stalkers?
some states like Delaware color code their exiration sticks, so you can spot a expired plate without having to run it. what your also failing to get is systems like NCIC exists where a cop can key in a tag number and get back that data. Delaware keeps all there tags on a mainfram and the responce time for looking up tags is ver minimal.
So, basically, insurance requirements are mostly pushed on people by an intrusive bureaucracy that is in bed with the insurance companies. And that's my concern with technology, it makes it easier for the government to take away your freedom and force you to pay for services you don't want or need.
Oh, I agree completely about being forced to pay for services/programs that I don't want or need (social security since I will never see any of the money I am paying into it again) and I don't like it much either, but in the case of car insurance forcing everyone to have it is good not for the reason so much of protecting against theft, etc but to protect people from some uninsured knucklehead in a $200 piece of shit car who slams into me and totals my brand new truck. Why should I have to pay for that damage by having insurance while the other uninsured person is only out $200? Insurance in this case would allow me to get payment from his insurance company instead of having to go after him/her directly and possibly not being able to get a dime. So sure, if the person who hit me did have insurance then they wouldn't directly be paying me but the insurance company they are paying would have to, so what is wrong with that? Everyone who belongs to an insurance company pays in a little bit of money and if they have an accident they possibly get a lot of money back out, sounds like a good thing to me.
Massive punitive damages need to be done away with and it is unfair to put the burden of those payments on the people who pay for insurance but in the case I described above insurance is most desirable for everyone unless you are the one driving the worthless car. Also, if I ended up being injured in the crash then the other person damn well have to pay for my medical bills and forcing insurance is the only way to make that possible for everyone.
Would you seriously rather live in a country that doesn't require car insurance and if so what good reasons do you have for it?
Hey, there is only one Return and it's not of the King, it's of the Jedi.
O.k. I work for a police department and was interested in looking at this tech for our department.
Here are the two vendors that I found through Wired: http://www.g2tactics.com/ & http://www.remingtonelsag.com/
If your police department can afford 20K-30K for this device, then they should purchase it. I'm more worried on the tech. end on how it connects to NCIC and makes its very many queries. (We've had problems with our RMS interfacing with ACIC for vehicle returns and it taking a min. of 1 minute to get returns back from the state. These systems will be making thousands of searchs. I want to know real-world results and not what marketing says what it should be able to do.) We have 2 interstates and several state highways passing through our small city. I would love for a federal grant to buy 5-6 of them for each of our major transportation links. It wouldn't stop all stolen cars, but any passing through would be far more likely to be picked up. I don't have a problem with a computer scanning all the cars on a road and checking for stolen/invalid tags. The police officers would love this system as they would go into the stop knowing that the car has been tagged as stolen.
from letting insurance companies find missing cars to letting the employ of the insurance company stock and rape is next victim.
Such ability to track movement should be limited to the fewest people who require it for the purposes of supporting law and order not made available to anyone who can profit from it. That is if you are going to collect it at all.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
Didn't read the article, but I can almost bet that it mentions protecting children, or at least comes close (maybe even hints at it).
The government could announce 8PM curfews under threat of death as long as they said it was in the name of children.
We both know that the licence plate tracking will never be used to find stolen cars or capture terrorists. Instead, its going to be used by gas stations to prosecute drive-offs, or by stores to profile you, or by your insurance company for taking your vehicle 250+ miles away from home without getting their express written consent.
We're getting closer and closer to the gargoyles talked about in Snow Crash. People who's sole job is to sell information. Right now, they're grabbing at everything they can get. Hell, if they could scan your drivers licence remotely without your knowledge, you bet they would. It would be sold to all bidders, since there's no scarcity of information.
Not sure about you guys but I really don't like the thought of having my fucking licence plate information stored in systems other than those used by the government. "Hello Mr. Renraku, you're wanted for a felony hit-and-run in California. Come to prison and we'll take several weeks to get this all sorted out. If we're wrong we'll let you go without an apology, after all, it was your fault your licence plate was hanging out in California."
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Yes.
First, I think that too much emphasis on retribution makes people unwilling to admit their mistakes. Unless there is gross negligence then everyone should just pay their own damages. If someone wants to drive an expensive sports car then they should bear the costs of having it repaired.
In those cases where there is gross negligence people should have to pay the costs directly (garnished wages, etc.). If the point is to get people to be responsible for their actions then passing the costs off to other insurance holders just isn't right.
When someone has the mind set "Hey, if my car gets stolen then other people will pay for it." then they aren't as careful to prevent their car from being stolen (likewise for traffic accidents). Insurance encourages people to be less careful.
That's not to say people shouldn't be allowed to have insurance if they want to - just that requiring insurance isn't making things any safer or any more fair.
That's another aspect of equalizing things. Currently criminals are more willing to put in the effort to do things that require such effort; if their intended victims can now fight back the same way for much less effort, it will change things dramatically. It equalizes things, and the only people who need to fear that are those who can put out more than average effort, or those who can afford to hire them.
Infuriate left and right
I'll be waiting until I can build one of these combined with a decibel meter that will grab the license plate and decibel reading of the cars/motocycles stopped at the traffic light outside my apartment and relay the info directly to the local police department. Straight pipes and subwoofers should be criminal...
There's nothing legally wrong with that -- it's pretty much what private investigators do all day, except they track you personally, instead of your license plate. There's nothing stopping someone from parking in front of the adult video store, or the liquor store, or the local tittie bar, and snapping a photo of people as they walk in from the street; there's no expectation of privacy there, and thus no violation. Likewise, if you park your car in front of said tittie bar, you have no expectation of privacy. Your car is sitting right there; your license plate number is not a secret (generally anyone can write to the DMV and, for a fee, get the name of the car's owner -- at least you could pre-9/11). You could probably sue someone for libel if they said "Joe Schmoe was in the tittie bar last night," if all they had was knowledge that your car was there -- in reality, all they should be able to say is "Joe Schmoe's car was seen in the parking lot of the tittie bar last night." (The second being fact and the first being potentally false conjecture passed off as fact.)
If you were using a system that tracked license plates to stalk someone, then you'd violate existing anti-stalking laws. But sitting around unsavory places and waiting to see if anyone notable shows up is nothing new. This might make it easier, but there's no great underlying moral dilemma there that the law has yet to solve. You're in public, other people can see you, you have no expectation of privacy: deal with it. If you don't want to be seen going into the brothel, don't go into the brothel. But you can't go into the brothel and then later demand that people just pretend you never did, or bar them from showing that you did in fact go in. (They can't say what you did inside -- there you have an expectation of privacy, probably.)
I could think of some uses of such a database that might really be illegal: looking up the location of someone who has a restraining order on file against you, that might cause you to run afoul of the law, and using it to follow someone around might qualify as stalking in some places.
Although I'm all for the right to privacy, it's equally dangerous to create "rights" where they don't exist. It would be an absolutely Bad Thing if people could simply demand that they couldn't be watched or photographed when standing in a public place; it would undo hundreds of years of settled law, and frankly undermine the whole difference betwen private and public space.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
From Edmunds Scientific (I'm sure they sell them). Put it over your license plate. You plate is still visible to to the human eye, but not this machine.
But still write to your congressman to ban this! Talk about your invasion of privacy...
I don't think it is possible for any government to band what Brin talked about. The Soviet Union couldn't ban copiers and fax machines, the Chinese can't firewall everything and everybody, and I don't see how any government can ban cameras like these. Maybe they will make it illegal to buy complete spy cams, but the cameras themselves are already pretty cheap, and as computing power increases, it won't be necessary to buy specialized machines. Just buy a dozen $1 cameras, download the software to pick out license plate numbers, bingo ... can't be stopped.
If I remember rightly, Brin wanted to make sure that all the street cams set up by police were also viewable by the public at all times so they could watch the watchers. But if cameras get dirt cheap and every balcony has a few, it won't matter what the police watch. In fact, it will quickly outpace what the police can set up to the point that the police won't waste money on any when the ViewTube of the future has far more and better cameras.
Technology will get so cheap and ubiquitous that the politicians won't have dime one to say about it. They will be overwhelmed by sheer numbers that are out of their control.
Infuriate left and right
I think you'd need an additional level of security for people to use a system of that.
... but they'd have to visually inspect your car (or read it using one of the plate readers) in order to do this, and store it in the database.
Here's how it would work: if you wanted to participate in the tagging system, you'd get a sticker with an extra two alphanumeric digits, which you'd paste somewhere onto the back of your car. These numbers would ONLY be on the back of your car (i.e., the DMV would not know them). The system would then ID your car through the hash of the concatenation of your plate number and the randomly-assigned characters. The randomly-assigned characters would just serve to make the hashed values not equal to anything that the DMV would have on file, so that they couldn't just run all of their plates against the database, and send people tickets en masse.
Over time, the DMV with help from the police would be able to create their own database of stickers on cars, and thus access your record
The idea is basically thus: you want to make the key to the database something that's easy for somebody who's looking at your car to recover, but hard for someone who's only has the DMV records to recover. Maybe this isn't the best way to do it, but there's probably a way.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I live very close to the road. I'm really, really tired of dumbasses shouting at my kids - sample: twentysomething driver of SUV purposely swerves to smash frisbee as it skitters out onto the tarmac, and shouts at six-year-old girl "Take that, bitch!".
A quick consultation with the traffic cam, a call to DMV "Hi there, I just accidentally scratched a car with license plate blah-blah-blah and I need to find them so I can pay for the damages, can you tell me who owns it please?", then I show up at midnight at said dumbass's house: "Now, YOU take THIS, BITCH!"
Ah... sweet, sweet vigilante justice.
Some of you people have clever ideas for abuse of this technology. Let me add a few more:
* Position a camera facing the parking lot of police stations. Capture the plates that enter and exit and post it on the Internet or sell it to criminal syndicates who want to check to see their associates have been near the cops recently.
* Position a camera near the entry/exit of suburban housing tracts. In the event of a burglary, rape, or kidnapping, compare the list with previous days to give the cops some leads to go on. If no crime is present, pay for the gear by selling the list of comings and goings to data aggregators who collate such things for sale to the highest bidder.
* Position a camera near an abortion clinc (or substitute the controversial location of your choice) and post the license plate details on the Internet in convenient database formats so that anyone can correlate this with data they capture from other locations (see above).
* Place a camera near the entry/exit of rich neighborhoods and issue real-time SMS alerts for when cars leave and enter the neighborhood.
* Place a camera near the parking lot where elected officials park, and collate these records with late night records of cameras near red light districts, crack dealers, etc. To save space, automatically delete the license plate of the Washington DC mayor as it goes without saying he'll be there.
Give me an hour and I could give you twenty more of these. Little Brother, indeed.
Je suis Marxiste, tendance Groucho.
but I do have a problem with it being used for minor violations such as a very recently expired license plate
Why? Right now, enforcement of laws is lax and random. This actually helps the police, since there's a very strong probability that anyone is doing something illegal, and may therefore be questioned. Which may or may not be a bad thing, depending on your point of view. If (theoretically) we made all laws real and enforcable, maybe we'd actually get some of the bad ones off the books. I mean, if every time anyone went 32mph down a big fast no-access street that was marked as 30 for some stupid reason they were ticketed, there's a much higher likelyhood that the limit would be fixed. Much better than unequal enforcement, where a cop could pick "anyone" based on who-knows-what-criteria (resembelence to ex-boyfriend even) and ticket them, ignoring hundreds of other violators.
And as for "recently expired," dude, your plate is either expired or it isn't. WTF is with the grace period? Or to put it another way, let's give everyone a 30 day grace period. And then, to make it easy for police to know when its "really" expired, let's put the month at the end of the grace period on the sticker. Er, except that now people would be clamoring for another grace period. Why not just replace your plates before they expire?
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
I see this moreso being used by places like McDonalds. They could track who buys what when going through the drive thru. Then they could see you ordering and using your past history target you on foods you've ordered before and may be more likely to order again.
Yeah, like maybe they could remember that I speak English and try to have someone on the other end of the intercom who likewise speaks English, to avoid my usual drive-around-to-the-window-and-make-hand-gestures method of ordering.
Actually, now that I think about it, if you outsourced the intercom-voice-person (say, to India, over VoIP -- which they already have experimented with), this could actually make a certain amount of sense. You drive up in your car, it connects you to an operator in your language, and displays the order to the kitchen staff in theirs.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
In my state, I don't have to pass any safety courses to get a permit or a hunting license because I'm too old. Explain that one for me without invoking the population control argument.
When library books are outlawed, only outlaws will have library books.
I welcome our new Library Police Overlords.
I've been thinking about David Brin's book The Transparent Society. His argument is that the cameras are coming -- the police are planning to use them in America, and Englishmen are already submitting to an even worse version -- so what we should do is make sure the cameras aim both ways. I don't want to be tracked this way, but if the cops are going to be monitoring my movements this way when I'm doing nothing wrong, I want to be able to track what they're doing.
Do you trust the government to be the only one with these tools?
Revive the Constitution.
If this becomes ubiquitous and eventually real-time (or close to it) couldn't a system be set up where drivers could track the locations of nearby police cars and simply avoid them? Sounds like a business opportunity in the making. Goodbye radar detector, hello PigMapper.
The Nebraska Highway Patrol's got one a few miles west of Fremont, eastbound, and Ohio is monitoring the Turnpike and I-70 near the Indiana line, also monitoring eastbound traffic. Linked to the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) database, these cameras have led to at least several siezures of loads of marijuana.
Ben Masel: 51,282 votes for US Senate in the Wisconsin Democratic Primary
In the UK we call these systems ANPR (automatic number plate recognition), and here they're already deployed in large numbers by private companies and the government/police.
:(
On my average commute to work (~10 miles suburban England) I pass through five fixed government ANPR catchplates (tinfoilhat theory: officially to monitor traffic flow rates, but reputedly linked back to our intelligence organisations), two Trafficmaster ANPR catchplates (a private traffic monitoring company) and a number of petrol/gas station systems too - for example the local Sainsbury's supermarket petrol/gas station has them installed by each pump, and you can actually see the plates as they get recognised by the system behind the counter - according to stickers plastered over the pumps they're apparently "automatically checked against a Police database as you drive up to the pump". The police may also be out and about with their portable ANPR setup which talks to the vehicle licensing and taxation systems.
Additionally ANPR is also used for camera based speed monitoring and automatic fine generation over a baseline using a system called SPECS
Incidentally, according to wikipedia every car trip in the UK is now recorded by an ANPR system.
Individually owned and run systems probably aren't much of a threat to civil liberties anyway, it's when that information is networked and shared that things start to get scary... It's too probably far late to worry about this here in the UK anyway
I don't want marketers knowing about me personally, and that's my right.
Business arrangements - especially the trading of ANY information concerning me - should be done entirely with my knowledge and consent.
What part of "it's my life to know about and control, not yours" is so hard for so-called "libertarians" to comprehend?
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I like how he says "I know it sounds really Big Brother", as if to defend it or say that it isn't, but doesn't. Its like, "I know this may be a kitten, but someday I'm going to take a nap."
Just wait until this technology is used by some rich wacko who uses it to hunt down and rape and/or murder some innocent victim.
Just because it isn't in the constitution doesn't mean it isn't a right.
While there are lots of rights explicitly protected by the constitution---carrying weapons in public; being safe from unreasonable search and seizure; conversing in speech or in print; etc.---the Bill of Rights is not intended to enumerate only those few rights you have, with everything else being privileges granted by an all-powerful government. In practice it may seem this way, but that is merely (!!) an aberration resulting from distortions promoted by those wishing to aggrandize government for their own personal gain, using indoctrination in the form of public schooling and widespread petty law enforcement to create a passive, easily-controlled populace.
The constitution was explicitly designed to enumerate those rights that the individuals and states were granting to the federal government---you know, that whole limited powers thing---not the other way around.
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Wired News is reporting that big-brother license plate tracking systems may soon be available to the average citizen.
I hate to tell you this, but they already are.
A few years ago, I worked for a company that put a bit of time into developing one. We had a working prototype: a cheap CCTV surveillance camera connected through a cheap Hauppauge video capture card to a Linux box running custom software. We could have put them together for around £400 (~$700) per box at the time... no doubt it'd be cheaper now. The software took us only a little over 2 weeks to develop (although admittedly we had a director who had experience of writing OCR systems). On a box with a P-II 350 processor using unoptimized software written in Java we were capturing at 4fps. A modern system could easily cope with the 30 that is the most you'd get off the camera. Probably even multiple cameras.
We dropped the idea because we wouldn't easily have been able to get certification for the system to be installed for use in legal evidence-gathering situations (it was designed as a point-to-point speed tracker, so you could fine people who'd averaged more than the speed limit over a few miles of a given road), but it would have been perfectly adequate for private use. We also considered selling it as an automatic car-park entry system, but we went to a trade show and found there were already several similar systems on the market.
Or you can obscure the plate legally by simply putting your tail gate down if you drive a truck. This is legal and of course defensible in this day and age of high gas prices, you get better gas mileage in most trucks if you do it. This is not going to work all the time, aka if you have front plates (and they aim the camera there) or they actually install the camera some place other on a high pole. Fortunately, not all US states require a front plate, and vandals being what they are will keep cameras up on poles. The result is that they will not likely get a good view if yer tail gate is down, and its not economically to put up both front and back cameras just yet. All in all this is much more easily done than buying "plate spray" or other plate modification just to risk next week a new anti-whatever you did law, complete with plate tamper detectors.