Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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 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.
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
- 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....
"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.
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.
I checked out the Manufacturer's website. They linked to several results of deployments on http://www.g2tactics.com/glavid.html. On the first day of deployment, there were 8 "hits", one of which was a false positive since the vehicle was mistakenly in the NCIC database. This is a 12.5% defect rate, which is horrendous. Of course, larger samples are needed, but I can see a lot of unhappy motorists becuase of this.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
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
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.
>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.
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
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?"
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
That's one extra stop every time that particular car is scanned. I bet it's easier to get off the No-Fly list than it is to get a mistaken entry removed from the NCIC. Stories abound of people being arrested over and over on the same erroneous warrants. Isn't this going to be fun...
I agree, it isn't, but now the Police can make mistakes at a much higher rate. As they say in IT, it has a "scaling problem". Now, put it in the hands of private citizens and corporations too, and there will be a lot of complications since their databases probably won't be any less error prone.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.