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NYPD Anti-Terrorism Cameras Used For Much More
An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from the NY Times:
"The Police Department's growing web of license-plate-reading cameras has been transforming investigative work. Though the imaging technology was conceived primarily as a counterterrorism tool, the cameras' presence — all those sets of watchful eyes that never seem to blink — has aided in all sorts of traditional criminal investigations. ... 'We knew going into it that they would have other obvious benefits,' Mr. Browne said about the use of the readers in the initiative. 'Obviously, conventional crime is far more common than terrorism, so it is not surprising that they would have benefits, more frequently, in conventional crime fighting than in terrorism.'"
Also every piece of information any corporation or state has or can collect on you will end up being used for more than you expected.
If you don't like it, stop developing the tech. Because if it exists, it will be used against you.
It's hard to argue against the impact on crime that the cameras have, but it would be naive to assume they're not being used to gauge general driving patterns. Of course they are. No government organization would turn its back on such a valuable storehouse of data.
Tell 'em it's to catch terrorists, then use it for everything else.
I'm all for it. Here, why don't you take my blood and semen samples along with my fingerprints, you know, just in case...
outside that dodgy diner where you get ptomaine and anime of dubious repute, all for a dollar, eh?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
FTA:
>The license plate readers are different from other security cameras in the city: they are aimed low, designed to focus on a small area, unlike traditional surveillance cameras which look at broader sections like a toll plaza or the entrance of a building, Mr. Browne said. The information collected is immediately checked against databases storing information on stolen cars, stolen license plates, wanted persons and unregistered vehicles.
Well, the cameras themselves doesn't seem so bad, but does anyone know how long data is retained? I don't want to be leaving records of where I've been for years...
Obviously, conventional crime is far more common than terrorism, so it is not surprising that they would have benefits, more frequently, in conventional crime fighting than in terrorism.
So obviously, calling them 'anti-terrorism cameras' is a lie.
information collected is immediately checked against databases storing information on stolen cars, stolen license plates, wanted persons and unregistered vehicles.
Is anybody aware of their 4th amendment rights or are we just giving it all up to catch The Bad Guys(tm)...
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
I can't wait til this becomes a nationwide practice so that all civilians can feel safe knowing that the terrorists and criminals are being actively monitored and will never ever harm us again.
- Meringuinoid, on Slashdot, ca. 2005.
And people wonder why my desires run counter to the reverse diaspora toward increased urbanization.
Just build the giant, sealed arcologies already, let the social engineering wonks have them, and let the rest of us live in more rural setting in peace.
Cameras can easily be foiled, as proven in Toronto. Simply wear a riot helmet and a small piece of black tape over your name - and it's infeasible to identify or investigate crimes depicted.
I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked!
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
please, STOP posting links to this horrible site!
I get a login screen. is that what you wanted me to read? ok, I read it. it said 'login'. I did not play its game. I saw no article.
didn't we all agree to start ignoring NYT? what happened subby? no other source?
poor showing. just poor showing, man.
and no, I will not 'login'. this is NOT what the web was supposed to be about.
PLEASE STOP SUPPORTING NYT.
thanks.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
what exactly is the difference between terrorism and crime? If you kill/threaten someone with a gun, it's crime, and if you kill/threaten someone with a bomb, it's terrorism? Or do you have to be a scary Mooslim to be a terrorist these days?
Leaving blood and semen samples along with my fingerprints is what got me in trouble with police in the first place.
Do you carry a cell phone? Cell towers reasonably collect connection logs and your general position can be triangulated. How long are those logs maintained? How easy would it be for you to acquire that information via the police records (corporate vs public)?
Any time you give a government organization power, they will use it and probably bend the rules to extend their reach beyond their original purview.
The Law of Unintended Consequences will probably come into play here. As camera systems - especially ones mounted on cop cars - get better at reading license plates, law enforcement officers will probably come to rely on them more. I.e. they'll pay less attention to your plates. So one conclusion that might be draw from this is that if you hide/obfuscate your plates, you're more likely to get away with it.
Now they just need to figure out how to link this with weekend shoppers going to Elizabeth.
And these cameras won't flag on vehicles where they can't find a registration tag?
Depends on the system. Unless the devices are going to flag when the camera is pointed at ordinary things like mailboxes, they probably won't be able to tell a car bumper from a regular wall. Obscuring license plates could become a simple hack, the same way smiling in a mugshot ruined facial recognition apps.
Now you understand why GW Bush fanned terrorism by attacking Iraq.
Oh, officer. Officer.
Yeeeeessss??
Why did you pull me over?
Because your license plate was on my alert list.
Do I look like a terrorist?
No! You look lie a cocker spaniel with a severe case of mange and an overbite, but why take chances?
Look, I haven't done anything wrong. I need to get whatever is going on with my license plate cleared up. Can you tell me where to go?
OOOooooooh! Can I!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The advancements in video analytics has gotten really impressive. Software can determine the difference between a group of people vs. say a flock of birds and only records when it sees people. Or say you stack some containers or pallets 7ft high, if the height drops below 7ft, the cameras start recording. Pretty interesting stuff!
Sounds expensive. Good thing we're rich!
Those cameras are useless anyway. Nobody drives in New York City-- there's too much traffic.
SCOTUS ruled that use of public roadways is public knowledge and legal without a warrant, including the use of GPS tracking units on your "private" vehicle. Their ruling is that when driving on a public roadway, there is absolutely no expectation of privacy as to your travelling. Now, searching inside the vehicle, that's a different question. And what if the camera takes a picture through your windows? That's as allowed as an officer looking in your window. The court seems to say that, police are allowed to use humans to track all public movements, so they see no difference between having 5 million police standing on corners writing down license plates or 5 million cameras doing the same thing.
I8-D
You know the rest of that story.
Dang Internets and the lack of voice nuance...
I can't tell if you're doing satire or if you believe your last line.
Meanwhile, this is newsworthy because we've seen part 1 of this charade for a decade now ... "We need a Billion Dollars to fight one Afghani guy and his ten friends!"
This time they're actually admitting "Hey look, our billion dollar toys are fun! And so is power."
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Well, except I will cynically say that at the very least, this could be seen coming a mile away and was pointed out by people as having this very likely outcome. At very worst, the people who were planning this very much knew and intended that this would happen. They just either convinced us to the contrary, or picked the most naive spokesperson they could find who loudly said "Oh, they'd never do that".
By the time people clue in, it's too late.
You can't seriously expect that when you give governments access to surveillance and information about the citizenry that they won't turn around and is it for exactly what they claimed they wouldn't.
You can't say "we're going to monitor everybody, but only use it for terrorism" and not be lying, or too naive to think it through. Anybody who didn't think this would happen was fooling themselves.
This is why people go around citing the notion that "Those who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security will not
have, nor do they deserve, either one".
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
So how many terrorists have these cameras caught?
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
I have a new idea to decorate the outside walls of your house: expired license plates!
It's going to be funny when automated police cars need to slow down when passing in front of your house to scan the license plates of the "4320 cars parked in your driveway".
Police Officer: Sir, are you classified as human?
Korben Dallas: Negative, I am a meat popsicle.
The existence of a "New York Times" is itself, a "psyop". ;-)
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
See, that's supposed to be what the web is good at - connecting dots to better promote education. (Wasn't that the story we just saw on Internet2?)
However the funny part is the social networking gang is doing a good job of distracting us from actually doing this work.
I agree with you, the loop is starting to close though, initial vehement denials are starting to loop back. I remarked elsewhere this is among the first time *they* (instead of us) are proudly(!) admitting scope-slipperiness. That can't go on forever - the tension is building.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I've seen this movie. Blue Thunder, right?
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
Please point me to the SCOTUS ruling that says they can use GPS tracking on private vehicles without warrants. Last I heard, this was still held up at the Federal Appeals level. SCOTUS hasn't even ruled on whether the GPS tracking in your phone can be accessed without a warrant.
There may be no expectation of privacy on public roads, but you aren't always on public roads. Your garage is not public. Your driveway is not public.
Also, while following an individual in public for a single stake-out may not be a "search", an automated system that keeps tabs on everyone's movements all the time would probably rise to such a level.
:(){
Actually, the unintended consequence at some point will likely be that you'll get pulled over because the computer could not read your license plate automatically, even if it is NOT expired. The computer will handle all of the plates that it can handle automatically, and the human operator will be signaled when the computer fails. Personally, I would rather get the automated response (even if it is a ticket) than have to deal with a police officer.
And I like *like* police officers.
Are these things 100% correct? Any false positives would create tremendous hassles for drivers and waste police resources.
These systems are going to be optimized for detecting license-platey text, and only if such text is found, doing anything further to look for violations of any sort. Asking them to know when they're looking at something that's supposed to have a license plate on it but doesn't is completely different problem. It's a completely different class of problem, one that hasn't been solved yet.
So, no, these systems won't flag when they're looking at something that doesn't have a recognizable license plate on it, like a trash can, a person, a dog... or a car with a plate that's been removed or covered in some way so it doesn't look like a plate any more.
I have seen these in use in New Haven, CT. Usually, they drive around the streets looking for the usual parking ticket scofflaws, and boot violators. I don’t have a problem with that. On the other hand, I have also seen them slowly cruising privately owned parking garages, which to me seems like it should be illegal. Public streets and private property would seem to have different laws, methinks?.....I would assume someone is getting paid to let them onto private property, to pursue something completely unrelated to parking. Where does it end?
There are lots of cars stolen in Los Angeles, and I was thinking that it would be useful to have a system kind of like this, but done privately.
I would build cameras that are far less intrusive than the NYPD ones, and offer to put them in people's cars for free. If they spot a car that has been stolen, we'd contact the police, and try to negotiate a reward from the owner, which we'd split 50:50.
A few hundred cars prowling the streets of LA, gobbling up all the license plates they see, would make stealing cars in LA a lot more dangerous. And cheating on your spouse, and calling in sick at work -- all kinds of nefariousness.
And all perfectly legal, I would think. After all, your license plate is displayed for all the world to see.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
When Luis Zeledon was captured by detectives, it was probably safe to say that he had not intended to be found.
Probably, but not everyone who doesn't wish to be found, monitored, or tracked is or was up to no good.
Though the imaging technology was conceived primarily as a counterterrorism tool...
Let's not kid ourselves -- terrorism was a workable excuse for the deployment of these systems, not the impetus.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
So as long as there is doubt of a criminal of being caught, there will be crime. "Hey, if I can get away with it, why not?", said the criminal. Now I'm not advocating more Government Watching but at the same time if you knew you would be caught no matter how you attempted a crime do you think you would try? Which brings us to the fine line of Freedom vs. an orderly society. What we need to asks our selves as a whole is how far do we want to go? Because I don't see the Government taking steps to stop watching us Citizens.
They will probably write and mail you a ticket for having an illegal junk yard with a fine for each of the 4320 "cars" parked in your driveway, that you wil have to go to separate court dates in order to fight.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
...and don't forget that information which is collected is archived (at least now it is, since TB cost practically nothing).
So even if info actually is only used for its intended purpose now, that doesn't mean it can't be used for all kinds of shenanigans later on.
n.b.: This applies to all the info. nerds seem so willing to give to Google as well. Even if they actually aren't evil now, are you sure they never will be?
Nothing is forcing him to live in the US founded on the premise that all Men are Free.
There aren't going to be any more registration tags. With always online law enforcement there's no reason to apply a sticker to the plate as the plate number itself plus an instant online lookup will tell you everything you want to know about the registration status of the vehicle.
Distributing tags costs money, cops don't want to have to kneel down in the snow and scrape off the slush and read the number off them, etc. Expect that the next step will be to announce that the vehicle registration system will now be completely virtual requiring no physical exchange to complete, and tags will be history.
Virtual registration also means that they could do things like require "temporary registration" for vehicles from other states that are, say, going to be in the state for more than a week. Before this would be impractical because nobody would want to have to apply some new sticker or display a registration card, and certainly not overwrite their home license tags with something else. But now the whole thing can be done virtually. Coming to New York for a month? Better go online and pay your $10/week temporary registration before the cameras catch up to you.
G.
With enough crime and with enough circumstantial evidence, anyone can be "proven" to be guilty of any of these crimes. The entire ideology of innocent until proven guilty is out the window.
So basically if you want to get rid of someone, you just need to follow them long enough until you can plausibly link one of crimes with your intended victim. And if the victim doesn't take countermeasures, they are screwed, legally.
But don't watch the TV show they made of it. The damn chopper *always* runs out of fuel halfway through the episode when they get a first chance to catch the bad guys.
It was more realistic than the Mach 1 antics of "Airwolf" but it's clear which one won out with the viewers. If the "Blue Thunder" TV writers hadn't relied on such a terrible crutch, it would have been a good show. These days you could have all sorts of technical issues crop up to evade the Blue team: radio interference, EMP jammers, etc. But running out of fuel *every single time?!*
We made the Government small enough to be drowned in bath tub ages ago. The larger corporations promptly drowned and it has replaced it with a Zombie government fully controlled by their paid servants in the Senate, HoR, WH and the Supreme Court.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Driving is a privilege, so you agreed to the responsibility when you registered the car to drive.
That's what they tell us in Driver's Education. That's what they told me, and it's what I hear from others. But, is it in the law somewhere?
I've already registered well over 20 cars, trucks and motorcycles in my lifetime. I've never agreed to any such thing - it's not on any of the paperwork you fill out - not even on the back in fine, light gray print.
Skills testing, licensing, emissions testing, mandatory insurance, obeying traffic regulations - they're all reasonable requirements, but assuming you've not done anything wrong and you're a safe driver, is driving still a privilege?
Some government-provided things are a little fuzzy. Safe drinking water, is it a right? It's not provided freely, but there are standards it has to meet, and in many places only one monopoly provider owned by the local government - doesn't that sound like something that should be a right? Many of us get our water from government owned water treatment and distribution systems and we pay water bills based on the amount of water we use, but the road system is paid for by taxes.
Is use of the public library a privilege?
How about availing one's self of the services of the police force? They're paid for by tax. Are their services a privilege?
Just something to think about, rather than repeat the same mantra over and over again.
This site is so predictably boring. Can't you people for half a second in your life actually have a meaningful thing to say instead of your usual knee-jerk reactions?
Following someone around with a camera all the time is a crime - it's called harassment. You can save money and not bother buying the camera to achieve that.
If I install a set of colored lights that turn on in sequence and aim them towards your house, you might be successful in claiming I'm doing it to annoy you.
If you happen to live across from a road intersection, and the city installs a set of traffic lights that happen to shine towards your house, you're not being harassed, but the outcome is similar, you still have annoying lights pointed at you.
What?!? They were just carrying that camera around so they'd be able to take pictures if you were mugged or someone ran you over - if that happened then you'd probably be thankful for having those images available. Now it sounds like a helpful service, doesn't it? For some reason, when government does insidious things, idiots are ok with it.
I would not want police cameras installed in my neighborhood, not only because I don't want people watching me, but also because presence of those cameras would make the neighborhood look like a high-crime area and might negatively affect my property value.
Do you really need "voice nuance" to get satire that obvious, or are you being ironic?
Unless, of course, you are talking about actual illegal activity, in which case you *should* be arrested. That's why we have laws.
That might work in a world of 100% enforcement and 100% equal punishment.
But we don't live in that world.
In this world, there are countless ways in which laws can be applied; maybe you pissed off a cop or a judge, maybe you're the wrong color, maybe you don't have enough money for a good lawyer.
If your definition of "freedom" includes being able to hide improper behavior from your neighbors, then yes, your freedom is in jeopardy.
Who decides what's "improper"?
What if you're gay?
What if you're seeking an abortion?
Those could get you lynched or disowned by your family.
Who decides who gets access to that information?
Most people seem to be willing to share details about their personal lives than even folks like me, that grew up knowing our neighbors' business, find uncomfortable. You can't blame government for that though.
Right, I can't blame the government when other idiots throw away their privacy... But I certainly can blame the government if they're the ones forcibly taking the information.
I guess the mods will never understand.
>> We need a Billion Dollars to fight one Afghani guy and his ten friends!
*sigh*
If only it was a billion dollars ... I suspect the US has spent much, much more.
War is very expensive --> Iraq
(To say nothing of lost / ruined lives.)
Having been hauled into court because my car's license plate "was obscured" (equipment failure) by road grime and exhaust residue, I urge you to reconsider.
I have also heard reports that some of those license plate covers - that incidentally make it difficult for red light cameras to capture your license plate - have been outlawed.
http://www.phantomplate.com/print_delaware.html
http://www.banoggle.com/products/ontrack/photo-blur.aspx
Both pages offer such products, both pages acknowledge that some jurisdictions outlaw them. And you KNOW that they love to make examples of people seeming to evade attempts to enforce the law.
After 9/11, the fear of another attack on U.S. soil cleanly supplanted the fear of having one`s penis chopped off by a vengeful lover in the pantheon of irrational American fears.
While we`re constantly being told that another attack is imminent and that radical Islamic fundamentalists are two steps away from establishing a caliphate in Branson, Missouri, just how close are they? How do the odds of dying in a terrorist attack stack up against the odds of dying in other unfortunate situations?
The following ratios were compiled using data from 2004 National Safety Council Estimates, a report based on data from The National Center for Health Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau. In addition, 2003 mortality data from the Center for Disease Control was used.
You are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack
You are 12,571 times more likely to die from cancer than from a terrorist attack
You are 11,000 times more likely to die from a misdiagnosed medical condition or botched surgery by an incompetent doctor or misuse of perscription drugs than a terrorist attack
You are 1048 times more likely to die from a car accident than from a terrorist attack
You are 404 times more likely to die in a fall than from a terrorist attack
You are 87 times more likely to drown than die in a terrorist attack
You are 13 times more likely to die in a railway accident than from a terrorist attack
You are 12 times more likely to die from accidental suffocation in bed than from a terrorist attack
You are 9 times more likely to choke to death on your own vomit than die in a terrorist attack
You are 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist
You are 8 times more likely to die from accidental electrocution than from a terrorist attack
You are 6 times more likely to die from hot weather than from a terrorist attack
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
So begins the market for decal style captcha license plate overlays.
Since when does the government have a right to monitor the movements of an entire city's population when 99% have probably done nothing wrong.
Just you wait... if you watch closely enough long enough, everyone will be found to have done something wrong!
Only thing it has ever been used for.
The state knows what time every man woman and child shits now.
And tin foil aint going to help.
"And I like *like* police officers."
You're a real cunt.
Could the cop-car camera magically stop working when the officers are doing something that they don't want seen?
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
that sounds like a fantastic idea. say for whoever is willing to run their camera, they get the "stolen vehicle reclaiming fee" dropped if they need to make a claim, you would also be able to have access to all your own footage to work out whos at fault in a traffic accident. so it would be an opt-in surveillance system, if you don't opt in, your cars numberplate wouldn't return anything because you hadn't opted into having its data entered in the database (by contacting them and having them help look for your car is opting in to have your data on their database), the biggest pitfall is giving government access to the information, which would have been unavoidable.
John Perry Barlow once said about privacy that living in a small town means that you don't need to use your turn signal because everybody already knows where you're going anyway.
This is basically doing the same thing for New York City. You gotta problem wid' dat?
The Feds are always complaining that when we get better telephony technology it's hard for them to wiretap us, and that's so unfair that we need to be forced to build better wiretap technology into everything, whether it's simple digital telephony or mobile phones or VOIP, even though the legal justification for wiretapping was always highly dubious. But this is is the opposite effect - putting a license plate on your car used to just make it easy to tell if a given car had paid its car taxes for the year, and now it provides them a really sophisticated set of tools for conveniently tracking where everybody goes, even the people who haven't paid extra for a Fastrack toll-payer or a cellphone. And somehow they don't have a problem with that at all.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Maybe you're younger than I am, but I remember back in the 60s when people were worried about computers and privacy, and the mainframe computers at the time cost a few million dollars, got their data from punchcards, and required large teams of programmers doing months of work to build databases that could do new large queries. By the mid-90s, I was ranting about how that level of work was something that a random government employee could to by typing in a casual query on his desktop PC at lunchtime (like "where's my ex-girlfriend been buying lunch recently" or "are there any registered Democrats in the department"?) Now that it's the 2010s, I've got a $50 wristwatch that's got a 16-bit 20 MHz CPU, and the low-end smartphone in my pocket has as much horsepower as a supercomputer did at some time in the 70s and an Internet connection that's faster than the whole building I worked in had in the mid-90s.
It used to be that if the police wanted to investigate a highly subversive organization like your college anti-war discussion group or Quaker meeting, the Red Squad had to get a young scruffy-looking cop to pass for a student to infiltrate you (failed) or at least park a large American car full of guys in suits outside the school you were holding the anarchist convention at (I offered them coffee, but they said they'd brought their own.) Now they can force your ISP and phone company to hand over your email and text messages and not tell you, as well as friending you on Facebook or whatever.
The numbers they were providing for how many stolen cars they recovered weren't expressed in the same units for with and without cameras, but it looks like they probably recovered at most a couple percent more of the stolen cars this year than before they got the system, not correcting for all the other things they've done differently or OnStar/Lojack. (Here in San Francisco, the real trick is to make sure the parking ticket system gets correlated to the stolen-car database, since amateur car thieves who are actually using their car don't bother to pay tickets; professionals seldom get caught.) It's significantly more effective at tracking cars that have expired registrations on them (which I don't count as "puts actual criminals in prison"), but that's a local taxation function that shouldn't be paid for by skimming Federal "terrorism" funds (which I'd consider to be a crime against the taxpayer.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Apparently the main impact of the London surveillance system on crime is that street criminals learn where the cameras are and only mug people or steal cars where they're not likely to be watched, and wear hats or hoodies to hide their faces. ("Criminal was an average-height man wearing jeans and a dark hoodie - probably white.")
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Of course, they claim they are being used for 'anti-terrorism', but any conscious civil libertarian well knew, that whenever you give the "authorities" and inch, they steal a mile. Your rights and mine are being constantly eroded by zealous authorities. We cannot rely on the the common joe to recognize the dangers. Joes are too ignorant, even stupid, and at the least, uncaring. Their lives are too mundane and meaningless for them to care. Don't forget, in the mythology, it was the aristocrat, Robin of Loxley, that fought against King John and the evil Sheriff of Nottingham. The Magna Carta was a creation of the oppressed Nobles of England against an over-arching King. The peasants were droolingly ignorant bystanders.
if we were to assemble our best architects and a devoted team of engineers and technicians, there's no doubt we could automate most of our law enforcement tasks.
look sig is kool
Any mass recording of car registrations by police constitutes a false accusation against the owner of every vehicle that comes within the scope of the spy cameras. Police should only be permitted to watch for specific numbers that correspond to people against whom they have a genuine, pre-existing suspicion of wrongdoing. 'Conspiring to commit activities not normally considered illegal' is not a sufficient suspicion.
Since when does your car have civil liberties? The driver isn't being tracked, or the passengers, (or the contents of the vehicle for that matter). The vehicle could be operated by anyone, and contain anyone or anything. However, if (and only if) the whereabouts of a particular car becomes of interest (IE it is connected with a crime,) then the information that has been gathered can be searched to determine the movement of that vehicle. Otherwise, no one wants to know that your car was seen parked in front of the topless bar at 2 am. No one is looking at or for that piece of information. No one cares.
Don't make me laugh. They wanted cameras but then had to sell the idea. The sales pitch involved terrorists but once they had the cameras they pushed ahead and used them as hey always intended.
The same happened here in the UK. Now number recognition systems cover the whole motorway system and central London. You cannot go anywhere without your registration being checked.
People are beginning to discover that it isn't just about terrorism because the government are using the system to identify vehicles which are on the roads without road tax or car insurance.
Is why I have used plastic covers over my plates for years now. In the strong sun of the southwest it only takes a year or two for them to fog and yellow so as to make the plates nearly unreadable even from close up, much less from a stoplight or dash camera.
"Those who give up liberty to purchase temporary safety can go fuck themselves." -- Benjamin Franklin
Oh, this other use was intended, you can bet your ass on that.
Not understood by the suckers who keep voting for politicians who keep growing their empires at the expense of citizens -- but the intention was there all along.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
This just in: Living in a police state is good for the police.
Car thieves just need to swap out the plates in that case. Presumably they're not just cruising around on the streets after stealing the car, anyway, and they get taken somewhere to be refitted into something they can sell, so there's a very narrow window where they would be driving with the original plates.
Obviously, fake plates would be noticed by the system too. But an easy solution is to go to a long-term parking garage and steal the plates off of a car there, so they won't be noticed for a few days. Then you have a couple days at least that you can drive around with the stolen car with little reason to expect your camera system would catch you.
Assuming a private system, hopefully you wouldn't actually have access to the state DMV records anyway, so there can't be a sophisticated database system. And no way to look up out-of-state plates either, so thieves would just stock up on out-of-state plates - even fake ones.
You might catch a few idiotic gang bangers and joy riding kids, but it wouldn't affect the overall problem.
Meanwhile, this is newsworthy because we've seen part 1 of this charade for a decade now ... "We need a Billion Dollars to fight one Afghani guy and his ten friends!"
I think you're off by at least three orders of magnitude...
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
One of the big mysteries to me way back was that the US Army
address book was classified but the individual entries was not.
A lot of folk are getting the privacy problem inside out. They are
concerned about individual privacy in a personal way. What the
collective WE need to be concerned about is the collections of
data that modern systems sweep up so well. Some of these data
collections might be used by foreign agents to watch for pending
credit expansions or contractions. So much of the world is
lubricated by debt knowing who to extend credit to is worth a lot.
Jewelry makers/ shops do not clean under the work benches. They
work on a grid or grate that lets all the precious metal shavings collect
and then once in a while gather it up, sent it to a smelter and then
pay the rent with what they get back. It is the sweepers that will
get rich on our data.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.