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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.
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...
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...
It's hard to argue against the impact on crime that the cameras have
Actually it's very easy to argue that. Many studies suggest that cameras don't do anything to deter crime. They may assist in the subsequent investigation and occasionally even provide the evidence that wins a criminal conviction but there is a bit of a difference between that and deterring/preventing crime.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.
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.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
I'm confused - are the police using their cameras to search your person, house, papers or effects? Or are they seizing them?
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."
Well then, clearly we should use all the info garnered by perverse medical experiments and torture also, seeing as that it's so 'valuable'..
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Leaving blood and semen samples along with my fingerprints is what got me in trouble with police in the first place.
In short, criminals are too stupid to be deterred by an increased threat of actually getting caught.
For the rest of us the idea that cameras make investigations easier (and therefore less expensive), and provide evidence that puts actual criminals in prison can generally be considered a win.
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.
And these cameras won't flag on vehicles where they can't find a registration tag?
Nothing really to do with stupidity. People tend to forget that they're being watched. It's a coping mechanism, I think. We can't always be on guard.
Where I work, there are cameras all over the floor. I KNOW that. And I'll still forget every once in a while that those are there. Then I'll see one, and I'll think "Oh, yeah... everything I do is being recorded. Have I done anything embarrassing lately?"
psmylie's dictionary: Godzillion (noun) Any number large enough to destroy Tokyo
Yet the strategy for the use of the license plate readers ... She said it was hard to tell whether interest in âoeeffective and efficient law enforcementâ was being balanced with the âoevalues of privacy and freedom.â
What possible interest of privacy could you have while on the public street? Hint: when you are out on the public streets everyone can see you.
Don't get me wrong, I'm very pro civil liberties in the context of private spaces. I just don't understand how anything I do on the street -- where I have the full expectation that other people can observe what I'm doing -- merits protections on the basis of privacy. That expectation informs me of the boundary between private and public. A citizen cannot reasonably claim to keep private his activities in public anymore than citizens have the right to publicize the private activities of others.
If anything, I see the blurring of this boundary as being quite destructive to privacy because it erodes the logical distinction between activities that take place inside a private space and ones outside. That is, attempts to extend the privacy of the home outside by making false equivalences are just as likely to erode the protections inside as they are to bolster protections outside.
Well then, clearly we should use all the info garnered by perverse medical experiments and torture also, seeing as that it's so 'valuable'..
Welcome to the 20th century...on wait...
You do realize, there is almost nothing of the 20th century (post WWII) which didn't directly or indirectly benefit from the Nazi's medical and scientific endeavors... As such, living in the 21st century means you benefited from the horrors of the Nazi's experiments conducted during the 20th century.
Was a statement of hypocrisy actually intended to invalidate your own point? Or perhaps your point went over my head? Was your point something other than what you seem to be implying?
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.
Crime isn't prosecuted with 'deterrence/prevention' in mind. That would leave all the prisons very empty, and reduce law enforcement funding. Punishment for crimes committed is much more profitable. If everybody obeys the law, it only means we don't have enough laws.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Sounds expensive. Good thing we're rich!
Those cameras are useless anyway. Nobody drives in New York City-- there's too much traffic.
Obviously you need to not park near crime scenes...it's not rocket science. Do you really have any business being near crime scenes?
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
Alot of the scientific breakthroughs the West made had nothing to do with Nazi research.
Much of the Nazi medical research was pure bunk, yes in some fields they were more advanced than the British and Americans, but in many fields they were less advanced.
The German jet engines were much less reliable then British ones and slightly less reliable than the first American engines for example.
Nuclear power, long range jet aircraft, radar, spread spectrum communications, proximity fuzes, computers, antibiotics, genetics and logistics are just some examples that come to mind where the Nazis really added nothing to the modern world's technology.
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.
Uh, these cameras are not searching your car. They are searching public streets FOR your car.
Neither you or your vehicle is being searched. Your vehicle is in plain sight. It is being observed in a specific location, just as if a police car drove past it and the officer noted it.
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".
Obviously you need to not park near crime scenes...it's not rocket science. Do you really have any business being near crime scenes?
Obviously all 100 people parking near there couldn't have all committed the same crime.
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.
:(){
For the rest of us the idea that cameras make investigations easier (and therefore less expensive), and provide evidence that puts actual criminals in prison can generally be considered a win.
That's only true as long as all the laws are just.
They're using public information--your license plate during your travels on public property (roadways)--to determine something. IE, if the car was reported stolen, etc. It's pretty clearly constitutional, even on its face -- and definitely when one looks at the decisions that have already supported these issues.
Whether or not it should be is another issue entirely. I don't think it is unreasonable to assume the Founders had no way to properly imagine technology such that you could be automatically, technologically tracked anywhere you went, nor do I find it a stretch to believe that had they considered such a possibility that they would have been strongly against it. As I am, and as anybody with any respect for privacy should be.
The reality is, America has gone too far down the "tough on crime" path. Most people just couldn't care less what we do to criminals, even if they're only accused criminals at the time. Right now they're using it for terrorism and to check for stolen cars and things like that. It won't be long until they link it to some sort of road usage tax, like in the UK. And that is the beginning of the ability for the government to know where you are at almost any point of your life. That's ridiculous.
Think about what, say, Richard Nixon, would have done with oodles and oodles of video evidence able to be manipulated post action...
I'm very pro civil liberties myself. Having the government record everything we do in public is a very good way for the government (or anyone able to hack into the system) to later on decide what you did *yesterday* is now illegal and you should be prosecuted for it.
This is why reasonable suspicion needs to be a part of *any* surveillance law.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Papers. That's what a license plate is. Yes, it's printed on metal; but they can look it up to see who owns the car, etc.
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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'd probably count a license plate as a "paper", though what exactly the writers intended by "paper" isn't clear. Here I'd be interpreting it as "official document" or "record".
That aside, one could better look at the case law surrounding “Stop and Identify” statutes, which are laws requiring people to produce identification upon police request. (The penalty for non compliance may be specified by the statute, or covered by some sort of obstruction charge.) Here's the Wikipedia page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_and_identify_statutes
The case law on these are mixed, and certainly recording license plants isn't as intrusive as requiring ID, but there are some interesting parallels. Consider a SCOTUS case shooting it one down:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolender_v._Lawson
While it was an appeal to reverse the circuit ruling that such laws violate the 4th amendment (where I'm presuming they interpreted "papers" as I have above), they ultimately based their decision on vagueness and left the 4th amendment issue open. They did, however, mention that it was problematic because it took otherwise non-criminal behavior and allowed the police to make a record of it for future investigations. (This, of course, being against the spirit of the 4th amendment, which requires probably cause (e.g. a crime) before the police can collect information.)
It worth noting that a more recent case (2004, instead of 1983) explicitly states that the police may demand you name, on the basis that doing so requires turning over no documents. (They also stipulated that if there is reasonable belief that revealing one's name is incriminating than they don't have to comply.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiibel_v._Sixth_Judicial_District_Court_of_Nevada
So, given that SCOTUS holds that providing the police documentation without reasonable suspicion violates the 4th amendment, it's hardly unreasonable to claim that their blanket recoding of license plates does as well. Of course, it'll have to be tested, but there is a leg to stand on.
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.
NASA says hello.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
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
Egad. The whole point of license plates is to be readily and publicly visible - kind of hard to argue the whole expectation of privacy thing there. Also, the license plate is not yours, it is the state's.
Or could they?
Think about it....
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.
It is completely unreasonable to claim that. Your car is not you. You indeed have the right to not provide documentation without suspicion. Your car, not being a person, has no such rights or privileges. If you don't want to provide documentation of who you are, don't drive around in something that plainly displays that information.
I've worked in that sort of an environment as well, and you are correct. After a bit you fail to notice the cameras. However, there is a huge difference between doing something that is merely embarrassing, and doing something illegal. My guess is that if you were planning on stealing something from your employer you would spend a great deal of time thinking about those cameras.
My father is a retired judge, and I spent a few summers working in his office when he was still a public defender. During that time I came to a shocking conclusion. Criminals become criminals largely because they are too stupid to find a more reliable way to make a living. Making it easier to catch criminals does not cure this stupidity. Most criminals simply aren't rational enough to properly judge the risks involved.
In short, the cameras at your workplace probably don't actually deter criminals either. It simply makes it easier to apprehend the criminals after the fact.
If you can't depend on your community to create just laws then you have much bigger problem than whether or not the police have a record of where you have driven your car.
Why not just lock them all up to be sure?
I gotta say, I think I see where you're going with it, and I love it.
That's because I'm not a criminal, and I'd never be mistaken for one, because it's obvious how good I am, and I trust the system... oh, and I'm retarded.
What community, anywhere, ever in history could one depend upon to create just laws?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
It's also worth pointing out that these cameras only prevent street crime. Low level poor people crime, that is. These cameras are entirely blind to the much larger crimes happening on Wall Street.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Troll.
"impact of crime" does not mean "deterring/preventing crime." These cameras do have an impact on crime, namely that it tremendously assists in the investigation and prosecution (every episode of Law & Order UK starts with them going to the CCTV footage). Still, it does seem fairly trivial to argue against that benefit, when weighing the costs to civil liberties, though it's not as trivial as you seem to think.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
A very small community.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
I'm pretty sure that if I were to follow you around with a camera every minute of the day that you were in public spaces, you'd be able to get a restraining order against me. Does it not bother you that the government can do, without a warrant, what an individual cannot?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
If anything, I see the blurring of this boundary as being quite destructive to privacy because it erodes the logical distinction between activities that take place inside a private space and ones outside. That is, attempts to extend the privacy of the home outside by making false equivalences are just as likely to erode the protections inside as they are to bolster protections outside.
An excellent point! We need to defend privacy because it's a private place. If we try to defend privacy everywhere, it will be reasonable to accept some exceptions.
Let's say you accept surveillance cameras in a bank. If there's no distinction between public and private places we would also have to accept cameras in private places for the same reason. Do you work in a bank? You would have cameras watching you at home. Do you live near a bank? There would be cameras at your home to see that you aren't building a tunnel to rob the bank.
It's much better for everyone to keep public places public and private places private, with no exceptions.
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?!*
Your vehicle is in plain sight. It is being observed in a specific location, just as if a police car drove past it and the officer noted it.
And yet, when I was a federally authorized agent, if I were to post agents on every street corner and have them record when a specific car passed each corner it would require judicial oversight. It's a form of surveillance, and has long been considered an intrusion on the subject's 4th amendment rights. Doing it to everyone all the time doesn't make it better, it makes it an atrocity.
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a camera is a search.
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
All missiles since 1945 have had German research in them, somewhere, but NASA isn't just rockets, NACA which proceeded NASA did much of the wing research which everyone used, even the 1930s and 40s German.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NACA_airfoil
The difference is that TPTB are following everyone else just as much as they are following me. *You* however are only following *me*, and therefore *I* am being targetted. THAT warrants a restraining order.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
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
A basic statement of fact is a troll?
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?
Do you really need "voice nuance" to get satire that obvious, or are you being ironic?
"To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it." --G.K. Chesterton (source)
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Nothing. It's what prevents you from being convicted without evidence, not for being suspected with evidence.
Yes. This is commonly referred to as "police investigation". It's a fairly fundamental part of a) their jobs and b) solving crimes.
Note that if you become a suspect you will need an alibi, regardless of whether the number plate was seen on a camera, or recorded by an officer searching the surrounding area on foot with his Mk. 1 eyeballs.
The presumption of innocence does not mean you can't be suspected. It just means you can't be convicted without evidence.
I guess the mods will never understand.
Heh. It's hard enough to get three people to decide on pizza toppings!
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
>> 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.
Probably not. Being in the area wouldn't be enough evidence to justify trying to prosecute you since the case would be thrown out.
Unless you happen to be the only black or Hispanic person in the area. That's enough to convict in many cities.
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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!
Also, the license plate is not yours, it is the state's.
That depends upon the state.
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I'm pretty sure that if I were to follow you around with a camera every minute of the day that you were in public spaces, you'd be able to get a restraining order against me.
You are incorrect, at least as far as my State (MA) goes. As always, State laws vary. Here, stalking requires "a threat with the intent to place the person in imminent fear of death or bodily injury". Stalking requires that the crime would cause"a reasonable person to suffer substantial emotional distress". In both cases, merely passively following someone around a safe distance and not disturbing their activities is perfectly legal. http://www.malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartIV/TitleI/Chapter265/Section43
In fact, I do some tech work for a divorce litigation firm, they have investigators that do precisely this to collect evidence to counter claims of insolvency. Protip: if you are at an expensive club 5 nights a week, the court will not take well your claim that you cannot pay child support.
Moreover, as interpreted by some courts here, photographers have an affirmative right to take a photo from anywhere they can legally stand and provided they do not intrude upon a private space. Anyone standing in public anywhere in the State of MA is fair game for any photographer that wants to shoot you.
The Nazis didn't experiment on rockets. They also had to make sure the people who rode inside were...um... "fit" for the journey. Simple things... like how long can you live in the event of sudden pressure loss...
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Yes, some people truly get a raw deal in how they are born into this world. It basically goes without saying, however, that crime is not a rational choice. In our society the potential rewards do not even come close to balancing out the risks. For most criminals it isn't a question of putting their own survival and well being ahead of someone else. Instead, it is the same fuzzy thinking that leads people to think that they are going to be able to go to Vegas and win money gambling.
In the short term it is possible to make crime pay, and some people are attracted to the lure of "easy" money, notoriety, etc.
crime is not a rational choice.
It is if they wish to survive (as a last resort, it isn't so bad to try to fulfill that goal).
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
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.
You need to take a hard look at the list you provided. You're extremely confused. You are confusing best implementation with scientific endeavor. Implementation really has little to do with its associated research. Furthermore, naming an extremely narrow list of technologies (some of which are flatly wrong) does not in any way invalidate the simple fact, the Nazis made massive contributions to the world of science, including genetics and especially medicine.
The police can snap your license plate on the way by and look you up in a database; but that won't get them very far because you're long gone. They may happen to be cruising behind you, with the passenger cop operating the computer; still, that means there must be a cop right there.
Different, indeed, is the prospect of police pulling you over "for a routine plate check," examining your plate, pinging the DMV database, and then sending you off clean. Different also is a network of automated systems to do just that to everyone, constantly, and then possibly send the police directly to you.
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it would be naive to assume they're not being used to gauge general driving patterns. Of course they are.
So what? I mean, really, so fucking what? Are you afraid that it's some evil communist plot to improve traffic flow and deprive you of your god-given right to sit in a traffic jam or something?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
What community, anywhere, ever in history could one depend upon to create just laws?
Do you mean "100% just", or merely "imperfect but a fuckload better than running around hitting each other with big rocks to sort out our problems"?
Because no society is perfect, that doesn't mean some aren't a lot better than others.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Crime isn't prosecuted with 'deterrence/prevention' in mind. That would leave all the prisons very empty, and reduce law enforcement funding. Punishment for crimes committed is much more profitable. If everybody obeys the law, it only means we don't have enough laws.
Not everyone in the western world shares the US obsession with filling up prisons.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
"To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it." --G.K. Chesterton (source)
Nice quote. Oh wait...
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
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?
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.
"Flash crime", the new Internet sensation...
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.