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Massachusetts Plans To Keep Track of Where Your Car Has Been

Posted by Soulskill on from the dude-where's-my-car dept.

Attila Dimedici writes "Massachusetts wants to establish a database with the information gathered by license plate scanners installed in police cars. The scanners will scan license plates of every car the police vehicle passes and transmit that information (along with the location) to a database that will be made available to various government agencies. The data wil be kept indefinitely."

5 of 521 comments (clear)

  1. I've been waiting for this. by Tsingi · · Score: 5, Insightful
    This is about as 1984 as it gets. Not only do Americans have no rights anymore, their movements are tracked by the government.

    Fascism.

    1. Re:I've been waiting for this. by interkin3tic · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This is about as 1984 as it gets.

      Lets not get into hyperbole here, lest people take us all for nutters and disregard our warnings that this is an invasion of privacy.. Government-mandated propaganda and webcams in every home is more 1984 than cars being tracked, but this is pretty horrible.

    2. Re:I've been waiting for this. by pixelpusher220 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The issue here is not a 4th amendment violation, at least directly. It's a technology advance that combines things that aren't 4th amendment violations 'what a police officer sees while patrolling' into a fully itemized searchable tracking database that does violate the 4th amendment's 'spirit'.

      The data 'seen' at the time is not 4th amendment violating, but the storage and persistence of said data *should* be a 4th amendment violation. Technology is trumping even the Constitution and we need to update our concepts to match what is now possible for the government.

      --
      People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people :-D
  2. Old Laws Before Automation by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think the problem rests in old case law, developed when automation like this was just science fiction, that anything not on private property is fair game. We need a new legal concept of "public but ephemeral" that applies to information that is normally soon forgotten like who was in a parking lot a week ago. Any collection of ephemeral data that occurs without a warrant should itself expire within a short period of time as well should be distribution limited - i.e. no sending it off to another database at the FBI that is exempt.

    That may still be too much of a slippery slope, because once its collected there will always be pressure to extend the retention and expand the distribution. All it would take is one kid getting kidnapped and the license plate data expiring a day before the cops thought to look at it and voila, ready-made emotional argument to push for doubling retention time.

    In Florida, the cops download a list of license plates of interest and only check scanned plates against the list instead of uploading everything they scan to a database. I'm not too happy with that either because I don't think that requiring a driver to regularly prove their innocence is valid, even if it is done passively, but at least it is miles better than what Massachusetts is planning.

    --
    When information is power, privacy is freedom.
  3. The Democrats run Massachusetts by Quila · · Score: 5, Insightful

    By a very large majority in both houses. They have a supermajority in the House, and there are only a few token Republicans in the Senate.

    Note that this kicks in not long after a Democrat takes the governorship, making the MA government absolutely dominated by Democrats. The only way Republicans have any influence is to get something the Democrats did declared unconstitutional in state court.

    So your metaphor needs changing to reflect the reality of what exceptions would be. It's more likely the Democrats would be specifically tracking Republicans to catch them at gay bath houses.