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Plate Readers Abound in DC Area, With Little Regard For Privacy
schwit1 writes "More than 250 cameras in Washington D.C. and its suburbs scan license plates in real time. It's a program that's quietly expanded beyond what anyone had imagined even a few years ago. Some jurisdictions store the information in a large networked database; others retain it only in the memory of each individual reader's computer, then delete it after several weeks as new data overwrite it. A George Mason University study last year found that 37 percent of large police agencies in the United States now use license plate reader technology and that a significant number of other agencies planned to have it by the end of 2011. But the survey found that fewer than 30 percent of the agencies using the tool had researched any legal implications. With virtually no public debate, police agencies have begun storing the information from the cameras, building databases that document the travels of millions of vehicles."
But you see, it won't stop with only being used against criminals. Most people can agree that less crime is a good thing, and finding stolen cars is good too, since they often aren't recovered. Today it will be used to find stolen license plates. Tomorrow it will be used to find expired tags and automatically ticket the owner. Next week it will be to get a list of suspects in an area who may or may not have robbed a convenience store three blocks away. Next month it will be used to see who is driving around the bad part of town at late hours.
Then one day, far down the road, maybe when you've posted something controversial in one of these threads, you just might get a visit. They'll uncap the scrolls and read a rough review of your life, asking you questions, telling you that if you've done nothing wrong then you have nothing to hide. We know you were at that protest last month.
See, I could get behind this technology if and only if the plates were only checked to see if they were stolen or legit, with no data being kept unless the plate was flagged for some reason. But it won't be. They'll be able to data mine your driving habits for the past year, with every sighting of your plate being a dot on the map. But when your ex-wife gets murdered in a robbery across town, the evidence that you weren't anywhere close won't be released or brought to court to provide an alibi for you.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
UK governments are NOT bound by the 4th Amendment. French, Canadian, Mexican, Russian, Chinese and every other non-USA government on the planet is not bound by the 4th Amendment.
The USA does not equal the rest of the world, no matter how narrow minded the USA rednecks think (if they think at all).