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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."
Where I live, there have always been plate readers.
We call them 'Sir'.
They register plates that seem suspicious to them and store them in little black notebooks that they keep 'til retirement, half a century sometimes. They work only 8 hours a day and want wages, uniforms, typing machines, unions, sick time, vacations, retirement money and other stuff the new ones don't need.
The new ones are much cheaper for us taxpayers.
They also know every fucking stolen car's plate by heart and can't be bribed by a doughnut.
When we want to be anonymous, we walk or use a bike and not a car which have had license plates to identify them since the last 100 years.
I guess that this new stuff is definitely eroding the right to drive a car in public that is registered as stolen, used in a robbery, kidnapping or murder.
We can't even use stolen money anymore, since scanning money counting machines were invented.
Even jewellery owners have digital photos of their stolen stuff online in seconds.
It's a hard world for criminals.
they can't land the black robot helicopter on your car if they don't know where you are.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
shake out.
Right now the Supreme Court is considering a case as to whether GPS monitoring of a car constitutes a search in the 4th Amendment sense, i.e. requiring probable cause or a warrant. This is important because one of the key car surveillance cases of the 20th century (Knotts v. United States) upheld beeper surveillance of cars but included dicta stating that "dragnet surveillance" could be debated by the court as a separate matter.
I am currently hopeful that pervasive and intrusive surveillance methods like this will be struck down by the courts, as the third circuit has already expressed doubts regarding historic cell site location data (case name: "In the matter of the application of the United States for an Order directing the provider of a communications service to disclose records to the government," third circuit, 2010). The Third Circuit more or left let magistrate judges make that determinations for themselves.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Hell, lets just throw a GPS tracking device in every car.
That way we can make the buyer of the car pay for it, and redirect that tax money to other programs. /s
...and welcome to the UK.
It is much quicker tracking down a stolen car and cutting down on uninsured vehicles using numberplate cameras than relying on manpower. We have had ANPR cameras all over the UK for years already. This story seems to pop up every now and again.
The thing about a real panopticon is that every node can see every other node.
Somebody needs to tag all the cop, govt, and elected officials' cars and keep a public database of their movements so that the citizenry can keep exact track of what they're doing. Their home addresses, where their kids go to school, medical records, and bank account information should also be posted.
Let's show them where this road they're on ultimately leads.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Make sure to update all your personal info on FB too so we don't have to work too hard to identify your less vocal friends.
...IMHO it does nothing to promote safety, it's a revenue collection aid, nothing more.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
http://vimeo.com/28950423 (jump to circa 5:50)
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
... of the sort of choices we have to make, now that storing things indefinitely is cheap. Do we want the panopticon? Do we rather live without constant oversight with the implication that some law-transgressors will remain uncaught? Given how we have laws impeding law enforcement, the choice ought to be a no-brainer. Yet even here people have trouble with the indications, apparently believing that if only you make sure you're nice and obedient and squeaky clean all the time, you cannot accidentally fall afoul of the law.
Personally, I draw the line at storing, if you must deploy automated readers. Let them match against lists of known-stolen plates and flag occurrences for immediate action, perhaps store for later reference if immediate action is untenable. But don't go keep tabs on things that reasonably are to be taken as being okay. There's no need to store where every soccer mom has been, so don't. That is a basic privacy principle, even if not seeing everything means you miss things you didn't know yet were out of kilter when you were seeing them. For that sort of thing we should probably reserve for human police officers. Not because the machines aren't better, but because at the end of the day society is about people, not about turning them into obedient little automatons.
Think about it. What do you really want?
Replace tag numbers and locations with random ids and make it open for researchers.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Using generic webcam type parts and open source software? Perhaps we should build an open system that anyone can log plate captures to....to be honest some of the douche bags that drive up my street way too fast could do with being shopped, replete with photo and license plate details....
tom-george.comBecause geeks rate higher t
âoeIf youâ(TM)re not doing anything wrong, youâ(TM)re not driving a stolen car, youâ(TM)re not committing a crime,â Alessi said, âoethen you donâ(TM)t have anything to worry about.â
Then officer, you're OK with my recording your making a traffic stop? Or how you choose to break up peaceful protestors? I mean, if you're following your agency's official rules, there should be no problem, right?
Bark less. Wag more.
Is it possible to use these photo's as an alibi that you weren't someplace else? A clear cut example: A car with my license plate is caught stealing (and it's the same kind of busted up blue Opel Astra stationwagon, since anyone can get that data nowadays). My car is pictured 10 minutes later 100 kilometers (62 miles) away. Will I get a ticket? Can I use the picture to prove there is at least something terrebly wrong?
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
The problem is certain agencies throwing this data in huge data bases and analysing them for many other things that are out of the public's control.
--
Teun
Why is it when I read something about DC's police force it's some new high tech tool, or a SWAT type tactic, or some other major program to reduce crime? And why is it that it never seems to even make a dent? Every time I've been to DC one of the most noticeable features is the sheer number of police cars, I'm just talking about DC metro cops, that are everywhere. Never mind all the Park Service police, black SUVs, and other law enforcement officials.
How about get rid of the toys and get cops to start walking the beat? Let them get to know the people they're arresting and maybe be a good influence in the neighborhoods during the day, and just maybe you'll see crime drop at night.
Oh, and let people carry. Nothing says "I'm armed and dangerous" like a Glock 9mm on the hip.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
The fact is that the technology exists. Its a BAD idea, but someone is going to do it. The thing we need to establish are the ground rules. Either the data should be sealed and accessible only with a court order, records should not be kept in the first place, or the data should simply be in the open (after all if the argument is you're in public then it is simply public information). Having discussed this with people involved in some of these programs it's pretty clear that different law enforcement agencies ARE right now using this data to 'coordinate'. Nobody will say exactly how this happens, but they ARE tracking people right now. Clearly if the data exists this kind of thing is going to happen. Again, the wise thing to do is establish comprehensive rules and make sure they are audited and enforced rather than debating whether or not the activity is going to happen in the first place since that's already a done deal and will simply happen covertly if it isn't happening overtly.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
What's the difference between this and Google mapping wifi? In one case people are broadcasting on 2.5 and 5GHz, in another they are broadcasting on 650 - 240nm. (~ 470THz to 1000THz)
If you don't want people recording your license plate, maybe you should encrypt it. (:-)
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Right now the Supreme Court is considering a case as to whether GPS monitoring of a car constitutes a search in the 4th Amendment sense, i.e. requiring probable cause or a warrant.>
That is a very different situation in the legal sense. GPS monitoring requires the authorities to attach a device to your car - so they must trespass onto your private property, and leave the device on your private property. They also track you whether you are on public or private property. Their use will, hopefully, be found to be "unreasonable search and seizure".
Cameras, on the other hand, do not trespass at all - they only record from a public location what is happening on public property. Their use in the UK is certainly settled case law; their use in the USA is pretty much settled law as well.
Saves time and effort, this is a great overall idea.
In the United States many police services, especially in large cities, meet the definition of a paramilitary force. The last thing we need to have is more police power.
To put it another way, the more effective the police are at enforcing the law, the more laws wind up being passed. We have so many laws on the books right now that it is hard for anyone to know whether or not they are actually guilty of some violation. Every new tool the police obtain is a tool that will be used to enforce more oppressive laws and ruin more innocent lives. Unless the deployment of these scanners is coupled with a wave of repeals and legal reforms, these scanners will wind up being another step down the road to tyranny.
Palm trees and 8
Ever take the E 470 in Colorado? Your plates have been read by the mystery box there, too.
Furries make the internet go.
I remember seeing more cameras than that last time I went to Best Buy.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Except the cops aren't going to put a cop of every corner and write down every plate because it would be way too manpower intensive. And people know that, so they have a reasonable expectation that their movements won't be tracked by the police without any suspicion of wrongdoing. Technology makes casual surveillance so much easier that the cops can and will track your every move in public even if they have absolutely no reason to do so. In other words, technology isn't simply the next generation of something that police are already doing, it allows a much different surveillance approach that is more invasive than what was practical before. The law needs to control that kind of thing in a way that simply wasn't necessary before.
If you don't want people recording your license plate, maybe you should encrypt it. (:-)
Hah! And they laughed at me when I got vanity plates saying "_nomap"
Set your phasers on "funky"!
but the claim that it's merely a revenue collection aid is bogus.
ALPR does a remarkable job of finding autos for which the owner has an outstanding warrant. It's usually pretty minor stuff, but not always. ALPR flags an auto with a warrant, the police officer takes notice. Obviously not every ALPR is located on a police vehicle and not every car flagged is being driven by the person for which there is an outstanding warrant.
Still, some of the time, it is used to find persons with outstanding warrants, and that is a very real, positive public safety and justice tool. We can argue if the benefits are worth the general loss of privacy (including tracking of location), but to claim that it does "nothing to promote safety" is flat wrong.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
I can't help but think that in a world where kids are growing up w/ smartphones which automatically upload the photo you just took and the location you took it that in 20 years anybody is going to care about "location" privacy. I was driving around Long Island yesterday and my wife noted that on the Maps app on my iPod Touch we were being "tracked". I know not every place has as many wifi hot spots as we do right now, but in 20 years you will be tracked one way or another. Forget tinfoil hats, get a tinfoil phone pouch. On a somewhat related note, I really hate red light cameras. Especially those that are advertised as anything other than money makers. Right on red is legal, just don't let the camera see you doing it. Total BS.
Police officers taking down plate numbers... Your plate number might exist in a few officer's notebooks. It is a very sparse and random sampling of places your car has been. It is very incomplete and is distributed in far too many places to hope to piece it together anyway.
A proliferation of automated plate scanners... Your plate number in a database listing every time you have driven past the scanners. Easily enough data to piece together the daily routine and and a good amount of other data on any criminal, protester, political opponent or person a police officer might just not like.
This is a lot of power to put in the hands of corruptible people. Are as many people as I see defending this really so scared of the criminals out there and have that much trust in the government? The overwhelming majority of us live our whole lives without being killed, raped or even mugged. I'm sure most of us experience something getting stolen from us at some point, usually a car broken into in the middle of the night but really, it's not THAT bad. Keep in mind as well that no serial killer, thief or rapist in history is responsible for as many deaths as our congress and executive branch.
If we keep giving so much power to our governments we WILL lose our freedoms. And for all these people who keep talking about biking and walking. Where do you live? Maybe in DC that works but DC is only an early adopter. Anything which gives the government and police more of the power they crave will spread without sufficient citizen opposition. Most areas are more rural than that and things are just too far spread apart. Many urban areas on the other hand don't have such great pedestrian accommodations and walking/biking is a likely way to get ran over.
If anything, this article bolsters the argument that attaching a GPS tracking device to someone's car should require a warrant. Why on earth do they need a GPS when the tags are likely already in a database somewhere?
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
If we restrict activities in public spaces only to those we approve of, are they still public spaces?
Public behavior should be recordable. You really don't want a precedent set against the recording of public behavior. It's not in anyone's interests.
However, we need to remain diligent and make sure that it is always all public behavior, meaning it must always include the public behaviors of those who work for the government in any capacity. Without exception.
But the program quietly has expanded beyond what anyone had imagined even a few years ago.
Ahh, the Washington Post/MSM and their standard excuse of "no one could have imagined" when finally forced to report the consequences of the sociopathic behaviors of the ruling class (consequences that were not only warned against at the time of the original behaviors but that they themselves were part of insisting were impossible).
"No one could have imagined America's war in Viet Nam would have such disastrous consequences."
"No one could have imagined rewarding companies for shipping jobs overseas would devastate the economy."
"No one could have imagined attacking other people's countries would create anti-American sentiment."
"No one could have imagined repealing Glass-Steagall would lead to such rampant speculation by Wall Street."
"No one could have imagined misleading our readers would have them stop reading our newspaper."
There hasn't been a lot of discussion on Homeland security's take on this.... I know several police officers (friends, family, etc) throughout the United States. These real time scanners are in cars and at "intersections" or off ramps when you get into or leave communities. If Homeland security is watching your tags then they know when you leave DC and drive through NC and end up in Myrtle Beach or Charleston. Of course, even if Homeland security isn;'t actively watching your tag, they have a record of your movements.
Every policemen I know loves them as people with warrents, stolen vehicles, etc are instantly recognized. However several of the policemen don;t like working with homeland security.
Go figure.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
It works like this: The government gets to use technology until they abuse it. This is supposed to encourage restraint. In the instant case, the requirement that the license plate be unobstructed and mounted in the normal place is voided. Vehicle registration laws are not voided, just the display of plates.
Next time the government will think twice before becoming oppressive.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
While it may seem Orwellian to have License Plate Reading systems, your information on your plate is not private and it's not an invasion of privacy if somebody looks at your plate while your in a public area. For law enforcement the obvious things come to mind. Serious Crime and Parking Violations. Any storage beyond that would start to raise concerns about tracking your whereabouts since you can be tied to the vehicle. In Texas for example we have Toll Tag systems that scan license plates when you go through a toll gate, those could be used to track you as well.
There should be some limit on how the data is used certainly, including time limits and third party use restrictions but I don't think that the government nor the companies who supply this technology will let that go easily because there's gold in that there data mining.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
I was wondering about something of this nature. I saw an episode of mythbusters in which they tried several methods (one of them being blinders), none of which were successful. My idea would use just a couple of high-intensity IR LEDs around the license plate (something they never even considered). Anybody know if this idea would work?
The teachers will crack any minute, purple monkey dishwasher.
I'd say it counts as a search if you drive your car onto private property in a garage not visible to the prying eyes of the public.
The question is would police gain information they could not gain with their own eyes?
It's simple.
Driving on state highways and city roads is not a right, it is a privilege.
You already need a driver's license.
As far as car thefts go, it usually doesn't take long for cars to get "fenced" at the chop shop.
It would be far more efficient to provide incentives and education for people to park their cars in a secure manner.
Like giving people parking tickets for leaving a running vehicle unattended or providing security briefings on locking your doors and not leaving the key in the ignition.
Not just that. The problem is also dumb-ass technophobe bureaucrats not securing their systems.
One big reason I don't want my information in the hands of the feds unless they need it.
Not only do I not trust the people in power not to abuse it down the road, but I also don't trust that a hacker who sees a big juicy governemnt database of personal information won't try to break into it for their own nefarious purposes.
I work with agencies that collect license plate data and one of the officers had an interesting case.
There was an ATM owner that would regularly maintain his ATM machines and refill it with money in a couple of locations in a large city. One night someone stopped, robbed, and killed him after leaving one of the locations. The perp apparently was aware enough to do this outside the view any of the cameras. There were no witnesses and no actionable forensic evidence as the body was discovered the next day. Most of the senior investigators on the case tried, but didn't have any luck figuring out where to turn. One of the more computer savvy investigators theorized that the crime was probably more likely to be a planned event as opposed to a random act because the ATM owner was on the way to fill up his first ATM (it never got filled). If that were the case, the perp must have known about the owner's route. On a whim, the investigator looked at license plate data for the past 4 weeks and used the victim's license plate number. In that, he was able to trace what ATMs the owner visited and when. Through some SQL manipulation, he was further able to see that within 30 seconds of passing a checkpoint, another vehicle's license plate was seen in the nearly all of the same points as the victim's car. Without knowing the identity of anyone on the case, the system provided a significant clue. When the police went to the registered owner's car, they eventually found the a group of individuals in a gang and recovered the money. I thought it was an interesting story and made me recognize that there are some benefits as well provided the right level of personal and privacy protection are in place.
It's not hard to make a fake license plate. There was an article a few years ago about students creating fake plates for their cars (using the license number from a teacher from their school), then driving around town and running through the red-light cameras to rack up tickets for their teacher.
What worries me is the ability to get tickets, or other, more serious violations, based on something that is very easy to spoof. Mad at your neighbor? Run a red light, get him a ticket. Mad at someone who cut you off in traffic? Steal gasoline from a station and get him arrested.
The more these plate-tracking systems are implemented and upheld in courts, the more we will see abuse of such systems.
Yet another way in which Steve Jobs predicted the future.
I want a plate reader for my car, using two $50 CMOS sensors with wide angle lenses for fore and aft, and I want it to alert me whenever it detects a government license plate. Seems like these should be available built into high-end RADAR/LiDAR detectors round-about now?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I'm not sure we should consider it a privilege when so many of our tax dollars go to pay for those highways, and many of them may only be used by motor vehicles.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
For tires with TPMS systems or RFID tags, vehicle tracking is already possible with simple antennas at a far lower cost than license plate OCR, and its harder to change your tires than your plates...
Here in the UK we have CCTV at almost every corner, ANPR cameras on all major roads and all entry and exit points of major towns. There are also speed, red light, and parking enforcement cameras. The argument used to be "If one has done nothing wrong rhwn one has nothing to fear". Whether this is valid or not it has still led to us being unable to leave our houses without being seen/tracked if they want but there has been no reduction in crime; seems the criminals are the only ones who manage to go unseen.
dont drive
Good people go to bed earlier.
What we need are license plate covers/skins that re-render your plate in Captcha font, only readable by humans and not by machines.
Though the result will probably be police departments just outsourcing ALPR to humans in China and India.
part of the comment body.
Stop putting your reply into it.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Just another increase in the cost of being poor. Renewing plates, an insurance payment, paying for a ticket, etc., etc., etc. You used to be able to use your car to scramble for the money to take care of thises things (work, going to borrow the money, etc.). Now you *will* be caught and be subject to large fines or jail. And when you're there your in the bail money/jail time trap for people without money. Hurry up and get rich people. It's the only way to get by,
The issue that was raised in Knotts was the specter of exactly this sort of surveillance. The court ruled in Knotts that one did not have a reasonable expectation to privacy when in public *but* distinguished this from some sort of hypothetical dragnet surveillance of public places, saying explicitly that this was not at issue here and that the court could decide it later.
In other words, while occasional surveillance of suspects may be permissible, the court has said explicitly that full tracking of everyone in public is not settled law.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I think you're validating my point. If the government or the companies that provide this technology start to build up a profile of your vehicle location then by direct association you're being tracked as well. So nobody is arguing the correlation doesn't exist but you have a presumption of privacy and that's what we're talking about here. Your information shouldn't be stored without your knowledge of how it's going to be used and your consent. There's obviously caveats to that but it's the same with any tracking mechanism now. Let's see we all carry phones with GPS or Cell-Tower based pseudo GPS. At any time, any one of the carriers can reach out and locate you on their network and we as Americans allow it to happen. Our government demanded it and used terminology such as "public safety." How does they government being able to track me when they want to make me safe? Oh I see it's that "other guy" they're looking for until somebody comes knocking on my door.
Technology is a wonderful thing. It can make our lives simpler and look all these free services and software that these big companies just offer us up for free. It makes you wonder.
Very Orwellian indeed.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
their use in the USA is pretty much settled law as well.
Citation needed please. This is a pretty bold assertion to make without providing evidence to back it up.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
Seconded. "reasonable expectation of privacy" is mentioned repeatedly, but nobody really pays attention to it. Do you reasonably expect police to follow you 24/7 with billions of dollars of equipment? Of course not. But they can, once it's in place, and then argue that you don't expect "privacy" while driving down the street. It's not a polar issue. I can expect that I'm not "private" in my car and that *someone* may record or report what I do. But if I'm anonymously walking in a large crowd, then I do have privacy, as it would be impractical to track me in that crowd, I'm anonymous, so I have personal privacy, even if I don't have actual privacy from being viewed by thousands of people. That distinction is gone these days. "if anyone can see you, everyone can see you" is apparently the standard.
Learn to love Alaska
No doubt that such counts as a search if the GPS device records such a location as per Karo v. United States.
However, the question that Knotts explicitly left unanswered was something different, namely whether surveillance of public spaces can ever be sufficiently pervasive to raise 4th Amendment concerns independent of the general lack of protection of public space. This sort of dragnet surveillance was explicitly not decided in that case or indeed any case since. And while such dragnet surveillance doesn't really fit into 4th Amendment search jurisprudence, part of the issue is that it is sufficiently recent that courts haven't had to confront the issues involved.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I would say yes, for the simple fact that it is 'in public' and there can be no reasonable expectation to privacy in public places. For example urinating in public is a criminal offence all over the western world, because it is not in private, it is in a public place. It is certainly an evocative question however, and there are arguements for both viewpoints.
YMMV
Any decent dazzle patterns to degrade ANPR?
(Other then the obvious drive through a muddy puddle --- the reason why I'm so glad the local council have still not resurfaced the intersection near home.)