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."

Comments

A sad world.

[nospam007]

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.

Re:A sad world.

[Nerdfest]

It's a great time for criminals. Of course, now we tend to call them 'corporations'.

Re:A sad world.

[Anonymous Coward]

Want to hear something funny? Where I live we have the right to travel freely, a right to privacy, a right to be secure in our papers and person, and a right to be presumed innocent.

Re:A sad world.

[zebidee]

The problem isn't the state doing this tracking - it's private corporations. Gas stations in the UK perform number plate recognition in order to avoid "drive-offs." But if you're then using your store loyalty card with your gas purchase then they've tied your number plate to your purchase history/patterns. On top of that the store can easily access the DVLA records [dailymail.co.uk].

In the UK we also have a system called TrafficMaster [trafficmaster.co.uk] which analyses traffic flow for their satnav services. There is, however, nothing to prevent them working with the stores to cross-reference number-plates against traffic flow. So now the store can find out exactly where you're driving as well.

That kind of information is something I never signed up for & one of the reasons I'll never have a store loyalty card.

Re:A sad world.

[dominious]

I was going to mod insightful but I want to add to that:
Dear /. reader,
Why do you have a plate on your car in the first place? It's an identification number... Yes, to identify you in case it's needed by the police or by anyone. Don't like it? Don't use a car then. What? Privacy? What do you mean exactly? Also, you expect the police to ask for public debate? Yes because the public knows better the job of the police than the police itself. Get over it. You live in a crowed city, and you should follow the rules of the system or get out.

Re:A sad world.

[betterunixthanunix]

It's a hard world for criminals.

Except for any criminals who are using these plate scanners. Do you think the people responsible for finding cars using this system is above being bribed? What system of accountability is in place to prevent abuses? How would people even know if they were being illegally tracked by this system?

The problem is not that the system might be used to catch criminals, it is that it almost certainly will be used to track innocent people, to avoid constitutional restrictions, and to make possible the enforcement of an even larger set of laws (as if we do not have an absurdly large and complex legal system as is).

Re:A sad world.

[betterunixthanunix]

You live in a crowed city, and you should follow the rules of the system or get out.

I know it is a foreign concept to most Americans, but...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy

Yes because the public knows better the job of the police than the police itself

The Wikipedia articles just abound this morning:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_servants

Yes, the police serve the public, and that means that if the public feels that some aspect of police work is unacceptable then the police must not do it -- even if it is helpful in catching criminals. These days we have militarized police forces and vast, ever-expanding police power and so it is easy to forget that the police are there to serve the public. It is cruelly ironic that one of the most famous police forces in the country has the motto, "To protect and to serve."

Re:A sad world.

[garyebickford]

In the better world, you and they are both sir - mutual respect, at least until proven otherwise. Thus the world avoids unnecessary conflict. It works that way most of the time, in several places I've lived.

Re:A sad world.

[mwvdlee]

Where I live, there have always been plate readers. [...] It's a hard world for criminals.

Thats besides the point.
Nobody is arguing that ubiquitous camera surveilance doesn't help bring criminals to justice or that it shouldn't.
The (perceived) problem is in the "colateral damage"; how does it affect law abiding citizens and can (and therefore "will") it be used for less than noble purposes?

Re:A sad world.

[Inda]

In the UK...

We also have police sat in cars with ANPR (Automatic number plate recognition). Their buddy will sit in another car 500m down the road.

We also have places like Bath and Bristol where all entrances and exits have ANPR. If you drive in one of these cities, make sure you are fully legal. If the camera spots you, you'll get pulled over further down the road.

We also have them in London. Drive into London, make sure you pay your fee, or expect a nasty letter.

The DVLA (Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency) also have mobile cameras. Expect a letter and fine if you drive past one and you don't have car tax.

The police also have ANPR facing forward in their cars. If they drive pass you, and you are not legal, expect to be pulled over and fined. Even if you are parked, expect the fine.

I welcome all the above. If you want to drive your car on the road in the UK, make sure you've fucking paid like the rest of us.

Re:A sad world.

[shentino]

Actually, when they're corporations they are no longer called criminals.

Doing wrong and breaking the law are two very different things now.

Remember that the one who has the gold gets to *make* the rules, not merely get away with breaking them.

Re:A sad world.

[gstoddart]

Why do you have a plate on your car in the first place? It's an identification number... Yes, to identify you in case it's needed by the police or by anyone. Don't like it? Don't use a car then.

Except we have around 6 decades or so in which this was a passive means of identification.

Automatically scanning and recording of these things is a relatively new development, and the technology is outpacing the the law and understanding of how best to treat this.

Some might argue that in the US, automatic plate identification and tracking is creeping a little close to the bounds of the 4th amendment in that there is no need for probably cause or judicial oversight.

I'm glad that you're embracing a surveillance society and think we all need to as well ... but unfortunately, some of this automated technologies is somewhat eroding actual rights entrenched in both law and custom.

From a certain perspective, it's hard not to see 1984 and Brave New World hurtling towards us as likely outcomes instead of just speculative fiction. Because law enforcement is charging ahead with these things under the assumption they can do anything they want, and it can take literally years to get these matters settled by the courts, at which point an awful lot of damage can have already been done.

Re:A sad world.

[shentino]

It's called "getting squeezed by the board of directors and the shareholders to deliver maximum profit, and having to duke it out in the market with several other businesses whose management has the same obligation"

A corporation's moral woes are merely the extension of the greed of dispassionate shareholders that see fit to only care about the almighty dollar while being comfortably insulated from the gory details of how that money is "earned".

And in a dog eat dog world where companies are ready to cut each other's throats to get ahead, anyone who ties to be nice and ethical will simply not survive.

I would opine that vice presidency doesn't so much strip away your moral sense as filter out those who have it.

Just like trying to be a politician will weed out happy horseshit folks who fail to pass the corporate kiss-ass test from special interests.

Re:A sad world.

[PopeRatzo]

Correction: better with FEWER street thugs

I'm not so sure.

I'd rather have 1000 street thugs than one street thug who can be in 1000000 places at once.

Re:A sad world.

[dave420]

The Data Protection Act would have a *lot* to say about that. The amount of data you would be able to request from said companies would bring them to their knees if even a handful of people requested it.

Re:A sad world.

[chill]

Unless the criminals happen to be the cops.

The people in charge of these are human, and a FOIA request will show a plethora of discipline problems. Many revolve around misuse of systems.

For example, running illegal criminal checks on your daughter's new girlfriend. Finding out everywhere your wife's car has been seen. Who is she visiting at that apartment complex?

There are numerous reports of hospital personnel snooping on patient records. Of IRS personnel snooping on private tax records. It isn't just celebrities who are the target, but political opponents and people with different religious or social views.

A bit of creative editing (think Michael Moore or James Oâ(TM)Keefe) can generate a web of lies that is plausible enough to cause irreparable harm to the victim.

Cardinal Richelieu is quoted as saying "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."

These system generate multi-volume epics.

Re:A sad world.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, horrible criminals such as myself:

  -- Forgot to get a new sticker for my plate for a month once
  -- Drove my fully insured, but unplated vehicle around the neighbourhood once to show a potential buyer it was okay once
  -- Drove a car to the mechanics with a mechanics/dealer plate that flipped over once
  -- Drove through a broken red light in the middle of the night once, after stopping and looking carefully, of course (not technically illegal, but something those cameras would have me in front of a judge for)
  -- Slid through another red light in an intersection frozen solid due to a water main break in the winter once (illegal, but a cop has a brain, unlike the camera)

Yep. Lock me up and throw away the key. I'm a 5 time loser.

Re:A sad world.

[slippyblade]

Except when it involves travel, enter the TSA.

You might be a terrorist! They need to track YOU! And sell your information.

Re:A sad world.

[stiggle]

Or worse, someone copies your plate and sticks it on a similar car and uses that in some criminal activity. You don't even know thats happened until the police come a-calling.

I had that happen. Fortunately when the police showed up (about 40 mins after the reported crime based on their questions), the car was in the workshop with its gearbox in pieces and fortunately they realised my car wasn't the one used in the crime.

Re:A sad world.

[Miamicanes]

Actually, it does. When the opportunity cost of collecting and analyzing data is high, it doesn't really matter whether it's being collected. When anybody can turn around and do data mining on it with trivial ease, it becomes quite important. Nobody cared about social security numbers being printed in recorded court documents until they became available online, and people didn't become *neurotic* about retroactively redacting them until thirdparties started scraping, OCR'ing, and data-mining those same documents.

What I want to know is why, to this day, it's still legal for municipalities in Florida to sell liens, then record literally a semi-truck of liens recorded against "John Doe" at the courthouse ~2 years later, instead of being required to electronically associate those same liens with the property's globally-unique folio number, so somebody who goes to BUY the property can conveniently find them all in 12 seconds. Instead, cities like Miami can shrug and say, "We sold a lien to somebody 3 years ago, but we didn't keep track of who we sold it to, and we filed it with 300,000 other liens on the same day at the courthouse under "John Doe", so you're just going to have to wait 4 years until the person officially redeems it, or literally spend 3 months looking for a needle in a haystack one record at a time until you manage to trip over it. Assuming we didn't make a typo." It's positively *insane* how easy it is for municipalities in Florida to pile on fines without making even the most trivial effort to notify property owners, and record liens that could end with a property being sold for literally pennies on the thousand-dollar with breathtaking recklessness that seems almost inconceivable. You read in papers about how careless mortgage companies were with paperwork (their excuse for just making up replacement paperwork with robo-signers as they go along), but it's *nothing* compared to how simultaneously careless Florida municipalities are allowed to be, and how ruthless they're allowed to be in spite of their carelessness.

Re:A sad world.

[swalve]

I agree. It would be nice if people would automatically know and do the right thing, but they don't. All it takes is a few instances of doing the wrong thing and getting away with it to teach someone that doing the right thing is a game to be played.

It reminds me of school. I was lucky enough to go to a couple of strict schools. The teachers and administrators were out in the halls, enforcing the rules. If your shoes weren't tied, you got pulled out of line and were told to tie them in a firm but friendly manner, probably with a lecture about how loose shoes can lead to falling down and breaking your neck. In high school, there was one administrator who was sort of in charge of one half of the school. He pulled you over for everything, made you fix it and then move along. Even if he didn't manage to grab you up at the time, he'll pull you aside the next day and let you know that he was on to your antics. He never had to give out detentions, and everyone was pretty happy with the setup. On the other side of the school, however, those administrators loved giving out detentions. You rarely got caught, but when it did, it costed you. Students had way worse "records", they were more stressed, and overall behavior and rule following was lower.

You end up doing the right things because it was a hassle not to, and were forced to accept that the rules were the rules, and it paid to just go along to get along. Life is easy that way. There didn't have to be crackdowns, there was no stress about getting caught when 100 other people didn't.

I look at the law the same way. If the laws are enforced uniformly, and you aren't subject to the whims and prejudices of the enforcers, you feel like you live in a just society. If there are bad laws, they get fixed because instead of a minority getting screwed, a majority gets screwed and demand a change.

duh

[stoolpigeon]

they can't land the black robot helicopter on your car if they don't know where you are.

Will be interesting to see how the 4th Am. issues

[einhverfr]

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.

Get used to it boys...

[Chelmet]

...and welcome to the UK.

Panopticon

[Phoenix666]

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.

Re:Panopticon

[pentalive]

Nice Idea, the watchers would never let it happen.

BTW the watched in a panopticon don't get to watch as well. "The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) inmates of an institution without them being able to tell whether or not they are being watched."(Wikipeda)

I thinks this comes under the heading of "Whatever rule you make should apply equally to all people, including you"

Re:Panopticon

[witherstaff]

I'm all for a social networking program that lets you sit your phone in a cradle on the dash while driving, capturing all plates that are auto-uploaded to an open database. The best part is this would allow the cop location services for speed traps to be reliable, instead of so many false positives. Anyone up for a project? While I've done android dev, I have not done any video processing work.

Re:Panopticon

[X0563511]

I'm pretty sure phones don't have the optics to do that. Even if the focus was good enough, you'd need polarizing filters, vibration compensation etc.

My $200 camera? Perhaps, but it's not going to be doing it live.

ANPR is old news

[Tastecicles]

...IMHO it does nothing to promote safety, it's a revenue collection aid, nothing more.

Re:ANPR is old news

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah in the UK a bunch of drive throughs like McD use it to check you havent parked up and gone shopping. They anpr your plate in and outbound and if greater than a signposted time has elasped they send you a ticket using the govenment database to get your details.

Whilst not legally enforceable most people pay up

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/watchdog/2010/04/mcdonalds_parking.html

excert below

They usually allow free parking for between 60 and 75 minutes and no return within 90 to 120 minutes.

If you break these strict conditions, your meal could be an unhappy one as Richard Kerr discovered.

On the way to collect his mum from Stansted Airport, Richard picked up a quarter pounder with cheese from McDonalds. When he collected his Mum, she was hungry so they returned to the restaurant about half an hour later.

Charges for repeat custom
Two weeks later, Richard received a demand to pay charges from Met Parking. He had spent a total of just 47 minutes on site but because he had left and then returned within the forbidden 90 minutes, his car was clocked by the camera and he was served a parking charge.

Re:So what?

[Smallpond]

Obviously this information is only used to prevent car theft because the car thieves will never think to switch plates. It couldn't have any other use.

It's a good example...

[Anonymous Coward]

... 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?

And yet ...

[ubrgeek]

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?

Re:Plain View

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, the problem is not the camera's catching criminals.

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

Washington DC has a chronic crime problem

[grumling]

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.

Re:Washington DC has a chronic crime problem

[bill_mcgonigle]

Oh, and let people carry. Nothing says "I'm armed and dangerous" like a Glock 9mm on the hip.

It's only been a couple years since Heller, I doubt you're going to see a statistical outcome for a few more.

But, while open carry is great and all, concealed carry is needed to really deter crime. First, open carry is a reasonable advertisement for theft. Not guaranteed, but a temptation. Second, when you have 5-10% concealed carry, it becomes a reasonable assumption that *everybody* is concealed carrying and will shoot you if you try to rob them. Sort of herd immunity for self-protection.

Re:Use it as an alibi?

[Anonymous Coward]

You get another ticket for speeding.

Re:So what?

[Custard Horse]

Professional criminals will get around most security measures. Most criminals are not professional and do not have the wherewithal to switch plates due to either crass stupidity or lack or resources.

Re:GPS tracking device

[fsckmnky]

Perhaps you haven't heard. That is in the pipeline.

http://www.wired.com/autopia/2011/05/automotive-black-boxes/

And it's not just GPS, its GPS and event data.

Re:Will be interesting to see how the 4th Am. issu

[sunderland56]

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.

Re:Plain View

[rainsford]

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.

The difference

[morgauxo]

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.

Vehicles/License Plates are not private

[Virtucon]

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.

Fake Plates

[fropenn]

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.

Re:Fake Plates

[Mr Krinkle]

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.

Lots of police cars have automagic plate scanners that pop up vehicle type, etc etc.
So don't have the right type of car, you run a risk of getting a NASTY ticket for that type of nonsense. Also "spoofing" a known plate is a reason for more complete monitoring. It would catch this immediately, "this plate is here, and over here at the same time. dispatch two officers to investigate both vehicles"
teacher gets annoyed for being pulled over, and student gets a nasty ticket.

Captcha font

[snsh]

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.

the subject is not

[X0563511]

part of the comment body.

Stop putting your reply into it.

Re:Whats the problem?

[arkane1234]

That's what we as Americans are trying to avoid, a police state.

Re:Will be interesting to see how the 4th Am. issu

[einhverfr]

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.