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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

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.

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: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.

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?

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.