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Canada's Massive Public Traffic Surveillance System
New submitter cqwww writes "A small magazine in Victoria, BC just uncovered a massive public traffic surveillance system deployed in Canada. Here's a quote from the article: 'Normally, area police manually key in plate numbers to check suspicious cars in the databases of the Canadian Police Information Center and ICBC. With [Automatic License Plate Recognition], for $27,000, a police cruiser is mounted with two cameras and software that can read license plates on both passing and stationary cars. According to the vendors, thousands of plates can be read hourly with 95-98 percent accuracy. ... In August 2011, VicPD Information and Privacy Manager Debra Taylor called me to explain that, even though VicPD had the ALPR system in one of their cruisers, the [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] ran the system, and I should contact them for any information. "We actually don’t have a program," Taylor said. "We don’t have any documents per se." ... A month later, Taylor handed over 600 pages. ... [The claim they kept no documents] was apparently only in reference to digital information. VicPD had kept 500 pages of written, hard-copy logs of every ALPR hit they’d ever seen.'"
I'm a smug canuck, been far north and the whole works, and I've just felt a distinctive *chill* for the first time in my 50+ years.
chills,
What does the system do with numbers once it has them? I can only imagine that the only use from a law-enforcement perspective would be to check for stolen vehicles. I'm not sure if tags like "yro" and the associated paranoia is justified.
Anyone of those can trigger the boys in blue to give you a tug.
Sigs. We don't need no steenking sigs.
Police will soon be outsourced to our technological overlords.
The system has been in Quebec for several months now. They are using it mostly to find folks who haven't paid their drivers registration. They say they will not use it to find folks with outstanding tickets. The traffic divisions get all the big bucks. It's a real cash cow for the government. It was all over the news here though so there was nothing to really uncover. You can see the equipment and every once in a while I see a provincial car cruising slowly along the shoulder of the road with an array of equipment bolted to the roof scanning. Over here as far as I know though it's not used by local police yet.
cheers
Several agencies in Western Washington have had these for a while. (State patrol, Tacoma & Lakewood, definitely Lacey & Olympia probably)
Main use: Finding people who owe them money (unpaid traffic tickets).
They do occasionally find stolen cars. Mine was found after 3 weeks, sitting on a side street. They called me to come get it, didn't run prints or in any way investigate who might have stolen it, "just get it out of here"
The MPD has over 70 of these roaming the city. They call them "Prowlers." See https://kiosk.memphispolice.org/realtime/LPR_Page.htm .
I thought ANPR was a pretty normal thing to equip a police car with nowadays. Not standard, by any means, but not something really out of the ordinary.
According to the vendors, thousands of plates can be read hourly with 95-98 percent accuracy.
Just a little grumble....
Two thousand an hour at 95-98 percent accuracy gives 40 to 100 wrongly-read plates.
Just like dictation software, where they say "99% accurate!" - a hundred words is pretty easy to clock up and then you seem to be forever correcting it.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
Your plates are already public information. These systems (the UK has had one for years) just read that information and flag up PlusBad. The argument is really about the likelihood of being caught.
Of course, someone will post about how their sainted grandmother was gunned down by El Federales because Bankrobber Billy cloned her plates on his getaway car and it was picked up by an A?PR system. Bring it.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Why not? And now that God is no longer watching, somebody has to.
Are you trying to turn people into "ban it" luddites?
Oh no, a machine can read a number plate! They'll know where my car was!
Well, no-one cares. It's technology. It happens. It has good parts and bad parts. Stop panicking!
Keep your insurance stickers up to date!
Took them 9 months to catch me, wont be long before
you get a notice in the mail that "Officer 203-67983 observed the
violation at XX:XX:XXpm on the date of XXX"
Just like the automated toll route in Ontario, the 407
This type of thing is the inevitable consequence of policing road traffic. But here's the thing about that: road traffic doesn't really need to be policed. The road rules exist to avoid crashes, but no one wants to crash. People try very hard to avoid crashing. If there were no police on the roads, the exact same people would try just as hard to avoid crashing.
But roads are a police state, because you know The Right Way for everyone else to drive. Learn to mind your own business. And tell your neighbor to learn to mind his. Then we can move away from traffic laws and police enforcement to traffic rules and guidelines that are upheld due to ordinary social courtesy and manners (and because you don't want to crash).
And then you won't have to worry about police tracking your every move.
Lots of other things don't need to be policed either. Please learn to mind your own business. Thanks.
Used to have a "hot hatchback", and a local PO mis-entered the license number into his system, just like the ALPR scan errors. The license plate/vehicle mismatch was obviously good grounds for a stop. Problem was that I couldn't see his active roof light bar above the low roof line and the locals don't have dash-mounted lights. All I could see when I parked at the grocery store was that some asshole had pulled up behind me (I'm in a diagonal slot in a shopping mall) and was shining his bright headlights in my mirror. I bounced out, carrying a black wallet; it wouldn't have been unheard-of for anyone other than an old white dude to end up dead.
I passed by a cop parked at a heavy intersection for the Superbowl scanning license plates as they went by. What are the chances I just got put into some database that will later be sold?
I think I will avoid passing by the stadium for two reasons now. the traffic, and this.
Smug? What? That Canada is better than the US at everything?
I wonder about the security of the networks holding all of the images of license plates and the databases of violators. What codecs are used and what streaming data type.
It's interesting how such an expensive system is thwarted with petroleum distillates and other natural minerals:
http://www.phantomplate.com/
A quick five second spray on each plate. Some people don't bother to take the plates of the vehicle and just spray. I've seen this and it did not alter the appearance of the vehicle. Some undoubtedly have thought of spraying the plates of random vehicles. Some have mailed photos of the cash to pay the fines as a reply to the photo of their vehicle being mailed with a ticket.
This has been going on for years in the states. Cameras in the cars spotting plates and running them against databases is common place. What the public (Slashdotters tend to be more educated than the public) seems to not know is that there are cameras at traffic lights that tie into the police departments and Department of Homeland Scrutiny. DHS knows where people are traveling to and from.
In a discussion with a peer the other day, she said, "Is seems we are headed for '1984.' When do you think we will get there?" I told her that we were already there and a better question to ask is, "When did we get there."
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
A close friend of mine is an officer in a nearby Connecticut town. Last week he told me all the towns in the state had the system installed in most of the cars. Apparently it was a gift from a local officer's club (or something similar) in a town that had great success with it.
To be honest, I have no problem with this technology being used with cruisers. Using it to create a stationary network to track the movement of all cars and civilians I do have a problem with.
I don't want to live in this country anymore.
Cylindrical cameras on top of traffic lights at all major intersections. Never heard an explanation, but they're at every new intersection built. Maybe they're for traffic monitoring, but once you have the image stream, anything's possible.
This stuff can make the work of the police far more efficient leading to the recovery of more stolen cars and the catching of more criminals. If, as the article claims, only the criminals' licence plate gets recorded, there is no privacy invasion.
For example, there's a vid on youtube (Which I can't find right now) showing the new cruisers that LAPD is using. They have ALPR cameras and software installed.
:)
And I've spotted ALPR here in Providence, RI too. So it's widespread. So either mount a high gamma source near your registration plates, or better yet, paint a clear radium coating over the entire plate.
Those probably aren't cameras, they're sensors that see the strobe lights on top of fire trucks so they can turn green for the fire truck.
Sure those aren't for detecting oncoming emergency vehicles? Check to see if the "camera" is strobing when an ambulance or fire truck is driving through. It switches the lights to a phase that clears the traffic and lets the emergency vehicle through more quickly.
A license is an instrument aligning the posessor to mercy of regulation directed by Private permition to do that is otherwise unlawful.
A driver is defined likewise in perview of said regulation.
According to the HISTORICAL office of Armiger, it is not the Coats of Arms as the cloth put on the Arms but the Arms is what actually describes the purpose of Identification. Do you understand that? The 2nd Amendement of the Bill of Rights is asserted by the People to Identify theirselves as able-bodies self-protecting self-governing individuals and they do this by crossing their Arms with their choice of Weapon to assert their Rights.
When you can't assure your self-protection and can't uphold your Identification with your trailing Coats of Arms then the Government can coerce your association to whatever political bastardry they wish to maintane the existance of the Government to necessitate further interaction with you (job security realy). Feel like being forced to be a Republican or a Democrat, like George Washing said would happen?
All licenses are private: they create the caste system of who is privileged and who is not.
In the public, regardless of private character there is only equality: even in Statutory Law it is written that "All Roads are Open as a Matter of Right to Public Vehicular Travel" whereas a license is a trespass of a foreign principal.
Tell me why you need Private permition for a Public road, but I'm sure you'll put your money where your mouth is like the Freemen of Montana or The Africca Family or Waco.
EOF.
I wonder how legal would it be to CAPTCHA my plate with some colored tape?
We are eternal, all this pain is an illusion.
So you are saying that you pay insurance and demand someone else to pay for damages that your insurance is supposed to be used for.
So you are saying that someone else collides with you, but you didn't collide to them in same to cause damage to them?
It's called an Equal Exchange: if you feel brave enough, then You decide to assent to another has having a more momentous Right of Way like how a more potent vessel is avoided by the lesser.
That's why Presidents of the United States starting with Jefferson were tampering with the rights of as many Americans as they could to force the people into getting into fights with foreigners like how they were forced to drive on collision courses with Brittish by changing the Right of Way alignment.
Let's cut the story short and just realize that in-order to abide by Traffic Signals then you need a license, whereas otherwise you are free to as casual and gentele that the United States wouldn't allow you into: if someone bumps into you, forgive them and pray God guides them.
Every government has reduced the people to poverty, killed-off the most responsible in favor of the one's that give the most potential revenue of job security, and changed the landscape of entire continents as traitors would breed a more manageable culture instead of independent responsible denizens (not citizens).
Has anybody been to Italy? It seems like every town of more than a hundred people has what they call a ZTL where foreigners cannot drive in. Those zones are bordered by barely legible signs with cameras attached to them. License plates are automatically scanned and fined with what appears to be no doublechecking.
I know that the last time I went there, we were fined for entering the zone when we'd specifically been "cleared out" by the hotel we were staying at. Apparently they send the tickets no matter what and quietly accept payments even if you did no wrong.
The cameras are pretty easy to distinguish from traffic signal control receivers. Some fixed cameras are used for vehicle detection in place of inductive loops. They detect vehicles on side streets and schedule a green light just like the old loop systems do. The cameras with pan and azimuth controls are usually only for monitoring conditions by human operators.
Camera systems used for capturing license plates are usually equipped with strobes (sometimes IR) which work in conjunction with plates' retroreflective coatings to enhance their performance. You take two successive frames, one illuminated with an on-axis strobe. Subtract the ambient illumination signal from the strobed frame and the scene looks almost black except for retro reflective objects. It becomes a simple matter to pick out only the bright rectangular objects and apply OCR only to the characters within those boundaries.
Have gnu, will travel.
Vancouver police were happily demonstrating this to reporters over two years ago... Maybe five. It's been some time.
Victoria (where I am) is just a ferry-ride from Van; we get plenty of news from "the mainland", as we call it. Hence I know about the system, and I don't even pay much attention to local news.
Congratulations! You're now a part of the 2-5 percent! Now spread 'em.
Coming from Ontario as a late 20's single male with no accidents or driving infractions, my insurance would have gone from $700 to $2400. I was told 'Everyone pays the same rate'. I guess they do, it's just that it is the highest possible rate.
So it reads thousands of plates per hour with an accuracy of 95-98%, so only one incorrect reading every minute. Not bad. How many false alarms will they have to deal with now?
Which means, build a slave strobe that spots the strobe and fires back. http://strobist.blogspot.com/2008/06/and-now-few-words-from-tourist-standing.html
You could do it with LEDs, too. Might mess up the look of the back of your car.
Or, somewhat lower tech, if you have a white car, use some white retroreflective tape to put your own distracting shapes on the car; the strobe will illuminate those, too, and they will confuse its license-plate detector.
Ha! I don't have a car!
... considering it was in the Globe and Mail in 2010. It's since been memory-holed, though reposted here: http://statismwatch.ca/2010/01/11/b-c-to-get-license-plate-scanning-system/ Ontario has had a pilot project ongoing for some time as well now. Welcome to your creepy future.
This system is breeding mass surveillance. You really think they do not store your location and your movements ?
ANPR and ALPR can also be deployed with fixed cameras at so-called suspicious locations, leading to police interactions for lawful activities, as pointed out in an editorial in the St. Petersburg Times newspaper.
And lawful visits to a lawful business can lead to your being placed on a watchlist and being investigated and interrogated by the police for suspicion of unlawful activities when you live in a surveillance society.
As soon as we allow too much surveillance, we will see abuse of these abilities.
http://www.tampabay.com//opinion/editorials/america-shouldnt-be-a-surveillance-society/1205592 [tampabay.com]
ANPR/ALPR systems are an automated replacement for the officer-entered plate lookup systems.
The old systems gave the officers discretion over which plates to look up and would always show them your info. Those systems were subject to abuse by officers who wanted to find the home address of a pretty lady, etc for later stalking or harassment. Although they eventually added logging to try to detect such abuse, it is about as effective as risk auditing on Wall Street traders.
The new systems only show the officer your info if your plates (appear to) have a reason for stopping you.
In some cases, I'd imagine that the shots that are rejected by the OCR are saved for human interpretation. So if the cop reviewing them sees a flash or any funny markings, they'll stop by to have a look at your vehicle.
Have gnu, will travel.
Go with the low tech, then. Nothing illegal about adding extra safety reflective tape to the back of your car, is there.
Comedy. About 5 or 6 years ago they showed and talked about one of these cars on a Toronto morning news show.
This is evident from your attitude.
Arrogance is a prime factor in dangerous drivers - you clearly think you are better than others. You very likely take risks (many of which you are not aware of), and drive in such a way that others are endangered.
There are all kinds of nuts on the road - defensive driving teaches that you treat ALL other cars as potential dangers because you have no way of knowing ahead of time which are and which are not.
People, in general, are assholes when in large or anonymous/pseudoanonymous groups.
Simple example - I drive at the speed limit on all local roads and I am tailgated 90% of the time.
My concern in a lot of these type situations is when things go to far, get abused, get expanded over time to include more and more things. Like tracking and so forth. Should not be used for the benefit of corporations in any way shape of form. Beware of the slippery slope.
If it runs a plate and there is no reason to stop it, the plate should not even be logged.
If it runs a plate, and it is flagged as stolen, or involved in a crime, or any other legitimate reason it is flagged at the moment, then it should alert the officer in the car.
It should be completely automatic, no browsing through details. Stays quiet unless there is something that should be investigated.
If it flags someone as uninsured, they should be stopped, but it should not automatically mean they can be searched. They should be stopped, given a warning or fine or whatever is appropriate. If the flag is this person is wanted for armed robbery or something, then obviously arrest and search could be just fine.
So what are some actually effective countermeasures? Those sprays do not work, or only in limited scenarios. So what might work? Infrared Lasers blinding the cameras, IR LED flashes? Retro reflective coatings on the plate surface to direct the light downward? About the only effective thing I can think of is to replicate Steve Jobs' system of driving without plates.
A couple of years ago I parked a vehicle in front of my house and woke up to discover it had been stolen. When I reported it to the RCMP, they already had information that the vehicle had been in a neighbouring municipality around 2:30 that morning. Apparently it had driven past an RCMP vehicle equipped with one of these licence plate scanners. The licence plate, time, and location data were recorded and kept in the system for later retrieval, even though at the time it was scanned there was no reason at all for the RCMP to have any interest in the vehicle. This is the so-called "non-hit" data that the article refers to. They are logging time and location data on randonly scanned vehicles. Who knows how long they are actually retaining such data.
http://www.capecodonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120206/NEWS/202060303/-1/NEWS01
Thanks for the interesting post; is it legalise or olde english? (Any links?)
Regardless, i think what you are saying is that its not the representation of Arms but the Arms themselves which are the guarantors of self-protection. If so, I get that.
But its hard to shoot somebody who's about to crash into your ride. Not like a horseback encounter on the bridge of sighs.
Also, I suspect that someone might argue that there is a difference between licensing a driver
(which I concur is neither a right nor a priv as much as a restraint), and the reason, or need, for registering a motor vehicle.
Since putting one's "coat of Arms" on their ride is as meaningless as it is powerless (since it can't bear arms), would you please elaborate how you separate the driver from the means of transportation in a State where freedoms are upheld while accountibility is safe-guarded.
TIA
Coming soon to an America near you!