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.'"

Comments

Uncovered?

[s4ltyd0g]

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

Re:I'm not sure what the big deal is.

[jamstar7]

Well, they could sell or give the info to auto insurance companies. By gathering data on which cars are where in relation to traffic accidents and traffic density, the insurance companies are bound to use that data to adjust their premium rates. And the tinfoil hat brigadier in me has the feeling they won't decrease.

Re:Wrong Kind of Chilling Out

[davester666]

This is NOT new. More than 5 years ago I read an article in a lower mainland newspaper describing how police had cars with this system, patrolling parking lots looking for stolen vehicles [at least, that's what they claimed they were looking for].

And of course, there was no information as to was retained after each plate was 'checked'.

Now, I wonder who is watching all those camera's that are located at each intersection in the lower mainland...