Slashdot Mirror
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,
Anyone of those can trigger the boys in blue to give you a tug.
Sigs. We don't need no steenking sigs.
No offense but I'm sure there are folks with far greater imaginations than yours (in this case) who will come up with many ways this could be used. Many uses of which I'm sure would definitely pertain to your rights, and not necessarily in a positive way.
The problem is they keep the logs, instead of comparing the read plates to a known search list and discarding the ones they were not looking for immediately. That way, they basically collect survelilance data on everyone "just in case they need it later". The only data that can not be misused is the data that does not exist, period.
Wouldn't this be an end-run around warrantless GPS tracking, which the USA Supreme Court has ruled unconstitutional?
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/01/supreme-court-holds-warrantless-gps-tracking-unconstitutional.ars
Who needs GPS tracking if you can put these on every government building, police car, and city vehicle (including buses) to track license numbers? City surveillance cameras could be linked in too.
(I realize this article is about use in Canada, but this technology is starting to get some use in the USA as well)
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
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.
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.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
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.
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"
At least they let you come pick it up -- in many cities they'll treat it as an abandoned vehicle and tow it and charge you the tow and impound fees:
http://blog.sfgate.com/cwnevius/2009/11/11/car-stolen-that-will-cost-you-300-part-ii/
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.
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!
I'm with the AC on this one. Normally I'm in the tinfoil hat crowd myself, and I detest the "if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide or to fear" argument... but I honestly can't see how this information could be abused. It's not a violation of any privacy rights -- I'm out in public along with the data on my vehicle. It doesn't deny me any freedom of movement, it doesn't reveal my stash of weed or guns hidden under the seat, it doesn't make them privy to my whispered conversation about plans to rob a bank or blow up the nearest Chuck E. Cheese's. So what constitutional rights are being curtailed or even threatened?
On the other hand, it CAN more quickly locate my car if it is stolen or the gardener who let himself in and abducted my child; it will (as others have pointed out elsewhere in this topic) also make it easier to check for outstanding warrants or unpaid traffic tickets. As someone who has had my own share of speeding tickets, I still can't object to that -- it was my own fault for getting the tickets, and if I don't pay them on time, it's my own fault for making the problem worse when (not if) I get caught.
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.
Well, they could sell or give the info to auto insurance companies.
Hell, that's nothing. They can sell the data to credit scoring companies - the kind of companies that are now promoting things like scores for how likely people are to take their prescription medicine. They can sell it to stalkers - directly or through some legiitimizing proxy like a PI - who might like to know all the places their victims have driven in the last year.
Really, the possibilities for how this information can be used to the against perfectly innocent, law-abiding people are endless. If it were up to me, any sort of ANPR would require a warrant. Wholesale dragnet surveillance without any suspicion of wrongdoing like this just does not square with my idea - and I hope the general public's idea - of a "reasonable search." (Yeah, I know it's Canada, same crap has been going on in parts of the US for over a decade now).
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
In BC the car insurance is run by a government monopoly, so I guess it would be easier to pass them data. Having a well run single insurer is actually pretty efficient, as it lowers a lot of advertising and other overhead, but of course there are challenges in a system without competitive pressures to keep things in line, and a poorly run monopoly can be really terrible.
So what constitutional rights are being curtailed or even threatened?
None. Until you realize that it enabled them to search your vehicle under 'reasonable suspicion' because the system incorrectly flagged(Honest mistake, really!) your car as stolen...
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.
Prowler and prowl car are names for police cars that have been around for a while.
Not only that. You just don't know where they are going to stop. Placing cameras on every intersection will be analogous to placing GPS tracker on every vehicle.
Unfortunately, that USA ruling about warrantless tracking was based on the reasoning that the older laws that considered it a search to do a physical trespass were still in effect. The tracking was illegal without a warrant because it involved physically putting the GPS on the car.
That's a very limited ruling that wouldn't make it illegal to track someone by taking thousands of photos, since you don't need to touch the car to do that.
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.
if you were incorrectly flagged the search becomes illegal and anything found would be inadmissible in court
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
Then they only need to say your car was smelling weed. The system false positive now serve only to explain why they controlled your car in first place. You can't disprove the reasonable suspicion of a officer claiming to smell weed.
They just really want to place GPS tracking around everybody's neck. Since they can't do that, tracking every car is the next best thing they can get away with.
It takes a lot more effort to put a license plate reader on every street corner and use it to pick one car out of every car on the road than to put one GPS device on a car.
Not to mention that driving at night would probably defeat the camera system.
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.
I wonder how legal would it be to CAPTCHA my plate with some colored tape?
We are eternal, all this pain is an illusion.
When you take this system to its logical extreme, i.e., several thousand cameras in a city instead of just a few tens of them to catch people making traffic violations at intersections, it becomes a system to location track everyone anywhere they go. Aside from the prohibitive expense to maintain such a system, you don't have a problem with that?
Except technology improves which means it will likely take less effort and less cost as time goes by. In fact that has already happened. The reason these systems seem to appear out of the blue is that they don't require major capital expenditures and large departments managing them. They can also be retrofitted to existing systems.
You also don't need every street corner. Major roads and areas of interest will give you enough information for most purposes.
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.
Hate to point it out, but you're wrong on several counts. While even I, who am ALWAYS in the tinfoil hat crowd, don't have a serious issue with systems like this scanning for currently wanted vehicles, there is absolutely no reason to retain the information on non-matched vehicles. OK, your car gets stolen and you haven't reported it yet, or your straw-man kidnapped child incident happens and knowing that the car involved passed one of these things 30 minutes ago might possibly be useful in certain edge cases. Therefore, I would consent to retaining the information for a VERY BRIEF period of time--a few hours or so. There is just no reason to maintain it for weeks or months, and if they won't admit that's what they're doing--that's what they're doing. One problem with this is that nobody consents to anything--they just do whatever they want without asking or even announcing. That's wrong. It's even more wrong than having these monitoring systems in the first place.
Even if the people running this system and the officers involved have the purest of motivations and would never do anything wrong, the mere act of having a database that effectively can tell where certain vehicles were at certain times is going to present too great a temptation for others who will try to get their hands on it. Information, once collected, WILL be abused. It happens every time. Political hacks, future police state officials, divorce lawyers, private investigators, news reporters (if we have any these days) would all love to get their hands on this stuff, and if you allow the information to exist, they'll find a way. That's one reason why the agency that operates traffic monitoring cameras in my area does not record them (let's just say I've had the properly legal access and technical ability to verify this). Why? They don't want to have to deal with accident lawyers, divorce lawyers, etc. Even government officials in this case know what happens when you have a large database of stuff somebody else can twist to their own uses. Unfortunately, law enforcement in my area also has vehicles with this big brother license reader technology and they are much less forthcoming with what they do with the data. The system is, at least, reasonably easy to recognize on vehicles if you know what to look for. Stay behind them unless you're in an area with front license plates, in which case you're kind of screwed.
BTW, regarding your tickets--I guess it's your fault if you knowingly went over the speed limit, but you also should figure out if those speed limits were set according to proper engineering standards or by someone looking to increase traffic ticket revenue. There's a difference, and I would submit that the latter would absolve you partially of the moral blame here.
It you are a typical citizen it only eliminates anonymous travel and subjects you to additional inconveniences. Officials driving government vehicles of course are untouched, and criminals can risk countermeasures like switching plates. Your stolen car will be chopped and your kid will be dead before the police are notified with the appropriate plate. That you look forward to being severely punished for slight vehicle operation errors or paperwork oversights suggests a psychological disorder.
So what constitutional rights are being curtailed or even threatened?
Innocent until proven guilty when they get a complete list of your traffic history (well, the vehicle's) and pull you over because you had a few previous traffic offences in your record. Either they think they can make a false report stick to you to increase their quota, or they'll just pull you up to have a peep (particularly if those previous records were DUI or similar, so they pull you up for a "random" test in the hope that you might be drunk again).
I drink to make other people interesting!
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.
..and given how corrupt the VicPD is (i live here), i'm sure they will only use it for good... *sigh*
Search for this city and you'll find teenager girls physically abused in cells (with video), guys on the street assaulted for no purpose during arrest (with video), the list goes on and on. Or take a look at what's been going on with who's running the department.. A trusted PD they are not.
I posted a long post above about the potential for abuse. It's in reply to the first comment in the very first comment of this article.
But to name just a few possible abuses:
They could suspect you of being an accomplice to a crime because your car was found in a starbucks parking lot at the same time as a known criminal's car.
They could locate you and prevent you from attending protests, union meetings, or other events where you legally exercise your civic rights. Just imagine the police intercepting the leader of a (legal) protest while on his way to the protest...
They could track your every move (with enough police cars on the streets at once, they can know the location of every car in the city) and know everything you do. Of course they could find this information by following you around, but they'd have to follow you SPECIFICALLY. And if they do, they need a reason: you have to be a suspect in an investigation and in some cases they would need a warrant. Following and observing a random person for no valid reason is harassment and is illegal. But with this system, they are "following" everyone without having to meet the legal requirements to actually follow somebody.
As for what kind of things you do in public that you might want to keep private: well first, knowing every single place you go is a lot of knowledge. Knowing you were at the supermarket at 10 am last Monday is not much, but knowing every place you went to and at what time really is a lot of info.
Second, they could have on record every time you were at the doctor, or the hospital (frequent trips to these places indicate you likely have some serious health problem, which is the kind of info the law helps you keep private). Again, they could find this out by following you in person but they'd require probably cause or a warrant for that.
They could also find out who you're dating (and even if you are gay).
Third: they could make you a suspect of a crime/"bad" activity even though you're clean ("bad activity" means having an affair or hiring prostitutes... stuff that isn't illegal but could ruin your reputation). Imagine every night on your way home from work, you stop at a convenience store located in a "hot" area to buy cigarettes and every night you spend a few minutes chatting with the owner. A cop driving by your parked car would notice the car is empty. But the computer records won't show that, and just looking at those records it might look like you're hiring prostitutes for a quickie before coming home to your wife.
OK, so maybe it's unlikely anyone would pull your record to dig this kind of dirt on you. Well, what if the data collected on the computer mistakenly made you look like a suspect of terrorism and you were put a no fly list? You don't need to be caught making a bomb for that, just being at a bar 3 nights a week at the same time as a terrorist can make you look suspect. With a bit of imagination it's easy to find more examples, but basically the problem is, the data collected by this system can be used to make the wrong conclusions about you. Why should you be subjected to that kind of risk when you are innocent and your only "crime" is that a police cruiser caught you on camera?
Look up my first post somewhere above for further examples (it's a long one with numbered paragraphs).
But frankly it hardly matters why my everyday activities are sensitive and private info. The important thing is, this system lets the police keep tabs on you without having probable cause or a warrant, unlike the current system where they must follow you around all day. It allows for police harassment.
As for the info itself, I shouldn't have to justify why I want to keep my activities confidential: I'm entitled to keep even my shopping habits private if I want to, no matter how silly or paranoid this is.
Also: we're in an era where hacking is not uncommon. The "kids" at Anonymous have managed to hack into the FBI, an internet security firm (HB Gary) and a police department (I think in Texas) -
In the States, officers knocked on the wrong door while searching for a drug lab. The guys inside the wrong apartment tried getting rid of weed, the cops said they heard "noise of evidence possibly being destroyed" and broke down the door and confiscated the weed as evidence. The judge agreed that "noise of evidence being destroyed" was probable cause. The fact that they got the wrong address and should not have been in a position to hear the noise in the first place was not considered relevant. The fact that they only interpreted the sound they heard as destruction of evidence because they thought they had the right address was not relevant.
So in the States, I doubt that the system falsely flagging your car would be grounds to throw out evidence. At least in states where the law doesn't dismiss evidence that is considered "poisonous fruit". To summarize: in some states, if the police collect evidence due to a mistake, the evidence is thrown out. But if the mistake leads to probable cause (not evidence per se) and the probable cause then leads to evidence, then the evidence is acceptable in court (again, in some states only).
BUT
This hardly matters anyway.
The reason the police need probable cause and warrants is not to help criminals escape. That would be silly.
The reason they need probable cause and warrants is to protect the innocent: being investigated or having your vehicle/home searched is very annoying and frustrating. I don't care that I don't have anything illegal in my car. I just don't want it to be searched.
I once had my home searched (for the record I was innocent and the search did not turn up what they were looking for) and believe me, it was very disturbing. Having the police enter my home and look through it made me feel violated. For 6 months I couldn't take a shower or go #2 on the toilet until late at night, as I was afraid the cops might return. I slept in my clothes in case they came back early in the morning (didn't want to be caught in my pajamas).
They did not even look through my drawers, they just visited the rooms (they were looking for a person actually) but it was still a pretty distressful experience. Also, they didn't have a warrant: after they questioned me on my door step, I willingly let them in - I thought the experience would not be that bad, I didn't realize how I'd feel afterwards.
I did feel coerced to let them in, though: they repeated several times that if I was innocent I had no reason to refuse them entry (yes, I know refusing entry is not evidence of guilt but the accusation still made me feel uncomfortable). After they left and I ran the whole thing back through my head, I felt like I didn't really want them to search my home, I felt that I gave in because the alternative was most likely being investigated (i.e. I chose the best of two harms)... I felt that the whole time, even though they were not looking for me, they treated me like a suspect, with hostility and suspicion.
I admit I'm a bit introverted and not really at ease in public. My home is not just a roof over my head, it's a shelter where I feel protected from the outside world. I can interact socially as much as everyone else but I don't feel as comfortable doing it.
For months I didn't think of my home as a shelter, instead I felt like it was a place that made it easy for the outside world to come and find me. I wanted to be anywhere else but my home, even a crowded public area. So perhaps I'm not the average person and most people would deal better than me with the police searching their home (then again all people I spoke to who had their home searched were disturbed by the experience to some degree, although not necessarily as much as I was).
But even though I'm a bit abnormal (and I insist on "a bit" - on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being normal and 1 a complete deviant, I'm at least an 8), I still have the right to be the way I am, I have the right to be less comfortable than other people about social situations, and the law is supposed to protect me from
Not only do you not need to touch the car, hasn't the Supreme Court decided that when in public you have no expectation of privacy? I suspect they would argue that taking the photos of the plates is just reading the data that is publicly available.
And there's very little up keep for the equipment. So you get a small budget to install the kit one year, then rinse and repeat until your whole city is covered.
I grew up in Ontario and moved to BC several years ago. I'm amazed how ICBC actually kicks ass. No matter how "bad" locals think it is, it blows away how things are run in Ontario. ICBC doesn't have family discount type plans, but their policies and prices are overall extremely fair and "cheap". I think it's something with the BC culture that also keeps ICBC in line.. don't think such a thing could exist elsewhere in the country and "work" so well.
Perhaps it's the same BC culture/loyalty that keeps ICBC alive, despite private insurance being cheaper.. or people know better and if ICBC folded and the only choice was private, it wouldn't be "cheap" anymore and all hell would break loose and people would experience a "true" monopoly amongst private companies. I don't think ICBC has profit as one of their top priorities, so THE people are always high on their list.
I've been in several accidents where morons rear ended me... and only *1* accident where it was my fault. With a province owned system, I was amazed how quickly, smoothly and humane the entire process was.
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.
Since they also know where they were when they spotted your tag, they can now follow the movements of EVERYONE all the time with just a few cameras. Not only without a warrant, but without even the annoyance of attaching a GPS tracker bought with other people's money.
For one car, yes. However, as the number of cars increases you reach a point where it becomes no mor expensive to track every car in the area all the time with the cameras.
The same need to feel 'powerful' that drives police to create paramilitary units with military looking gear wo yel "HUT!" a lot will drive them to want that ability no matter that there's practically no legitimate use for it.
Ha! I don't have a car!
And our penises are larger, don't for get the penises.
Just make the data public so everyone is on an even footing, instead of creating a power imbalance.
As a later post alludes to they already can do that anyways. All they got to do is pull you over for a "random" chat to see if you are impaired and "smell weed'. If a cop is going to go out of their way to abuse your rights they can do it with a notepad and pen just as easy as they can with a computer being the one that reads your licence plate.
Also rate of checks. If an officer has to look at the plate and type it in wait for a response and then act on it they can only look at a very small fraction of the cars that pass them in a day. If they can go about their business and have an alert whenever something interesting comes up it is a much better screening technique. It pisses me off how many drivers pull across crosswalks waiting for an opening for a right hand turn for example. I wish cops fined people more for that as it is insanely dangerous but most can't be bothered because of the paperwork. If the traffic lights just snapped a picture of someone doing that and mailed out the ticket it would be a better world: more revenue for the city, hopefully a reduction in people doing it, and if not at least the idiots would be paying the idiot tax.
1) Resources that are limited and have a larger demand for them than resources exist. How often does a criminal get away because the police have to make a call and say 2 weeks of surveillance is all we can afford for this case before we need to move on?
2) So? Making laws hard to enforce isn't the solution. Changing the laws are. You can argue that making laws easier to enforce is universally good. Good laws should be universally enforced. Bad laws that the police routinely ignore because they are inconvenient and only enforce when they feel like it (because they have a quota on the number of tickets they need to issue, someone got caught driving while black etc) again is a bad thing because it is a subjective enforcement of laws and not fair. If everyone was pulled over for doing something that shouldn't be illegal in the first place it would quickly become a political issue and the law would be changed.
Not that it matters - since ICBC has the responsibility of ensuring we have safe drivers, both through their issuance of BC Drivers Licenses and vehicle Insurance.
What really gets me is the lack of transparency and due diligence in informing the public of how they are sharing our information and what technology they are using on our public infrastructures. I would have though the legislation and regulations that govern how public bodies store, utilize and share personal information would require ICBC to inform drivers that ICBC would be providing 'identifying information' to third party agencies/organizations. I don't remember seeing such a statement the last time I renewed my insurance.
I'm not surprised the RCMP took a while to cough up any documentation. They have their compartmentalized units and unique policies from division to division.
As an aside - how about the traffic cameras that have popped up everywhere. Pretty much every major intersection has a wireless or fibre connected camera for live monitoring. Who knows what's attached to that.
When I moved from Ontario to Vancouver in '98, ICBC insurance was prohibitively expensive. I had already paid the high-risk $1800/yr premiums in my teens and was down to $70/month, then ICBC expected me to pay the high-risk premiums again, pretty much ignoring my driver training and driving record. I was literally quoted the same rate as a new untrained driver my age when I inquired out of curiosity. I wasn't planning to own a car there anyway because the transit system rocks, but I can't say I'm a fan of government-run insurance. Melloche Monnex discounted me for my driver training, my university degree, and even waived the 2-year insurance lapse when I returned to Ontario. As a musician and sound engineer, my van is damaged about every 6 months from being parked in high-risk areas, and I've never had anything but a smooth claim process and I pay under $80/month for auto and home insurance, which covers my gear in the van, even when I'm touring in BC. Recovering two items stolen from my van on separate occasions seems to help. (Moral of the story - never steal from musicians, fan-led campaigns to recover stolen gear make RCMP manhunts look pathetic)
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
... 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.
From what I'm reading, you had a bit of a minor breakdown because some police (which you invited in) simply walked through your home.
You might not realize it, but this isn't exactly healthy or normal behavior. Please go see a psychologist and talk with him/her. When a quick police search through your home impacts your life that much then something is out of balance somewhere.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
I wonder if some "decorative" infrared LEDs framing your license plate could thwart (or even damage) such a system.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
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.
Wanting innocent people to be left alone is "arrogance" now. Wanting people to mind their own business is "arrogance".
Using armed agents of government power to enforce your whimsical notions of The Right Way to Drive upon your neighbors: not "arrogance" at all.
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.
You're (i) unsympathetic, and (ii) wrong.
They may need help, but it's because the police were scouting their home. I read it as an understandable reaction to an extremely stressful event. You may or may not understand that the police's actual purpose is to instill paranoia; much of their work involves intimidataing people and in some places is the default posture of LEOs. It's a sad byproduct of lax hiring strategies. What we want is people who can take control of a hairy situation. What we get is people who want to take control of all situations.
As analogy, limping isn't exactly healthy or normal behaviour either - but should you be surprised if you see someone limping after falling off of a roof?
If opportunity came disguised as temptation, one knock would be enough.
3^2 * 67^1 * 977^1
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.
I haven't lived in BC for quite some time, but the ICBC rate system does seem "fair" in that they classify drivers based solely (or is it just primarily?) on their driving history rather than on their demographics. The things one has at least some control of (ie your driving record) seems less arbitrary than your age, gender, etc. With that said, I don't know how ICBC deals with people who's history is from outside the province, but it seems reasonable to think they should be able to get historical data from other provinces.
http://www.icbc.com/autoplan/costs/premiums-set
When I moved from Ontario to Vancouver in '98, ICBC insurance was prohibitively expensive. I had already paid the high-risk $1800/yr premiums in my teens and was down to $70/month, then ICBC expected me to pay the high-risk premiums again, pretty much ignoring my driver training and driving record. I was literally quoted the same rate as a new untrained driver my age when I inquired out of curiosity.
Well, ICBC does not set rate based on age, just on driving record, so you might have been quoted the same rate as a new driver, but that rate is what any new driver would be quoted, no matter what age they were. With that said, I am pretty sure that they can include out-of-province driving records, as there are loads of hits in google searches with people posting how they needed to get letters from their ON insurers to prove various details about their previous driving history, and other responses from people who had no issues. It at least is possible that had you pursued it further you would have been able to get "credit" for your many years of claims-free driving.
As analogy, limping isn't exactly healthy or normal behaviour either - but should you be surprised if you see someone limping after falling off of a roof?
For a week or two? Sure. Six months? Something's still wrong.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
2) So? Making laws hard to enforce isn't the solution. Changing the laws are. You can argue that making laws easier to enforce is universally good. Good laws should be universally enforced. Bad laws that the police routinely ignore because they are inconvenient and only enforce when they feel like it (because they have a quota on the number of tickets they need to issue, someone got caught driving while black etc) again is a bad thing because it is a subjective enforcement of laws and not fair. If everyone was pulled over for doing something that shouldn't be illegal in the first place it would quickly become a political issue and the law would be changed.
Problem is, a huge number of unjust, draconian, puritanical, or otherwise shittastic laws are on the books. How about we change those laws first? Once a nation's laws are a paragon of virtue, and shining light on the hill so to speak.. okay, then the request to give unrestrained panopticon surveillance power to the police might not be quite so terrible an idea.
You may or may not understand that the police's actual purpose is to instill paranoia
No, you just think that because you're weird and paranoid like the OP.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
The article reads like a small time left-wing reporter, a Phd student and a web designer got their tinfoil hats on and went on a mission of framing the system in the worst light possible.
It's right wingers who are most paranoid about The Government "spying" on them, surely?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
BTW, regarding your tickets--I guess it's your fault if you knowingly went over the speed limit, but you also should figure out if those speed limits were set according to proper engineering standards or by someone looking to increase traffic ticket revenue. There's a difference, and I would submit that the latter would absolve you partially of the moral blame here.
Who gives a flying fuck abouty the moral blame? You break a law, you should expect to get punished for it. You don't get to choose which lawa you obey. End of story.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
And our penises are larger, don't for get the penises.
Shhh! A big prick will put you on the no fly list.
Upkeep of any such equipment would be prohibitive anywhere near where I live.
Coming soon to an America near you!