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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,
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
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/
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.
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.
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.
"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."
You assume people Give the Proverbial Fuck without being reminded. Maybe you do, in which case congrats on your virtue but don't expect it to scale.
Drunks don't try hard to avoid crashing and crash often. Many drivers crash but refuse to carry insurance. Many drivers run expired license tags or swap them from other vehicles. Auto theft is common.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Even though it's against the law? And with all the police out there? How can that be? It's almost as if all that policing doesn't solve the problem...
Stop the hyperbole. 1984 had cameras in every room in every house, and televisions broadcasting propaganda 24/7 that couldn't be turned off. Entrapment was both legal and encouraged to catch people breaking the law. If you want to put a soundproof room in your house to have a place you can guarantee you can't be snooped on no one is going to stop you. No one is going to arrest you for reading a history or politics book, even if it is about how great communism is. Even if you go grab a copy of the Anarchists Cookbook and get arrested for it no one is going to try to torture you into loving America while you're in prison. Anyone who thinks we're in 1984 hasn't read 1984.
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.
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.
Dear Mr/Mrs/Miss tbird81,
Your vehicle has been identified on several occasions frequenting liquor stores. Statistically, we find that drivers who fit this behavior pattern tend to be riskier drivers and poor insurance risks. Consequently, we are raising your liability insurance rates.
Signed, Your friendly insurance company.
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.
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
and you're purposely ignoring the increasing number of similarities between today and 1984 for reasons I cannot fathom.. we're headed there, step by step. slow cooked.
no one will arrest you for building that room because it's ineffective and cost prohibitive enough that most people don't do it. you might not be arrested for reading political books, but you WILL be put on a watch list (eg no fly) that supersedes due process. your example, if true, disproves the previous statement, ie that you CAN be arrested simply for buying/reading/distributing certain literature. I guess anyone who's actually read 1984 would know how terrible such a reality is even if today isn't EXACTLY what was described.
"This is false. I'm not a danger to anyone on the road. Almost no one is."
And you know this, how? And we should believe you, why? The Lake Wobegon Effect is alive and well -- most people think they are "better than most" drivers. It's also possible that you are ignorant and unaware of it -- the Dunning-Kruger effect. I know, how insulting of me to even raise the issue -- but how can I know which cars contain safe drivers, and which do not?
There's also multiple views of "danger". If you say, no harm, no foul, no danger, then indeed, danger on the road is pretty rare. But there is driving that raises the probability of a crash -- for instance, tailgating -- that most people regard as dangerous even when no crash results. And to be most expansive in the definition of the word, simply having a car on the road and driving at high speeds creates danger; the pedestrian who jaywalks into your path (his fault, according to the law) is at greater risk when you are driving fast than when you are driving slow. That is increased danger. And note that "jaywalking" is our word for breaking one of those evil rules that you hate so much, so if you decide to just dump all the blame on the pedestrian for breaking a rule, that would be a little inconsistent of you.
So think it through. We're talking about operating heavy machinery in public. We're all surprisingly good at it, but that doesn't mean it's not dangerous, and the inevitability of human error means that nobody can claim to be "not dangerous".