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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.'"
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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...
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
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.
There's a lot of potential for abuse with this system:
1) They could track your every move. Where you shop, where you get your hair cut, when you go to the doctor, that you visit the hospital often (meaning you're being treated for something), that you eat fast food often, and WHO YOU MEET OR DATE (they could figure out you're gay, which many people prefer to keep secret).
2) They could make you guilty by association. If you have coffee at Starbucks every morning at 8, and so does a criminal, they could easily claim you're suspected as an accomplice and they could investigate you. Being investigated is not pleasant even if you are innocent. This makes police harassment easy if somebody in the police force or the government has an ax to grind against you for any reason.
3) They could find that you often drive near protests, night clubs, areas with gangs or drug traffic. They could make you a suspect even if you are not involved in those activities. "Probably Cause".
4) They could use info from points 2 and 3 to make your life miserable: investigating you is just one thing. They could put you on a no fly list (as the article suggests) or a surveillance list or whatever else...
5) They could track you at any time and stop you from attending protests, union meetings, elections, political meetings, business meetings, etc. If the cops want to be a pain in your ass they could choose to stop you for questioning specifically when you're on your way to an important business meeting.
6) If it's legal to record license plates like this, they could then extend the system to identify people's faces. It's easy to argue that your face is public info if you don't cover it in public and there are judges who would accept this argument.
7) They could put traffic cameras, bus/subway cameras or building security cameras into this. If they run out of vehicles, they could install cameras on city or government vehicles like fire trucks, garbage trucks, ambulances... They could even make contracts with private companies to install this system on their service vehicles (imagine every Fed Ex truck or every Taxi being turned into a surveillance vehicle). It all depends how much they want to watch people.
8) They could use the system to automatically flag you as breaking the law. For instance, they could calculate how much time it took you to go from point A to point B, and conclude that your average speed was slightly higher than the maximum speed limit you encountered on your trip. Or they might notice you've been driving in circles (e.g. you don't know the area too well) and accuse you of DUI. It's not uncommon for law enforcement to think "let's look for patterns in unlawful activity, and then conclude every occurrence of such a pattern is an indication of illegal activity and dismiss the possibility of a legitimate explanation".
To put it simply, this means they could be accusing you of a crime because a computer says you committed a crime.
It's too much power in the hands of the government/authorities. It may help fight against some crimes (and the original article claims it works worse than traditional methods) but this comes at a cost of bigger threats to society: government/police abuse (and in the worse case scenario: tyranny). Also, if the purpose is to find needles in a haystack, why keep data about every car? The software could just analyze every plate number the cameras spot, then discard "innocent" cars and only save data about the cars that police are searching for. Clearly this is a case of "You're assumed innocent now, but you may not actually be clean so we're keeping the data in case we need it later. You know, in case you suddenly decide to break the law".
And let's keep something in mind here: maybe the government today is well-intentioned. But what about in a decade or two?
Also, the police doesn't spend a ton of money on technology just to catch 100 stolen cars. Once they get the funds for the technology, they need to justify the expense and so they expand th
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