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The Rapid Rise of License Plate Readers
An anonymous reader writes "Today, tens of thousands of license plate readers (LPRs) are being used by law enforcement agencies all over the country—practically every week, local media around the country report on some LPR expansion. But the system's unchecked and largely unmonitored use raises significant privacy concerns. License plates, dates, times, and locations of all cars seen are kept in law enforcement databases for months or even years at a time. In the worst case, the New York State Police keeps all of its LPR data indefinitely. No universal standard governs how long data can or should be retained."
Your license plate is always showing. I don't understand how anyone can claim it's private.
I think we need to attach infrared camera "discouragement" to the back of our cars.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
The slippery slope is not real. Keep telling yourself that.
I see it differently. I welcome such "progress" because it can only have one eventual outcome - the destruction of the current order. So by all means, push a little harder. Just a little more...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Your license plate is always showing. I don't understand how anyone can claim it's private.
I don't know why we need to go through this every damn time; but here goes:
Tracking and correlation. Yes, obviously, a license plate is visible, and passers-by have always been able to see them. However, without a network of passers-by observing license plates on every corner, and chattering amongst themselves about which ones are seen where, when, that means almost nothing. Only the most overtly memorable and/or suspicious license plate would merit accurate memory of time/place, much less multiple time/place recordings allowing for inferences about travel.
With automation and machine vision, highly accurate recording and correlation across fairly broad areas, in space and time, becomes relatively easy and cheap.
Surely this difference is obvious?
Do you really have an expectation of privacy over the license plate hanging on your car bumper?
Aren't license plates like the opposite of private?
How about very specific knowledge of where you're going and when? Because, that's what we're really talking about here.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
It's quite different when the government is using technology to automatically record everything. Just like someone seeing you walking down the sidewalk is different than you being recorded by cameras everywhere you go.
Private, public, it really doesn't matter. The citizens (in theory, at least) control the government, and they should be able to stop them from trying this nonsense.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Every Android device is constantly tracked by Google. You can see this on Google Maps...check out the accuracy and detail of the traffic overlay. Apple does the same thing with iPhones. Both companies comply willingly with law enforcement requests for tracking data. So not only can they read your plate, but they can tell who is in the car with you, where you go, and where you stay.
Is all this information good, or bad? YES! This information can be used to bring about justice, or it can be grossly abused.
How about we make a bunch of signs that are pictures of different license plates, and place them randomly about town? Swap them out every few days, and change the plates, and soon the cops DB will be full of bad data.
Or pull a Little Bobby Tables, and have an image of a plate that ends in an SQL injection
Where I live we had a referendum against red light cameras. It passed, and now the cameras are gone. Surely the same could be done with plate tracking.
Do you really have an expectation of privacy over the license plate hanging on your car bumper?
Aren't license plates like the opposite of private?
How about very specific knowledge of where you're going and when? Because, that's what we're really talking about here.
No, it's general knowledge about what public street you were on at the time of the photo. It doesn't tell them anything about a specific place you are going. At best (worst?) they might see a still photo of you turning in to a parking spot or parked along a road.
In the past, limited law enforcement resources prevented the cops from taking pictures of everyone and everything at every moment of the day.
Society's basic expectations of privacy and the laws that followed, are based upon this assumption that you could not be tracked at every second.
Not "would not be track," but "could not be tracked."
As a result, the police are operating in a grey zone.
What they're doing may be legal, but only because the law did not anticipate this.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Lol, you should check out this TV series called Mythbusters. They would laugh at your foolish lies. And then prove you utterly wrong.
I don't know why we need to go through this every damn time; but here goes:
We have to go over it "every damn time" because people keep saying that publicly visible things are somehow privacy invasions. Once people stop claiming that then people will stop correcting them.
Or move to a country that doesnt track its citizens using license plates. Or you know make your vote and voice count in your own country and limit these.
I think things are going to have to get a LOT worse (not jsut "a little more..." for most Americans before they get off the couch and cause the destruction of the current order. Unfortunately I don't think that there's enough care out there for any meaningful push back towards a decent state. This means we're going to be stuck on this slow downward spiral for a while now. The worst part is that by the time most Americans wake up, first they will be called hippies and minimized in the media, and then the technology used by the police state will be too advanced for any meaningful change to occur. We will simply all end up being labelled as terrorists or have criminal records for showing up at an anti-whatever rally.
Three days from now?? Thats tomorrow!! ~Peter Griffin
Today's reading club will be focusing on a little gem in the same vein as the ever popular 50 Shades of Grease:
IB6 UB9
Mmmm, that it's made by a convict is all the more racy!
Nope. Public is public. Don't like having a license plate? Don't own a car.
Says an Anonymous Coward...
A few people taking pictures here and there is an order of magnitude different than a single organization recording everything nearly everywhere. And since citizens can (theoretically) control the government, we definitely can stop nonsense like this, and still be allowed to take pictures in public ourselves.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
It's not a matter of what technology the cops are allowed to use, it's a matter of how they use it.
Cops, with a warrant, are allowed to do all sorts of stuff. They can listen to your phone calls or search your house. As long as there's some level of checks and balances on it, I can accept that. I have this crazy idea here -- hear me out -- that before the police put together a database of everywhere my car has been pretty much forever, they should need a warrant for that too. And it'd be kind of nice if they had to get rid of that data after a certain point if it didn't enable them to build a case.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
No one is claiming your license plate is private. It's the tracking and storing of data that's a concern.
Similarly, no one is claiming the heat escaping your house is private, but you still need a warrant to use an infrared camera to "see" inside someone's house. Even though the camera works by seeing what *leaves* the house.
It means they can ( and will ) track people that visit other people or places or meetings that they classify as "subversive" - like political parties they dissagree with. Like people organizing labor. Like people who are members of pro-pot groups. Socialists. Anti-totalitarianists... SUBVERSIVE TYPES LIKE YOU......
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Most of our laws are written around the fact that we are humans. For example, there are pretty severe laws about pouring certain chemicals into the ground, but very different laws about pouring clean water into the ground, because as humans certain chemicals could greatly poison the ground and groundwater, while pouring water into the ground is only unlawful when it's a waste of clean water in a drought. If human physiology were different, these laws would be different.
The laws and customs related to public privacy are all based around the concept that humans have poor memories, which are often forgotten in moments, and are most certainly forgotten in days, months, and years, and are absolutely forgotten upon in about a century. Moreover, any "memories" which are more durable require extensive human time and effort to produce and catalog - something which is very expensive and thus limited.
Our laws and customs were designed taking this into account. Now, after however many centuries of development of our laws and customs, in the last five years we have means to augment fundamental human nature. Those that only understand the letter of the laws and customs written long ago see this as changing nothing, for they view the letters in a vacuum and ignore human nature. Those that understand the spirit of the laws and customs understand that they were established for a given time and place, and if the circumstances change the laws and customs should as well.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
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No, it's general knowledge about what public street you were on at the time of the photo. It doesn't tell them anything about a specific place you are going. At best (worst?) they might see a still photo of you turning in to a parking spot or parked along a road.
Sorry. But you don't see the whole picture. License plate readers are not just single photos. It is about movement of individuals And not just one suspect, but everyone. It is automated and turns the where-abouts of individuals into a searchable database. Combined with security cameras, face recognition, and cell phone records they can give you a very accurate description of someone's movements.
So what? NY (eh, Bloomberg) is proud, that with their new technology (provided by Microsoft) they can automatically search for certain suspects. Looking for someone in a blue jacket? They can now automatically pull up surveillance of anyone in a blue jacket. And they keep video records for the last 30 days (Other records for years). They can probably match that to what car that person drove, what store he/she entered (nice pictures there), or whether she/he used the subway. They are working on software to automatically detect suspicious activity.
Once you have all this data, it would be very easy for some other unnamed agency to use it to match movement data of different individuals and come up with a list of possible contacts.
Now imagine that technology in the hand of a repressive police state. The White Rose (students who distributed leaflets against Hitler) lasted about 9 months before they were beheaded. A janitor caught them distributing leaflets. With Bloomberg/Microsoft's new Information Awareness they would last a couple hours.
As a resident of NYS, the highest taxed state in the country, the expense of this is far more upsetting to me than the privacy implications.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
Hello, I see a *lot* of negative privacy concerns on this post, but I see it differently. I've felt for over a decade the police should have license plate scanners. Then when they tie it into a database of stolen cars, or cars used in recent untried crimes, it would come up as a positive, and the cop could pull the car over.
Isn't there any love for police here being able to do their job more effectively? Every civilized nation needs a police force. So even if you don't like the current government, a new government still would need police. We should therefore help our police to be empowered to solve the crimes they're commonly tackling.
God spoke to me
There's a post just a couple above yours from a guy who's municipality had a referendum to get rid of some of this surveillance stuff and it passed and the cameras are gone.
Yes, you control your government if you're willing to exercise that control. You can even have a significant impact on the political system, simply by showing up at a local party committee meeting and speaking up. It takes time and will, which most people don't have.
And it means ignoring advertising and all political media for a while, and being very mindful of what corporations you give your money to, which is harder work than most people are willing to do.
You are welcome on my lawn.
As a result of this rapid expansion of private monitoring, the company recently won a $25,000 contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to provide a database that would help locate "fugitive aliens."
I don't get it. What does an agency whose primary mandate is to shut down Web sites and seize domain names need LPR data for? Are people driving server farms around in trucks?
That may not be as crazy at it sounds.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
I see two common responses to this:
1) This technology will lead to a loss of privacy and abuses by police, therefore it should be stopped
or
2) This technology will enable police to find and catch criminals more quickly and effectively, therefore it should be allowed.
The truth is, both reactions are correct -- but the issue is typically presented as a tradeoff: we can have our privacy OR better law enforcement, but not both.
But what fun is that? I want both. And since we are all clever Bagginses here on Slashdot, perhaps someone can think of an LPR system that would allow police to track down criminals quickly, and yet still by highly resistant to privacy loss or abuse. I recognize that such a design is non-trivial, but in a world where people come up with clever systems such as BitCoin, I don't think it's necessarily impossible either. It just takes some serious thought, and getting past the "ooh, new technology is scary" stage.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Your navigating thousands of pounds of metal at high speed with a UUID at least on one end of it, if not two
who would want to keep an eye on that? Fuck I get annoyed by the same GFD hillbilly who is doing 100+ in a 1992 chevy truck with 6 inch pipes sticking out of the back of the cab 2 foot above the roofline every single day. I know their vehicle, shit I even know their license plate, whats the difference if I report it or a camera does?
Yea I am being tracked as well, but theres this thing called an if statement ... if (driver == asshole) flag; else break
All that tells us is that legally, it isn't an technically an invasion of privacy, per se. However, the potential for abuse is almost unlimited, and as such, it is not something the government (or any private party, either) should ever be allowed to do—not for privacy reasons, but because it gives the government nearly unlimited power over the people. As Jefferson once put it, "A government afraid of its citizens is a democracy; citizens afraid of government is tyranny."
The big thing you're missing is that the public would never authorize the expenditure for such a colossal waste of resources if this were done with humans, which means that although that could theoretically be done, it can't happen in practice. One reason the public would never authorize it is that it would be one very large step towards the panopticon, towards the world of Big Brother, etc. It would massively creep out the public to see twenty police officers on every street corner, to the point that everyone would feel constantly afraid for their freedom—afraid to say or do anything, for fear that they might accidentally cross some line and get arrested. That is the essence of totalitarianism.
Cameras on every corner are really no different from officers on every corner. What makes them far more dangerous is that they are less daunting psychologically—less likely to cause the public to realize the risk they pose—yet the totalitarian threat they represent is exactly the same. This means that they represent a way for government to take enormous strides towards increasing its power over the people without the public ever noticing. Nothing could be more dangerous to democracy and freedom. Not all the tin-pot dictators in the world, not the corrupt politicians in the pockets of big business, not terrorists, not whatever country we're ostensibly at military war or cold war with. Nothing.
The nature of government is to march determinedly towards totalitarianism. In a free society, it is the public's greatest responsibility to periodically push them back with such vigor that they are forced to retreat to a more balanced position. This is potentially a very large step towards totalitarianism. It is, therefore, the public's supreme duty, in the face of such an overstep, to slap the government's hand and say, "No. Bad government. No cookie." As it is oft said, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
My license plate is out there for the world to see. So what? So is my face and my fingerprints. Big freaking deal. People could track people centuries ago, they're just faster now.
Wouldn't have matter if it did work. Texas law prohibits any and all methods of obstructing license plates (that would otherwise obstruct automated OCR based technology).
http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/tlodocs/80R/billtext/pdf/SB00369F.pdf
I wouldn't be surprised if the next version of plates have RFID tags built into them. It would certainly make their job easier and the technology would be cheaper than it is with complicated and software. It would also cost the tax payer less money in equipment costs. Think of it as rape with lube thrown in to make the experience better. And remember to say "Thank You".
You're welcome citizen.
Life is not for the lazy.
The government is not your mom. The government is simply a collection of falliable people just like me. Who gave them the right to say what is a right and what isn't?
Trotting out this nonsense that driving is a "privilege" when it's one that nearly everyone has and is just about required to be a functional adult in many places is simply stupid.
I would say that there are two issues that don't get consciously acknowledged enough; but that are assumed when a 'what, when, and where' style privacy expectation is formed...
The first is ubiquity(which is almost identical to cost, over a modest time horizon). Being shadowed by a cop, say, costs nontrivial money. I don't have an absolute protection against being shadowed; but I do have a reasonable expectation that I would only be followed if there were some reason to go to the trouble(an analogous case might be the assorted awkwardness that facebook photo-tagging has spawned: Obviously, I can't claim to have any privacy right to the visible fact that I showed up at a party; but, historically, my presence there would likely only be remembered by my friends, or if I were a celebrity, or if I did a naked kegstand. Now, even the most tedious attendees are recorded in trivially searchable form).
The second is inference: With more advanced technology, you can gain new insights from old data. The hunting-grow-ops-with-FLIRcams cases are a good example: Do you have a privacy right to the outside of your house? Umm, it's outside and visible from the street... How about the inside? Now, with new imaging technology, I can draw strong inferences about the inside of your house just by looking at the outside. Once the fancy terahertz stuff gets cheaper and more compact, this should get even more dramatic. In these cases, new technology means that information in which I don't have a privacy interest can now be, with some clever math, turned into information that I do have a privacy interest in. This presents a bit of a problem.
And it will likely be replaced with a worse order.
Because every American citizen has a Gawd-given right to run over pedestrians anonymously. Unless those pedestrians are a group of iPhone-carrying hipsters.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
license plates have light for illumination so they can be read. those light just might some how start imitating more energy in the IR part of the spectrum than before.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Sure, one wants the police to have good tools. The thing is, these tools should only be used in genuine criminal cases.
How about this:
- The license plate scanners are great, they run all the time, scanning every plate they see.
- The data on the plate (this car was here at this time) only if the plate is in a list of accepted cases. Otherwise the data is immediately discarded
- A plate can only be placed in the list if the car has been reported as stolen, or if a judge has issued a warrant.
- Plates may only remain in the list for a limited time, for example, as specified in the warrant.
- If data collected on a plate is not needed (e.g., no criminal complaint results from a warrant) the data is deleted.
This way, the police have a good tool to use, and the privacy rights of innocent citizens are not infringed.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
license plates have light for illumination so they can be read. those light just might some how start imitating more energy in the IR part of the spectrum than before.
As far as I know there are rules requiring certain lights on a car, and often also ban certain lights that can cause misunderstandings or similar, but lights that emit invisible light cannot cause any problems as they are - invisible. I cannot see how a ring of strong infrared lights around a license plate can be a problem as this light is completely invisible to humans. That most cameras doesn't filter it out isn't a problem traffic-wise; but recordings and pictures may be useless due to light flooding.
I've always wondered - most digital cameras have a built-in UV-filter (make people don't know this and still buy an external UV-filter to put on the lens of their DSLR camera) but no IR-filter? - Why?
For fun, go to a dark room with a standard remote and first take a picture in the darkness, then again while you press something on the remote. If the batteries aren't run down you'll see light as from a flashlight illuminating stuff in front of the remote in the last picture. You saw nothing but the camera picks up the IR-light from the remote and translates it into 'light'.
Similar for UV-light. Use a 'darklight' like often used in clubs which will make 'optical white' glow intensely, and if you take a picture of a dark room illuminated with UV-light, you'll most likely see only the optical white illuminated (it can actually be any color, like seen in UV-paint), but if you see everything somewhat illuminated you have no UV-filter and then you'll need an external filter if you want to take decent pictures outside or just in sunlit rooms.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
This doesn't follow. Lots of common, everyday objects and activities have "potential for abuse" one could describe as "almost unlimited". Automatic weapons. Automobiles. Kitchen knives. Ball-point pens.
Is it really fair to compare these potential existential threats to the non-existential threat of the creeping invasion of privacy in the name of security? If someone abuses automatic weapons, it results in murder, but abusing LPRs is about abusing laws that were written before this technology existed to extract more fines from people. The former is obvious and elicits a sharp reaction from the media, while the latter just blends into all the other annoyances that we have come to accept in the Post 9/11 World. I would say LPRs are more like body scanners, which were installed at airports without any public comment and which are demonstrably useless at thwarting terrorists, but which justify the ever-increasing DHS/TSA budget.
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.
Don't like being tracked? Don't have a face. No, wait....
Just put on glasses... it worked for Superman/Clark Kent!
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
On the other hand unmarked police cars have been able to follow your car wherever it goes without a warrant, and that was not considered a privacy violation.
Without a warrant, but not without a police-related reason.
In the UK, there was a court case that explained that very well: A police officer claimed to be injured and collected pay without working, but his employer (the police) didn't quite believe him, so they watched his home to see if he was as badly injured as he claimed. He wasn't, it ended up in court, and there was the question whether the police was allowed to do what they did.
Result: While your employer is allowed to check whether you leave your home when you claim you are too sick to work, the police isn't. They have powers/rights that normal people and companies don't have, and with those rights come obligations, so they can't just watch you. However, in this case the police was actually the employer, and as an employer, they can do what other employers can do.
Almost everywhere you go in britain now (certainly in big cities) you see ANPR cameras slung up above the road. Sure, it has helped catch a few criminals but at what cost to personal privacy? You could argue that no one should be allowed curtains in their house because that way the police could see any crimes being committed such as burglary or rape. But I can't see many people going along with that. The current generation of politicians and police commanders just can't see the road to hell they're leading us down.
These systems will be abused more often than they will be useful. I know what you did last night!
A famous person committed suicide some years ago here. Police stats showed that her 'police record' was accessed a couple of thousand times by cops that had nothing to do with the case.
They abuse the system to check upon there new neighbor, the daughters bf and the likes.
A centralized system detecting licence plates will now be used to check upon the wife and kids more often than the original intent.
It's just one big google for them.
You misunderstand the concern here. Do you feel that you should be tracked and monitored by the government when you are not involved in any crimes? If there is an investigation of criminal activity, then license plate readers would be very useful, but what about rogue police officers who just decide to track the movements of individuals? Monitoring everyone in the hopes of discovering a crime goes against the idea of being innocent until proven guilty, and most people feel that it is abusive for police to pull someone over who is not breaking any laws.
What if you worked nights, drove a regular car, and every night you were pulled over to-from your job or to get "lunch"? You might get a bit offended by that, and that is when driving at night IS seen as unusual. Now, what about the police just keeping a record of every car on the road, with no reason for it? If they pull you over for a traffic violation, then it makes sense to speed up the process of issuing a ticket, but if they just randomly collect license plate information, then what?
So, does MONITORING of people who are not suspected of a crime seem like it is good for society? That isn't enforcement, and that is the problem. How about if a given police officer decided to use blanket monitoring to trace everywhere you go, for no reason? That starts to sound like it might be a bit paranoid, but it also sounds like the government keeping tabs on EVERYONE, and a police state is NOT what the USA is all about.
Being able to identify someone with a license plate is not the problem, but when does recognition become monitoring a tracking the movements of individuals? Would you want the police to be monitoring your every move all the time, even if you are not doing anything illegal? This is the issue, the "keeping records" part needs to go away. Make it so any license plates scanned are removed from the system after 30 minutes, unless a ticket is given, and it should again be deleted if there is no reason to keep it after the ticket is contested.
Those who get tickets regularly should know that there is a record of it, so there isn't a problem with it being kept at that point.
So you would be OK with the entire contents of this database being made public? So not just the police, but your boss or your ex-girlfriend being able to look up your location whenever they want?
No? That's not OK? Well now that we've established that it's reasonable to feel uncomfortable with some public data being known by some members of the public, can you understand why I'd feel uncomfortable with the police having that information?
If it's truly public, it should be available to anyone and everyone. If it's not truly public, the police should have to get a warrant before they access it.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I just had Jury Duty this week. Simple criminal case, I wasn't picked for the jury.
But the chatter in the halls by the other potential jurors was scary:
"Well, he wouldn't be up there if he wasn't guilty."
"Someone that age should know better than to steal!"
"He looks guilty as hell."
etc.
So do YOU want to be put in front of these "peers" of yours?
I always imagine that these tools, and it seems there are more of them each day, will lead to complacency, the evidence seems so very compelling when it comes from such a fancy system. However, one day someone will game the system; maybe the villain just bolted his license plates onto the back of some unsuspecting stooge's car, or had a second set of plates, or even put out a dozen sets of duplicate plates, or put different plates on the front and the back of the car or do any number of things that simply makes the system unreliable.
Then the system will wind up providing an alibi for someone we would all have rather seen in gaol and its veracity will go unchallenged because it is so whiz-bang.
Nullius in verba
So based on your Orwellian tautology, a totalitarian regime in the vein of 1984 would actually be demonstrative of a perfect society? It's the perfect mix of governance and enforcement.
Here's a handful of abuses a cop in his car would be able to perform:
* know where you were, every day for the past whenever
* without knowing who the driver is, observe regular driving patterns
* know where you live (or at least where the vehicle is registered - maybe you remember the concern when this became possible from a police car?)
* know whether you travel to or from a 'crime' area on a regular basis
* potentially know (using some of the newer systems) if any crimes coincide with your regular visits to a certain locale
* probably 100 other things statist statisticians have decided can be inferred
The truth is, you've got it backwards. Society doesn't require governance; government requires a society. You can not have a government with fractured society - not for any significant period of time. That's the idea behind Democracy here in the West: you avoid totalitarianism by providing a fluid, non-derisive, upheaval-free method of societal governance change.
When you have a statist government moving towards totalitarianism, the sheer ability for self-regulation is being slowly denied. A growing totalitarian government essentially strangles democracy slowly, killing the society and culture which built it, replacing it with a shallow stereotyped shell. You can clearly see this in every totalitarian state that has grown and fallen over the past century: the USSR, Nazi Germany, China, North Korea, etc.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers