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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 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.
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.
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
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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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.
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