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UK License Plate Cameras Have "Gaps In Coverage"
Aguazul2 writes "UK police are sad that despite having the most comprehensive driver surveillance system of any developed country, there are still gaps in their coverage. From the article: 'The cameras automatically record plate/time/location information and send it to a central data store, which has complete nationwide records for 6 years.' Also interesting is that an unspecified 'particular driving style' can be used to evade detection by the cameras. It appears, however, that criminals are well aware of the cameras and take other routes. Big Brother technology, coming soon to a country near you!"
So let it be !!
It's OK as long you're not seen by two cameras at the same time.
Say out loud: I'm an Aspie and I'm somewhat proud, I guess. Uh. Can I write an email in all caps instead? Hm...
bit by bit, freedom is chipped away in the name of safety. I know I want no part of such a society.
There is no national plan to cover the whole road network in these cameras which makes saying there are 'gaps' in coverage a little misleading (it even says so in the article). It may well be a hint that universal coverage is a de facto goal of many involved in deploying these cameras. Weird and wacky driving may help you avoid detection but in many cases the bahaviour would draw attention to you and would be counter-productive.
Yeah, because Julia and Winston are supposed to take the train, not drive.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
The world is only now waking up to the dangers of 'big data', and having faceless corporations track your every move across the internet, or your purchases, or your contacts via social media. Governments quite like corporations doing this, since once the data is mined and analyzed, they can get it via court order, for free, with laws that prevent the companies from telling their customers.
What's happening with motoring is similar. Placing ANPR technology on main roads implements the whole-scale surveillance of a nation. Gone are the days of having to have a court order to tap a phone or intercept someone's postal mail. Now, the data is collected and analyzed first - essentially presumed guilt, not presumed innocence.
The linked article suggests that there are ways of defeating ANPR technology. There are perhaps two. The first is to steal the license plates of a different car. This trick has been around for years, and extensive effort has been put into supplying license plates that show clearly visible signs of this - they fracture and turn black. The other is somewhat more dangerous, which is to know in advance where all the cameras are, and then tailgate a large truck past the cameras.
In short, the police have the inclination, budget and incentive to build out a better and better tracking system until even these few gaps are gone.
A more important question, however, may be to step back and look at where the balance now lies in terms of personal freedoms versus state power. The theory of a democracy is that it provides a 'government by the people', yet I wonder how many people are comfortable with the current state of play?
What? They only use 8 bits to store the speed of the car which then crashes the system before it records the image?
Funny, that. And true. I was driving in England a few weeks ago, and even the simple, solar-panel fed digital speed-warning systems read your plates. Even my (foreign) plates!
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
I used to live 1km from the ANPR that was situated on the "ring of steel" near Canary Wharf in London - or, more accurately - my bedroom window was right next to the point that the cop cars would catch up with the non-taxed, non-MOT'd cars after they had cruised through. At the beginning of the month it was about 2 a night that would be stopped as police cars operated a pincer movement around the Isle of Dogs
the slightly scary thing is that you can buy your own ANPR System off the shelf. (I know that geeks can easy create it themselves using motion and some OCR tools - but, imagine selling this to normal people!!
I thought UK cameras looked at the rear plate.
Another good reason to work in mph! :)
That would technically be a simple solution. Heck, you might as well implant a beacon on the people themselves. But from the point of view of marketing, that won't sell so well. And our dear politicians are afraid of only 1 thing: election time.
There probably was an integer overflow during the conversion of a floating point to a fixed point number, which shut down the primary control system and the backup shortly after eachother (because they were running the same software) and sent the vehicle offcourse.
I used to work on license plate recognition about a decade ago. Typically there are problems with illumination, motion and noise. So what the systems try to do is boost illumination (often by hidden IR lights) and decrease motion related blur by taking multiple shots and integrating images and/or filtering the results. All this algorithms have some built in assumptions about the expected area of interest, scale and most likely motion. Suppose you detect license plate at some position and scale in frame N. To boost the probability of being correct, you want to check if you can find the same plate number in frame N+1 and possibly N+2. Detection is all about probability. There are some thresholds built in that on one side maximize the probability of license plate detection and on the other side minimize pollution of the database with bad results. So in short, if your license plate is dirty and your trajectory is not what the system expects (changing lanes and velocity) it's more likely the system will not store the result. If you know the specifics of the particular system, you may beat it easily, like if the system first looks for the plate frame, you can mask or offset the frame, or if you know about the exact illumination filtering procedure you may add some conflicting structured illumination.
Sorry officer but there is a big muddy puddle just outside of my house.
When I go to the UK, I always change my numberplate to: FU'); DROP Table NUMBERPLATES;--
I thought UK cameras looked at the rear plate.
(Most) speed cameras do, for some reason though ANPR cameras (including 'SPECS' ANPR speed cameras) usually look at the front, perhaps to catch a view of the driver if needed. It's common knowledge that you can 'lorry surf', meaning drive so that a high truck is between you and the cameras at the right moment; the cameras usually being mounted high above the kerb.
This is a substitute for a clever sig that fits within the maximum number of characters.
Currently we see court cases where the fact that a mobile phone was turned off during the period as a reason for suspicion.
How long before driving a route that doesn't involve cameras is also seen as a reason for suspicion?
It means that in order to avoid these cameras, from now on you will have to do skidding 360s through every single intersection, like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcmswRwdvnA. It's really just a natural progression from the roundabout.
Nah, you're not from the UK - no one here refers to themselves as British.
Whoa, where did that come from? They also claim they "contributed to more than 50,000 arrests". That's a lot of "terrorists" then: maybe we should live in permanent shivering supine unquestioning fear.
Or maybe we could just put Elbonian plates on and jabber "No speaking Englandish!" if stopped, like any halfwit career criminal could figure out.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
1984
Murdoch's papers (News of the World) use to buy information from the police. They even admitted as much to Parliament inquiry as though they were above the law.
I bet they bought the logs of where famous stars and politicians went, when and how.
And if Murdoch can buy that info, how many times do you think other criminals have bought that info. Just as the vehicle registration office was selling license plate information to clamping outfits, debt collectors, pretty much anyone who wanted it, I bet the police have been selling this information too.
What is the betting that's is sold to insurance companies, debt companies, private investigators. Maybe not legally, but then Murdochs Notw buying wasn't legal either.
If it was an integer overflow, the speed would just be interpreted as s - 256, where s is the original speed. If the car was doing 280, the camera would think it was going at 24 km/h.
We had plans to do so ; for a while the documents were publicly available from the Department of Transport website (they may still be there, linked below).
They were dressed up as plans to implement "road pricing" - a scheme whereby you are charged a differential toll rate for driving on certain "congested" roads at peak times, which allegedly would create incentive for you to drive at different times, or via different routes, thus reducing congestion.
The implementation was to be a small black box with a GPS locator and a GPRS modem, which would log and upload your movements to the DoT. The estimated cost was £100 a unit ; even if you accept this optimistic number, a back-of-the-napkin calculation tells you that it would be MUCH cheaper to mandate an active RFID tag in the number plate (on the order of £10, rather than 100), and fit induction loops on these roads that are deemed "congested" for tolling purposes - a sort of universal SpeedPass.
So wielding Occam's Razor, the plan was to install and operate a tracking device in every vehicle in the country (it also mentioned linking up with a European system, so this was presumably a pan-European initiative), and since their stated aim could be achieved via much cheaper means, you have to assume that the real aim was indeed to provide the capacity to track everyone.
The cameras aren't there for ordinary criminals to get caught /tinfoilhat
It's more to do with how the timing mechanism works. If you devise a speed camera to measure a "sensible" range then at some point you're going to have something that's too slow or too fast to measure accurately.
GATSO-type cameras work by taking two photographs a certain interval apart, with the speed of the car as measured by Doppler RADAR printed on the frames. To verify that the electronic measurement is accurate, the distance the car travels can be measured between the two photos because there are stripes painted on the road.
Now, if you go so fast that you run off the end of the stripes before the second photograph is taken, your speed cannot be verified - but you *are* clearly going far too fast (the TV show Top Gear experimented with this and found that above 160mph or so, the cameras don't trigger correctly).
It's near IR not "proper" IR so that won't work. In far IR the plate would look like a solid block of colour because it's got the same temperature all round.
Don't take my advice (ianal and all that) but if you wanted to you'd be better off filtering near IR with a sheet of special glass (same type they use over CCD camera to only pass visible light). The plate would look normal to the human eye but would be too dark for near IR cameras (maybe). Though covering the plate with anything , even transparent to visible light , is often illegal just about everywhere.
Top Gear experimented with this and found that above 160mph or so, the cameras don't trigger correctly).
Which is 257kph!
Which is what I've done. Only been stopped once in 5 yearsby some bored country plod , gave some BS excuse and he let me off.
Or you could ride a motorbike - they don't have front plates anyway. Presumably the police arn't interested in catching people on bikes. Perhaps crims don't use them? Oh , wait.... this isn't about catching criminals. Silly me.
When did this happen? Am I a member of the Christian race then? I don't look much like Jesus but hey...
The monitoring will be done by your own bloody car. Real-time tracking will be required to register a car or even obtain insurance as the surety knobs want it too, to increase your rates in real time if the telemetry suddenly goes non-milquetoast.
Remember, citizen: driving is a privilege, not a right. Just like travel, speech, and thought.
1) steal a set of plates from another car
2) place on your car
3) enjoy driving, filling with fuel etc
4) discard plates - goto (1)
Lasts upto 24 hours before plates are reported as stolen as they generally have to check with current owner
and soon to be replaced with
1) raprep plate from same/similar make model color vehicle (I've seen a very convincing copy already)
try telling the police you weren't at the crime scene
criminals will always have the upper hand in a Big Brother/Nanny state
Your'e all thinking it, I just said it for you
I do. What else should I write on an entry card? UKian? Devonite?
There's a radar sign near my home that displays nothing if you go, uh, significantly faster than it says you should.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The issue is not the technology, the issue is how it's used and by whom. This is an excellent system for reducing vehicle crime - theft, unisured drivers, unsafe vehicles on the road, etc. that cost us all a shitload of money in taxes, insurance premiums, death. They can do this as much as they like, I'm cool with that, but I want to know that that's ALL they're doing with it, and that they're not selling my data etc. etc.
People need to stop getting all antsy about the technology and concentrate their attention / concerns / questions on HOW it's used.
There is no music - home taping killed it.
"It appears, however, that criminals are well aware of the cameras and take other routes"
Careful, that makes anyone whose vehicle does not show up on the cameras possibly shady.... ~;-)
all the best,
drew
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
Or even find a dis-reputable company that will produce 'fake' plates for a fee/bottle of whiskey
I think this just might maybe have to do with the fact that they cheaped out on low res, grainy, piece of crap cameras that can see about 10 feet reliably.
What if you got your car a rather unique paint job that featured random strings of numbers and letters at different orientations. I wonder how well the tracking system would work, or bet yet, change the paint scheme every so often.
Winston thought he'd found a gap in Big Brother's surveillance net too; turns out it was just what they wanted him to think. Tin foil still works, though.
All those multimillion big bro investments bypassed by something this simple:
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp6SlR5CR0M">License plate flipping on youtube</a>
If you get to the point where you are worried about the cops misusing this stuff, then you're already fucked, as you can't trust your police.
Same here.
Except 12 years ago.
Every time I pay a visit, any inclination I had to return evaporates. The news coming from there makes me sadder and sadder (and I don't even make much of an attempt to keep up with it).
Ignoring the whole innocent until proven guilty bit and right to privacy we in the US are so accustomed to, it's not entirely about the trustworthiness of the police. There will always be crooked cops - put 1,000 people in a room there will be a few bad apples. It's human nature.
More importantly, if the data exists then its security can be compromised. Data in the wild can be used for, well, anything. You may never plan on getting divorced, but if you do you probably don't want your soon-to-be ex-wife's legal council pulling up your whereabouts for the past 6 years. There are lots of scenarios - most of them outlying cases to be sure - where the data could be used against you for profit, or in a defamatory or misleading way.
To put it in computer terms, there's no need to back up your data on your PC because real failures that result in permanent, irrevocable data loss are actually very, very rare on a probabilistic basis given regular replacement of hardware. But smart people back up their data anyway - because nobody wants to be part of the statistically small group which lost all of their life's work in a lightning storm.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Devil's advocate: Wouldn't this be a good argument FOR plate tracking? Sure, the plates were at the crime scene. But if they start tracing the vehicle back on its journey, they'll find it came out of 123 Seedy Garage Lane. They'll also have a record of your car pulling into 1701 Enterprise Blvd., parking, and never leaving.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
What about British people that aren't from England?
Or Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland?
I'm British. I'm not English, I'm not Scottish and I'm sure as shit not fucking Welsh. I'm not Irish but I'll pretend if it gets me laid.
I do not drive myself, but wondered about this.
How about you ring your license plate with infra red LEDs to make it too bright for the cameras to read what is on it?
Normal cop won't see a problem, but cameras, well, it would be too bright to read it.
Be seeing you...
You seem to presume an unchecked environment where operations just continue with ruined data.
However, in a more professional runtime environment such an integer overflow is causing an exception which can be handled in more or less successful ways.
One would assume that systems used to provide evidence in legal procedures have the facilities to protect them against using invalid data because of variable overflows etc.