Automated Plate Readers Let Police Collect Millions of Records On Drivers

schwit1 writes with a report on just how extensive always-on license plate logging has gotten. The article focuses on California; how different is your state? "In San Diego, 13 federal and local law enforcement agencies have compiled more than 36 million license-plate scans in a regional database since 2010 with the help of federal homeland security grants. The San Diego Association of Governments maintains the database. Unlike the Northern California database, which retains the data for between one and two years, the San Diego system retains license-plate information indefinitely. Can we get plate with code to delete the database?"

Comments

Had this in the UK for years

[clickclickdrone]

The police set up vans with cameras that scan the number plates of all the cars that go down the street that day, cross ref for road tax, MOT and/or insurance and send out automated fines if any aren't in order.

Re:Had this in the UK for years

[Frobnicator]

Great, the UK is becoming a panopticon state even faster than the US. As an American, I'm not petty enough to welcome the company.

You got it backwards.

The UK entered the mass-surveillance business back before WW1. Pax Brittania meant they could monitor the world with impunity, just like the US does now. Mass surveillance of British citizens entered the public knowledge around WW1, so the government made the GCCS (Government Code and Cypher School) public after the war. It was later named the GCHQ, which is the functional equivalent to the NSA in the United States. Thanks to the CCTV cameras every five meters it is still the most surveilled nation --- the US is not alone in monitoring every phone call.

US mass-surveillance came a bit later, but WW2 saw the industry boom. It entered public knowledge after WW2, which is about the time the NSA was formed. The "Five Eyes" program during World War 2 expanded government surveillance to the global scale. The five nations (UK, US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) are still working together to ensure that when one country can't do the spying, another country will gladly step in and spy for them.

The US joined the UK. Even though the US does an incredible amount of spying around the globe, the UK has been and continues to be the "leader" in homeland surveillance.

Re:Had this in the UK for years

[Anonymous Coward]

Panopticon is also a metaphor used by Michael Foucalt to highlight the way in which a society can discipline and punish itself. Technological advancements have granted the State an enormous amount of power, "where no bars, chains, and heavy locks are necessary for domination any more." By the way, no true Bentham Panopticon prison design has ever been created.

Re:Had this in the UK for years

[kilfarsnar]

Seems by now someone would have come up with a viable way to make the plates unreadable by machine, but still perfectly human readable??!?

Would the high intensity infrared LEDs around the plate not do the trick?

I've seen them blind cameras before, and be un-noticed by the human eye.

Yes, a plastic film, or a clear plastic cover will often foil the plate readers. Of course, both are illegal in my state.

Not news for UK

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not really news for the UK, the UK police have ANPR automatic numberplate recognition, which they put on most major junctions and motorway on and off ramps.

They revealed it a couple of years ago when somebody started shooting people and they tracked his location to the nearest town.

All that has happened is car number plate cloning has become much more wide spread by criminals, the records are also kept forever.

Makes it easy for police

[benjfowler]

As others have mentioned, they've had ANPRs in the UK for quite a while.

The cops sit on the side of the road, and they check all passing cars for registration and tax. Then, some basic computation is done: if a plate is seen in two places, which is clearly impossible (e.g. the same plates popping up in distant towns five minutes apart), the plates are flagged as bad, and the police go and chase them.

The idea being, people who break little laws, also tend to break big ones. E.g. a bunch of "poor and misunderstood Asians" who were on route to blow up an EDL rally only got caught, because they had a bad tax disc. The alternative doesn't really bear thinking about (large-scale civil disorder) -- and I'm glad they got caught.

I'm sure the civil-liberties obsessives here would hate the idea of ubiquitous ANPR, but the practicality of the situation is that it works.

Re:Being done commercially too ...

[perpenso]

Ever wonder why your purchases via credit card three states removed from home after a day full of driving aren't flagged for a fraud alert? This is why.

Because I've been to that state before and purchased something on that credit card?

Because I left a "breadcrumb trail" of purchases at gas stations and restaurants using that credit card?

Because fraud alerts use statistical data from past fraudulent purchases to rank the risk of a new purchase and I'm in a particular neighborhood, at a particular vendor, purchasing a particular class of item that is considered a low risk?

Credit card companies can do a lot with only their own database. I'm not sure subscribing to this license plate database would add much to their existing fraud risk scoring system.

Re:Errr

[Anne Thwacks]

Well the UK is not a US State. Here the plate follows the vehicle, and all vehicles must have a place if they are in a public place. Yes, the police can and do track your every move, and the data IS archived for ever. I understand that there is no one with sufficent authority to request deletion of the data.

However, the system is gloriously incompetent. I once bought a car with a plate that had been cloned. The cloner had run over some children in the entrance to a school and been arrested, and this fact was recorded on the DVLA database. However, several local authorities in the area where the cloner operated continued to hound us for various motoring offences committed by the cloner before we bought the (innocent) car. Only when we managed to get one of the officers prosecuting the cloner to call the local authorities did the harassment cease.

They routinely collect the data "to go after terrorists" but use it haphazardly on innocent people, and it costs money and time (their time and money is your time and money) to perform this stupidity.