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

[ebno-10db]

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.

Re:Had this in the UK for years

[Captain Hook]

So long as the car isn't used on Public Roads it doesn't need MOT, Insurance or VED, although you have to declare that the vehicle isn't used or store on the road (SORN Declaration).

Knowing a vehicle isn't insurance etc isn't enough, they have to show you using the vehicle on public roads which is where the camera comes in.

Re:Had this in the UK for years

[newcastlejon]

Great, the UK is becoming a panopticon state even faster than the US.

The original Panopticon was a British prison. The system there worked because prisoners couldn't know if they were being watched, unlike the ANPR cameras the parent mentioned, which - like speed cameras - are always preceded by a sign to let you know they're there.

Re:Had this in the UK for years

[mrbester]

ANPR cameras aren't signposted.

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

[Gerzel]

In many ways I attribute the trend towards panopticon and surveillance state and a matter of laziness and unprofessionalism among police forces.'

A professional uses their knowledge to weigh the pros and cons of what they are doing for their client. It isn't just giving the customer what they ask for like some sort of service vending machine but actually listening to needs and desires and working to fulfill them for the client. This is a lot harder than simply doing what needs to be done to "get the job done."

Widespread surveillance and net tactics are easy to use to produce basic results of lowering crime but don't consider other aspects and duties of the job such as watching out for citizen's rights or privacy or in many cases, actually following the law.

Secrecy is used to much the same effect. You don't have to do the work of explaining if you just label it a secret.

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

[Tharkkun]

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.

Hell they only make movies about it every couple years under the name James Bond. I find it funny when people are surprised that things are being monitored. What rock have they been living under for so long?

Re:Had this in the UK for years

[cayenne8]

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.

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.

Re:Had this in the UK for years

[Phreakiture]

In the area I live in, about half the police cruisers have ANPR cameras on them. Wherever they go, they collect data. I know of one case where an acquaintance got stopped because his registration was flagged for an insurance lapse. There was no other violation than that, just that the computer went "ping!" when he drove by the cop car.

Re:Had this in the UK for years

[N_Piper]

Pretty sure Mythbusters already took that one on...

Re:Had this in the UK for years

[stiggle]

They don't even need vans these days - most traffic police have ANPR camera built-in, so they just need to park up and point the vehicle towards the traffic they want to scan.

Re:Had this in the UK for years

[RaceProUK]

Not with ANPR, but with speed cameras. Still valid though, since you still need to see the plate. No matter what they tried, the result was the same: Busted.

Re:Had this in the UK for years

[RaceProUK]

Yes, a plastic film, or a clear plastic cover will often foil the plate readers.

No, they won't. They barely have an effect at all.

Re:Had this in the UK for years

[kilfarsnar]

Ok, if you say so. I haven't tested it myself.

Re:Had this in the UK for years

[RaceProUK]

I would, but I figured I'd leave it to professionals.

Re:Had this in the UK for years

[RockDoctor]

I know of one case where an acquaintance got stopped because his registration was flagged for an insurance lapse. There was no other violation than that, just that the computer went "ping!" when he drove by the cop car.

... Which is exactly what the technology is designed to do.

Your point is ... ?

... that people should have the freedom to avoid the various taxes that their elected representatives have decreed upon them?

... that people should have the right to impose major hazards on other people's lives and livelihoods by using dangerous machinery (i.e. vehicles) without carrying valid insurance against those risks?

I drive a car ; I pay my road tax ; I pay my insurance (and devote around 1 day/year to trying to get the best deal available, which typically returns me £300-£400 for that day's work - a fair return) ; I also pay for fuel for the vehicle. None of these things constrains my freedom to travel, any more than the cost of feeding, shoeing and stabling a horse impeded the freedom of travel of [INSERT ROMANTIC STEREOTYPE OF "FREEDOM" HERE].

Re:Had this in the UK for years

[uninformedLuddite]

I got pulled over in AU because of a 27 year old marijuana charge that flagged me as a suspected dangerous drug user. Since that charge marijuana has been decriminalised in my state but that didn't seem to matter. If you think these cameras aren't going to interface with more than just transport authority computers either now or in your near future then you have an unpleasant surprise coming.

Re:Had this in the UK for years

[Phreakiture]

Wow! Who pissed in your cereal this morning?

Follow me with this for a second.

clickclickdrone started by saying that, "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."

I follow on by corroborating that, furthering that it can also be fit into a smaller form factor, and that the technology works.

So . . . YOUR point is?

Re:Had this in the UK for years

[RockDoctor]

So ... this technology works. As intended. And this needs comment? And the only people who get caught are the ones who can't prove that their insurance/ license/ MOT etc really is in order (because there are errors in databases after all, and you've always got the option of disputing the allegation).

Re:Had this in the UK for years

[Phreakiture]

Yes, it warranted comment. It warranted comment because anyone can say anything here, and it is useful to have the facts corroborated.

public?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't the whole point of license plates that they are a publicly readable tag to identify your vehicle? the state's already have an entire department dedicated to tracking which plate is one what vehicle... its called the DMV... They all share this data with each other. I fail to see how this is a significant concern?

Re:public?

[TheGratefulNet]

we believe you: you probably DO fail to see why this is such a big deal.

but it is. even if you don't get it.

Re:public?

[Gr8Apes]

Because it's one thing to have an identification item on your car, it's another to track where you are when and store that data. It's no different than the NSA keeping tabs of everyone you know and when you talked to them. If that's not clear, please prep yourself for an anal implant that will collect all data on your person at all times, for the public record.

Re:public?

[Jmc23]

Or no different than pretty much living in any small town.

Re:public?

[zlives]

i didn't realize small towns were keeping permanent databases.

Re:public?

[Antipater]

i didn't realize small towns were keeping permanent databases.

They have for decades. It's an undeletable, all-seeing database called "the Pastor's Wife"

Re:public?

[Holi]

Then you won't mind being tagged with a GPS chip so we can track your location at all times.

Re: public?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I already carry a smartphone which is that asking other things...

Re:public?

[h4rr4r]

If it is so simple, why not explain it to the whole class?

Re:public?

[Kilo Kilo]

for the public record.

For the super secret anti-terrorism record, you mean.

Re:public?

[fustakrakich]

And the "Harper Valley PTA"

Re:public?

[Wookact]

What right do they have to know where I go and when with my vehicle? None? It is one thing when someone takes down a suspicious vehicle's plate and reports it in, and a completely different to have a computer categorize all plates heading anywhere. All of the sudden everyone is suspicious.

Re:public?

[ebno-10db]

It is illegal to have a car on the UK road if it doesn't have an MOT (stringent annual vehicle safety and emissions inspection), road tax and insurance. Many people try to skirt the system by skipping a month or two and hoping not to get caught. The result is that they are no longer insured.

Of course the panopticon state is only looking out for our welfare. What government policy isn't strictly concerned with that? Of course the fines going into the treasury don't hurt, but I'd be thrilled if that was the worse that could come of this.

Perhaps you need to learn English, your post makes zero sense.

You're right, assuming the reader is oblivious to anything other than plain literal statements that don't rely on context.

Re:public?

[ebno-10db]

The saving grace is that you can also see the pastor's wife.

Re:public?

[Existential Wombat]

It's as good as tracking indivuiduals as an IP address is.

Not that that stops the RIAA.

Re:public?

[Libertarian001]

"They have for decades. It's an undeletable, all-seeing database called "the Pastor's Wife"

I just call her "Mom"

Re:public?

[Chris Mattern]

Let us remember that this is the country from which the Beatles, who were hardly Randists, gave us "Taxman":

(If you drive a car ), Iâ(TM)ll tax the street,
(If you try to sit ), Iâ(TM)ll tax your seat,
(If you get too cold ), Iâ(TM)ll tax the heat,
(If you take a walk ), Iâ(TM)ll tax your feet.

Re:public?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it's none of the governments damn business if I'm parked in front of the local strip club/mosque/synagogue/church/bar/party headquarters/planned parenthood/soup kitchen/school etc. It's none of their business that I was out driving at 1:00 am and it's not legitimate to run the social network algorithms to see how I'm connected to all the other plates they tagged at 1:00 am It's not their business to build up a database that can tell them when & where I go to work, come home, take the kids to soccer - or how I deviate from that pattern when my wife's car is tagged at the airport.

It's none of their business and that's all that needs to be said. If the data exist, it will be abused, manipulated, sold, distorted, etc. And not for your benefit.

Ha - captcha: cynical

Re:public?

[cyberfunkr]

Because the DMV doesn't know where you've been, or where you're heading.

Park a plate-recorder van near the entrance/exit of the local gun show. One in the parking structure near a rally. A couple at select places of worship around town. You get the idea.

Now cross reference that data with border checkpoints, HOV lanes, and other public traffic cameras.

Instant, no-effort, and of course infallible watch-list.

Re:public?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nonsense. An IP address can be attached to literally any device and behind said device can be any number of other devices belonging to literally anyone.

A license plate is attached to one vehicle. Generally only one or a handful of people drive a given vehicle. Even among married couples one car is usually his and the other hers and while either may drive either, most of the time the same individual is driving the same vehicle.

Yes, license plates can be spoofed like an IP address, but that's probably not going to convince anyone of your innocence in court.

Just imagine how you'd feel about your daughter's stalker having access to this information vs access to an IP address she once used and maybe you'll see the difference.

Re:public?

[davester666]

...or that you are seeing the pastor's wife...

Re:public?

[pixelpusher220]

So following you're own logic, the DMV already has this data. They're the ones who issued the plates. So why do they need to be recording it again?

What they are doing is building a location map of where you go and when; not directly but the data could easily be arranged to provide that data. That is hardly what the DMV and gov't are supposed to be doing in a 'free' society.

Re:public?

[I'm New Around Here]

Before my wife and I were married, we were spotted at the mall one day. The mall in the city, on the other side of the island. The largest shopping mall in the state of Hawaii. One of my mother-in-law's friends saw us walking together and holding hands.

Imagine the shock my future wife got when her mother asks her about "that young man you were with today".

In Hawaii, everywhere you go there is someone related to or friends with your family.

Re:public?

[serbanp]

Oh, the NSA reference is patently stupid. Eavesdropping a *private* conversation is completely different from taking snapshots of cars/license plates, which is *public* information.

I, as a private citizen, can use my dashcam to record whatever happens in front of my car while I'm driving on public roads, including your license plate. However, I do not have the right to intercept your phone conversation. Can you now see how the two situations are different?

Re:public?

[Gr8Apes]

You can record whatever happens in the public domain. Making that available to the public at large is a different issue. The government keeping that data is illegal.

Re:public?

[Ichijo]

Identification on your car tracks where your car is, not where you are. Remember, car != person. A lot of people get the two confused.

In many cases, one may be a good proxy for the other, so if you don't like it, stop operating deadly machinery in the presence of others. Should the FAA stop tracking airplanes?

Re:public?

[joe_frisch]

It is the record of your motions that is a problem. An occasional incident of knowing where and when a person was driving is very different from a complete record of someone's movements.

If you see my car parked at a burger and beer place at 3pm on a Thursday, you can't deduce much. If you record my car arriving there at 11:30 every day, and leaving at 3:30, then you have information that might be interesting to employers.

License plate readers are just one piece of the growing array of technology that makes it possible for all of your activities to be monitored. This information is valuable to law enforcement, companies, and political interests.

Re: public?

[Jsigona]

Very well said.

Exploits implementation

[Anonymous Coward]

There was a joke circling in Poland a couple years ago:
http://i.pinger.pl/pgr456/3d49724c000eb4404b01224d
worth a try ;)

Re:Exploits implementation

[Thud457]

hey, that's Bobby Tables' car!
now I feel unclean because I posted a XKCD link to /.

Re:Exploits implementation

[gmuslera]

Thats the real world equivalent to the xkcd strip. The problem is, knowing the trend, going in the streets with something like that will surely put you in jail, for years. If they put in jail, for a decade, for scribbling anti-bank messages in sidewalks with washable chalks this will be harder. In fact, is a hack attempt, you could get a century in prison for that kind of things. Meanwhile, you keep the money and walk free, even if caught screwing the entire world's economy. In their view, law needs justice like a fish needs a bicycle.

Re:Exploits implementation

[Yakasha]

I think you did it wrong. Those normally get modded +5 pretty quick.

Re:Exploits implementation

[ebno-10db]

There was a joke circling in Poland a couple years ago: http://i.pinger.pl/pgr456/3d49724c000eb4404b01224d worth a try ;)

What makes you think that was a joke?

Re:Exploits implementation

[eth1]

Actually, it would be interesting to know if those ANPR cameras can see outside of the visible spectrum. You could then have a "blank" plate in the rear window (or just at the side of the road, for mobile systems) that accomplishes the same thing.

Re:Exploits implementation

[jklovanc]

If they put in jail, for a decade, for scribbling anti-bank messages in sidewalks with washable chalks

I despise articles that quote maximum consecutive sentences as what a defendant is facing. The article makes it sound that if he is convicted he will automatically get a a decade. The maximum sentence for vandalism is 1 year and $1000. He is charged with 13 counts as he is alleged to have done it 13 times. The sentence is only 13 years if the sentences run consecutively. In most multiple count cases the terms run consecutively. They also don't mention that he could get probation or a suspended sentence if found guilty. If they wanted to be accurate instead of sensational they would say the following;

If they put in jail, for up to 13 years, for scribbling anti-bank messages in sidewalks with washable chalks

Re:Exploits implementation

[chihowa]

To an officer making a traffic stop, it's perfectly visible and readable, and nothing is obstructing his ability to read your plate. To the dash-cam in his patrol car, it's a white license-plate-sized blob.

Of course, that right there is enough to get some serious attention payed to you. There is then video evidence that you, John Smith with (officer read) license plate 123 XYZ, have taken steps to obscure your license plate from cameras, as seen in the timestamped dashcam video of you being pulled over. It may not be illegal, but you can't be certain of that.

You should at least turn it off when you're being pulled over. You don't want to automatically be a suspect in any crime where the perpetrator used the same method. Extra police attention never does you good, even if you are innocent.

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.

Stolen Idea

[Sparticus789]

Fractal pattern embedded within a set of bones? Now let us hope that the police do not understand regular expressions.

Not that anyone will.

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

"Can we get plate with code todelete
the database?"

Sure. Put this on your plate:

L2LBRTRIAN

Re:Not that anyone will.

[Anne Thwacks]

How is that going to help? It is not a legit UK plate - automatic arrest after you pass the nearest APNR camera (allegedly 50 metres, but might be more if you live in a rural area).

All plates have either

two letters, two digits, three letters

or

one letter, one to three digits, three letters.

or (if more that about 40 years old)

three letters, one to three digits, one letter

or, if dating from before 1960,

three letters, and one to three digits.

if the vehicle dates from before 1939, there may be even fewer characters, but there were never very many cars before 1940, and very few of them still work .

SQL injection is old news

[KPU]

> Can we get plate with code to delete the database?"

Yes. http://gizmodo.com/5498412/sql-injection-license-plate-hopes-to-foil-euro-traffic-cameras https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/04/sql_injection_a_1.html

My Car's Nickname

[Saethan]

I think I'll call my car Little Chevy Tables.

Already been attempted

[cybernanga]

FTFS

Can we get plate with code to delete the database?"

You jest, but it's been thought of before:

http://gizmodo.com/5498412/sql-injection-license-plate-hopes-to-foil-euro-traffic-cameras

brave new world

[Thud457]

Because, unlike patents adding "with a computer" qualitatively changes the situation.
Checks that used to be limited by manpower can be done on every plate that goes by, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
And anybody, local PD, FBI, NSA, your insurance company, pissed off $cientologists, criminals staking out people to kidnap, crazy ex-girlfriends, can have the ability to do so.

Re:brave new world

[Ol Biscuitbarrel]

The film version of A Scanner Darkly had cars with barcodes on plates instead of numbers, which were scanned at every intersection. Yes, the system was abused. Or utilized according to design, take your pick. And that 2006 film was set "7 years in the future."

We'll stick with numbers though, for pedestrians' ease of ID. Helps to find your ride in the parking lot.

Re:brave new world

[blippo]

I live in Stockholm, Sweden, and here we have cameras in every intersection, scanning all licence plates.

I think the cameras have been there for more than 10 years, and the cameras where installed without any
kind of public announcement,supposedly because they are used for monitoring the traffic flow, and are storing only a hash of the licence numbers.

There is a short notice regarding the cameras on a government website, claiming that there are no privacy issues with the cameras,
as it is impossible to calculate a licence number from a hash.

It does not mention that it is trivial for anyone with access to the system to compute a hash given a license number, and find out wherever your car has been, and how fast it was driving, the last 10 years or so...

Re:public? FTFY

[zlives]

for the public safety.
I guess some people like anal probes.

Surprisingly low

[phantomfive]

36 million over two years is like watching a single freeway. If you want to track a single person, you're not likely to get a whole lot of useful data from that.............

Re:Surprisingly low

[CanHasDIY]

36 million over two years is like watching a single freeway. If you want to track a single person, you're not likely to get a whole lot of useful data from that.............

36 million total scans, not scans of 36 million individual plates.

Re:Surprisingly low

[phantomfive]

Yeah, it doesn't seem particularly useful for any sort of real investigation.

Re:Surprisingly low

[CanHasDIY]

Yeah, it doesn't seem particularly useful for any sort of real investigation.

Nope, but very useful for Stasi fascists who want to log the movements of supposedly free citizens.

Re:Surprisingly low

[phantomfive]

That would be a real investigation. I'm not sure you're getting much useful logging here. Not enough data points.

Re:Surprisingly low

[CanHasDIY]

I'm not sure you're getting much useful logging here. Not enough data points.

A matter of time, man; I'm certain someone at Google said almost the same thing when they first started monitoring their users, er, I mean, 'products.'

Just a matter of time...

Re:Surprisingly low

[phantomfive]

Yes, there is no doubt it can be expanded. It's just surprising it hasn't expanded yet.

Re:Surprisingly low

[CanHasDIY]

It's just surprising it hasn't expanded yet.

Yea, about that...

Considering recent disclosures about just how expansive government surveillance really is (compared to what we thought it was), I suspect, since we're now hearing about it, the systems use is far more expansive than we're currently being made aware of.

Spies are like cockroaches: for ever one you actually see, there's a few thousand more hiding in the walls.

Re:Surprisingly low

[phantomfive]

lol now you're talking like McCarthy. Next you'll be calling for hearings or something?

Re:Surprisingly low

[CanHasDIY]

The difference being, McCarthy was chasing imaginary boogeymen to satisfy his own political agenda; the boogeymen in my narrative are far from imaginary, and my only agenda is to force government agents to live up to the expectations set forth in the Constitution (presumably a far nobler goal than "flushin' out Joe Red")

Re:Surprisingly low

[phantomfive]

That's not the difference. There actually were communist spies in high positions.

Data Lifecycle

[onyxruby]

The thing that people need to think about is that data is an asset. Like any asset it has a date of acquisition, a period of usefulness and a time that it should be removed from service. Just like you would have a retention policy for your corporate email or payroll records, you should have a retention policy for all other data.

The key is to define the lifecycle of your data ahead of time - before there are any legal actions against it and within legal compliance requirements. Once you have defined your requirements and useful period of retention you need to purge it and destroy all backups - all as a matter of policy. As long as this is your normal course of business your butt is covered in court.

Government owned data like license plate data should be treated the same way. Since it is publicly owned data the public should have a say in how long it is retained. My suggestion is to simply define a policy with a very short retention period. Normal data would be kept for a week and data that matches up to a criminal investigation (stolen car etc) could be retained per legal requirements.

The balance of the thing between big brother / police state and a bonafide crime fighting tool (these things are really good at catching stolen cars for example) is to define your data retention policy as short as possible and zealously enforce it.

Re:Data Lifecycle

[camperdave]

This isn't about license plate data. This is about which vehicle was where at what time data.

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:Makes it easy for police

[CanHasDIY]

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.

Theoretically, rounding every non-government employed citizen up and sending them to the work camps and gas chambers "works" even more effectively...

Re:Makes it easy for police

[benjfowler]

For those of you playing along outside the UK, calling somebody a "Daily Mail reader", is a common slur thrown at people who disagree with the sort of people who read left-wing newspapers like the Guardian.

Blaming Whitey for any and all anti-social behaviour from people who happen to hail from an ethnic minority is also quite common amongst those of a "liberal" persuasion here. It's an insidious form of reverse racism.

The rather absurd idea that brown people can't control themselves and are being provoked by British intervention in the middle east (as opposed to criminality, warped political ideology, indoctrination by extremists, etc), is very common amongst the far Left here.

Re:Makes it easy for police

[ebno-10db]

The idea being, people who break little laws, also tend to break big ones.

Yes. I've occasionally let my car's inspection sticker expire, so it's likely that I'm a terrorist. Please learn the difference between P(A|B) and P(B|A).

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

But the next time the terrorists might come on foot, so you should add mandatory pedestrian stops with the classic "papers please". They might also swim ashore so you should ensure that people carry their ID when swimming too.

Re: Makes it easy for police

[TheGavster]

This isn't about checking plates as they're scanned, this is about collecting long term data linking a plate to a sequence of places and times. If an incumbent wished to discredit an upstart opponent, they could quite easily query data going back years to develop a defamatory sequence of events. The implications get worse as you consider the cross correlations that could be made between vehicles.

Re:Makes it easy for police

[ultranova]

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.

The practicality of the situation is that we don't know if it works. No, a single datapoint featuring particularly dumb terrorists doesn't prove anything, nor does the rather inane slippery slope of "avoid taxes today, murder people tomorrow". If anything, you'd imagine that someone transporting a bomb would be more likely to ensure their vehicle is squaky clean.

On the other hand, the expression you used - "civil-liberties obsessives" - does reliably flag you as a threat. Just look at Europe's not-so-distant history to see what happens when people start giving their leaders more and more power in the name of security. Or do you perhaps think that this time power will miraculously fail to corrupt and end up at the hands of a homicidal tyrant?

But I guess it's inevitable that the same shit will begin again as the generation that got the lesson hammered into them by artillery dies off.

Re:Makes it easy for police

[Bugler412]

yeah, cause presuming that everyone is guilty and virtually frisking them as they pass by is the perfect definition of a free and open society

Re:Makes it easy for police

[stenvar]

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.

Police states "work" in reducing crime. They don't "work" when it comes to providing a place anybody in their right mind wants to live.

Re: Makes it easy for police

[aztracker1]

"My 'respected opponent' happened to be travelling to/from the same destination nearly 4 days a week for over a year that a convicted transsexual prostitute used, and I have proof of that fact... you do the math."

---
Due to the inability of certain persons on this site to distinguish humor from genuine malice, I am claiming the above comment as a statement of satire not meant to resemble any person living or dead at any point in humanity's history, present or future.

Re:Makes it easy for police

[chihowa]

The idea being, people who break little laws, also tend to break big ones.

I think you have that backward. It should read, "people who break big laws, also tend to break little ones."

As in, "people who intend to bomb a rally have no qualms about not keeping up with their taxes."
Not, "people who don't keep up with their taxes have no qualms about bombing rallies."

the more data government collects

[Presto Vivace]

the more companies who have a vested interested in surveillance and data mining, the greater the economic and political power of those with a vested interest in continuing and expanding these sorts of practices. It is not a good situation.

Re:the more data government collects

[Solandri]

This doesn't seem like a very impressive surveillance program though. San Diego County has a population of about 3.1 million. There are about 243 million cars in the U.S. vs 313 million people, or a 0.776 ratio. Apply that to San Diego and you get 2.4 million cars. They've scanned 36 million plates in 3 years, or 12 million per year. So on average each car is scanned 5 times a year. One scan every 10.4 weeks.

Like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the scans tell you a lot about a car's exact position at a very specific instance in time. But virtually nothing about its movement (where it's going). There are legitimate privacy issues with which to challenge this program. But it's pretty damn ineffective as a "surveillance and data mining" program. About the only data mining info I could see you getting out of this is after a few years, you could localize the neighborhood where a car tends to be, to figure out where the person lives/works. But the government already has that info - your home address is on your vehicle registration and tax return, and your work address is on your W2.

Re:never understood the logic behind license plate

[Antipater]

People already have a publicly readable identifier called a "face". Since you can't really pick a car out of a lineup, they needed some sort of system.

Funnily enough, the "all you *insert minority* look the same to me" effect was what gave us modern fingerprinting. British in India couldn't reliably pick Indian criminals out of lineups, because all the faces looked the same to them. So they found a different system of identification.

My next custom number plate

[DeathToBill]

Y871 953"; drop table users; commit; select "

Re:Customized reg plates

[CanHasDIY]

I need to get a reg plate that reads: DROP TABLE vehicles;

To DMV clerk: Whaddaya mean there's no asterisk available???

Someone please create an App

[Idou]

That allows me to press a button that:
-Saves to a file the last minute of video recorded from my cellphone mounted to my dashboard.
-Recognizes the license plate number of the idiot that just almost killed my family with their piece of shit pick-up truck.
-Forwards both file and license plate number to the local authorities, who can then apply the appropriate penalty.

Centrally controlled surveillance is dangerous, expensive, and inefficient. It must be limited in a democratic society. Decentralized, community based surveillance has great potential to improve overall quality of life, especially on public roads, where every idiot has a license to kill with their own stupidity.

Re:Someone please create an App

[benjfowler]

Seriously, get a dashcam. Every man and his dog in Russia has one, and they stick the videos up on YouTube.

Re:Someone please create an App

[tukang]

Centrally controlled surveillance is dangerous, expensive, and inefficient. It must be limited in a democratic society. Decentralized, community based surveillance has great potential to improve overall quality of life, especially on public roads, where every idiot has a license to kill with their own stupidity.

Yeah let's outsource surveillance to the community so that neighbors spy and tell on each other. That doesn't sound like a police state at all.

His earlier thought returned to him; probably she was not actually a member of the Thought Police, but then it was precisely the amateur spy who was the greatest danger of all.

Re:Someone please create an App

[Thud457]

geeze, they let dogs drive in Russia?!!

Re:Someone please create an App

[Idou]

Yes, and only the most extreme cases make it to Youtube. Is Russia a much safer place to drive because of Youtube?

The barrier to provide negative feedback to the bad drivers needs to be significantly lowered before we will start seeing significant improvements in roadside deaths. . .

Re:Someone please create an App

[Chris Mattern]

Why not? He paid the bribes to get his license, just like everyone else!

Re:Someone please create an App

[benjfowler]

I doubt Russia is a safer place.

However, I'm sure that with dashcam, it's less worse than before. Apparently, it's quite hard to get an insurance claim paid out without concrete evidence that one wasn't responsible.

Re:Someone please create an App

[Idou]

Notice my use of the word "potential." Yeah, take it to the "peeping Tom" extreme and no one will disagree with having legal restrictions.

However, public roadways are the other extreme. 30K people die a year in the U.S. from accidents. If you are driving on a public road, I am not sure if we, as a community, need to be prioritizing your privacy over the safety of the public (especially if you are driving like a moron).

Re:Someone please create an App

[Idou]

Russia is probably not safer because the bad drivers are not getting enough negative feedback, quickly enough. That is why I am wanting that App.

Re:Someone please create an App

[coinreturn]

geeze, they let dogs drive in Russia?!!

If you've watched some of those videos, it's easy to conclude that dogs wouldn't be much worse at driving than the Russians.

Re:Someone please create an App

[Anne Thwacks]

I use "dailyroads" its an Android app, and definitely works on HTC and Samsung, even in Russia. (No APNR feature yet).

Re:Someone please create an App

[Idou]

I use it, too (on a Galaxy S4). It is the best App I have come across so far.

All they need to do is add license plate recognition and automatic forwarding, and I think the world's public roads would get a lot safer, quick.

Being done commercially too ...

[perpenso]

I believe businesses are doing it too. Auto repossessors, bail bondsmen and others have mounted cameras on their cars to scan and record the license plates of vehicles around them and enter the data into a private central database that they all subscribe too. The driver receives an alert if a nearby license plate is tagged in the database. Previous location information is also available.

If you have parked in Wal Mart parking lot a local auto repo guy has probably scanned you and you have been entered into the database.

I believe the number of vehicles recovered using this technology is currently in the tens of thousands per year in the U.S.

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:Being done commercially too ...

[pixelpusher220]

never assign to malice what can be explained by incompetence..

Re:Being done commercially too ...

[Quila]

The breadcrumb trail itself can raise a flag. Me driving coast-to-coast for the first time on a certain credit card resulted in a call to confirm several gas station purchases across the country. It was way outside my normal purchasing pattern, so it got flagged.

Re:Being done commercially too ...

[hawguy]

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.

Sorry, I'm not willing to subscribe to that level of paranoia, while I can believe that the government sweeps up a *lot* of data from all of us, I don't believe it's a two way street, what value would there be in the government sharing my travel data with Visa/Mastercard? It's not like they have to do it to get cooperation from the banks since a secret national security letter can make private companies hand over any data the government wants.

When my girlfriend and I made a cross country trip a few years back (in my car), her credit card worked fine at our destination thousands of miles from home, even though she last used it before we left home at a Starbucks. Conversely, my credit card was recently flagged for fraud at a home depot 5 miles from my house when I was purchasing several hundred dollars of painting supplies -- I had to call them to verify that it was me making the purchase.

Re:Being done commercially too ...

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

And sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

Re:Being done commercially too ...

[Tharkkun]

The breadcrumb trail itself can raise a flag. Me driving coast-to-coast for the first time on a certain credit card resulted in a call to confirm several gas station purchases across the country. It was way outside my normal purchasing pattern, so it got flagged.

So 5 minutes of your time was wasted? It would be months of your time had your card been stolen or the magnetic strip forged as you try to prove that the $300 of gas purchases suddenly escalated to $15k dollar charges. Not to mention your credit will be screwed for years due to companies who don't clear fraud even after you've resolved the mistakes. Plus the time and resources spent to fix it on both ends.

Re:Being done commercially too ...

[kilfarsnar]

never assign to malice what can be explained by incompetence..

From what I've seen over that last 10 - 15 years, I'm going with malice first, sorry.

Re:Being done commercially too ...

[Anne Thwacks]

what value would there be in the government sharing my travel data with Visa/Mastercard?

What makes you think that the commerical entities ask first? Most government databases appear to leak like sieves. In all probability. the data is freely available on servers in Afganistan/NIgeria/Russia for anyone who wants it.

Re:Being done commercially too ...

[hawguy]

what value would there be in the government sharing my travel data with Visa/Mastercard?

What makes you think that the commerical entities ask first? Most government databases appear to leak like sieves. In all probability. the data is freely available on servers in Afganistan/NIgeria/Russia for anyone who wants it.

Even if that were true and stolen government databases were available in Afganistan/NIgeria/Russia, why would Visa/Mastercard download a freely available database of dubious origin and validity for use in fraud prevention? Why wouldn't the criminals that steal card numbers to go on spending sprees just alter the database to hide their activity before making it available to the banks?

Re:Being done commercially too ...

[Quila]

I didn't say I had a problem with it.

Re:But does it recognize all 50 states?

[camperdave]

Couldn't there be, at most, 50 different guys?

What? Canadians, and South and Central Americans can't drive there?

Re:But does it recognize all 50 states?

[desdinova 216]

...but how many of those are proctologists?

Re:Screw the constitution, right?

[Ronin Developer]

Driving is NOT a right covered by the Constitution - it's a PRIVILEGE allowed by individual states (exception - federal licenses and vehicles) - how quickly people forget or just assume something they consider commonplace to be some sort of a "right".

If you wish to operate a motor vehicle, you are subject to rules and laws of the state where you are operating a vehicle as well as those where the vehicle is registered.

Re:Paranoia

[camperdave]

Yeah, It's all fun and games until some schmuck who borrowed his buddy's car to grab a pizza gets gunned down by the cops at a drive through ATM.

Danger of Electronic Law.

[jellomizer]

There is a real danger in increasing this electric law.
With governments with Complex and large legal systems combined with the fact that we are human, means most of us probably have broken some minor laws every day. To have a system that indiscriminately catches you, and in essence judges you and send you the fine in the mail. Comes close to the Orwellian 1984 world, but not so extreme.

Re:Danger of Electronic Law.

[Baby Duck]

It doesn't say you are automatically fined. You are automatically flagged for human review.

Re:Danger of Electronic Law.

[gstoddart]

It doesn't say you are automatically fined. You are automatically flagged for human review.

Who will, in all likelihood, just rubber stamp what the machine tells them.

People are lazy and if you can just keep pressing the enter key all day long, you can surf the web or generally screw the pooch wile you're supposed to be reviewing.

And don't act like people won't do that. Somewhere, Wally from Dilbert will be the one who is supposed to be monitoring this.

Too late, private system already exists

[perpenso]

funny I was just thinking of creating my own plate recorder using a dash base raspberry pi. VCs start throwing your money NOW!

You are too late. A private service with many subscribers and a huge database already exist. Tens of thousands of autos are located and repossessed each year with this system. If you parked at a Wal Mart, a mall, etc in the U.S. then your license plate has probably already been scanned and recorded in this private database as an auto repo guys drive through the parking lot scanning all the plates.

My truck ...

[PPH]

... is already equipped with countermeasures.

The plates are covered with mud and the entrails of small animals.

Re:My truck ...

[jklovanc]

In most jurisdictions, police officer can legally pull you over and ask you to clean it and probably fine you as there are laws against driving with an obscured license plate.

Re:My truck ...

[PPH]

No problem. But that will only last until the next possum forgets the right-of-way laws.

Re:never understood the logic behind license plate

[ebno-10db]

yeah the nazis did that

Those numbers were Hollerith codes - thanks IBM!.

Courtesy of a death camp he'd once resided in, my neighbor across the street from where I grew up in the US had one of those on his forearm in big characters (they weren't some little unobtrusive thing). Just seeing that growing up left a lasting impression.

Millions of Records On *Plates

[QuasiSteve]

Since this is already about cars, I guess it's time for an internet analogy.

Plates are like IP addresses. They cannot be used to identify a specific computer (car) let alone a specific user (driver).

Re:Millions of Records On *Plates

[jklovanc]

It is illegal to display a license plate on a vehicle that is not registered to that license plate. While they can not identify the user they can identify the vehicle. The registered owner of the vehicle get fined for allowing the vehicle to be used in illegal ways. It is up to the owner of the vehicle to recover these charges from the person who actually improperly used the vehicle. The only exception is if the vehicle is reported stolen. (Reporting a vehicle stolen to avoid fines would be filing a false police report and cause more issues).

Re:Millions of Records On *Plates

[QuasiSteve]

Right, because false plates are totally unheard of, let alone having plates on a buddy's trailer that's behind your car, obstructing any view of your car's plates.

Plates alone cannot be used to identify a vehicle and should be (not saying they are, but they should be) checked against the characteristics of the car.
( More often than not, in the case of false plates, this means the person getting the ticket has to object to the ticket, demand the photo (if not included), and then point out that it's not even the right car. )

Re:Millions of Records On *Plates

[QuasiSteve]

It is illegal to display a license plate on a vehicle that is not registered to that license plate.

Which doesn't preclude this from happening anyway.

Which renders the next statement incorrect.. or at least incomplete.

Re:Millions of Records On *Plates

[jklovanc]

To clarify, the person registered to the plate is liable for anything the vehicle attached to the plate does unless the plate, possibly with attached vehicle, is reported stolen.

Re:Millions of Records On *Plates

[Flere Imsaho]

If you have the DHCP logs or use static addressing, then they can

Over expose and/or damage the image sensor

[Bob the Super Hamste]

I have said before we should be massively over or under exposing these images. Most states have gone to newer style plates that are higher contrast in the IR spectrum and have easier to OCR letters and numbers for this reason. I have been saying we need some high output IR LEDs to illuminate the license plate or the area around it so it either massively over or under exposes the plate to become unreadable by machine. If you are dumping out enough power (No idea what it would take so if others can venture a guess I am all ears) you should be able to either temporarily or permanently damage the image sensor in the camera but I imagine 100W of narrow beam IR from the front and back plate area would make your plate pretty unreadable. You could even build the lights into a license plate holder.

Re:Over expose and/or damage the image sensor

[jklovanc]

In most jurisdictions it is illegal to deliberately obscure a license plate in any way. Flooding the area with IR would probably constitute obscuring. The fact that the IR light's only use is to make the plate unreadable by scanner points toward deliberate obscuring.

Re:Over expose and/or damage the image sensor

[tomlouie]

If the sensors don't already blow up when used in the daytime, I doubt you have an IR emitter that rivals the sun.

Re:Over expose and/or damage the image sensor

[Bob the Super Hamste]

On digital cameras they do have warnings about pointing the thing at the sun as that will damage the sensor. Also the sun has a very broad beam (360 degrees) and broad spectrum where as I was thinking more along the lines of a narrow beam in the 15 to 25 degree range of a narrow spectrum that the cameras are already sensitive to. I think it might be doable when you get up into the 100+W range but I don't know. I have seen lasers damage image sensors as well and those are those little red lasers that run off of 3 button cells but it is with a very narrow beam and a single wavelength.

Re:Over expose and/or damage the image sensor

[Bob the Super Hamste]

Not in my state:

Subd. 7.Plate fastened and visible.
All plates must be (1) securely fastened so as to prevent them from swinging, (2) displayed horizontally with the identifying numbers and letters facing outward from the vehicle, and (3) mounted in the upright position. The person driving the motor vehicle shall keep the plate legible and unobstructed and free from grease, dust, or other blurring material so that the lettering is plainly visible at all times. It is unlawful to cover any assigned letters and numbers or the name of the state of origin of a license plate with any material whatever, including any clear or colorless material that affects the plate's visibility or reflectivity.

I'm not putting any cover over the plate or slopping it up. I would also not be affecting the reflective properties of the plate. The plate would still be legible, unobstructed, and free from grease, dust, or other blurring material so I wouldn't run afoul of the law. The Minnesota law seems pretty specific about physical things and lighting isn't a blurring material as it isn't changing the reflected ray's path (I would really worry if I was spot heating pockets of air enough to do this). Even if given a ticket the defense is to show the judge the plainly visible plate which it would be. And on that note my mind has wandered off and wondered if cops can be charged with making false reports and perjury in a case like that.

Re:Over expose and/or damage the image sensor

[Technician]

Don't flood the plate with IR. Simply having a very bright IR ring around the plate will cast the plate in darkness in the contrast game. This may make plate detection for OCR fail to acquire the plate. In the world where the brightest object was the reflective plate, it is now the plate frame, casting the plate in relative darkness.

Illumination for your rear view camera is legal. Simply mounting an IR illuminated back up camera next to the plate may be effective at night and not be an obvious attempt at foiling ANR.

Re:Over expose and/or damage the image sensor

[jklovanc]

The person driving the motor vehicle shall keep the plate legible and unobstructed and free from grease, dust, or other blurring material so that the lettering is plainly visible at all times.

The law does not state what spectrum the plate has to be legible in. The prosecutor just has to prove the plate is not legible in IR and the statute may be broken. Such fine points would come out in court.

Re:Over expose and/or damage the image sensor

[LunaticTippy]

Cops around here have a dash cam that can show the image in the cabin. This is useful at night with low light or to verify the framing of the video. Your glaring plate is going to be a cop magnet, causing a lot of law enforcement attention. If enough people do it, or you are a big enough dick about it you can bet the law will be updated.

I think a better approach is to fight the routine collection of data instead of trying to figure out a stopgap workaround.

Re:Paranoia

[SirGeek]

Ok. How's this for a very "possible" scenario.

You're driving a different route (due to road construction/etc.) And your car goes past a house that is under surveillance for some crime (Say prostitution or drugs).

Your car's plate gets "snapped" in front of the house. They don't CARE that you're just driving by, You're driving past a crime scene. They get your data, and then they check your plate and find you had unpaid parking tickets. Then they visit you at your place of employment or better yet your home. They ask for you in regards to a crime at house where Prostitution/Drugs are used.

Does it MATTER to the police that you were just driving by the hose ? Nope. They can use it as an excuse for harassing you.

Does it matter they already knew your plate # ? Nope. They can use the cameras to determine ANYTHING they want:

"Gee. You drive from Camera A to Camera B, a distance of 1 mile. You drove it in 45 seconds, It should have taken you a full minute @ 30MPH. So you're speeding - DING ! Ticket issued. Camera B to Camera C, another Mile. Another 45 seconds, DING Another ticket.

Is that OK with you now ?

Re:Throughput

[ebno-10db]

Heaven forbid a government agency try to do something with efficiency and accuracy. Too many people complain about this because then they would have to stop telling jokes about government being too slow and too dumb.

Nonsense. I've always admired the efficiency and thoroughness of the Stasi.

Serendipity

[fahrbot-bot]

Can we get plate with code to delete the database?"

Coincidentally, the alt text for that xkcd image is: "Her daughter is named Help I'm trapped in a driver's license factory."

Re:Pastor's Wife

[Technician]

Priests don't have wifes. Must be why they flew under the radar for so long.

I'm more worried about the privacy

[Registered Coward v2]

of the data than the collection. I know, if you don't collect you don't have the problem but then again I like the idea that if my car is stolen I have a better chance of getting it back; or if break-ins occur in my neighborhood the police may be able to identify some suspects. Oh yeah, and think of the children. Once you start getting the data on plates and their geo location; it becomes relatively trivial to cross reference that with commercial databases and tag / license data to develop a more complete picture of someone's habits. That is potentially valuable information to private companies; how soon is it before the government decides to make the database pay for itself by selling the data? saving the taxpayer's money and all that.

Of course, the first time a politician's habit of visiting certain "shoppes" or the address of some young lovely who is not their partner gets into the news, with pictures, we may see more interest in privacy; just as video rental records became important when they were used against a supreme court nominee.

Re:Stupid Governments

[camperdave]

If they want that information all they have to do is go down to the DVM and get it

No, they can't. The DMV only tracks the license plate, vehicle VIN, and registered owner. It does not track when and where what plate was scanned by what camera. The DMV can't tell them, when they discover that a particular house was a meth lab, that your car was parked in front of that house every Tuesday night for the past two years. The DMV records won't show that your car, over the past two years, had made stops on subsequent Wednesdays at a few neighbourhood school yards, and Fridays around the block from a sleazy hotel.

Re: Stupid Governments

[TheGavster]

The DMV has data on how many times per month I visit the liquor store?

but-but-but

[swschrad]

there is no RFC allowing for a change in the plate while in operation, as there is for an IP address. the soft IP was very useful in the life of things like VAXes because of all the licenses tied to the MAC address. so when our net card died at the school, DEC just added a line to the startup script with comments to soft-IP the machine to the old hard address.

used to be in the old days, the cops could spot a fake plate from ten lengths away. now that almost all stamped plates have been replaced with printed plates only, "a hacker" could spoof the plate with some Scotchlite film and black paint.

How they caught Hernandez

[ubermiester]

The NFL player Arron Hernandez was just arrested and charged with murder based primarily on texts, surveillance video (some from his own home) and cell tower records. There are also corroborating witnesses who heard shots and found shell casings, but they were only contacted after the digital evidence was examined. Assuming he actually did what they say he did - shot a friend execution-style for making him "nervous" - I think his case presents a fairly strong argument as to why such pervasive record keeping and anonymous surveillance is useful to law-enforcement. No one actually saw him do anything, but the picture painted by the digital evidence is quite compelling.

That said, it is obviously the duty of a "vigilant democracy" to ensure that such tools are not used to target people maliciously, but I have to ask: who has actually been targeted in this way? Is there actually a known, verifiable case of a person being framed in such an elaborate way by some nefarious rouge agency? I am sure it has been attempted in the name of international espionage, but an every day citizen? Snowden claims that he's saving us all from something, but what exactly?

Re:How they caught Hernandez

[ebno-10db]

The NFL player Arron Hernandez was just arrested and charged with murder based primarily on texts, surveillance video (some from his own home) and cell tower records.

The question is how many serious crimes are solved this way that couldn't have been solved otherwise. You can find an anecdote to justify anything, but it means nothing.

Re:How they caught Hernandez

[GodfatherofSoul]

The evidence isn't all in yet, but I've also had a VERY strong suspicion some kind of surveillance was ongoing; sanctioned or not. Too much information conveniently turned up too quickly. Really, how the HELL did they find that gun that had been discarded off the side of the road into a bunch of trees?

Re:How they caught Hernandez

[ubermiester]

Didn't see anything about a gun being found, only that they found shell casings that matched the bullets found in/around the victim. As for what surveillance was ongoing, I dont think anyone was actively watching Hernandez before the murder, but the data used to retrace his steps - SMS records, cell tower records, phone call records, security cameras, etc - were simply there for the taking. Police have used pre-existing records to solve crimes for more than a century. Go look up the NYPD detectives that set the standard for investigative techniques like fingerprinting and fiber detection.

Everyone leaves a trail in both the digital and real spaces. The question is how much of that digital trail is stored as evidence before any crimes are committed. Law enforcement (including the NSA) will say that bits are cheap to store and can provide invaluable information when reconstructing someone's movements, relationships, etc. It is then up to the courts to decide what, if any, of that evidence is admissible in court. They use the Fourth Amendment to decide such things and i have not seen anything from Snowden or anyone else to suggest that this process is not the norm. The NSA can track you, but what exactly can they do to you without the support of the courts? And then if your're saying that the NSA and the courts are conspiring to circumvent the constitution, you've got Congress acting in an oversight role.

The conspiracy theories that arise from such "revelations" (there's nothing really new here except the specifics of the data being retained), often invoke the slippery-slope argument. But an entire government conspiring against it's people is not constrained by quaint notions of constitutional integrity. If its gotten that bad then the difference between FISA being secret or not become moot.

Its similar to the fears that creating a national background-check system for firearms would somehow lead to a totalitarian state. A totalitarian state would not concern itself with issues like the Second Amendment or the Tea Party when rounding people up for the camps.

Re:How they caught Hernandez

[anagama]

The flip side of this is that a person could be very convincingly set up with a fake plate, a "borrowed" cell phone, and a few forged texts. At that point, your life hangs in the balance of that casino we game we call a jury trial.

It's only big news if it happens on the coast

[Bob the Super Hamste]

Stories like this have come out previously but maybe this time it will get traction as it is happening in a big important city in CA. The city of Minneapolis MN has tried to get the data they have been collecting classified as non public data for a while now and this legislative session it was made private. This is the article that broke the story but doesn't mention how long Minneapolis had been doing it but the neighboring city of St. Paul has been doing it since 2008. At the time of the article Minneapolis had eight mobile vehicle cameras and at least two stationary cameras and St. Paul had 10 mobile units but those numbers are from about a year ago. For those of you who wonder why this type of thing is a bad idea there is the MPR article about just how some people used the Minneapolis license plate DB.

No expectation of privacy

[EmagGeek]

You have no expectation of privacy in a public place, nor do you have an expectation of privacy when engaged in a privileged activity while driving. By signing your name on your license you are agreeing to abide by the State's conditions, which may include placing a license plate with personally identifiable information on the outside of your vehicle.

Nothing to see here. Move along.

Re:No expectation of privacy

[Bugler412]

That's significantly different than their collecting storing and correlating the date to reconstruct your movements in near real time.

Coming Up: Automatic Speeding Tickets

[TheSpoom]

I guarantee that once these become standard, a police department will get the idea to use time differentials between scans to determine a minimum possible speed for the car, and send out automatic speeding tickets if that speed is over the amount posted. Within a few years, everyone will do this.

Re:Coming Up: Automatic Speeding Tickets

[bunnyman]

Why have highways with toll booths not done this years ago?

Re:Paranoia

[Wookact]

The problem here is you assume I do not like it because I have done something. I do not like it because it is an invasion of my privacy. Where I go and when I go there is none of their business without a warrant.

Time to watch the watchers ...

[gstoddart]

OK, so every single law enforcement officer and government official in the country needs to have everything they do on duty recorded, logged, and made public.

If they are going to constantly watch us, they also need to be watched. Their privacy is now irrelevant, as they have decided ours is too. Since they have decided they will collect and store this information without our consent, they sure as hell have no leg to stand on to claim that monitoring them invades their privacy unless we somehow believe they have more rights than we do.

We no longer give a shit about what they want, and quite frankly, we can't trust them any more than we trust the least trustworthy of them -- and I see no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt.

I can almost guarantee they don't have nearly enough access controls on this -- so you can pretty much assume the cops are accessing this to look up their wives, exes, and friends and other things they have no business using it for.

I think people should take the opportunity to film and record every police officer they see. Put them under constant surveillance. Post it online. Make it publicly available. Then they'll whine and say how unfair it all is, and the collective response should be "if it's OK for you to do it, it's OK for us".

Uncle arrested

[Anonymous Coward]

Just this week on Tuesday my Uncle was arrested because of these auto-plate scanners in Minnesota. In this situation he does not have a license and was driving his mothers car. The scanner showed that the owner of the vehicle had a immediate relative with a revoked license, and when he saw it wasn't a little old lady driving he pulled them over.

evasive maneuvers

[bitt3n]

this is why I constantly swerve from lane to lane, so those cameras can never get a proper focus

Read / Write power is God power

[WOOFYGOOFY]

All these databases are used as evidence during criminal investigations... this one... the NSA one etc. etc..

Any political operative with read / write access to these databases can fabricate evidence as they see fit. And it's not just theoretical :

http://www.ibtimes.com/changing-timestamp-mystery-continues-after-texas-abortion-bill-defeat-wendy-davis-filibuster-1324549

If you believe, as I do (and even if you don't ) , that we can't do law enforcement without databases like this, then I submit we have an engineering challenge here.

We need stores of data which are designed to be "evidential" or "purely factual" in nature and once an entry is written, it can't be changed at a later time to have another value. I am using the word database here but I am pretty sure it's more like a "store" .

Is there a one way, write-once technology which is provably tamper proof? Can one be designed?

The scenario I am trying to prevent is the most obvious one where a malefactor, at some possibly distant date after information about their target has been recorded, attempts to change that information to produce a perception or suspicion or even proof of "guilt".

It's not just a theoretical worry. It's not much different than what the Texas legislature attempted to do with its own record yesterday. Seen in a certain way, they attempted to "frame" Wendy Davis, D-Fort Worth, as having not begun her filibuster in time.

This is benign compared to what a Dick Cheney or Richard Pearle or Donald Rumsfeld type could / would do with some career analysts' whereabouts, phone records etc. etc. who displeased them ala Valerie Plame. Sure, Scooter Libby went to jail for the crime, but I think we all know who he was protecting.

It's not even slightly far fetched and the consequences couldn't be more corrosive to democracy. In fact, just the potential for this kind of manipulation could under the right circumstances lead to a widespread loss of faith in all law enforcement on the part of the general public. That itself is unacceptably corrosive and dangerous to the republic.

So how do we solve this problem so it can't be "unsolved" by some domestic Axis Of Evil ? A running, recorded one way hash on the totality of input seems unworkable , but I am not an expert.....

Re:Read / Write power is God power

[MozeeToby]

Is there a one way, write-once technology which is provably tamper proof? Can one be designed?

Save simultaneously to multiple, external, independently controlled locations. If the data is not private there should be no problem with allowing 3rd parties access for truly independent record keeping. If the data is private you could still upload encrypted copies to 3rd parties on a defined, regular basis, to be unencrypted only by court order.

Re:Read / Write power is God power

[WOOFYGOOFY]

Yeah I agree something like this. An independent auditor . It';s not even necessary for the auditor to have access tot he semantics, just the hash. Can these hashes be defeated? This is expert territory, at least more expert than me.

As far as entering false information, sure but there are issues with that involving contradicting other parts of reality that make it hard. It's hard (I think) to isolate a certain part of reality away from every other part so you can manipulate it without creating a contradiction in the record, or at least, a very unlikely and suspicious circumstance. It's just another form of lying. Lies spin out of out of control for just this reason.

This is a thing. This is something we should be actively floating around as a serious issue. This should be taken up by people with the platforms and reputations to make it a thing, a discussion point, something they can't ignore.

I actually think that most of the people involved with intelligence work would welcome this, excepting the people we have to worry about in the first place. Their work product is to know reality, to know the truth and relay it to policy makers. If people are manipulating the input, then they're manipulating them also. If you dig around a little in history you'll see that there's been this kind of tension between analysts and policy makers on more than one occasion; we have to suppose it bubbles up to the surface less often than it occurs in reality. There's probably skirmishes like this at the departmental levels and between factions and personalities often. Just extrapolating my own civilian organization experience here.

Contempt for untruth , for non-reality has to be grounding principle in intelligence circles, along with doing nothing to hurt the nation and lose reputation with the public. Absent any of those, and organizational effectiveness is massively compromised.

People should talk about this. This should be a meme.

Re:Read / Write power is God power

[WOOFYGOOFY]

Can you link me to a relevant explanation of Bitcoin technology? I haven't followed it so closely on a technical level. It has to be a series of hashes, the running accumulation of which, should any of them be changed, be detectable. IS this what Bitcoin is?

Strange, this doesn't raise my hackles.

[sbrown123]

I really don't see a problem with this. I mean, I can actually reason this as being used to find "bad guys". This is very different from the NSA bullshit program which you don't have to be a conspiracy nut to know is being used for totally different reasons than we are being told.

Re:Strange, this doesn't raise my hackles.

[Charliemopps]

Ok, lets make a simple example. Lets say that one of the governments primary duties was to demolish abandon houses. This was expensive, hiring crews, hauling away the rubble. So, the government secretly started placing C4 in every new home built and linking these homes up to a computer. When a home was declared abandon my the computer it would flag the home for human review. The human would verify that it was abandon and then the computer would detonate the house. BOOM... no more house, the lot could be sold and someone else could build there. It saves time, money, resources, and there are now very few abandon homes right?

Well it's silly... because it's over the top. So is tracking every vehicle on the road everywhere it goes to find a few criminals. The majority of citizens are not criminals, and the majority of houses do not get abandoned. And what if at some point in the future the government is a little less altruistic than our current government? They start blowing up houses of people that are threats to the state? What could they do with knowing everywhere you drive every day of the week?

The government does not need more power. They can legally have you put to death. That's power enough.

Re:Strange, this doesn't raise my hackles.

[WOOFYGOOFY]

I think this has to do with the future. In the future, criminals will be worse, as in, technology will deliver to them the ability to do much worse with much less, just as it will deliver to you the ability to do much more with much less. That's what technology does.

The thing is, in the history of warfare, the ability to inflict damage long ago exceeded the ability to withstand that damage. It's no longer even a contest. If you want to survive, you can't let the enemy get the first shot off. You have to act preemptively because the level of destruction is so great relative to armor or protection available , offense has an overwhelming advantage. This is only going to get truer in the future, and not just truer, but truer of smaller and smaller groups of individuals. It's about the dynamics which will be present in the near future.

What I am taking away from this is, the world of security: FBI, CIA NSA MI6 etc. don't believe they can explain that fact to their civilian populations. They can't say "we're tracking everyone because of this good reason.. we know this is going to happen" because they don't believe people will follow their logic. It's just not in the realm of most imaginations to think in this way and take it seriously as a reason for action today.

We can't even get people signed onto climate change, a fact about the climate and pollution, despite the pronouncements of the world's civilian scientists. What is a politically significant proportion of people's reaction? It's a conspiracy. Who is conspiring? The scientists. For what reason? Money. What money? Grant money....

With THAT as your baseline, you can see what quandary they find themselves in.

It's their job to defend America. Americans are provably incapable of processing distressing facts about future reality.

But it's still their job to defend America.

Telling Americans "yes, we're tracking everything, and we will shortly be recording all telephone calls and everything else and yes, that's why we're building out in Utah, plus we have storage technology you don't even know exists..." and then trying to tell them that the reason they're doing this is because DIY genetic sequencing and DIY bioinformatics and DIY fab machines and less-than-state-actors getting a hold of nano technology is going to potentially put so much capability for such destructive offense into such small groups' hands that knowing everything everyone is doing all the time is basically the only way we're even going to have a fighting chance of preserving civilization.

Yeah, Americans will understand that. Not. Americans will insist, as people on slashdot do everyday, that the REAL reason is fascism and a lust for power.

Worse yet, considering all angles of this is that this technology being developed to protect us actually may lead to fascism just because it is so powerful. People with a lust for power, or as history calls them ideologues convinced of their own world view.... Hitler Pol Pot, Stalin, David Kordesh, Jim Jones , are in no short supply at any given moment in any given organization.

So you see what's happening. We are being lied to, but not for nefarious reasons ,at least those reasons aren't nefarious yet. The world is actually becoming less safe, far less safe far faster than people understand or would accept.

The intelligence agencies have to react to the threats they know are real. They have to also accept what Americans are telling them indirectly about their limited ability to process reality. It's a no win / must lie situation for them.

It's also true that in the darkness those lies create, there's room for the realization of the most paranoid American's fears about their government.

We have to bring everything out of the dark, starting with our fellow American and their rejection of science and reality. It's an aspect of human nature to reject unpleasant facts and even to frame those facts as the lies of conspirators. We have to overcome this aspect of our psy

I don;t get it, why is this news anymore?

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything you do is monitored.
Disk space is cheap
All your e-mails
All the GPS data from your phone
All your telephone information
All your tweets, facebook , google/yahoo/bing searches
All the orders that you placed online.
Everything

Do you have a modern cell phone? did you go to a gun store? Assume you;re in a database as having purchased a gun.
Did you go to aknown drug dealer? You're in a database for suspicious drug activities.

You don;t even have to wear a tin foil hat anymore.
It's over.
Either let go of technology (Including ON*Star) or get over it.

infrared jamming

[H310iSe]

I just read recently, and I have not confirmed this from a second source yet, that the plate readers rely on infrared at night. This is *not* how speedcameras like the ones used in toll booths work but it does make sense the on-board cameras might work this way. Privacy can be improved by adding some IR lights to your licence plate lights. This will blow out the image unless they have image processing on the camera dedicated to dealing with this kind of thing. You will need some decent IR to be effective, some experimentation will be needed to find out how many lumens are needed, but I'm pretty sure it's achievable with modern IR LEDs. In daylight their IR filters will be down and this will be completely ineffective, you can point a 1 watt IR LED directly at a camera with an IR filter and it won't bother it in the least.

Re:Screw the constitution, right?

[Bugler412]

Correction, you DO have a right to drive. The constitution does not grant rights, it only delineates important ones. Read the 9th and 10th amendments. Just because the constitution does not specifically mention a right does NOT mean you don't have it!

Re:never understood the logic behind license plate

[I'm New Around Here]

Funnily enough, the "all you *insert minority* look the same to me" effect

For myself, insert "humans" in the space.

Re:never understood the logic behind license plate

[MiniMike]

why don't we apply that same logic to people?

Among other reasons, because it's counterbalanced by the right to privacy. Cars have no such expectation. License plates have other purposes too, such as proving that the car is registered and licensed (not applicable to people), and to help identify it if it gets stolen (in addition to VIN numbers). Most people do carry a photo ID in case it is needed, instead of a license plate.

Did I just make a people analogy about cars?

Simple Solution: Reduce Following Distance

[guttentag]

And all this time I thought Californians who leave 0.1 seconds of following distance beween their car and the one in front were just stupid. Turns out they were trying to avoid having their plates scanned.

Another way to track you

[Muad'Dave]

Don't forget the RF-transmitting tire tags that were mandated by the NHTSA due to the Ford/Firestone 'problem'. These tags transmit a unique code that is associated with your vehicle ID Number (VIN) that is recorded when you buy your vehicle, when it's inspected, when you get new tires, when anyone peeps thru your windshield, etc.

There are stories of it been used at the border to catch people that try to do funny things with cars in Mexico - not sure what.

The VIN mapping is very real - the alleged purpose of TPMS sensors if to be able to alert owners of defective tires - that couldn't happen without having a mapping of Owners VINs TPMS sensor IDs.

If they'd known back in the early days of cars...

[intermodal]

...they never would have accepted the idea of license plates so readily.

Errr

[Archfeld]

In some states the license belongs to the individual NOT the vehicle and is moved from car to car, this works well in TRUE NO FAULT INSURANCE states. Granted the Motor Vehicle Dept. need notification but rarely is anyone else involved.

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.

Re:FYI IR LEDs can diffuse any digital camera...

[Worf Maugg]

How about a LCD panel the goes from transparent to opaque 200 times a second in 1/2" squares. So that no more then 20% of the plate is visible to a camera but to the human eye it just looks tinted.

eternity welcomes safe drivers

[Thud457]

Who will, in all likelihood, just rubber stamp what the machine tells them.

I think we've had enough citizen ire about sending out tickets from red-light cameras that we're safe from that happening. Currently in most jurisdictions, the ticket has to be reviewed by a police officer (well, meter-maid) who will have to appear in court to if the ticket is contested.

But, if you're actually are speeding all over town, you're still screwed.

Re:But does it recognize all 50 states?

[holmstar]

You're only thinking about cars. What about motorcycles?

Being Big Brother isn't good enough...

[mariox19]

Any Lord of the Rings buffs note the name of the security firm mentioned in the article?

A year ago, the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center [...] signed a $340,000 agreement with the Silicon Valley firm Palantir to construct a database of license-plate records [...]

Apparently, California isn't satisfied with being Big Brother—it wants to be Sauron.

Graduated Income Tax

[Roger W Moore]

This is brought to you by the same people who brought you the VAT and the television tax.

Forget that, this is the government that gave the world graduated income tax. It was introduced as a temporary measure to finance the Napoleonic Wars. Interestingly it was temporarily repealed in 1816 and all the tax records were taken out and burnt to show that they had been destroyed...only they kept a second copy in the basement of the tax court. So even back then they were lying to us!

Big Brother is Watching

[Anonymous Coward]

In Connecticut, the police have been known to use ANPR for years now. There was a huge scandal over the fact that they were keeping the ANPR records on a permanent basis, and that the database effectively allowed the police to track your every movement, especially if you were in large public areas where the police were more likely to use the automated scanners. A bunch of journalists balked at the concept, but the police used their usual "It's for the public's own good and we need it to track criminals" bit and the public outrage pretty much ceased.

Re: Stupid Governments

[Anne Thwacks]

That is not done by APNR cameras. The public CCTV cameras with face recognition are there do that (we are talking about the UK here).

Re:Screw the constitution, right?

[Ichijo]

Yes, you have a right to drive on private property, even without a license. Driving on public roads is a different matter, for good reason.

Johnny Tables

[flyingfsck]

Someone needs to get a 'Johnny Tables' vanity plate.

Re:Johnny Tables

[ImperialSardaukar]

Someone needs to get a 'Johnny Tables' vanity plate.

Here you are good sir.. http://gizmodo.com/5498412/sql-injection-license-plate-hopes-to-foil-euro-traffic-cameras

When they Changed GA plates...

[3seas]

... with teh excuse its easier to read and I found it harder.... I knew easier wasn't for the human eye, but camera. Why? Non-raised letters with sharp corners

Re:Pastor's Wife

[Nyder]

Priests don't have wifes. Must be why they flew under the radar for so long.

nope, Priests have alter boys to keep them happy.

do this to make your plate unreadable by cameras

[Nyder]

You don't want cameras recording your plate? Then line the plate with IR lights. That will make it too bright to read on the pictures without making making it hard to see with your eyes. In other words, they won't know you have them, unless they check with a video camera in person. And even then, it's not against that law (yet).

Good for the Goose, Good for the Gander?

[zer0sig]

If any of these information gathering systems and/or the keeping of data for any length of time are legal, than surely the authorities won't mind if we know where each and every one of their vehicles and employees are, to whatever extent they can collect the same data from us. After all, they work for us, and if they aren't doing anything wrong, they have nothing to worry about, right? ;)

Re:Screw the constitution, right?

[mjwx]

Correction, you DO have a right to drive. The constitution does not grant rights, it only delineates important ones. Read the 9th and 10th amendments. Just because the constitution does not specifically mention a right does NOT mean you don't have it!

Wrong.

The constitution of the US does not grant rights. It only specifies which rights are inalienable (read, which ones cant be take away).

Driving is not mentioned among them and to be frank, a lot of drivers need to be taken off the roads.

Re:Coming Up: Automatic Speeding Tickets - DONE

[TheSpoom]

Do they take them from roving cop cars? I'm aware that stationary cameras have used time differentials for this purpose.

FOI?

[hicksw]

Put the data online. Let anyone search or copy it. That would give some hope of detecting modifications.

And end more that a few marriages.
--
If you do nothing more than not take my advice, you will better your life almost immediately.

Obfuscate

[forrie]

I suppose it would be illegal to attach small appendages to the fonts on the plates that would thwart the scanner process :-)