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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?"
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 want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
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?
There was a joke circling in Poland a couple years ago: ;)
http://i.pinger.pl/pgr456/3d49724c000eb4404b01224d
worth a try
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.
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.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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.
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.
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.
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.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
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.
It doesn't say you are automatically fined. You are automatically flagged for human review.
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
The plates are covered with mud and the entrails of small animals.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
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.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
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.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
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".
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
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.....
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.
closed minded is as closed minded does
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!
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.
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.
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.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
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!
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.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good