Automated Plate Readers Let Police Collect Millions of Records On Drivers

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

Comments

Had this in the UK for years

[clickclickdrone]

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

Re:Had this in the UK for years

[Frobnicator]

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

You got it backwards.

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

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

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

Re:Had this in the UK for years

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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

[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: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?

[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"

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.

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.

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: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.

Re:public?

[fustakrakich]

And the "Harper Valley PTA"

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.

My truck ...

[PPH]

... is already equipped with countermeasures.

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

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.....

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.

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.