Slashdot Mirror
ACLU Study Says Police Cameras Create Database of Our Movements
puddingebola writes "The ACLU has published a study saying the widespread use of police and traffic cameras has made it possible to track individual's movements, even across multiple jurisdictions. From the article, 'While the Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that a judge's approval is needed to use GPS to track a car, networks of plate scanners allow police effectively to track a driver's location, sometimes several times every day, with few legal restrictions. The ACLU says the scanners are assembling a "single, high-resolution image of our lives." "There's just a fundamental question of whether we're going to live in a society where these dragnet surveillance systems become routine," said Catherine Crump, a staff attorney with the organization. The group is proposing that police departments immediately delete any records of cars not linked to any crime.'"
This is the backstory that hasn't been covered. It's not about the NSA or Google or Microsoft.
It's about Moore's Law and optical fiber and storage densities and the Internet.
Soon it will be about robotics and AI.
"There's just a fundamental question of whether we're going to live in a society where these dragnet surveillance systems become routine," said Catherine Crump
The answer is yes, we will, because not enough people care. Just as many people in the USA are in favor of these programs to "keep us safe from the omg terrorists!" as oppose them, according to many polls.
Hell the media hasn't even been talking about the issues, they've been playing up the celeb angle.
Our society is trending towards a total surveillance state, and people don't care enough to do anything about it. They'll keep voting for the same two parties.
Create network of private cameras and open source distributed back end. Collect and record all the data, make it available for anyone, and add OpenStreetMap style metadata editing. Then users can flag vehicles of interest, like those owned by Law Enforcement, politicians, lawyers. If dragnets are really constitutional, then nobody should mind, right?
While the capabilities to do this are there, can the local police stations afford it? Or would they outsource it to the NSA (who in turn outsources to a private contractor) so they can claim they are not doing it?
If this is the future we are looking forward to, maybe it is a time for transparency in the local governments & police. Let's face it, while this has some good uses, the ability to easily abuse it is way too high. And it will be abused because that is what we humans do when we have no oversight (sometimes even when we do).
If we want to still have freedoms in America, we have to change the way our government works. We have to reign in the abuse of power that happens at all levels. Give no one total power and make sure there is always oversight.
Be seeing you...
A couple of years ago, I was driving behind a cop who initially appeared interested in the car ahead of him. That car prepared to make a left turn, and the officer signaled the same, and after I passed them (at about 35-40MPH) within two or three seconds he disengaged from the other guy and came after me, lights flashing.
Turns out my registration had expired, which is what he told me he pulled me over for. No way possible he could have visually read my plate and run it in the time he had - so I wondered if there were license-plate reading cameras in some LEO vehicles, then dismissed the idea as silly. Now it doesn't sound so far-fetched. Anyone have any direct knowledge of systems like this?
Right wing nut jobs have been screaming about this for decades. Municipalities keep putting these cameras and phone taps in place in the name of safety, both personal and the unnamed war (crime, terrorism, even poverty.) Unfortunately these measures don't stop crime. At best they help find the person(s) who did the deed a little faster.
If you say we need more cameras, need I remind you of the Boston bombing. It was a low tech pressure cooker bomb in backpack that easily got past heighten surveillance at a marathon. How many days did it take to find the people who did it? It was people that found them, not cameras.
Technology in the wrong hands leads to Orwell's nightmare and the direction of the Nazi nationalism before World War II. Good governments can handle this kind of power. But we've seen major abuses of this kind of power from Bush senior through to Obama's drones in our government. Governments, especial large ones, easily get corrupted or hung up on political correctness so they keep getting re-elected. Stop watching every move I make if I'm not doing anything wrong.
I'll end this rant with two quotes/cliches:
* With great power comes great responsibility
* Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean you're wrong.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
I manage IT for a small city whose police department has two patrol vehicles equipped with LPRs. Officers download an updated hotlist of expired and stolen plates daily to the PCs in those cars and have the LPR software running while they patrol and answer calls. Our official policy is to let data expire from the PCs after 40 days. While the software has the optional capability to centrally gather reads and archive them, we've never bothered to implement it. The only inquiry we've had regarding plate reads in the last three years was from the NYCLU, wanting to know our data handling policies.
That's not to say that there isn't a very creepy Orwellian aspect to the proliferation of this technology. With enough zealots in the right places, this stuff is odious.
They've been doing this for ages here in the UK.
When something happens the police also go into all the shops in the area and take their video data too. Also in central London we have the Congestion Charge. A camera based entry exit system. The people of England have paid for surveillance under the guise of easing congestion/pollution (and catching peodfiles should that ball'o'crap get the opportunity to manifest).
CCTV hasn't stop any crime. but it does give awful low res images for news teams to air.
Nope, not this time. I cannot find any room for humor as I read this and put together the sum total of all we have learned so far--moreover mostly recently--about domestic surveillance. Where will it end? Can we stop it and reverse it, or are we fucked for sure? What may come to light next? As an American I am a patriot regarding the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the founding ideals of my nation. But, at the same time, the reality we are now facing is harsh, confusing, desperate, and scary. I don't know what to think about my country anymore; our government has declared that every citizen is a criminal suspect subject to all kinds of constant surveillance, it's like they're just waiting for a slip up that gets you busted--mind your thoughts, thinking the wrong thing, or worse saying the wrong thing, could one day soon be your undoing.
It's not our fault, but maybe we could have done more to prevent this. And so it goes...
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
The UK is far worst with 1 CCTV camera for every 12 people.. take a look at this recent article http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2359825/One-CCTV-12-people-Surveillance-soars-care-homes-hospitals-schools.html
On top of that we also have ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition); facial recognition systems in some shops bars etc!
It does make me wonder though; what would happen when someone develops some malware that affects CCTV and similar systems? I think it is only a matter of time... just look at Stuxnet.
All cows eat grass!
Yet another great reason to ride your bicycle!
The point being that manual surveillance is done purposely and usually with a warrant or as part of an investigation.
Plate scanners are tracking everyone and are capable of building detailed pictures of your every vehicular movement.
When the police manually trail someone, they usually have a reasonable suspicion to do so. When police electronically trail everyone, regardless of even a hint of crime, that becomes a system ripe for abuse.
In ethics, not everything is a 1 or a 0.
Surveillance is not the problem per se. The problem is when people (read, government officials) can actually make use of the data without oversight.
If they needed a search warrant to do a database search of the video archives, then I would be fine with that. I would also want to see reasonable limitations on data retention by law enforcement agencies -- not to exceed the statue of limitations for felony crimes.
As others have said, the surveillance genie is out of the bottle. I believe it's time to talk instead about putting law enforcement agencies on a very short leash with regard to how they can use information systems. They will whine and moan that it "makes it harder to to catch criminals." It is really time to push back and say, "making your job easy is less of a priority than preventing crooked cops from abusing the public trust."
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Even as governments increase their secrecy, they demand increasing ability to track and spy on their subjects.
Virginia is a "pilot" state for the on-line identity system that is being promoted by Microsoft and will be used for both private and government transactions. This is being run and promoted by the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA).
The Cross Sector Digital Identity Initiative (CSDII), led by AAMVA is developing technology that will demonstrate the acceptance of commercial identity provider credentials by Virginia state government, including securely verifying identities online with the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles. The pilot plans to make this technology available for voluntary access to on-line state services over the course of the project. State governments, including Virginia, are exploring leveraging commercial identity providers for secure online access to state government websites, ostensibly "as a means to improve customer service and reduce the costs associated with online identity management". In the case of sensitive government transactions, the credential is “leveled up” to higher assurances of identity verification and security.
Pilot partner Microsoft is providing a secure, privacy-enhancing cloud identity service, Customer Partner and Identity Manager (CPIM), and OpenID-based interoperable Windows Accounts to pilot participants. The pilot will also explore increasing the security of the Windows Account and other pilot interoperable credentials by enabling the Biometric Signature ID multifactor authentication solution, BioSig-ID. The BioSig-ID solution measures unique behavioral characteristics as the user draws a password on the computer screen, deriving an additional factor of authentication to supplement user name and password and thereby increasing account security in a user friendly fashion.
On the association's web site is the Policy Positions PDF document, which connects Real ID to PRISM. Page 15 includes:
What they don't tell you is that PRISM is the same system used for collecting and storing communications by the NSA. How convenient! So not only will they have all personal information about you, they will have all your communications integrated into one convenient data storage system.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
As for police, the problem is that police investigations reveal irrelevant private information. That's something we've just got to accept if we want the police to do anything at all. However, we don't have to let the police collect irrelevant private information when that isn't part of an investigation of a crime. In other words, the ratio of criminals caught to private information collected is too low.
There's also the general problem of "false positives", which have been notoriously common in previous security-related data collection. This was especially common in the "Red Scare" investigations of the 1950s to 1980s.
Back in the 1970s, there was an example that got a bit of coverage in the scientific press. There was a researcher (in Detroit as I recall) who had applied for lots of federal grants, and had been turned down for all of them with no explanation. Eventually, via the FOIA (Freedom Of Information Act), he eventually found the explanation.
It seems that earlier, his teenage son had been using his car frequently to visit his girlfriend in another part of town. Some agencies looking for "subversives" listed a local group that held meetings occasionally in the same block. When the meetings were scheduled, the investigators visited the block, and wrote down all the license-plate numbers. They compared these with the registry, and the owners of all the cars who didn't live in the area were listed as suspected members of the group. So the father was listed as a suspected subversive, and that information was given to funding agencies.
Presumably the investigators didn't notice that his car was there on lots of other days, because they didn't do their scans on non-meeting evenings. This is one good way to get a false positive.
I never read any followups to this story. It's unlikely he had any legal recourse, since failing to give grant money so someone on the basis of false data about them isn't exactly a crime.
Those who use the "we have nothing to hide" argument should probably consider stories like this. Political investigative agencies have a long, sordid history of such false positives, and they've ruined a lot of lives as a result, while typically catching few "true positivies" in their nets.
I wonder if it would be possible to set up a list of such stories, for the education of the general population. It could be useful to impress on people that, no matter how much of a "good citizen" they consider themselves, they can easily be victimized in this way.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
The ACLU says the scanners are assembling a "single, high-resolution image of our lives."
The resolution of the image is how often a license plate is scanned and the location stored. It is not a high resolution scan for the following reasons;
1. Not all police cars are scanning all the time.
2. Not all police cars have license plate scanners.
3. License plates are not visible/decipherable by the scanner all the time.
At best a license plate will be scanned a couple of times a day. That is not a very hi resolution image of a life.
This kind of surveillance is fortunately illegal for the police to do in New Hampshire.
Liberty in your lifetime