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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...
They exist, and can scan 10000 plates an hour, if I remember correctly. The police here in GA sometimes sit by the road at highway interchanges and scan plates, and pull over car with expired plates. Where you used to get away with renewing your registration at the end of the month, you can now be caught one day after your birthday.
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.
There are scanners that can be mounted on the police cars. The ones I know of are about the size of a box of breakfast cereal. From what I've seen there are at least 2 of them mounted, it might be as many as 4. They are mounted on the trunk and possibly hood, pointing at about a 45 degree angle from the direction of travel to the left and right, so that is 2 rear left and right, and possibly 2 front left and right. They can scan while they are driving and check thousands of plates per hour. I expect that they keep the police cars with those scanners moving all day if they can to scan as much as they can.
This video is informative.
Police License Plate Scanner
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
My father-in-law recently went on a police "ride-a-long" (we live in Virginia Beach, VA). He said that in between responding to domestic disturbance calls, the majority of the time was spent driving around scanning license plates. Prior to that, he didn't even know the police had the capability, much less the desire to track innocent folks. One particular incident occured that night when they pulled up to a vehicle that came up stolen. The cop pulled the guy over, handcuffed him and put him in the back seat. The guy was upset, and for good reason, which would only become clear some minutes later. He was the owner of the car which had previously been reported as stolen, but had not been cleared in the database after it was returned to him.
They were even featured on one of those "reality" TV shows a few months back, as I vaguely recall. A private towing company installed it in a vehicle, loaded up a database of deadbeats, then trolled public parking lots and shopping center lots looking for cars to repossess. When they found one, they quickly dragged it away and claimed a bounty.
John
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.