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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?
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.
It's getting cheaper all the time. It's exactly what's going on in London, with the massive array of CCTV cameras there, but they quite refuse to share the data with citizens for tracking personal or non-political crime (such as personal assault or stolen luggage).
Been there, done that, got tracked and questioned about my presence at an anarchist rally. But the same network was left unused for tracking who stole my luggage or smashed my car windows.
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.