Boston Police Stop Scanning Registration Plates, For Now

Ars Technica reports that after journalists gained access to a database readout showing a sample of the data gathered by the 14 registration plate scanners that had been in use by the Boston police and analyzed some of that data with embarrassing results, the police force has announced it will suspend use of the scanners indefinitely. Among other things, the data dump (which was not quite as thoroughly scrubbed as the police department had intended it to be) showed that a stolen motorcycle was detected by the cameras 59 times and red-flagged, but evidently no action was taken to recover it.

Comments

Re:The police have no ability to control motorcycl

[Phyrexia]

From TFA:

One Harley Davidson motorcycle that had been reported stolen passed license plate scanners a total of 59 times between Oct. 19, 2012, and March 13, 2013. It was often recorded on sequential days or multiple times in a single day, all by the same scanner and almost always within the same half-hour span in the early evening.

The issue here is not cyclists driving like assholes.

Re:Boston PD

[glavenoid]

one word: Mooninites

Re: we have more important issues

[Anonymous Coward]

don't forget the time they shutdown the city over a sponge bob square pants lite brite.

The machine seems to be working ok.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

The problem is not the scanners are producing wrong reports or misreading the plates. Looks like no one is bothering to follow up on the alerts triggered by these scanners. Apparently the police were more interested in trying to detect movement of people, though the systems was allegedly installed to report stolen vehicles. Even the ars technica report is more than a year old. May be the police are just slow, to react to anything, from the scanner report to ars technica.

Anyway the license plate scanners are not going to work. There was this news report about some precocious teens, taking a picture of the license plate of a teacher they did not like, printing it, pasting it over their own number plates and went through several red-light cameras and triggered a number of tickets for that poor teacher. So it ain't gonna work. Criminals are two steps ahead of the cops, they will easy mark some sap and pass the blame on them, use these cameras to create iron-clad alibi etc. Glad it is gone.

Re:The machine seems to be working ok.

[mariox19]

Apparently the police were more interested in trying to detect movement of people []

That would be my concern too, but for the fact that I suspect something else entirely.

I'm going to guess that someone in industry, eager to sell a product, got together with someone at the police department, eager to carve out a brand new, bureaucratic niche for himself; and putting these two together is why the scanners got bought—not for any legitimate police work. The cops in their cars don't really care about the scanners, and neither do their superiors; because catching stolen cars doesn't do as much for revenue generation as does writing tickets for expired registrations, pulling over drunk drivers, or setting up good old-fashioned speed traps.

I'm not shocked

[sgt scrub]

If the records were publicly available, people would see that the majority of stolen items/vehicles are not found unless they are in a vehicle stopped for a traffic violation or an actual stolen vehicle has been stopped. Last year there was a group of people that was stealing stuff out of peoples cards in a near by neighborhood. They pilfered stuff from cars for a month until they got pulled over because their inspection sticker expired. Successful criminals keep their cars clean, insured, up to date, and drive slow.

Re:I'm not shocked

[blackraven14250]

Except when it comes to the details of the motorcycle case in particular, it's baffling that it wasn't recovered. It passed by the same camera something like 40 times, on sequential days, in the same half hour period. Shit, you can just station a cop there and let them write speeding tickets for 2-3 days, and they'd be bound to run into it.

Read The Source, Not The Blog

[Frosty Piss]

The Ars T "story" is simply a re-hash of this (from the Boston Globe):

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/12/14/boston-police-suspend-use-high-tech-licence-plate-readers-amid-privacy-concerns/B2hy9UIzC7KzebnGyQ0JNM/story.html

Re:Why not just use it for for specific targets

[TheRealMindChild]

Take a gander at this: https://www.aclu.org/meet-jack-or-what-government-could-do-all-location-data

Traffic camera prone to spoofing and abuse

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

http://www.dailytech.com/Students+Use+Speed+Cameras+to+Frame+Innocent+Drivers+Prank+Teachers/article13749.htm

http://boingboing.net/2009/01/06/naughty-speed-camera.html

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2008/12/dont-like-speed-cameras-use-them-to-punk-your-enemies/

Re:They Did Not Say They Would Stop

[Anonymous Coward]

Are there any other programs that use LPR data?

CUPS?

Thank you! I'll be here all week. Try the veal.

Re:Boston PD

[OhPlz]

That's "Boston Strong" - wasting massive amounts of money to get no results, when simply not even trying would have allowed normal people to accomplish the goal immediately. And then being smug about it. There's a reason nothing of any worth comes out of Boston.

While I have no love for the Commonwealth, I think you're way off here. The reason a citizen found flash-bang (the kid) hiding in the boat was because the police had driven him into hiding. The other brother was killed while trying to escape the police. If not for the actions taken, those two might still be out and about planning who knows what.

Re:Boston PD

[icebike]

All the while, remember that. in-spite of the FBI having been handed a dossier on the bombers by the Russians and the NSA continuous 24/7 indexing all cellular call metadata and monitoring all overseas calls, the intelligence apparatus of the entire US government was clueless about who these guys were.

Re:Boston PD

[the eric conspiracy]

That's nothing compared to Claude Shannon's master's thesis which laid out the use of boolean logic to solve general problems.

Here's a list (just from MIT, which is one of the 100 or so universities in Metro Boston).

1802 -- Modern navigation -- Bowditch
1886 -- Management consulting -- Little
1901 -- Disposable safety razor -- Gillette et al.
1914 -- "Tech"nicolor -- Founded in Boston by Kalmus et al.
1919 -- Trans-Atlantic aircraft -- Hunsaker et al.
1929- -- Instant photography (Polaroid) -- Land
1931 -- Stroboscopy -- Edgerton, Germeshausen et al.
1937 -- Use of Boolean logic to design "digital" circuits -- Shannon
1940-45 -- Practical radar -- Anglo-American military collaboration at MIT
1944 -- Mark I/II computers and first computer "bug" -- Aiken, Hopper et al.
1945 -- Hypertext -- Vannevar Bush
1951 -- Huffman code
1951 -- Random access memory ("core")-- Project Whirlwind
1953 -- PET scan -- Brownell
1953- -- Doppler radar -- Gordon
1956- -- Chomsky hierarchy
1957- -- Generative grammar -- Chomsky
1957 -- Confocal microscope -- MInsky
1957-61 -- Time-sharing (and some of what we now call virtualization) -- Project MAC
1958 -- LISP -- McCarthy
1961 -- Chaos theory -- Lorenz (and many others)
1961-2 -- Digital videogame (Spacewar!) -- Graetz, Russel, Wiitanen, Kotok
1963 -- CAD -- Sutherland
1964 -- Minicomputer -- DEC
1964-5 -- Electronic mail -- Van Vleck / Morris on CTSS (also network email, Tomlinson in 1971)
1969 -- Apollo guidance computer that navigated to and landed on moon -- Instrumentation (now Draper) Laboratory
1970-90 -- Object-oriented programming and data hiding -- Liskov (and many others)
1972 -- Packet-switching and ARPANET -- Kahn, BBN, etc.
1973 -- Black-Scholes option pricing model -- Black, Scholes, Merton
1978 -- Practical public-key cryptography (RSA) -- Rivest, Shamir, Adelman
1979 -- Spreadsheet -- Bricklin and Frankston
1981-89 -- Copyleft/sharealike, GNU and free software movement -- Stallman
1995- - E-ink -- Jacobsen et al.
2000 -- Zipcar -- Danielson, Chase

Re:Pretty obvious

[Smauler]

I don't believe, in the UK that the police are that corrupt, and I'm more cynical than most with regards to the UK police. What I _do_ believe is that with the laws that are on the books today, most people can be guilty of a crime, and police _do_ selectively arrest. Part of the problem is that police assume that they are deserved of "respect" above and beyond that of normal citizens... you see this all the time on police shows, telling them to fuck off gets you arrested. Telling normal people to fuck off gets you ignored mostly, or hit sometimes. You don't get arrested.

It's a consistent theme with police following programmes - you show us respect, or you get arrested. Fuck that shit.