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It's Not Just the NSA: Police Are Tracking Your Car
New submitter blastboy writes "Every day in Britain, a vast system of cameras tracks cars on the road, feeding their movements into a database used by police. And because that data is networked, cops can use it to go back in time — or even predict your movements. But even though there are serious concerns about the technology, and it's regularly been abused by law enforcement, it has now been exported by the Brits and put in place by police departments around the world."
Government surveillance is necessary in this date and age to protect not only our Freedoms but also our security.
England, the USofA, and the rest of the Free World have fought a long and hard battle against totalitarian, oppressive and stifling governments. And with the current trend of indiscriminate searching, monitoring and spying on its citizens, the Free World will stay free.
...it's regularly been abused by law enforcement, it has now been exported by the Brits and put in place by police departments around the world....
Well, of course, the Brits have always been the first to invent new technical concepts. The steam engine, the computer, the jet, radar, you name it.. In this case we wrote the book here, so I'm not surprised that we're exporting it.
The book was 1984.....
O don't have a car. Public transport FTW.
You decided to vote for the Tories, Britain. You decided to vote for the corrupt Beeching to suck up corporate welfare for his road-building business and strike his Axe down on public transport.
And now you are surprised that we're over-taxed and over-tracked across the country while engaging in the statistically most dangerous everyday activity in the Western world.
God is perfectly just. Judge not lest you be judged. I giggle thinking about that.
Boston police apparently abandoned their license-plate reading program after reporters found out they weren't using it for the stated purpose of finding stolen vehicles.
Of course, it is easier to get a crooked, ineffective police program killed when it is funded from the local budget, not windfall "homeland security" dollars in the US.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Tracking the movements of vehicles is quite a bit different than tracking cell phone conversations. There is no expectation of privacy when driving a vehicle on public roads. Operating a vehicle (at least in the US) is heavily regulated, requiring registration of the vehicle, insurance, and licensed operators. In my area, in addition to the traffic cameras there are license plate scanners on most police vehicles. They scan and record the plates of vehicles as the police drive around town, popping up an alert if they get a "hit" on a vehicle with issues (suspended registration, insurance, or involvement in a crime). You're also tracked via tolls (EZ Pass in my area) and gasoline purchases (credit card data), but the police don't have easy access to that data without a subpoena.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
IT WAS A COOL, QUIET MONDAY EVENING in northeast England when the computer first told them about Peter Chapman. The clock read a little after five, and two officers from Cleveland police were cruising in their patrol car. A screen lit up next to them: the on-board computer was flashing an alert from the local police network. The message told them the target was a blue Ford Mondeo and gave them its registration number.
It was only a few minutes before they came across the car and pulled it over with a sounding of their siren. Inside was Chapman, a 33-year-old convict wanted for questioning in connection with a string of offences, including arson and theft. The officers verified his identity and took him to a station just a few miles away.
At 5:07 p.m. on October 26, 2009, just 20 minutes before he was arrested, Chapman had driven past an Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) camera stationed next to the road. As his car passed, the camera recorded its registration number, together with the time and location, and sent the information to Cleveland Policeâ(TM)s internal computer network, where it was checked against a hotlist downloaded from Britainâ(TM)s central police database.
There was a hit: a request to detain anyone driving Chapmanâ(TM)s car had been entered into the system three days earlier. Once the computers had processed their searchâ"a matter of fractions of a secondâ"the command to apprehend the driver was broadcast to local officers, who stopped and arrested Chapman as soon as they were able.
This feat was made possible by the continuous operation of a vast automated surveillance network that sits astride Britainâ(TM)s roads. The technologyâ"known as License Plate Recognition (LPR) in the US, where it is also usedâ"captures and stores data on up to 15 million journeys in the UK each day.
I believe it's because of the proliferation of ANPR and other cameras that I had a major reduction of my motor insurance premium this year. Society pays for the crimes of the minority, so using technology to take the crooks off the road pays dividends to all.
...and her Fascist Regime
" Another man, who spoke to journalists but chose to remain anonymous to prevent further harassment, says he was stopped more than 25 times by police under a variety of pretences after he had attended a peaceful local protest against duck and pheasant shooting. He finally made a formal complaint after police armed with machine guns pulled him over during an evening out with his wife."
Apart from the invasion of privacy, what a complete waste of resources, maybe some budgets need to be reduced in order to cut down on waste.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
cannot let us out of their sight for fear we'll run tell the truth somewhere
Concerns about the new technology were raised immediately, including from within the government. A 1984 report for the Greater London Council Police Committee warned that the system made every car a potential suspect and handed policy on mass surveillance to the police. “This possibility in a democracy is unacceptable,” it concluded.
We're tracking ourselves!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Government surveillance is necessary in this date and age to protect not only our Freedoms but also our security.
England, the USofA, and the rest of the Free World have fought a long and hard battle against totalitarian, oppressive and stifling governments. And with the current trend of indiscriminate searching, monitoring and spying on its citizens, the Free World will stay free.
'-1' - D'oh! I thought the last sentence was a dead give away.
-Doug Salmon, Kilgore Trout's retarded neighbor.
I thought it was placed in an "indefinite hold", at least until they can figure a way of turning off the readers when they enter the police employee parking lots (where the most unpaid ticket were found).
There's a big difference between seeing, recognizing and maybe even following a car on a public road and cataloging every single one and keeping that data for as long as you want. If you don't think there is some expectation of privacy imagine a private citizen/organization putting a bunch of these up and tracking government vehicles. You'd have arrests, lawsuits, threats and confiscation of the equipment within a week.
Just wait until we export SCORPION STARE!
Police and the NSA wasting tax dollars doing the same thing twice?
Can they just set up a Ministry of Truth, and be done with it? It would save a lot of money.
One picture from the article illustrates why we need this in the UK. Its the large muzzy threat that we face.
Ok, that's the one case where it did some good. Now where are the droves of cases of people getting pulled over for being a day behind on their registration. Or the typo in the system resulting in the wrong person being flagged for arrest. Or the case where someone used a stolen ID when they were arrested and now the actual owner of the ID has a warrant out for their arrest (actually happened to someone I knew)
...wrote 'Brave New World'.
Which dystopia do you prefer?
You know what? Fuck all this "no expectation of privacy" bullshit!
Sure, anything people do in public could be observed. But those are the keywords: "anything could." Not "everything will." And certainly not "everything will be observed and then get stored forever in an instantly-searchable government database!"
This Orwellian shit needs to stop.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Spying on innocent civilians is an application of guilty before proven innocent, the exact opposite of what government claims to provide us. Same with police checkpoints. The fact that it occurs on public property is irrelevant, because the essence of the act is the same whether you are on public or private property. If you aren't guilty yet, then they have no reason to demand proof of your innocence -- unless of course they have adopted the principle of guilty before proven innocent.
... perhaps they already are ...
The original title of the book was 1948. He was writing about the cold war.
Editors made him change the title to 1984. Read 1985 for some more info.
Old Blighty of late is reminding me more and more or something out of Orwell. We care about "security" of Britons, but couldn't give a monkey's toss about their rights, freedoms, feelings.
Have gnu, will travel.
It's a system designed to thwart lawbreakers, except that lawbreakers know how to avoid, so it's only effective "against" law abiding citizens, and therefore is of no use to anyone.
Are you sure that its cheaper? I pay I think in the neighborhood of $650 a year in car insurance. I've never been in a wreck (at least one that damaged my car) but when I was out of the state my sister borrowed my car and did some pretty significant damage (not her fault, elderly couple pulled out in front of her). Over a decade of payments totaling probably somewhere in the region of $10,000 and the most the insurance would pay is $500. Maybe they've just substituted lower payments for less coverage.
In November, some guy at the local mall went to several shops and asked the young women on staff to help him find stuff on lower racks. He then took some "upskirt" pictures with his camera phone. When he got noticed, he ran out of the mall.
Police reports in December give the follow up. Mall security went back to the cameras and found the guy. They tracked him outside the mall running to his car. The parking lot camera got his license plate number. License plate number was sent to the local police, who picked him up at home.
I have mixed feelings about the 'all cameras, all the time' thing. On the one hand: "good - they got the creepy guy." On the other hand, I'm also now REALLY aware that if I decide to leave a passive-aggressive note on the windshield of a guy who parks right up against my door, I could likely expect a visit from his friend-of-a-friend who works in a local police department.
I attended a conference on XML back in roughly 2004. A police technical architect was describing the ANPR system. He pointed out that the current deployments of the time were entirely local and not joined up nationally - but went on to say that it wasn't a very big step to do this, allowing the tracking of vehicle movements on a national scale. He looked embarrassed and uncomfortable as he said this.
I got the very strong impression at the time that he was trying to give a warning on where this technology was heading.
Putin of Russia gets a lot of attention. Why? Because no matter how the Russian people vote, or whom they apparently vote into high office, it is Putin himself that is clearly in absolute control of Russia. We do not doubt or question this obvious fact.
Tony Blair- who by the way is Putin's most important ally, and who personally helped Putin's initial rise to power when Russia faced ever kind of opprobrium from the EU- operates just like Putin, only raised to the power infinity. Blair, in his initial power run, modified every significant institution in the UK, placed his loyalists in absolute control, and set mechanisms in place (including Common Purpose and the Academy School project) that ensured future local controllers in the UK would be even MORE Blairite than their predecessors.
Full Surveillance programs were one of Blair's greatest goal. Blair worked tirelessly to join the intelligence programs of the Anglo-Saxon nations (Britain, Canada, USA, Australia) with those of West Europe and those of significant ex-British Empire nations in the Middle East and Asia. His method was promoting the game changing nature of intelligence gathering using the systems developed by Google, and other new technology entities.
The most interesting aspect of all this is while Britain and Britain II (the USA) have really quite different philosophies by design (what point a Britain II if we designed it to be an identical copy of the original), Blair was able to leverage the distinctions to maximum advantage.
One thing Blair did was to make it clear that members of Team Blair in the UK shared all possible resources and advantages of membership. Blair created new laws giving EVERY official member of Team Blair (down to local councillors and Blair aligned business people) access to much of GCHQ's intelligence gathering on the lives of ordinary Britons. These databases are NOT designated as official GCHQ projects, but in reality they most certainly are.
But British full surveillance projects are, in every real sense, redundant, since the UK has a population that has been passive and subservient since long before Blair rose to power. Britain's Fabian movement, of which Blair is the latest Head, passified the population, and rendered it harmless, long before WW1 (and long before the Fabians even had that name).
The REASON for the full surveillance in the UK is British influence across most of the world. "ENGLAND IS THE MOTHER OF PARLIAMENTS." This concept of Britain being the home of fundamental morality (see the ending of legal Human slavery for another example), means that leaders of other nations, especially the more despotic ones, can say that if Britain does it, if is right and just for their nation as well.
Blair's ultimate goal is WW3, driven by the use of the biggest and most evil war machine yet created by Man, that of the USA. Blair single-handedly created the NATO war in Kosovo, that was intended to involve the US armed forces in their first major ground campaign since Vietnam, and blood the US armed forces for Blair's future program of rolling wars. However, the best Serbs were ex-Soviet, and America was scared s**tless of Soviet tactics and weapon systems, so refused to do anything but cowardly bombing from the air. Blair, in disgust, initiated the PNAC option, and the world witnessed 9/11, and America falling over itself to fight Blair's new wars.
Back to the specifics of the article. It isn't car tracking, BUT people movement tracking that Blair rolled out in the UK. Every major transport hub, especially train and coach stations, is filled with face recognition camera systems- a project that goes back more than a decade. Now understand, this is for city to city travel, NOT local travel within a city. The Soviets under Stalin didn't care to know about the travel of ordinary citizens UNLESS those citizens were leaving their home town/city.
British cars are tracked in many ways. Visible cameras. Hidden cameras. Under road RFID readers reading the RFID tags that major tire m
No cell phone either.
Let the fuckers try to figure that one out.
Snicker snicker
In order to impound the car when it is left unattended so they don't have to deal with the owner.
Now if only Dutch debt collectors weren't so corrupt and overly trigger happy...
Wouldn't it be fantastic to have a job where everything you do is measured so thoroughly?!
Many agencies don't bother with this since there are dozens (at least) of private companies that drive around with scanners. I have not taken any time to follow up on suits and laws that were being proposed to protect people, so can't say for sure where these people can no longer operate. This was easy to resolve in Michigan with no front plate requirement, I simply started backing in everywhere. In CA where front plates are required, the only protection is a cover when parked.
So the Police in Boston stopped, did the private companies stop? I don't know myself, but this is the next logical question to ask.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
as far as vehicle tracking goes, how about just requiring every car to have a gps that reports to the state all the time? that is what they are planning in finland and probably other countries as well.. of course cameras have the added benefit of recording everything else while at it.
With a large enough telescope and enough satellites there is no reason why you couldn't track everyone and every vehicle.
I think the most important and shocking thing in the article is the revelation that this technology is already being used for political purposes. The testimony from people who were stopped and harassed repeatedly simply because they attended some protest rallies should raise huge red flags for even the most dyed in the wool law-and-order types, because it proves not just that the system can be abused, but that such abuse has already occurred, and is very likely still occurring on a massive scale. When law abiding citizens are getting "placed on a list" that causes their movements to be tracked and mandates any police unit to pull them over and question them, repeatedly, all as a result of activity that is perfectly lawful, well... It's well past the time to be getting worried. This type of thing is flat-out Police State behavior, and should not be tolerated in any country still pretending to be a democracy. If we continue to blithely let this stuff be implemented by any law enforcement department that wants to (which is probably all of them), all without any civilian oversight, very soon it will be too late. Can you say dystopia? Better get used to it, cause we're almost there already.
Just like the billions lost to nsa humping the cloud.
There's also that thing where you're "stealing" business from businesses, who by definition are more honest, more trustworthy, and more efficient than any form of government.
Thanks for making shit up in an attempt to make someone seem guilty who should, on the balance of things, be viewed as innocent.
You're as bad as those you're defending.
Perhaps I should cherry pick my examples in the same way you have, so I can show that Catholics (in the form of the IRA) kill many people every year? Or would it be unfair, because many/most of those Catholics are white, which would show that religious extremism isn't limited to those evil Muslims?
Perhaps I should cherry pick my examples in the same way you have, so I can show that Catholics (in the form of the IRA) kill many people every year?
It was the GP that cherry-picked (by having a cut-off date that excluded 2001) - I used National statistics. I think that if you wanted to show that Catholics killed a lot of people you would have to cherry-pick a few decades ago. We used to be evacuated from shopping centres and things fairly frequently with bomb scares, but haven't been for years
Or would it be unfair, because many/most of those Catholics are white, which would show that religious extremism isn't limited to those evil Muslims?
You seem to have a hang-up on race here. It may surprise you to know that not all Catholics are white, and not all Muslim terrorists are brown. people like Richard Dart, Samantha Lewthwaite, Colleen Renee LaRose, to name only a few are just as much murdering muzzy scum as any other muzzy.
That's why I don't drive anywhere, leaving my fully licensed, plated and insured car sitting for weeks at a time. Not paying for movie tickets they can track and count in their never-ending efforts to prove the Obama Economy is Winning. I don't go to the Malls to buy new shirts or new nuthin. Let them calculate the amount of what I am not spending. I am not a cattle like most these young folks. And when they flood my e-mail box with Discount Prices hehehe no, I don't bite, because I also ain't no d*mn catfish to be pulled in and eaten. Their doctors refused for over 23 years to help me get back to work and a paycheck so now let them starve along wit me. Amen & Amen you dogs and worthless physician trash.