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DHS Wants Access To License-plate Tracking System, Again
schwit1 writes: The Department of Homeland Security is seeking bids from companies able to provide law enforcement officials with access to a national license-plate tracking system — a year after canceling a similar solicitation over privacy issues. The reversal comes after officials said they had determined they could address concerns raised by civil liberties advocates and lawmakers about the prospect of the department's gaining widespread access, without warrants, to a system that holds billions of records that reveal drivers' whereabouts. "If this goes forward, DHS will have warrantless access to location information going back at least five years about virtually every adult driver in the U.S., and sometimes to their image as well," said Gregory T. Nojeim, senior counsel for the Center for Democracy & Technology. ... The largest commercial database is owned by Vigilant Solutions, which as of last fall had more than 2.5 billion records. Its database grows by 2.7 million records a day.
They will keep asking, over and over, forever. The "people" will get bored with the requests, less and less of them will voice their opinions. DHS will win in the end. The United States Government is nothing if not extremely patient and very persistent.
Some things need to be said...
no way they could possibly "address concerns" about privacy when that much data is at their fingertips... no.fucking.way.
The vision of homeland security is to ensure a homeland that is safe, secure, and resilient against terrorism and other hazards.
License plate tracking wouldnt have stopped the shoe bomber, the Aurora theatre shootings, the Arizona shooting of Gabrielle Giffords, the fort hood shooting, the innumerable school shootings in america, or the standoff at the Cliven Bundy ranch. a License plate tracking system wouldnt keep the average american safe, but the plutocracy? yes. License plate tracking systems allow you to monitor and track activists and protestors that organize around your government for systemic changes to policies and processes you benefit from disproportionately. Why, a plate tracking system could prevent proper media coverage of the next Fergusson shooting or even identify, proactively, members of the media that should be prevented from ever accessing the state. A plate tracking system would allow the government to create a plutocratically sanctioned whitelist of vehicles allowed to enter or leave DC. It would serve well to blacklist occupy protestors from financial areas, and regulate their entrance and exit to and from parks. It could also be used to collect citations and build cases against potential activists.
Good people go to bed earlier.
A system that tracks the whereabouts of every American (or at least, every one with a car), and saves the data for five years...
This story needs the tag "what could possibly go wrong"?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
They've be MUCH more secure when they're 6 feet under.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
the old 007 rotating-license-plate
Of course they could. With access to the data they'll quickly know where all of their "concerns" live and be able to , well, "address them".
Or is outsourcing the only thing the government knows how to do these days?
Summary really needs a link to Vigilant Solutions' National Vehicle Location Service (NVLS)
The National Vehicle Location Service (NVLS) is a national data sharing initiative started by Vigilant in 2008. The data in NVLS is made up from two primary sources: 1) data shared to NVLS from law enforcement and 2) commercial LPR, or “private” data harvested by Vigilant.
Data shared to NVLS by law enforcement is available free of charge via a LEARN account from Vigilant; sharing to NVLS by Vigilant LPR customers is up to the agency and can be changed at any time. The data remains the property of the agency and is governed by the data retention policy set by that agency. The data is accessible only to law enforcement users, and is not shared or used by Vigilant Solutions in any way.
The largest pool of data is that harvested by Vigilant from commercial sources, most notably, Vigilant’s subsidiary, DRN (Digital Recognition Network). This pool of LPR data totals over 2 billion detections and grows at a rate of over 70 million per month. This data is available via an annual subscription and greatly enhances an agency’s investigative reach.
Data Sharing and Interoperability. Users of LEARN can choose to share their LPR data to NVLS, or select individual agencies for sharing. With minimal integration, competitive LPR systems can also share with NVLS for the benefit of the larger law enforcement community and to have access to their own data within the LEARN environment for improved analytics. Even agencies that do not have LPR systems can leverage the shared pool of LPR data to conduct searches for vehicles of interest.
Data Security is paramount with NVLS. Hosted in the same secure facility as LEARN, and governed by the same redundancy, power management, backup, and physical security, NVLS also features a strict credentialing policy due to its accessibility via the web. Registered users must have a valid Originating Agency Identifier (ORI), a government email address, and pass through several layers of validation to gain access. Periodic audits and re-validation insure that only credentialed law enforcement have access to this data.
Investigative Leads are provided by NVLS via LEARN at a level that would otherwise be impossible for an agency to achieve under their own resources and finances. Additionally, the nature of the LPR collected from private sources tends to be stationary vehicles and/or vehicles entering into parking and/or other access controlled locationsproviding law enforcement with detailed precise and targeted historical location information for vehicles of interest.
the fact that this info is already privately owned is worse.
I'm not sure how to connect "virtually every adult driver in the U.S.," with "Its database grows by 2.7 million records a day."
That would amount only a handful of observations of each driver per year, average. Still a privacy violation, but not very useful if the interest is in building a model of an individual's behavior or knowing the individual's current whereabouts.
One of the risks here is that the system will seriously jeopardize individual privacy at the same time that no useful benefit will be created. This has the potential to void even the morally bankrupt "the end justifies the means" argument for the system.
The federal government is simply a broken mess. At this point, we would be better off if the individual states disowned it and formed a new government to unite them.
Seriously, once one state realizes this and goes it's own way, the rest will follow.
It's only a matter of time.
I feel safer already.
As our government continues spending taxpayer money on the industrial security complex, they will continues to collect trillions of bytes of data. That is obvious. The vested interests in collecting and analyzing this data have a wonderful perpetual money making scheme.
Now, these entities will be analyzing this data and we all know that when you have a shit load of data, you start seeing things Your algorithms may start picking things up. The dark side of Big Data.
They are going to get so many false leads that they will not have the manpower to do anything. They'll be chasing after people that have no intention of doing anything, and they'll miss the folks who are quite careful about attracting attention.
And then there might be some social passive protests like, name all of our sons Mohamed. Write a book called the Anarchists Bible and print chicken recipes. Pay strictly in cash for your road trip, then on the way back, pay with a credit card - or do that for one leg of your trip. Trip up the data. Give misspelled names, street addresses, false middle names...wrong eye color. Nothing really egregious, but enough to make their lives much more difficult.
Make it illegal? Well why don't they prove it. Is it me or a tired clerk entering my data?
Customs and Border Protection is a division of DHS and they have this already. Kind of strange.
The problem with license plate readers is that there are only so many cameras out there. How can they know where everybody was all the time?
The answer is the Vehicles Miles Traveled tax. Many states and the federal gov't have proposed over and over that all cars have GPS trackers in them that tax them on how many miles they drive. They say "the problem is cars are more efficient, so we don't make as much money." (Can't you just raise the rate then? wtf?) or that this is "more fair", everybody is charged the same amount for how far they drive; as opposed to how much gas they use and how much carbon they emit.
But, come on, the real reason is almost certainly to track where everybody went, all the time. If there is anything the Snowden revelations have demonstrated, it's that if there is any possible way to capture data on people, the government is going to do it. Anything you can imagine, and many things that you could never have imagined, are being done. If you want to believe that a GPS tracker that hooks up to a gas pump only sends one bit of information, well, I suppose you deserve what you get.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
No. Data deleted after 14 days.
Im sure this is possible..?
But something like
';drop tables.
http://bobby-tables.com/
Persistent lobbyists will get everything they want. Opposition will tire emotionally of fighting and winning, until they lose once, and then they won't have the energy to claw it back. People will be left to make way in their lives for whatever it was so that it doesn't effect enough compliant sheep to ever put up much of a fight to get things back the way they were.
...
So give it to them. Have them budget it, spend the money, gain absolutely nothing, fuck it up, suffer a massive data leak, embarass themselves and the government, ask for more money to clean it up, become a bloated inefficient disaster, and finally, finally, when the US eventually gets around to becoming an Orwellian dictatorship, at least it will resemble Brazil instead of 1984.
I know which future I'd choose. And it involves the DHS.
The supremes have recently ruled that gps tracking requires a warrant.
One could argue that a system which a amalgamates multiple, automated sightings is pretty much the same thing as gps tracking.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
As the government isn't allowed to spy on citizens without a warrent, under normal circumstances, the satellites aren't supposed to take images when over the U.S.
So the government instead buys images from commercial vendors ... the same folks who provide images to Google and Bing for their mapping projects. (which admittedly, might not be as high of resolution).
I'm thinking that there needs to be a line drawn, otherwise all you end up doing is having a way to make an end-run around the legal verdict -- "we'll just spin off a company that does what we're not allowed to do, and buy the results from them".
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I believe a lot of the data companies like "Vigilant" have is coming from the intersection and roadside / highway pole cameras you see mounted everywhere in the USA. I don't know if it's the companies mounting them themselves in rights of way, or if it's the government mounting them and giving the data away in some kind of sick partnership. Either way, the government is at fault. And you are at fault for not stopping it.
FUCK the government, and basically, FUCK you.
Pass a law that all politicians' and lobbyists' vehicle whereabouts are automatically posted to a publicly accessible website 24x7x365. In fact, that type of thing would pretty much immediately fix all fucked up laws in the country. E.g., I wonder if the CA governor's mansion is subject to the meaningless, bullshit water restrictions he's inflicted on the serfs?
The DHS, which has never caught a "terrorist" ever. At least before the fact. When passengers caught one after the fact (the "underwear bomber") and handed him over to the DHS, they claimed that "the system worked". It used to be that apologists could claim that there had been no terrorist attacks on the US since 9-11 and use that to support an argument that the DHS was a good thing. Well it's 2015, and there have been a few successful attacks now...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
It is just creepy thinking they track where I drive.
Curious if the cameras that actually read the plates block the infra-red spectrum or not.
If not, would it be plausible to ring the LP with high powered IR LEDs to effectively blind the cameras to the plate or no ?
It disappeared after a news crew did a story on it.
http://kdvr.com/2015/03/11/mys...
No data deleted after 14 days. FTFY
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
If you were required to wear a placard with your identification number every time you left your house, that would be an invasion of privacy, and the courts would throw such a law out. In our modern era, what's different about the ID number being on your car?
When cars were new, lots of people were scared of them, and the government used that to get people to go along with licensing them. And now they can use that license to track people's movements. In another ten years, our computer systems will be powerful enough to take the data from cameras and patrol cars (which also have plate cameras these days) and give probability ratings for the location of any car in the US. Any protest group the government doesn't like can be tracked to their homes. Additional "conspirators" can be identified. And then a few alterations to the traffic light system can arrange some "accidents" to eliminate them in a way that won't arouse any suspicion. Or the fact that new cars are almost entirely computer controlled and have been demonstrated to have remotely-exploitable security flaws can be used to arrange a more personalized version of the same.
The question to ask of any system is not "what good can this do if used properly?" but "What could this do in the hands of someone evil?"
No problem.
True freedom is no car, no phone, no credit card.
Get a horse.
>"officials said they had determined they could address concerns raised by civil liberties advocates"
Sorry, that is impossible, unless by "address" they mean "dismiss". If the government (and also private industry) in any way collects the information, it will be abused. Period. Regardless of what they say they will do, they will store the info for extended times, share it with all the black-ops agencies, index and associate it with all kinds of other databases, and search it at will, without a warrant, with impunity and without even audits.
Anyone that thinks otherwise is just totally naive and living in some fantasy world. The only safe data is the data not collected in the first place. Wake up people- the only real way to ensure data privacy is to prevent its collection in the first place.
DHS: Pretending to protect 'Murica from the bogeyman since 2002.