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.

Comments

Repetition Bores People

[Needs2BeSaid]

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.

Re:Repetition Bores People

[Trachman]

Except that DHS currently has access to those License plates. There are so called fusion centers which are supposed to be amalgamation of all the mass spying to one interagency group (consisting of multiple agencies).

The idea is that while they have access now and they are asking to legitimize.

this isn't going to make you safe.

[nimbius]

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.

Re:this isn't going to make you safe.

[Opportunist]

NONE of the high-tech tracking systems can help you against low-tech terrorism. The enemy isn't using those high tech tools.

That's the whole deal with asymmetric warfare (and let's face it, folks, we can finally call a spade a spade and call it war). Each side will field what is available and affordable to them. For governments, weapons, gadgets, technology and tools are cheap, while reliable and affordable manpower is expensive or hard to come by. For terrorists, it is exactly the opposite.

It's fairly easy for a terrorist group to communicate without raising any red flags simply by avoiding any of the means of communication that are easy to tap. If everything fails, face to face communication is an option. There's no time constraint, terrorists don't work 9 to 5. Like, say, agents.

Doesn't history teach us anything? The East Bloc had maybe the most through surveillance system in existence. In the GDR, one of every 50 people was working for the Stasi. 2% of the population. Imagine that! To give you an idea what that means, if the NSA employed 2% of the US population, 6.5 MILLION people would work for them.

And what did it serve? I mean, except crippling the economy to the point where it collapsed?

Because that's something that's so easy to overlook but quite dangerous: Surveillance costs money. And we're not talking about pocket change. While at the same time it doesn't do jack. And don't gimme that "but it creates jobs" spiel. Yes, it creates jobs for unemployable idiots, but it would be heaps cheaper to just make the idiots sit at home and pay them for it.

Not to mention that it also would be a lot less annoying.

What could possibly go wrong?

[Geoffrey.landis]

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"?

Re:What could possibly go wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the scary thing:

The system ALREADY EXISTS.

The article is about the DHS asking for access to the system from private companies that are already recording that data.

Instead, it is seeking bids from companies that already gather the data to say how much they would charge to grant access to law enforcement officers at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a DHS agency. ...

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.

DHS officials say Vigilant’s database, to which some field offices have had access on a subscription basis, has proved valuable in solving years-old cases.

So, yeah. You're already being spied on. Fortunately, for now, it's only in the hands of private businesses who sell it to anyone who's willing to pay. Or is that really all that fortunate?

Next step -- VMT

[Thagg]

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.

Re:Already unconstitutional?

[Needs2BeSaid]

I doubt this. License plates are visible to the public and GPS tracking is not. Installing a GPS device is even more invasive.