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.

Re:Repetition Bores People

[cayenne8]

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).

Geez, when the Patriot act and all was going through and the DHS was being formed, I really didn't understand how bad a thing it could/would be!!!

Man, we need to break it back up again. It was less intrusive and dangerous to the common US citizen when they weren't quite as efficient and weren't able to as easily work with each other. Government gridlock in most all areas, IMHO, is generally a GOOD thing. Shit like this happens to us and we lose freedoms the more efficient and together the Feds seem to get!!!

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.

[Livius]

The catch is that you could imagine more or less plausible scenarios where such information would make a material difference. (In fact, television Hollywood movies do so frequently and they really do sound reasonable if you don't think too carefully.)

This means they can fool everyone who doesn't think and/or doesn't remember, which sadly is likely to be a majority.

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

[tristes_tigres]

"Not being government they are probably safer" ?

What an astonishingly ignorant statement. Billions of corporate propaganda clearly have had profound effect on Americans.

Corporation is by design and law fascist, top-down hierarchical organization that is unaccountable to public, and forbidden by law to have any motivation except profit motive. That is safer than however flawed and limited checks-and-balances of the government?

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.

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

[Vitriol Angst]

I talked to someone that worked at one of the "Big Three" credit reporting agencies. You know those credit scores that make things cost more, because you have less money? Well, seems they are going to be rolling out "Work Scores" -- ratings of performance of employees that companies can use when the time comes to hire.

If they implement this "reputation system" and things like license plate tracking. Nothing will happen. You will try and get a job somewhere, and will never hear back. You will be curious why you can't get a loan. Nothing will happen TOO YOU, and nothing will happen FOR YOU. You will just be inexplicably a permanent loser.

The invisible hand of the market place will finally find it's way around your neck. The marketplace does not want people who question the way things are done and who cause a fuss. Just be popular, agree with what is shameful or interesting at the water cooler, play golf, laugh at the executive jokes, kiss ass and make a living.

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

[Vitriol Angst]

I like your comment. When you distill it down to the raw motivations; how COULD a company be trusted? Big or Small, there is a power vacuum. What do you want filling that power? Fast Food, Goldman Sachs, and a Credit Rating agency?

There was good work done by faceless bureaucrats in Washington for many years. Yes, there are careerists and cogs and people who muddle through,... but the "inefficiency"? People have no clue about an economy if they worry about the "cost of government." Every year around sweeps, our TV News covers "lazy government workers."

Someone shows up, gets paid, raises a family. Life goes on. I worked in marketing - and that's not necessary if there is one product. Most accountants aren't "necessary" if the tax code were made simple -- I'd be all for that; no taxes until your family makes over $120k and get rid of sales tax -- then you've got 1,000 less points of taxation on those who an afford and who actually get the most benefits AND that would spur investment to avoid taxation and lose the money (lowering capital gains has the effect of lowering capital investment-- see; history). Anyway -- the point is; for most of us, there is an artificial environment of inefficiency that created our job.

If we had total efficiency; there'd be a robotic plant that created all your stuff, drones would bring it to you, but they wouldn't because you'd have no money to buy anything because you were replaced by a robot.

So fundamentally; business wants you as an outlet, and wants to only pay you as little as possible, and shift costs of educating you to someone else. Government is motivated by the people involved, and who puts them in their job and gives them their power. Increasingly; that's corporate money more than votes -- the same money that owns the insipid news station that covers the heinous crimes of road workers caught napping.

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

[RabidReindeer]

Corporation is ... forbidden by law to have any motivation except profit motive.

B. S.

Corporations are chartered organizations and their motivations are whatever their charters mandate them to be. That's why there are things like "not-for-profit" corporations. NPR. The American Red Cross. The AFL-CIO. The American Medical Association. Thousands of neighborhood homeowners associations. And so forth. That's not even counting the for-profits who worry as much about doing the Right Thing as they do about profits. For example, Costco.

For-profit corporations spend a lot of time an money lobbying the government for favors, it's true. But I think you'll agree that some of the above corporations do also.

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

[Vitriol Angst]

I don't think the majority are fooled -- the Majority doesn't vote or is Independent. The MAJORITY is discouraged by the constant deceit and don't want to expend the energy arguing -- just making a living and enjoying what they can.

The people who are FOOLED are the ardent supporters who likely get more information on the subjects they are so ignorant about.

I remember years ago working with a company that sold the Interest Only home loans. They hired a guest speaker for about $100K for their conventions and other speaking engagements who wrote a book on how you could put all that wonderful equity from a home into the market. Keeping a mortgage is your cheapest credit card. Which, conceptually, if you crunch the numbers, works out on paper if you are a wise investor and don't ever use this money for food.

Anyway, the point is; an author who wrote a crap book promoting a crap financial concept got lots of money, and I'm a worker drone who is informed, and thought the idea was going to run a lot of people into serious trouble.

Think tanks and charlatans get paid big bucks to inform people of "wisdom" that makes people with lots of money, lots more money. The Wall Street insiders who have financial shows on PBS or NPR. The numerous "think tanks" who churn out papers on how not having tariffs allows America to "be competitive" -- as if any of that helped 99% of the public.

So who is the fool? People got good jobs and paychecks working at companies selling bad ideas. There are people working at horrible companies that every year find a new way to add a fee to their services and bilk customers.

I was aware and predicting the 2008 bank collapse because I noticed the reserve requirement on banks kept going down (it got negative in the last couple months) -- and that meant they were over-leveraged. For all my wisdom, I didn't improve my economic situation.

There are people who believe in talking snakes, that human activity cannot effect the climate, and who vote for less protection of workers even though they are a worker -- and YET, those people are better off than me financially. People who believe that America can do no wrong and has noble ideals AND can do horrible things because they have those ideals (not noticing that it can't maintain AND break ideals to be noble), are much more promotable. The person who will administer electric shocks because they were told to, and who will happily sell the Interest Only mortgage to a young lawyer with $300,000 in student loans is someone a business wants to hire.

SURVIVAL is why people in our society may not pay attention to things they think are unnecessary. And being a MORON is a good way for an average person to succeed financially. Being both aware and altruistic means that your chance for success is more limited. We have a Darwinian dog-eat-dog system in this country, and dogs are better adapted to it.

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

[houghi]

How is this "freedom" thing going for you? I hear my country might be interested in it.
Is the waving of that many flags a requirement? Bceause the last time we did that it did not end well.

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

[Vitriol Angst]

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

Yes, well, the agenda was; track the population so we can CONTROL THEM.

We all should know that was the excuse. Dick Cheney's PNAC group had the Patriot Act and Iraq invasion plans written years earlier and shows that he used disasters as an opportunity for an agenda - we should only wonder why anyone with internet access can know these things and yet it does not appear as a point of discussion on our TV News.

People on TV and the press talk about "reasonable things." Things that have made the gauntlet of other people on suits on TV.

Everyone watching TV news "KNOWS" that Iran is two years away from developing a nuclear weapon -- yet not that they've been two years away for thirty years now.

Everyone knows that we need security -- yet not that mercenary companies can buy tanks. That foreign companies own weapons plants on US soil. That engineers have tried to go on strike and nuclear weapons facilities over unsafe working conditions and long hours -- and that private companies are running these facilities and cutting costs.

Bill Maher pointed out the other day that about 26,000 people die due to antibiotic resistant bacteria -- the threats of a 9/11 incident each year pale in comparison to the real threats we ignore. There's obviously nothing to be gained by worrying the public with things that won't increase profits or power. You are more likely to be shot by police than a terrorist. So why did we spend $3 Trillion on Iraq and Afghanistan? We could have put everyone in those countries through college and bought them a home -- and 99.999% of them would likely kill anyone who would harm us just out of gratitude.

The media has interviews with “security experts” who debate the dangers of whistleblowers like Snowden. The “enemy” might get our secrets. Really? Did the Media cover the Wikileaks that told how agencies doing work for the NSA and CIA routinely sell databases of information gleaned about Americans to private companies? If China wants to know something - they don’t go to Snowden. They go to a firm.

Is there some “military strategy” that could be compromised? Is that F16 or drone with a GPS guided missile not going to win against that guy with an AK47 4 miles away on the infrared targeting system that costs more than his closest ten villages?

There is no "enemy" just people trying to get power vs. other people in power. A person like Cheney wants to get dirt on some political opponent or to have a war with a country that his friends paid to profit from, or a corporation wants to sell diseased cattle and cut corners and make profits so want dirt on someone who might stand in their way. Tracking EVERYONE, does not track people who are intending to sabotage the system. They will steal, disguise and use low-tech methods. But it's great to manipulate people who are part of the system and ruin their lives if they get in your way.

We can't have a Democracy or even representational government with "total awareness" -- and that's the reason it's the solution to whatever disaster they care so much about. If they cared about human life, I'd have a decent wage and Universal healthcare -- for instance. Doesn't seem to be a priority for "securing" the homeland.

I'm more interested in being protected from our Dick Cheney's and Judicial Punishment System.

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?

Can we just kill these cockbags now?

[Chas]

They've be MUCH more secure when they're 6 feet under.

the next Kickstarter project

[turkeydance]

the old 007 rotating-license-plate

Re:the next Kickstarter project

[KingBozo]

Even better, get some bumper stickers with random numbers characters on them, and the plate readers will have multiple numbers to collect.

bumper stickers are not illegal yet.

Concerns Addressed

[rea1l1]

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".

Hijack someone else's car - problem solved.

[FreeBillClinton]

I feel safer already.

CBP

[bhcompy]

Customs and Border Protection is a division of DHS and they have this already. Kind of strange.

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.

Not random numbers...

[Anonymous Coward]

But something like
';drop tables.

http://bobby-tables.com/

Already unconstitutional?

[sycodon]

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.

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.

Re:Already unconstitutional?

[LessThanObvious]

License plates are visible and a single check at a point in time isn't very telling, but if you write a query that says "show me all the license plates that have been in the vicinity of this intersection by this church on Sunday between 9AM and 5PM more than 3 times in past 60 days", I bet you'd have a pretty good idea of who attends. You can apply the same logic to find residence, employer, or just about anything that is a consistent pattern. You can treat anyone who was present around the time of an incident as a potential suspect. The argument gets made that it is legal to follow a car on the street without a warrant so this is no different, but while cops can follow one car, they don't have resources to follow everyone and in this case the technology allows them to follow everyone all the time. All they have to do is ask the database the right question and they can find out just about anything they want about people's habits or about which people are likely connected to a specific location.

Reminds me of the spy satellite restrictions

[oneiros27]

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".

Re:Give It To Them

[ShanghaiBill]

So give it to them. Have them budget it, spend the money, gain absolutely nothing, fuck it up

Time for Godwin: In 1933, the German establishment decided to make Hitler the new chancellor, on the theory that he would screw everything up, lose credibility, and then the Nazi movement would collapse. That plan didn't work, and neither will yours. Besides, your basic premise is that the DHS should not do this because it is inefficient. Rather, they should not do it because it is wrong and unconstitutional. Whether or not it is an efficient use of their resources is irrelevant.

 

Re:Give It To Them

[Panoptes]

"You do realize that essentially only 2 things combined caused him to fail? The invasion of Russia being delayed by a month alone might have made the difference, but the attack on Pearl Harbor sealed the deal. Without the latter, the US likely would not have entered the war in time to save Britain, which was on the brink of surrendering..."

Am I correct in assuming that you are not a historian?