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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

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?

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.

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/