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Louisiana Governor Vetoes License Plate Reader Bill, Citing Privacy Concerns
An anonymous reader writes: Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has vetoed a plan to acquire license plate reading cameras in the state. Law enforcement agencies nationwide use such cameras to scan cars and compare them to a "hot list" of stolen or wanted vehicles. That data is kept for weeks, or even years In some cases. Jindal wrote in a signing statement: "Senate Bill No. 250 would authorize the use of automatic license plate reader camera surveillance programs in various parishes throughout the state. The personal information captured by these cameras, which includes a person’s vehicle location, would be retained in a central database and accessible to not only participating law enforcement agencies but other specified private entities for a period of time regardless of whether or not the system detects that a person is in violation of vehicle insurance requirements. Camera programs such as these that make private information readily available beyond the scope of law enforcement, pose a fundamental risk to personal privacy and create large pools of information belonging to law abiding citizens that unfortunately can be extremely vulnerable to theft or misuse. For these reasons, I have vetoed Senate Bill No. 250 and hereby return it to the Senate."
Too late for what? Apparently 'practically everywhere' does not include Louisiana.
The skeptic in me says he vetoed it as political cover, expecting his veto to be overruled. The article says that the bill "overwhelmingly" passed both Louisiana chambers. This way he can say "I stood up for privacy and against big government" knowing that his veto wasn't going to stop it.
Would he have vetoed it if it barely passed?
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
I see much more potential for evil. Be nice if they had a 0 day retention policy, then it could be used to find stolen cars. But it's a very small step from scanning a plate, checking it against a database, then discarding the into; , to retaining the data for however long The Powers That Be want it. I flat out do not trust the government anymore, I don't want them tracking everyone's cars 24/7.
...when an IP address does not?
Because multiple cars don't share the same license plate. Besides, even if it's just multiple drivers sharing one car (analogous to multiple users on one computer), the "owner" of the car should only be punished incidentally for crimes/violations committed by other people driving the car.
Surely they can't be needing to track that many plates? Why not push a whitelist to all the cameras so that they only send data on matches instead of sending all data for all plates found.
Because when your car is stolen in the middle of the night and driven to a chop shop never to see the light of day again, and the theft isn't reported until the owner discovers the car missing the next morning, the police would like to have a clue if it was seen driving somewhere the previous night, and where. Or maybe a bank was robbed and by the time the plate is reported and entered a half hour later it is already ditched in a lot and not driving by any plate readers.
May not be the best answer for libertarians, but it is a reason a whitelist would fail for many legitimate cases.
Forgive me for being dense. But you are in a public area with a publicly mandated identifier on your publicly registered vehicle. HOW can you have any expectation of privacy? I could understand them banning a car driving around reading the number plates of cars on driveways or other private property but if you a driving on the road I don't understand.
From what I gather as well it is not the recording of the information so much as the method that has been cited as the issue. So if they were to have someone sitting on the road writing your number plate down as your drove by that would be ok but an automated camera is not?
My little village has had ALR's on police cars parked in the village, outside the PD, for years.
The problem is not the reading, but the recording. If the ALR is on the police car, and it immediately beeps when a car drives by that is registered to someone wanted by the police, that is one thing. But recording and indefinitely storing a photo of every passing car is something else entirely.
Anyone could do this, if not now, certainly in ten years. There is really nothing preventing a smartphone in a GPS mount from doing this, though I can't think of any benefit to someone doing it.
I don't understand the problem. Maybe I will someday, because there doesn't seem to be a practical way to avoid this. It's like taking pictures or video in public. Is the answer to have maximum data retention laws? That apply to every level of government... only?
It's bad for the same reason that police access to library records is bad: it's too easy to turn innocent actions into apparent evildoing. The library example is easier to demonstrate:
Let's suppose you're an avid reader who likes mysteries, and in a year you've read 100 such books. One day you find yourself in court, and the prosecutor says to you: "Haven't you, in the last year, read 100 books detailing how an innocent person was murdered?"
Don't think something like this couldn't happen to you. There are very few actions that a sufficiently nasty government couldn't use to railroad you; making their job easier is a bad idea.
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Jindal was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to immigrants from India. He is an American.
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My point was that stealing a license plate is not sharing a license plate. Computers switch their IP address frequently, so can be considered to share them. Same with software licenses that allow 3 people to use the program at one time, and there are 7 people who borrow and return those licenses.
I can see what you wrote. I can agree that people do steal license plates to hide their tracks. But the previous post was talking about sharing an IP address, not physically stealing another person's computer. Pretending it is the same as stealing license plates is a stupid argument.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
As a European socialist, let me be the first to say that the government can keep their goddamn noses out of my private affairs.
Socialism is about making some individual sacrifices for the good of society as a whole (because in the bigger picture, that also benefits each individual); not mindlessly letting the government have complete control over my life.
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There are already private companies doing this, and selling access to the data to the gov't and anybody else who stumps up a couple of bucks.
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If you call the ability of the government to put everything into large, databases shared between all government agencies "socialism", then the U.S. is much more socialist than any EU member state. Even the data retention directive had to be pulled after the European High Court called it unconstitutional in 2014.
Repossession companies use this a lot. You can take static locations (the cam car was sitting still ) and narrow down the likely location of an asset to within about ten or twenty minutes of searching.
The real problem is with who has access to the info. The repo companies will generally only be able to identify vehicles they are actively looking for. But just like a general warrant which the fourth amendment was addressing, you can build a significant circumstantial case against someone or expose personal information for malicious reasons. For instance, suppose you logged taking some friends home after a few drinks. Some businesses get robbed in that area but they get robbed all the time because it is a bad area. A year later, you help the campaign of some local politician trying to unseat the longstanding mayor and all the sudden you are being investigated for connections to those robberies. You forgot you were even in the area and after proclaiming how preposterous the investigation is, the cam data makes you appear to be lying. Or even worse, suppose you saw a shrink after the loss of a loved one and the cam data shows you in the parking lot of the shrink. You are running for office and now it's revealed that you have mental issues.
It's quite different to secretly scan the license plate of everyone and compile a database.
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PATRIOT.
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