San Jose May Put License Plate Scanners On Garbage Trucks

An anonymous reader writes: It's bad enough that some places have outfitted their police vehicles with automated license plate scanners, but now the city of San Jose may take it one step further. They're considering a proposal to install plate readers on their fleet of garbage trucks. This would give them the ability to blanket virtually every street in the city with scans once a week. San Jose officials made this proposal ostensibly to fight car theft, but privacy activists have been quick to point out the unintended consequences. ACLU attorney Chris Conley said, "If it's collected repeatedly over a long period of time, it can reveal intimate data about you like attending a religious service or a gay bar. People have a right to live their lives without constantly being monitored by the government." City councilman Johnny Khamis dismissed such criticism: "This is a public street. You're not expecting privacy on a public street."

Comments

Already being done commercially ...

[perpenso]

Car repo and bail bondsmen have been doing license plate scanning and logging for a while. Going far beyond what the garbage trucks will do. For example the repo/bond guys in addition to logging while driving down the street they also cruise parking lots of grocery stores, walmart, etc to log plates. There is a huge national database of these logs. Many police departments actually subscribe to this database.

Re: To Fight Car Theft

[postbigbang]

CAL. VEH. CODE Â 5201 .....paste

(1) The installation of a cover over a lawfully parked vehicle to
protect it from the weather and the elements does not constitute a
violation of this subdivision. A peace officer or other regularly
salaried employee of a public agency designated to enforce laws,
including local ordinances, relating to the parking of vehicles may
temporarily remove so much of the cover as is necessary to inspect
any license plate, tab, or indicia of registration on a vehicle.
      (2) The installation of a license plate security cover is not a
violation of this subdivision if the device does not obstruct or
impair the recognition of the license plate information, including,
but not limited to, the issuing state, license plate number, and
registration tabs, and the cover is limited to the area directly over
the top of the registration tabs. No portion of a license plate
security cover shall rest over the license plate number.
      (c) A casing, shield, frame, border, product, or other device that
obstructs or impairs the reading or recognition of a license plate
by an electronic device operated by state or local law enforcement,
an electronic device operated in connection with a toll road,
high-occupancy toll lane, toll bridge, or other toll facility, or a
remote emission sensing device, as specified in Sections 44081 and
44081.6 of the Health and Safety Code, shall not be installed on, or
affixed to, a vehicle. ....end paste.

Re:To Fight Car Theft

[HiThere]

Actually, the property taxes are quite related to the schools. The current property tax law (Prop 13) was sold on the presumption that it would enable equal funding of all school districts...which required that the state provide the funding, so the state got to control the schools rather than the cities and counties which had done so previously. Somehow the schools didn't get equitable funding out of it, but the state did get control of the (previously) local school system. AFAIKT the funding for the poor school districts hasn't gotten any better, but it does seem as if the funding in the rich districts has gotten harder to come by, and there has been a rise in the number of private schools.

Also ignored was the effect caused because people eventually die, but corporations don't necessarily do the same. This has lead to an increasing proportion of corporately owned land being assessed at a minimal rate.

I can't really claim that all of the effects of this measure were intended by it's sponsors, but it's hard to think of any that they wouldn't have approved of. Look up "Donald Rumsford".