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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."
San Jose: just because technology gives you the ability to do something doesn't mean you have to do it.
City councilman Johnny Khamis dismissed such criticism: "This is a public street. You're not expecting privacy on a public street."
This argument did not work for Google Maps, who have been forced by various state and municipal governments to blur the license plates and faces of people captured.
But I guess they aren't the government... if the government does it, it's fine.. (???)
This is only partially true. I'm not expecting that no one in the world will see my car. I am expecting that it's rather unlikely that if I park on a random street for a couple hours, anyone I know will see and notice my car and actually realize it's mine.
I very much DO expect the level of privacy that excludes someone frequently taking note of the exact location of my car. If John Q. Public were doing that, I'd be very put off. I might even consider it stalking. In no sane world do we then say, "Well, it's fine if it's the government and they're stalking EVERYONE."
Yes, Mr. Khamis, I do expect that level of privacy, and it's not for you to decide what the public gets to expect. Your job is to do what we want, not the other way around.
Google was publishing those pictures via street view.
And license plate scanning and logging is something corporations and individuals are allowed to do. Car repo and bail bondsmen have been doing this 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.
The real problem isn't the public nature of your data; it's the private nature of aggregate data.
Because you carry out your activities in public, any individual who legitimately wants information about you can, without violating any laws, personally keep track of your public activities. Without publication or any direct action, the person is not harassing you or whatnot. The things you do are completely public and not subject to privacy protections.
That, of course, implies someone is interested in you, personally, in the first place.
With aggregate data, we can put together lists of all people whose public functions follow a certain pattern. This, then, draws our attention to those people.
Most people don't realize the very criminal nature of human existence. A lot of folks have... mischief in their histories. Hanging in parks at night, casual adultery, illegal gambling between friends... hell, there's estimates that some 40%-70% of 20-year-olds have hooked up with underaged teens. These are all things that can put you in jail, and may or may not distress people in your community--some more than others, some not at all (nobody cares about your poker games in your basement with your drinking buddies). As it stands, these activities aren't actually harmful to society, or distressing at large.
That's why we have strict, constitutional controls for searches and seizure: if your criminal activities aren't drawing any attention, your criminal activities aren't harmful to society. The police rifling through your belongings and arresting you on bureaucratic technicalities *would* harm society at large, creating a constant state of paranoia and resentment among the population, along with costly economic and social disruption.
Aggregate public data collection and profiling similarly draws attention to people's behaviors, focusing legal scrutiny where it does not necessarily do the most good. As this scrutiny broadens, it necessarily dilutes the attention of legal enforcement from the important criminal activities which actually harm society. Persons whose activities are of no consequence are more frequently investigated and arrested, while persons whose quiet activities invoke a greater injury to their peers enjoy reduced law enforcement attention and a consequential lower risk for expanding their operations even further. Such aggregation could, as consequence, allow petty criminals to build and operate more substantial criminal networks with even less likelihood of police detection.
Many forget the police are not law enforcement officers, but peace officers. Their job is to keep the peace; they are not lawyers and not expected to know the law. This is because police detect crime by detecting its effects: injury, death, property loss, and, above all, distress among the population. This fits well with the explicit prohibition on police actively looking for crimes without first having a crime brought to their attention by the public nature of its activities.
Broad data collection and aggregation changes the public nature of people's activities. It distorts this function, leading to false positives and arrests of harmless members of society.
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It will only be a matter of time before San Jose recognizes the revenue stream they could generate by selling this data.
The difference between just and unjust is the difference between easy and feasible.
A lawful search is every bit as feasible as an unlawful one; the difference is the miniscule administrative impediment of securing a search warrant.
Surveillance, even in a nominally public setting, is unjust without cause. Pervasive surveillance is unjust specifically because it's done so without cause or suspicion (other than the despot's constant suspicion of everyone).
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Actually, in this case yes, the government is allowed to do it - police cars already do it.
Police officers have to operate under fairly specific guidelines and we expect them to be monitoring to some degree. That doesn't mean the government should have carte-blanche to put tracking technology everywhere. A LOT of questions have to be satisfactorily answered before I'd even consider whether this application of the technology is acceptable. Who is paying for it? How do we ensure that it isn't used for other purposes? Who has access to the data? Under what conditions? How do we ensure the safety of citizens from false-positive results (even one is unacceptable)? How do we know this isn't yet another revenue generating scheme like red-light cameras? Is this really the least invasive and most effective measure available? Is the problem of sufficient scale to warrant an expensive and potentially (likely) invasive technology?
I have a LOT of questions about this and I very much doubt they will be answered to my satsifaction
The question is one of degree.
Yes it is and that question is in no danger of being answered.
I really DO NOT get California. If there was ONE state I thought you *might* be able to get an anti-government-monitoring consensus in....
Why would you think that? Nanny's are all about monitoring the children and California is quite the nanny state.
They won't do this.
Here are a couple of things wrong with your statement; 1. The garbage truck is not parked in front of your home 24/7 2. Only pictures of license plates are save. No pictures of people are saved. No vehicles parked off the road are photographed. 3. Access to the database is restricted and there will be retention policies in place. A webcam and license plate scanning are very different and equating the two is invalid.
I cannot believe you actually accept all of this as truth, as if we haven't found rampant abuse of monitoring systems after promises like this shit are made up front to justify the "innocent" program. Hell, I couldn't even make it past #2 in your list without thinking of the stories that came out regarding images gathered by TSA body scanners.
The level of blind faith here fucking floors me.
Considering that the garbage truck will be on your street for a few minutes every week or two it is not monitoring day and night.
I'm not worried about the garbage truck and the "few minutes". I'm worried about years of data being collected and used and abused in ways you've not even thought of by law enforcement.
Do you think streetlight camera databases are never tapped into to track movements of "suspects" (gotta love parallel construction), even though the entire system was justified in order to curb people who cause accidents by running red lights?
Do you think your travel information isn't kept for years to benefit pattern analysis even if you've never even been accused of a crime?
Do you enjoy the fact that you could end up on the No-Fly list with zero explanation as to how you got on the list, or how you could be removed due to your obvious innocence?
How will you feel when they come back in a few years complaining about the limited capability of vehicle mounted cameras and instead propose a fleet of drones to capture images in driveways and parking lots? (of course, they'll pinky-swear they won't point them in your windows or otherwise invade your privacy, and none of that footage will ever be leaked.)
On top of all this, statistics will likely show this monitoring will do fuck-all to stop or curb auto theft. I sure as hell don't expect my auto insurance company to hand me a huge refund if I move to a "monitored" community next week, and chop shops don't usually worry about keeping license plates intact.
It's also not illegal in California to put a temporary cover on your license plate when it's not in motion, parked on public or private property. When in motion on public streets/lots, it's fair game.
The scanners, if they're in radio contact with something, can easily give up GPS information about the locus of what was seen. Whether or not a governmental body/public safety unit will dash out and do something remains to be seen.
License plate covers can easily made from scrap cardboard. But what will happen next is a closeup of the VIN # on the dash. When VINs eventually go to an RFID tag, there'll be covers for the tag to prevent identification. This cat and mouse game will go on until California actually *does* run out of water, at which point, who cares?
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
They will drop it when the councilman is found parked in front of the strip club.
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