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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."
So, if fighting car theft is the reason, will they agree up front to abandon the effort if a significant drop in car theft is not realized? I betcha not.
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.. (???)
City councilman Johnny Khamis dismissed such criticism: "This is a public street. You're not expecting privacy on a public street."
I'm also not expecting the spanish inquisition...
Just because I don't have a legal expectation of privacy does not mean the government gets the right to give me a rectal exam every time I set foot outside my house. The real question is whether there is a compelling public interest in the government having and using this technology. They might claim it is to fight car theft but is the problem of such significant as to justify automated monitoring of the entire populace? I'm guessing probably not. We all know that the use of the technology would not stop with just car theft. Even if they were being forthright about that being the primary use I just don't see it not being abused for other purposes.
"...City councilman Johnny Khamis dismissed such criticism: "This is a public street. You're not expecting privacy on a public street."
Really Johnny?
So you won't mind if I just set up this webcam on the public street outside of your home and feed that stream to the internet, right?
Or perhaps we'll find some volunteers to follow you and your family around day and night as you drive around. That won't seem creepy or invasive at all, I'm sure. And after all, we're just driving around on public streets, right?
Sometimes I really wonder what the hell it would take to get these morons to wake about privacy and how it feels to be monitored day and night.
Are they thefts or just people reporting their car is stolen when they woke up in the morning and discovered that all the cars on the street had been towed.
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.
City councilman Johnny Khamis dismissed such criticism: "This is a public street. You're not expecting privacy on a public street."
Then why doesn't Khamis make his and his family's personal info available to all the taxpayers/voters? Why don't all elected officials ensure "transparency" and let us see what they are up to? Why don't governments, who consider themselves providers of services for their "customers" be like the tech startups and eat their own dogfood? Let the civil servants show us how serious they are about the safety of surveillance society by making their personal activities public.
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.
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.
There's only so much of this bullshit people will stand for before the pitchforks and torches come out.
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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While the councilman is correct regarding expectation of privacy in the general sense, having data to track private citizens not suspected of criminal activity goes far beyond typical capacity to track, historically anyway. Potential safeguards are possible, such as legal limits on how long the data could be kept, or maybe an on-board database with a list of sought-for plates that will then contact the station. There is no need really to keep a record of what was scanned.
Every Week.
Within the same second after checking it number is in the list of numbers of stolen cars. Basically: Do not store it at all.
Remaining question: Which stolen car keeps its original number?
This is nothing. Listen to this Radiolab episode.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Everyone's already carrying a personal tracking device called a cell phone, and we're worried about adding in data about where you parked your car? (For the record, I've parked my car in business/church/bar lots that I haven't patronized.) That's kind of like worrying about the can of gas in the garage when your house is on fire, isn't it?
...City councilman Johnny Khamis dismissed such criticism: "This is a public street. You're not expecting privacy on a public street."...
The party of freedom from government is turning into the Big Brother party.
.
And from a Republican who was not even born in the US.
Maybe that's how privacy is viewed in Lebanon where he was born....
Please track Mayor Sam Liccardo and Councilmen Johnny Khamis and Raul Peralez's every move, and post it!
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Anyone want to lay bets on how long it will take for a system like this to be breached? You'd have to hope the information is only leaked to shame people and not facilitate any number of types of crime.
nah,
Just figure out who are cops, city hall big wigs and staffers.
Then post it on a web site.
There no difference with what they are doing.
Just because you CAN do something doesn't mean you SHOULD.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Concerned citizens should drive a scanner van down City councilman Johnny Khamis' street every 10 minutes until he wises up.
I can't wait until autonomous delivery drones are so ubiquitous that we can check up on the locations of all our elected officials, unelected bureaucrats and police officers 60 x 24 x 365.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Looking at the numbers from the San Jose police website, with over 7000 cars stolen a year, I really can't blame them for trying this.
I can. If that many cars are being stolen then they need to get busy on doing the things that will deal with the root of the problem. Even if a system like this worked it won't solve the problem. You need to look at other cities with less of a stolen car problem and figure out what they are doing differently. Areas with high crime rates rarely have the problem solved by having the government become more oppressive. It sounds like they if they have that many cars stolen that they have some form of organized crime involved. Might want to look into that.
If they are just scanning cars that are visible from the street and alleys, then I can't really argue that this system would be that invasive.
Only if you aren't really thinking about it. How is the data to be handled? What is in the data and who has access to it and under what conditions? What is to prevent it from being used for other purposes? How do you ensure that it never violates privacy rights? What assurances do I have that this is not going to turn into a revenue generating scheme? How is it going to be funded?
Just because I'm not in my house doesn't mean the government should be able to probe everything I'm doing without probable cause. And rest assured that there is no probable cause here for most people going about their daily business.
So if they go ahead and collect the data on the theory that it is "public", how much do you want to bet that they will later refuse to give the data up under access to information on the theory that it has become "private" in the mean time?
I sell 'em cheap.
Cut a piece of cardboard and cover up the plate when you park the car, hinged on the top with a piece of duct tape (everybody has a roll in the glove compartment, right?).
But, it's true, out in public there is no privacy. Let's make sure that applies to all government officials also. They'll be more discreet and take a cab to the bathhouse instead of driving.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Because short of lubing it up with buckyballs, you're not going to get much slipperier than this.
I'm surprised, no, shocked that they didn't manage to work in a 'for the children!' angle to this.
So tell me, asshole San Jose officials: How long after that do you plan on adding facial recognition and audio recording to your garbage truck surveillance network, hmm?
Come on, assholes, I know your type, why don't you just cut to the chase: What you really want, I'll bet, is barcodes tattooed on everyone, or RFID implants, with readers on every lamppost and telephone pole, and in people's houses too if you can get away with it, so you can track people everywhere they go. You know, to cut down on crime, and for the children!
..OK, I'm being extreme on purpose (or am I?). But enough with the gods-be-damned surveillance state bullshit!
Memo to Idiot Politicians: IT DOESN'T WORK.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
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.
This whole not-expecting-privacy-on-a-public-street is as laughable as it's always been. There's a missing concept here.
It's not about PRIVACY. It's about RECORDING.
You don't expect privacy when you're talking to a friend in public either. But it's illegal to record the audio of that conversation without permission.
It's the difference between expert testimony (i.e. video evidence) and heresay. One's convincing, always, while the other is completely inadmissable as evidence -- which is a good thing.
Surprisingly, I'm not actually against all of this scanning for data. I'm only against keeping that data in the absence of a crime.
Scan the cars, check the plates, see that it's fine, destroy the data. Let's say within 5 business days. No aggregates, no data-based stats (number of scans made by the truck is fine, number of blue cars is not).
"NO CRIME = NO RECORD", plain and simple.
There's an expectation that, while public, what you do in your day to day life tends to be an anonymous undertaking. nobody is tracking and cataloging all of your various excursions and foibles.
Being private and being functionally anonymous are two very different things.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
You have 36 hours (+/- depending on municipal law) to report your vehicle has been stolen. So let's say they keep a searchable database for 36 hours then the data is automatically deleted (permanently, using the Hillary Wipe Algorithm if it proves effective).
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
"City councilman Johnny Khamis dismissed such criticism: 'This is a public street. You're not expecting privacy on a public street.'"
If your citizens have no choice but to keep their private property on your public streets, you better be ready for people to argue that, Johnny Khamis, you *piece of fucking shit*.
That's not even an argument. Your car may be private property, but it's still out in public on a street, and it had to be registered to get plates. Now, the people who park in their driveways, they're on their own property, they have a valid argument.
Exactly. It is the citizens fault for openly displaying a license tag on a public street. if they didn't want that information to be public, they should have taken their tag off.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I grew up here, I can explain why the city council is seeking this.
A few years back the city implemented huge cuts to it's police department in salary and benefits. Before the cuts, we had 1400 officers (not bad for a city of a million people) After the cuts our police has dropped as low as 700 officers.
With a reduction in the number of officers we have, bay area criminals have taken it as a "Vacancy" sign to do business here. Every type of crime has shot up. Violent crimes, we're a magnet for package theft, prostitution runs rampant, with one spot having as many as 50 girls walking one particular street corner, and car theft.
San Jose just voted to restore some of the pay last week, but it still won't be anywhere near 2010 levels. Cops continue to leave.
So now San Jose is in a situation of having to make due with what they have. Cops won't even consider this place for a job any more. Since they can't get another 700 officers to replace the ones lost, they're leveraging technology to fill the gap. Myself, and many other residents welcome any effort to clean up the streets.
I don't think this is very likely to determine if you go to religious ceremonies or gay bars. Garbage trucks tend to only run during the weekdays, so most religious ceremonies are out. They also tend to run during the day when patronage at bars is the lowest. They also tend to go directly to the garbage bins, which means very few plates will be read. Basically they will get plates of people parking on the street, or people driving on the street at the same time as the trucks.
I believe about the only useful information they will be able to get is that certain people are not home at certain times of the day, which will likely serve as a valuable information source for house thieves, and that certain people tend to park on the street, which will be valuable information for car thieves. The most likely statistic from this endeavour is a sharp uptick in car thefts and burglary.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
When someone says something like "This is a public street. You're not expecting privacy on a public street." and means it, and if they're in some position of authority or influence, the game begins. Separate teams immediately start following this person around whenever they're in public and record everything they do for a solid week, and posts it on the internet. Zoom lenses, parabolic mics, the whole bit. Stream it live if possible. The team that captures the most activity wins! Fun fun fun!
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Or restrict the info to only the auto theft squad.
My guess is how it works out is that the data goes directly to the "intelligence" squad and they don't even share it with the auto theft squad for fear that it will be used to deduce the Mayor's car is parked at his girlfriend's or something.
Then how the f- do they think it's okay to have the guy who picks up your trash doing the job of a cop?
This is true to a degree. If you are walking down a public street, you can't object that my taking a photograph of you is an invasion of your privacy. So long as said photograph is of something that you can normally see - e.g. upskirts wouldn't count as a "photograph in a public place." Along the same lines, while I might see you in public and be able to take a photo of you, I wouldn't normally be following you around everywhere you go. So I might happen to take a photo of you entering $POTENTIALLY_EMBARRASSING_LOCATION but I wouldn't normally see you entering said location every Wednesday at 2pm. That would be approaching stalking territory.
Now, I will grant that the government does get some powers that your average citizen doesn't have, but "tracking your every move on public streets" shouldn't be one of them.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
City councilman Johnny Khamis dismissed such criticism: "This is a public street. You're not expecting privacy on a public street."
The public also does not expect continuous surveillance from the government either.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Slippery slope arguments are, by definition, logical fallacies.
How long after that do you plan on adding facial recognition and audio recording to your garbage truck surveillance network, hmm?
"Never" is a plausible answer. Facial recognition/ audio recordings is not an inevitable extension of license plate scanning.
What you really want,
How about license plate scanning to find stolen cars and parking violators.
I'll bet, is barcodes tattooed on everyone, or RFID implants, with readers on every lamppost and telephone pole, and in people's houses too if you can get away with it, so you can track people everywhere they go.
No, that is many orders of magnitude more expensive and complex that putting scanners we already use on parking enforcement vehicles onto garbage trucks.
.OK, I'm being extreme on purpose (or am I?). But enough with the gods-be-damned surveillance state bullshit!
By making extreme statement you just show how weak your real argument is.
A new gigantic market just opened for stealth-ed out license plates that present a phony, ... or no image at all to the scanner! :)
What happens in the public is and should be accessible by the public. That's the sort of law that allows us to have security cameras on homes and businesses, to take cell phone video of friends - or police. It's why we can tell someone what we saw, or try to reproduce a noise we heard, making a "pwooosh!" and spreading our hands for effect.
Did you know that the government isn't even doing the data aggregation? It's civilian companies that produce and distribute the hardware, that make deals with other companies and yes, government agencies, to mount them, and then they sell access to it.
The idea that data aggregation from public sources should be illegal, or that it should be illegal for the government to do are poorly thought out ideas indeed. What you're arguing against here is actually removing those rights from civilians, and you're going to have to use an extremely wide brush to do it.
That's because the only three important differences here are that this program records things in a way that's accurate, in a way that's reproducible, and that a machine sorts the information so that it's more immediately useful. None of those things have an intrinsic point where they cross a line that suggests harm is being done - there's nothing wrong with being 'too accurate' or 'sorted too well', and mixing the three together provides no obvious resolution. Lacking justification means you either restrict it all at the most base levels, or none of it - it's all equal. So you end up very quickly at what some would call a (logical) extreme.
Think where we'd be if we made it illegal for people to correlate data about racism or police brutality, or the ability to take a cell phone video, tag it, and upload it to a shareable location. This is the level that would be required to avoid aggregation of public data. You'd have to eliminate the ability to collect any data, any ability to correlate it, and you can't do that without removing the entire concept of public spaces being public in any way. ... and at that point, they'd be private to a government entity, and they'd still be able to surveil you while you lack any rights to do so in return.
Because everyone knows that the first thing a car thief doesn't do is remove the license plate. And the second thing they don't do is park the stolen car in a garage or warehouse for stripping.
Never argue with idiots, they just drag you down to their level then beat you with experience.
There are ones that have an LCD screen. When the vehicle is running, the display is clear. When you turn off your car, the LCD screen is BLACK.
I'd say go for it... With the following two caveats: Since the city council is claiming you get no privacy on a public street, then all scans should be uploaded immediately to a public facing, searchable web site and No scrubbing of data is allowed. That means, city council, that your plate scans are available for everyone to see (including date/time and place). I'll bet once they discover that anyone can see their car parked outside of Mistress Gretta's Rub N' Tug every day at lunchtime, they may not think it is such a great idea...
But we all know that would never happen 'cuz they are better than us mere mortals...
except there's a difference between "people can see me" and "people are WATCHING ME ALL THE TIME!!!!"
All your comment-on-my-comment shows is that you have no sense of humor whatsoever, and that furthermore you're probably just another jackass that likes to start arguments just for the sake of starting an argument. Please bugger off.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
How about a guy that never pays his child support but parks outside a strip joint five nights a week? Don't you want the ability to arrest him and show the courts where his money is spent?
Why do you want their bartender fired? Five times a week sounds like he works there.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Where my car is at any one time is public information to anyone at the same place at that time.
It is a whole other thing to aggregate that and store it on a server and map and study that data and deduce patterns in my life
City councilman Johnny Khamis dismissed such criticism: "This is a public street. You're not expecting privacy on a public street."
And I'm not expecting my city to blow thousands of dollars on something it doesn't need either. How much does it cost? Some for the hardware, some for maintenance, some for the DB and software running it, some for the data connection, and none of that goes away. So congratulations you just raised the cost to live in your community.
The so called benefit was to reduce car theft, so now a car thief needs a screw driver so he can remove the plates....ooooh, I don't think they'll figure that out.
Pun intended on the subject line.
I refuse to sign
We're not going to mandate government tracking beacons in every vehicle. We're just going to record the time and location of your vehicle so frequently you might as well have a government tracking beacon attached to your vehicle. Perhaps this will cut down on vehicle theft, but then, installing a telescreen (or, a live government agent for that matter) in every home might cut down on domestic violence. Installing a government mind control chip in your brain, should they exist some day, will likely reduce the crime rate as well.
"City councilman Johnny Khamis dismissed such criticism: 'This is a public street. You're not expecting privacy on a public street.' "
Somebody equipped with a good-quality DSLR and a very long lens should follow this creep around for a couple of weeks. I'm sure they could assemble a lovely mix of video and still photography showing Khamis picking his nose, reaching into his pants to adjust his dick, pulling his underwear out of his crack and ogling pretty girls (or pretty boys) when their backs are turned. Maybe they'd even get lucky and catch him running a red light or breaking some other law.
I bet there'd be record turnout at the City Council meeting where a public delegation screened their video as part of a presentation on the importance of privacy.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Anyone know what the law is there, or in their area - would one be within their rights to have a flip down cover or flip up license plate for when your vehicle is parked? I could see there being potential legal issues (though to be fair, it's not being "operated") while it's on a public street - but what if it's in your driveway, are you within your rights to shield your license plate form view? How do these readers work, is there a detectable signal or anything that could be used to trigger your license plate to become covered when scanners are near? Garbage trucks are easier, set it to dB levels and you'll be covered when they're banging around at 5AM and banging around on a predictable schedule at that. Do we know what camera's they use? Is there a film that one could put over the plate to render it obscured from view of the camera but not the naked eye? What about a transparent cover that changes your plate to be 8888888 or even just by one digit - granted in the reality of aggregated data, you would need to change what you change your plate to on a semi-regular basis. It's not only that it identifies you it's that it remains a constant identifier for you. There is a distinction. Just throwing ideas out.
All your comment-on-my-comment shows is that you have no sense of humor whatsoever,
Sorry but I have seen way to many people on this site that actually hold the opinion that you stated. Perhaps if you made it clear the post was in just with something like "/sarcasm".
and that furthermore you're probably just another jackass that likes to start arguments just for the sake of starting an argument.
Nice assumption. Too bad it is inaccurate. Many people try to use slipper slope arguments as a reason to not do something. I am just point out how invalid those arguments are.
Sure someone might notice your car near a strip club. But they won't notice it every 3pm on Wednesday like a systematic scanning system would. Similarly,they might notice your car but they won't necessarily know that the car next to it belongs to your nanny. Not to mention people likely won't be certain in most cases (do you know your friends license plate?)
Not a 100% expectation of privacy shouldn't mean that the government is free to search and track whatever you do. Stupid loopholes like a cop pulling you over and asking you to get out of the car. If you don't close the door behind you it is fair game for them to lean and and take a look at whatever they want. If you do they can't. You shouldn't have to be a constitutional lawyer to realize that the thing that otherwise would be considered a dickhead move is fine for the cops to do, because you know, they have a $10 badge and some carnival lights on their car.
I am not expecting the bloody government to data mine all activity on all the streets. I wouldn't mind IF the government was completely limited from doing anything to anyone with this data except preventing actual crimes (initiation of force). Otherwise forget it.
Many police patrol vehicles have ANPR (Automated Number Plate Recognition) for over a decade now. Along with average-speed cameras (read the number plate at one location ; read it 10 miles down the road ; divide distance by time and issue ticket appropriately ; yes, they are generally installed just after and before major junctions) spreading across the nation's roads.
Obviously petrol stations and parking garages have been deploying the technology for years too, to locate and discourage theft (of fuel, of parking service). This is just not news, and hasn't been for years.
Don't drive to the bar - how difficult was that? Many countries have laws against driving while shagging, or driving while drunk, so isn't that what taxis are for? Unless you don't trust Uber.
I'm moderately amused by the idea of holding a religious service in a gay bar.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"