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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."
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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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....
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.
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!
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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.
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...
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.
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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.