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Oakland Changes License Plate Reader Policy After Filling 80GB Hard Drive
An anonymous reader writes: License plate scanners are a contentious subject, generating lots of debate over what information the government should have, how long they should have it, and what they should do with it. However, it seems policy changes are driven more by practical matters than privacy concerns. Earlier this year, Ars Technica reported that the Oakland Police Department retained millions of records going back to 2010. Now, the department has implemented a six-month retention window, with older data being thrown out. Why the change? They filled up the 80GB hard drive on the Windows XP desktop that hosted the data, and it kept crashing.
Why not just buy a cheap drive with an order of magnitude more storage space? Sgt. Dave Burke said, "We don't just buy stuff from Amazon as you suggested. You have to go to a source, i.e., HP or any reputable source where the city has a contract. And there's a purchase order that has to be submitted, and there has to be money in the budget. Whatever we put on the system, has to be certified. You don't just put anything. I think in the beginning of the program, a desktop was appropriate, but now you start increasing the volume of the camera and vehicles, you have to change, otherwise you're going to drown in the amount of data that's being stored."
Why not just buy a cheap drive with an order of magnitude more storage space? Sgt. Dave Burke said, "We don't just buy stuff from Amazon as you suggested. You have to go to a source, i.e., HP or any reputable source where the city has a contract. And there's a purchase order that has to be submitted, and there has to be money in the budget. Whatever we put on the system, has to be certified. You don't just put anything. I think in the beginning of the program, a desktop was appropriate, but now you start increasing the volume of the camera and vehicles, you have to change, otherwise you're going to drown in the amount of data that's being stored."
Sometimes it can do good...
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
Just stop keeping data on average citizens for which you don't really have any justification.
Common off the shelf.
You it department needs to learn about and be authorized to use COTS for items less than $100.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
So, this Sgt is being honest, and likely will get his hand slapped for it. I work with public IT. Public organizations have contracts with vendors and vendors upcharge like crazy to sell these items, and none of the technical staff can do anything about it, and that's assuming the entity's IT isn't outsourced. This is just one more place where graft exists to line the pockets of donors/supporters/whatever.
Good luck purchasing a new hard drive that's "certified" for Windows XP.
Forget the idiotic complaint about the horrors of a government purchasing process: who is responsible for the security of this "system"?
If a real argument could be made for the need of this data, the system would have been quietly upgraded, and we would have even more information at risk.
he lack of the upgrade is the best evidence that there is no compelling reason to keep this information at all.
Six months? I guess I'm OK then, having not been through Oakland in the last six months. So what other municipalities are quietly using this same hopelessly lame system?
There are, however, good reasons for bureaucracy in government. If government officials can just do whatever they think makes sense, without any accountability to the people, you end up with North Korea. Efficient, but at a cost.
One reason we have processes in place is so that Sgt Blow doesn't buy a $5000, 200 GB hard drive from his brother. Another reason is that doing bad things on a wide scale costs money. With specific budget items, the citizens of Oakland could decide to cut the budget for license plate readers to $0, and end the program.
So all the red tape in government in the US is inefficient and annoying, but it's there for a good reason - a few good reasons in fact. Where we get into trouble is in when we pretend it doesn't exist. Like a few years ago, people saying "we can all have healthcare like VA provides, they do a great job". Well, the VA is a giant government bureaucracy, with all of the problems that come with a giant government bureaucracy. It's when we pretend that more government bureaucracy will make things more efficient, less costly, or faster that we get in trouble.
Yes they're still being sold because we're still getting those in some Dell machines here. You can still buy 17-19" 4:3 monitors too even though wide screens are cheaper!
Having worked with .gov agencies, the amount of bull shit that they need to go through to purchase ANYTHING some days is mind numbing. We had to:
Buy from specific vendors who had a contract (so no amazon/newegg options)
Only buy specific products (ex: GSA merchandise)
Fill everything out in triplicate by hand and wait for signed approval (taking weeks)
Specify the cost center for purchase and pray that there's money in the budget or wait for someone to determine whether something like a HD truly is office vs maintenance vs misc equipment
Why all of these hoops? Ultimately to have "transparency" in our purchases so when an external entity comes in and looks at the accounting books our collective asses are covered because we purchased from a contract retailer instead of bobs-hard-drives.com.
For what it's worth, the purchase order for that XP machine with the 80gb drive was probably initially submitted when that was a "normal" size
1) they can spy on everyone in perpetuity
2) they can't make rational buying decisions
Yay?
Yes, and project management, properly-tracked procurements, and approval processes make sense; bidding wars and approved vendor sources don't. I'd just as soon have them start troubleshooting, identify the problem, carry out a Kepner-Tregoe decision analysis to figure on how to address it, and then buy drives on Amazon to load up an empty SAN chassis and mount storage through an HBA. If the drives meet spec--not "oh these are cheap, they'll probably explode under load," but "We were going to get WD Caviar Black drives from HP, but Amazon sells them for $80 instead of $350; we're buying them from Amazon and self-insuring because we have 400 of them"--then go for it.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Wait a second.
I don't mind paperwork.
In this case, Sergeant what's-his-name could look up prices for HDDs on Amazon, fill a form asking for 100 dollars to buy a larger HDD and 50 dollars to pay for installation services and be done with it. Paperwork's done, tracked, everyone's happy.
Bureaucracy is fine as long as it doesn't become ridiculous. Processes need to be streamlined and efficient. When they become cumbersome and tedious, they need to be rethought.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Communism sucks, yes. But Communism != Socialism. Socialism certainly does allow for a reasonably free market. It just makes sure that said free market doesn't fuck over the people, and only takes control of or at least heavily regulates those things that would be detrimental to society to simply hand over to the free market, such as roads and healthcare.
In this case, Sergeant what's-his-name could look up prices for HDDs on Amazon, fill a form asking for 100 dollars to buy a larger HDD and 50 dollars to pay for installation services and be done with it. Paperwork's done, tracked, everyone's happy.
No, in this case, Sergeant what's-his-name looked at the time he'd have to spend filling out a purchase requisition and decided the data just wasn't worth that. Five years of historical license plate location data is not as valuable to his department's investigations as a coffee break.
What are license plate scanners actually good for? The present location of stolen cars. Maybe some location data for crimes currently under investigation (ie, a few weeks). Not last year's crimes. Strangely, this is what citizen activists have been asking for a long time: why do you need to know where every car has been over the past five years? So now, when it comes down to costing the police even just the tiniest amount of effort, they find that, in fact, they probably only need a few months' worth of history.
Does it? The US got nation-wide railroad network, flush toilet, telegraph, commercial air-travel, and massively-affordable personal car under laissez-fair economy. Was that wrong?
You mean, bullies and cutthroats like Che Guevara and Stalin? Or those like Warren Buffet and the Koch brothers?
Which of the two groups I listed has actually cut a throat in your opinion?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Ahhh...
But the Sergeant really does not want another hard drive on the existing PC
He wants to force a situation where they consider 'long term needs' and end up with multiple image processing workstations, a central server, terabytes of SAN storage and a searchable metadata database
He will only get this by killing the current system and then driving through a study on future needs, meeting current needs with an inexpensive hard drive will not procure the millions of dollars that he wants
Wherever You Go, There You Are