Slashdot Mirror
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.
So is this PC the *only* place the data's held? Really? So there's no backup, no analysis system, nothing like that?
Is Oakland twinned with Keystone?
Oh arse
It's a shame they don't live near a major technology hub. These little backwater towns just don't have the resources to lure competent IT staffers away from the cities where you have large computer-savvy people.
Where did they say this was?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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?
For this, yes. Not so much for the public information server, also out of space since it runs on an 80gig hard drive as well. If bureaucracy is your only protection, you are in trouble.
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.
But this sort of thing happens at the State and Federal level as well.
http://it.slashdot.org/story/1...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.gao.gov/products/GA...
Just to name a few....
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
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
Well, I agree government is dangerous -- so is anything that is powerful. Max Weber defined the state as the organization that has a monopoly on violence.
But the blame isn't with the liberals, or the conservative libertarians, neither of whom want this kind of data collection. It's with the conservative authoritarians who want to expand the power of the police.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
"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"
The poor guy is exhausted just thinking about it. He has my sympathy.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
If you work at a large enough company, you can't just take the company credit card to shop with whenever the whim strikes you. Otherwise the IT staff would end up with their own company Lamborghini. There has to be a process. That prevents abuse, but of course it bogs things down. The more potential for abuse, the more "process" there has to be, and the more ridiculous the resulting process looks to someone used to doing their own shopping.
Back when I worked for LMC, I had one vendor who could simply not understand why the package he paid extra to "overnight" to us then took a week to get through our receiving department and to my desk. A more recent employer of mine had a process for selecting PC equipment (after we told the purchasers exactly what we wanted) that took so long that quite often the part had been obsoleted by the vendor before the process completed.
Both of those are private employers. Add in the extra regs you have to have to prevent corruption in government procurement, and yes simply buying a bigger hard drive is not so simple.
Plus, the guy actually has a good point here. The fact that they've filled up a 80GiB HD tells you that they really ought to drop back an reanalyze the whole process. Perhaps its as simple as not relying on a four year old desktop PC (can it seriously do anything useful with >80Gig of photographic data?), or perhaps something a bit different should be done with the entire process.
1) they can spy on everyone in perpetuity
2) they can't make rational buying decisions
Yay?
It's with the conservative authoritarians who want to expand the power of the police.
There are damned few in power -- no matter their stripe -- that want to reduce their power. It's just a matter of where they focus their expansion of power. (Liberals naturally say, "but we know best, and that's why government -- with us at the head -- *needs* to expand". Besides, how many Democrats voted against the PATRIOT Act or to defund the NSA?)
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Government incompetence and the red tape partially mitigates government abuses. News at 11!
The blame goes to both liberals and conservatives who keep adding size and red tape to the government.
Sure, conservatives want more cops and cop gear. The liberals get upset with cops and their solution is regulating the cops into the ground.
The liberals or "progressives" want to create a whole new social experiment with health care or their plan for ending racism or something. They increase the government to do it. The conservatives oppose this. Their solution? More laws to complicate the implementation of the program, or they just hold up the rest of the government to get their way. In the end, the program still gets implemented, but in some mutant form.
Neither strategy streamlines the government because both sides are statists before they are liberals or conservatives. They believe the government is the solution to the problem, they just disagree on what the problem is.
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)
stop trying to correct this with the obvious suggestions to shell out $60. This is a good thing.
Problem is when they get a new hard drive and the policy becomes "as long as we got the space"... the part about Windows XP should have been the red flag in the story. These records are very likely not well secured. Policies on record retention and archiving should reflect the risk that old systems can become compromised and only what is really needed should be kept online. Policies on record retention that merely reflect the physical limitations of hard drives are bad.
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.
A laissez-fair economy sucks as well. It makes the bullies and cutthroats rise to the top without any negative repercussions.
The problem is when power is in a relatively few hands. If everything is controlled by a Communist/Fascist dictator, that's a bad thing. If everything is controlled by 5 giant corporations, that is also bad.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
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.
bidding wars and approved vendor sources don't.
You clearly are not aware of how bad a no-bid procurement process can get. Sadly I've seen it in action and let's say it would put third world countries to shame. Not that the current system eliminates the problem, but it does reduce it's magnitude.
Also, you can't do social engineering w/o approved vendors sources (not that I approve of social engineering by government, but apparently a large majority of people seem to want it). Things like minority or woman owned businesses contract/sub-contract set-asides, living wage requirements, union affinity, steering money to constituency etc, would be basically be moot. You might argue this is a good thing, but apparently that is not the current majority thinking.
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
Let's see:
Nation-wide railroad network: To incentivize its' constrcution, the US government gave away huge land grants (much of it land of various Indian tribes) to corporations. The US maintains a federal bureaucracy to support rail transportation.
Flush toilets: Flush toilets existed for hundreds of years before the US did. Improved designs became popular and mass produced as governments built water supplies and sewers run to each house.
Telegraph: Before it was commercially built in the US, a demonstration line between Washington and Baltimore funded by Congress was built by Morse. Early commercialization was protected by patents.
Commercial air travel: Early commercial air travel was supported by US mail delivery. Massive government investments in airports, air traffic control, and safety bureaucracy support it now.
Massively-affordable personal car: Useful for travel because of the government construction and control of roads and bridges.
Those things happened with a regulated economy. The government was significantly involved in the railroad network in particular.
Moving to laissez-fair gave us Enron and the forced banking bail-out of 2007.
I see where you're going and in some sense I agree. I had to laugh at this, though:
> 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,
The problem is that the 80 GB drive in a PC is full. Super Walmart (an approved supplier) sells Western Digital 1 TB replacement drives for $100. They could either:
A) Stop at Walmart while they're out picking up donuts.
B) Carry out a Bulshet-Hokey determination analysis process, with the help of a consultant.
There is something to be said for "if the local Walmart sells it, you can just pick it there rather than going through a month-long procurement process", aka having Walmart as an approved vendor.
B) Carry out a Bulshet-Hokey determination analysis process, with the help of a consultant.
Actually, those decisions were made when they selected their contracts. They now have these endless procurement processes which they should probably shorten.
The concept of no-bid contracts versus endless bidding wars is separate from this bureaucratic procurement process. You've conflated the spot purchase of a hard drive, which doesn't need any sort of contract bid, with a comment made about contract bidding. Your argument is thus ridiculous and unfounded.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
> Your argument is thus ridiculous and unfounded.
It's not really an argument, it just struck me as funny. Like a Dilbert comic. I used to work for the government, so I'm familiar with ridiculousness in procurement.
> The concept of no-bid contracts versus endless bidding wars is separate from this bureaucratic procurement process. You've conflated the spot purchase of a hard drive, which doesn't need any sort of contract bid, with a comment made about contract bidding.
Well if it's a contract to provide PC parts, or specifically hard drives, it's precisely the same thing. Where I worked, for Macs we had a contract with a local vendor to provide all Mac computers, parts, and accessories. For "other PCs" (Windows), we had a contract with a large national company. For a Mac, I'd say "I need a docking station" and a few minutes later the the boss would say "Ray, stop by Mac ***** and pic up a docking station." For Windows machines, it took a couple months.