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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.
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.