Slashdot Mirror
Boston Tracks Vehicles, Lies About It, Leaves Data Exposed
An anonymous reader writes: License plate readers have been in the news a lot lately for the invasion of privacy they represent. Boston is the latest city to make mistakes with the technology. Two weeks ago, a reporter realized that the City of Boston had accidentally exposed records for their automated license plate reader system online. Anyone could have downloaded "dozens of sensitive files, including hundreds of thousands of motor vehicle records dating back to 2012." What's worse is that the Boston Police Department claimed in 2013 that it had stopped using license plate readers. A look through the accidentally-public database shows "hundreds of emails" dating from 2013 to the present, indicating that the police were still getting that data with help from the Transportation Department.
their brothers-in-cheating
I'm shocked, SHOCKED!!!!
Oh wait... How can you tell when a politician is lying? His lips move.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Most counties do this, lie by omission. "We don’t spy on our citizens!" Correct, we allow other countries, then we swap data.
Police, "We don’t track license plates!", We let the DOT do it for us.
So many lies in government agencies.
Taking them at their word, let's assume the police department stopped using license plate scanners. They no longer own them, they sold them off, whatever.
That doesn't mean that a third party doesn't run the licence plate scanners and the police have a very cozy relationship for getting all the data whenever they need it.
It's much like the recent changes to the NSA's spying playbook. They say they will no longer collect and store that metadata themselves .... but they will use a third party to do it. In particular, that third party is not subject to the government's data retention policy limiting position of the metadata.
In both cases, it means the agency itself is no longer doing it. That doesn't mean it still isn't happening, just that the agency is not the one actively doing it.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Is anyone going to be charged, arrested, jailed, or even fired or fined for this act of blatant spying and the attempted coverup? My answer is, only if these leaked records embarrass a high-ranking policeman or government official (eg, their wife thinks they go bowling every Friday night, but the records show them actually going to a gay bar).
One motorcycle that had been reported stolen triggered scanner alerts 59 times over six months, while another plate with lapsed insurance was scanned a total of 97 times in the same span.
We are going to be partially rescued from the data collection efforts; not from conscience or court ruling,
but for the sheer, greedy mass of collections.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Cows don't have license plates, but if they did, I'm sure Boston would track them and lie about it.
If you believe this, you're a moron. The whole point is that they can selectively go back and pin things on you while they're on a which hunt / fishing expedition.
No agency, governmental or otherwise, willingly gives up surveillance or information. We must ignore their claims to do so, and;
Require watchdogs, monitors, and direct supervision.
Constant investigation of databases, storage, and records, as of this of a continuous FOIA request.
Assume that they are still collecting the data and institute legislation to render enforcement actions, either predicated on this data or potentially made possible by it, to be illegal and unenforceable.
And more.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Yet another Democrat run city plumbing the depths of power abuse. Slashdot is unwittingly chronicling the erosion of civil liberties by libtard governed hell-holes.
San Jose May Put License Plate Scanners On Garbage Trucks
In Baltimore and Elsewhere, Police Use Stingrays For Petty Crimes
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
I'm undoing all my moderation to post this, but to anyone who thinks "what a conspiratard!" they should be asking themselves what the point of all this collection was if they weren't using this to find stolen vehicles or uninsured motorists.
It is highly likely that the politicians who might vote for this sort of bill will have long since been nobbled; tracking their indiscretions by this means will have been... helpful.
I'm undoing all my moderation to post this, but to anyone who thinks "what a conspiratard!" they should be asking themselves what the point of all this collection was if they weren't using this to find stolen vehicles or uninsured motorists.
To measure which streets are the most congested? To detect unusually slow traffic on major bridges or tunnels in and out of Boston as an accident indicator?
Those are reasons that Europeans do it and would probably be pretty good reasons for the Boston Traffic Department to do so too.
And law enforcement wants us to respect them. Good fucking luck with that.
And you wonder why certain groups have basically given up trying to work with the police. I don't condone the violence, in fact I condemn it, but what do you expect when, seemingly, the police (and complicit city councils) don't respect you and repeatedly trample your rights? I would recommend that these groups give up the violence and focus on city hall and all the bastards that we keep electing. Insist on new management and ditch the entrenched LEO leadership, union or actual. Policing is big money and changing that is going to be really hard!
To measure which streets are the most congested?
They have traffic counting hoses for that. No need to have a complex system to measure traffic congestion.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Its not like they are going to go and stop and interrogate every single black person they can find with this data, Over a false rape allegation or anything...
They said they stopped - true. BPD did not promise they will never use it again.
That is where we must start. Replacing the current politicians, starting at the local level.
I'm not hopeful.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
They've got easily tracked RFID chips. They've bionic cows. Robotic? Despotic? Animatronic? something-ic!
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
a) The police typically has better things to do in a big city
b) These things are built for the sheer necessity to build them. They are required by some law or agency in pursuit of terrorism or tech jobs, then promptly underfunded and mismanaged resulting in becoming useless as a tool to the people who would be able to use them. The collection part works but then we have things like a few weeks ago where the police just can't manage to upgrade the 40GB hard drive that has the data.
c) These things are built and often forgotten due to (b) unusable interfaces and/or given to untrained units and/or given to units where a union prevents them from being used because they didn't cater to the blind cop behind the desk.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Wrong.
What happens is that - as usual - victims of various crimes will be ignored, while all of that data and information gets put to 'good' use against anyone that speaks out or they (whether as an organization or on an individual per-cop basis) don't like.
It will be used for blackmail, for planting evidence, for parallel construction, and for any other number of nefarious uses. That's what it exists for, why they pay for it, why it is planned and designed.
It just so happens that such a system, by sheer coincidence, actually, also collects information which could technically be used to solve rather than enable crimes.
Here in New Hampshire, the State is forbidden by law from using ANY automated license plate scanner technology. We are the only state to have passed such legislation. Not by coincidence; we have some two dozen hardcore libertarians in the State Legislature and thousands of liberty activists, with more moving in all the time. And you can join us http://freestateproject.org/
Is there anyone in Boston that is not a cheater, liar, or supporter of either?
In Boston the crooks and thieves and conspirators are exposed, in other places they continue to run amok.
Exactly this. There are plenty of relatively low-tech ways to count traffic or check traffic flow rate (paired sensor coils in the roadbed, as is done around here, for example). Tracking license plates is actually a much harder, more expensive way to do it (so I don't believe that's why Europeans do it, although that might be one of their cover stories).
There's certainly no need to store a couple of years' worth of license plate data if measuring flow is all you're doing. (I can think of a couple of rare scenarios where you're actually trying to analyze traffic flow over a large area (who is going from A to B, who is going from C to D, and who is going from A to D for example) where you might want to track specific vehicles -- in which case the data really ought to be anonymized by eg storing a hash of the license number rather than the actual number.) But cops, FBI, etc are compulsive hoarders.
Is anyone shocked at this from a state that criminalized everyone by barging in to houses to try and find the Boston bombers? But yeahhhh, think of the children.
With advances in technology (ie we have phones, radios, cameras, and similar) we need to consider that law enforcement has become too invasive and there employment needs to be thinned, technology restricted (ie no more wire taps, no more license plate scanners, no more facial recognition software, no more recording devices of any kind), and equipment handicapped (ie get rid of the military equipment). This way cops will need to actually investigate crime rather then sweep us all up into there investigations to catch a few perps. Much of the violence can be eliminated simply culling the police, FBI, military, and technology they can use along with disabling there means of tracking us (ie get rid of social security, get rid of drivers licenses, get rid of license plates, etc).
We don't need these things and have been fud'ed into believe they are critical for our well being and safety. Regardless of any truth to these things the cost to our freedoms is too high a price to pay.