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New Software Puts License Plate Scanners Into Citizens' Hands (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Automated license plate readers have become a serious point of contention between law enforcement and privacy-minded citizens. But the advance of technology might make it a moot point — with some open source software and a cheap webcam, anyone can now start cataloging the cars visiting their street. A two-man team developed OpenALPR and started distributing it for free, along with the source code. Law enforcement and the agencies that build their plate scanners have argued in favor of the legality of such data collection, so it's not like they can suddenly start cracking down on private citizens doing the same. "An enterprising person could even use a car-mounted camera and create a mobile plate hunting device along the lines of what many police agencies already use." Is this particular privacy fight one that's still winnable?
I believe paint ball guns are still legal.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
will be first in line to get this....and, knowing our local ones, they might do an 'Apple camp out'.
"With this new open-source software, anyone can freely and easily create their own hot list."
Thanks a lot! You fucking assholes!
Not only is this privacy fight not winnable on many levels, but this actually makes it harder--once a technology is in use with the general public, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy and the Fourth Amendment is much harder to apply. (It is much harder to argue there has been an unreasonable search). You might still be able to argue data retention past a certain point is not permissible under a mosaic theory (i.e. enough information lets police put together a mosaic that should be barred without a warrant), and the Supreme Court has started to talk about that idea, but we don't have evolved law on that point yet.
Remember, if you care about privacy rights, you should be strongly supporting prisoner defense NGOs and lobbying for better support for your public defenders' offices. Seriously, write your state representatives a letter asking them to increase funding for criminal defense.
After watching police documentaries I often thought that surveillance of police station car parks would give you a good list of unmarked (and marked) police car VRNs. Couple that with static (entry points to housing estates, etc.) or vehicle mounted cameras and you have automated early warning of police in your area.
Citizens can do a hell of a lot more things than police can. Citizens enjoying Liberty doesn't change how the police operate.
Good-bye
Wtf? I cannot believe that it is now possible to do OCR on a live video feed using, above all things, a license plate. What's next? 3D pictures of a face. This shit must end NOW! As a security guard this is highly offensive and I doth protest.
...when the first guy sets up right in front of the police station. Or better yet, in front of the officer having an affair's house.
If enough of us nerds have these and aggregate the data, we can see where the cops are going and make sure they are out and about doing their jobs. As the summary says, it cuts both ways. Start watching the watchers.
I was summoned to district court for an 8:00 AM hearing, and discovered - quite by accident - that the judge didn't bother to arrive until 10:00 AM. My lawyer mentioned that this was typical.
Everyone had to wait around and was forced to listen to some insipid video about drunk driving (irrelevant to my landlord/tenant purpose) for two hours over and over before the judge bothered to arrive.
I've often wondered how useful it would be to mount a trail camera behind the courthouse and log the judge's arrival times, and then make that information public. Say, 6 months of study.
I wonder how long it will be before someone modifies this software to automatically log the comings and goings of government servants to a public website.
I'd be interested to know if the people I'm paying (with my taxes) are putting in a full 40 hours.
This is not all that helpful or useful unless you can connect to the DMV databases that links the plate to the person.
Distributed identification & reporting of tailgaters - Store 30-60 seconds of video leading up to and following a tailgating event, tag it with location, speed, plate number (where available), then let the tailgaters' insurers have at it (or sue 'em outright for all they're worth, since they are gambling with your life).
Surveillance is for those in power, not for you. (Captcha: masters)
So maybe the solution is to think about removing license plates and finding a system that works better.
We need to decide if we want people to be constantly tracked, or anonymous. And both sides have problems.
Honestly it depends on how you look at it. You can make a bomb out of items in Walmart. If I started to argue that because you can do that, we shouldn't produce those items, it would be a moot point. Conversely if I started to argue we should all make bombs because it's inevitable, that too would be a moot point. The point is, don't mix those things to make a bomb, more simply, don't be a dick. This includes putting me on a watchlist because I just said, "I can make a bomb" and start watching me, trying to get me to do it. That is what the Constitution was trying to avoid in respecting people's privacy. You can make the case that anyone is potentially dangerous and we should just start treating each other like adults and realize that processing power is cheap and sensor technology has become high quality and also cheap. Source code for decent data processing is free, yet you need not slap the label, "Bad guy detector" on your setup because you will find in fear what you are looking for if you're paranoid enough.
Citizens can do a hell of a lot more things than police can. Citizens enjoying Liberty doesn't change how the police operate.
Wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
A device being commonly available to the public can affect whether or not police can use it.
...it's what government will do with the information. Private citizens shouldn't have an issue; but we should forbid police from having such technology/information. There's a lot that private citizens can and should be able to do that government should not; the few exception are things like weapons of mass destruction and the judicial system.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
I believe there was an article a while back about how repo men were already using [commercial] license plate scanners to troll parking lots.
Millions of crimes, including mass shootings, are committed with the necessary aid of a vehicle. Most of these crimes could not be committed if the perps were subjected to background checks that could block their legal access to vehicles. Legislation making such checks mandatory would be opposed by vehicle owners, who would rather see background checks for gun owners, which would be less effective at reducing crime.
who troll our burbs late at night looking for scrap, running lights and street signs, and cause our pets to go into barking fits with their muffler-less shitmobiles.
By and large LPR is a technology that is designed from the ground up for revenue. You'd figure if it were really good at catching real criminals, they'd use it to track down people.
The problem is in the combination in technology and how that provides private enterprise with an information advantage. LPR captures data from your license plate, then the system see's you get out of your car and uses facial recognition to determine who you are, then links that to your debit or credit card number. A separate system gauges your reaction when you see displays in the store. You go to other stores, the same analytic's company has the same infrastructure setup and they can tune the environment to you and everyone else. You go home your Smart TV tells whomever what you're watching and what mood you're in, what your relationships are like, what your political leanings are, and so forth.
In the hands of the general public, this information will arguably be used for the betterment of society given society actually uses it and tries to draw reasonable conclusions from it. The problem is when you give that as an information advantage to a bunch of corporate schmucks hellbent on creating a highly automated mechanism for waging targeted psychological warfare against the general population for profit. In the past, psychological warfare has been a fire and forget, broad area of effect weapon that the public has, by and large, begun deploying countermeasures against. Marketers call these countermeasures "Noise", the rest of us are just tired of being made to feel insecure, inadequate, and incapable and have correctly associated certain brands and companies with diseases.
We're literally talking about the same kind of crap slashdot is constantly pulling these days; imagine being a gun nut and seeing anti-gun-nut advertising non-stop but it coming through in a way you don't recognize in order to slowly change your viewpoints. We see all of these pro-feminist articles about putting women in technology positions which literally kills the slashdot reading audience; first they have a reasonable discussion, then they make fun of you, then they leave for the register. We see articles that are slightly related to the bias but are still bullshit, such as stories about how womens and mens brains equal (gee there's that word) or I remember a story about a guy who was wondering how his sick sick daughter who loved IT stuff was going to get into the field. You get people to make these small "microsteps" in the direction you want them to go in and nudge them in without them noticing. It's fucking disgusting and the people who do that have no respect or capability to comprehend free choice and therefor, have no control themselves after they've lied to themselves so many times everything becomes a bias or barrier to overcome to get a few bucks.
Other way 'round. That's why police oversight is so essential.
"Law enforcement and the agencies that build their plate scanners have argued in favor of the legality of such data collection, so it's not like they can suddenly start cracking down on private citizens doing the same."
Which alternative universe does this poster live in?
Let's start using LCD panels for plates. The number changes every 12 hours or so. Police could still use it to match it based on the date/time it was scanned, but makes scanning by private citizens useless. #maintainthestatusquo
What we need to be doing is eliminating visible license plates. They serve no useful purpose that benefits the average person.
To make this an effective counter to intrusive government surveillance, all of the scanned license plate data by private citizens would need to be uploaded to a central, publicly accessible, database. Then the average citizen could assess where their elected representatives were at at given time. Same goes for where law enforcement individuals are.
If we do this enough, maybe "they" will understand why this technology is such a privacy violation.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
It used to be citizens would fight against extreme governmental control.
Americans have gotten to the point where they, not the government, is making "1984" real.
What a sad, sorry country we have devolved into.
If people with my intelligence were in charge, they would keep licence plates as a ruse, to make the criminal and civilian believe this is the method of tracking. It serves an effective taxation method too. For the actual tracking I would have the vehicle emit electronic signatures readable by all my other infrastructure under the disguise of normal entertainment equipment. Oh wait.
But when it comes to technology, it is not your government you need to fear. Your government is content with the amount of money it makes from you.
I skimmed through the ruling and saw a mention of 'commonly available' but nowhere was it addressed if widespread public use means police can also avail themselves of these methods. Would you care to point out the relevant points?
Good-bye
if yo get enough people doing this, ideally in a mobile version, you can start tracking and geo-locating vehicles; which can then be correlated with locations on Google maps.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Now I want to see this built for android, and for each hit save an image, date, time, gps location. Mount it on your car and away you go.
Yet another nice thing about riding a bicycle: no license plate.
Thanks for eating the > sign in the intended "2 > 4" subject line.
We all must do what our our masters say and not what they do!
From Part III of the court's decision:
'We think that obtaining by sense enhancing technology any information regarding the interior of the home that could not otherwise have been obtained without physical "intrusion into a constitutionally protected area," Silverman, 365 U. S., at 512, constitutes a search at least where (as here) the technology in question is not in general public use.'
Wow, lots of people saying 'what would happen if we put this here' completely ignoring that you could put a person there and still get all the data, so this changes nothing. Yet no one complaining that this is primarily a commercial web service? Are they keeping a database of everything you scan? The open source version is not the same as the commercial version: "commercial customers have access to a number of exciting enhancements that improve license plate recognition performance and efficiency". You're free to provide all the enhancements you want to the open source version and they'll move them into the commercial one.
We had to write license plate readers in our Intro to Computer Vision class at college. So far mine has worked on every image that works on theirs too. At the core they're using OpenCV for some image processing and Tesseract for OCR. That is a weekend project for crummy results and a week or two for usable results. The extra features like state detection sound good, but they have no implemented classes in the open source version, only the interfaces. They also don't include the raw training data they used for Tesseract, only the training results. You can't build a complete clone of the program from it's GitHub page! (not to mention it's missing all of the cloud related code)
This is a sham open source project at best. (or maybe I just suck at reading their code)
These are tools used to oppress the citizenry. The government(s) around the world have literally turned the masses into slaves. You have to get the permission of the government to conduct commerce. They use business licenses, birth certificates, drivers licenses, social security numbers, licenses plates, and vehicular registration to quite literally imprison otherwise law abiding citizens into doing work on the governments behalf. You can't choose not to pay your taxes and your taxes are a significant portion of ones income generally speaking. Once you factor in all the taxes you actually pay that is. 15% is taken directly from your employer, another 15% is taken from your pay check, another percentage is taken from the work you perform, and then another percentage is taken on the work you purchase from others. Then there are fees left and right for cars, drivers licenses, and other commercial activities. There are also property taxes which add significantly more as well.
We do not have a right to work, but are rather workers or slaves at the governments pleasure. If you don't work under such licenses you'll be locked up and forced to work. Don't believe me? Try refusing. There are no minimum wages for prisoners and they are made to work for what amounts to nothing (pennies an hour).
End the license plate and find a better way to license cars. Maybe reading the VIN if you need to know something about the car.
Is this particular privacy fight one that's still winnable?
I don't think so. License plates were specifically designed to make the identity of each car publicly visible. That decision -- made many years ago -- resulted from the widely-held judgment that the ability to easily identify cars is more important than any driver's right to anonymity or privacy.
Essentially, the "right to anonymity" is one of the rights that a driver must give up in order to enjoy the privilege of driving a potentially lethal machine at high speeds in public. I don't think there's much disagreement about that tradeoff.
Due to the fact that driver anonymity is not a reasonable expectation, I think it's unlikely that anyone would ever have been in legal jeopardy if they -- for example -- published logs of which cars are present at a particular location at a particular time.
The advancement of technology makes the task of identifying license-plates easier today, but I doubt that any new technology will have much impact on the decision-making that went into the original principle that we must strip drivers of their "right to anonymity".
Obviously, license-plate data is more powerful in the police's hands, because the police can use that data as a key to access much more information than the general public can. I believe this is where most of the concern is centered. But, at its root, this will always return back to the original issue, which was: "Do drivers have a 'right to anonymity' (and, thus, an exemption from police scrutiny) while they are driving potentially lethal machines?". I doubt that we will ever change our answer to that question.
It all started when I decided to use my old mobile phone (android) as a dash cam in February this year. At first I wrote a single app to record video footage from the road. It can store on average up to 3 days of footage that can be then sent to my home server over WIFI when I park my car in front of my house. In April, however, I also added a plate recognition subsystem. It performs surprisingly well for such a cheap solution. Now I can tag plate numbers and assign notifications for specific tags. For example I receive a sound notification when I am passing my boss/friends/work colleagues. I also have a separate group for people who I have seen driving badly before. It generates a warning sound whenever the camera spots them. :-]
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
So if someone smacks into you or your property then drives off without stopping to identify themselves, do you not think a visible licence plate might be a good way of tracking them down?
What's the issue here? When you're in public, you have no expectation of privacy. We might have gotten used to being anonymous most of the time, but there's nothing inherent or ethical about that...
I have said it for years, Privacy is changing, not going away. It used to be about anonymity. Now it is about the appropriate collection and curation of data; yours and others'.
Dialectician. Archology.
What can possibly be private about a license plate in plain view of the public? Seriously the privacy advocates are way over the edge.
The plate readers represent a two edged sword which likely is a far more power tool for committing crime than it will help enforcing the law. Passively scanning cars will create a register for when a car passed a spot allowing criminals easy ways to match cars with for homes, owners and family members, letting criminals do passive and active planning of potential victims.
We cannot make the readers go away, so we would need to do something with the plates instead. This could technically be done as the plate could be replaced with a unique id through algorithm instead, allowing a constantly changing id together with a timestamp.
The driver may find the car using the alarm system, so the owner does not require the plate.
However the plate is also used by citizens to report on cars, such as when speeding, having an accident where the driver try to get away, when there is suspicious behaviour, and so on.
The problem is if pedestrians loose their ability to report on on cars. Unless we can find a good way for pedestrians to report particular cars without requiring them to have special reading devices, we cannot move away from plates and corresponding plate readers.
We may however make laws prohibiting the accumulation of such data without legitimate reason.
I still maintain there is a difference between the technology, like a person or org could make, and a government program. I would also contend that since they are so distributed, and their misuse of data, can have such serious consequences for others, that whether or not the police should be permitted to use their resources on something is quite a different question from whether private individuals should be able to persue it. The police should have more restrictions on them.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Had to do a double take to make sure I didn't read "New Software License Blast Into Citizens' Scanner Heads"
It all started when I decided to use my old mobile phone (android) as a dash cam in February this year. At first I wrote a single app to record video footage from the road. It can store on average up to 3 days of footage that can be then sent to my home server over WIFI when I park my car in front of my house. In April, however, I also added a plate recognition subsystem. It performs surprisingly well for such a cheap solution. Now I can tag plate numbers and assign notifications for specific tags. For example I receive a sound notification when I am passing my boss/friends/work colleagues. I also have a separate group for people who I have seen driving badly before. It generates a warning sound whenever the camera spots them. :-]
Nice. Is it open source somewhere?
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
Difficult to read the plate as the car drives away.
Scan outside local mosques, then scan people coming into local events. You can then see the potential terrorists and give them a more thorough search. This is particularly useful as many white converts to Islam are terrorists and hard to spot otherwise
We don't need further tracking of our lives by the government or by the people trying to sell us stuff. I noticed advertising in my web browser based off of things I searched for on other sites. This is no doubt from tracking of my IP address or shared cookies. With this software am I going to get advertising based off of what shops I drove past that day?
No doubt this will lower the cost of entry for petty tyrants in law enforcement that want to track people without cause or warrant. A device with license plate reading and logging capability doesn't have to show on the department purchase logs since it takes just a cell phone or tablet to stream the video, and a common desktop computer to create the log.
An argument for use of this software was made in the article that people have no expectation of privacy, which is nonsense. I should be able to expect that no law enforcement office is going to log my travel activity barring cause or warrant. I should expect no private entity also logging who travels on a public road either, private property is another matter.
As pointed out in the article the government may have a problem with private individuals logging the coming and going of government vehicles. I can see what will happen, the government just won't put individualized plates on their vehicles any more, or not use plates at all. This activity has already been spotted on federal vehicles, expect the trend to expand to local and state government as well.
The government can rule only upon the consent of the governed. If this becomes a problem then expect people to follow the government trend and remove their license plates. But that would be illegal! Yep, sure would. If the government is not willing to put individual plates on all their vehicles then they should not expect the public to do so either.
I can also hear another defense of this practice of logging plates, "We aren't tracking you, we're tracking the vehicle." This is bullshit. I own one vehicle and I am the only driver. Barring a walk to the bank or store I drive everywhere. School, work, and most shopping is too far to walk. If they track my car they are tracking me.
This "papers please" society we all allowing the government to create must stop. As Dr. Franklin warned us we have a republic so long as we defend it, we can have our liberty so long as we don't trade it for the false promise of security. But, but TERRORISTS! Bullshit! We supposedly got a promise of safety from the government through background checks on immigrants, tapping our internet, phones, and postal mail, from gun control, and so many other intrusions in our lives. What did we get? We got a couple immigrants that bought guns because they passed these background checks, then they modified the guns illegally, carried them in public without a permit, and proceeded to shoot up a workplace Christmas party. Every level of government failed us here. The only people that had a fighting chance would be those that also broke the law and carried weapons to defend themselves.
I recommend that the reader consider the value of license plates and licenses to drive. There is a value in them for law enforcement but also a very real threat of government or criminals to abuse these methods of tracking to cause us harm. This also applies to other government documents, like Social Security numbers used for things other than Social Security benefits.
I realize I got to a dark place real fast based on what is really just a fancy OCR program. I'm just seeing a very real trend here and I'd like more people to see it too.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
With mirrors, reflective paint, something that would allow the plate to be read by eyeballs, but not some tech device. Or would that be declared illegal--interfering with legal police activity?
Oh well. time to get a horse.
Which is why a citizens network of ALPR cameras would be useful.
Not really but I think I could clean up the code and make it open source when I have some more time over Christmas.
There are two ways to reply, inline or on a separate page. The preview on the separate page shows the subject white on white.
Visible license plates let me identify that an approaching vehicle is the Uber vehicle I'm expecting.
This article illustrates the unfortunate and cloistered world of the open source community. The article presumes that due to this open source project, that private citizens "now" have access to ANPR/ALPR and questions if the authorities will allow citizens to keep this "new" technology. But, this mentality is due to the blinders worn by those cloistered by the open source community. They won't look at the world around them and what technology/software is available unless it is open source.
There has been ANPR hardware and software available for anyone, willing to spend the money, to buy and use. It is perfectly legal, even in the hands of lowly private citizens, and is not at risk of being infringed upon by the gubmint. There are several manufactures that have been selling to the private sector for years. Industries like repossession companies routinely patrol mall parking lots looking for cars to repossess and there are others using it for other purposes as well.
I'm thrilled that there is now a free(cost) solution that can be used with a webcam, if it works well. But, It's not new and this article is a clear illustration that the open source community needs to get out more.
You'd literally be amazed at what Windows and proprietary software is readily available and can do.
abusive cops could be tracked. Assumes the same cars are typically used by the same cops.
Not really but I think I could clean up the code and make it open source when I have some more time...
Yet another project that will never see the light of day.
An iSpy plugin for license plate reading has been around for many years: http://www.ispyconnect.com/plu...
If misuse becomes a problem, we could have have smart license plates that show a periodically changing QR code that contains a random (but validatable) message encrypted with user's key. Then a proper authority can try all the keys in database (could use salt as a hint, but really even a billion keys does not take that long) until they find a valid message after decryption.
One could even discourage random snooping / girlfriend stalking by cops on the beat by giving them instant access to only smaller database of stolen cars or cars of people with whom police has current business. Anything else would be available only when a judge issues a warrant based on evidence that a car is involved in a crime.
They will ban it soon. They don't like things like conversations being recorded, especially political conversations where they lie because they lie all the time. I'm sure they're going places they shouldn't as well.
Technology - making it harder to be a twit.
There are a number of ANPR packages available.
One that's of particular interest to me snaps plates and calculates vehicle speeds - I live in a street with a particularly irksome speeding problem (some drivers are regularly hitting 80-90mph in a 30mph zone) that the local authoritries refuse to address.
It's known they've run long-term speedchecks on the road but have repeatedly refused FOI requests for the data, although it's known that "The average speeds is 33mph, so that's OK" - they went silent and started covering tracks when asked about the 85th percentile, stats over time (the egrarious speeding happens at night when the cops refuse to stand around with lidar guns) and mitigation measures. At one point they issued an official denial of any measuring taking place despite email exchanges with the officer running the checks already admitting to them.
It's been tempting to start publishing stats
If you think police agencies are the only ones that have been using ALPRs then you're sorely mistaken. A number of shopping centres, such as Westfield megacorp, have been installing ALPR-driven boom gates at their shopping centres because they're cheaper and easier to maintain than the paper ticked-based systems that they had previously been installing.
Beginning Jan 1, California Senate Bill 570 will come into effect. (Until going into effect, sections 3 and 4 of the bill refer to section 1.3 (for agencies) and section 2.3 (for individuals or businesses).
People holding unencrypted license plate data along with people's names, that then lose that data, know of unauthorized access to that data or improperly share it will be required to notify all individuals in that dataset within 10 days.
California Senate Bill 34 covers automated license plate reader operators and their requirements for operation and disclosure of that operation, its purpose, etc.
The long story (short) is that in California, there are upcoming regulations (enacted Jan 1, 2016) about how this data is to be collected and used, and responsibilities for those who collect it.
Hmmm, what if somebody made an online searchable database and seeded it with fake plates and location info. That would suddenly throw into doubt all the "real" info out there.
Yet another prediction that has turned out being wrong...
https://github.com/sujaybhowmi...
-alex-
This'll end up being run sort of like ATCS Monitor—a network of sensors contributing to a tracking system. Police will eventually have to employ countermeasures—either allowing multiple identical plates, no plates, or changeable plates—to prevent criminals from knowning where all the patrol cars are located at any one time. Criminals will just swap plates frequently or disguise them somehow, but then we'll recognize them as criminals, right? The rest of us have nothing to hide, so we'll submit to tracking, right?