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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'.
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
...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.
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.
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).
That's one good use. Also, we had a couple of turds that like to speed down my street. As in 55 in a 25 mph zone type speeding. I've already given a few license plate numbers via regular digital camera to the local police, who haven't arrested them, but paid them a friendly visit. Seems to help a lot.
Can't help it if I accidentally leave my car vidcam turned on now, can I?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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)
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.
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
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.
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.
Yet another nice thing about riding a bicycle: no license plate.
Thanks for eating the > sign in the intended "2 > 4" subject line.
You gave no evidence of someone doing 55 in a 25(do you have a way to measure their speed? You can tell someone is speeding but you don't how fast it actually was) and you actually expected some official act from a cop?
LAWL
The cop gave them a warning. That's all they needed. A simple metter of telling them there were complaints, and even slashdotters should know that the police act on complaints. Regardless, without anything but a camera, I can pretty precisely tell what speed they were moving, with a method that would stand up in court. Do you know how I would do it?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
and you actually expected some official act from a cop?
Yes, and he actually got an official act from a cop. Can't you read?
I've already given a few license plate numbers via regular digital camera to the local police, who haven't arrested them, but paid them a friendly visit. Seems to help a lot.
I've reported a few people over the years for (what I considered to be) dangerous driving and/or driving while using phones. My local cops are more than happy to take the details and call up the drivers. They've usually made it plain that it was unlikely to lead to any official sanction, although on a couple of occasions what I've reported has concerned them enough to ask if I was prepared to state such-and-such in court (I was; I didn't end up doing so).
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Yes.
Stop being an awful nerd lording a modicum of knowledge over people. This is why nobody likes you. And no, no, I really don't care if you're going to make me beg.
Actually I'm willing to share it with anyone. I thought as a knowledable guy such as yourself I might have bored you.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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.'
troll parking lots.
Parking lots are private property. So there would be nothing stopping me from using a plate flipper.
Have gnu, will travel.
I know. I can't believe how many people are taking the position that: "We doesn't wants da power. Let's do "X" to ensure they have da powerz, but we don'tz!!!!!" It's sad. Truly pitiful in fact.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Since you used or, thereby evaluating the "sham project" and "poor code reader" possibilities as mutually exclusive when they are not, I'm going to go with both for the win! ;-)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
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. :-]
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.
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"
Obviously tailgaters weren't the only ones I was thinking of. They're just the less noticeable peril out there. There are also the cars that are driving along behind me at a steady pace, but suddenly accelerate the moment I start signalling for a lane change.
Oh gawd, there is something wrong with those people. I had one guy who was probably 3000 feet away, going 45 in a 45. I pulled onto the highway, and was up to the speed limit in a few seconds. He floored it, came up and tailgated me, then passed me flipped me off and tried the old brake slam trick. I suspect he was having a bad day or something. He had no idea of the danger he was in.
There are the people who negotiate lane mergings and on-ramps by driving all the way out to the end of their lane, then accelerate hard and slip in between the shoulder and the truck I am driving, then jumping right in front of me..
Are you in a big truck? I suspect that entrance ramps are pure hell.
Not germane to the original subject, but the interstate that runs near here slows from 65 to 55 right nearby. There is a major route interchance of 3 how's a few miles in. Then there is 2 lanes thru, 2 lanes right to the other roads, and a exit immediately to the right off the right lanes. plus a intermdiate strip about 600 feet between the thru and rhagt lanse about a lane wide. The people driving who were going 65 don't want to slow down, but they are in the passing lane, but there's a lot of traffic, so they want to be in the right lanes to go onto the other highway, but theres's a lot of traffic, so they are soon going 90 so they can get over. It makes for a game we call I99 Bingo, Where do they end up making their exit? The winner is when you catch a person making an effective 6 lane shit in a space of 600 feetto get off the right exit. Man, those idjits have gotta be pulling some fair lateral G's.
I'm amazed there hasn't been a hundred car pileup - yet.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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
Well that depends on jurisdiction I'd say.
Here around all publicly accessible private space are covered by traffic law. Only your private yard that is open only to you is not covered.
(That regulation seems to be a couple of decades old, on old properties you can see signs telling that traffic law applies on this parking lot, but these signs are clearly dying out.)
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.
ACLU preemptively nipped this one in the bud. No LPR devices for cops in Maine. Portland was going to get some. We said no.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
He didn't claim he could secure a conviction in court with his evidence, he stated that he could accurately determine their speed.
I believe him, within certain tolerances.
"Dear Police, this bloke was speeding" will get a polite "Thank you"
"Dear Police, here's evidence of this bloke doing 53 in a 35 limit. I know it wont hold up in court but perhaps a friendly word would help" will get someone a knock on the door.
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.
It's not a reply. It is a new post. Go to the top of this particular thread and you'll see their preview. 'Snot hard. It is the same no matter if you have JavaScript enabled or not. It even previews the subject line in a plain text browse (Lynx) as I recall.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Visible license plates let me identify that an approaching vehicle is the Uber vehicle I'm expecting.
abusive cops could be tracked. Assumes the same cars are typically used by the same cops.
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.
TLDR; He's scared of women and good at rationalizing.
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
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?