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EFF: License Plate Scanner Deal Turns Texas Cops Into Debt Collectors (eff.org)
An anonymous reader writes: The Electronic Frontier Foundation is sounding the alarm about a deal between Texas law enforcement agencies and Vigilant Solutions — a company that provides vehicle surveillance tech. The deal will give Texas police access to a bunch of automated license plate readers (ALPRs), and access to the company's data and analytic tools. For free. How is Vigilant making money? "The government agency in turn gives Vigilant access to information about all its outstanding court fees, which the company then turns into a hot list to feed into the free ALPR systems. As police cars patrol the city, they ping on license plates associated with the fees. The officer then pulls the driver over and offers them a devil's bargain: get arrested, or pay the original fine with an extra 25% processing fee tacked on, all of which goes to Vigilant. In other words, the driver is paying Vigilant to provide the local police with the technology used to identify and then detain the driver. If the ALPR pings on a parked car, the officer can get out and leave a note to visit Vigilant's payment website." Vigilant also gets to keep the data collected on citizens while the ALPRs are in use.
I'm not glad that a private company is in the mix. We've seen what happens when red light cameras are turned over to private companies: the yellows get illegally shortened, tickets start going out to people who didn't run lights, etc. Corporations have no business in law enforcement, the incentive to fuck things up for profit is just too high.
Speaking of profit, Vigilant is tacking 25% onto the fees these people already can't afford, and now they're being threatened with jail. This sort of shit is why the DOJ is investigating St. Louis County, MO. That county has been a revolving door of get a parking ticket, can't afford to pay it, get taken to jail, scrape together bail money, now you have court fees and jail fees on top of the ticket you already couldn't afford in the first place, and back to jail you go. Now you've lost your job and how exactly does the county expect you to pay the debt they keep piling on you?
Debtors prison is illegal in this country but damn if red states aren't trying their best to bring it back so their business cronies can profit.
Better have a copy of the debt being paid on hand or GO TO DIRECTLY TO JAIL, do not collect $200. This happens more than you might think.
What is horrible about this, is that a private company is getting the proceeds "plus" %25, when A. the original fine is what was levied, and B. this is taking money that should go to the courts and is directing it away from what it was intended to fund.Of course, this will bring in more fugitives, but will eventually cause a feedback loop to where it will encourage more to pay on time or at the time the fine was levied, but also cause many to go to jail who would have eventually paid the fine; any who don't well, that is all going to go to Vigilant and will I surmise causing a deficit in the long run.
Flat out, this is a horrible deal, whether or not you dislike the technology. Personally, I see this as a invasion of privacy. I'd like to see criminals caught, and in time they will be. If not, then they've died or become good citizens.. which is the point of enforcing the law. Unless your the police, it's all about the cool toys and getting to have adrenaline rushes of doing your duty (and the money) it seems.
Forcing people to have an identifiable tag and then accessing that information in real time to everyone that you come across appears to me to be on the side of skirting against the constitution's mandate we be secure in our papers and persons. Imagine this, if we one day decide to rise up against the government, which is not only our right but our duty as citizens, it will be easy to automate a list from social media (or other accessible records) and stop and detain any and everyone on the "bad list". Whites, blacks, the 99%, independents, republicans, democrats, or any criteria deemed "hostile". We're losing the battle for independence, and sovereignty and stuff like this proves it. Without these things, freedom is meaningless. Innocent until proven guilty is meaningless. It effectively becomes the Matrix, where you can only do what is whitelisted, instead of blacklisting true injustices.
Im not sure this is a helpful distinction. Fascism was a much more complicated beast than simply the collusion of government and capitalism. There was an underlying mythology of the nation and of violence. Fascism was the glorification of the dictatorship of the nationalists, and all had to fall into compliance, citizens, companies, the military and so on, and any opponent was to be smashes with maximum violence. I dont know this exactly describes this. Certainly the tendency towards unreasonable patriotism certainly doesnt help, but its not quite fascism, its something else....
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Vigalent cameras (and one major competitor plus a host of smaller members of the scanned license plate database industry) are placed in fixed locations as well as attached to damn near every tow truck in the country. This is why tow trucks keep taking quick jaunts through parking lots, going too fast for a human to read plates and check lists. The cameras are reading every plate. It's a bonus reason for them to stage their trucks along congested expressways. These companies compile and keep the data for decades.
https://www.aclu.org/feature/y...
This fool thinks that it's horrible that a detailed database of every license plate that Vigalent cameras ever saw, and the place and time it was seen, is now in the hands of law enforcement and probably soon in available for a small fee. Spouse abusers, kidnappers and hitmen take note. NSA/FBI, whoever can't collect this legally themselves, can now fetch a outline of anyone's life and create a profit for the private industry supplier.
They get a free and presumably effective tool to enforce the law and the fines go to pay the company that provides them the tool.
The flip side of this tool is also that the company can provide analytics to seniors in the political system on how the police are using their tool, and they won't get the tool dropped. Why? Because the agency knows that Podunk Jurisdiction ain't going to pay huge licensing fees in this economy to replace the system with a competitor's tool because the company responded to a request from the Attorney General or the legislature on how the police were using their product. It's a captive audience.
It's just one 'e' short of Vigilante. That can't be a coincidence.
If the police end up caring about the public, then they can't be trusted to act in the interests of those in power when they're told to go bash skulls at a food riot in progress.
That just won't do. To prevent that, animosity must be generated between the police and the people. Psychopathic goons who want to lay a beat-down must be given hiring preference. Unjust court rulings must let police off the hook for their wrongs and overly punish regular folks for even the slightest perceived infractions.
That's how you get the people busy fighting among themselves and ignoring the real problems in our society: bankers/financiers, crooked politicians, and billionaire globalist industrialists.
In some countries a lot of the fines are income dependent. For example they take what you make in a day on average. Subtract a fixed amount based on the minimum amount necessary to survive. Then half it. The result is the daily fine. Depending on the violation you are fined a number of days.
This way it will hurt a rich persons wallet just as much as a poor persons. For some people a day fine will just be $10 other people will pay $10000
And since we now have face recognition, everyone who displays their face in plain view have no expectation of privacy either. If you don't want to be tracked, it's a burqa for you... or you can just keep walking with your head up your arse, I suppose.
Over here, privacy laws make a clear distinction between data being available, and the acts of collecting, processing and sharing that data. Each of those acts is strictly regulated, and the fact that your license plate is always in full view doesn't mean that everyone has the right to track your whereabouts 24/7. In this case, the idea behind this setup (catching outstanding fines with a license plate reader) does not clash with principles of good privacy, but the implementation does: a private company having access to that list of deadbeats, for instance. I would expect the police to (be ordered to) demand a system that is under their full control, with no 3rd parties having access to any of the data.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...