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Government Spy Truck Is Disguised As A Google Street View Car (vice.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Matt Blaze, a University of Pennsylvania computer and information science professor, discovered a SUV "tucked away in the shadows of the Philadelphia Convention Center's tunnel" that was labeled as a Google Maps Street View car. It had two high-powered license plate reader cameras mounted on top, meaning it had to belong to a government agency. The Philadelphia Police Department had admitted it owns the truck after the report from Motherboard was published. "Unless the Philadelphia Fire Department of Streets Department are using automated license plate recognition (ALPR), this strongly suggests the city's police department is trawling city streets under the auspices of Google while snapping thousands of license plate images per minute," says Motherboard. ALPR can photograph thousands of license plate images per minute and track and store a person's travel habits without a warrant. Google spokesperson Susan Cadrecha commented on the report, "We can confirm this is not a Google Maps car, and that we are currently looking into the matter." The Philadelphia Police Department since responded to the report: "We have been informed that this unmarked vehicle belongs to the police department; however, the placement of any particular decal on the vehicle was not approved through any chain of command. With that being said, once this was brought to our attention, it was ordered that the decals be removed immediately."
Move along, nothing to see here
from law enforcement are why the tree of liberty needs refreshing from time to time..
Really, what's the difference?
I am sure disguising it as something else would be easy enough.
Someone has a sense of humor.
You know, the issue is that what has happened since Osama Bin Laden created the 9/11 disaster is that the U.S. has been creeping toward a surveillance state, but it has been slow enough that it's like hair growing. You have short hair, and you still have short hair, and a few weeks later you still have fairly short hair, and then a few months later you finally realize that you have long hair. But it happened so slowly that nobody is very alarmed. We have Clapper lying to Congress, we have Comey saying the government needs to get into terrorist encrypted phones, and we have Feinstein putting (essentially) backdoor encryption legislation out for comment. Meanwhile, police departments are going wild with Stingrays and cameras. Welcome to Big Brother and the surveillance state. "Land of the Free" and the home of the spied upon...
what is that?
No, of course not. What do you think, cops have to fear the repercussions of their actions or something?
The Orwellian Society draws ever near.
So some lowly peon opened their wallet and paid out of pocket for printing the Google vinyls? Bullshit.
This kind of falls into the same category with the fake cell towers does it not?
Google should sue them for Trademark infringement.
Time to slap the "Flowers By Irene" stickers back on the side of this one.
"It had two high-powered license plate reader cameras mounted on top, meaning it had to belong to a government agency. "
Those were "high powered" ALPR cameras? They sure look like every other one I've seen. And by no means does that indicate that it's owned by a government agency. They are commercially available, and are regularly used by Repo agencies.
As someone who took his picture with a parked google maps car, I just want to say that they didn't even try. Nothing about this even remotely looks like a google maps car. As a person who makes costumes, this is equivalent to showing up to a star wars convention with a bucket on your head and saying you are a storm trooper.
I don't know what everyone is getting so upset over. I mean, the decals were removed.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
... or Streets ...
Even if it were legal to gather ALPR information without a warrant, gathering ALPR information in this manner is illegal (unless they had explicit consent from Google, which is not the case). Wouldn't that make any evidence gathered as well as any subsequent callouts from the ALPR data also illegal? Cases have been thrown out of court for less.
It's a typo, "of" should be "or".
It was probably just Garfield and Sherry trying to reboot the series.
With stories of laydeez flashing their t*ts, and the various other things that people do when they see an 'oogle maps car, I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was someone who was hoping for a free show.
After all, cops are human too.
Well, some of them.
The difference is that doing this would put Google maps drivers in danger.
Just like when the CIA sent spies disguised as vaccine workers, and set back the effort to eliminae smallpox worldwide.
It is also use of Google's Trademarks as part of a government surveillance program--this reinforces the notion that Google itself and the American tech sector in general is not only replying to subpoenas, but is actually complicit in warrantless mass surveillance. It is harmful to Google's business reputation.
Real lawyers write in C++
So if what this vehicle was doing was so above reproach, why disguise it's purpose? Oh, you mean, you have a reason to hide behind a facade, a LIE? Good going assholes.
Really, can't tell the cops from the criminals these days.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
"The Lives of Others" (Das Leben der Anderen) is a great German movie about the Stasi.
The fact that they are checking who is going in a convention center made me remember the movie. It may not be because of anything on the movie, but because of this CCC talk about the Stasi: What does Big Brother see, while he is watching? [32c3]. I don't know, I watched the movie a long time ago and the talk this year, I just remember how beautiful it was.
Google is owned by the CIA
I lol'ed at the headline. That's about it.
The big question is, why? Why would they want to do this?
Not so much the camouflage, but why reading all those license plates? What is the purpose of collecting that data, and what's going to happen with it? Is this a one-off (looking for a specific vehicle) or routine surveillance trying to map movements of individual vehicles?
I can understand such an action if they're specifically looking for a suspect - someone they know is driving around the area, expected to use that road, but it's a needle in a haystack to find an individual car in a big city. But if not, what could possibly be the use of such data - effectively a list of license plate numbers (which of course can be linked to car owners - not necessarily drivers) and time/location? Without having lots and lots of collection points and almost continuous collection at all those points it seems quite useless to me.
It was "Go ogle." Totally legit.
Destroy all Google Streetview cars.
Government Spy Truck is Very, Very Poorly Disguised As a Google Street View Car
Rockets solve the matter then and there (please wait until it's not stuck in traffic or near pedestrians).
Harshly worded letters will not.
> I am not aware of any legal police authority allowing this
There's no law that allows you to eat chocolate ice cream in your bedroom. You may do so because there's no law AGAINST it. So the question is whether any law prohibits this.
Trademark law regulates the use of someone else's mark and name in TRADE, aka commerce. Because the cops weren't engaged in commerce, it probably doesn't apply.
This looks a lot like "tortious interference ", disrupting business relationships through a guilty act which is not merely competitive. However, most jurisdictions require that tortious interference be "intentional", not just negligent. That means it would apply only if the cops were TRYING to harm Google or their customers. If business relationships are harmed as a sidee-effect of whatever the cops were doing, that's legal in most places.
Some jurisdictions, including California, allow for recovery under tortious interference where the defendant both acted NEGLIGENTLY and did a guilty act, they were being a slimeball in some way. One could argue that the cops' actions qualify (and one could argue that they don't) . Again, most jurisdictions don't allow it anyway, they require intent to cause harm.
Someone else may think of another law the police may have violated in this instance, but the laws which are most obviously relevant don't quite cover this case.
Please investigate. Inquiring minds want to know why, for the love of $DEITY, they picked You and not bing =) when the police department suited this one up.
Sounds too much like the work of Lt. Frank Drebin of Police Squad!
If police or spooks are using it as a cover for an operation the answer is obvious. Please try to keep track of context and please try to be less ridiculous. I come here for information not pointless mass debating.
"It won't happen again; we promise*."
* We'll still do it, we'll just be more stealthy.
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
Why would local PD want to "track citizen's traveling habits?" They make money by giving speeding tickets and fighting drugs. Why do they care, what would be easier to track with by Stingray, about ur midnight run to gross fast food or random addresses in the city -- they happen to observe you at -- you travel to?
thank goodness...since you know..the decals is what everyone is concerned about. Not the mass tracking of the population without any cause.
I wonder if the professor would have thought to say anything, or even noticed, if the van had just been an unmarked white van.
This scanner can scan thousands of license plates per minute?? Let's do the math.
The vehicle has cameras on both sides. Assuming each camera can capture plates from up to 3 lanes of traffic, to achieve "thousands" of scans per minute, conservatively interpreted as at least 2000 scans per minute, each camera would have to pull in 1000 scans per minute, or 333 scans per minute per lane. This translates to a little over 5.5 scans per second per lane, or 0.2 seconds per scan per lane. This is impossible with the recommended 2 second minimum following distance between cars, regardless of the speed the cars are traveling -- in fact, the scan rate is 10x larger than the safe carrying capacity of 3 lanes on each side of the car.. Therefore, to scan "thousands" of plates per minute, this vehicle would have to be parked in the middle of a road 10x as wide, for roughly a total of 60 lanes.
The only alternative to this would be to scan cars parked close together on both sides as the scan-van travels really, really fast up the middle. You'd have to pass 5.55 cars per second on each side. Assuming the cars are parked 5.5 meters apart, you have to travel 70mph past the line of parked cars to hit this rate, which would be not only illegal in a zone lined on both sides with parked cars, but it would also be dangerous. Maybe that's where they get the number from though? (Also, this is probably not workable due to motion blur at those speeds...)
hey guys, my Cessna 152 is disguised as an F22!!! but only on Halloween. seriously
Apologies, this is a bit contrived and a bit tongue-in-cheek, but could we think about this case from a trade mark perspective?
Suppose the Google Logo is fully copyright and trademark protected [which I'm pretty sure it would be]. Now let's suppose that the city of Philadelphia was using the camera system on this [and perhaps other] vehicles to not merely build up a huge database of vehicle movements around the city, but also to detect vehicle tax or insurance evaders.
Now suppose that the relevant government office [and, sorry, but I'm not a US citizen, so the legal jurisdictional boundaries between federal, state and city are confusing to me] uses the data harvested by this vehicle to identify and prosecute insurance and vehicle tax evaders. Thus, the government body is using a vehicle carrying a Google trademark to generate revenue.
And there's the huge flaw in my contrived theory - Google don't themselves generate revenue from prosecuting vehicle-related frauds, so would struggle to show harm in this case. But surely, if someone is using Google's trademark without permission, then surely at the very least they have legal redress to have that trademark removed. Further, if the actions of the department operating the vehicle did generate revenue, how thin is the ice they are skating on?
Fraud?
False advertisiing?
Entrapment?
Something else?
Whilst I am sure that the obvious response from the relevant law enforcement agency may be something along the lines of "The ends justify the means" and whilst I may in some cases even agree with that, how is this established? Where is "The ends justify the means" enshrined in law? How can both an acting government department or an average citizen consider a given scenario and determine whether it falls within such a doctrine?
This case gets much more interesting if we extrapolate the precedent into other scenarios to consider if similar actions would still be considered legal. This has to be the acid test here. We can't think about this as an isolated incident, but as a single manifestation of a policy. Or, in coding terms: this is the instance, not the object. It's the properties of the object that we need to be worried about.
If the van was driving towards multiple lanes of traffic, then for at least *half* of the vehicles within line-of-site of the cameras, they could be passing at a relative velocity of, say, 110mph. With that rate of closure, the perceived gap between vehicles, from the perspective of the van, would be far *less* that two seconds, yet for those vehicles themselves, they could all be driving entirely safely at the two-second separation.
OK, so this would only ever work for half the vehicles on the road [the oncoming traffic] but it hopefully address your point at least partially...
We have been informed that this unmarked vehicle belongs to the police department; however, the placement of any particular decal on the vehicle was not approved through any chain of command. With that being said, once this was brought to our attention, it was ordered that the decals be removed immediately.
"We got caught doing creepy as fuck shit, and nobody is behind it. So relax."
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Is this surveillance limited to that particular convention, the convention center, or is this part of some mass surveillance program? What was the convention about? These are the important questions in my mind.
As if we didn't know that Google was part of the Gubmint, anyway, pshaw.
Unless the Philadelphia Fire Department of Streets Department are using...
This is a joke, right?
ALPR can photograph thousands of license plate images per minute and track and store a person's travel habits
Yes the *can* but that doesn't mean that's what was happening in this place. These systems can also be pre-loaded with lists of target vehicles, and the system looks for these amongst the thousands that it can see.
It's an interesting technology, and very useful - also interesting that poster assumes that it's being used for some nefarious purpose.
Well I'm sure glad you caught our purpose-built and deliberately-disguised but also entirely-accidental surveillance can! What a mistake, I'm sure that was the only one, and we're the only police department to have made such a silly, silly mistake!
-Styopa
A govt looking SUV with a google street view log printed on paper and stuck inside the glass window? It is going to fool anyone? If they really wanted to fool anyone they should have disguised the car to look like this.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Google and other big companies, act as if they are above the government and even 'own' the government. The government act as if they are employees of those companies. The next president will wear a suite or a hat with the logo's of their employer.
Hilary with a professional looking suit with a Goldman-Sachs logo or Trump will be the foul-mouthed self-employed construction worker with his own Trump hat.
Perhaps Philly or at least their PD could use some.
can't say i approve of it ideologically, but it's not a big deal.
1) the SEPTA police here openly video people walking down the streets every day. there are tons of HS kids that hang out near our public transportation hub near city hall and get into fights/brawls all the time after school. to combat this, they video tape every person on the street all afternoon long. this happens a few times a week. i'm no video algorithm developer, but i would assume it's just as easy for them to apply facial recognition to the video to track people's movements. i'm not bothered by this, but it took some getting used to.
2) the only people near the convention center (besides visitors who stay in hotels near the convention center and walk to the convention center) are the bums that live underneath the convention center tunnels. so, i doubt they are capturing anything interesting besides maybe a few episodes of bum fights. if anything, i wish they would police stickers all over the car to maybe thwart some unpleasant behavior.
i'm a little more surprised that in a city where we have enough problems to worry about, the police think they are smart enough to use big-data analysis to identify anything work acting upon. the time/resources would be better spent on working the streets.
I have said it before and I will say it again: the citizenry should place street facing cameras that record and submit online the movements and activities of cops as they drive around your town.
This weekend is the 9th World Congress for NeuroRehabilitation that this convention center. Looking over their exhibits and speakers, why are the polices needing to record the plates of professionals involved in "neurorehabilitation, which includes physicians, physical and occupational therapists, psychologists, speech therapists, rehabilitation engineers, basic neuroscientists "? Did the Philly police confuse them for some MAPS type of organization, thinking their going to be doing drugs at the convention? WCRN isn't even a US orgainzation, but is out of the UK, their main organizer (Kenes International Organizers) is out of Switzerland.. Why are the police recording plates of doctors, scientists, and people from a country we consider a close ally?
Anyway, I just used their Contact Us page and sent them a message: "Did you know that the Philadelphia Police Department has been monitoring license plates from an illegally marked vehicle at your WCNR 2016 meeting? Thought you might want to look into this. http://motherboard.vice.com/re..." If they respond I'll post a follow up, maybe this can cause some international scandal (laughs manically while wringing hands).
I always get Google and the Government confused as being one. Silly me....
"With that being said, once Google threatened to sue us and the city into bankruptcy, it was ordered that the decals be removed immediately."
There Philly PD, FTFY
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
cops are caught in a blatant lie and everyone just carries on as usual
the brainwashing is working well
Professor Blaze had someone put the decals on it so he could create this scandal?
> there is a Constitutional argument that they don't have the authority to impersonate a corporation unless explicitly given that authority.
The US Constitution says that the federal govt is limited to the enumerated powers and all other powers are "reserved to the states or the prople". So the Federal Constitution explicitly reserves to the states "all other powers". It then adds a restriction in the form of the due process clause of the 14th amendment. That's generally interpreted as extending the Bill of Rights to the states. So what we end up with is that the states may do "all other" things except violate the Bill of Rights.
A state Constitution COULD have enumerated powers, but I don't know that this particular state actually does. (City and county are parts of the state) .
It's a TRADE mark, a brand used in commerce. It's perfectly legal for me to put the word "Google" on my post. Google Google Google. What I can't lawfully do is SELL (trade) a competing product under the name "Google". The cops weren't selling anything, so generally trade mark protection doesn't apply. Obviously Google's lawyers might find a way to argue otherwise.
But again, Google, Google, Google. I just wrote Google on my post. Nothing unlawful about writing the Google on something, since I'm not selling this post.
Now that they've been informed, they'd be doing it "knowingly". That's the legal term, knowingly.
"Intentionally" is another legal term with specific meaning. In tort, it's one level above "knowingly". Intentionally (in tort) means you're trying to cause that specific effect, it's not a side-effect. If I push you out of the way of an oncoming bus, I knowingly knocked you to the ground, but not intentionally. You hitting the ground wasn't intentional because it wasn't the desired purpose . My intent was to get you out of the way of the bus. Hitting the ground was a side-effect.
The distinction matters mostly with respect to people to whom we owe no duty of care, strangers. I may know that you won't like something I do, but I'm not required to care what you think. On the other hand, it's often illegal to -intentionally- harass you - to do things IN ORDER to piss you off.
In this case the ANPR system was a government agency vehicle, but since ANPR is a dull, easily available, commercial product, it doesn't necessarily follow that a vehicle with these devices fitted is owned or run by a government agency.
The wife got hit by £60 charge for spending 3 hours and 15 minutes in a private car park in a motor way last moth - the evidence was a pair of ANPR images of the vehicle entering and leaving the property, with time stamps.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Law enforcement often uses company trademarks on vehicles to hide their identity as a police vehicle. Some have even enlisted an employee working for a company to help them such as the DEA using a company truck from a company owning only two trucks to use one of it's trucks for a secret drug enforcement action without the knowledge or consent of the business owner: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150428/16401530826/who-pays-when-dea-destroys-your-vehicle-kills-your-employee-during-botched-sting-hint-not-dea.shtml. If they use a company vehicle don't expect to be paid back for the damages by law enforcement and if you become the target of drug dealers who think you were a "narc" don't expect extra protection from the police even though you were not involved and your reputation was destroyed by their use of your company property for a drug raid and now you are a target of angry drug dealers. Don't expect to be repaid for the money you lose because you are inconvenienced due to one of your two vehicles in your fleet being destroyed.
"once this was brought to our attention, it was ordered that the decals be removed immediately." - What? How does that happen? lol
Google should just post the license plates of all their vehicles. Then we could check at any time to make sure that their brand is not being used by others. After all, the cars I've seen have "Google" written all over them, so it is not like they would be sharing private information. And it would give us the ability to know whether to just wave or throw eggs.