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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."
Brother, the US has been creeping toward a surveillance state since J. Edgar Hoover spied on civil rights leaders. Maybe he kept his data on index cards instead of on some nondescript server in a nondescript building but he was every bit the Big Brother wannabe. He was even spying on the President of the US and members of his administration.
And like every authoritarian, he had his own secrets that could have destroyed his career. This is probably what drove him to get dirt on other people.
There was never a time when the United States was a "free" country in any real meaningful sense. There were either people in literal bondage, or people with a boot on their neck since the day the country was founded as a slave state in 1789,
You are welcome on my lawn.
It probably came out of some (un)official slush fund billed as community outreach or something. A peon in the sense of the chain of command could likely still have access to these funds.
We had a chief of police run out because the department purchased paintball guns and rented some land which they claimed was for training purposes. That claim fell apart quickly when it was videotaped and appeared purely recreational. It really fell apart when the owner of the land was discovered to be one of the office's relations. They claimed some patrol leader set it all up and that the higher ups were unaware of it. The chief took a leave of absence and retired shortly after. But he went to work at the municipal court building two months later I
"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.
if the police aren't doing anything wrong, why are they trying to hide it?
Because if they drive down the street with a car marked "POLICE LICENSE PLATE SCANNER" and find a car associated with a wanted suspect, then that suspect may be long gone by the time they come back to make an arrest.
> 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.
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...)
You must be an electrician. This is powers of zoom. It's not watts, it's scale. A 500 mm focal length is 10x the power of a 50 mm focal length. 50 mm is presumed to be about the focal length equivalent to the human eye (high levels of debate on this due to the science behind the differences between camera lenses / sensor mechanics and the human eye mechanics). Before you apply a blanket definition of power to only apply to electricity, remember that the word power applies to a plenitude of scientific applications. Mathematical powers (A x B^10), Horse Power (arbitrary method of measuring presumed output of an engine as compared to how many horses could perform the same amount of work), Power as a function of force..etc.