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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."
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
> 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.