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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."
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...
The Orwellian Society draws ever near.
So some lowly peon opened their wallet and paid out of pocket for printing the Google vinyls? Bullshit.
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!
It was probably just Garfield and Sherry trying to reboot the series.
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.
Government Spy Truck is Very, Very Poorly Disguised As a Google Street View Car
> 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.
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.
thank goodness...since you know..the decals is what everyone is concerned about. Not the mass tracking of the population without any cause.
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...)
1. Finding cars with large numbers of parking tickers (See "Parking Wars")
2. Finding wanted vehicles, fugitive warrants, suspended or revoked drivers’ license and stolen cars.
A few vehicles driving around a large city will scan every car maybe once a month. That is useless to track a vehicle's movement.
Hey, you don't get to see a "high-powered" camera every day! Regular cameras, sure. But high-powered ones?
Oh, I had no idea magnification could be expressed in Watts. You learn something new every day.
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.
If I applied an "[un]approved" PD decal to my white or black Charger or Crown Vic, do you think I'd be able to make a public statement on it and it would be dropped? Yet they're allowed to impersonate Google's car and get away with it.
The time to start removing the privileges of the police was 10 years ago. Now the entitlement has set in like MRSA.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
The Power of Thor's Mighty Hammer? The Power of Greyskull?