Slashdot Mirror
US Cops Can't Keep License Plate Data Scans Secret Without Reason, Court Rules (theregister.co.uk)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Police departments cannot categorically deny access to data collected through automated license plate readers, California's Supreme Court said on Thursday -- a ruling that may help privacy advocates monitor government data practices. The ACLU Foundation of Southern California and the Electronic Frontier Foundation sought to obtain some of this data in 2012 from the Los Angeles Police Department and Sheriff's Department, but the agencies refused, on the basis that investigatory data is exempt from disclosure laws. So the following year, the two advocacy groups sued, hoping to understand more about how this data hoard is handled. The LAPD, according to court documents, collects data from 1.2 million vehicles per week and retains that data for five years. The LASD captures data from 1.7 to 1.8 million vehicles per week, which it retains for two years. The ACLU contends [PDF] that indiscriminate license plate data harvesting presents a risk to civil liberties and privacy. It argues that constant monitoring has the potential to chill rights of free speech and association and that databases of license plate numbers invite institutional abuse, not to mention security risks.
I do have a problem with them keeping that data for years. IMHO, a day or two at most should be sufficient .
I'd say a bit longer than that- maybe a week, but no longer than a month- say someone has their car stolen from their home and don't discover it until they come back from a vacation- it would be nice to be able to track it down.
What I really want to know is what they are truly doing with the data and the contribution to solving crime and public safety.
That's why you should have a problem with them scanning your plates.
ATI request: List all license plates NOT under investigation.
Thanks to this ruling, the data can be accessed by any company wiling to fill out the proper forms. This is the information age and data can be bought and sold. Quickly you will find big data finding some use fo this data. If only to allow anyone to search your license plate and find out where you've been in the last 6 months. (your spouse, your stalker, etc). That sort of process is a good way to collect marketing data, as you can quickly associate a Google or Apple account once the sucker installs an app to access your stupid website.
Some people go abroad for six month contracts. Leave their home exactly as it is with the car in the driveway. An individual should have the right to say whether they want their data retained or not. But then anyone who refuses to have their data retained is then a suspect.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
6 months is an edge case which is effectively a logic fallacy.
The points of WHY to keep the data need to be determined first. If its for tickets then delete it after review (except for the offender until after court). If its for something else then that something else first needs defined and why it benefits society.
Does this mean I can request data on the whereabouts of my wife and the government has to help me? She hasn't had a good beating in ages.
How are they going to enforce this? The only way to catch them is through illegal hacking or sloppy handling of the data.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
If the government has data I feel as if i should have access to that data. After all, the public pays for that data to be collected. And yes, I can see how that data could easily be misused to plan or commit crimes. On the other hand maybe i need to know where my teenage kids go or perhaps a wife might be straying. My neighbor may seem a bit off and i may want to see where he goes and if he really works at the job he claims to do. I even question whether anyone has a legitimate reason to have any secrets or privacy at all. In today's America I am willing to bet that the underground and black market economies are as large as the official economies. It is a sick state of affairs when any individual needs to have off the books income and the like. How can we correct that situation if we can not focus on individuals and drag the reality, kicking and screaming, into the light of day. Today quite a few young men will ask girls to marry them. Some of those girls have a serious history of really radical behaviors and they hide it well. Wouldn't it be nice to see where she parked he car three years ago? And in turn she could check you out as well. If the Truth is to set us free should we not encourage the truths to be known to all?
What do you have to hide? You're driving on a public roadway. You have no expectation of privacy. I should be able to paint a billboard with a photo-realistic rendering of whoever happens to be on the street at that moment in time. For perpetuity.
This is just a bunch of drama queening over a perceived loss of privacy. You had none on a roadway, and you will now have none in the future. Worry more about your phone tracking your transit of private venues.
This is an unexpected and far-reaching ruling, potentially out-lawing automated licence-plate readers: there is a California law (like in many complex states) that forbids accessing the registration database without valid specific reason (investigation, lawsuit). Basically because cops were picking up women. To justify scanners, LAPD said they were investigating the whole city, but that has now been overturned.
Now that "investigating everything" has been tossed, a number of cases that started from this dragnet can be challenged and evidence excluded as "fruit of the poisoned vine". Expect more parallel construction from LEOs.
My thoughts are
1 Allow collection of data (they are going to anyway)
2 cycle detailed data off the "hot servers" after 6 months but keep Make/Model/Color level data
3 drop ALL DATA into a cold server after 2 years (thaw out data only on a three judge signed court order)
4 ANY crimes get performed using the data then the data techs get charged with aiding and abetting
5 Civil suits resulting on the data getting misused have an automatic 3X multiplier
Let's start with your credit card number/expiry, full name and DoB.
Just making sure you're not a terrorist.
The issue is that the difference in degree becomes a difference in kind.
There have always been the ability to make note of licence plates by individual patrolmen. Now it can be automatically cross referenced so that your social and political affiliations can be estimated easily. Imagine how easy it would be for union organization to be tracked, or that you visited a psychologist or cancer specialist.
If you think that this information won't be abused by people in power please, please open a history book.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
Really, I'm serious. The world will still turn and the sun will still rise in the morning. The only real purpose
of plates is to track you. The vehicle already has a VIN.
A body dump is found and the scene dated to five years ago.. The retention time is more of the question of resources and the stage of deploying those cameras to give a sufficient information to draw conclusions where innocents are not unnecessary targeted. But, ACLU is right about the threat assuming the levels of police corruption and organized crime are high.
If you think that this information won't be abused by people in power please, please open a history book.
Police individuals have been known to use this data to track potential dates, and ex-partners. Sure anyone can hire a private investigator, but making this too easy for a segment of the population is just asking for trouble. In theory, this is a terrible idea. In practice, it's tragic, because the practice seems to be worse than the theory.
Those who leave for 6 months don't leave their stuff unattended, they put their vehicles in storage or give them to friends and loved ones to watch while they are gone. I live near Fort Bragg where soldiers leave all the time, they don't just up and leave their stuff like unless they wanted them stolen as soon as someone knows they are out of town for 6-9 months.
If they left like that for that long, even if the vehicle was left alone, it would be in a little worse for wear after sitting for that long without being driven and exposed to the elements.
The intelligent ones are worried about Feds, the people cops actually work for. The problem with not keeping license plate data secret is now EVERYONE has WARRANTLESS ACCESS. Dumb-asses..
Suppose the cops are investigating a series of murders that have taken place over 5 years and finally have a suspect in those cases. The suspect has given a statement that he was in different locations from where and when the murders occurred. By analyzing the license plate data and searching for the suspect's car that he was known to drive at the time, the police could either verify, or discover inconsistencies in the suspect's story. For example, if the suspect says he was in a different state at the time of one of the murders, but a license plate scan shows that his car was on a highway just two miles heading away from the murder scene at the time when it was estimated that it took place, then that would be a circumstantial piece of evidence used to knocks a hole in the suspect's story. If it turns out the suspect's car was in the vicinity of the other killings, then it becomes even more damning. It still is circumstantial, but it can be used to follow other leads, such as checking stoplight camera footage, or ATM video, or convenience store video, etc.
If the data can be anonymized until such time as it is needed in an investigation, then I don't see a problem with the longer data retention.
>Imagine how easy it would be for union organization to be tracked, or that you visited a psychologist or cancer specialist.
LOL, you can get all that information just from scanning a license plate? Surveillance society? Getting there (at least in the cities). Panopticon? Not even close.
Is to fix the DMV for temporary holds on registration, and allow the person to flag their own car as non-operating for the period they will be gone.
If nobody is going to be using the car, this would ensure their car would be flagged immediately if in operation. And if by some chance they plan to have someone else using their car during that period, obviously that person should be responsible for calling it in stolen thanks to periodic checkups.
Or your regional license plate recording law enforcement agency, and you won't have to request it.
Seriously, that is at least 1/4-1/2 of the concern here. Law enforcement has been abusing access to other private data like this for years, from checking up on spouses/potential dating partners, to ex-wives, to kids they don't have custody of, you name it.
The real solution would be to cull law enforcement for only the highest caliber individuals with actual senses of integrity, honesty, law enforcement, etc. Instead of ones who often see the world as us vs them, or we're above the law because we enforce the law.
That's the crux of the problem. I'm OK with them collecting the data. I'm even OK with them holding it for a few months (2-5 years seems excessive). What I'm not OK with is them (or the public) being able to access the database willy nilly to look up any license plate they want. The system should be behind lock and key, and require a warrant before they can search for a specific license plate. Or maybe a wildcard search for a partial plate at a certain location around a certain time. Or a match search if the same plate appears at multiple locations at specific times, which spits out only the plates which match that criteria, none of the other plates.
But the ACLU is always arguing from a point of potential abuse of these systems, rather than actual document abuse. There have been reported cases of cops checking up on ex's and other abuses of that caliber, but I don't think they have been that numerous as to diminish the usefulness of the data with aiding an investigation into the scenario you just described, AC. The usual problem is the abuse associated with the methods of gathering the data in the first place, not necessarily the abuse of the data that was legally collected.
We need to focus on the real privacy issues. The US government is collecting our PII in areas where there *is* an expectation of privacy; on our own computers, telephones, and routers (see Snowden, et al). Allowing everyone to have access to the data from public roadways is better than only law enforcement (see The Transparent Society, David Brin). Even without LPR, that ship had sailed anyway (see toll transponders).
If you can keep track of your political opponent, how will our government function?
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
What I really want to know is what they are truly doing with the data
Heavy analysis, archival, patterns of life detection. Vehicle 12 spotted plate X at location L at 7:30PM on Wednesday. Vehicle 18 spotted plate X at location Q at 6:30AM on Friday. Red light camera 327 saw plate Z at 5:00PM on Sunday, different driver than usual as per basic recognition algos. Collect enough data frames and you have good information.
Eventually I can make some pretty strong guesses about where vehicles will be and what their drivers' lifestyles may be like, and that system could be co-opted by units on the field with software to process observed plates automatically. Get a little "ding!" and a toast popup on the in-car tablet that the car in front of you is an extreme anomaly, you should pull it over for emissions checking or some BS reason to give a once over and collect further info.
But it can't be anonymized in any way that would still make it useful for investigative purposes. A plate number is an identifier. It is impossible to anonymize an identifier in such a way that it can be consistently rehashed from the original value to the same "anonymized" value every time, but in such a way that someone with access to the original value cannot effectively de-anonymize the data at will. If there's a way for the license plate readers to convert the plate number into a consistent identifier, then the police can perform the same conversion just as easily, so it isn't really anonymized from the police. If there isn't a way to do so, then it isn't useful for the police to have the anonymized data, because there's no longer any way to determine whether two "anonymized" values refer to the same car.
And if the intent is to hash it in such a way that you can look up a specific car but can't easily see who was near a particular location, that won't prevent abuse, either, unless you don't have traffic cameras or other storage that would contain the unencrypted plate information (even for a short time). After all, to unmask a hashed plate number, all you would have to do is watch for a particular hashed plate to pop up somewhere, then look at the unhashed plates in that spot, checking each plate until you find the one that hashes to that value. Although that would be harder, it still would not require a judge to issue an order or otherwise force external oversight into the investigative process in any meaningful way, at least from a technical standpoint.
The best you could realistically do would be to discard the complete data and store only a colliding hash in you throw away everything but the last two digits, thus allowing you to say yes or no to the question of whether a car with those last two digits was in a given area at a given time, but not which of the millions of cars with those last two digits were there. This would make it harder to use for tracking, but would also make it less useful for investigative purposes, providing only sufficient grounds for getting a judicial order to compel access to the complete (unhashed) records.
Realistically, the options are either A. don't keep the records, or B. keep the records offline, in a vault, with a judge's order required to remove one of the tapes from the vault, and the key used to encrypt it kept in the independent custody of an antagonistic organization, e.g. the police have the tapes, but major news media outlets have control over the private key required to decrypt them, split in such a way that a certain number of outlets have to agree before you can reconstruct the entire private key.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
By scanning it in the right places, you can establish patterns that strongly imply those things, assuming the psychologist or cancer specialist is in a clinic dedicated to that specialty and not in a general hospital. You can also determine that your husband or wife is in a particular neighborhood on Friday nights and not at work as he or she has claimed, thus leading you to discover that your husband or wife is having an affair. You can determine whether clusters of adjacent houses won't have anyone nearby to report someone breaking in and stealing everything. (Just be sure to cover your plates a few blocks away.) And so on.
The general public gaining access to such a database would be a privacy nightmare. And as a rule, if disclosure of information would be a big enough disaster, the right solution is to not retain the data, or where possible, to not create the data in the first place.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Except the data was already accessible. Lawyers were already able to buy access to this data. And private companies' as well, because besides the cops, there are private companies driving around with ALPR cameras building their own databases. What do you think they were planning to do with that data, keep it to themselves ?
But the ACLU is always arguing from a point of potential abuse of these systems, rather than actual document abuse.
Given enough time (and usually not very long), the probability that potential abuse will become actual abuse approaches 1. ACLU has the right idea here. It's based on a comprehension of history, especially recent history.
I would argue its a sick state of affairs anyone needs "on the books income" there should be no income recording. We only need consumptive side taxes and most government functions like waste pickup should simply be fee for service. The federal government should stick to its constitutional mandates. Its total budget should probably not be greater than and of the higher population states (which will grow to do a lot of what the feds are doing now).
The federal government should have no power to tax individuals or business only power to tax states, to again provide its constitutionally mandated responsibilities, setting weights and measures, defense, etc.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Perfect. Let's just make salary data available so that everyone can know what everyone else makes, and watch as jealousy consumes the nation. And now that we can get those fingerprints from the DMV database, we can crack everybody's cell phone trivially. Awesome! Oh, and the government knows what church you donate money to, so that makes religious discrimination much easier and much harder to detect.
Need I continue to list data that the government has but shouldn't be public? How about the schematics to nuclear power plants? Launch codes for nuclear missile silos? Encryption keys for military communications? Coordinates of safe houses? Current addresses of people in the witness protection program?
As you can see, good counterexamples are numerous, important, and obvious.
Only because the risk is so high, and thus, the cost of transactions. Were those same black-market transactions legal, they would be lost in the noise.
Yes, if she was driving a car formerly owned by He-Man, I definitely would want to know about it. :-D
But if you mean her car, then no, it would not be nice. It would strike me as creepy, psycho, stalker behavior. The sorts of people who want that level of access to everyone's history are often precisely the people who should not be allowed to have it. As soon as you allow someone that level of access, they will find ways to use it to manipulate and control people.
For example, it is relatively trivial to cherry-pick data to paint unflattering pictures that will embarrass you, even if you have done nothing wrong. Between property crimes and violent crimes, a crime is reported about every ten minutes somewhere in San Francisco. If you have a car, the probability of your car being near a significant number of them approaches one by the time you have lived there for a year. So you could use this, potentially, to implicate anyone for anything.
And that doesn't even consider whether people should have a right to privacy in their personal lives, in their medical history, etc. We have explicit laws to prevent disclosure of a person's medical history precisely because there is a good reason for a right to privacy in those areas. Yet if you have full access to plate data, you can show a pattern of someone going to an oncology center for a chemo appointment every n weeks, and suddenly you know something that you really should not have a right to know.
And what of that bride to be? What right do you have to know who every one of her ex-boyfriends was? You could get that from plate data. Correlate which plates appeared in the same places at the same times week after week, and you now know intimate details. Oh, and that one time when she spent a couple of extended stops at an abortion clinic followed by suddenly no longer seeing that guy... well, now you know that, too.
You definitely don't have a right to know everything about everyone—even the people closest to you. What your bride-to-be chooses to disclose to you is her decision, and hers alone. That is as it should be. The past is the past, and unless your bride-to-be poses a real risk of causing you harm in the present, you should leave it in the past. And if she does, you shouldn't be marrying her in the first place. More to the point, if you don't trust her, you shouldn't be marrying her in the first place, because either she is untrustworthy or you are untrusting, and either one will eventually lead to the marriage self destructing. Distrust leads to more distrust as you discover things about the ot
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Why should we trust these groups? The more people that have this data the more potential for abuse. If anything, let them have supervised access with strict security preventing them from having a copy
It's not that people don't want to be seen when they venture out in public. It's that they don't want to be tracked. There's a difference.
Just because something is nice to have, that doesnt mean its right to have.
"His name was James Damore."
Government apologist.
Choose voluntaryism ftw.
They are datamining your ass in order to keep financial and political and ethical / moral rule over you.
You give up your absolute right to privacy and you become a slave to them.
Examine voluntaryism, Slave.
A friend in Missouri had an old Camaro stolen - almost certainly for a joy ride because it was old. He thought he'd get it back quickly because they are usually abandoned at the side of the road afterwards. He checked with the police several times to see if they had recovered it to which they responded in the negative. A few months later, he went ahead and bought a new car.
Nearly a year after the car was stolen, the police impound contacted him asking if he was the owner of a car they had. It was his car. It had been in the impound since the day after it was stolen. They actually asked him to pay the impound fee for all of that time.
Do not for a moment believe that police departments really care about recovering stolen vehicles unless, perhaps, the victim is influential. Do not use such trivialities to justify these databases. They will not be used for that. Too much paperwork for things covered by insurance.
The points of WHY to keep the data need to be determined first.
a) Terrorism
b) Children
c) Because we're the man and we need to show the whiners who's in charge.
The new law will be passed within weeks, just watch...
No sig today...
I would put it up to a referendum and be far more draconian. Force every vehicle to be monitored via a transponder. 24/7. The benefits would outweigh the negatives.
It would make most crime near impossible. You can't rob a bank or a liquor store since they can track you. It would be impossible to steal a car or even drive without insurance. Any vehicle without a transponder is instantly noticed and it would be hard to impersonate another vehicle since both vehicles would need to originate from the same location and the other couldn't move. You would also notice the vehicles moving into location before switching signals. Traffic tickets would be automatic and suddenly everyone would become a good driver. Benefits for driverless cars. Child abductions? Most homicides?
Bad for the cops and cities but good for citizens is they will have to fire 60% of their police forces which are dedicated to traffic stops. The cities will no longer have the income from traffic violations because again people would instantly all become good drivers once tickets are automatic.
I DO THINK governments needs a single privacy/data branch where all data retention is done through them. They install the equipment and record the data. For such car location data I would limit government monitoring to a single month without a warrant but limit it to specific targeted searches. All all data access is logged and every citizen is notified after a certain period of time of the data access.
For child abuse I would do similar things but require a warrant. First an accusation. Then a warrant. Then a special government crew installs hidden cameras and the abuse is recorded. After a reasonable period of time if no actionable abuse is observed then the cameras are removed and the person notified of the allegation and the false accuser is reasonably blacklisted against future claims if not incarcerated themselves.
Certain uses of motoring is reasonable.
that begin in the subject line?
Headline: "US Cops Can't Keep License Plate Data Scans Secret Without Reason, Court Rules"
Reality: "California Cops Can't Keep License Plate Data Scans Secret Without Reason, Court Rules"
The ruling was made by the California Supreme Court. It doesn't affect anything outside of California, nor does it affect the Federal Government.