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The US Government Is Using Road Signs Showing Drivers How Fast They're Going To Capture License Plate Data (qz.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the keep-your-eyes-peeled dept.

Zorro shares a report from Quartz: According to recently released U.S. federal contracting data, the Drug Enforcement Administration will be expanding the footprint of its nationwide surveillance network with the purchase of "multiple" trailer-mounted speed displays "to be retrofitted as mobile LPR [License Plate Reader] platforms." The DEA is buying them from RU2 Systems Inc., a private Mesa, Arizona company. How much it's spending on the signs has been redacted. Two other, apparently related contracts, show that the DEA has hired a small machine shop in California, and another in Virginia, to conceal the readers within the signs. An RU2 representative said the company providing the LPR devices themselves is a Canadian firm called Genetec.

4 of 218 comments (clear)

  1. They do not care how fast by SuperKendall · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The point of these things is not to measure speed, itâ(TM)s to disguise tracking cameras as something else you normally encounter on a road and do not think of recording anything. They are trying to get a sense of where people are using cars that may be evading known traffic cameras.

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
    1. Re:They do not care how fast by garcia · · Score: 5, Insightful

      My problem with these isn't even the 'being tracked' issue, it's that the Government (state or federal) was not meant to be a revenue generation machine. Unfortunately, governments use these tools not for safety, as they claim--especially in the instances of speed/red light/LPRs, but for revenue generation. They send automated civil fines for speed/light violations (potentially taken entirely out of context with no recourse) or to fine owners for any number of violations related to license plates.

      We have to decide what levels we're willing to accept as intrusion. Papers please are not acceptable to me nor are these civil, out of context, fines. YMMV.

  2. Vandalize them by mapkinase · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That's all. We should start a national campaign of vandalizing this bullshit good-driver tax.

    It's very well known that all the speed controlling devices are located in the areas where people are most likely to speed and people are most likely to speed in the areas where it is the SAFEST to speed.

    The parkway with a healthy forest devider three lane on each side that has typically 50 mph limit in California is getting a 35 mph speed trap for no reason but to rob the drivers.

    Vandalize them. Destroy them. A la guerre comme a la guerre.

    --
    I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
  3. Redacted? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    How much it's spending on the signs has been redacted.

    That right there. That disgusts me. How dare a government hide such information from the voting public that's paying for it all.