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EFF, MuckRock Partner To See How Local Police Are Trading Your Car's Location (eff.org)
v3rgEz writes: The Electronic Frontier Foundation and transparency non-profit MuckRock helped file over a thousand public records requests, looking into how local police departments were trading away sensitive data on where you drive and park, picked up by their use of automated license plate recognition devices. They've just published the results of those requests, including looking at how hundreds of departments freely share that data with hundreds of other organizations -- often with no public oversight. Explore the data yourself, or, if your town isn't yet in their database, requests its information free on MuckRock and they'll file a request for it. "[Automated license plate readers (ALPR)] are a combination of high-speed cameras and optical character recognition technology that can identify license plates and turn them into machine-readable text," reports the EFF. "What makes ALPR so powerful is that drivers are required by law to install license plates on their vehicles. In essence, our license plates have become tracking beacons. After the plate data is collected, the ALPR systems upload the information to a central a database along with the time, date, and GPS coordinates. Cops can search these databases to see where drivers have traveled or to identify vehicles that visited certain locations. Police can also add license plates under suspicion to 'hot lists,' allowing for real-time alerts when a vehicle is spotted by an ALPR network."
Its often not the police collecting the data, the police are often merely subscribers to the commercial private databases. These database are filled by other private sources, bail bondsmen, reposessors, etc. These private entities will literally cruise up and down the isles of parking lots at various public venues -- malls, stadiums, walmart, etc -- scanning/recording plates and waiting for statistics to find them a car/person of interest. As a bonus they also sell all their collected data to the commercial private databases.
To think that this is largely a law enforcement effort or a law enforcement database is to totally misunderstand what has been happening.
No warrant is needed for public information available from a private source. That's the "beauty" of the current system for law enforcement, why they like to merely be a subscriber.
Originally the license plate was there to show your vehicle was registered, enabling you to the full right of way along with other vehicles. Only later did it become a tool of the police.
The problem here is we've had government push increasingly draconian and abusive law in order to punish people for doing what was unenforcable. Now that it's the future, we can enforce those laws, and then the government begins putting people in jail or fining them for all they're worth for minor offenses and it feels good to them for awhile. Then the feel-good ends when the widespread effects are felt on society and they realize they've become monsters.
E.G. Indiana adopted $1,000 speeding tickets about a decade ago; the police might like reaping it in, but when businesses and government abuse people, they can put them out on the street or get them to the point they don't care. Then they have a pension funding problem, and a crime problem, and a drug use problem, all of which are far more severe. As we've seen in Chicago, the community has zero tolerance for the police doing their jobs because what they are doing is not working; they aren't fixing poverty and bad habits with handcuffs and making statistics look good isn't helping either. You have one perspective that they arrested Jamal because he's a coke fiend, and another perspective that you don't arrest him because that's all he'll ever become because society was so bad.
The police, and the governments that fund them, are beginning to wake up to that, since its their lives on the line. They are keenly aware traffic tickets can result in loss of life and people may start packing because they expect an altercation with the police over tickets they cannot pay. It is really sad things have come to that.
If its easy to enforce, the infractions should be smaller and a matter of public records and debate. Furthermore, any widespread surviellance of the public that a municipality provides needs to be publicly accessible. Furthermore, the public needs to begin viewing fines the same as bribes, because that's precisely how they operate, and we need to begin taking fines out of our system of law enforcement entirely as an antiquated and ineffective form of enforcement, same as debtors prisons or passing laws that are totally unenforcable like prohibition. The police need to view their income as a result of taxes, not bullying people into paying bribe money.
Don't know why the parking tickets guys have such bad luck, when the Repo Men seem to have great success with a giant private license plate scanning network.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley