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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."
Isn't this the point of a license plate?
EFF
In the UK, ALPR's will often lookup the license plate in some database to find out whether the car is insured, whether road tax is being paid and whether it has an MOT test, so the police can immediately stop a car that fails, and all motorists other than those stopped appreciate it very much.
The police can't even find cars that owe thousands of dollars in tickets. And that is using plate recognition devices. I doubt if the data is very useful to identify individual car's travels.
Interesting. If you eyeball the list of states and localities that are doing the tracking, most are in "blue" states. Why is the left so interested in where we're driving?
Let's get this out in the open and have a discussion about it. Let's share all the info that is tracked and shared so people can be smarter about protecting themselves.
TL;DR
Companies put tracking pixels on websites and share the info with each other.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Texas and Georgia are not blue states
All the more reason to use public transit + walking.
Well, except for the coming wave of facial recognition. Shit.
who gives a shit
he said most... not all..
Texas and Georgia being on the list doesn't make his statement untrue.
Texas and Georgia are not blue states
but a significant portion of the population of both states are California and New York transplants that long for all the shit they left behind
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.
If the public were to get a system up and running that tracked Law Enforcement vehicles and distributed this information to anyone who wanted to see it in real time, they would pitch an absolute fit about it.
Yet, it's perfectly acceptable to push such technology upon everyone else. :|
I wonder if LE understands it's this hypocrisy that creates such hatred between LE and everyone else.
Knowing that MuckRock and EFF are trying to hold government accountable is laudable. I am glad they are doing it. But if someone wants me to get all worked up about it, I ran out of outrage back during the Reagan administration.
For an entity like "California Department of Justice - Bureau of Firearms" that only scanned 3 (three) plates, I wonder what the cost of their system is? Or what the system is? Are they reporting manually sighted and called in plates? Their success rate is one of the highest 33% with 1 (one) of the 3 (three) being a hit.
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
Not a perfect solution, but it might be possible to legally obfuscate one's license plate when parked. I've seen cops in my community slowly driving up and down the rows in a couple of local mall parking lots. There's no question they're scanning plate numbers. I'm sure the day will come when they have scanners mounted everywhere there's a light pole, but for right now the cops in my area need to actually drive around to do their data harvesting.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
The Car License Plate is the property of the State Governments. The police are entitled to a clear view of the plate and have the authorization to remove impediments to a clear view. You can get a ticket for this type of action in many jurisdictions.
Probably that only applies to viewing via the eyes of the police officer. Assuming that is the case, one merely needs a technology that can block electronic viewing without obstructing human eyes. If such technology were to become widespread, law would probably be introduced to halt its use or technologies developed to circumvent it.
Whether such technology can be developed is entirely another issue, one on which I am neither qualified or informed enough to comment.
the glare of the infrared flash reflected by hairspray applied to the numberplate helps to make the plate unreadable for electronic and analog cameras.
When license plates were introduced, there were no automatic license plate scanners. Now there are, so things are different.
Automatic plate number scanners aren't a requirement for surveillance, they only "lazy-fy" the work which would have historically needed to be done by actual human police officer doing the spotting and - later when that appeared - the CCTV footage reviewing.
Which also means that any criminal worth their salt has already a parade: counterfeit license plate (preferrabily, multiple of them, to swap them) in order to muddy their track.
Which also means that by automating the license plate reading :
- they slightly increase the possibility of automatically observing a "clash" (multiple vehicle popping up with the same number in different part of the country/continent, numbers that don't match the vehicle they are supposed to be registered to, and some number not being seen after some video check-point and another different number popping up on the exact same type of vehicle at the next point). Things which were already posiible, but much more work intensive.
- they dramatically increase the risk of tracking random people on the street and destroy their privacy (a computer database has way much more way to leak than a human reviewer), mostly those who don't exchange their plates (i.e. most of the non-criminal people). But yeah, nowadays "innocent until proven guilty" is only a vague notion.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The state of Michigan says that their cameras are for monitoring traffic and road conditions and that the cameras "do not record data". Yeah, sure.
Passionately Indifferent
Anybody ready to leave yet?
This is just yet another pebble on Mount Example, showing how the most reasonable solution is violently eliminating all things marked police.
This is why so many parking lots say, no back-end parking.... it to facilitate the scanning of plates and decals.
he said most... not all.. Texas and Georgia being on the list doesn't make his statement untrue.
Given there are only five states on the list CA, IL, GA, TX, IN and only two of them are clearly blue. I'd say the state that it is dominated by blue states is bullshit.