I can't say much about the Republicans, there are still too many for me to really break this down effectively, but I have put the Democrat candidates' policies on a number of issues (technology included) on my blog. Obama clearly breaks away for general policies, although there are some areas that all (well, now both) of them could be more clear (or give any policies).
1) TURN OFF UPnP! Anyone who has been listening to Security Now has known about this issue for the past two years. UPnP is by design insecure. If it is turned off it can't be used to attack your router. The only reason to have it is so that you don't have to configure anything when a program decides it needs to be open to anyone contacting it. Personally, I would rather have control over when someone else can talk to my computer.
2) Browse with No-Script (or similar settings in the other browsers). If JavaScript and Flash are blocked as you are browsing sites and only turned on when you need them, you can't be hit by drive by attacks like this one. Heck, I've seen maybe 2-3 banners in the past couple months with a combination of No-script, Adblock, and Flashblock.
3) Change the default settings of your router. This won't prevent the attack described necessarily, at least without the above steps, but it will make sure those steps aren't for nothing. The most important thing this prevents is a CSRF attack to turn UPnP back on, even if you have it off. This also would require not staying logged into your router when you don't need to be (and routers without gaping CSRF holes built in that don't need passwords)
I don't know what sites you go to, but there is only one website I ever see that prompt for, and that is an intranet website. It would be an issue if this could be used to get saved passwords more easily, which I haven't seen anything about yet, but that is easily prevented by using the secure login plug-in.
Except that Google isn't isolating themselves simply to the dominant browser. It works well with Firefox, Safari and others. Google is not doing what Microsoft did with the x86 platform.
What does this have to do with Google's take over of online advertising? Google isolating itself would hurt more than anything. MS isolating itself to x86 was a business move that helped it grow because the other competitors to x86 were weakening, not growing stronger as Firefox and Safari are doing now against IE in the web sphere.
Besides, the web is a wide open platform. If you can do better than Google, you have a much cheaper distribution path than Microsoft ever had. It's not the same kind of business at all.
You may have a cheaper distribution path, but you have the same difficulty breaking into the market. Do you think that website X would rather go with a large, well established advertiser such as Google or DoubleClick, or with Advertiser Joe Shmo to serve ads on their page? You are likely to get a very small niche along the lines of Linux at best, but you have very little chance of getting more than a couple percent of the internet's ad revenue, even if your product is light years ahead of Google's tools.
Isn't this called a remote control? Just because they moved it into a phone, etc. doesn't change that. I think they already have these.
The only problem would be that now a hacker could take control of your robot from anywhere in the world. Might have worked out better for Syndrome if he had gone that way, but sounds like a waste of effort to me...
If they wanted to, they could. Its much more likely that the government will try to use this to confiscate (and destroy, the law doesn't allow for return of the property) anonymizing routers like tor. It wouldn't surprise me for this to be a back door to remove any vestige of privacy from the web.
How about M$ adjusting Windows to operate on the laptop? There is nothing preventing them from doing so.
Pushing new hardware requirements on OLPC, after all that they had to go through to get the hardware they are using for the price they finally had to go with, will require probably a redesign and I doubt M$ is willing to do anything to help with that...
Wow, you really greased that one. Recognizing the fact that terrorist organizations use the internet (Al-Qaeda and other less well known organizations do use message boards, chat rooms and other internet based tools to aid in recruiting and planning, it is a known fact) does not mean that Congress wants to shut down or censor the internet.
You also very effectively ignored a later finding:
(8) Any measure taken to prevent violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence and homegrown terrorism in the United States should not violate the constitutional rights, civil rights, or civil liberties of United States citizens or lawful permanent residents.
Now, we will need to watch that they follow through on that, but that they acknowledge the fine line that they will need to walk gives me some hope.
A back door in AES would have been found by now. There are enough brilliant security experts hacking on the big public schemes, with full access to the algorithm (it is open source after all), that something would have been found by now. The only weakness known in AES is weak passkeys.
Locking your files with the password "12345" is about as brilliant as it has been for the past 20+ years.
So is this an argument for not carrying those weapons, or that those weapons should be the first line of defense to prevent them from falling into the wrong hands?
No. It's fair to call a straw man when someone puts words in someone else's mouth and then defeats that argument. In this example, (I did not RTFA, nor anything else related to this btw)if Microsoft did not say anything about performance, but this group tore MS apart because of a lack of performance improvement, it would be a straw man because this group is attacking a claim MS never made. On the other hand, if MS did say performance would be improved, it wouldn't be. From what others have said, and my own personal expectations of this SP, this is probably a straw man. I wouldn't expect a service pack designed to fix security holes and other issues would by default improve performance significantly. Service packs are, generally, a roll up of all the previous security updates, plus any additional security or features they want to add.
An example of a straw man fallacy:
Person A: I don't think children should play on busy streets.
Person B: I think that it would be foolish to lock children up all day.
In this case, like others have said, they would have to prove that you are still hiding something. With the way True Crypt works, that is impossible. A doubly encrypted partition, like Truecrypt uses, looks no different from a singly encrypted partition. You can't just say, "I know they have something else they are hiding, but I have no proof, throw them in jail." Properly encrypted data should be indistinguishable from random gibberish. The only proof that you have a True Crypt partition in the first place is the fact that the program is installed on your system.
The only problem with this theory is the fact that it is inconsequential for ISPs to catch a number of internet based illegal activities. More complicated for things like kiddie porn would require a breach of privacy (I don't believe they should be able to actively view what we are doing online), but pretty simple for things like DDoS or spam do not. In these instances, it is very easy to prevent them without not infringing on privacy, by watching the volume of traffic and sudden fluctuations or blocking some ports, which some already do. In these instances, I don't believe that ISPs are out of bounds when they protect us from them. I, personally, draw the line at examining the contents of the packets, where it would infringe on my privacy. To draw a real world comparison, it is not illegal to read something written on the envelope (i.e. packet headers) but they are not allowed to randomly open the envelopes and read the contents.
The problem is that the "evolutionary imperative" in these instances are much more strong on the rest of the population than it is on the people who leave their machines open. They just suffer from a slow computer, and often blame the manufacturer/OS/etc. not themselves. We however have to deal with spam reaching critical mass, DDoS, etc.
Unfortunately, if you want to leave it to "evolution", as far as "evolve or die" goes, we are the ones that will need to do it, not the unlearned.
Actually, you are starting on the wrong side. In the words of Carl Sagan - "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof." Homeopathy needs to prove that it can work, contrary to all the scientific theory against it. There has not been a good scientific study that proved that a homeopathic have any affect. The only evidence homeopathic providers offer is anecdotal, which holds no actual weight as scientific evidence. Just because someone claims they got over a cold after taking a homeopathic 'cure' doesn't mean the 'cure' was what cured them. That is the logical fallacy of post-hoc ergo proctor-hoc (number 13 here).
True homeopathic cures dissolve some random chemical/herb/whatever in water, then continue to dilute it until there is none left. The providers claim that an "essence" is left, that water remembers what was in it, but if that were true we could drink regular tap water and be cured of diphtheria, and last I checked, diphtheria hadn't been cured...
Are there any facts associated with this article? It appears that this is just one group's claim, backed up by nothing other than their opinion.
The facts of the matter are:
The current mixed method voting options are very prone to error. Most are in a non-human readable format (marked, or worse punched, dots on a piece of paper). And all are paper ballot trails.
Electronic voting, with closed source machines (and even to some extent with open source machines), is inherently insecure if the vote count that matters is only stored electronically.
Paper voting trails are reliably valid under three conditions: The people voting look at the papers and verify that it reflects their vote. The ballots are secured the same as any other paper ballot. The paper ballots are regularly and thoroughly audited after, during and in between each election.
with all this, a well mandated, accessible, audited electronic voting system is more secure than previous voting methods. There is no excuse for these companies to have created and sold the craptastic voting machines they did. There is no reason for Diebold, an ATM maker, to have only made voting machines that had no paper trail capabilities. If they tried to sell something like that toa bank, their contract would have been dropped in a heartbeat, but election boards across the country didn't blink an eye. It is time that there be a nationwide standard that works within a degree of certainty. Electronic voting machines with paper audit trails are accessible, human readable, and as secure as anything we currently use. You don't have questions of "Did this voter actually mark a circle?" or "Which of these half erased circles did the voter mean?" or "That chad isn't punched all the way through, so I will just do it for them because I know what they meant." It is very hard for an auditor to see "President: Al Gore" printed on a receipt in human readable form and say that the voter chose George Bush.
I expect that by the time DNA is used as evidence against a person in court it has been through several increasingly comprehensive levels of testing.
You have far more faith in the system than I do. The only people that are likely to get that sort of testing are those who can pay for it out of their own pocket, or are able to convince organizations to fund the testing for them. As it stands now, the only people (maybe just most people, I don't know how it is in every state) who are being released on DNA evidence have civil rights agencies paying for the testing.
For example that the person with the match had the opportunity...
That is true, however, being in the same city with 22 million people as residents (NYC) will give you the "opportunity" to be in the right place. Without an alibi, you could be up the proverbial creek pretty quickly.
Actually, DNA is only unique to a certain percent (I don't have numbers, nor am I a geneticist). Outside of that percent, the full genome can be repeated. For the sake of arguement, lets say thats a 1 in a billion chance of a duplicate, as others have posited. Thats fine odds when trying to determine innocence as its not very likely that the person who perpetrated a rape or other crime has the same DNA sequence that I do.
However, there are two problems with this line of logic:
A. When DNA is matched, as others have said, the entire genome is not sequenced, only a snippet. This leads to a much higher rate of duplicates. However, this still doesn't completely rule DNA evidence out as a likely use for proving innocence/guilt.
B. As the database grows, the number of potential duplicates grows with it. This is the biggest weakness to the "collect everyone's DNA" theory of prosecution. True, its not likely that any one person in 1,000 has similar enough DNA for a criminal match, but if the database is 1,000,000, or the population of England (last check on Wikipedia over 50 million)chances are a lot higher. Factor in similarities between relatives and you have a big mess of false positives.
All of this ignores the fact that a simple mistake while doing the sequencing can completely screw this up, or the fact that retroviruses (the most famous being HIV) actually change your DNA (again, not being a geneticist, I don't know to what degree this will happen).
Ok, your definition of integrity is not the same as mine. You hold up Miller as your model? As far as I could tell from watching all of the Plame madness, she withheld her source, not from a sense of integrity, but because a) she knew she would be released eventually, b) she needed to keep her sources in the White House so she could continue to sling her mud, and c) she was associated, personally, with many of the people who used the media to destroy Plame and Wilson. She had more to gain by staying silent than by talking. If she had had integrity, she would not have been a part of the Plame stuff to begin with.
I agree with what you are saying about those wanting to do serious journalism. Unfortunately, you won't find many of those people in the main stream media. Many of the journalists on NPR and PBS and for various other small and local publications do what you say. However, you don't see/hear these people on the evening news, or the 24 hour news sources. This is my complaint.
As far as Williams goes, I have great respect for him as a newscaster. Unfortunately, his reporting is restricted so that he can't present the facts, but instead is limited to point/counterpoint of what the Democrats/Republicans most recently said. He is able to let his personal views in with his off-hand comments, but most of his 20 minutes is scripted and edited.
I never said that the media was perfect, but back in the '50s most journalists (maybe not the editors or companies running the press) had integrity. Most of today's journalists wouldn't know integrity if it hit them in the face. Back then at least we had Murrow, et.al. Now we are lucky if Brian Williams actually gives us any facts to the story, and we are just screwed if we try to turn to the Coopers, Courics, or any morning news program...
Listen, ass-hole reporters are the price you pay for a free media.
False, they are the price you pay for a profit centered media. Back when the news was "free" you had reporters like Edward R. Murrow and the original Bernstein and Woodward that you so aptly mentioned. These journalists would report the news, and programs like Green Acres and Leave It to Beaver would make the money. Now conglomerates like ClearChannel, Viacom, Fox, and GE see the 30 minute evening news as underused advertising space. They sell out news time to "partners" (read company that stands to gain from you listening to this "article").
Newspapers are worse, being completely starved for cash. Every advertiser is so precious to them that alienating one large company could end the print cycle for a newspaper (almost). Imus is an example of that in the arena of radio. I don't agree with what he said, but I think he was always a dick. The only reason he lost his job was because he pissed of advertisers, not because he didn't deserve to have a program in the first place.
The GP's religion analogy was one I hadn't heard before, but it was fitting. He did paint with too broad a brush in calling for press restrictions. But I do agree that sensationalist, profit driven news should go the way of the dodo and the dinosaurs. Unfortunately I don't see that happening any time soon....
The part about the EULA is also technically true in the US as well, companies don't want you to know. Reverse engineering is 100% legal, EULA or no EULA. As far as being able to put OSX 10.5 on any system, you would have to personally reverse engineer it and do the installation yourself, distributing it to someone else would infringe on copyright and possibly patent laws.
Not exactly. Many other large, industrialized nations have "you protect mine, we'll protect yours" IP laws with the US. Thats why cheap knock-off drugs are illegal in most other countries, why you legally can't copy Windows and hand it out on the street in China (although thats not very well enforced there), etc.
Its not an issue with law and order; its an issue with those in control (in this case police departments) using their power, potentially, illegally. The ability to find stolen cars is fine; I would appreciate my stolen car being found quickly because of an ability to cross-reference passing license plates and a list of stolen cars. However, I believe that my right to travel (semi-)privately, without my every movement being tracked, should remain uninfringed. Yes, allow police officers to actively scan passing vehicle's license plates for a quick match. No, do not allow an automated system to be created to track every vehicle that passes and stores that information indefinitely for future data-mining, or more nefarious uses.
I don't know about the ACLU, but my personal objection to this is the fact that the data is being stored indefinately, thus tracking my every movement. That is an invasion of privacy. You have the right, and this has been defended in the Supreme Court, to travel anonymously. This is very important to the right to congregate freely and free speech. If this information was used immediately, a la radar guns, there wouldn't be a problem. But the fact that this information is instead aggregated and stored forever is an issue.
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I can't say much about the Republicans, there are still too many for me to really break this down effectively, but I have put the Democrat candidates' policies on a number of issues (technology included) on my blog. Obama clearly breaks away for general policies, although there are some areas that all (well, now both) of them could be more clear (or give any policies).
1) TURN OFF UPnP! Anyone who has been listening to Security Now has known about this issue for the past two years. UPnP is by design insecure. If it is turned off it can't be used to attack your router. The only reason to have it is so that you don't have to configure anything when a program decides it needs to be open to anyone contacting it. Personally, I would rather have control over when someone else can talk to my computer.
2) Browse with No-Script (or similar settings in the other browsers). If JavaScript and Flash are blocked as you are browsing sites and only turned on when you need them, you can't be hit by drive by attacks like this one. Heck, I've seen maybe 2-3 banners in the past couple months with a combination of No-script, Adblock, and Flashblock.
3) Change the default settings of your router. This won't prevent the attack described necessarily, at least without the above steps, but it will make sure those steps aren't for nothing. The most important thing this prevents is a CSRF attack to turn UPnP back on, even if you have it off. This also would require not staying logged into your router when you don't need to be (and routers without gaping CSRF holes built in that don't need passwords)
I don't know what sites you go to, but there is only one website I ever see that prompt for, and that is an intranet website. It would be an issue if this could be used to get saved passwords more easily, which I haven't seen anything about yet, but that is easily prevented by using the secure login plug-in.
What does this have to do with Google's take over of online advertising? Google isolating itself would hurt more than anything. MS isolating itself to x86 was a business move that helped it grow because the other competitors to x86 were weakening, not growing stronger as Firefox and Safari are doing now against IE in the web sphere.
You may have a cheaper distribution path, but you have the same difficulty breaking into the market. Do you think that website X would rather go with a large, well established advertiser such as Google or DoubleClick, or with Advertiser Joe Shmo to serve ads on their page? You are likely to get a very small niche along the lines of Linux at best, but you have very little chance of getting more than a couple percent of the internet's ad revenue, even if your product is light years ahead of Google's tools.
Isn't this called a remote control? Just because they moved it into a phone, etc. doesn't change that. I think they already have these.
The only problem would be that now a hacker could take control of your robot from anywhere in the world. Might have worked out better for Syndrome if he had gone that way, but sounds like a waste of effort to me...
If they wanted to, they could. Its much more likely that the government will try to use this to confiscate (and destroy, the law doesn't allow for return of the property) anonymizing routers like tor. It wouldn't surprise me for this to be a back door to remove any vestige of privacy from the web.
How about M$ adjusting Windows to operate on the laptop? There is nothing preventing them from doing so.
Pushing new hardware requirements on OLPC, after all that they had to go through to get the hardware they are using for the price they finally had to go with, will require probably a redesign and I doubt M$ is willing to do anything to help with that...
Wow, you really greased that one. Recognizing the fact that terrorist organizations use the internet (Al-Qaeda and other less well known organizations do use message boards, chat rooms and other internet based tools to aid in recruiting and planning, it is a known fact) does not mean that Congress wants to shut down or censor the internet.
You also very effectively ignored a later finding:
Now, we will need to watch that they follow through on that, but that they acknowledge the fine line that they will need to walk gives me some hope.
A back door in AES would have been found by now. There are enough brilliant security experts hacking on the big public schemes, with full access to the algorithm (it is open source after all), that something would have been found by now. The only weakness known in AES is weak passkeys.
Locking your files with the password "12345" is about as brilliant as it has been for the past 20+ years.
So is this an argument for not carrying those weapons, or that those weapons should be the first line of defense to prevent them from falling into the wrong hands?
No. It's fair to call a straw man when someone puts words in someone else's mouth and then defeats that argument. In this example, (I did not RTFA, nor anything else related to this btw)if Microsoft did not say anything about performance, but this group tore MS apart because of a lack of performance improvement, it would be a straw man because this group is attacking a claim MS never made. On the other hand, if MS did say performance would be improved, it wouldn't be. From what others have said, and my own personal expectations of this SP, this is probably a straw man. I wouldn't expect a service pack designed to fix security holes and other issues would by default improve performance significantly. Service packs are, generally, a roll up of all the previous security updates, plus any additional security or features they want to add.
An example from the wikipedia article:
In this case, like others have said, they would have to prove that you are still hiding something. With the way True Crypt works, that is impossible. A doubly encrypted partition, like Truecrypt uses, looks no different from a singly encrypted partition. You can't just say, "I know they have something else they are hiding, but I have no proof, throw them in jail." Properly encrypted data should be indistinguishable from random gibberish. The only proof that you have a True Crypt partition in the first place is the fact that the program is installed on your system.
The only problem with this theory is the fact that it is inconsequential for ISPs to catch a number of internet based illegal activities. More complicated for things like kiddie porn would require a breach of privacy (I don't believe they should be able to actively view what we are doing online), but pretty simple for things like DDoS or spam do not. In these instances, it is very easy to prevent them without not infringing on privacy, by watching the volume of traffic and sudden fluctuations or blocking some ports, which some already do. In these instances, I don't believe that ISPs are out of bounds when they protect us from them. I, personally, draw the line at examining the contents of the packets, where it would infringe on my privacy. To draw a real world comparison, it is not illegal to read something written on the envelope (i.e. packet headers) but they are not allowed to randomly open the envelopes and read the contents.
The problem is that the "evolutionary imperative" in these instances are much more strong on the rest of the population than it is on the people who leave their machines open. They just suffer from a slow computer, and often blame the manufacturer/OS/etc. not themselves. We however have to deal with spam reaching critical mass, DDoS, etc.
Unfortunately, if you want to leave it to "evolution", as far as "evolve or die" goes, we are the ones that will need to do it, not the unlearned.
Actually, you are starting on the wrong side. In the words of Carl Sagan - "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof." Homeopathy needs to prove that it can work, contrary to all the scientific theory against it. There has not been a good scientific study that proved that a homeopathic have any affect. The only evidence homeopathic providers offer is anecdotal, which holds no actual weight as scientific evidence. Just because someone claims they got over a cold after taking a homeopathic 'cure' doesn't mean the 'cure' was what cured them. That is the logical fallacy of post-hoc ergo proctor-hoc (number 13 here).
True homeopathic cures dissolve some random chemical/herb/whatever in water, then continue to dilute it until there is none left. The providers claim that an "essence" is left, that water remembers what was in it, but if that were true we could drink regular tap water and be cured of diphtheria, and last I checked, diphtheria hadn't been cured...
Are there any facts associated with this article? It appears that this is just one group's claim, backed up by nothing other than their opinion.
The facts of the matter are:
with all this, a well mandated, accessible, audited electronic voting system is more secure than previous voting methods. There is no excuse for these companies to have created and sold the craptastic voting machines they did. There is no reason for Diebold, an ATM maker, to have only made voting machines that had no paper trail capabilities. If they tried to sell something like that toa bank, their contract would have been dropped in a heartbeat, but election boards across the country didn't blink an eye. It is time that there be a nationwide standard that works within a degree of certainty. Electronic voting machines with paper audit trails are accessible, human readable, and as secure as anything we currently use. You don't have questions of "Did this voter actually mark a circle?" or "Which of these half erased circles did the voter mean?" or "That chad isn't punched all the way through, so I will just do it for them because I know what they meant." It is very hard for an auditor to see "President: Al Gore" printed on a receipt in human readable form and say that the voter chose George Bush.
You have far more faith in the system than I do. The only people that are likely to get that sort of testing are those who can pay for it out of their own pocket, or are able to convince organizations to fund the testing for them. As it stands now, the only people (maybe just most people, I don't know how it is in every state) who are being released on DNA evidence have civil rights agencies paying for the testing.
That is true, however, being in the same city with 22 million people as residents (NYC) will give you the "opportunity" to be in the right place. Without an alibi, you could be up the proverbial creek pretty quickly.
Actually, DNA is only unique to a certain percent (I don't have numbers, nor am I a geneticist). Outside of that percent, the full genome can be repeated. For the sake of arguement, lets say thats a 1 in a billion chance of a duplicate, as others have posited. Thats fine odds when trying to determine innocence as its not very likely that the person who perpetrated a rape or other crime has the same DNA sequence that I do.
However, there are two problems with this line of logic:
All of this ignores the fact that a simple mistake while doing the sequencing can completely screw this up, or the fact that retroviruses (the most famous being HIV) actually change your DNA (again, not being a geneticist, I don't know to what degree this will happen).
Ok, your definition of integrity is not the same as mine. You hold up Miller as your model? As far as I could tell from watching all of the Plame madness, she withheld her source, not from a sense of integrity, but because a) she knew she would be released eventually, b) she needed to keep her sources in the White House so she could continue to sling her mud, and c) she was associated, personally, with many of the people who used the media to destroy Plame and Wilson. She had more to gain by staying silent than by talking. If she had had integrity, she would not have been a part of the Plame stuff to begin with.
I agree with what you are saying about those wanting to do serious journalism. Unfortunately, you won't find many of those people in the main stream media. Many of the journalists on NPR and PBS and for various other small and local publications do what you say. However, you don't see/hear these people on the evening news, or the 24 hour news sources. This is my complaint.
As far as Williams goes, I have great respect for him as a newscaster. Unfortunately, his reporting is restricted so that he can't present the facts, but instead is limited to point/counterpoint of what the Democrats/Republicans most recently said. He is able to let his personal views in with his off-hand comments, but most of his 20 minutes is scripted and edited.
I never said that the media was perfect, but back in the '50s most journalists (maybe not the editors or companies running the press) had integrity. Most of today's journalists wouldn't know integrity if it hit them in the face. Back then at least we had Murrow, et.al. Now we are lucky if Brian Williams actually gives us any facts to the story, and we are just screwed if we try to turn to the Coopers, Courics, or any morning news program...
I have to disagree with you somewhat.
False, they are the price you pay for a profit centered media. Back when the news was "free" you had reporters like Edward R. Murrow and the original Bernstein and Woodward that you so aptly mentioned. These journalists would report the news, and programs like Green Acres and Leave It to Beaver would make the money. Now conglomerates like ClearChannel, Viacom, Fox, and GE see the 30 minute evening news as underused advertising space. They sell out news time to "partners" (read company that stands to gain from you listening to this "article").
Newspapers are worse, being completely starved for cash. Every advertiser is so precious to them that alienating one large company could end the print cycle for a newspaper (almost). Imus is an example of that in the arena of radio. I don't agree with what he said, but I think he was always a dick. The only reason he lost his job was because he pissed of advertisers, not because he didn't deserve to have a program in the first place.
The GP's religion analogy was one I hadn't heard before, but it was fitting. He did paint with too broad a brush in calling for press restrictions. But I do agree that sensationalist, profit driven news should go the way of the dodo and the dinosaurs. Unfortunately I don't see that happening any time soon....
The part about the EULA is also technically true in the US as well, companies don't want you to know. Reverse engineering is 100% legal, EULA or no EULA. As far as being able to put OSX 10.5 on any system, you would have to personally reverse engineer it and do the installation yourself, distributing it to someone else would infringe on copyright and possibly patent laws.
Not exactly. Many other large, industrialized nations have "you protect mine, we'll protect yours" IP laws with the US. Thats why cheap knock-off drugs are illegal in most other countries, why you legally can't copy Windows and hand it out on the street in China (although thats not very well enforced there), etc.
Its not an issue with law and order; its an issue with those in control (in this case police departments) using their power, potentially, illegally. The ability to find stolen cars is fine; I would appreciate my stolen car being found quickly because of an ability to cross-reference passing license plates and a list of stolen cars. However, I believe that my right to travel (semi-)privately, without my every movement being tracked, should remain uninfringed. Yes, allow police officers to actively scan passing vehicle's license plates for a quick match. No, do not allow an automated system to be created to track every vehicle that passes and stores that information indefinitely for future data-mining, or more nefarious uses.
I don't know about the ACLU, but my personal objection to this is the fact that the data is being stored indefinately, thus tracking my every movement. That is an invasion of privacy. You have the right, and this has been defended in the Supreme Court, to travel anonymously. This is very important to the right to congregate freely and free speech. If this information was used immediately, a la radar guns, there wouldn't be a problem. But the fact that this information is instead aggregated and stored forever is an issue.