The Rapid Rise of License Plate Readers 302
An anonymous reader writes "Today, tens of thousands of license plate readers (LPRs) are being used by law enforcement agencies all over the country—practically every week, local media around the country report on some LPR expansion. But the system's unchecked and largely unmonitored use raises significant privacy concerns. License plates, dates, times, and locations of all cars seen are kept in law enforcement databases for months or even years at a time. In the worst case, the New York State Police keeps all of its LPR data indefinitely. No universal standard governs how long data can or should be retained."
Re:Welcome to the Future (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:privacy? (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't know why we need to go through this every damn time; but here goes:
We have to go over it "every damn time" because people keep saying that publicly visible things are somehow privacy invasions. Once people stop claiming that then people will stop correcting them.
Re:Welcome to the Future (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:privacy? (Score:5, Interesting)
Really? - You really don't get it. (Score:3, Interesting)
No, it's general knowledge about what public street you were on at the time of the photo. It doesn't tell them anything about a specific place you are going. At best (worst?) they might see a still photo of you turning in to a parking spot or parked along a road.
Sorry. But you don't see the whole picture. License plate readers are not just single photos. It is about movement of individuals And not just one suspect, but everyone. It is automated and turns the where-abouts of individuals into a searchable database. Combined with security cameras, face recognition, and cell phone records they can give you a very accurate description of someone's movements.
So what? NY (eh, Bloomberg) is proud, that with their new technology (provided by Microsoft) they can automatically search for certain suspects. Looking for someone in a blue jacket? They can now automatically pull up surveillance of anyone in a blue jacket. And they keep video records for the last 30 days (Other records for years). They can probably match that to what car that person drove, what store he/she entered (nice pictures there), or whether she/he used the subway. They are working on software to automatically detect suspicious activity.
Once you have all this data, it would be very easy for some other unnamed agency to use it to match movement data of different individuals and come up with a list of possible contacts.
Now imagine that technology in the hand of a repressive police state. The White Rose (students who distributed leaflets against Hitler) lasted about 9 months before they were beheaded. A janitor caught them distributing leaflets. With Bloomberg/Microsoft's new Information Awareness they would last a couple hours.
I see a lot of negative posts on this (Score:4, Interesting)
Isn't there any love for police here being able to do their job more effectively? Every civilized nation needs a police force. So even if you don't like the current government, a new government still would need police. We should therefore help our police to be empowered to solve the crimes they're commonly tackling.
Is there a path to the best of both worlds? (Score:4, Interesting)
I see two common responses to this:
1) This technology will lead to a loss of privacy and abuses by police, therefore it should be stopped
or
2) This technology will enable police to find and catch criminals more quickly and effectively, therefore it should be allowed.
The truth is, both reactions are correct -- but the issue is typically presented as a tradeoff: we can have our privacy OR better law enforcement, but not both.
But what fun is that? I want both. And since we are all clever Bagginses here on Slashdot, perhaps someone can think of an LPR system that would allow police to track down criminals quickly, and yet still by highly resistant to privacy loss or abuse. I recognize that such a design is non-trivial, but in a world where people come up with clever systems such as BitCoin, I don't think it's necessarily impossible either. It just takes some serious thought, and getting past the "ooh, new technology is scary" stage.
overblown (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:privacy? (Score:4, Interesting)
license plates have light for illumination so they can be read. those light just might some how start imitating more energy in the IR part of the spectrum than before.
Re:wait, I thought stuff like this & tripwire (Score:4, Interesting)
This doesn't follow. Lots of common, everyday objects and activities have "potential for abuse" one could describe as "almost unlimited". Automatic weapons. Automobiles. Kitchen knives. Ball-point pens.
Is it really fair to compare these potential existential threats to the non-existential threat of the creeping invasion of privacy in the name of security? If someone abuses automatic weapons, it results in murder, but abusing LPRs is about abusing laws that were written before this technology existed to extract more fines from people. The former is obvious and elicits a sharp reaction from the media, while the latter just blends into all the other annoyances that we have come to accept in the Post 9/11 World. I would say LPRs are more like body scanners, which were installed at airports without any public comment and which are demonstrably useless at thwarting terrorists, but which justify the ever-increasing DHS/TSA budget.
Re:privacy? (Score:5, Interesting)
On the other hand unmarked police cars have been able to follow your car wherever it goes without a warrant, and that was not considered a privacy violation.
Without a warrant, but not without a police-related reason.
In the UK, there was a court case that explained that very well: A police officer claimed to be injured and collected pay without working, but his employer (the police) didn't quite believe him, so they watched his home to see if he was as badly injured as he claimed. He wasn't, it ended up in court, and there was the question whether the police was allowed to do what they did.
Result: While your employer is allowed to check whether you leave your home when you claim you are too sick to work, the police isn't. They have powers/rights that normal people and companies don't have, and with those rights come obligations, so they can't just watch you. However, in this case the police was actually the employer, and as an employer, they can do what other employers can do.