Automated Plate Readers Let Police Collect Millions of Records On Drivers 276
schwit1 writes with a report on just how extensive always-on license plate logging has gotten. The article focuses on California; how different is your state? "In San Diego, 13 federal and local law enforcement agencies have compiled more than 36 million license-plate scans in a regional database since 2010 with the help of federal homeland security grants. The San Diego Association of Governments maintains the database. Unlike the Northern California database, which retains the data for between one and two years, the San Diego system retains license-plate information indefinitely. Can we get plate with code to delete the database?"
Re:never understood the logic behind license plate (Score:4, Interesting)
People already have a publicly readable identifier called a "face". Since you can't really pick a car out of a lineup, they needed some sort of system.
Funnily enough, the "all you *insert minority* look the same to me" effect was what gave us modern fingerprinting. British in India couldn't reliably pick Indian criminals out of lineups, because all the faces looked the same to them. So they found a different system of identification.
Being done commercially too ... (Score:5, Interesting)
If you have parked in Wal Mart parking lot a local auto repo guy has probably scanned you and you have been entered into the database.
I believe the number of vehicles recovered using this technology is currently in the tens of thousands per year in the U.S.
Uncle arrested (Score:2, Interesting)
Just this week on Tuesday my Uncle was arrested because of these auto-plate scanners in Minnesota. In this situation he does not have a license and was driving his mothers car. The scanner showed that the owner of the vehicle had a immediate relative with a revoked license, and when he saw it wasn't a little old lady driving he pulled them over.
Read / Write power is God power (Score:5, Interesting)
All these databases are used as evidence during criminal investigations... this one... the NSA one etc. etc..
Any political operative with read / write access to these databases can fabricate evidence as they see fit. And it's not just theoretical :
http://www.ibtimes.com/changing-timestamp-mystery-continues-after-texas-abortion-bill-defeat-wendy-davis-filibuster-1324549 [ibtimes.com]
If you believe, as I do (and even if you don't ) , that we can't do law enforcement without databases like this, then I submit we have an engineering challenge here.
We need stores of data which are designed to be "evidential" or "purely factual" in nature and once an entry is written, it can't be changed at a later time to have another value. I am using the word database here but I am pretty sure it's more like a "store" .
Is there a one way, write-once technology which is provably tamper proof? Can one be designed?
The scenario I am trying to prevent is the most obvious one where a malefactor, at some possibly distant date after information about their target has been recorded, attempts to change that information to produce a perception or suspicion or even proof of "guilt".
It's not just a theoretical worry. It's not much different than what the Texas legislature attempted to do with its own record yesterday. Seen in a certain way, they attempted to "frame" Wendy Davis, D-Fort Worth, as having not begun her filibuster in time.
This is benign compared to what a Dick Cheney or Richard Pearle or Donald Rumsfeld type could / would do with some career analysts' whereabouts, phone records etc. etc. who displeased them ala Valerie Plame. Sure, Scooter Libby went to jail for the crime, but I think we all know who he was protecting.
It's not even slightly far fetched and the consequences couldn't be more corrosive to democracy. In fact, just the potential for this kind of manipulation could under the right circumstances lead to a widespread loss of faith in all law enforcement on the part of the general public. That itself is unacceptably corrosive and dangerous to the republic.
So how do we solve this problem so it can't be "unsolved" by some domestic Axis Of Evil ? A running, recorded one way hash on the totality of input seems unworkable , but I am not an expert.....