DHS Wants Access To License-plate Tracking System, Again 114
schwit1 writes: The Department of Homeland Security is seeking bids from companies able to provide law enforcement officials with access to a national license-plate tracking system — a year after canceling a similar solicitation over privacy issues. The reversal comes after officials said they had determined they could address concerns raised by civil liberties advocates and lawmakers about the prospect of the department's gaining widespread access, without warrants, to a system that holds billions of records that reveal drivers' whereabouts. "If this goes forward, DHS will have warrantless access to location information going back at least five years about virtually every adult driver in the U.S., and sometimes to their image as well," said Gregory T. Nojeim, senior counsel for the Center for Democracy & Technology. ... The largest commercial database is owned by Vigilant Solutions, which as of last fall had more than 2.5 billion records. Its database grows by 2.7 million records a day.
Repetition Bores People (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Repetition Bores People (Score:4, Insightful)
Except that DHS currently has access to those License plates. There are so called fusion centers which are supposed to be amalgamation of all the mass spying to one interagency group (consisting of multiple agencies).
The idea is that while they have access now and they are asking to legitimize.
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Geez, when the Patriot act and all was going through and the DHS was being formed, I really didn't understand how bad a thing it could/would be!!!
Man, we need to break it back up again. It was less intrusive and dangerous to the common US citizen when they weren't quite as efficient and weren
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there really isn't any choice in the matter. one company has been scanning license plates in a bunch of cities for years and storing the data. And of course selling the data to anybody with a buck. The DHS wants permission to wallow in this data. Cost doesn't matter.
Give It To Them (Score:1)
So give it to them. Have them budget it, spend the money, gain absolutely nothing, fuck it up, suffer a massive data leak, embarass themselves and the government, ask for more money to clean it up, become a bloated inefficient disaster, and finally, finally, when the US eventually gets around to becoming an Orwellian dictatorship, at least it will resemble Brazil instead of 1984.
I know which future I'd choose. And it involves the DHS.
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Thats a big assumption that it will end up that way. I for one am not willing to take that risk. I stand against the DHS.
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So give it to them. Have them budget it, spend the money, gain absolutely nothing, fuck it up
Time for Godwin: In 1933, the German establishment decided to make Hitler the new chancellor, on the theory that he would screw everything up, lose credibility, and then the Nazi movement would collapse. That plan didn't work, and neither will yours. Besides, your basic premise is that the DHS should not do this because it is inefficient. Rather, they should not do it because it is wrong and unconstitutional. Whether or not it is an efficient use of their resources is irrelevant.
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In fact, the US was actively supporting Britain and waging war in the Atlantic before Pearl Harbor. The Pearl Harbor attack actually interfered with the war against Germany: US materiel that could have gone to troops actively fighting the European Axis were withheld for training or sent to the Pacific. Britain was never on the brink of surrendering, and in particular wasn't going to surrender in 1941, having weathered 1940.
Germany never came particularly close to defeating the Soviet Union. An earlie
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"You do realize that essentially only 2 things combined caused him to fail? The invasion of Russia being delayed by a month alone might have made the difference, but the attack on Pearl Harbor sealed the deal. Without the latter, the US likely would not have entered the war in time to save Britain, which was on the brink of surrendering..."
Am I correct in assuming that you are not a historian?
Already unconstitutional? (Score:3)
The supremes have recently ruled that gps tracking requires a warrant. [sophos.com]
One could argue that a system which a amalgamates multiple, automated sightings is pretty much the same thing as gps tracking.
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License plates are visible and a single check at a point in time isn't very telling, but if you write a query that says "show me all the license plates that have been in the vicinity of this intersection by this church on Sunday between 9AM and 5PM more than 3 times in past 60 days", I bet you'd have a pretty good idea of who attends. You can apply the same logic to find residence, employer, or just about anything that is a consistent pattern. You can treat anyone who was present around the time of an incid
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And how did Vigilant Solutions or any other private company get a database of plates that is supposed to be restricted information?
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there is.. (Score:1)
no way they could possibly "address concerns" about privacy when that much data is at their fingertips... no.fucking.way.
Concerns Addressed (Score:2)
Of course they could. With access to the data they'll quickly know where all of their "concerns" live and be able to , well, "address them".
Re: there is.. (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:this isn't going to make you safe. (Score:4, Interesting)
"Not being government they are probably safer" ?
What an astonishingly ignorant statement. Billions of corporate propaganda clearly have had profound effect on Americans.
Corporation is by design and law fascist, top-down hierarchical organization that is unaccountable to public, and forbidden by law to have any motivation except profit motive. That is safer than however flawed and limited checks-and-balances of the government?
Re:this isn't going to make you safe. (Score:4, Interesting)
I like your comment. When you distill it down to the raw motivations; how COULD a company be trusted? Big or Small, there is a power vacuum. What do you want filling that power? Fast Food, Goldman Sachs, and a Credit Rating agency?
There was good work done by faceless bureaucrats in Washington for many years. Yes, there are careerists and cogs and people who muddle through,... but the "inefficiency"? People have no clue about an economy if they worry about the "cost of government." Every year around sweeps, our TV News covers "lazy government workers."
Someone shows up, gets paid, raises a family. Life goes on. I worked in marketing - and that's not necessary if there is one product. Most accountants aren't "necessary" if the tax code were made simple -- I'd be all for that; no taxes until your family makes over $120k and get rid of sales tax -- then you've got 1,000 less points of taxation on those who an afford and who actually get the most benefits AND that would spur investment to avoid taxation and lose the money (lowering capital gains has the effect of lowering capital investment-- see; history). Anyway -- the point is; for most of us, there is an artificial environment of inefficiency that created our job.
If we had total efficiency; there'd be a robotic plant that created all your stuff, drones would bring it to you, but they wouldn't because you'd have no money to buy anything because you were replaced by a robot.
So fundamentally; business wants you as an outlet, and wants to only pay you as little as possible, and shift costs of educating you to someone else. Government is motivated by the people involved, and who puts them in their job and gives them their power. Increasingly; that's corporate money more than votes -- the same money that owns the insipid news station that covers the heinous crimes of road workers caught napping.
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Corporation is ... forbidden by law to have any motivation except profit motive.
B. S.
Corporations are chartered organizations and their motivations are whatever their charters mandate them to be. That's why there are things like "not-for-profit" corporations. NPR. The American Red Cross. The AFL-CIO. The American Medical Association. Thousands of neighborhood homeowners associations. And so forth. That's not even counting the for-profits who worry as much about doing the Right Thing as they do about profits. For example, Costco.
For-profit corporations spend a lot of time an money lobby
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> That's not even counting the for-profits who worry as much about doing the Right Thing as they do
> about profits.
I have a very nice bridge available for a low, low price. Interested?
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Corporations are forbidden by law to have any motive other than profit. If immortal, soulless legal person concerned solely with profit is not the very definition of evil, I don't know what is.
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Repeating an untruth doesn't make it true, even if Fox News may give that impression.
Some day when you're grown up, you, too may decide to incorporate, and you'll have to opportunity to see what corporations really are forbidden to do by law.
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Nice bit of shilling for corporate America. Did you learn to do it on your marketing job, perchance?
The officers of public corporation are charged by law to maximize the shareholder profit. If they stray from that duty in any significant way to actually do good, rather than appear to be "socially responsible" as a part of PR strategy, they will face shareholder lawsuits, hostile takeovers and removal by shareholder vote.
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Yes, there is. It's called "fiduciary duty". Look it up some day, sunshine.
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I'm not sure many large companies worry about doing the right thing for its own sake. In some cases, it's great PR. In other cases, it can improve the company's efficiency, like any other long-term thinking.
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Based on what I've seen, very few companies of any size worry about doing the right thing. I do mostly appreciate the ones that do, although in some cases, their "right thing" is based on religion, not ethics.
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The catch is that you could imagine more or less plausible scenarios where such information would make a material difference. (In fact, television Hollywood movies do so frequently and they really do sound reasonable if you don't think too carefully.)
This means they can fool everyone who doesn't think and/or doesn't remember, which sadly is likely to be a majority.
Re:this isn't going to make you safe. (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't think the majority are fooled -- the Majority doesn't vote or is Independent. The MAJORITY is discouraged by the constant deceit and don't want to expend the energy arguing -- just making a living and enjoying what they can.
The people who are FOOLED are the ardent supporters who likely get more information on the subjects they are so ignorant about.
I remember years ago working with a company that sold the Interest Only home loans. They hired a guest speaker for about $100K for their conventions and other speaking engagements who wrote a book on how you could put all that wonderful equity from a home into the market. Keeping a mortgage is your cheapest credit card. Which, conceptually, if you crunch the numbers, works out on paper if you are a wise investor and don't ever use this money for food.
Anyway, the point is; an author who wrote a crap book promoting a crap financial concept got lots of money, and I'm a worker drone who is informed, and thought the idea was going to run a lot of people into serious trouble.
Think tanks and charlatans get paid big bucks to inform people of "wisdom" that makes people with lots of money, lots more money. The Wall Street insiders who have financial shows on PBS or NPR. The numerous "think tanks" who churn out papers on how not having tariffs allows America to "be competitive" -- as if any of that helped 99% of the public.
So who is the fool? People got good jobs and paychecks working at companies selling bad ideas. There are people working at horrible companies that every year find a new way to add a fee to their services and bilk customers.
I was aware and predicting the 2008 bank collapse because I noticed the reserve requirement on banks kept going down (it got negative in the last couple months) -- and that meant they were over-leveraged. For all my wisdom, I didn't improve my economic situation.
There are people who believe in talking snakes, that human activity cannot effect the climate, and who vote for less protection of workers even though they are a worker -- and YET, those people are better off than me financially. People who believe that America can do no wrong and has noble ideals AND can do horrible things because they have those ideals (not noticing that it can't maintain AND break ideals to be noble), are much more promotable. The person who will administer electric shocks because they were told to, and who will happily sell the Interest Only mortgage to a young lawyer with $300,000 in student loans is someone a business wants to hire.
SURVIVAL is why people in our society may not pay attention to things they think are unnecessary. And being a MORON is a good way for an average person to succeed financially. Being both aware and altruistic means that your chance for success is more limited. We have a Darwinian dog-eat-dog system in this country, and dogs are better adapted to it.
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One of the most interesting posts I've read here all year.
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NONE of the high-tech tracking systems can help you against low-tech terrorism. The enemy isn't using those high tech tools.
That's the whole deal with asymmetric warfare (and let's face it, folks, we can finally call a spade a spade and call it war). Each side will field what is available and affordable to them. For governments, weapons, gadgets, technology and tools are cheap, while reliable and affordable manpower is expensive or hard to come by. For terrorists, it is exactly the opposite.
It's fairly easy
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NONE of the high-tech tracking systems can help you against low-tech terrorism. The enemy isn't using those high tech tools.
Yes, well, the agenda was; track the population so we can CONTROL THEM.
We all should know that was the excuse. Dick Cheney's PNAC group had the Patriot Act and Iraq invasion plans written years earlier and shows that he used disasters as an opportunity for an agenda - we should only wonder why anyone with internet access can know these things and yet it does not appear as a point of discussion on our TV News.
People on TV and the press talk about "reasonable things." Things that have made the gauntlet of oth
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The problem is that sensible surveillance isn't something you can automatize easily. Computers cannot decide which information is useful and which isn't. We still struggle with computers being able to grasp the meaning of simple written sentences. Let alone spoken word (can be fun to talk to an automated system when you're drunk. Now imagine someone deliberately talking in heavy slang).
Sure, you can make systems sieve the yottabytes of data you collect for certain words or strings. And as soon as you may le
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I talked to someone that worked at one of the "Big Three" credit reporting agencies. You know those credit scores that make things cost more, because you have less money? Well, seems they are going to be rolling out "Work Scores" -- ratings of performance of employees that companies can use when the time comes to hire.
If they implement this "reputation system" and things like license plate tracking. Nothing will happen. You will try and get a job somewhere, and will never hear back. You will be curious why
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Here is what is going to happen. They will invest in license plate trackers while autonomous cars start to hit the roads. Soon, autonomous cars will be driving by themselves. I can even envision the day where multiple families timeshare an autonomous vehicle. Why park a car in a lot when someone else could be using it? The day of the autonomous taxi is not far away.
Meanwhile we need a clever way to defeat the license plate readers. Since they are fixed tech, how hard could it be? Spraying the plate wit
What could possibly go wrong? (Score:5, Insightful)
A system that tracks the whereabouts of every American (or at least, every one with a car), and saves the data for five years...
This story needs the tag "what could possibly go wrong"?
Re:What could possibly go wrong? (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's the scary thing:
The system ALREADY EXISTS.
The article is about the DHS asking for access to the system from private companies that are already recording that data.
Instead, it is seeking bids from companies that already gather the data to say how much they would charge to grant access to law enforcement officers at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a DHS agency. ...
The largest commercial database is owned by Vigilant Solutions, which as of last fall had more than 2.5 billion records. Its database grows by 2.7 million records a day.
DHS officials say Vigilant’s database, to which some field offices have had access on a subscription basis, has proved valuable in solving years-old cases.
So, yeah. You're already being spied on. Fortunately, for now, it's only in the hands of private businesses who sell it to anyone who's willing to pay. Or is that really all that fortunate?
Can we just kill these cockbags now? (Score:3)
They've be MUCH more secure when they're 6 feet under.
the next Kickstarter project (Score:5, Funny)
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Even better, get some bumper stickers with random numbers characters on them, and the plate readers will have multiple numbers to collect.
bumper stickers are not illegal yet.
Not random numbers... (Score:3, Funny)
But something like
';drop tables.
http://bobby-tables.com/ [bobby-tables.com]
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There is one small catch . . . if you happen to copy the license plate of a criminal, things could get complicated . . .
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There is one small catch . . . if you happen to copy the license plate of a criminal, things could get complicated . . .
Well, in the Brave New Land of the Free, of COURSE the license plate will belong to a criminal. Just like yours will.
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The license plate is registered to you, right?
Mount the plate with quick-release bolts. When you park somewhere take it with you, or store it inside the vehicle.
Or, you could find the motor pool where they park the plate-reader parking enforcement vehicles and set them all on fire.
Or, you could find the politicians/bureaucrats responsible and set them on fire.
Depends on your style, I suppose.
Strat
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Or you could just back in where you park. Then they can't easily take a picture of you when they drive by.
*That only works in starts where you aren't required to have front license plates.
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I once got a ticket for a tag 7 days past expiration. The officer had to go onto semi-private property and look under the bumper overhang to see the expiration date sticker. And obviously did.
If I had removed the plate, the officer would have gone around to the front of the vehicle and read out the VIN from the display window on the windshield. And if the VIN number had been obscured, AND the plate was missing... I'd like to think being met by a SWAT team would be overkill, but in my town, I'm not 100% sure
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The data is already being collected, and has been for years; why should the NSA put out bids to create a parallel system that won't have historical data when it stands up, when they can just put out bids for building them an interface to the existing database?
National Vehicle Location Service (NVLS) (Score:1)
Summary really needs a link to Vigilant Solutions' National Vehicle Location Service (NVLS) [vigilantsolutions.com]
The National Vehicle Location Service (NVLS) is a national data sharing initiative started by Vigilant in 2008. The data in NVLS is made up from two primary sources: 1) data shared to NVLS from law enforcement and 2) commercial LPR, or “private” data harvested by Vigilant.
Data shared to NVLS by law enforcement is available free of charge via a LEARN account from Vigilant; sharing to NVLS by Vigilant LPR customers is up to the agency and can be changed at any time. The data remains the property of the agency and is governed by the data retention policy set by that agency. The data is accessible only to law enforcement users, and is not shared or used by Vigilant Solutions in any way.
The largest pool of data is that harvested by Vigilant from commercial sources, most notably, Vigilant’s subsidiary, DRN (Digital Recognition Network). This pool of LPR data totals over 2 billion detections and grows at a rate of over 70 million per month. This data is available via an annual subscription and greatly enhances an agency’s investigative reach.
Data Sharing and Interoperability. Users of LEARN can choose to share their LPR data to NVLS, or select individual agencies for sharing. With minimal integration, competitive LPR systems can also share with NVLS for the benefit of the larger law enforcement community and to have access to their own data within the LEARN environment for improved analytics. Even agencies that do not have LPR systems can leverage the shared pool of LPR data to conduct searches for vehicles of interest.
Data Security is paramount with NVLS. Hosted in the same secure facility as LEARN, and governed by the same redundancy, power management, backup, and physical security, NVLS also features a strict credentialing policy due to its accessibility via the web. Registered users must have a valid Originating Agency Identifier (ORI), a government email address, and pass through several layers of validation to gain access. Periodic audits and re-validation insure that only credentialed law enforcement have access to this data.
Investigative Leads are provided by NVLS via LEARN at a level that would otherwise be impossible for an agency to achieve under their own resources and finances. Additionally, the nature of the LPR collected from private sources tends to be stationary vehicles and/or vehicles entering into parking and/or other access controlled locationsproviding law enforcement with detailed precise and targeted historical location information for vehicles of interest.
Terrible AND inadequate (Score:1)
That would amount only a handful of observations of each driver per year, average. Still a privacy violation, but not very useful if the interest is in building a model of an individual's behavior or knowing the individual's current whereabouts.
One of the risks here is that the system will seriously jeopardize individual privacy at the same time that no useful benefit will be cre
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That is currently the largest privately owned system. DHS is obviously unhappy with the hodge podge of such systems, and their relatively small size. It wants one big system it can own and not have to ask to access.
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Hijack someone else's car - problem solved. (Score:2)
CBP (Score:3)
Next step -- VMT (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with license plate readers is that there are only so many cameras out there. How can they know where everybody was all the time?
The answer is the Vehicles Miles Traveled tax. [wikipedia.org] Many states and the federal gov't have proposed over and over that all cars have GPS trackers in them that tax them on how many miles they drive. They say "the problem is cars are more efficient, so we don't make as much money." (Can't you just raise the rate then? wtf?) or that this is "more fair", everybody is charged the same amount for how far they drive; as opposed to how much gas they use and how much carbon they emit.
But, come on, the real reason is almost certainly to track where everybody went, all the time. If there is anything the Snowden revelations have demonstrated, it's that if there is any possible way to capture data on people, the government is going to do it. Anything you can imagine, and many things that you could never have imagined, are being done. If you want to believe that a GPS tracker that hooks up to a gas pump only sends one bit of information, well, I suppose you deserve what you get.
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We already have this tracking system in place, it is called a smartphone or OnStar or any other vehicle crash reporting system.
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All plates must be (1) securely fastened so as to prevent them from swinging, (2) displayed horizontally with the identifying numbers and letters facing outward from the vehicle, and (3) mounted in the upright position. The person driving the motor vehicle shall keep the plate legible and unobstructed and free from grease, dust, or other blurring material so that the lettering is plainly visible at all times. It is unlawful to cover any assigned letters and numbers or the name of the state of origin of a license plate with any material whatever, including any clear or colorless material that affects the plate's visibility or reflectivity.
So this makes it illegal to use the most effective method of stopping these things. Also it makes almost all of those vanity license plate holders illegal so conside
The slow blade penetrates (Score:2)
Persistent lobbyists will get everything they want. Opposition will tire emotionally of fighting and winning, until they lose once, and then they won't have the energy to claw it back. People will be left to make way in their lives for whatever it was so that it doesn't effect enough compliant sheep to ever put up much of a fight to get things back the way they were.
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Taxpayers. They are bureaucrats trying to increase their budgets to get paid more.
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+1 for the Dune reference :D
Reminds me of the spy satellite restrictions (Score:3)
As the government isn't allowed to spy on citizens without a warrent, under normal circumstances, the satellites aren't supposed to take images when over the U.S.
So the government instead buys images from commercial vendors ... the same folks who provide images to Google and Bing for their mapping projects. (which admittedly, might not be as high of resolution).
I'm thinking that there needs to be a line drawn, otherwise all you end up doing is having a way to make an end-run around the legal verdict -- "we'll just spin off a company that does what we're not allowed to do, and buy the results from them".
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Except that, whenever my car and license plate are visible from public land, keeping track of my car isn't spying in that sense. The police have always been allowed to use what they can see without trespass. If they wanted to keep track of my car, they always had the legal authority.
The new development is mass surveillance. This isn't a matter of the police deciding to keep a particular car under observation, it's a matter of them keeping all cars under observation all the time. The big problem is th
Easy fix (Score:1)
Star agency (Score:2)
LP Readers and IR (Score:2)
Curious if the cameras that actually read the plates block the infra-red spectrum or not.
If not, would it be plausible to ring the LP with high powered IR LEDs to effectively blind the cameras to the plate or no ?
hidden cam found on post office grounds (Score:2)
It disappeared after a news crew did a story on it.
http://kdvr.com/2015/03/11/mys... [kdvr.com]
Sorry, impossible. (Score:2)
>"officials said they had determined they could address concerns raised by civil liberties advocates"
Sorry, that is impossible, unless by "address" they mean "dismiss". If the government (and also private industry) in any way collects the information, it will be abused. Period. Regardless of what they say they will do, they will store the info for extended times, share it with all the black-ops agencies, index and associate it with all kinds of other databases, and search it at will, without a warrant
At least they're consistent (Score:1)