EFF, MuckRock Partner To See How Local Police Are Trading Your Car's Location (eff.org) 60
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."
Re:Isn't this the point of a license plate? (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't this the point of a license plate?
Nope. The purpose was never to enable full-time surveillance of people's vehicles. It was to permit identification of vehicles in realtime. When license plates were introduced, there were no automatic license plate scanners. Now there are, so things are different.
Re:Isn't this the point of a license plate? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:1)
Everything becomes a tool of the police eventually. This is just a fact of life.
Re:Isn't this the point of a license plate? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not so different that it would legally allow police to sell that information collected. That would be a gross invasion of privacy by law pretty much police are only allowed to collect and present to the courts only, information collected during their duties, other than that, the law pretty much requires they SHUT THE FUCK UP. I really think some police forces need, like unruly guard dogs, taught their place. Honestly those who allowed should be prosecuted where possible and where not, most definitely fired for betrayal of the public trust.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
The problem here is we've had government push increasingly draconian and abusive law in order to punish people for doing what was unenforcable. Now that it's the future, we can enforce those laws, and then the government begins putting people in jail or fining them for all they're worth for minor offenses and it feels good to them for awhile. Then the feel-good ends when the widespread effects are felt on society and they realize they've become monsters.
E.G. Indiana adopted $1,000 speeding tickets about a
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Not so different that it would legally allow police to sell that information collected. That would be a gross invasion of privacy by law pretty much police are only allowed to collect and present to the courts only, information collected during their duties, other than that, the law pretty much requires they SHUT THE FUCK UP. I really think some police forces need, like unruly guard dogs, taught their place. Honestly those who allowed should be prosecuted where possible and where not, most definitely fired for betrayal of the public trust.
Where I come from, police are put under extra scrutiny, far more so than the ordinary public because they are granted extra ordinary powers over the general public. Even covering up a few parking tickets has cost police commissioners their entire careers.
We have, in my country, a process called a "royal commission". It's got nothing to do with the Queen, but it is an ad-hoc and very high level public inquiry into serious matters. The most famous one would be the Royal Commission into New South Wales poli [wikipedia.org]
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Nope. It was just supposed to show you paid your road taxes. That is all. No vehicle ID at all.
Old school tracking (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:2)
Automatic plate number scanners aren't a requirement for surveillance, they only
...make it practical and feasible on the current scale, which absolutely was enabled by this technology. It was prohibitively expensive to use humans, otherwise the cops would have done it already. It's not like their wanting to know everything about everyone all the time is new.
Re: (Score:1, Troll)
Not even close. ALPR data should require warrant access no different than that required for adding a GPS device to a vehicle.
Its often not the police collecting the data (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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I'd also not quite mind it if I had the option of trading the info that I parked my car downtown as payment for the parking space--I mean, seriously, I'm probably going to give a lot more specific information away if I don't have the small bills & change to pay the fee. Having to use one of my cards to pay is a lot more specific and definite than just having it known that my car was parked there, especially since I'm not the only person who drives it places...
Some of the issue here should be that it's
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>"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."
+1
Agreed. And that needs to change. And probably sooner than later. Because ANYTHING the police/FBI/HLS/whatever want, there will be a "private contractor" there to provide it.
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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.
Just... wow... At least here in Europe that sort of thing is extremely illegal.
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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.
Why are databases of licence plates - and the links to their owners - publicly available? Sure there are some public records - like real estate transactions. But cars? I suppose it's not intrinsically horrible to be able to look up the owner of a car - except that when the cost of the lookup is zero, you get perverse consequences, like commercial companies tracking and selling your location. It's kind of like spam and robocalling. Once the price of sending junk mail went to zero, there was no disincent
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Why are databases of licence plates - and the links to their owners - publicly available?
I'm not sure the links to owners are, rather the data that says a license plate was here on date/time. The civilian users of the database -- bail bondsman, vehicle repossessors, etc -- may have access vehicle registrations as part of their normal work or they are coming from the other direction. They have data on the person who has the bond/debt and this data includes license plates.
Insurance, road tax and MOT (Score:1, Troll)
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- Clearly defined use and retention policies, and oversight.
- No sharing with other departments.
- Access to the data should require probable cause or a warrant, with the level of access determined by the alleged
Ever watch the show Parking Wars? (Score:3)
Counterpoint : car repo (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [slashdot.org].
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Re:Blue states dominate the list, no (Score:1, Insightful)
Texas and Georgia are not blue states
All the more reason (Score:1)
All the more reason to use public transit + walking.
Well, except for the coming wave of facial recognition. Shit.
Yanno (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:1)
Your painting of BLM as the bad guys down there says much about you. Nah, it was probably despair and rage that accumulated while monitoring rogue police shootings of unarmed citizens in the media that drove a maniac to kill those officers in blue.
Society's failure to hold such uniformed murderers to account, as well as pervasive policies of aggressive, hostile and deficient training practices within so many law enforcement orgs are probably factors that will drive the next cop-killing maniac over the edge.
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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.
We have, and they did. [npr.org]
When you're parked, rules change (Score:2)
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.
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>"When you're parked, rules change. Not a perfect solution, but it might be possible to legally obfuscate one's license plate when parked."
You might be onto something, but that would only hold if the car was parked on private property. This might include most parking lots, since they are not public streets vs. on-street parking or on public/government land.
In any case, I bet if one of those trolling police/other tracking cars found something like that in a private parking lot, they would ASSUME you were
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A couple of points: the cops aren't usually looking at the plates or the monitor when they're driving up and down. They're checking out the pretty girls, looking for somebody "suspicious"...all the usual cop stuff. And I can tell you that yes, in Canada parking lots are considered private property, and you're free to have a car parked there, with the owner's permission, that isn't licensed.
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You might be onto something, but that would only hold if the car was parked on private property. This might include most parking lots, since they are not public streets vs. on-street parking or on public/government land.
It does not even hold on private property in many areas and there is no such requirement. In some areas, cops can and do ticket cars in driveways for expired registration or other violations.
Re:When you're parked, rules change..Nope! (Score:2)
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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.
hairspray (Score:1)
Local? (Score:2)
When will you be ready? (Score:2)