“If anyone can get this information, that’s getting into Big Brother,” he told Ars. “If I was trying to look at what my spouse is doing, [I could]. To me, that is something that is kind of scary. Why do they allow people to release this without a law enforcement reason? Searching it or accessing the information should require a warrant.”
The state collecting this info in the first place is a parallel with Big Brother. The state handing out the data to anyone that asks is not.
Since cars do not have rights, nor do the plates, the reasoning is they are not violating your personal privacy. Courts and Police have so twisted the law as to deprive our rights by stripping our association with our property. Sadly they can simply initiate forfeiture against property still protected by the law.
There hasn't been sufficient push back to stop this erosion. Worse there isn't sufficient push back against government agencies holding back information which they are bound by law to surrender.
It is interesting, that you mention forfeiture. In my opinion it is one of the biggest examples, how governments twist basic personal rights that are normally protected by the constitution.
Recently, I also learnt that even in the Magna Carta (1215 BC) the property of a "free person" was protected against the grasp of the potentate.
When modern governments now disable this basic right by legal trickery, than we in essence loose our freedom.
> Since cars do not have rights, nor do the plates, the reasoning is they are not violating your personal privacy.
Is that really the justification, though? The only justification I've heard is that you have no reasonable expectation of privacy when driving down a public road. It has nothing to do with you v. your property or the fact that your license plate does not have constitutional rights.
The courts have agreed that you can't mindlessly swap out a police officer for a computer, save all the data and keep going as you were, but that doesn't change the fact that you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in public.
- people vote for cops to track license plates "for security", "for the children", "don't complain if you have nothing to hide"
- libertarians complain "you don't know who will be in power tomorrow and (mis)use this data or allow for its misuse"
- some company comes along and buys the data off the cops because those in power let them. Maybe those in power when the law for collecting this data passed promised that this data wouldn't ever be shared, but now it's someone else or they changed their mind because fuck the people.
We'll never get clear statistics on this, but at some point it will be possible to start making judgements on whether keeping this data (and making it available to the public) is a net negative or positive.
My gut tells me that it's a negative, but my head tells me there is, or will be, no real way to stop it being collected, even if it's not public bodies doing the collection.
> even if it's not public bodies doing the collection
There already are private companies that drive around scanning license plates and selling access to the data. One of their “use cases” is selling the data to “repo men.”
Are there dedicated vehicles doing it? I had the idea that tow trucks were using the scanners and sharing data, I hadn't heard about anything dedicated to plate scanning.
Edit: This article mentions "purpose-built camera cars":
Back when homosexuality was considered really bad, imagine if all this tech had existed. How would history for LGBT rights have been different if we could find and imprison all homosexuals instead of them being able to hide, organize, and fight for their rights?
Maybe not to capital-L Libertarians, card carrying members of the party who buy into an ideology, but I interpreted that statement to mean "civil libertarians." That is to say, people who are concerned with all manner of personal rights but not necessarily members of a specific ideology.
The price for registering data in government databases that seems innocent at first has been well known since world-war II and was the reason why we had the attack on the Amsterdam registry:
Unfortunately by then it was too late and that little box 'religion' on the census forms had done its damage. 10's of thousands of people dead for simply being honest about something the government might have had some good reason for asking but no necessity.
It's simply a well documented fact not associated with any 'isms' at this point that you should only store that which you need to store because you can't predict future use or access. That civil libertarians or capital-L libertarians agree with this is nice but it is about as relevant as the fact that they need to eat and breathe as well.
It'd be nice if we could simply learn history's lessons but it appears we need to re-live the past over and over again without making much headway. I can see why law-enforcement get all gooey when they realize that they can store all movement of all vehicles pretty much indefinitely and such sentiments ought to be stamped ruthlessly into the ground whenever they pop up, the temptation is just too large to leave oversight to the services that are in a position to implement such data banks.
The only good thing to come out of this story is that Ars was able to do a public records request and get access to the data.
Having the data available to anyone who wants it opens up enough privacy concerns and potential abuse outside of the 'good guys' that hopefully someone in the city realises it should stop spying on it's citizens.
Unfortunately the fix will likely be to continue the surveillance and to bar public access to the data.
Been flying a drone over landfills for a year now. I'm taking high resolution photographs of all the address labels I can find. Wrote a script to do OCR on the photographs and then export that into an Access Database. Been mailing out flyers to positives asking folks to do better recycling.
So you're mailing a bunch of flyers to people you know don't recycle? The project is cool but that struck me as particularly ironic, assuming your intention is to help minimize waste.
Playing along - my trash goes into bags, but my recycling goes unbagged into a bin. If the recycling company my municipality runs or uses actually just dumps my recycling into a landfill, you've been mailing flyers to the wrong address.
Yeah. This is why I shred any document with my name on it. If it's junk mail and has my name, it's shredded. If it's anything, and it's got my name on it anywhere, it's shredded. You can't be too paranoid.
You realize that if you are getting junk mail with your name on it, your name and address are almost certainly in a commercially available database that is accessible to anyone with a credit card? I think what you are doing is equivalent to locking the barn's skylight after the horse has bolted.
Sure. I do know that my address and name are out there. But security isn't about perfect protection. If there was such a thing as perfect defenses, we wouldn't need security. Shredding documents with my personal details is about stopping low-hanging vulnerabilities. Thieves who are picking through garbage to find identity theft victims are not the type who are going to pay money for corporate database access.
This is great that the Oakland PD acquiesced to the request...it appears old Excel spreadsheets is a common way for the camera-tech contractors to store and disseminate the information. A couple years ago, MuckRock made a request for Boston PD's records, and received one spreadsheet (in error) that had 65,536 records: https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2013/dec/15/boston-po...
It seems to me that we need the legal system to recognize computer-processed 'big data' as what it is, which is a totally new kind of information that doesn't fit neatly into our existing privacy framework. I think it's good that this technology exists (especially if my car were to be stolen), but I don't see how it would be harmful to the public interest to require police to get a warrant before looking me up.
Of course there are edge cases, where it's hard to draw the line between automated and semi-automated data collection, but that's why we have judges. However, it is troubling that this new technology is hitting its stride during a time which is not great for privacy rights in general.
> I think it's good that this technology exists (especially if my car were to be stolen), but I don't see how it would be harmful to the public interest to require police to get a warrant before looking me up.
The most justified uses for this seem to be those where your car is stolen, or suspected to be involved in a crime, or otherwise of interest for an ongoing investigation. Since there's no reason to store this data indefinitely for any of those uses, it seems like erasing non-matches within 24 hours or so would be a good way to address many of the privacy concerns. On the other hand, if the goal is now to collect as much data as possible about everyone just in case it turns out to be useful later, then things seem to be going according to plan.
Agreed -- non-matches must not be stored indefinitely. 24 hours might be a bit on the short side; I could see letting them keep them for 30 days, but no more than that.
Some crimes aren't even discovered for weeks or months afterwards. For example, a dumped body. There's definitely a trade-off, 24 hours seems too low to me, multiple months too long. 15 to 30 days sounds about right.
The utility for solving crime is, I think, the wrong metric for deciding what technology police should be allowed to use.
Murders would be a lot easier to solve if every person was forced to wear a tracker that reported their location to the police at all times--but we would not stand for such a thing. Why should we accept a lower standard of privacy just because we're driving?
Because like everything there's a trade-off and it deserves to be carefully examined. I value my privacy, but that doesn't mean it's beyond reproach. If, and I under no illusions as to it being likely, we could reduce certain types of crime by storing this data and making it accessible with a warrant for a specific time frame until it's removed (which is the context this is under, a warrant was specifically mentioned up-thread), then it's worth having that discussion.
If it's a trade off, the question is, what are we trading?
This thread so far has been entirely about what's the "right amount" of crime to prevent. But if you ask the police how much crime they should prevent and solve, the answer will be "all of it." That's their mission, after all.
The police understand how this technology can help them do that. You say 30 days will help solve more crime than 24 hours. Well, they'll say "forever" will solve even more crime than 30 days. End of discussion?
If the subject is "preventing crime," the privacy argument is already lost. So what is the counterbalance?
There has to be a reason we would make it harder for police to do their jobs. What is that reason? To me, that's the hard question, but a lot of people here on HN seem to take it for granted that there is an answer.
> If it's a trade off, the question is, what are we trading?
Privacy. That's what this comment thread was about. The privacy implications of storing this data (csmith). Then, when it would be justified to access it if it IS stored for some reason, for what crimes, and how long it would last to address privacy concerns (iak8god). Then I chimed in with some reasoning as to why a somewhat longer retention period might be warranted, and why. Is it unclear there somewhere exactly what we're discussing?
> The police understand how this technology can help them do that. You say 30 days will help solve more crime than 24 hours. Well, they'll say "forever" will solve even more crime than 30 days. End of discussion?
Since when is a discussion about one side saying what they want and then it's over? In an effort to solve more crimes, the police would undoubtedly want a lot of access to data that is kept for a long time. But the other side, the public whose information this is gets a say as well. I, for my part, would argue that if this information is even allowed to be gathered, that if police want access to it there should be strict controls and conditions.
> There has to be a reason we would make it harder for police to do their jobs. What is that reason? To me, that's the hard question, but a lot of people here on HN seem to take it for granted that there is an answer.
There is an answer, or more accurately, many answers. Civil liberties, preventing corruption, privacy, etc. There's a reason police can't detain you indefinitely without charges, why they can't enter your home without cause, why they can't seize your property without cause (and of course, there are exceptions to these which people take offense to, often rightly). Those all make the job of the police harder, but we've tried to strike a balance. It shifts back and forth over time.
> If the subject is "preventing crime," the privacy argument is already lost. So what is the counterbalance?
What, so we don't talk about it? It's not okay to have the conversation because you think the other argument isn't obvious enough? I'm not really sure your point, because to my eyes, this thread is all about balance. It feels like you're just trying to stifle discussion.
Right now the expense means that it require government spending and coordination, which you can regulate, but this stuff is going to be so cheap in a couple of decades that it won't matter. Anyone will be able to dump a bunch of sensors around a city that take this data and phone home, and it only takes one of those people to make it publicly accessible. What then?
We may just be better off just regulating what government and people are allowed to do with the data. Because, at least in my mind, the data is neutral. I don't personally care if the government has a bunch of records of where I go, as long as they aren't going to use it to do something bad.
I think a lot of netizens value anonymity and tend to conflate it with privacy. I don't think anonymity is necessary for liberty or freedom. Small town folk don't have anonymity.
We should just ban uses that do restrict liberty. For example, the data shouldn't be used for prior restraint reasons. The government shouldn't block you from buying cold medicine because you go to X neighborhood that has 20% higher meth production. It shouldn't be used to troll for ticky tac violations.
Maybe the rule should be no active analysis of collected data in real time unless you are looking for a fleeing suspect or an emergency.
I'm with you. Not only is the data neutral, but it's damn hard to get that cat back in the bag- which is a glaring hole in the plans for solving the problem with crypto.
> "you should support restrictions on how long law enforcement agents can store this data, and who can access it, and under what circumstances."
Or better yet, start opposing its collection... if you're under the speed limit no authority has a good reason to keep track of where you're going and when.
I am sympathetic that this data could be useful for law enforcement - however this data must not be released wholesale to the public and there should be limits to how long it is stored.
This was /exactly/ the situation that I was going to write a thought about, though I replaced stalkers with abusive ex-relationship partners for a more visible display of concern (and admittedly an appeal to more extreme possibility)
I am all for privacy, but...it is not a reasonable expectation of privacy that your car and/or license plate will not be photographed while on the road (at least according to US law).
There is an entire body of law regarding reasonable expectation of privacy vis-a-vis 4th Amendment search and seizure. If nothing else, even if one does not personally agree with the jurisprudence, then they might find it informative to know what the police may or may not search/seize without a warrant, probable cause and/or reasonable suspicion.
Privacy isn't a one-size-fits-all type of thing. I think there is an inherit difference between reading license plates that are publicly visible on the roadway versus tracking license plates over time and storing that data for a long enough period that someone can deduce even more personal information from it.
If you were to say "is it okay to read license plates and check a stolen vehicle registry" I don't think many people would complain. But if you were to ask, "Is it okay that i know where you live and work and hang out on a regular basis by just reading your license plate," that's a different story.
If they just erased the data after a few days that would take care of most privacy concerns that people have.
It's a different thing entirely when the government has data, particularly when that data traces your life.
The guy standing on the corner waving a "We buy gold" sign seeing my car/plate is unlikely to be able to do anything with that data. But the government recording my whereabouts can draw me into any sort of investigation they like, based on correlated but not necessarily cause-related data. It's very different.
At the least, the government is our servant, not our adversary, and we're supposed to be able to limit and direct what they do. Just because the can do something does not automatically give them the right, particularly if we've told them they can't.
Unfortunately they do see themselves as our adversary, and so the question of whether we actually have given them the right to do something is often arguable.
There's a difference between a human police officer who is, well, human, and a robot who has eyes in the back of their head, and remembers every single license plate they've ever seen in the past two years.
The Supreme court agreed, in United States v. Jones, that technology has changed things, and GPS trackers or license plate readers are fundamentally different than having a law enforcement officer do it the 'old fashioned way', especially because data storage is so cheap these days.
New Hampshire has completely banned automated license plate readers, and Maine, New Jersy and Virginia have already put limits on the license plate readers.
This is one of those cases where it's largely a matter of degree. For example, as a longstanding matter of American jurisprudence, a police officer doesn't need to do anything at all to justify looking at you in public. This makes sense to our traditional expectations of how a police officer would actually do that, with the Mk 1 Eyeball. He'd probably be physically present somewhere, either coincidentally seeing something legally relevant, or else have particularized suspicions about a particular person/location/etc and do Good Old Fashioned Police Work to see who they talked to / who went in / etc etc.
However, given sufficiently widely distributed cameras and facial recognition, one can imagine "looking at you in public" being carried out not by particular officer but by a for loop. On everybody. All the time. Retrospective since whenever the system started slurping in everything, all the time.
And that's not the American expectation, and not just for the paranoid set. "Should the cops have access to a database which, for any citizen, would trivially be able to answer the questions a) where they go to church, b) what private residences they entered and at what frequencies, c) what building they were in at 4:30 PM on last Tuesday?" is positively spine-chilling to virtually the entirety of the American polity.
I know privacy debates on HN are frustrating, as they're often carried out in primarily by invective among a sliver of the population who have already staked out the most extreme possible position and are busy trying to vote each other off the island for insufficient extremism. That said, frustration at the HN privacy climate probably shouldn't spill over to "All claims of law enforcement overreach are ludicrous."
Society may be able to keep data out of the hands of our own government without a warrant but there is virtually no chance of enforcing anything like that on private citizens, companies and other countries with the current rate of technological advance. Privacy, at least in public spaces, is a sandcastle in the path of an incoming tide. I don't think people even realize that credit card transactions including location are blithely bought and sold everyday.
However, given sufficiently widely distributed cameras and facial recognition, one can imagine "looking at you in public" being carried out not by particular officer but by a for loop. On everybody. All the time. Retrospective since whenever the system started slurping in everything, all the time.
Serious question - how can you hope to construct a law that addresses this perceived misuse without also stomping on other recognized rights? Long term, the paradigm in law is that whatever happens in the public eye is fair game, and I'm not sure you can put that genie back in the bottle without seriously impacting basic rights like freedom of speech (think photographers and the like).
I also don't understand on a moral/legal level how doing a thing suddenly becomes more wrong just because it can be done more accurately, at least beyond a vague feeling of "eww". A cop (or a set thereof) can already sit at an intersection and note every plate that passes by, legally, yet it's somehow wrong just because it became cheap to do? What?
I'd like to think we don't make laws based on vague feelings of "eww". I think the data is coming, you can't stop it, any attempts to do so would be ineffective and regressive, and we'd best get ready to live in a post-privacy society, where "privacy" in this case is defined as "the hope that nobody bothered to connect the dots you've been leaving visible the entire time".
Why do I think you're being willfully obtuse, here? What you're proposing would require nothing short of a constitutional convention, and what we end up with on the other side of that process may not actually be the America we grew up in anymore.
How does a law that limits the government ruin America? Or specifically, how does a law limiting the use of surveillance footage by police ruin America? Why would it require a constitutional amendment? I honestly don't understand your reaction.
To be clear, I am only talking about laws that limit the gov't.
Because the process I mentioned is the only feasible way to create "a law that limits the government", especially given the current legislative climate, and that process is incredibly dangerous.
1. Alice installs app on smartphone. Alice puts smartphone in cradle on dashboard. Smartphone captures license plates Alice drives by on way to work. Alice drives by Bob.
2. Carol goes to website. Carol enters Bob's license plate number. Website says, "25 hits found. Enter credit card number to see times and locations". Carol enters credit card. Carol finds Bob.
3. Alice gets some of Carol's money, since she took the photos.
Why is that not a thing yet? License plate reading, unlike, say, tapping undersea fiber, is not something you need either a government's resources or a government's ability to skirt the law to do. This is easy stuff.
That will end up becoming an interesting court case, followed by a set of laws, followed by a court case, until such a thing is almost certainly illegal (in the United States), by pressure of societal desire alone.
One could do something similar with facial recognition software, but if someone tried to make a large business out of it, I'm sure there would be significant friction.
You're trying to get the frog to jump out of the pot before it is too late but you're underestimating the degree to which it has already become drowsy.
there may be significant friction and even laws against it, but the government, behind closed doors would pay you a significant sum for your company to continue doing it and I would wager would lobby the government to pass bills to not only make it legal, but protect its legality.
It's already been done. PIs, LE and insurance companies utilizes data of a few companies that have scanners all around US; it's just not a social thing at the moment because when most drive they either text or check email or browse net or listen to the music. Dashcams are still not popular here but the services like you mention could be a huge hit in Russia when dashcams are extremely popular.
Here only few would actually go into lengths to set it up on their dashboard and be capturing licenses with the hope to make a dollar.
I'm sure there are various tracking networks that track browsing across websites, it is sort of a logical extension. UPS or Fedex could easily build out a big tracking network.
This is trivial to do for a number of feedback/analytics/cdn/socialnetwork companies. Basically, the people who have JS living on large swaths of the web. There are some names you sorta expect (Facebook, Google, Twitter) and other names like Mixpanel, Foresee, Opinionlab, Survey Monkey that might not be as obvious.
It would be pretty easy for a Foresee to deliver a customer profile aligned on verticals in near real-time to clients based on data their network captures from major websites around the world.
The value proposition for the user is very weak - too weak to get people to spy on each other.
What are the odds that I'm going to get a payout? That someone out there is interested and willing to pay for one of the license plates I've seen? Probably very low. Do I really want to waste my smartphone battery doing this? I'd rather have maps and music on.
> What are the odds that I'm going to get a payout?
The expected value of slot machines is negative too. Humans have a psychological weakness for "Just one more, I haven't won in a while, I'm due." In this case though it wouldn't even cost money to play.
The expected value of slot machines is negative, but there is that slight chance of making a significant amount of money. That sort of "lottery odds" behavior doesn't really work here, imo.
The value prop for the average user is also very weak for encrypting data. I am more likely to lose all my data than prevent some theoretical malfeasance, never mind the extra time and effort. I am not a secret agent.
Generally, a system like this might work by handling queries via two ways:
* A "point" system - spend "points" (or credits) to find a user by license plate.
* You can buy credits with money directly, or you can earn them by contributing information
That way, if you're a data contributor, you have access to the information without having to pay. That's how data.com works.
They don't seem very popular in the US, but always-on dashboard cameras already have obvious value. Maybe a dashboard cam cloud storage company could offer a discount on their services if you allowed license plate data to be gleaned from the footage you upload. Or maybe they would just throw a line in their ToS and do it.
IIRC they are very popular in Russia because the insurance companies reduce your prime. This cause a lot of interesting videos, like the meteorite a few years ago, and a lot ow weird accident videos: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=dashboard+camer...
I would be happy to submit free videos to the police if they'd issue citations. When people break the traffic laws they are almost always putting other people's lives at risk. I'm happy to pay some of my time (pushing a button that uploads a 20-30second video of the violation) in exchange for safer roads.
>Alice installs app on smartphone. Alice puts smartphone in cradle on dashboard.
I tried this, but camera phones are (currently) too terrible. I would be curious if anybody more skilled than me (I'm just tinkering) could make it work.
Not all cameras in all phones are too terrible, that said having done the experiment, I found it is much easier to do license plate extraction from a video rather than from some sort of stills. Using an off the shelf "GoPro equivalent" on the dash of my car, post processing the video for plates was relatively straight forward with OCV[1] and now that I think of it, would make for an excellent tutorial on the technology. Were I to do it again I would provide a copy of GPS co-ordinates on the screen to make it a bit easier to tie the two together.
For me the interesting bit I was trying to figure out was this technique (car mounted) gave you license plate 'segments' which is to say the car in front of you may have been there for two blocks and then turned right giving you a segment that was two blocks long with a right turn at the end. If you had multiple subscribers, then you could match that segment up with a segment from another vehicle and then interpolate the path of any observed plate through an urban area. Since the general color and shape of the car is trackable, you can actually create a number of segments for different cars if you've captured their plate at any time, and if you manage 'untagged' segments (cars seen but you have yet to see a plate for) then you can add those as well. Needless to say, the taller vehicles are a "win" here for more complete surveillance.
I was also using opencv, but I had a ton of trouble getting clean video from a couple different cellphones and a tablet (lot of blurring from movement) and was putting off buying a gopro to try. This is great info, thank you.
Some commercial units apparently have tail-light detection to narrow down scanning for plates.
See Mappilary work on this area. Although they work on static pictures, I wouldn't be too surprised if their work could be succesfully applied to real-time video.
Another area you can explore are commercially available units. French police use on board license plates readers which seem to be quite fast (at least when you watch the french equivalent to the "cops" tv show).
LAPI(Automated Reading of License Plates) is the acronym you want to look for. I think several hardware and software manufacturers equipped different police units so if you're really interested, you'll be able to find several datasheets and derive a reasonable minimum computing power from them.
What if instead of using or in conjunction with using vehicle mounted cameras, you also utilized traffic cameras and street cameras. Many are accessible online.
No, that would have taken a lot more work. The algorithm was really primitive, find rectangles, look for letters and numbers which were > 50% the height of the rectangle.
Mistake is #2. Don't make people search for the info, give it to them without friction. "Pay" them by providing more info. Real money would be in paid data mining.
Add ability to comment on other drivers. "Idiot cut me off!!!" turns into automatic notification when any instance of the app sees that plate ("Warning: 8 reports of risky behavior for vehicle"). Include automatic marking of "seen before" ("augmented familiarity").
You've also accidentally found a very interesting side business model for Mapillary.
(except that afaik they've done considerable amount of work on actually detecting and blurring license plates, so I guess Peter would rather sink Mapillary than entering this business ;-) )
It's possible to get around it by selling a device you plug the camera into, and your device has built-in GPS. I think Russia's dashboard camera "culture" might mean the device is a much easier sell - in Russia "Monitor traffic" is a problem people already seek solutions for, while the dashboard cameras is a good enough quality video people don't have to pay for again, whereas in, e.g. USA you will have to convince people they have this problem in the first place, and to pay for the cost of the device including a good video camera and storage.
In Russia people buy dashboard cameras because there is less trust in the "system", and is consistent with the paradigm:
License plate reading, unlike, say, tapping undersea fiber, is not something you need either a government's resources or a government's ability to skirt the law to do.
Maybe tie the the back end into repossession company databases. Have the user turn it on when in parking lots and they get a commission when found. A local repo service is instantly alerted with GPS coordinates whenever there is a hit. The app could even alert them to stop and observe until the repo company gets there.
Certainly not a mass consumer thing, just like most people won't become Uber drivers, but some people would do it and there is potential for making decent money.
This is already being done by companies and police forces using their own vehicles. It's more efficient than outsourcing it through an app because cameras mounted on the roof of a vehicle can scan license plates in 360 degrees.
This is very common with towing, repossession, or "recovery" companies, who can drive around with automated cameras looking for "hits": cars with repo orders. Companies (ex: Digital Recognition Network [DRN]) sell cameras, provide a database of "wanted" vehicles, and collect the incoming scans—which they also turn around and sell.
DRN "claims to collect plate scans of 40 percent of all US vehicles annually."
You don't need to crowdsource because there's already a critical mass of users willing to pay YOU for the privilege of collecting information.
There are a lot of business models in crowdsourced image data. For instance, Google could give away high resolution dashboard cameras in return for the right to use the video for ground truth data. With sufficient intelligence onboard higher-level information like signage, license plates, or even faces could be uploaded on demand. You'd probably even be able to bundle an insurance premium discount in.
Seems sort of like crowd-sourcing data that would be used to infringe on the freedoms and happiness of people without restraint beyond "did the payment clear?"
Sadly, I do not think your willing participation would a requirement. This seems like the sort of thing that would be imposed upon you by the sheer force of adoption.
Yes. It can be considered tampering with evidence in an "ongoing" operation. I too have thought of this for radar guns and laser speed guns. But most of these sensors know when they are being jammed and can actually result in the FCC finding you and fining you.
Radar guns are regulated by the FCC because they are RF sources. They aren't going to come after you for mounting extra lightbulbs on your car.
Infrared bulbs are more similar to polarized plastic covers that obscure the plate when viewed from certain directions. Not sure if they are illegal or not but they are definitely outside the purview of the FCC.
Nowhere in the United States of America are 'citations' sent by - usually private - speed/red light cameras considered criminal offenses.
Know why? They barely stand the requirements for civil infractions in most areas. Typically these 'tickets' are implemented as backwards preconditions-to-vehicle-registration.
----
Actively jamming radar is a crime and could possibly net you trouble. Light? IR? No such 'unlawful interference' law exists at the federal level. You might be violating a state statute, but that's the extent of it.
Interfering with a civilly-implemented speed/red light camera via use of plate-obscuring equipment on your vehicle might be a state-level offense but it wouldn't be for long if challenged.
If you want to foil them, you would put clear, IR-reflective decals next to your license plate with additional letters and numbers so that your license plate no longer scans as a license plate. You might even try to SQL-inject their ALPR ;-)
It's bad enough the state collects and retains this data.
It's even worse that this kind of data can legally be obtained by FOIA. I'm all for transparency, but not where it touches the privacy of individuals.
btw, I have no particular problem with plate scanners as long as no-hits are not stored for longer than 7 days and any searches on the data heap are authorized by a judge (e.g. to gather data in a murder case).
I think the best part of the story is that they could do the FOIA. The data is not somehow magically safe from misuse because the press can't see it. In fact, quite the opposite.
Collecting this data on the general public should not be legal. If you are a suspect in an active investigation it is completely different, but you must be actively identified, you shouldn't be able to do what LA did and simply say "everyone is a suspect".
I think you have to take these technologies to their logical conclusion, because Moore's law will ultimately take it there. A camera recording every plate, everywhere it goes, stored for all time. That's not a database any people should allow their government to keep, warrant or not.
I'm glad they quoted the 2012 USA v Jones GPS tracking case, because this is exactly the same thing with an even lower cost per vehicle tracked. Ultimately I want Congress to pass a law putting limits on the data retention, but obviously that's not going to happen any time soon.
The state collecting this info in the first place is a parallel with Big Brother. The state handing out the data to anyone that asks is not.
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