Automated license plate readers spring to mind. The police have been noting license plates forever, automate it and suddenly now you have a database that tracks everyone's movements.
I agree that this part is scary, but it isn't news.
I first heard about license-plate readers back in 2008, and at that point police could already take a wired-up squad car for a cruise through a grocery store parking lot, scanning a couple hundred plates. Onboard software would run the numbers for outstanding warrants or lapsed registrations, and alert the officer.
This has already been going on for years. The capacity to mine that data effectively is slightly more recent, but I'm sure the logfiles exist.
Surprised this isn't already a thing in production. Police cars have had automatic license plate detection coupled to databases of known stolen cars etc. for many years. Likewise cars have had pedestrian detection cameras for a few years.
All the technical bits are there, and I can't imagine it would be a difficult issue legislation/privacy-wise.
License plates have seen such an enormous mission creep, starting out by enforcing safety inspections and liability for car accidents and finding stolen cars, and continuing down to letting the public and private sectors routinely track motorists' whereabouts.
When license plates were introduced, the technology to make them more privacy-protective didn't exist. Today, it might, but it would be expensive to switch and challenging to get police to give up monitoring powers they've become accustomed to.
The vast majority of those laws seem to be targeted at law enforcement. I imagine any system designed to automatically collect license plates would be included, whether it's sync or async.
Now put license plate readers facing every direction on every police car and send that information to a database where it's stored forever. Now link it to every other license plate scanner across the country, and make searching through someone's trips as easy as using a TiVo, with complete history on their location. You don't have to imagine though, because they do this today: http://gothamist.com/2016/01/26/license_plate_readers_nypd.p...
Not really they already have some kind of computer with database access in every cop car I believe. And the worst case is you just update it daily or manually enter wanted plates in if it's urgent.
I don't think it was foreseen when license plates were created the harmful use case of having a cop at every street corner with photographic memory and accurate speed measuring abilities who occasionally notes cars down for speeding / running a red light and who is networked with every other cop all working together reporting on such-and-such car now at position x,y while a team at HQ is constantly updating large maps with tacks showing the last known location of car x,y. Agree that the modern tech equivalent of the above has already been happening to various extents. Indeed we're fast approaching a time when we'll have enough sensors-of-all-sorts penetration to be able to track the whereabouts of anything of interest worldwide -- the underlying geospatial tech to make that scale already exists.
They probably could automate this even further if they added some software to read license plates and then it would be child's play to program a set of rules which spit out potential violators for humans to review.
Do you drive a car? License plate readers and associated location tracking software are becoming increasingly commonplace. Are you also "helping to create" "the surveillance state"?
In some cities (I know Chicago) they have automated license plate readers on at least some police cars, and handheld scanners for traffic enforcement. Walking or driving past and it pings? Easy ticket. Even for out of state cars.
You also need to realize police already drive around and randomly type into their computer license plate numbers to see what comes up. This system just makes it faster and red flags those who are really breaking the law.
I believe it is the inevitable outcome of the "Internet of Things" meets the "identification of things". Today a number of police departments have red light cameras the give no tickets. So you might wonder why they are still there. As it turns out they do an excellent job of watching your license plate go through an intersection and recording that on a server. Add that to police cars with their own license plate readers and GPS and you end up with a cloud of data points, with time and GPS information for places in a city where a license plate has appeared.
That provides a very valuable database for law enforcement, if you know a car was used during a robbery, poof you know where that car as been, so you are one up on the robbers. Even if the license plate was stolen or the car stolen, you have it from the point the plate was stolen to the present. The ALCU has been trying to get statements about how long this data is kept and how it is accessed.
Today you can recognize faces with machines better than you can with humans. A camera can take pictures and store the face data with no other personally identifiable information, and yet when you suspect someone of something you plug in their face data and "poof" you get all the cameras that have seen them and when. Recent laws about trying to protect this sort of abuse not withstanding. [3]
IMSI catchers and simply Wifi MAC address catchers for the purposes of advertising (or surveillance)[4] can provide GPS + Time + identifiable number logs.
Storage is cheap, 32 bit CPU chips are free, HD cameras are cheap, and software radios can build white-space mesh networks on demand. When you lay a grid of these passive technologies around town, it will become the most powerful tool humans have ever invented for keeping track of, or locating, other humans of interest.
The fun part is that private citzens can play too, anyone can put together a fleet of cameras recognizing faces and license plates with a Raspberry Pi 2. And if you have a HackRF One you can pick up GSM bands and WiFi bands to note the phones, tablets, laptops nearby. Call it $400/unit, $40,000 for 100 units (two at every intersection would cover an area of 7 square blocks. Not something you would do on a lark but certainly within reach of someone who could profit from the information.
"Police can be alerted automatically in real time when a wanted individual passes by one of the devices. Agencies around the country have been affixing the machines to the outside of patrol cars and receive an in-car notification if they come upon a license plate connected to a wanted felon or stolen vehicle. Vast amounts of historical data also may be searched and used to map where someone has been, making the intelligence value of license-plate readers attractive to law enforcement."
I'm in Taiwan right now, and they use license plate readers to associate plates in parking lots with the parking ticket you receive to track the time you're in the mall. Sure you could use it as metadata for human analytics, but in this case I'm pretty certain its current use is for reducing queues and making checkin and checkout of parking lots more efficient.
I feel like there is a fine line between pure technology advanced convenience and actually big brother style monitoring. In Taiwan if you drop trash where you shouldn't there's a chance that a camera will capture your movement, and they will try to find out who that person is.
In China, I assume it's the same, but because of the way it's set up it gives you more of a prison feeling. At least that's what I felt like to me in Pudong, Shanghai.
What I'm saying is how can we make sure that we get the convenience part without the pervasive big brother aspect. I'm sure there is a way and I believe that's what we should focus on as technically moves on.
Similarly, the same applies to things such as medical records.
Previous poster wasn't talking about automatic scanning of all license plates, but about license plates themselves and (maybe) speed cameras and the like. These are two different things.
ALPR Automatic License Plate Readers are a significant portion of this article, and they raise a lot of questions in my mind.
If the police have access to realtime info on the location of all vehicles, how is auto theft still a thing? How are gangs stealing $100k worth of tools from hardware stores and driving away scott free?
Are we just at a time before wide use of the data ALPRs provide?
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