Or you could pull a stunt where you monitor a road a set up a website where people can check the license plates of all who have passed and at what time.
Would probably only move us closer to having having private surveillance banned, while the real problems continue.
The weird thing about license plate scanning is that basically anyone could do it, and there's no obvious way to stop it. Any group of ordinary citizens (including private businesses) could create a distributed network of license plate scanners by installing devices in their cars and around their houses/buildings.
It would be an interesting act of protest to track the movements of powerful people, so as to compel them to take privacy more seriously.
Get rid of license plates. They can also be used by private parties to track car movements. They aren't safe anymore in this time and age. Once someone builds a proof of concept of a real time car tracker using crowd sourced license plate trackers, we'll realize that.
I think the US already has big private networks of number plate recognition cameras that sell feeds to cops, bounty hunters, advertisers, and traffic alert companies. It wouldn't be much of a hop.
If it doesn't catch a picture of the driver it most likely will not valid in court in most states.
Be fun to troll the shit out of politicians/elected officials with this. Have someone monitor them leaving one place, then with another car and a fake plate have them get scanned at another location moments later.
I agree that the license plate situation is a concern, but banning the scanners is the wrong fix. I could organize a group of friends to all point cameras out our windows and do the same thing, without the help of government (and in fact, have sort of considered doing so just as experiment, to prove how trivial it would be). The privacy incursion occurs when the government requires you to attach an easily recordable unique public identifier to your vehicle, not when they document sightings of the identifier. Once you put the license plates on the cars, you've lost already -- anybody could be looking, and you'd never know; it'd be basically impossible to regulate.
Not to say I don't think there should be license plates; obviously there's a public safety argument for having them, and that argument has to be counterbalanced against the privacy concerns (and perhaps rebalanced as technologies advance and change the relative difficulty of some kinds of privacy-invading tasks). But focusing on the scanner is pointless. More broadly: acknowledging that people trivially have access to tons of data that, when taken together, damages privacy, and trying to fix the privacy problem by telling them they're not allowed to look at it, is never going to end well. If the problem is solvable at all, it's by controlling access to the data in the first place.
And in the context of a crime investigation, all those private cameras will have their recordings looked at by the police - though I concede "spying" is too harsh a word for that.
I don't think the police will have any empathy towards regular every day people (in regards to license plate databases) until private individuals start tracking the whereabouts of police 24/7 (and potentially posting the data online for everyone to see). Not only that but think about it this way: It doesn't cost that much for organized crime to put up cameras all over town for their own benefit.
BTW: Heaven forbid if one of these license plate databases ever gets leaked! It's not like the government will re-issue everyone new plates for free.
It will only become better and more accessible to organizations. Deal with it... by starting your own companies and making sure things go in a good direction. Maybe educate lawmakers on the potential dangers.
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.
Me, I've been thinking about ALRs. If this stuff is going to be available, I think everyone should have it. So this is one of those projects I am just never going to get around to, but someone else, please do it - it shouldn't be that tough to build a cheap Raspberry-Pi-ish automatic plate reader anyone can point out their window to capture every plate going by. With a network of them, everyone can know this stuff, all the time, for free.
I find that to be a frightening outcome, but I think it is a less frightening one than only certain people having access. We have to learn how to live with this tech; far better to not allow it to be a tool of selective control while we're adapting. And it can be a more honest resource - police and other official vehicles' movements will be visible to those paying for those cars, whereas anything official will have official holes.
How about a reverse response? Build a dash cam which watches plates & logs metadata, possibly even crowdsourcing the info. Outrageous? no different from what DHS would do. Leverage that outrage to get license plates dumped entirely.
Plane watches already do this. They have even outed CIA operations.
I wonder how the Government would like it if many hobbyists sat in front of the NSA car park and started writing down every license plate and put them on a searchable database.
Now this is a project I would fund. Kickstarter anyone?
until about 20 years ago license plates were a reasonable compromise between privacy and accountability: they didn't have your name on them, and looking you up from the number could only be done by the police, who would only do it when it seemed important, and then only if someone made a note of the plate
they couldn't, for example, make a list of everyone who was parked near a protest, and then search a database to see where they were parked over the next two weeks
modern computer vision has changed all that, giving rise to massive dragnet surveillance; we should figure out how to get back the privacy we've lost
i don't think taping dead leaves to your license plate is going to solve the problem
prohibiting police from using computer vision isn't it either; they'll just buy the data from a private vendor like ring
Good point. It would become dramatically more useful if netizens just ran license plate scanners on their dashboards that regular report the timestamped geodata of marked/government vehicles.
If you have an automatic toll transponder (ez-pasz, etc.), those things are read very frequently even when you're not going through a toll meter. There's info on this online.
TPMS sensors also transmit a serial number. I wouldn't put it past the NSA to have sensors embedded in certain roads to track that.
And of course, dragnet automatic license plate scanning / tracking is already ubiquitous and there's really not anything you can do about it. Use a bicycle instead, I guess...
Would probably only move us closer to having having private surveillance banned, while the real problems continue.
reply