The other problem is that state laws aren't keeping up with law enforcement technology. FOIA-similar laws in Minnesota meant that every ALPR-captured license plate was public information, which I requested to prove a point. I got back 2.1 million license plates (+ timestamp and coordinates) on a USB stick.
Without strong policies and laws, this data is ripe for abuse -- domestic abuse victims and stalking where someone eats, visits, and sleeps, or tracking regular routes of hazmat or cash trucks, etc.
Yea, great so you complain about that and then they solve just that narrow case.
Doing so reduces some fringe harassment risks, but actually makes the power inversion worse since then only a privileged minority has access to the data.
In practice the stalking/harassment stuff isn't actually happening with any great frequency: The mentally ill people who would do this are generally not competent enough to go on a big data data mining exercise. Complaining about that just creates an excuse to remove access to the public to data they're paying to create while leaving access to it to authorities and commercial interests who might use it against them.
Despite being in public -- and on public streets -- I think anytime the government is tracking where I go, it should require probable cause and a judge's signature. I believe ALPR circumvents the judicial system.
I use my cellphone in public, but it's obvious that the government shouldn't be able to automatically log when and where I placed a call. I use my credit card in public, but the government shouldn't be able to automatically log every penny going into or out of my bank account. I use my car in public too, and I don't think the government should track everywhere I drive.
I don't think there's an acceptable amount of harassment that's tolerable. If the technology enables it to happen, it's worth challenging.
There are three issues for me with ALPR: (1) limiting the scope of persons who have access to the data, (2) ensuring that law enforcement agencies have strong (ab)use and access policies with checks and balances, and (3) ensuring that logs of where innocent individuals drive is never stored.
I think it's easier to progressively win a fight rather than going guns-blazing to a large issue that people don't understand. By first building the notion that 'yeah, this technology is actually somewhat scary' it's much easier to win a fight arguing that the police shouldn't be storing and accessing the data either.
In my situation in Minnesota, the public finding out about the police releasing 2.1 million license plate tracking points to the public was enough pressure to get the state to make the data non-public and to have police departments voluntarily create more restrictive policies. It was also enough to get a fabulous bill passed through the state House that prohibited police from storing any data on non-hit (non-wanted) vehicles. Unfortunately, it didn't get to the Senate floor in time before the session ended, but I was shocked at the number of legislators who spoke out against ALPR data storage. They weren't necessarily anti-ALPR (and honestly I'm not vehemently anti-ALPR either), but the prospect of storage is wildly unpopular among non-police communities.
There's another issue all together, which is privately owned and operated ALPR systems -- typically used by vehicle repossessors but it was also uncovered this week that a defense contractor had also been on the receiving end of Minneapolis Police ALPR data, which is somewhat unnerving.
If you're walking around in public, the government has the right to follow you around. In fact, everyone has the right to follow you around. Having cameras and drones around just means they got better at doing it.
Of course anyone can follow you in public, the alternative would be impossible to enforce.
The problem is that the cost of getting that data could be made unacceptably low. For example, I think most people would object having their government uploaded their coordinates to a public website. The interesting question is what is the right tradeoff between transparency and cost.
I believe there is a limit to this. You can't continuously follow someone around making notes on everything they do because at some point you're likely to trigger some type of local harassment or stalking laws. Of which there is a legal recourse to handle this.
What this describes goes beyond that because there's apparently no legal recourse to deal with it. Well, I suppose that may vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
The ACLU report appears to claim that Minnesota is actually one of the few states that keep recording plate data for a maximum of 48 hours. Was that a recent result of this disclosure? See the callout on the map at http://www.aclu.org/alpr
There is no state law limiting retention to 48 hours. The Minnesota State Patrol -- one single statewide agency -- has voluntarily chosen to limit to 48 hours. Any local police department or county sheriff's department can retain for whatever they want under state law. Or the State Patrol could be lying.
I have a personal experience with the harm that ubiquitous recording of location data can bring, even when you don't do anything wrong.
When I was in college, I was called to the police station and accused of breaking a glass door in the dorms. I knew NOTHING about this. I told the police I knew nothing about the event, but they continued to press me. They asked me details about where I was that night (many weeks prior), and I had difficulty remembering where I had been. To make matters worse, I originally thought the day in question was another day, so I ended up giving information about my location that was incorrect. If the police decided they didn't like me, they could have easily pressed charges for lying, even though I thought I was telling the truth. Luckily, they eventually believed me and I was let go.
How is this related to license plate readers? Well, the only reason they suspected I was the person who broke the door was because my ID card had been swiped at around the same time the door was broken. Simply because I was present near the time and location of a crime committed weeks prior, I was accused of a crime and nearly accidentally perjured myself. (Don't worry; I know now to never talk to the police!)
If we start tracking everyone's movements, this sort of thing will happen more and more often. You will EVENTUALLY have driven by a place where a crime was committed. You may be called to account for your being nearby, even weeks or months later. When the police ask you why you were there, will you remember? Will your answers satisfy them? Will your general unease at being questioned make you appear suspicious? Will you fumble, and say things that contradict yourself, making you appear even more suspicious?
Plus is some cases (and countries) they treat you worse, and take advantage of loop holes to delay you seeing a lawyer as much as they can, even like several days or so.
Of course, invoking my right to a lawyer may have prolonged my experience. Whether the increased risk of being in trouble by talking was greater than the increased time to resolve the incident if I requested a lawyer would have been a tough call to make.
Well, technically, yes. However, if we had a court case where the prosecutor thought the defendant had a key for some encrypted data, and they claimed that they didn't, and they weren't thrown in jail for "refusing to divulge a key to the data that we totally know they have", then I might call that a theoretical win for the plausible deniability "defense".
The way the truecrypt hidden volume works, the defendant WOULD give up the key (it would just be the key for the REGULAR encrypted volume, not the hidden one) The prosecution would get the key, use it to decrypt the drive, see a bunch of files, and assume the defendant had complied and given them the correct key.
What they wouldn't know is that there is also a SECOND encrypted volume inside the one they decrypted. There is actually no way for them to know if there is this second volume or not.
Invoking your right to remain silent is sufficient.
Telling the police to direct further inquiries to an attorney doesn't actually necessitate retaining one until they make additional inquiries.
One way to view this is upping the ante. You've made clear that you know your rights, and that they're not going to be able to use you as an easy source.
Of course, if they call your bluff, it's helpful to be able to produce said attorney.
Err... actually, what happened to you happened because of faulty and inadequate surveillance. Had they had cameras in the places watching 24/7, they would have seen you DIDN'T do it. It was only because they didn't have surveillance that they had to rely on partial data. If you think about it, had surveillance been even less, and they relied on a random witness who said they saw a guy in a hoodie, and you happen to own a hoodie, you could actually be vindicated by better surveillance. In other words, the truly innocent will always benefit more from such a system than those who are actually guilty. But this assumes the use of surveillance is benevolent. Your example is not actually a good example of why surveillance is bad. It is in fact an example of how it can help. Where surveillance might be bad is in the potential for abuse. It can cause misunderstandings, but even better surveillance resolves that.
I have a personal rule that I am forming, where if the approach to improve something, is to use that something in greater quantities, it is probably a bad thing. e.g. brute force, vendor specific stack, XML, C++, classes, templates, advertising and surveillance.
Have you ever had the misfortune of watching reality TV? You do realise the power of selective editing. Sufficiently motivated camera operators can 'destroy evidence' with no paper trail.
So no, I really don't think more surveillance would necessarily give a better result.
Who would be so crooked as to do such a thing? Faculty to get insurance claim/avoid insurance claim, overloaded cop who just wants to get to 'done' or a promotion.
I'm saying more surveillance == worse. And I'm saying that it would not necessarily resolve his specific problem. It would resolve the problem of whoever controls the footage.
Why wouldn't more surveillance have solved his specific problem? His specific problem arose because nobody knew the truth about where he was or what he was doing. Imperfect information caused him to be falsely accused.
Here's a though experience. If you believed in an all-knowing God, do you think He would know that the OP was innocent? If yes, then that's because the God knows and sees everything right?
Again, I'm not saying more surveillance is good in any way. One of the problems is that it's a lot of concentrated power and whoever gets a hold of it could abuse it. However, one way to ameliorate this would be to implement lots of surveillance, and make it all public data. A more open society would probably be a good thing though.
Because unless I am mistaken, you had not mentioned it being public data. Private surveillance is not really much use to him. I've worked in places where the surveillance tapes were wiped or mislaid when it wasn't in the interest of the footage owner to have its existence known.
Making it all public data would be totally different. That opens another can of worms: Would it then be a crime to delete the data if you were the owner of the footage?
Regardless of it being public or not, fundamentally it still stands that more surveillance means the OP would have been vindicated. If you want to talk about abuse of the data, that's a whole other issue. The question is, if surveillance is benevolent, would it have helped the OP? Yes. It would have.
That's a big if. The owner of the footage can be ambivalent, malevolent or benevolent. If I was ambivalent over an incident, I wouldn't be motivated to get involved and hand over my footage.
The same issue already exists in more limited form with fingerprints. Often random prints are found near the scene of a crime. That's not proof, however--just cause for questioning. If the police didn't question potential suspects they wouldn't be very good at their job, but I'm sorry it freaked you out.
I had a similar thing happen, I was the last person on security footage before someone discovered vandalism.
You wouldn't have been guilty of perjury, maybe obstruction of justice. But I think your overall point is good, they will use data against you even though you were innocent and answering questions with good intentions.
From user qz10 (who seems to have been hellbanned absed on IP):
It should be no surprise that this is happening. Give anyone unlimited surveillance power and it will always be abused.
I live in a western EU country and have a friend in law enforcement. Last year, he brought me to see our city's traffic surveillance 'control room'. Almost every street corner and traffic junction here has a pole-mounted police camera transmitting video data back to servers accessible from this room and elsewhere.
To summarize the demo: He was able to type a vehicle registration plate into this system, and instantly see every journey the car has taken plotted on a map, as well as the thousands of raw video clips of this vehicle that were used to generate the map.
I think as a practical matter, expecting police to stay stuck in the 20th century is futile. The public will never strongly oppose that kind of technology when they themselves are wearing google glass everywhere.
The fear of this sort of thing depends on being suspicious and wary of the police, and people aren't. My wife thinks I'm crazy when I rant about cops, but as a practical matter she has no reason to be skeptical (as a young white woman). As long as most voters are either white, old, or female (groups cops tend to avoid harassing) you won't see the necessary skepticism to oppose this sort of thing.
Heck, over the last 20 years people happily handed the police enormous amounts of power via drug laws. The white suburban moms in my school in the 1990's shrieking about "just say no!" had no reason to be skeptical.
This is why I'm seriously of the opinion that surveillance data should be regulated somewhat along the lines of HIPPA or PCI rules.
Storing a weeks worth of traffic camera data and allowing to be misused should result in a demotion, a small fine, and a personal civil liability towards people who've been affected by the misuse. Signing off on storing years worth of ALPR/surveillance-camera records and having _that_ misused or exposed should be a career ending and company destroying event.
Collect that sort of data if you think it's of sufficient "value" - but make sure everyone is aware of the risks and the magnitude of the penalties of being "careless" with other people's personally identifying data.
I've said this before, but I'll do so again: forget about the cars. How long before your friend can type in a person's name and get a similar record of that face's movement based on data the general public continuously records and shares?
I'm sure the authorities' line of defense will go something like "oh but you're not in the database by default!" Then you'll be added as soon as you cross a border, apply for a passport, or get a parking ticket. Time to buy stock of facemask producers...
A few days ago I posted a document regarding NYC's relatively new booting program for cars which have accumulated too many tickets/fines. In it they point out that the system is backed by a team of vans which scour the city doing license plate recognition to find these cars. Obviously the consequence is that everyone's license plate gets photographed, but it's up to the NYPD what to do with that information. The ACLU doc has some stats, but if you want to see the document I'm talking about I've linked it below.
Though Bloomberg and the NYPD hardly have any trouble pushing these things through for the last decade, I imagine one impetus behind ramping these programs way up would be incidents such as the would be Times Square van bomber from a couple years ago. In that case however, the perpetrator had actually stolen license plates from another vehicle (which they learned after finding a VIN that wasn't scratched and the registration didn't match).
I always wondered on the legality of private license plate scanning. With just a bunch of people cooperating one could pretty much map out all the troop movement throughout the city.
At least one person's been arrested for keeping track of and publicly reporting police movements. Guy in Brooklyn who aggregated information on police movements around Pittsburgh during a protest, and Tweeted them: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/04/elliot-madison-accu...
The charge seems to have been based on not the reporting itself, but a theory that he was conspiring with people committing crimes, like a lookout at a robbery. I wonder if it'd be on more solid ground if it were a website that just always updated with police movements, rather than only in connection with a specific event.
Well the argument usually heard for the government doing it is "they've always been able to watch where you go in public". I suspect that somehow would not fly if it were reversed.
It's an interesting idea. Thanks to smartphones, the people have more cameras than their governments. The governments however have more targets.
An interesting app idea would be to have a distributed palantir-like system that specifically targets Ambulances, Police Cars, City vehicles, etc. OCR a license plate or other identifying tag on it, geo-tag, etc.
Given a decent proportion of people using the app, you could probably map out the location of most of the active government vehicles in a city. With the time-series data, you could add some analytics and probably predict where the cars were going to be at specific times and days. You could even gameify it, so catching a police car at a donut shop would win the user a little badge.
I wonder how close the russian dash-cam eco-system is to making that come true?
Inexpensive but ubiquitous and "always on" cameras, with a little bit of OpenCV smarts built in (or perhaps with a RaspberryPi-grade computer hanging off them) could probably manage a pretty good implementation of this.
If you could somehow roll this out as part of some innocuous looking project (off the cuff idea - approach a taxicab company, tell them you want to put camera's on each cab - so you feed each driver back information about nearby traffic density/speeds and approximate counts of people standing on sidewalks correlated with the number of other cabs around. Slip in ALPR without mentioning it, and a whitelist of marked and unmarked police car licence plates. Sell access to the real-time police location data to high-speed courier services, boy-racers, and drug cartels.)
You might be able to publish data on a 24hr lag, and make money by selling live feeds (or live analysis on live feeds, if the raw data is difficult to handle) to local news stations, independent reporters/camera men/etc.
Monetizing it might harm adoption by volunteers though, so that is important to consider. Gamification is a great idea though.
That doesn't mean that there isn't a law on the books against it. No one would bother invoking it in a criminal prosecution unless they were really gunning for someone and they couldn't find anything else that would stick.
The public listening to police scanners is not new and frightening to those graced with the gift of a monopoly on violence. The unknown has a profound ability to frighten, and fear has a profound ability to inspire violence.
>Well the argument usually heard for the government doing it is "they've always been able to watch where you go in public".
The issue is that of technology being an enabler. Always being able to watch you (with some cost), and being able to watch everybody effortelsy and automatically, with instant retrieval is a game changer.
A problem seems to be that the state of open source plate recognition software isn't that great. There are a few projects around but none seem to be ready for production.
CALIFORNIA CONSTITUTION
ARTICLE 1 DECLARATION OF RIGHTS
SECTION 1. All people are by nature free and independent and have inalienable
rights. Among these are enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring,
possessing, and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining safety,
happiness, and *privacy.*
I've often wondered if the right to privacy in California's constitution actually means anything. I guess it doesn't.
If you're in a crowd, by definition, you're not expected to have privacy, however you are allowed anonymity by virtue of being in a crowd. If you're in a cafe, you're naturally not afforded privacy, however you are still anonymous unless spotted by someone who recognizes you. If you lean over to tell something to this person, that conversation (despite being in public) is still private.
Your public information still afforded you anonymity in a sea of data however since we now know it can conveniently be assembled into a dossier, it's being used to destroy your anonymity which, believe it or not, used to be taken for granted.
> however you are allowed anonymity by virtue of being in a crowd.
That's not true at all. Anonymity is the state of personally identifiable information being unknown. That's exactly what your license plate is, and it's displayed on the back (and front sometimes) of your car. You have never been anonymous while driving.
Your license plate is the equivalent of a online pseudonym linked to a database. Common users aren't able to browse this database, however if someone's keeping a tally of the appearances of said license plate (the equivalent of a search engine), then they can infer a whole lot of information that goes beyond the scope of the purpose of license plates. That is the real problem here. You are anonymous in the crowd or should be as far as other ordinary people are concerned and that's clearly not what's happening.
Incidentally, you should stop using the same username for everything.
Your license plate is a unique identifier for your car, not you. It is not like an online pseudonym in that cars are often shared by others, whereas a pseudonym is a false name, generally (with exceptions) reserved for individuals. To claim they're equivalent is therefore not true. You are not anonymous in a crowd (I can take a picture of you and identify you later, your identity is tied to your face), nor should you be (if people where anonymous all the time, personal responsibility would go out the window - there is a time and a place for anonymity and privacy, driving around on public roads is not one of them).
And why should I stop putting my name on things? I'm the one who did them, after all. Besides, if I were at all concerned that what I was saying would land me in trouble, I'd create a new face. I'm not against privacy, I just don't think you have any when you're in public.
Yeah, seems like it's more likely to be referring to the US Dept of Transportation Performance and Registration Information Systems Management "PRISM" program.
Good find. Control-F suggests there are three mentions of PRISM.
On page 349 (pdf pagination): "LPR technology uses specialized cameras and computers to quickly capture large numbers of license plate photographs and compares them to the hot list (NCIC, ALERT/REJIS, KDOR, PRISM)."
Without context, the PRISM references somewhat are abstract, although it's a remarkable coincidence if not reference to the same program. What was striking for me was the 10X markups for equipment provided under contract to the US government. Where is the governance in government?!
Ah crap, the above search requires you to be logged-in and have the "Telnet" add-on for your account. Here's a quick alternative that also returns some results, though they all require login over HTTP:
It should be no surprise that this is happening. Give anyone unlimited surveillance power and it will always be abused.
I live in a western EU country and have a friend in law enforcement. Last year, he brought me to see our city's traffic surveillance 'control room'. Almost every street corner and traffic junction here has a pole-mounted police camera transmitting video data back to servers accessible from this room and elsewhere.
To summarize the demo: He was able to type a vehicle registration plate into this system, and instantly see every journey the car has taken plotted on a map, as well as the thousands of raw video clips of this vehicle that were used to generate the map.
It is fascinating to observe the proliferation of technological misadventures federally funded in the past decade+ since 9/11. There needs to be a real legal movement to place limits on these activities. The argument is already lost in many other countries (e.g. U.K.), but we have a fundamental legal doctrine, enshrined in the 4th Amendment, that should apply. That requires real congressional and judicial action to restrain these law enforcement and anti-terrorism activities. Unfortunately, since nobody can yet claim tangible harm from having their privacy invaded, the judicial route seems murky.
we have a fundamental legal doctrine, enshrined in the 4th Amendment
You need a constitutional amendment specifically for privacy and data retention. The 4th amendment does not do what you think it does.
Meanwhile, the argument is not lost in countries like the UK, but very much alive in terms of people invoking EU law via the charter of fundamental rights.
One of the scariest bits is that most of the operators of these cameras pool information. The result is an ad-hoc nationwide surveillance system operated by a private party.
I'm not a cryptography guy, but do you think it would be possible to come up with a technical solution which has these properties:
- License plate numbers are immediately encrypted at scan
- A judges possess some sort of encryption key
- Upon obtaining some sort of warrant, judge grants police specific encryption key
- Key can only be used to decrypt certain kinds of data - say, only decrypts license plates in a certain geographical area or around a certain time
Remember some of the biggest issues? Exploitation (wars, colonialism, imperialism, no labour laws), racism (slavery, Jim Crow laws), overeaching government (McCarthyism, Hoover, bureaucracy, protestors shot at, , surveillance, etc), rampant private interests (banana republics, RIAA, patent law, militias shooting strikers, corporate espionage, buying legislation), religious nuttery, etc?
Those things are not solved by technology. If you're lucky, you might find some technology that can nullify one of those issues.
But in general technology is an enabler. It can help those perpatrating those things to do them 1000 times more efficiently and far scarier. Science too, is neutral. Nazi germany was choke full or good scientists -- and they are behind all messed up inventions anyway too, not just the good ones.
This, among other things, is such as case, of technology being an enabler for bad things. To really effect change you must change how people think about things -- and then, the laws.
Interestingly, my state Department of Transportation is the agency responsible for operating the ALPR systems, and according to my county Police Chief his department doesn't use ALPR technology, so I wonder how readily the various enforcemnt agencies have access to the the acquired database(s)?
Can someone explain why your public movements should now be private?
And when someone brings up the "pseudo-anonymity of the crowd", can you accompany that with a legal precedent for such a claim? Who actually came up with the "I'm acting privately in public" thing in the first place?
Yeah. If you don't like the prospect that some random person can know the intimate details of your <travel|communications|financial transactions>, you might as well just abstain from the services and institutions that make anything remotely like a modern standard of living possible. It's a fair tradeoff.
Sure, and by natural extension there are some people, whom you will never meet (or even be aware of their doing so), who will get to become intimately familiar with the aforementioned data, journalized and cross-referenced in handy tables and graphs. Indefinitely. Nothing you can do about it! Might as well just accept it. Really, all of this hubbub around privacy concerns is totally unfounded. It's the way things have to be.
They have to be this way because of how we structured the English language. When you act in public, you are, definitionally, not acting privately. There is literally nothing to be done about that short of changing what words we use.
Your movements in public are in absolutely no way equal to your conversations in private. You're trying to equate things which aren't equal, and you're taking an extremist, hard-line stance on what should and shouldn't be private.
It's utterly silly to think that a person can exist in society without anyone else knowing they exist. Soon you'll claim it's a violation of privacy to even look at other people.
> When you act in public, you are, definitionally, not acting privately. There is literally nothing to be done about that
It seems that lately we're redefining what "public" is when it comes to the other privacy issues that are in the media spotlight recently.
> It's utterly silly to think that a person can exist in society without anyone else knowing they exist
There's no disagreement there, but do note that in no way did I attempt to make that equivocation either.
There is a distinct difference between someone knowing you exist or seeing you drive by, and someone having extensive, journalized, cross-referenced data, stored potentially indefinitely for perusal at their discretion. You will never know of this person or the fact they're studying your data.
Right now, there are only 3 states even pretending to place responsible restrictions on the usage of this particular data. That is the issue. Of course we will not be getting rid of ALPRs, but we can certainly make sure they're used for reasonable things. The potential for abuse is huge, and that's why there's outrage over the issue.
How do you feel about Onstar or Progressive insurance snapshot?
Progressive Snapshot: We look at your driving habits to see if you could be saving more. You can track your projected savings online. "We look, you track"
Without strong policies and laws, this data is ripe for abuse -- domestic abuse victims and stalking where someone eats, visits, and sleeps, or tracking regular routes of hazmat or cash trucks, etc.
https://tonywebster.com/2012/12/minneapolis-police-license-p...