What is the legality of something like this? If this worked or if it didn't and someone gave a damn it seems like this could fall under attempted destruction of property or something like that. I'm definitely not a lawyer though.
License plate scanners are pretty cool technology-wise. It's amazing machine vision has advanced that much. I was under the impression these were being used to search for specific license plates though. Like a stolen car or the car of a fugitive. I didn't realize they were storing every single license plate recorded into a giant database. That is more concerning.
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.
The crux of the argument which comes up from the 'apologists' for this type of thing extends from a different understanding of the axioms of privacy to everyone else.
Let p(x) be a proposition that means that doing x is a violation of someone's expectation of privacy.
Some people seem to assume that (not p(x)) and (not p(y)) implies that not p(x union y). In other words, the assumption is that if x is not a violation of someone's expectation of privacy, and doing y is not a violation of someone's expectation of privacy, then doing both x and y is also not a violation of someone's expectation of privacy.
However, the 'mosaic theory' suggests that the above assumption is not valid - doing x and y individually might be perfectly reasonable, but doing both could be a violation of someone's expectation of privacy.
From TFA: "...said the Menlo Park police department violated his client's rights during the internal affairs investigation"
I actually support his getting his job back, because it seems to have been found that the police department overstepped their boundaries in their investigation of him. If that is indeed true, then it's imperative that any illegal evidence against him should be discarded.
At some level, if you have enough defense lawyers, it becomes literally impossible to conduct a detailed investigation without forgetting to dot an i or cross a t somewhere.
I don't know whether they violated his rights or not, but it's pretty clear from the reporting (all of which I've read, since he makes $150K as my neighborhood cop) that he's guilty in the pure sense of "he did it." And they originally discovered him in some other context - not while illegally pursuing him. (While "they" continue to illegally tap your phone, and your emails, and mine.)
There's legal theory around this, and it's fairly well established, though often somewhat murky. The concept is "inevitable discovery".
The defense attorney can bring up claims that the evidence was ill-gotten, and if the claim is upheld, then the judge can throw out everything gained afterward, unless they can prove that it would have been discovered unrelated to the ill-gotten loot.
For example, if a police officer searches your home without a warrant and finds the murder weapon, that murder weapon ceases to exist, legally, and the suspect will likely get away scot free.
However, if a different officer pulls him over for a DUI a week later, not as a result of information provided by the unlawful search, and finds blood in the back seat of the car, which leads to an arrest, prosecution could claim that they would have obtained a warrant to his home that would then have likely surfaced the murder weapon.
Edit, all that was fairly random rambling, re-reading it in context, but what I meant to say was that I agree, and that his confession ought to be enough grounds to keep his termination permanent.
I think that's totally missing the point of the article. The license plates are being used to track where every person goes over a long period of time, which can uncover some very private information about people, like whether the person is cheating on their spouse, or sees a psychiatrist on a weekly basis.
And yes, you can find this out just by physically following someone wherever they go, but since that's impractical to do on a mass scale, it's not likely to be done for people who aren't targets of specific criminal investigations. License plate scanning collects this personal information indiscriminately about totally innocent people.
And this information is likely to be abused by people in positions of power, just like existing records about people are. I can't count how many times have I've heard about cops getting in trouble for running unauthorized database searches on ex-girlfriends, etc. Detailed data about a person's every movement would be even more tempting to abuse.
You're taking actions in public, of course it's not private. Where do we get this idea that, not only do we have a right to privacy, but we have a right to privacy everywhere, all the time?
As for potential for abuse, guns can be abused too - that doesn't mean guns aren't allowed at all. Or if your country does ban guns, think of something else that might be abused but is allowed anyway.
Just because something could be abused doesn't mean that's a valid reason for not doing that thing.
I have a right to record when I see you. Everyone has that right. If you're free to act, I'm free to record that act, assuming you've acted in public.
Also, what's "horseshit" about "you don't have privacy when you act in public"? I'm not recording your conversations as you're in public, only what you do. Why is that horseshit?
Because historically (and also legally) the bounds between what is private and public have been defined by what was plausible at the time, not by what was hypothetically possible.
We know live in a world were what used to a be a hypothetical dream (or science fiction novel) has now become the mundane. The law can either adapt (via judicial rulings), be changed by voters or become an absurd anachronism that's good for nothing but justifying invasive surveillance.
FWIW, it is legal to record wireless transmissions like cellphone calls. It is illegal to pass copies of those recordings on to other people. At least in the USA.
But you recording by your house isn't that interesting.
It is more complicated when you start talking about whether you should sell derivations of those recordings or someone aggregating the recordings made by many people.
It's not much more complicated. If I own properties throughout the city, and at each of those properties I record every license plate that drives by, I'm well within my rights to not only do that, but to aggregate that data and supply it to others if they ask.
It's the exact same thing as CCTV, fundamentally. How can you construct an argument that prevents me from doing this without preventing many things we already are okay with?
Legally, probably. Your final question sets a bad standard, present day societal approval is only weak evidence (that is, lots of heinous shit has been normative in various historical periods).
There is also the problem where you are talking about morality as if it is clear cut and all settled.
Anyway, I'm pretty well in favor of trying to find a meaningful definition of a space that exists between public and private, where shared space activities are not just a free for all. Mostly, because I think I would/will be more comfortable in shared spaces if I can expect that other people will mostly have some respect for my wish to not be followed around with technology.
(I would argue this space exists, it's plenty easy to irritate someone by 'getting in their face' in public. This is them expressing strident disapproval of your behavior...)
What is that argument, specifically? So far all I've heard is "this is wrong", not "this is wrong because of x".
The only point anyone's been able to make is that it could possibly be abused, but frankly, everything the government can do can be abused. You'll need more than "it could be abused" to argue against it.
I'm arguing that it makes me uncomfortable and that this discomfort will be widely shared. Go ahead and disagree that morality is something different than that if you want. You are also welcome to think that is weak sauce (but then go ahead and make a habit of making strangers uncomfortable in public and see how that serves you).
Recording and documenting where you go in no way hinders or interferes with your freedom of action, therefore I retain my right to freedom of action in doing so.
I don't have a right to go into a place where you have privacy. If you come out of a private place, or act in a way that is public, I have every right in the world to track you.
Oh sure, but I can't follow your around whenever you leave your house, and record everything you do. There has to be a line, and we need to decide what is crossing it.
Personally, I have not trouble tracking every car.
As one example, you are not legally allowed to record a conversation to which you are not a party, and in some states, you need all participants' consent.
Perhaps not yet, but it should be illegal to collect and record license plate data en masse. Traffic monitoring for DOT optimization purposes can be done without uniquely identifying vehicles. Individual license plates can be compared against a wanted and stolen list without storing them. Witnesses of a crime can write down individual license plate numbers. But wide-scale recording of innocent individuals' historical movements via license plate numbers (and, for that matter, cell phone towers) ought to be illegal the same way wiretapping is illegal.
Until recent technology, mass surveillance and tracking wasn't possible. It hasn't been an issue until recently. You can't just say that we've always been ok with a lack of privacy in public, because those laws and customs came about long before this was around.
And yes abuse is a perfectly valid reason to ban something. Dangerous things that are allowed are because the amount of abuse is thought to be less than the amount of benefit. Is that true for surveillance? I honestly don't know.
So are you arguing that this won't be abused? That seems extreme. There is a large probability that government databases will eventually be hacked, that the people using them will do a look-up for personal reasons, that police will use it excessively on some case, or use it to enforce bad laws, etc.
You can say the benefit of it makes it worth it, but I don't see how you can believe these things won't happen at all.
I'm arguing that everything gets abused, and I'm not sure what is special about this that would make it additionally prone to abuse, more-so than any of the other tools the government has at its disposal.
No, it's not. A nuclear weapon is a special case. Guns are not, as it's already accepted that many people can own them despite their risk levels.
"It could be abused" is not a valid reason not to do something, because everything is abused. It's human nature to abuse power. "The consequences of inevitable abuse are too severe to risk." is a better argument. What are the consequences of the abuse of this information? What, of these consequences, are possible only by the abuse of this information? What can go wrong when this system gets abused?
Those are the relevant questions, and what we should be discussing, not quietly yelping, "my privacy" as we're each drug out of our beds into the night.
The implication of license plates changed from individual tracking (recording the plate during a crime) to mass tracking (recording all plates all the time). That's very different.
Also, misusing a gun is different than misusing information.
Privacy is the difference between a city and a village. Cities are big enough that you don't know everyone you see and remember everything they do, and that lets eccentrics exist. Anonymity should be a sacrament.
well, it is called intelligence fusion centers and license plates is just a minor piece. Pretty spotty. Face recognition info from surveilance cams pretty spotty as well. Credit card transactions - similar. Cell phone position is much better... Once taken together ("fused" dare i say :) - works like a charm i guess.
Guys from Palantir would know better i guess what Suspicious Activity Reports are cooked there:
"...many Fusion Centers have gradually shifted to a
broader mission of providing general criminal intelligence and all-crimes, all-hazards analysis support for constituent agencies."
"...many Fusion Centers have gradually shifted to a broader mission of providing general criminal intelligence and all-crimes, all-hazards analysis support for constituent agencies."
Inevitable given that terrorism is effectively non-existent in the US. When you have a great big expensive hammer, you just have use it on something.
If license plates were meant to be as public as possible, it would be possible for the public to find out who the registered owner of each car was!
In my understanding, license plates were created for two reasons:
* To enforce registration requirements for cars and drivers in order to enforce training standards (for drivers) and safety standards (for the construction and inspection of cars)
* To allow the easier identification of the party responsible for an accident (and maybe for certain other infractions, like speeding, parking violations, or abandoning a vehicle)
That means that other uses to which license plates have been put are a kind of mission creep. Where they harm motorists' privacy, we can reasonably see them as a failure in the design and implementation of the license plate system.
If we had a license plate system that let people responsible for accidents and traffic infractions be identified and that ensured cars were safe without also making it easy to figure out individual people's travel patterns, I'd view that as a strict improvement over the status quo -- and more legitimate, because it wouldn't impose unrelated burdens on motorists.
Right now we're creating and deploying lots of other systems that assign unique identifiers to people and their possessions. Those systems are meant for specific purposes, which their users may see as legitimate, but designing them in the simplest, most obvious way will cause collateral damage to privacy by allowing often invisible kinds of tracking and profiling of people's activities, whereabouts, and relationships. If those uses are not the intended purpose, we should demand more careful designs that end up enabling them.
It's one thing to be identifiable in the here and now; it's quite another to have your movements recorded and kept on file for an unspecified period of time. That creates the same privacy problems that collection and analysis of telephone and email "metadata" create.
They are explicitly designed to be as public as possible, as they should be.
They were designed in an age in which pervasive video-cameras and back-end databases that never forget were pure science fiction at best.
In effect, the terms of the public's contract with the state regarding license plates have changed. It's time we re-negotiate that contract in light of the new circumstances.
"The trick is that that the frame is basically a optically-triggered slave-mode flash unit that’s placed right up to the subject (the license place). A sensor at the top of the frame detects when a flash is fired, which in turn instantly triggers two xenon flashes built into the sides. The powerful flash will turn your license plate into a rectangle of blown-out highlights."
> Did you use the same camera design as the speed & red-light cams do?
We didn't.
In Australia, at least, red light cameras are cameras, and they do have a flash (you can see it go off). The plate readers on the freeways for tolls are more like video cameras.
What this article doesn't mention is that this data isn't only for cops, anyone should be able to see license plate records. Milage may vary, but since this is government data, something along the lines of a FOIA request should get you huge files with license plates, coordinates, and times. Some police departments may be more stubborn, but under current laws this data should pretty much be public.
historically the use of license plates were fought because of the potential to track the coming and going of american citizens. however, it was decided that it was not possible to do such tracking so they were allowed. the error is that provisions were not made that when such fears were realized the use of such plates should be revoked.
The majority of commuters in what location? The majority of commuters in my metro area are most definitely motorists, with no safe bicycle paths to a lot of destinations.
I know of some Canadian jurisdictions that used to require bicycle licenses. Toronto was one, until the 1950s.
I can't imagine a license scheme being repealed these days, as these things are all about the fees that can be collected, as well as the feature-creep that bureaucrats can promote. A drivers' license today goes well beyond driving, now, in its various official (and unofficial) uses.
I think there is a mathematical theory here people should become acquainted with -- differential privacy. So far it has found use in the context of a large data set, e.g. search engine query logs, to try to determine how invasive a statistical summary or release of only partly obfuscated data would be.
Like calculus, it has a sort of epsilon/delta construct -- given a differential privacy concern epsilon, under what circumstances (how tight a bound on delta) do I need to prevent that.
Perhaps this theory could quantify the intuition that while it's ok to snap my license plate now and then (very little differential privacy loss on my part), enough times and it becomes invasive, and dreadfully so.
This puts some teeth into the vague talk about a mosaic theory. The key idea is whether the aggregate information in the data set can triangulate you, to within say 10000 persons (not much privacy invation), or 100 (quite a bit). There seems to be a tipping point around clusters of 100-1000 persons or so, that is the typical size of small organizations or groups of people, such as churches and schools.
Now, as an application: license plates are nearly unique identifiers and the attacker has a database of who's who for all intents and purposes, so it is little different from asking everyone for their ID just because they are on the street. That's illegal by the way, even for the police.
The argument that was formerly deployed here is that using a vehicle on public roadways was a privilege that cost you natural expectation of privacy (non-intrusion) in public places.
The real crux of the issue here is that the public-private tradeoff was once predicated on the individual (the individual atom has protection, because data collection is sparse, so tagging the individual but not the path was meaningful). Now the data collection is dense, and even single particle tracks become visible.
If you think in terms of fluid mechanics, there's a sort of Euler view / Lagrange view here (as there is with tagged dollar particles and tagged wallets or accounts).
That is, tracking individuals and tracking their paths become duals of each other, if the data collection is dense enough. It doesn't matter whether the item tracked is the tagged individual, or the flows and transactions -- either way, complete reconstruction of the system becomes possible.
With any data set, there is a sort of 'phase transition' in its size, where you suddenly can see the underlying trajectories of all the tagged particles. Things that made perfect sense when data collection was sparse, just as allowing the police to jot down you license number and chase you with a bicycle, turn into totalitarian surveillance when the observations become dense enough -- in a way we can quantify in terms of a sudden jump in information gain that goes from nearly complete ignorance of where people are and what they are doing (the former phase), to near complete knowledge of everything. Very much like percolation theory.
asking everyone for their ID just because they are on the street. That's illegal by the way, even for the police.
That is not illegal at all. Anyone can ask for ID, including the police. Doesn't mean you have to give it to them. In the case of the police, refusing to show your ID can't be used as cause to arrest you. But they can still ask for it.
