
DHS to Launch Nationwide License Plate Reader Program - conorgil145
https://cdt.org/blog/government-keeps-its-eyes-on-the-road-with-invasive-license-plate-reader-program/
======
lemonlyman87
Hi all, Original Author of the article here - glad to see so much interest and
discussion of this topic.

There are a few threads going on here but the main one seems to be: Should we
care about "privacy" of information available in public, and if so, how do we
set rules (Given that it's in public)?

I think the answer to the first question is undoubtedly yes because of the way
technology is advancing. Yes, we've always been able to see people in public,
but we've never been able to do it in a rapid automated fashion on a mass
scale, or catalog and query natiowide databases. This creates new implications
for privacy. In the past the government simply didn't have the resources to
know exactly what religious ceremonies, political meetings, protests every
American was going to. Now they do.

This may mean an expansion of 4th Amendment protections (@sharemywin mentioned
the idea of a new amendment, but I think this is exactly what the 4th
Amendment is for). In Jones the Supreme Court said you can't attach GPS
devices to cars without a warrant, and 5 Justices said we may need this type
of protection for location data generally. Since then many lower courts have
applied this protection to location data generated from cell phones (even
public locations), which I think is correct.

As far as setting a standard, I think the best approach is to require 4th
Amendment protections for location data generated from an electronic
source/device. This is what a number of states have been doing to address
demands for cell phone location data and police use of stringrays. It also
directly goes to the issue that electronic devices are given government
unprecedented power to record, store, and query our location data, which makes
that data more sensitive and suseptible to abuse.

~~~
karmacondon
I just don't agree with the "technology is advancing" argument. If something
is legal, ethical and moral then it doesn't matter if technology makes it
easier to do or not. If it's right for the police to follow one person around
to see what religious ceremonies, political meetings and protests that person
is attending, then it's right for the police to do that same thing at scale.

The issue here is: is it right for the police to be able to perform physical
surveillance of an individual? It's a yes or no question, regardless of what
use the police make of technology. If you think the police shouldn't be able
to follow you around to see what meetings you go to, which they can do now
without a warrant, then it shouldn't matter if they do it with their feet or
by automatically capturing and recording license plate numbers.

Technical capability doesn't alter the definition of right and wrong. This is
why we should think through laws and rules carefully, so that they apply not
only to the present, but to how things might be in the future. If it turns out
that we need new laws, then there's a process for changing them. But I don't
think that we should let the technical trends of the moment alter how we view
our basic principles.

~~~
ghaff
However, as the parent wrote, technology creates differences of degree that
become differences of kind.

And it creates problems that just weren't problems when the law was written.
Maybe the laws should have been written more carefully but that's a rather
idealistic position. That laws regarding control of personal airspace over my
house didn't anticipate the widespread use of consumer drones is pretty
understandable. Ditto lots of laws regarding regulation of weaponry, etc.

In this case, we've been seeing nominally public info become more readily
available for a while now. There are good reasons most public information
(deeds, etc.) are public. But that used to mean someone had to have a good
reason to look at them because they'd have to trudge down to the county
clerk's office. And maybe the town clerk's office. And then some other clerk's
office. Now it's all aggregated in one place at the touch of a button. The
good reasons those records were public in the first place haven't gone away.
But technology has fundamentally changed the scope of how that information can
be used.

------
msandford
This is an end-run around the fourth amendment by using a private party to do
a law enforcement function; namely finding "criminals" which has historically
been the job of the police.

I find it interesting that the supreme court recently ruled that GPS trackers
are a form of search. I suspect that in a few years this will go before them,
but given the differences (namely that nothing is attached to your vehicle)
I'm a lot less confident that they'll rule against it. I REALLY hope they
will, but I'm a bit doubtful.

~~~
ams6110
Not sure. One does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in one's
travels on a public street. Anyone (including police) can follow you, record
where you go, photograph you, etc.

When it comes to large-scale, untargeted, collection and retention by traffic
cameras, etc. then it may come into the realm of what is "reasonable."

~~~
parineum
You're right that there is no real expectation of privacy when you're in
public but I think the difference between tracking/storing movements and
seeing your neighbor at the bank is you expect the loss of privacy to end when
you get home.

The data something like this collects is so vast that it actually encroaches
into the parts of your life you would reasonably expect to be private. For
instance, you could determine that I'm seeing a psychiatrist, that I'm
cheating on my wife or that I have cancer. That's private information you
don't expect to be exposed by simply driving around.

To push the limit of the broad interpretation of your public data, consider
the following scenario. Imagine in the not-to-distant future that a technology
exists that allows people to scan, from a distance, the electromagnetic field
produced by your brain and use that data to map your thoughts and memories.
Would me simply stepping into public be a tacit agreement between me and the
government to forfeit that privacy?

------
jwally
Is this doing anything that a private citizen couldn't do (taking pictures on
public property and storing it in a computer)? Conversely, what would happen
if someone took pictures of cars going in / out of NSA/CIA/FBI facilities on a
regular basis and posted them online?

~~~
sp332
This is a private database. The article speculates that it's owned by Vigilant
Solutions.

~~~
sitkack
Is there a word for government and corporations weaving themselves together?

~~~
jnbiche
Yes, it's typically a hallmark of fascism (seriously, look it up).

~~~
maxerickson
World War I is still playing out.

[http://mises.org/library/war-collectivism-world-
war-i](http://mises.org/library/war-collectivism-world-war-i)

(I don't really mean to endorse that article, but I do think it looks at the
world through an interesting lens. WWI probably does represent some sort of
transition point in history, where the idea of an actual global empire became
realizable and we are still in the period of developing a global governance
structure to deal with it. Maybe such a structure is not inevitable, but I
think it is quite likely.)

------
AngrySkillzz
Anyone got ideas for a CV Dazzle[1] equivalent for license plates? I'm
imagining "dirt" used to partially obscure some of the characters, in such a
way that a human police officer would be able to tell the difference but a
text recognition algorithm would either fail or interpret it wrong. Maybe make
an 'I' look like an 'F' or a 'T', that kind of thing.

[1] [http://cvdazzle.com/](http://cvdazzle.com/)

~~~
joezydeco
PukingMoney's excellent presentation at DEFCON 21 has some tips on how one can
(legally and illegaly) obfuscate your plate.

[https://www.defcon.org/images/defcon-21/dc-21-presentations/...](https://www.defcon.org/images/defcon-21/dc-21-presentations/Pukingmonkey/DEFCON-21-Pukingmonkey-
The-Road-Less-Surreptitiously-Traveled-Updated.pdf)

It's a really great primer on a number of issues concerning free travel in the
USA and what law enforcement can and cannot do. Also covers other possible
ways that the government can track your vehicle (toll transponders, tire
sensors, etc). Read the whole thing when you have time.

~~~
AngrySkillzz
Thanks, this is fascinating and exactly what I was looking for.

------
transfire
Why would waste so much gad-dam money? If you really have to track us all
(which obviously is a very dubious proposition to begin with) then just
require the car makers to put RFIDs in the cars. They cost like a whole $1.
While you're at it please require them to print serial numbers on the back of
the cars too so we no longer have to pay the State extortion fees for license
plates.

~~~
ck2
Most cars today do have RFID

It's in the tires and broadcasts the VIN

Part of the TPMS tire pressure monitoring.

~~~
DenisM
How can tires broadcast the VIN? I bought my tire+wheel package on Tirerack,
certainly didn't tell them my VIN.

~~~
ck2
I was under the impression factory TPMS have the vin.

It's been mandatory in the US since 2008 to have TPMS so all 2008 and newer
cars have an oem system.

~~~
digitalneal
Signal isn't really that strong, a few feet away and your not gonna be able to
capture that data.

~~~
jonlucc
I suppose it would be simple to embed the receiver in the street. You know
with decent certainty where the tires will be, so if the signal works one
wheel-diameter away it will be picked up.

------
detcader
All the comments along the lines of "if a person looking at a license plate
and remembering it isn't an invasion of my rights, why is a government
database so bad?" make me wonder why my classmates had such a hard time
grasping induction. Perhaps the concept is only intuitive when convenient to
the user.

As other commentors pointed out, the government is not a private citizen, and
the world is not made of math.

------
peterwwillis
London's Metropolitan Police Service already have the same technology the US
uses to track mobile phones ([http://motherboard.vice.com/read/uk-police-wont-
admit-theyre...](http://motherboard.vice.com/read/uk-police-wont-admit-theyre-
tracking-peoples-phone-calls)) but refuses to comment on its use. Once we
_eventually_ uncover these programs and their use in full detail, programs
such as the DHS's license plate reader will be used as the example of why it's
totally OK to monitor the movements of innocent citizens and interfere with
their communications.

The slippery slope isn't that we're being tracked, or that we are losing our
privacy. Our movements as well as all our communications already are being
tracked. The slippery slope is that one surveillance program justifies another
until anything is fair game because otherwise nothing would be. In terms of
'intelligence', we are very rapidly moving towards a world where privacy will
be illegal.

------
conorgil145
This related HN thread from 2 weeks ago has some good related conversation:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9256322](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9256322)

------
sharemywin
That's why we need a privacy amendment to the constitution.

~~~
wyager
The constitution already protects privacy.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griswold_v._Connecticut](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griswold_v._Connecticut)

The government tries to violate the spirit of the constitution all the time.
It will just require a supreme court ruling banning mass surveillance via
licence plate scanning. Even then, I'm sure various LEAs will try to worm
their way around the ruling.

~~~
LLWM
The supreme court also once ruled that black people could not be citizens and
had no standing to sue in court. That's the problem of depending on
interpretation. If a right to privacy is important, it should be explicit.

------
venomsnake
And here is idea taken from the swingers party - car key lottery. We have a
lot of cars everyone throws a key and takes random for the day ...

------
ctdonath
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.

------
ck2
One day before the decade is out it will be cheap enough to keep dozens of
drones flying over a city with continuous high resolution recording so every
person can be tracked back and forth from every start and endpoint, car or
not.

------
baldeagle
I think one of the problems with this collection is the asymmetric nature of
the information. It will be readily accessible to convict but not to
exonerate. I think that is the biggest problem in the coming days.

~~~
orik
I wonder if you'd be able to have a GPS unit that you could use to exonerate
yourself without having to have that system managed by a third party.

------
aetch
People seem think that the government/police will track their movements. Yes,
that will happen but there are upsides to license plate readers as well. A few
years back my car was stolen from in front of my residence. The local police
were able to find the car in a nearby city through license plate scanning and
I got the car back. Allowing license plate data to be kept for a reasonable
amount of time is absolutely okay. You're driving on US soil in public so it's
not outrageous for the government to monitor their territory.

------
ianstallings
IMHO this isn't about spying, or control. No, this is about the DC culture of
_spending_ and institutional power. DHS is trying to grow as fast as possible.
Inside the US government, power is equal to how much funding you can grab and
how many people you can employ. And the DHS is on a mission to grab as much as
possible right now, while congress is willing to fund it all. Congress
certainly wouldn't want to go against _fighting terrorism_.

------
pacala
Why stop at license plates? Partner with Facebook and do face recognition
already.

~~~
draugadrotten
> do face recognition already.

Someone hasn't been paying attention.

[http://edition.cnn.com/2014/06/01/politics/nsa-facial-
recogn...](http://edition.cnn.com/2014/06/01/politics/nsa-facial-recognition/)

------
coherentpony
This is not an invasion of privacy. The UK has been doing this for years with
ANPR to catch people speeding, stolen vehicles and people driving dangerously.

Edit: It wasn't entirely clear, but when I said, 'This is not an invasion of
privacy,' I meant this to come off as an opinion. Not fact. Please do not read
it as fact.

~~~
switch007
"John Catt, an 80 year old pensioner at the time and his daughter Linda (with
no criminal record between them) - were stopped in 2005, had their vehicle
searched under section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 by City of London Police
and were threatened with arrest if they refused to answer police questions.
After making formal police complaints, it was discovered they were stopped
after their vehicle had been picked up by roadside ANPR CCTV cameras, after a
marker had been placed against their vehicle in the Police National Computer
database as a result of them being spotted attending EDO MBM demonstrations in
Brighton"

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police-
enforced_ANPR_in_the_UK#...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police-
enforced_ANPR_in_the_UK#Criticism)

~~~
coherentpony
From the following paragraph:

'The Register has noted that "in theory a system could be organised in such a
way that records of law-abiding drivers weren't generated at all, but that
hasn't been the way things have panned out.'

The problem here is not ANPR. The problem here is the application of section
44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, a law that is, in my opinion, not sufficiently
circumscribed. A law that was also deemed illegal by the European Court of
Human Rights. That same law can be used to stop and search anybody for any
reason whatsoever, ANPR or not. The solution is to fix the law to prevent
abuse, not to remove ANPR leading to potentially, and in my opinion, more
dangerous roads.

Here's a list of other abusive applications of this law that do not involve
ANPR:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_Act_2000#Section_44_2](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_Act_2000#Section_44_2)

~~~
switch007
The police used ANPR to very easily track them down to then use the Terrorist
act...

~~~
coherentpony
Correct.

~~~
simoncion
The point is that the harder it is to do something, the less likely it will be
done.

If you have to post officers throughout a metro and distribute lists of plates
to look out for, you have to contend with

1) The limited number of officers you can pull off of other police duties

2) The limited amount of space in each officer's head to keep that list of
plates

3) The limited amount of focus each officer can give to the task of checking
each plate that passes by

This means that you'll _either_ put out APBs for only the most important
cases, or you'll move more manpower from other police duties to surveillance.
There's a natural limiter in play.

On the other hand, if you have your tireless friend whose powers of
omniscience and perfect recall are only limited by the number of installed
cameras in the city and hard drives in his array; you'll put out APBs for any
case you feel like. Your friend will watch for _all_ of them, 24/7/365.

Because you don't need assign more manpower to watch for more plates, there is
practically no upper bound to your ability to track persons of interest [0]
within your city.

I agree that improperly vague laws are a pox on all civil societies, but
there's much more to this case than the Terrorism Act. The vast, inhuman
ability of Those In Power to cheaply and easily surveil vast numbers of people
is an issue that's no less important.

[0] No matter how small the interest.

------
Saturnaut
We should honestly be doing away with traditional license plates anyway. First
off, and I say this as a sports car enthusiast, it highly detracts from the
design of a car. Second off, there are much better ways for law enforcement to
identify a car other than limited sight. RFID or some other tech that could be
required at a federal level. This could be tied into registration and
inspection, as well as other services that would benefit drivers as a whole.
There are of course privacy concerns, but I would rather deal with that than
standing in line at the DMV.

------
hellbanner
Tor taxi for citizens, anyone? It's a shame that the railroad companies sold
highways to car manufacturers so they could rip them up and sell
individualism.

------
CyberDildonics
So if they are going to collect widespread data on Americans, it will be
accessible to everyone right?

And we will get to see everywhere cops and dhs vehicles go right?

------
orionblastar
Some people put tinted plastic or mud over their license plate so the red
light readers cannot read them.

I figured by now the NSA ot DHS are putting RFID tags in license plates and
stickers so that they can be read easier.

I figure by the time they pass a law that all cars have to be driven by
robots, the robots will be phoning home everywhere they go.

Not to mention the GPS in smartphones that tells where you have beem

------
drivingmenuts
Is reading a license plate on a public road an invasion of privacy, though?

Looking inside your car might be, but anyone can read a license plate.

~~~
Carrok
No, reading that information in one place and time is not an invasion of
privacy. Storing that information from almost every intersection in the
country for an indefinite period certainly is.

For one example take the paparrazi. While many people consider what the
paparrazi does to be an invasion of privacy, it is not legally defined as
such, and is therefore legal. Now imagine if there was a paparrazi on every
single street corner, wirelessly connected so that any time any person of
interest passes through any intersection, a photo of them with a timestamp is
uploaded to the internet instantaneously. Would that be an invasion of
privacy? Now what if these same paparrazos on every street corner just so
happened to not be real people, but cameras covering every angle of the
intersection? How quickly what "isn't an invasion of privacy because you're in
public" becomes a terrifying scenario.

~~~
Karunamon
So let me get this straight - what you do in public eye is, by legal and
common definition, _not_ private, unless the collection of that information is
efficient, in which case it's a violation of privacy?!

The words "reasonable expectation" come to mind, and in my mind, it's not
"reasonable" to expect that anything you do in public remains private just
because someone never bothered to connect the dots.

That seems a _mighty_ arbitrary line to draw in the sand, in other words. We
already have laws against stalking and the like - how about we enforce those
instead of creation of new, conflicting laws?

There's also the problem of any laws conceived to address this problem have
free speech concerns.

~~~
msandford
It's not illegal for me to happen to walk down the street behind you for a
couple of blocks; we both happen to be going in the same direction. Same for
cars.

What happens if I make the same 20 turns as you, though, at the same
intersections, right behind you? At first it was a coincidence, but after a
certain number of turns, it's probably not.

What if I did this every day for a year? You could probably get a restraining
order against me for stalking. But for two turns one day last year? Definitely
not.

The outward behavior is exactly the same, I just happened to be following
behind you (that's what I'll argue). Why should the courts treat a couple of
blocks any differently than many miles for many days?

~~~
devnul3
I've heard the "occasionally is nothing, repeatedly is stalking" argument on
here repeatedly and (ianal but I know some) this is inaccurate. There are two
requirements for a charge of stalking: willfully and repeatedly, and criminal
intent.[0] In other words, I can follow you all i want as long as I'm not
trying to be stealthy, or I can be as stealthy as I want as long as I don't
follow you repeatedly.

[0] [http://koehlerlaw.net/assault-
theft/stalking/](http://koehlerlaw.net/assault-theft/stalking/)

------
supergeek133
I think people should get notified (or be able to look up) when/if their plate
is scanned. You know every cop that follows you looks it up for no reason.

At the very least, it's looking up my name and address, which people sue
private companies for and credit card companies have regulations for.

~~~
estebank
And then anyone able to spoof your identity (including a spouse worried about
being cheated on) can get your entire location history.

------
tekromancr
Holy fucking shit... At this point, let's just GPS tag every car? It's the
same fucking thing.

~~~
ptaipale
Over here (Finland), the government (driven by Ministy of Treasury and
Ministry of Traffic officials) really plans that. Put a mandatory GPS tracker
in every vehicle, to collect tax based on where the vehicle was driven.

Privacy concerns are brushed away with the usual "we will make it secure" and
"if you have nothing to hide, there's no harm". And the usual promises "we
will only use it for tax reasons, nothing else", which promise will of course
be broken once the system is established, because "we need to all we can to
prevent serious crime".

The amazing thing is how completely predictable the whole path is.

------
niche
0 and O look the same, at least in Maine...#hack

~~~
evilduck
Not all permutations are issued as "standard issue" stamped plates and some
states have a format where there wouldn't be any confusion about where number
and a letter would be. Customized plates might have a chance but they're free
to refuse to issue any plate they want and if there's an issued customized
plate with any ambiguity in the OCR, they can just run through all the
permutations and match it against secondary values like color, make and model
or the registered owner's address. The odds of two people with a late model
red Chevy truck living in the same areas of the state with similar travel
routes, one with something like 'O0O0NMN' and the other with '0O0OMNM' is
probably astronomically low.

------
tek-cyb-org
I feel like the headline should include the term "publicly". They've had this
implemented for quite some time now.

------
userbinator
What a coincidence:
[http://i59.tinypic.com/2r24z5z.png](http://i59.tinypic.com/2r24z5z.png)

(The two articles are completely unrelated, but the juxtaposition caught my
attention.)

