
Automated License Plate Readers Threaten Our Privacy - fstutzman
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/05/alpr
======
6d0debc071
_> Law enforcement agencies claim that ALPR systems are no different from an
officer recording license plate, time and location information by hand. _

Sure, if the officer thought several thousand times faster and had an
encyclopedic memory. In practice it's like having an entire team of officers
hanging around on the street corner noting down the numberplates of every
single car. And people would, I think, find that far more objectionable.
Having large amounts of law enforcement in any area tends to put people's
backs up.

There's a difference of degree going on. People may allow the occasional
surveillance, but it was occasional - and because it was relatively expensive
it was liable to be used for reasonably good reasons. It doesn't really seem a
great idea to have these systems in place as a matter of routine.

And there's a worrying liberty angle to the whole thing too - in many ways how
advanced a society is seems like it can be judged by the degree of privacy
that it allows its members. The need to confirm that everyone's following the
rules, acting appropriately, smacks of tribalism and oppression. Inevitably
we're going to have the ability, but that doesn't imply the will. And seeing
these things actualised is consequently rather troubling.

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copperthrowaway
This is just a throwaway account.

I actually work on a system like this, including creating and training
specialty neural networks for a state I will not name. Although it sounds like
California's DB is a lot more sophisticated in the amount of data it captures
and the amount of data mining that they plan to happen, it's hard to imagine
that more states aren't doing things like we're doing. My department works
directly with law enforcement as basically an R&D arm of state/local police.
The extent of our work on this particular domain is mostly limited to running
automated NCIC checks on the licenses (reveals warrants and stolen cars) - not
really tracking total location and piecing together where this car has been in
the past (though that probably could be gleaned with a few well-defined db
queries).

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danjones
The issue isn't license plate readers, it's data retention.

They certainly have a valid point about the need for limits on data retention
however I feel they're going too far in demanding "public disclosure of the
actual license plate data [(a week’s worth)]" just to highlight the issue.

For reference on how this is handled in other countries take a look at
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_data_retenti...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_data_retention)

~~~
GhotiFish
Gooooood point.

Releasing that data publicly could be dangerous. Which kind of goes to show
that the police shouldn't have that kind of data to begin with.

I really wish they had just used that bloody system to look for hits on wanted
and stolen vehicles. That's fine, everyone's ok with that. Mass collection and
tracking of every single car that gets recorded? Why did they have to torpedo
such a useful technology by doing something so stupid?

~~~
notahacker
_Releasing that data publicly could be dangerous. Which kind of goes to show
that the police shouldn't have that kind of data to begin with._

That's the point the EFF is trying to make, but it's also absurd. It would
obviously be dangerous for them to release their donors' credit card details
in public (or even store them in a non-encrypted database and non-PCI
compliant manner), but that's an argument for limiting who has access to how
much of the records and not an argument that credit cards and financial
transactions data shouldn't exist.

------
cbhl
In the Toronto, Ontario area, ALPRs were built into the 407 Electronic Toll
Route to accompany the RFID readers. This eliminated the need for toll booths
entirely, because the license plate reader could be used to find the car's
registration and send a bill.

Of course, there are slightly different semantics here -- the ALPRs in the 407
are stationary (mounted at every on-ramp and off-ramp), and you can choose to
avoid them by simply using other roads running in parallel to the toll road.

However, this tech is at least a decade old (the 407 was first opened in
1997). It seems odd to me that people are up in arms about the tech now,
especially since you can build a rudimentary ALPR with just a webcam and the
right image processing algorithms.

~~~
Amadou
> It seems odd to me that people are up in arms about the tech now, especially
> since you can build a rudimentary ALPR with just a webcam and the right
> image processing algorithms.

That is precisely why people are up in arms. What was once rare is now
ubiquitous. When every police car has an ANPR capable of reading 60+ plates
per minute and is feeding plate numbers plus timestamps and gps coordinates
into a backend database with poorly defined access controls the potential for
abuse skyrockets.

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sp332
_states including Maine, New Jersey, and Virginia have limited the use of
ALPRs, and New Hampshire has banned them outright._

Good to know, and just another reason to live in NH :)

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jerrya
I am not a lawyer.

I found Professor Orin Kerr's discussion of _United States v. Jones (2012)_ at
the Volokh Conspiracy both enlightening and depressing. Professor Kerr's
analysis there, if I recall it correctly, was that any violation occurred when
the GPS device was physically placed on Jones' car violating the seizure part
of unreasonable search and seizure. That the search itself was legal.

And I think that's how the government's attorney and Scalia and the Court saw
it. (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jones_(2012)>)

But presumably according to Kerr, and I am very likely distorting his views
since a) I ain't a lawyer and b) sometime has passed, that if the same
tracking information against Jones was obtained by having ALPR devices mounted
on city street lights, freeway overpasses and freeway ramps, then Jones (and
us!) would have no more expectation of privacy than if Jones had been seen by
a cop walking a beat.

I think there is a fundamental difference between a cop walking a beat
recognizing a citizen and having an array of massively cheap cameras hooked
into an ALPR network tracking all citizens 24x7.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
There is a massive difference.

But that's not the point. There is a societal benefit to tracking people this
way. Well, there is _expected_ to be one - of road pricing, congestion and
crime reduction.

The handling of loss of privacy, which seems pretty much inevitable, is
something we do need to deal with - just not try to stop it.

------
draugadrotten
The battle for privacy is already lost. David Brin's approach is what is
remaining. THE TRANSPARENT SOCIETY.

~~~
jacquesm
> The battle for privacy is already lost.

Over my dead body it is.

~~~
CamperBob2
(Shrug) It might take that long, but it will happen nevertheless.

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malbs
Here in Australia there is a move towards this same technology. Vehicle
registration stickers are being phased out because the registration of
vehicles are auto queried by police vehicles, RTA cameras, etc

I'm pretty happy about this because I don't drive. I ride a bicycle, and the
two times I've been involved in a genuine aggressive altercation with another
vehicle, the car had stolen license plates.

One of those times the police had planned to charge the passenger with
attempted murder (We were both travelling south, I was going about 25 km/h,
they pulled in close beside me, and opened the car door into me). When it
turned out the license plate was stolen/hadn't been registered for 10 years, I
was at a loss as to why anyone would want to drive around with stolen plates
on their car (me being a law abiding citizen), and the police said it's to
avoid speed cameras and to steal petrol (turn up to petrol station, fill up,
drive off). Apparently petrol theft is like one of the number one crimes here

------
csmatt
We need CAPTCHA-style license plates :)

I actually started doing some experimenting with IR LEDs since they emit light
outside the visible spectrum, but do show up on cameras (as long as the
cameras don't have an IR filter). The LEDs just weren't powerful enough.

There is this <http://www.nophoto.com/>

~~~
AnthonyMouse
>We need CAPTCHA-style license plates :)

I was about to post the same thing. This is a technological problem, it could
do with a technological solution: We need a way to make sure that license
plates are not machine readable.

Or maybe this: Make them explicitly machine readable, but then have the
vehicle alert the owner when something reads it. So instead of a license plate
you have a radio transceiver with a range of a few hundred yards, which
broadcasts the vehicle's make and model and allows anyone to request the VIN.
You can request the VIN with a mobile device but every request gets logged and
notifies the vehicle owner, and making a request would require probable cause
by law.

Everyone in the U.S. will soon have a mobile device anyway (if only one
without a data plan that was discarded by someone with more money and only
used for wifi), so this actually serves the original purpose of a license
plate _better_ than existing license plates do, because you can read the VIN
from a vehicle after witnessing a violation of the law even if it's at an
angle that you couldn't have read the plate or is far enough away that you
couldn't have made it out.

On the other hand, it prevents passive surveillance or surveillance without
probable cause, which has always been a misfeature of license plates outside
of their original purpose.

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jumby
You have no right to privacy on a public street. Nor is your tag non-public
information.

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nooneelse
Does a license plate, legally speaking, have to be visible when the car is
parked? If not, then covering it would be a stop-gap against cops driving
through a parking lot and collecting the info on who is in that area.

~~~
blocking_io
Covering up your licence plate would be a really great way to attract the
attention of the police.

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squozzer
Imagine what would happen if we had technology that made breaking the law
impossible. I don't mean top-down Orwellian-style tech, but bottom-up.

Behold, the Legal Singularity.

Cops would probably start shooting babies in the streets.

~~~
chii
true freedom mean the freedom to knowingly break laws. with out that freedom,
it isn't truly free...

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johnschrom
In Minneapolis, they started collecting and retaining ALPR data, but the
sunshine laws hadn't caught up to the retention period. So, one of my buddies
made a request for all of the data, and it was fulfilled.

If anybody is interested in playing with ALPR data, we put it up on github but
removed the license plate numbers: <https://github.com/johnschrom/Minneapolis-
ALPR-Data>

------
emeidi
Maybe we should switch off our smartphones first? Who cares about OCRing
number plates if you can track an individual's EVERY move using his mobile
phone data?

------
GigabyteCoin
I have never liked the idea of them but couldn't put my finger on the "why".

Thanks, EFF.

------
corresation
_But we should not so readily give up the very freedoms that terrorists seek
to destroy._

The freedom to not have your license plate OCR'd? Is that what it's all about?
Putting that in there is jingoistic and appealing to the same emotions that
the other side abuses.

Pervasive, often incidental monitoring (e.g. the growing proliferation of
electronic toll roads) is absolutely inevitable. Cameras are everywhere.
Recording costs close to nothing. Capacity is endless. Processing and OCR is
achieved with negligible power on tiny, low-cost devices. Imagine what
tomorrow will be like?

Reactions that involve essentially trying to pretend that technology doesn't
exist or can be suppressed will never and have never worked.

~~~
mikeash
It does seem terribly hypocritical to complain about the police capturing
images from a public street, while simultaneously defending people's right to
record the police in public.

I wonder what people would make of it if someone released a highly popular
smartphone app that did this same sort of thing, just crowdsourced rather than
done by dedicated police. You could build a gigantic, publicly-accessible,
searchable database that would absolutely destroy privacy in the same way that
having the police do it would, except it would be available to all instead of
just to the government. Somehow, I imagine that the same people fighting
against this would fight _for_ people's rights to run this app.

It's a tough problem, certainly. I'm sympathetic to the privacy argument, but
on the other hand, it seems like that ship has sailed. Maintaining privacy in
public just because it's too hard to correlate all of the available data is
becoming as anachronistic as riding a horse into town.

Edit: it's so wonderful how people are downvoting me apparently because they
disagree. Before you downvote, click the reply button to explain why you think
I'm wrong, and then don't downvote. Seriously, you can't take a little bit of
differing opinion? I didn't insult anyone or say anything unproductive here, I
just went slightly against the hivemind. And yes, I realize that complaining
about downvotes is against the rules, and I don't care.

~~~
sp332
_It does seem terribly hypocritical to complain about the police capturing
images from a public street, while simultaneously defending people's right to
record the police in public._

Cops are only recordable on the job, because they are public servants doing a
public job.

~~~
mikeash
I thought anyone in public could legally be recorded.

~~~
saraid216
It's a legal gray area because the physics of wave propagation are not good
about obeying privacy laws.

IANAL, so that's the extent of the opinion I should be giving.

~~~
krichman
It's not gray at all. You may record someone in public. You may record someone
on private property iff you have permission or you are on public property. You
may not use their image in an advertisement without a signed release.

(IANAL also)

