
Judge orders police to stop collecting data from license plate readers - jatsign
https://www.washingtonpost.com/crime-law/2019/04/02/judge-orders-fairfax-police-stop-collecting-data-license-plate-readers
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dsfyu404ed
What a pleasant surprise this ruling is. The DC area (of which Fairfax county
is part) is probably one of the most government tracking heavy regions of the
US. This is a curve-ball on par with the CA judge that overturned the mag ban
recently. I would never have predicted this ruling.

>Nine states have passed laws limiting how long the police can maintain the
data, ranging from three minutes (New Hampshire)

Now that I could have predicted. If any state is going to proactively curb law
enforcement's capability to build a dragnet it's gonna be NH.

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forgottenpass
> If any state is going to proactively curb law enforcement's capability to
> build a dragnet it's gonna be NH.

License plate collection used to be outright prohibited there (with toll both
exception) before they caved on Real ID.

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dsfyu404ed
>before they caved on Real ID.

I blame that on two things (in no particular order).

1) There's been tons of money dangled in front of state legislators
incentivizing them to break from what their constituents actually want because
both the national parties want to make the state theirs. If you have enough
money (from voting how the people with the money want you to vote) to
steamroll whoever you're running against you don't actually have to listen to
your constituents that much.

2)The MA 5th column.

~~~
SkyBelow
> If you have enough money (from voting how the people with the money want you
> to vote) to steamroll whoever you're running against you don't actually have
> to listen to your constituents that much.

Perhaps we need to reconsider the idea of running government on the basis of a
popularity content. Perhaps we should give strange women lying in ponds
dispensing swords a reconsideration.

~~~
ScottFree
> Perhaps we should give strange women lying in ponds dispensing swords a
> reconsideration.

Bring back Monarchy and Manifest Destiny? How would that be any different than
what we have now? Money can be used to influence Kings and Kingdoms just as
easily as politicians.

If we could ever secure mobile devices and servers well enough, I think a
direct democracy could be interesting. Mob rule, for all it's faults, still
works better than having a ruling class.

> Perhaps we need to reconsider the idea of running government on the basis of
> a popularity conte __s__ t.

Have I spotted a Dvorak user in the wild? :)

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rb808
Anyone have an open source license place reader software? I always thought
this would be good for a neighbourhood watch kind of project.

~~~
stevekemp
This was a good read, along those lines:

[https://medium.freecodecamp.org/how-i-replicated-
an-86-milli...](https://medium.freecodecamp.org/how-i-replicated-
an-86-million-project-in-57-lines-of-code-277031330ee9)

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jermaustin1
I work in this space, building the tools to help LEAs seach their databases. I
also have conflicting feelings about how this could be used. We built in
access control down to the specific camera, auditing of every user action,
requiring the reason you are performing an action, and mandating the user
associate an open case in the same access group as the camera you are querying
in order to view the data.

Its pretty locked down to help prevent abuse. I'm not saying abuse is
impossible but LEOs or more likely, their administrators, but it is difficult
to do it and get away.

I've heard from the higher ups, that abuse used to be rampant in other
systems, but since switching to our software, only a handful of people have
been found to abuse it.

~~~
chris_mc
Yes, until the government passes new laws which reduce those protections and
allow the use of this data for other things. It's really great you built in
decent protections, but that doesn't mean they'll always be in place. Us
techies seem to think technology exists in a static environment, but it
doesn't.

Always ask yourself before working on stuff, if the USA were to turn to
fascism tomorrow, would your work be helping us fight it or helping it
subjugate us?

~~~
5874-4b22-a4e0
yeah no thanks, i'll just take the paycheck

~~~
acct1771
"Fuck you", then, since that's what you're saying to all of us.

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sjwright
We want to protect innocent people from snooping and harassment, but we also
want law enforcement to have useful resources. These shouldn’t be mutually
exclusive requirements.

It always baffles me that nobody thinks to set up a best-of-both-worlds system
whereby all the data is gathered, but stored in a secure database under the
control of an independent government entity, possibly the courts themselves.
If you’re tracking a suspect, get a warrant and the court will supply the
data.

The same should apply to all passive data gathering systems like body cams.

~~~
DennisP
Somehow, law enforcement once managed to do its job reasonably well even in
the absence of pervasive surveillance.

~~~
P_I_Staker
That's debatable. Try going to law enforcement with anything non-trivial, and
see how that goes. People routinely get murdered by someone that's a known and
reported threat to them personally.

You might be shocked what the police are unable or unwilling to go after
someone for. Things like aggravated assault, stalking, and breaking /
entering. If you have a known address and whereabouts for someone, and you've
checked there once (or a few times), what else can you really do? These tools
can be used to automate things that would be extremely costly for an
officer(s) to do.

I don't agree with pervasive surveillance btw, and there are other factors
that cause law enforcement to be ineffective. I strongly disagree with your
premise, though.

~~~
DennisP
By "reasonably well" I don't mean "solves every crime." I mean well enough to
keep society running smoothly, with affordable property insurance and the
average person having low risk of violent injury or death.

~~~
drb91
> I mean well enough to keep society running smoothly, with affordable
> property insurance and the average person having low risk of violent injury
> or death.

Well, that's a fairly heinous definition of law enforcement working well as it
also covers, say, fascist secret police. Society running smoothly should not
be prioritized over society running ethically. This is the core of why you
could consider police primarily protecting the property rights of rich people:
a disrupted rich person is enormously inefficient in terms of capital use, but
a disrupted poor person is just another burden on society without much effect
on the economic health signals to which people refer.

~~~
DennisP
Mass surveillance is a favorite tool of secret police, most famously the Stasi
of East Germany. If we want to avoid secret police, we should avoid mass
surveillance, even if that means some criminals get away.

~~~
P_I_Staker
I agree, I just don't think you should be exaggerating the capabilities of the
police.

