
The Alexandria Police Department is taking pictures of everyone’s cars - danso
http://capitolcityproject.com/police-are-keeping-records-of-when-i-visited-my-girlfriend/
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drdaeman
While I don't like mass surveillance (feels uneasy), I don't like the idea of
forbidding someone to remember things they've seen (heard, received, observed
- whatever verb's appropriate).

My belief is - if one wants privacy - they should park in the backyard (i.e.
area restricted to general public), shield the license plates (if that's
illegal while the vehicle's parked at appropriate place - it's another issue)
from observers or do whatever seems reasonable to not _emit_ information. If
you don't emit anything, there's nothing to receive thus nothing to store -
privacy problem ultimately solved. Otherwise, there's a tricky issue to
recognize where lies the barrier between "that's okay" (say, neighbors notice
a car and unconsciously recognize the pattern - one really can't complain
about that) and "that's violation of my privacy."

Oh, and I presumed he parked in a publicly observable place, like a public
parking lot or on a driveway just in front of the house or something like
that. If PD'd would've used special hardware to peek into private areas that
are inaccessible to a "naked eye" \- that would be another (tricky) issue.

State keeping track of their citizens from their funding (taxes) is another
issue, but it's not about privacy anymore.

~~~
sirsar
Would you be bothered if someone followed you daily on the sidewalk, noting
your paths? I would.

Would it be any better if, rather than one person following you, it was one
guy on every street corner, who collaborated to reconstruct the paths you
walked, and kept a record?

For me, that would be just as offensive. Now consider that by collecting data
points from every car, anywhere, the police can do this kind of tracking to
everybody. I don't find that any better than hiring one stalker per citizen.

You remembering that you met me in a coffee shop wouldn't bother me. You
following me everywhere _certainly_ would.

~~~
randallsquared
I'm not the grandparent commenter, but your first example would indeed bother
me, while the second wouldn't. The scenario of someone following me around
holds worrisome import quite apart from the mere knowledge of what I'm doing
or where I'm going (which I used to worry about, but tried to avoid worrying
about after I realized that in a decade or two, there would be no way of
knowing if someone had a camera (other than their eyes, of course...) pointed
at me).

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nateabele
Obligatory:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc)

(Summary: the job of a police officer is not to 'solve crime' \-- it is to
apprehend suspects and assist district attorneys in obtaining convictions;
hence, if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, the more information
they have about you, the greater the danger to your freedom & safety).

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AndrewKemendo
There is an inherent conflict in the demands of the citizens. We all want to
be kept safe from crime and have law enforcement and state protection actually
keep us safe, vindicate us when falsely accused and resolve our case when we
are hurt. We also don't want them to have data that they could misuse.

As this community knows well, you can't solve problems without data and data
collection for policing historically was anecdotal and varied wildly by
jurisdiction. beat cops would walk around and use their own internal sensors
to take data and make correlations. This of course is subject to all the
common human failings and would more often than not fail the community more
than it helped - but it was rarely considered invasive.

So we have two options: Build and apply to our civic lives effective tools for
persistent collection/analysis of public data and take the chance that
oversight is improper or that the data will be misused. Or do we accept fewer
resolved cases of homicide/speeding/kidnapping/parole etc... and have a higher
probability that our PII is only kept within private companies?

~~~
Zigurd
Most low-performing police departments, in terms of solution rates, have more
serious problems than a lack of data.

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Finbarr
There is a precedent for this in the United Kingdom[1]. The nationwide
Automatic Number Plate Recognition system (ANPR) tracks vehicles in real time.

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

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VLM
How much do repo men pay for access to the license plate DB? So if he declines
to pay his loan, the repo truck drives past his GFs apartment...

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zorpner
For the curious, the EFF has a post on a similar situation in Los Angeles
which addresses some of the legal implications of mass license plate data
collection: [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/03/los-angeles-cops-
argue...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/03/los-angeles-cops-argue-all-
cars-la-are-under-investigation)

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diminoten
License plates were _designed_ around identification. The whole point of
having license plates is so the police know who your vehicle is registered to.

Combine that with the fact that you're driving around on publicly funded
roads, and you find yourself without any right to privacy whatsoever. You're
in _public_ , the very definition of "not private".

Where your car goes on public roads isn't private, even if you want it to be.
It never has been.

That being said, just because your car is somewhere doesn't mean you are. Any
competent defense lawyer in a criminal case would point that out. In some
states, traffic cameras can't be used to issue tickets unless the camera has a
clear picture of the driver.

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logfromblammo
Machines are mindlessly obedient. The technology is not an actor here.

What matters is who controls the data. That person is the one effectively
performing the surveillance. If you eliminate the force multiplier as a
separate entity, what you see is that one or more Alexandria cops are
ruthlessly hounding everyone that enters their city.

I presume that the collected data are not being published freely, probably
using "ongoing investigation" and "officer safety" as a cover. I further
presume that the data are being correlated and mined for the purpose of
identifying criminals and assembling evidence against them, and the algorithms
in use do not likewise search the records for exculpatory evidence for those
who already stand accused.

The failing is not that cops are using powerful technologies to aid their
work. The failing is that the police departments themselves have no technology
remedy for their long-standing human failings. Rather than tracing a
verifiable harm from victim to perpetrator, focusing on the facts of the case,
and leaving matters of justice to the mechanisms of the courts, cops are
increasingly filling quotas for their citations and encounters, punishing
people on their own prerogative, and enjoying an asymmetric relationship with
the public.

You want to watch us? We must ask qui custodiet custodes? Before training your
cameras on the public, first point them at yourselves, and show us that you
are trustworthy. Are cops prepared to confront the video evidence that they
engaged a prostitute while on duty and then took a nap in their patrol car?
Stop pretending that a smartphone camera is in any way equivalent to a gun.
Before I am willing to tolerate in any way the trappings of the panopticon,
every last cop out there, from bicycle patrol rookie to the city commander,
should be willing to have a camera on his badge and uniform from the moment it
is donned to the instant it is doffed, with an uncut record freely available
at some point to the public.

Now, I wouldn't like having someone hanging over my shoulder all the time
making sure I'm not reading HN at work, either. But sometimes you have to
experience it personally before you can empathize with the person you intend
to inflict that upon.

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thomble
Across the Potomac, DC also tracks plate information. They at least use this
technology to track new DC residents that fail to register their vehicles with
the District. I once received a "warning" because my car had been parked
overnight on the street X number of times with VA plates. I was told to either
register my car with the city or get an Out Of State Registration[1]. My
girlfriend lived there at the time.

[1] [http://dmv.dc.gov/service/registration-out-state-
automobiles...](http://dmv.dc.gov/service/registration-out-state-automobiles-
rosa)

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zaroth
How about the CCTV cams that are appearing at every single *^#% intersection
in the Bay Area? Obviously they are recording everything and probably running
the same license plate detection as well.

It's like someone (Homeland Security grants I assume) figured, we have all
these mounting points already wired (traffic signals) might as well add a
camera.

I figure the camera will just be built into the traffic signal in the future,
and the whole unit will be IP addressable. Saves on having two different
things to mount, and the light's probably already at the right orientation.

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danielweber
Side note: mousing over an image should not make it _harder_ to see

~~~
MichaelApproved
Clicking on the images darken the whole page. Looks like they have a broken
implementation of an image gallery. The page dims but the larger image doesn't
appear.

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DanielBMarkham
I read recently that some startups are collecting this data and providing it
back to police departments. So you could search on a license plate number and
receive hits on every where and every time it was used. Of course, it's only
available for LE and they have to promise not to talk about where they got the
data from.

Just imagine a similar system using facial recognition and Google
glass/FB/G+/Instagram/etc.

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rafekett
troubling, but i can't see any way in which this is illegal on the part of
Alexandria PD.

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batmansbelt
This is why I ride a bike. That way no one can take a picture of it!

