
The small and surprisingly dangerous detail the police track about you [video] - ColinWright
http://www.ted.com/talks/catherine_crump_the_small_and_surprisingly_dangerous_detail_the_police_track_about_you
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jessaustin
Transcript:

[https://www.ted.com/talks/catherine_crump_the_small_and_surp...](https://www.ted.com/talks/catherine_crump_the_small_and_surprisingly_dangerous_detail_the_police_track_about_you/transcript?language=en)

TL;DR: Local cops have Automatic License Plate Readers that run all the time
tracking every car that drives by, also that data is kept forever because why
not.

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ChuckMcM
Here is a startup idea, the "License Plate Club" ...

For $10 a month users register their license plate and state, then every month
they get a printout of two random plates (at 75% size so as not to be confused
with the car's real license plate) which you just stick to the side of your
car doors. Of course being on the side of your car no police officer is going
to think you're passing it off as your own plate, but every camera trained to
detect and record license plates will add a 'hit' to their database right then
and there. As more people join more license fuzzing data will be dumped into
the databases and eventually all automatically collected license plate data
will be useless without manually going through and verifying each sighting by
hand, which will make it cost prohibitive.

Hell you could pay pedestrians to walk around with license plates as they go
from intersection to intersection. That would be hilarious.

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ams6110
Having multiple license plates displayed is generally prohibited. As I found
out when I had not had time to change my plate after it expired: I had the old
one in the usual location, and the new one in the rear window. Got pulled over
for it, but got only a warning.

~~~
idohealth
Which makes perfect sense to me. Not sure how you thought that would be
acceptable.

But then, I am of the unpopular opinion that every car should be tracked, they
are far too dangerous, and cause far too many accidents for them not to be.

You want to murder someone and get away with it in our society, the best
chance you have is killing them with your car.

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Mithaldu
Oh good. Clickbait title _and_ TED. Wonder what would make the trifecta
complete.

~~~
atap
Ray Kurzweil.

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schoen
License plates have seen such an enormous mission creep, starting out by
enforcing safety inspections and liability for car accidents and finding
stolen cars, and continuing down to letting the public and private sectors
routinely track motorists' whereabouts.

When license plates were introduced, the technology to make them more privacy-
protective didn't exist. Today, it might, but it would be expensive to switch
and challenging to get police to give up monitoring powers they've become
accustomed to.

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justonepost
What I find amusing are body cameras. We want them so bad to protect against
police officers violating civil rights, but think how fast they'll ramp them
up to doing things like face recognition. And why not? Imagine being able to
spot criminals with warrants on them by just walking around in a crowd. Of
course, it won't stop there. Hmm, I better go pay off those speeding tickets
that are due...

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whoopdedo
You can justify that, and license plate cameras for that matter, because the
camera is only automating a process that the police could still have done
manually although it would have taken more time and been less reliable.
Namely, if a police officer is told that a person is wanted and he sees a
picture of him, then he could walk around a crowd looking for people who
resemble the wanted person. The camera is doing the same thing his eyes and
memory does, only faster.

The problem is not so much the data collection, it's the retention. Because
computers never forget, the police are then given a power the existing limits
on their authority did not consider. So new laws need to be drafted to limit
the actions of a police force that has infinite memory.

Which many states are doing now. Until the police unions tell a bunch of scary
"think of the children" stories about why they need unlimited surveillance
power. Then the issue shifts from the police to the influence of money in
politics. (And perhaps also whether public employees should be allowed to
unionize. Or at least, whether a union of public employees should be allowed
to lobby.)

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javajosh
To paraphrase an old saying, "When all you have is threat analysis, everything
looks like a threat." Law-enforcement in the US has become a victim of it's
own unrelenting focus on threat-mitigation, to the extent that they are all
too happy to use tools that have always been anathema to American Culture. We
have mass surveillance, abusive police, and huge gulags full of people who's
first crime was to be poor and under-educated. It used to be these were the
things we pointed to when asked, "Why is the USSR/DDR so much worse than you?"

Epic fail, USA. Epic.

~~~
dredmorbius
I've likened the situation to an auto-immune disease: a hopped-up defense
mechanism which false-positive categorizes non-harmful elements as harmful.

I like your threat-analysis line.

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pdkl95
Automatic license plate scanning is bad enough, but at least _some_ people are
concerned about it. Meanwhile, the _much_ more detail information that the
phone companies gather for themselves and the NSA as part of COTRAVELER[1] has
apparently been entirely forgotten.

Building a map of where your license plate has been is bad enough. The map of
which {micro,pico,femto}cell you phone has been near will contain far more
detailed travel information. It didn't even require any clever hacks or
software vulnerabilities; COTRAVELER only required writing a few INNER JOIN /
WHERE clauses. It doesn't even use any private information: it only needs the
_metadata_.

Unfortunately, I expect that the conclusion - that it is probably a bad idea
in the long run for everybody to be carrying a radio transponder in their
pocket - is going to be ignore (or actively avoided). Cognitive dissonance can
be a powerful motivator, and these properties - necessarily common to all
mobile communication devices are very dissonant with the common socially-
acceptable addiction to social media and "being available" that keeps
everybody tied to cell phone.

[1] [http://www.washingtonpost.com/apps/g/page/world/how-the-
nsa-...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/apps/g/page/world/how-the-nsa-is-
tracking-people-right-now/634/)

~~~
new299
> necessarily common to all mobile communication devices

I think there are possible technical solutions if there was a will to adopt
them. The main problem is authenticating with the network, if unauthenticated
wireless networks were generally available then it would likely make tracking
harder.

I think even if you are paying for network access then there could be
technical solutions to the problem. Perhaps authentication tokens which were
purchased but not linked to a user.

I guess fundamentally, breaking apart network access authentication and user
identification/authentication would be good.

But I agree, I doubt people are motivated enough to seek out a solution.

~~~
pdkl95
While I don't completely rule-out the possibility of finding a technical
solution, if such a solution exists it is going to be _really_ hard to find.
Re-associating "anonymized" tokens is a lot easier than it looks in many
situations, and it doesn't take much data leakage to JOIN tables together. I
would love to be wrong on this topic. It would be absolutely incredible if
someone can invent a way to make mobile devices still work without leaking any
information that can be tracked.

I totally agree with separating authentication from authorization; we need to
do that anywhere it is possible, not just for mobile devices. Unfortunately,
the trend has been in the reverse direction. :/

~~~
new299
I would have thought the problem in mobile networks might be easier than
elsewhere. Where the wireless network is public infrastructure, for example,
if devices used randomized MACs then I'd imagine it'd make them much harder to
track.

You'd still need to authenticate with a VOIP provider. But by breaking out
these services I would guess it would make tracking much harder.

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upofadown
I sold my car so I was doing pretty good up until the part about the cell
phone tracking. Time to get a pager I guess...

~~~
pdkl95
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-
switch/wp/2014/08/11...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-
switch/wp/2014/08/11/why-one-of-cybersecuritys-thought-leaders-uses-a-pager-
instead-of-a-smart-phone/)

Pagers are probably a good idea.

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infectoid
Does anyone know of any good open source automatic number plate reading
software?

Was thinking if could be a fun project for my rPi 2 maybe.

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cozzyd
Good thing I don't drive (but my Ventra card tracks me just the same).

