15 ms·

ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US

201 points by tonyztan 9y ago

cup 9y ago
Disgusting development and a horrible example of how destructive technology can be. This reinforces my belief that engineers and scientist need to go through mandatory ethics classes throughout their education.
- EduardoBautista 9y ago
  Who gets to determine what is considered ethical?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - tptacek 9y ago
    In general, the individual engineers do. The point of ethics training is to recognize that you have ethical obligations that extend past your job responsibilities, and that when your ethics conflict with your work tasks, it's not your ethics that should compromise. For some of us, that might mean not working on a project that we could reasonably foresee would result in the deportation of children who don't speak Spanish and have only ever known this country to some foreign country. For others, it might mean not working on projects that assist women in obtaining an abortion. Obviously, there's no "class" that settles the differing ethical boundaries we all have (though better ethics education would allow us to recognize the huge subset of ethics that we tend to share). The point is to tune in to our own ethics and not let the noise of professional life occlude them. As a field, I think we've allowed ourselves to simultaneously believe that we're doing the most important work that's being done this century, while at the same time believing that we're powerless to shape the outcomes of our labor. But that's not true at all: if you believe the former, then it's likely that we have immense power over the latter! So, I think the point of the root comment on this thread is well taken.
    - userbinator 9y ago
      For some of us, that might mean not working on a project that we could reasonably foresee would result in the deportation of children who don't speak Spanish and have only ever known this country to some foreign country. For others, it might mean not working on projects that assist women in obtaining an abortion. Unfortunately it seems a lot of engineers either don't have much in the way of ethics, or truly believe what they're doing is good. See all those willing to implement things like invasive telemetry, DRM, and walled gardens, for example. The "security" argument is pervasive and very convincing to those who don't realise that it's also a way for companies to enforce more control over its users. This also brings up another point: if you had to choose between not working on a project that goes against your ethics (leaving others to drive it toward its undesirable-to-you goal), or work on it but silently subvert it (as in subtly break it or otherwise impede its progress), which one would be the more ethical thing to do? In other words, "do everything you're told, just some things better than others"? Maybe I'm just optimistic, but the existence of jailbreaks, rooting, and flaws discovered in DRM schemes really make me want to believe that the latter exist.
      - tptacek 9y ago
        People have different morals and ethics. I don't have a problem with DRM, for instance, and even if we debated to the point where I had to concede some theoretical problem with it, it'd be pretty far down my list of ethical priorities. I'm not commenting to advocate for the notion that people should get an ethics education so they'll all turn out to be good Democratic Socialists. I'm saying, our field would be better off if people recognized that their ethics intersect with the field heavily, and they should do this work mindfully.
    - refurb 9y ago
      Ok, so if I'm an engineer and I think the ethical thing to do is help build a better license plate scanning technology to protect everyone from terrorism, then what?
      - tptacek 9y ago
  - matt4077 9y ago
    As a first approximation, it would be beneficial to convince people of the concept‘s existence, and to get them to start questioning the implications of the work they do. As it is, too many in the tech community are willing to defend anything with arguments such as „if I don’t, someone else will“ or „technology is ethically neutral, it is the use...“.
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    Someone who is very good at it. There's a process for coming to group concensus on contended questions, in which individual volition and choice isn't possible. It's called "politics". It's messy, but I'm unaware of any better options.
- quasse 9y ago
  That was actually a part of my mechanical engineering degree. We had almost a half semester spent in one class on engineering ethics. Definitely no such thing covered during my master's degree in computer science.
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  I am sure a lot of people working on this stuff think they are doing something to secure their country and this is the ethical thing to do.
  - ams6110 9y ago
    For that matter (and not to equate the two) people working in concentration camps thought they were serving their country and doing the right thing also. The point is we cannot rely on the ethics of the people doing it to stop it.
    - dang 9y ago
      Please don't do this here.
- lend000 9y ago
  While I agree this is horrible, mandatory ethics would have zero effect because: 1. Some people will need jobs. 2. Ethics are subjective. 3. Some people won't care. The correct solution would be in trying to vote in less authoritarian politicians. Americans haven't done a very good job of that over the last century.
  - FLUX-YOU 9y ago
    >1. Some people will need jobs. People are probably less likely to stand up when economic inequality widens and they have a cozy software engineer position.
  - mschuster91 9y ago
    > The correct solution would be in trying to vote in less authoritarian politicians. That requires a system where people actually have a meaningful vote... e.g. it's impossible in China, and for what its worth Chinese ethics are way, way different than typical Western-sourced ethics. In the US, the ability of people to have a meaningful vote has been largely dismantled by a number of bad factors: 1) gerrymandering leading to situations where a Democrat won't run in a Republican stronghold (or, less often, the other way around) 2) the Electoral College leading to a situation where despite losing the popular vote, the respective candidate does win the presidency (as happened with Trump and I believe also with George W) 3) states with "fixed" political leanings get largely ignored and campaigning largely takes place in contested/swing states. 4) voter disenfranchisement: in Germany, voting is generally on Sundays as most people do not have to work on weekends, thus improving turnout compared to the US where voting is on a Tuesday for whatever reason; also in the US there are all sorts of measures to make it harder for poor or minority people to vote, including weird arbitrary ID requirements.
    - lend000 9y ago
      Numbers 1, 2, and 3 can all be fixed, and fixing those fix number 4. For gerrymandering, there are plenty of proposals around requiring districts conform to some set of geometric rules. The electoral college issue gets a lot of attention, but the more fundamental problem is first-past-the-post voting. What we really need is approval-based voting (i.e. I approve of candidates A and B; whoever has the most approvals wins). Such would eliminate the incentive to solely vote for the lesser of two evils. The electoral college has a bigger influence than when the Constitution was written due to the even higher concentrations of people in urban centers -- the idea makes sense though, perhaps with some math we can find a compromise. Regardless, FPTP is much more serious. Easy to pass any legislation that changes voting and threatens all the incumbents? Not without a HUGE push, which I don't see happening anytime soon but why not try?
- CoryG89 9y ago
  For the record, I did have to take two ethics classes to get my BS in software engineering. One was an introductory ethics class mostly focusing on philosophy and ethical theories, the other was a class focusing on ethics as pertaining specifically to technology.
mschuster91 9y ago
Yet another piece of evidence that the US is turning into an authoritarian state - as, to be fair, others do too (especially China!), but the US have the unique advantage of being the technologically most advanced civilization. In earlier times, when situations got too authoritarian, there were rebellions and revolution. With the level of militarization in police and military and the abilities made possible by today's technology (the Gestapo or the Stasi would have done anything for this kind of power), it is very well possible that a revolution might simply be made impossible or crushed before it even begins, as you can simply single out and eliminate potential "leaders" based on AI analysis of what people do... and what people think, as they post it on Twitter, Facebook or their own "private" cloud space. In addition, the future of AI is already showing its first signs - and governments around the world have not shown any interest in planning for the inevitable millions that will lose their jobs or for the social unrest caused by this. Quite to the contrary: governments and right-wing parties are "looking back in time" and promising their citizens that they will bring back the "good old times" and snatching up the votes of the Frustrated Old White Men - and are very successful at this. Scary indeed.
- mc32 9y ago
  To quote madam secretary, "at this point, what difference does it make". People have been more then willing to give up their data to FB, Google, Apple, etc. The only difference is this is captured by governments --who at least in theory represent the voting public. It'll be interesting to see what the outcome is. Will the public demand the government regulate industry as well as ask it to rein in its own capabilities, or will they just get used to it and accept it? We'll have to see. Some technologists, libertarians and interestingly an intersection of right wing and left wing ideologies will oppose this for different reasons, but in the end, I think they will be a minority in total.
  - mschuster91 9y ago
    > The only difference is this is captured by governments --who at least in theory represent the voting public. Actually I trust a megacorp like Google, Amazon, Twitter or Facebook more with my data than I trust the state. The state can arrest me based on that data. The tech giants not, and they are fighting like hell that the government does not get access to that data (as that would compromise trust, and by that their business model). Given the massive amounts of money involved, I have no doubt who will win that fight.
8bitsrule 9y ago
The Frog slowly boils.
- tyingq 9y ago
  I thought of lobsters or crabs, but yeah. It's slow and not getting much attention.
  - craftyguy 9y ago
    Too bad the end result is not likely to be as tasty as crab or lobster.
    - tehlike 9y ago
      It will be more like an episode of black mirror.
- thinkingemote 9y ago
  A frog with actually jump out of slowly warming water. It has a chance of living and escaping. If you drop a frog into boiling water, it won't jump out, it will die.
chucksmash 9y ago
It would be nice to see voters react to these sorts of technologies (whether they're provided by private companies or not) the way people reacted to the idea of being filmed via Google Glass when they went to a bar on a Friday night.
- scarface74 9y ago
  Of course they won't. The same group of anti government people are very pro hard on crime/ pro police.
  - JBlue42 9y ago
    Yeah, also love cops and firemen voting Republican - you know, tough on crime, small business - while also pulling down taxpayer OT pay and pensions. Is there any metric showing they Republican party is actually good at enacting crime-fighting policies or are they just good at funding crime fighters? Seems more like the latter.
pavel_lishin 9y ago
Is it possible to fight back by poisoning the data? Is it legal to set up a display by the roadside that shows randomly generated license plates, filling their automated cameras with garbage data? Or is their data collection smart enough to recognize a non-car, either technologically or by filtering everything through a Turk-like equivalent?
- pdkl95 9y ago
  (pdf) https://www.defcon.org/images/defcon-21/dc-21-presentations/Pukingmonkey/DEFCON-21-Pukingmonkey-The-Road-Less-Surreptitiously-Traveled-Updated.pdf https://www.defcon.org/images/defcon-21/dc-21-presentations/...
- DrScump 9y ago
  It would be ideal if you chose the fake plate numbers from the population of actual plate numbers used by corporate plate-tracking vehicles, just in case one encounters its "namesake" -- you might trigger some highly entertaining edge condition. ("Um, wait, that's... me! WTF?")
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    Maybe, but that would be incredibly easy to filter out.
- tehlike 9y ago
  Sql injection in license plate would be funny.
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    I'm not sure if "it's been done" is accurate, but it's been attempted: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/cdndevs/2010/03/22/sql-injection-and-the-flintstonesjetsons-way-to-deal-with-licence-plate-cameras/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/cdndevs/2010/03/22/sql-inje...
- Scoundreller 9y ago
confounded 9y ago
Taking a quick look at Vigilant Solutions has been interesting. Yet another Israeli mass surveillance company started by ex 8200 IDF 'graduates'. The founder Adi Pinhas may ring a bell --- he also founded SuperFish! Worth noting that the EFF have been on ALPR tech for years. Signing up for their emails has given me opportunities to contact representatives regarding ALPR legislation and decisions I would have never heard about otherwise. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Aeff.org+ALPR https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Aeff.org+ALPR
- Scoundreller 9y ago
  The same Superfish that US-CERT warned us about here: https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/current-activity/2015/02/20/Lenovo-Computers-Vulnerable-HTTPS-Spoofing https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/current-activity/2015/02/20/Len... And US-CERT is a part of DHS, just like ICE.
  - confounded 9y ago
    Yes
coldcode 9y ago
I remember reading a paper on confusing road sign recognizers by adding certain bits of noise to the sign that completely baffled the recognizer. I wonder if one could do this to the license plate which would still look normal to a human but be unreadable to an AI.
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago
  Most plate cameras rely in part on the reflectiveness of the plate. You can definitely modify a plate to be mostly illegible to these cameras but easily human readable.
  - craftyguy 9y ago
    Given that most cameras are sensitive to IR (but human eyes are not), it seems like you could also wire up some super bright IR LEDs to obscure the plate too. Hmm... idea for a new license place 'holder'...
    - UncleEntity 9y ago
      Maybe some transparent non-IR reflective paint?
    - Scoundreller 9y ago
      Wouldn't it be better to use IR to saturate the camera? I think they use IR to 'light' up the plates at night, otherwise the exposure time would be too long to pickup a license plate. Should make your car invisible to dashcams too. I want an IR detector for my car, so I can know when I'm getting hit by one of these things. Not that it will accomplish much.
      - craftyguy 9y ago
        Yes, 'saturate' is the word I wanted to use. Basically, the light source(s) are pointed at the camera, and it is unable to make out anything near the light source(s) as a result.
  - 9y ago
SubiculumCode 9y ago
ICE is starting to act like Trump's little gestapo
- lamarpye 9y ago
  Sure. The parallels are pretty obvious.
- superioritycplx 9y ago
  Obama set the record for most deportations, but sure...
cinquemb 9y ago
Another selector for potential metadata drone strike in the future… largesse abroad tailored to domestic needs!
jermaustin1 9y ago
One of my clients does license plate reading and tracking. They have hundreds of tiny customers, and a handful of VERY LARGER customers, so I can say with 100% certainty, there are hundreds of agencies across the USA already doing this. For fun, I tracked my rental car from Georgia to Texas after a vacation a few months back to see how often I hit one of my client's customer's cameras. It was a lot. I saw myself hit toll booths, go under over passes, and parked at a service station. About 25 hits that my account had access to (probably hundreds or thousands that I didn't have rights to see).
- ams6110 9y ago
  IIRC there's an episode of Jay Leno's Garage that features a cop with a license plate reader. He can sit on the side of the road and every car that passes is scanned and checked for warrants. The answer comes back about as quickly as the speed reading on a radar gun. What they don't tell you is that all those plate numbers are going into a database, time- and location-stamped.
  - jermaustin1 9y ago
    Yep, and there are agencies all over the US that share data between themselves to get access to much larger sets of data. So when a cop pulls you over in Dallas because you have a warrant in Atlanta, you now know how he figured that out.
  - mehrdadn 9y ago
    > The answer comes back about as quickly as the speed reading on a radar gun. This isn't surprising. Why wouldn't it? They just need to cache that day's data, right?
    - jermaustin1 9y ago
      Depends on the vendor and the product, but that is pretty accurate. Some vendors send the plate over the network to check, some download the latest data to the cop-puter daily. Some hourly, and some get pushed updates as they happen.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
kd5bjo 9y ago
Wasn't there a Supreme Court case a while ago that ruled it illegal for the government to put a tracking device on your car? Given this recognition technology, could someone challenge the visible license plate requirement as an illegal tracking device?
- tehlike 9y ago
  I think eff is doing exactly that: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/01/california-senate-hear-effs-license-plate-cover-bill https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/01/california-senate-hear... Is among many. Eff challenges state and local law enforcement in court for their use of automated license place readers.
- SeanBoocock 9y ago
  That would be United States v. Jones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jones_(2012) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jones_(2012)
- Clubber 9y ago
  Plate scanning is against the spirit of the law; it's a workaround for not being able to place a tracking device on your car. Unfortunately, since your car is in a public place, and your plates are in the open, I don't think place scanning will be ruled unconstitutional. Of course congress could always pass a law making it illegal, but both our major parties have authoritarian with regards to privacy.
  - azernik 9y ago
    The Supreme Court actually has in the past ruled that a technology that is cheap and can be applied without public knowledge is constitutionally different from direct observation. See e.g. United States v. Jones, which ruled that a GPS device placed under a valid warrant could not be used to continue tracking a person outside of the scope of the warrant. "Deputy Solicitor General Michael Dreeben[15] began his argument for the United States by noting that information revealed to the world (i.e. movement on a public road) is not protected by the Fourth Amendment.[16] Dreeben cited United States v. Knotts as an example where police were allowed to use a device known as a "beeper" that allows the tracking of a car from a short distance away.[16] Chief Justice Roberts distinguished the current case from Knotts, saying that using a beeper still took "a lot of work" whereas a GPS device allows the police to "sit back in the station ... and push a button whenever they want to find out where the car is."[17]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jones_(2012) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jones_(2012)
Scoundreller 9y ago
New license plates in my jurisdiction are $59... Maybe something to do every few years...
- UncleEntity 9y ago
  Or one of those polarized licence plate covers I see every so often on cars -- think the general idea is for speed/red light cameras but would probably do for this too.
  - Scoundreller 9y ago
    Very illegal here...
- tehlike 9y ago
  You can buy car and keep it license plate free legally for sometime. I think this is what steve jobs was doing. New license plates wont help as it needs to get registered with the state.
  - Scoundreller 9y ago
    I'm hoping that the name behind the license plate isn't being sold along with the plate/Lat.Long/Time pairs to private companies...
    - tehlike 9y ago
      I assume private companies would be what govt contracts to, so it is unclear :)
  - ubernostrum 9y ago
    California allowed a grace period to obtain a license plate for a newly-purchased car, and taking into account the allowed time to file for a plate, and time to issue and mail it to the car's owner, this could stretch out to a few months. However, California's laws are changing due to a case in which someone was hit and killed by a car that couldn't be identified for lack of plates. Beginning January 1, 2019, all cars sold in California will be required to have a license plate attached at time of sale (for new cars which don't yet have a permanent plate, dealers will be able to produce a temporary plate).
tehlike 9y ago
I said this before, and i will say it again. Call your representative and voice your opinion. Donate to eff and aclu or any other civil and digital liberties organizations, to help them protect our privacy and rights through legal means. Privacy evasion is slippery slope and it only gets worse. Take this as your daily or weekly reminder to do something, even if that something is donating just the price of a coffee.
- ActsJuvenile 9y ago
  I am feeling pessimistic man. We had a few decades of privacy and human rights progress post World Wars. But with Terrorism on the rise there is no way for privacy or human rights to make a comeback. We will see increasingly clever ways to water down laws we already have in place.
  - tehlike 9y ago
    The incentives are huge, and digital life makes it all the more easy. The more information someone has, the more lucrative it is collect even more. You can find someones property address online - it used to take wuite a bit of effort in the past. Now the effort is on the property owner to protect his privacy - using land trusts or other estate structures. What is worse is now people volunteer information on social networks. If you dont, your friends do - nullifying your effort. I am not optimistic either, but i will do whatever i can ti protect my own privacy whenever i can. I stopped using fb, and making an effort to learn estate planning and so on.
  - JBlue42 9y ago
    >Terrorism on the rise Terrorism in the US isn't on the rise (unless we're counting white supremacists marches, which the media doesn't) but the powers that be and their cohorts are still milking the teat and our fears from 9/11 on this stuff. People who have no reason to be scared of any of this also won't stand up to it ('I'm not a criminal so it doesn't matter...'). Also funny that when/if another attack does happen, it will be those of us in blue cities (NYC, LA, SF, etc.) sacrificing our lives even if we're against this stuff and the system as it is. Fear is a business and some people are making bank. Osama would be proud.
d--b 9y ago
Anyone care to comment on the legality of the whole thing? Why are people allowed to snap pictures of my car and store them in a database? Do roads come with Terms of Service these days?
- Clubber 9y ago
  In the US, anything you do in a public place is considered fair game. The inside of your car does require consent, a warrant, or probable cause.
  - DrScump 9y ago
    ... except for objects in plain view.
- lamarpye 9y ago
  I think it's that First Amendment thing.
WalterBright 9y ago
I decided to get my garage queen back on the road after 10 years. The tabs being expired, I went down to the DOL to get new tabs. They claimed that the auto records were purged after 7 years, and that there was no record of my car in their system. I needed to present the original title to prove the car existed and was mine.
- jmaygarden 9y ago
  Title issues can be... interesting. I've had major headaches trying to title a boat purchased in a state that doesn't have boat titles in a state that requires them for registration. Eventually, you can lay everything out before a judge/magistrate, and they can rule that your vehicle indeed exists and belongs to you.
  - JBlue42 9y ago
    Don't want to be that guy, but I have read where blockchain might make this easier in the future. I'm sure given the money hose that someone is trying to work on this.
    - callumjones 9y ago
      A database can also do this.
      - JBlue42 9y ago
        True. It's odd that titles of cars, boats, etc. aren't already in one but it seems laws vary by state.
JBlue42 9y ago
It's too bad there's no way to grab and analyze who these agents are and turn the tables on them. I'm sure some have parents or other relatives that might have been considered illegal at some point (or possibly still are? I would assume federal background checks would catch that). Name and shame, or, if able, have them knock down the doors to their parents or grandparents house and see how it feels. Jackbooted assholes sending people to their possible deaths.
chatmasta 9y ago
One solution is to purchase your car from and register it to a front company. This way they can still track license plates, but not easily associate them with owner names.

201 points by tonyztan 9y ago

cup 9y ago

Disgusting development and a horrible example of how destructive technology can be. This reinforces my belief that engineers and scientist need to go through mandatory ethics classes throughout their education.

EduardoBautista 9y ago
Who gets to determine what is considered ethical?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- tptacek 9y ago
  In general, the individual engineers do. The point of ethics training is to recognize that you have ethical obligations that extend past your job responsibilities, and that when your ethics conflict with your work tasks, it's not your ethics that should compromise. For some of us, that might mean not working on a project that we could reasonably foresee would result in the deportation of children who don't speak Spanish and have only ever known this country to some foreign country. For others, it might mean not working on projects that assist women in obtaining an abortion. Obviously, there's no "class" that settles the differing ethical boundaries we all have (though better ethics education would allow us to recognize the huge subset of ethics that we tend to share). The point is to tune in to our own ethics and not let the noise of professional life occlude them. As a field, I think we've allowed ourselves to simultaneously believe that we're doing the most important work that's being done this century, while at the same time believing that we're powerless to shape the outcomes of our labor. But that's not true at all: if you believe the former, then it's likely that we have immense power over the latter! So, I think the point of the root comment on this thread is well taken.
  - userbinator 9y ago
    For some of us, that might mean not working on a project that we could reasonably foresee would result in the deportation of children who don't speak Spanish and have only ever known this country to some foreign country. For others, it might mean not working on projects that assist women in obtaining an abortion. Unfortunately it seems a lot of engineers either don't have much in the way of ethics, or truly believe what they're doing is good. See all those willing to implement things like invasive telemetry, DRM, and walled gardens, for example. The "security" argument is pervasive and very convincing to those who don't realise that it's also a way for companies to enforce more control over its users. This also brings up another point: if you had to choose between not working on a project that goes against your ethics (leaving others to drive it toward its undesirable-to-you goal), or work on it but silently subvert it (as in subtly break it or otherwise impede its progress), which one would be the more ethical thing to do? In other words, "do everything you're told, just some things better than others"? Maybe I'm just optimistic, but the existence of jailbreaks, rooting, and flaws discovered in DRM schemes really make me want to believe that the latter exist.
    - tptacek 9y ago
      People have different morals and ethics. I don't have a problem with DRM, for instance, and even if we debated to the point where I had to concede some theoretical problem with it, it'd be pretty far down my list of ethical priorities. I'm not commenting to advocate for the notion that people should get an ethics education so they'll all turn out to be good Democratic Socialists. I'm saying, our field would be better off if people recognized that their ethics intersect with the field heavily, and they should do this work mindfully.
  - refurb 9y ago
    Ok, so if I'm an engineer and I think the ethical thing to do is help build a better license plate scanning technology to protect everyone from terrorism, then what?
    - tptacek 9y ago
- matt4077 9y ago
  As a first approximation, it would be beneficial to convince people of the concept‘s existence, and to get them to start questioning the implications of the work they do. As it is, too many in the tech community are willing to defend anything with arguments such as „if I don’t, someone else will“ or „technology is ethically neutral, it is the use...“.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  Someone who is very good at it. There's a process for coming to group concensus on contended questions, in which individual volition and choice isn't possible. It's called "politics". It's messy, but I'm unaware of any better options.
quasse 9y ago
That was actually a part of my mechanical engineering degree. We had almost a half semester spent in one class on engineering ethics. Definitely no such thing covered during my master's degree in computer science.
maxxxxx 9y ago
I am sure a lot of people working on this stuff think they are doing something to secure their country and this is the ethical thing to do.
- ams6110 9y ago
  For that matter (and not to equate the two) people working in concentration camps thought they were serving their country and doing the right thing also. The point is we cannot rely on the ethics of the people doing it to stop it.
  - dang 9y ago
    Please don't do this here.
lend000 9y ago
While I agree this is horrible, mandatory ethics would have zero effect because: 1. Some people will need jobs. 2. Ethics are subjective. 3. Some people won't care. The correct solution would be in trying to vote in less authoritarian politicians. Americans haven't done a very good job of that over the last century.
- FLUX-YOU 9y ago
  >1. Some people will need jobs. People are probably less likely to stand up when economic inequality widens and they have a cozy software engineer position.
- mschuster91 9y ago
  > The correct solution would be in trying to vote in less authoritarian politicians. That requires a system where people actually have a meaningful vote... e.g. it's impossible in China, and for what its worth Chinese ethics are way, way different than typical Western-sourced ethics. In the US, the ability of people to have a meaningful vote has been largely dismantled by a number of bad factors: 1) gerrymandering leading to situations where a Democrat won't run in a Republican stronghold (or, less often, the other way around) 2) the Electoral College leading to a situation where despite losing the popular vote, the respective candidate does win the presidency (as happened with Trump and I believe also with George W) 3) states with "fixed" political leanings get largely ignored and campaigning largely takes place in contested/swing states. 4) voter disenfranchisement: in Germany, voting is generally on Sundays as most people do not have to work on weekends, thus improving turnout compared to the US where voting is on a Tuesday for whatever reason; also in the US there are all sorts of measures to make it harder for poor or minority people to vote, including weird arbitrary ID requirements.
  - lend000 9y ago
    Numbers 1, 2, and 3 can all be fixed, and fixing those fix number 4. For gerrymandering, there are plenty of proposals around requiring districts conform to some set of geometric rules. The electoral college issue gets a lot of attention, but the more fundamental problem is first-past-the-post voting. What we really need is approval-based voting (i.e. I approve of candidates A and B; whoever has the most approvals wins). Such would eliminate the incentive to solely vote for the lesser of two evils. The electoral college has a bigger influence than when the Constitution was written due to the even higher concentrations of people in urban centers -- the idea makes sense though, perhaps with some math we can find a compromise. Regardless, FPTP is much more serious. Easy to pass any legislation that changes voting and threatens all the incumbents? Not without a HUGE push, which I don't see happening anytime soon but why not try?
CoryG89 9y ago
For the record, I did have to take two ethics classes to get my BS in software engineering. One was an introductory ethics class mostly focusing on philosophy and ethical theories, the other was a class focusing on ethics as pertaining specifically to technology.

mschuster91 9y ago

Yet another piece of evidence that the US is turning into an authoritarian state - as, to be fair, others do too (especially China!), but the US have the unique advantage of being the technologically most advanced civilization. In earlier times, when situations got too authoritarian, there were rebellions and revolution. With the level of militarization in police and military and the abilities made possible by today's technology (the Gestapo or the Stasi would have done anything for this kind of power), it is very well possible that a revolution might simply be made impossible or crushed before it even begins, as you can simply single out and eliminate potential "leaders" based on AI analysis of what people do... and what people think, as they post it on Twitter, Facebook or their own "private" cloud space. In addition, the future of AI is already showing its first signs - and governments around the world have not shown any interest in planning for the inevitable millions that will lose their jobs or for the social unrest caused by this. Quite to the contrary: governments and right-wing parties are "looking back in time" and promising their citizens that they will bring back the "good old times" and snatching up the votes of the Frustrated Old White Men - and are very successful at this. Scary indeed.

mc32 9y ago
To quote madam secretary, "at this point, what difference does it make". People have been more then willing to give up their data to FB, Google, Apple, etc. The only difference is this is captured by governments --who at least in theory represent the voting public. It'll be interesting to see what the outcome is. Will the public demand the government regulate industry as well as ask it to rein in its own capabilities, or will they just get used to it and accept it? We'll have to see. Some technologists, libertarians and interestingly an intersection of right wing and left wing ideologies will oppose this for different reasons, but in the end, I think they will be a minority in total.
- mschuster91 9y ago
  > The only difference is this is captured by governments --who at least in theory represent the voting public. Actually I trust a megacorp like Google, Amazon, Twitter or Facebook more with my data than I trust the state. The state can arrest me based on that data. The tech giants not, and they are fighting like hell that the government does not get access to that data (as that would compromise trust, and by that their business model). Given the massive amounts of money involved, I have no doubt who will win that fight.

8bitsrule 9y ago

The Frog slowly boils.

tyingq 9y ago
I thought of lobsters or crabs, but yeah. It's slow and not getting much attention.
- craftyguy 9y ago
  Too bad the end result is not likely to be as tasty as crab or lobster.
  - tehlike 9y ago
    It will be more like an episode of black mirror.
thinkingemote 9y ago
A frog with actually jump out of slowly warming water. It has a chance of living and escaping. If you drop a frog into boiling water, it won't jump out, it will die.

chucksmash 9y ago

It would be nice to see voters react to these sorts of technologies (whether they're provided by private companies or not) the way people reacted to the idea of being filmed via Google Glass when they went to a bar on a Friday night.

scarface74 9y ago
Of course they won't. The same group of anti government people are very pro hard on crime/ pro police.
- JBlue42 9y ago
  Yeah, also love cops and firemen voting Republican - you know, tough on crime, small business - while also pulling down taxpayer OT pay and pensions. Is there any metric showing they Republican party is actually good at enacting crime-fighting policies or are they just good at funding crime fighters? Seems more like the latter.

pavel_lishin 9y ago

Is it possible to fight back by poisoning the data? Is it legal to set up a display by the roadside that shows randomly generated license plates, filling their automated cameras with garbage data? Or is their data collection smart enough to recognize a non-car, either technologically or by filtering everything through a Turk-like equivalent?

pdkl95 9y ago
(pdf) https://www.defcon.org/images/defcon-21/dc-21-presentations/Pukingmonkey/DEFCON-21-Pukingmonkey-The-Road-Less-Surreptitiously-Traveled-Updated.pdf https://www.defcon.org/images/defcon-21/dc-21-presentations/...
DrScump 9y ago
It would be ideal if you chose the fake plate numbers from the population of actual plate numbers used by corporate plate-tracking vehicles, just in case one encounters its "namesake" -- you might trigger some highly entertaining edge condition. ("Um, wait, that's... me! WTF?")
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  Maybe, but that would be incredibly easy to filter out.
tehlike 9y ago
Sql injection in license plate would be funny.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  I'm not sure if "it's been done" is accurate, but it's been attempted: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/cdndevs/2010/03/22/sql-injection-and-the-flintstonesjetsons-way-to-deal-with-licence-plate-cameras/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/cdndevs/2010/03/22/sql-inje...
Scoundreller 9y ago

confounded 9y ago

Taking a quick look at Vigilant Solutions has been interesting. Yet another Israeli mass surveillance company started by ex 8200 IDF 'graduates'. The founder Adi Pinhas may ring a bell --- he also founded SuperFish! Worth noting that the EFF have been on ALPR tech for years. Signing up for their emails has given me opportunities to contact representatives regarding ALPR legislation and decisions I would have never heard about otherwise. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Aeff.org+ALPR https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Aeff.org+ALPR

Scoundreller 9y ago
The same Superfish that US-CERT warned us about here: https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/current-activity/2015/02/20/Lenovo-Computers-Vulnerable-HTTPS-Spoofing https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/current-activity/2015/02/20/Len... And US-CERT is a part of DHS, just like ICE.
- confounded 9y ago
  Yes

coldcode 9y ago

I remember reading a paper on confusing road sign recognizers by adding certain bits of noise to the sign that completely baffled the recognizer. I wonder if one could do this to the license plate which would still look normal to a human but be unreadable to an AI.

dsfyu404ed 9y ago
Most plate cameras rely in part on the reflectiveness of the plate. You can definitely modify a plate to be mostly illegible to these cameras but easily human readable.
- craftyguy 9y ago
  Given that most cameras are sensitive to IR (but human eyes are not), it seems like you could also wire up some super bright IR LEDs to obscure the plate too. Hmm... idea for a new license place 'holder'...
  - UncleEntity 9y ago
    Maybe some transparent non-IR reflective paint?
  - Scoundreller 9y ago
    Wouldn't it be better to use IR to saturate the camera? I think they use IR to 'light' up the plates at night, otherwise the exposure time would be too long to pickup a license plate. Should make your car invisible to dashcams too. I want an IR detector for my car, so I can know when I'm getting hit by one of these things. Not that it will accomplish much.
    - craftyguy 9y ago
      Yes, 'saturate' is the word I wanted to use. Basically, the light source(s) are pointed at the camera, and it is unable to make out anything near the light source(s) as a result.
- 9y ago

SubiculumCode 9y ago

ICE is starting to act like Trump's little gestapo

lamarpye 9y ago
Sure. The parallels are pretty obvious.
superioritycplx 9y ago
Obama set the record for most deportations, but sure...

cinquemb 9y ago

Another selector for potential metadata drone strike in the future… largesse abroad tailored to domestic needs!

jermaustin1 9y ago

One of my clients does license plate reading and tracking. They have hundreds of tiny customers, and a handful of VERY LARGER customers, so I can say with 100% certainty, there are hundreds of agencies across the USA already doing this. For fun, I tracked my rental car from Georgia to Texas after a vacation a few months back to see how often I hit one of my client's customer's cameras. It was a lot. I saw myself hit toll booths, go under over passes, and parked at a service station. About 25 hits that my account had access to (probably hundreds or thousands that I didn't have rights to see).

ams6110 9y ago
IIRC there's an episode of Jay Leno's Garage that features a cop with a license plate reader. He can sit on the side of the road and every car that passes is scanned and checked for warrants. The answer comes back about as quickly as the speed reading on a radar gun. What they don't tell you is that all those plate numbers are going into a database, time- and location-stamped.
- jermaustin1 9y ago
  Yep, and there are agencies all over the US that share data between themselves to get access to much larger sets of data. So when a cop pulls you over in Dallas because you have a warrant in Atlanta, you now know how he figured that out.
- mehrdadn 9y ago
  > The answer comes back about as quickly as the speed reading on a radar gun. This isn't surprising. Why wouldn't it? They just need to cache that day's data, right?
  - jermaustin1 9y ago
    Depends on the vendor and the product, but that is pretty accurate. Some vendors send the plate over the network to check, some download the latest data to the cop-puter daily. Some hourly, and some get pushed updates as they happen.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

kd5bjo 9y ago

Wasn't there a Supreme Court case a while ago that ruled it illegal for the government to put a tracking device on your car? Given this recognition technology, could someone challenge the visible license plate requirement as an illegal tracking device?

tehlike 9y ago
I think eff is doing exactly that: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/01/california-senate-hear-effs-license-plate-cover-bill https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/01/california-senate-hear... Is among many. Eff challenges state and local law enforcement in court for their use of automated license place readers.
SeanBoocock 9y ago
That would be United States v. Jones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jones_(2012) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jones_(2012)
Clubber 9y ago
Plate scanning is against the spirit of the law; it's a workaround for not being able to place a tracking device on your car. Unfortunately, since your car is in a public place, and your plates are in the open, I don't think place scanning will be ruled unconstitutional. Of course congress could always pass a law making it illegal, but both our major parties have authoritarian with regards to privacy.
- azernik 9y ago
  The Supreme Court actually has in the past ruled that a technology that is cheap and can be applied without public knowledge is constitutionally different from direct observation. See e.g. United States v. Jones, which ruled that a GPS device placed under a valid warrant could not be used to continue tracking a person outside of the scope of the warrant. "Deputy Solicitor General Michael Dreeben[15] began his argument for the United States by noting that information revealed to the world (i.e. movement on a public road) is not protected by the Fourth Amendment.[16] Dreeben cited United States v. Knotts as an example where police were allowed to use a device known as a "beeper" that allows the tracking of a car from a short distance away.[16] Chief Justice Roberts distinguished the current case from Knotts, saying that using a beeper still took "a lot of work" whereas a GPS device allows the police to "sit back in the station ... and push a button whenever they want to find out where the car is."[17]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jones_(2012) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jones_(2012)

Scoundreller 9y ago

New license plates in my jurisdiction are $59... Maybe something to do every few years...

UncleEntity 9y ago
Or one of those polarized licence plate covers I see every so often on cars -- think the general idea is for speed/red light cameras but would probably do for this too.
- Scoundreller 9y ago
  Very illegal here...
tehlike 9y ago
You can buy car and keep it license plate free legally for sometime. I think this is what steve jobs was doing. New license plates wont help as it needs to get registered with the state.
- Scoundreller 9y ago
  I'm hoping that the name behind the license plate isn't being sold along with the plate/Lat.Long/Time pairs to private companies...
  - tehlike 9y ago
    I assume private companies would be what govt contracts to, so it is unclear :)
- ubernostrum 9y ago
  California allowed a grace period to obtain a license plate for a newly-purchased car, and taking into account the allowed time to file for a plate, and time to issue and mail it to the car's owner, this could stretch out to a few months. However, California's laws are changing due to a case in which someone was hit and killed by a car that couldn't be identified for lack of plates. Beginning January 1, 2019, all cars sold in California will be required to have a license plate attached at time of sale (for new cars which don't yet have a permanent plate, dealers will be able to produce a temporary plate).

tehlike 9y ago

I said this before, and i will say it again. Call your representative and voice your opinion. Donate to eff and aclu or any other civil and digital liberties organizations, to help them protect our privacy and rights through legal means. Privacy evasion is slippery slope and it only gets worse. Take this as your daily or weekly reminder to do something, even if that something is donating just the price of a coffee.

ActsJuvenile 9y ago
I am feeling pessimistic man. We had a few decades of privacy and human rights progress post World Wars. But with Terrorism on the rise there is no way for privacy or human rights to make a comeback. We will see increasingly clever ways to water down laws we already have in place.
- tehlike 9y ago
  The incentives are huge, and digital life makes it all the more easy. The more information someone has, the more lucrative it is collect even more. You can find someones property address online - it used to take wuite a bit of effort in the past. Now the effort is on the property owner to protect his privacy - using land trusts or other estate structures. What is worse is now people volunteer information on social networks. If you dont, your friends do - nullifying your effort. I am not optimistic either, but i will do whatever i can ti protect my own privacy whenever i can. I stopped using fb, and making an effort to learn estate planning and so on.
- JBlue42 9y ago
  >Terrorism on the rise Terrorism in the US isn't on the rise (unless we're counting white supremacists marches, which the media doesn't) but the powers that be and their cohorts are still milking the teat and our fears from 9/11 on this stuff. People who have no reason to be scared of any of this also won't stand up to it ('I'm not a criminal so it doesn't matter...'). Also funny that when/if another attack does happen, it will be those of us in blue cities (NYC, LA, SF, etc.) sacrificing our lives even if we're against this stuff and the system as it is. Fear is a business and some people are making bank. Osama would be proud.

d--b 9y ago

Anyone care to comment on the legality of the whole thing? Why are people allowed to snap pictures of my car and store them in a database? Do roads come with Terms of Service these days?

Clubber 9y ago
In the US, anything you do in a public place is considered fair game. The inside of your car does require consent, a warrant, or probable cause.
- DrScump 9y ago
  ... except for objects in plain view.
lamarpye 9y ago
I think it's that First Amendment thing.

WalterBright 9y ago

I decided to get my garage queen back on the road after 10 years. The tabs being expired, I went down to the DOL to get new tabs. They claimed that the auto records were purged after 7 years, and that there was no record of my car in their system. I needed to present the original title to prove the car existed and was mine.

jmaygarden 9y ago
Title issues can be... interesting. I've had major headaches trying to title a boat purchased in a state that doesn't have boat titles in a state that requires them for registration. Eventually, you can lay everything out before a judge/magistrate, and they can rule that your vehicle indeed exists and belongs to you.
- JBlue42 9y ago
  Don't want to be that guy, but I have read where blockchain might make this easier in the future. I'm sure given the money hose that someone is trying to work on this.
  - callumjones 9y ago
    A database can also do this.
    - JBlue42 9y ago
      True. It's odd that titles of cars, boats, etc. aren't already in one but it seems laws vary by state.

JBlue42 9y ago

It's too bad there's no way to grab and analyze who these agents are and turn the tables on them. I'm sure some have parents or other relatives that might have been considered illegal at some point (or possibly still are? I would assume federal background checks would catch that). Name and shame, or, if able, have them knock down the doors to their parents or grandparents house and see how it feels. Jackbooted assholes sending people to their possible deaths.

chatmasta 9y ago

One solution is to purchase your car from and register it to a front company. This way they can still track license plates, but not easily associate them with owner names.