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Maker of US border's license-plate scanning tech ransacked by hacker
- module0000 7y agoGood job vetting your vendors Uncle Sam! Somehow, we'll end up paying (taxpayers) to clean this up - just like we paid to deploy it. Sure would be nice if we had any voice/vote in these things...
- azinman2 7y agoYou think people voting on vendors would somehow result in less data leaks?
- module0000 7y agoIt would result in us not approving the project/vendor at all. edit: We(citizens) don't like being spied on, and it just rubs salt in the wound that we have to pay for it.
- jstanley 7y agoGiven that this is literally only useful for tracking people, not approving the project would be ideal.
- Retra 7y agoTracking people is like 90% of what every organization does. It's why we have names, phone numbers, addresses, id numbers, license plates, etc. "Tracking people = bad" is an untenable assumption.
- savethefuture 7y agoWell go ahead and dox yourself right here for us.
- Retra 7y agoPerhaps I'm not being clear. "Tracking people involuntarily" might be bad. "Tracking people unnecessarily" might be bad. But they will be bad because they are involuntary and unnecessary, not because they are tracking people.
- stale2002 7y agoMy username is associated with my real life identity and would be trivial for people to look me up. I am already "doxxed" and it doesn't bother me.
- phnowned 7y agoWho gets born in 2001 or whatever. 2002, I meant. You must feel embarrassed now. Jk
- torified 7y agoI don't see it anywhere. Where does it list your personal info?
- stale2002 7y agoIt's easily googleable, man. In 5 minutes you could find my LinkedIn info, and then know exactly who I am and where I work.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- bqqyz 7y agoIf you think 0% of the citizenry supports scanning licence plates that cross the border, I have bad news for you.
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoThe overwhelming majority of people are probably ok with recording plates at the border. If it's confined to the border it's not really any different than the customs agent jotting down your license plate. It's also not really "tracking", it's just a record created at that single point. It's the whole network that makes it "tracking" It's the record keeping everywhere else and tracking that that enables that's not ok.
- sneak 7y agoJotting down on paper is not the same as aggregated and uploaded to an open ftp server.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoI honestly support license plate readers on most roads, if they were used for average speed measurements and in conjunction with automated ticketing of people speeding.
- wbronitsky 7y agoIf you are a citizen and have not been disenfranchised, and I grant you that many fall outside of these buckets, you absolutely have a say. That say is that you can elect whomever you want to decide these things for you. It is the central mechanism in a representative democracy.
- inetknght 7y ago...and then the person we voted for doesn't win the election and the person who does win the election doesn't listen to the citizens they're supposed to represent.
- pingucrimson 7y agoRe representative democracies, why are opinions on disparate issues like the economy, abortion, climate change, etc. all packaged into one party? At least 99% of people won't find a party that agrees with them on every single issue, so it feels like there should be a better system.
- mrguyorama 7y agoBecause the US has first past the post. Sure you could vote for someone who matches every single one of your ideologies, but the chance that they win is zero.
- jorblumesea 7y agoThis is a flawed viewpoint. The idea that any single company can stand up to a nation state is absurd. The level of resources that Russia or China brings to bear for a single hack is far beyond what any company or even groups of companies could defend against. This is the unfortunate weakness of the Western style democracies in the face of totalitarian states. We have a much more obvious divide between private and public entities. In China and Russia, the lines are blurred and often they get much better support from the government to defend and hack the opposition. Even to the point where China will hack US companies and just give the IP to Chinese companies.
- DogRunner 7y ago> Even to the point where China will hack US companies and just give the IP to Chinese companies. You can be sure that the USA is giving the "acquired" IP to their us companies as well.
- jorblumesea 7y agoNot to the level that China is doing it, that's for sure. Just by the very nature of how closely companies in China operate with the government, you'd be fooling yourself if you think that's equivalent.
- ALittleLight 7y agoWhere do I sign up to collect stolen IP?
- UncleSam 7y agoI try my best!
- glitcher 7y ago> The files also include .mp3 files, presumably from someone's desktop or laptop PC. Among the songs: Superstition, by Stevie Wonder, and Wannabe by Spice Girls, and a variety of AC/DC and Cat Stevens songs. Quite an odd detail to add to the article, why was this seen as relevant?
- kabwj 7y agoReminds me of when they reported on the contents of the hard drive of Bin Laden.
- Isamu 7y agoHe was a Spice Girls fan?
- bqqyz 7y agoI think he watched anime.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mtmail 7y agoIt contained strategic Al-Qa‘ida’ documents, but news outlets loved writing about the unlicensed anti virus software, disney movies, anime, porn that was also on the hard drive. https://www.cia.gov/news-information/press-releases-statements/2017-press-releases-statements/cia-releases-additional-files-recovered-in-ubl-compound-raid.html https://www.cia.gov/news-information/press-releases-statemen...
- sct202 7y agoIt humanizes the victim from computer hard drive hacked to this is a person with quirks who you could know.
- 7y ago
- dev_dull 7y agoAre they worth it as a target? With an RPI and openalpr I can easily build my own license plate reader in one evening. This technology is so far out of the bag already. I’m critical of people like me (millennial, working in tech) and I think I have good reason. I hear so many bizarre technological “solutions” to what are ultimately policy issues. If we spent half that time instead lobbying our representatives we would be in a much better place as a society. Can you name your state rep? How about you write them a little today rather than succumb to cynicism or spitballing tech.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ttul 7y agoPerceptics is a pretty big player in the license plate camera market. This breach is extremely embarrassing for them and will doubtless put their future work with government in jeopardy as they become a political target. I wonder if this hack was perpetrated by China as retribution for the Huawei blockade? The Chinese perhaps have an arsenal of such breaches ready for release when the right politician needs a nudge.
- jermaustin1 7y agoReading the license plate is trivial, its processing, and doing the advanced queries that make ALPR solutions real. Sure you could create a bunch of pi cams able to handle a few reads per second, but then say you want to know what plates have traveled with your target plate between multiple camera sets to see if someone is being followed, or you have cell phone pings and want to search all cameras in the radius of that tower for a plate. The reading isn't hard, its fully solved, the economical and real-time searching of plates and evidence compilation is the much harder problem.
- bredren 7y agoIt’s true. There is also a lot of data cleaning and grouping to do. Building sighting histories gets computationally intensive with scale.
- samstave 7y agoWell you can also worry about Fucking tech company Being spying on your driving habits as well as there is a rumor of companies being required to scan/spy on all license plates by the municipalities.....
- atemerev 7y agoLooks like Russians (disclaimer: am Russian, work in infosec). Some previous hacks that were attributed to Russians, like Shadow Broker leak, actually were executed by somebody else, I think. This one is more suspicious, in my opinion.
- Cakez0r 7y ago... Based on?
- atemerev 7y ago"Boris Bullet-Dodger" is a Russian joke name, «Борис-хрен-попадёшь» (and it is rare enough to be picked up by somebody who is not Russian). Repacking everything in rars in 2019 is also a Russian thing. If you are interested why I think Shadow Broker was not of Russian origin (as opposed to Guccifer 2.0, who was), I can also provide my insights. The choice of the venue to leak the information and some other minor details lead me to strongly suspect one of our state-sponsored APTs.
- mikorym 7y agoWhy do they repack in RAR? I have always when encoutering RARs rolled my eyes and then tried to remember the names of tools to do extraction.
- _ah 7y agoI believe this is a holdover from piracy the early 2000s, when file sizes needed to remain small (due to unreliable downloads or the need to fit on a particular piece of physical media) and RAR was a convenient format for generating compressed archives in multiple parts.
- adanto6840 7y agoI recall it being the common go-to for file-sharing (piracy) uploads on Usenet. I'm not sure if it was because of repair-ability when you were missing some of the RARs, file-size limitation, resume-ability, low bandwidth, etc... Probably a combo of them all I guess; wasn't aware it was still used nor that it might be more common in RU.
- throw2016 7y agoThis is dystopia, but this is not just any dystopia, this is dystopia with 'justification', this dystopia is 'legal' and for many that word somehow makes everything ok, but for the rest of us trivializes everthing of value. There is so much cognitive dissonance and denial in the tech community and their role not just in building but also defending and whitewashing narratives that its becomes difficult to see movies and read about surveillance dystopia and be expected to feel creeped out and then return to current reality where its sort of normalized and ok.
- nikisweeting 7y agoWere logs of license plate scans leaked, if so, is there anywhere we can find the dump to see if our plates are in it?
- canada_dry 7y agoRelated to this, I'd love to see some in-depth wire brushing done on how the US got blanketed with 4 way cameras at every intersection and how this data is used/kept, and by whom. I first noticed it in major centers years back, but now it seems even small towns have cameras at every intersection. From an IT perspective it's a pretty interesting project, but from a tin-foil-hat perspective it's astonishing when you imagine the ability to link all these cameras together in real-time.
- LeifCarrotson 7y agoWe have them all over the place in Michigan. I specifically asked my friend who's a civil engineer with the county road commision when some were being installed just down the road from my house why they were being added. I was personally concerned at the prospect of red light cameras, which are currently banned in the state. The explanation was that they were updating the stoplight controls. One of the inductive sensors in the road had failed, and it was cheaper to have a guy in a bucket truck stick a couple cameras on the pole than to rip up the road. The cameras are used to see the volume of vehicles in each lane and dynamically adjust light timings. And since I drive through the intersection multiple times a day, I have noticed an improvement. They skip the left turn sequence if no one is waiting, and rarely have a big backup when volume is high in one direction for the commute. Also, the left turn timer used to be very short (like 2 cars making it through on green, one on yellow, and the 4th car often took control and went on red), which was nice when there was only one car and you wanted to go straight, but annoying when you were one of 6 or 7 cars in line and an extra five seconds would let everyone make the turn but instead you had to wait through multiple light cycles. Now it seems to often hold the turn cycle long enough to let the whole line empty out. But I totally agree that the idea of a soft update to either issue red light tickets or track license plate activity is extremely concerning. Might end up with a stray paintball from my backyard accidentally hitting the lens if they make that a policy change.
- Shivetya 7y agoCamera control of lights is a blessing for many motorcyclist, there are just some lights that will not trip. Plus like the guy told you, it is far cheaper. Plus I know in Atlanta they use the cameras to adjust timing and such and did show improvements. if there is no retention, or a press here to save last five minutes in case they witness an accident that would be good
- blibble 7y agoso it's probably some off the shelf ANPR tech that sends info into a database? same as my local supermarket's car park?