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Eliminating license plates would be a good step. As I understand it, license plates were established as a compromise between privacy and accountability: they m
by kragen 11mo ago
Eliminating license plates would be a good step. As I understand it, license plates were established as a compromise between privacy and accountability: they made it possible to track down evildoers without entirely eliminating anonymity in public. Now, due to advances in computer technology, they entirely eliminate anonymity in public. Therefore we should abolish them and invent an alternative that strikes a better balance between these concerns. Encrypted radio beacons, for example, which beep to alert the driver when they are being probed.
- cogman10 11mo ago> Encrypted radio beacons, for example, which beep to alert the driver when they are being probed. That thing would ping so often that everyone would just turn it off. You'd also want to require it to always be on so that, for example, someone can't do a hit and run. The problem that needs to be addressed is the fact that the american police force has WAY too much power and funding. Particularly the DHS. The tracking sucks, but what sucks more is the police using that tracking in pretty much any way imaginable.
- kragen 11mo agoYou'd need to have some causal pathway from it pinging too often through people getting irritated to removing the scanners that were doing the excessive tracking. Police forces are not the only ones who can use this information. Foreign intelligence agencies, violent insurgencies, and drug cartels can also use it.
- cogman10 11mo agoThe rub is that the information is something that regular drivers need access to. If I get into a car accident, I need some way to know who hit me in the case they bolt from the scene. And that's what makes this a hard problem. I don't think there's a solution that allows me to address a hit and run and would prevent the groups you mention from similarly tracking people.
- kragen 11mo agoAs I said in another subthread, it would be surprising if the solution were not worse in some way than the status quo ante; after all, we're looking for a solution to the new problem of mass surveillance, not taking advantage of a new opportunity.
- vl 11mo agoWith network of cameras large enough you can trivially profile and identify all cars without license plates.
- kragen 11mo agoIt's possible that you could learn to recognize every individual car from things like the pattern of scratches on their hoods, yes, but this ability has not been demonstrated and may prove more difficult than you think.
- potato3732842 11mo agoWhat you're talking about was being done a decade ago in the skies over Iraq. https://www.northropgrumman.com/what-we-do/mission-solutions/radars/an-zpy-5-vader-vehicle-and-dismount-exploitation https://www.northropgrumman.com/what-we-do/mission-solutions... I don't know jack about the algorithms because classified and not my job, but I can tell you that however good you think it was, it was better. I don't know if it's real or just marketing BS but what we said publicly was that differences in antennas, mirrors and trim were key in re-identifying vehicles after they leave the observable area (e.g. two silver Camry's go into a garage, come back out, how do you keep track which is which).
- kragen 11mo agoInteresting, thanks! That page doesn't say anything that even suggests that.
- potato3732842 11mo agoWell it's also been a decade. I'm surprised they still have a web page for it. I was able to find some more old info online. https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA500620.pdf https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA500620.pdf
- akerl_ 11mo agoInstead of pieces of metal physically on the car, you want all cars to have a radio transceiver attached to a computer with crypto? That doesn't seem like a privacy win.
- kragen 11mo agoYes. It's potentially a privacy win because (1) it can't be read by random people, only law enforcement, and (2) it can't be read without notifying you.
- akerl_ 11mo agoYou may want to read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip You can’t make a transceiver and chip for this kind of deployment that can only be used by the right people. Either the secrets will leak or the implementation will have vulns or both.
- kragen 11mo agoOh, I was on cypherpunks in 01992, so I know about the Clipper Chip. But in this case you don't need to keep any secrets from the owner of the vehicle; they're free to attach a debugging connector to their own transceiver and read it at any time. The idea is to make their car anonymous to other people, except for law enforcement, not to themselves. Maybe you think there's no way that the transceiver can successfully authenticate those law-enforcement requests without containing secrets. It can; it only needs the public key of a root CA.
- kmeisthax 11mo agoLicense plates are there not to "catch evildoers". They're there because cars are heavy and kill people even when non-evildoers are operating them. The problem is not that cars can be tracked, it's that we design cities to mandate people travel in heavy metal boxes that kill people. When we made walking inconvenient, we also surrendered our rights. In other words, cars were a fascist[0] long-con - a project of societal engineering to deliberately control Americans[1] by offering the illusion of freedom. I don't even think the panopticon of license plate readers was in the thoughts of the people who designed this nonsense, but all the major figures involved with the institutionalization of cars would have loved being able to bulldoze those pesky 4A/5A rights. [0] Fords and Volkswagens are the original model swasticars. [1] And, arguably, make segregation survive the Civil Rights Act - but that's a different topic for another day. Look up what Robert Moses did to highways on Long Island if you want to know more.
- potato3732842 11mo agoBullshit. You don't need to track everyone to figure out who done it when something serious happens. You can do "good old fashioned police work" and go look at CCTV footage, ask witnesses, etc. People are happy to help when it's something serious. ALPRs are useful so that mustache twirling evil people can a) have law enforcement more easily unilaterally do enforcement work from their desks without actually having support on the ground from the public b) burn public support doing stuff the public doesn't support without affecting their ability to investigate serious stiff. Neither of those are good.
- kragen 11mo agoIf non-evildoers kill people with their cars, they will make extreme efforts to make amends, not flee the scene.
- potato3732842 11mo agoLicense plates were always about taxation/revenue first. Creating some level of identifiability without putting people's names on their cars was how it was sold to the general public.
- kragen 11mo agoDo you happen to have any references?
- nobody9999 11mo ago>Encrypted radio beacons, for example, which beep to alert the driver when they are being probed. And when "encrypted radio beacons" are placed everywhere that Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR) exist, that changes things exactly how -- instead of identifying cars (and, by extension, their owners) by their license plates, you do so with these hypothetical "beacons." How is that any different than what folks are doing today and why would that be less invasive for governments and corporations to collect en masse to track folks wherever they go?