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The FBI Wants to Buy Nationwide Access to License Plate Readers
- amanaplanacanal 5mo agoMy local town runs their own license plate readers for red light and speed cameras. Not sure how the feds could get access to those.
- masfuerte 5mo agoBy offering money?
- giantg2 5mo agoOr withholding money (grants).
- chaps 5mo agoPresumably it's a system that can be viewed from a phone or from dispatch remotely right? All they'd have to do is share the credentials and that's that.
- testplzignore 5mo agoThe NSA would presumably have all of this. From a taxpayer perspective, it's such a waste to have multiple agencies doing their own unconstitutional surveillance. Why have two Ministries of Love when one would do? :)
- irishcoffee 5mo agoThis is the purview of the FBI. The NSA is focused on the rest of the world. Is there overlap? Sure. But the amount of disinformation on the website about the FBI vs the NSA is comical. If anything, when people say “NSA” they really mean “CIA” and just don’t understand the difference.
- cucumber3732842 5mo ago>The NSA is focused on the rest of the world. In the same way that the CIA doesn't sell cocaine. I'm sure they "mostly" focus externally but that doesn't mean they're not still doing a hell of a lot domestically.
- convolvatron 5mo agorecently there has been some football and stopgap in congress about reauthorizing the patriot act permissions for the NSA to collect any communications where one endpoint is out of the country. so that's at least widely recognized and 'legal'
- irishcoffee 5mo agoI covered this with: "Is there overlap? Sure." The FBI is the boogeyman everyone around these parts wants the NSA to be. The NSA has the skillset, they just don't use it like that, domestically. That was my point. Carry on. I don't mind if you agree or not.
- joquarky 5mo ago> The NSA has the skillset, they just don't use it like that, domestically. That seems like a statement that needs backed up by sources.
- irishcoffee 5mo agoFat chance. I don’t care if you believe me. I’m not lying to you.
- mothballed 5mo agoI believe you but this seems far more like HSI territory, who are comfortable, able, and excessively willing to overstep rights of both citizens and foreigners. They're also an underestimated agency that IIRC is larger than the FBI.
- dayofthedaleks 5mo agoIt already goes to your local DHS Fusion Center.
- asdff 5mo agoThese have funny loopholes usually. For our county they have a few connected to running the red light for a busway. But notoriously the information is collected by some company out of state with no actual policing power, who then begs you to pay the ticket with a letter every couple months. You can actually ignore this if you avoid any sign of life that indicates you might have received the ticket, such as looking it up on the county ticket portal. They don't serve you or send it via certified mail. The county courts motioned years ago that they aren't enforcing these tickets. They don't affect your ability to renew your license, register your car, or insurance rates. They don't come up when you get pulled over for anything else. It is basically a scam to support the traffic ticket company out of state hoping you pay them and sustain their business model.
- jamiek88 5mo agoExcept current immigration enforcement. Ignoring that is enough to have citizenship denied. Just happened to a friend of mine in Houston. Culture is to ignore, courts ignore, police don’t see it. USCIS do.
- bl4kers 5mo agoYou sure that data is stored locally and not on a vendor's cloud offering?
- baggachipz 5mo agoI had already assumed that they were using Flock data for exactly this. I guess paying to speed the nationwide rollout makes it official and will free them from pesky courts and human rights.
- delichon 5mo agoIt's not that they don't have access but that they don't have legal access that they can use as leverage. Parallel construction is a pain in the ass. They're buying the right to use it in court.
- goolz 5mo agoExactly. It is not that they are not already spying on all of us; they are. Or that they cannot already nail you for something. It is that they need a way to launder their evidence so that it is kosher come prosecution.
- scholarnet-AI 5mo agoI believe technology is great but we must regulate to assure personal privacy is maintained.
- cute_boi 5mo agoI think we can’t easily choose both, because these agencies will portray it as something they need in order to help children.
- bpoyner 5mo agoThey'll also need it to track down terrorists. And who determines who is a terrorist? Why, the department of justice does.
- nazgulsenpai 5mo agoI don't think regulators (government) protecting the people from the FBI (government) is going to work out.
- asdff 5mo agoIn socal people might not even use license plates at all. Some people mask them with a towel or something like that. Some run paper dealership plates which I guess don't need to have any license number on them at all, just the dealer logo. Others just take them off and drive. I've seen plates that were sanded clean and with different numbers stuck on them that don't match then indented numbers. And then of course all the texas plates. No, it isn't just visitors from texas. Texas has a cool loophole where there is no registration information on the plate, it is on a little sticker on the dashboard. As such, there are a dozen plus cars that have been regulars in my neighborhood for years with texas plates, with some several years old sticker on their dashboard. It is kind of surprising that they don't get hit with a huge ticket for failing to register their car after 20 days. Some even park on the street quite brazenly. But maybe that shows how these systems are, today at least, very poorly connected between states. I've even seen a car being sold locally where the owner openly admits it was never registered or smogged, and they used it as their local neighborhood runabout just rolling the dice that they would not get pulled over. Just an aspect of the driving culture.
- giobox 5mo ago> Some run paper dealership plates which I guess don't need to have any license number on them at all, just the dealer logo In California, isn't this just a normal person buying a new car? If bought from a dealership lot, a new car will run on temporary paper plates for several weeks until the permanent registration and new plate is processed. You see this all the time in CA, because CA buys a lot of new cars. There are even circumstances a used car will roll of the dealer lot with paper plates pending processing.
- asdff 5mo agoYou can tell when it isn't a normal person buying a new car when it is your neighbor's car you see for multiple years with those "temporary" tags. I catch a lot of out of date registration too. Usually those cars are parked off street but sometimes not. I usually see about two dozen on my walks. Easy to tell at a glance when you recognize what color tag is now very stale.
- 5mo ago
- NoMoreNicksLeft 5mo agoDoes anyone sell am eInk display that's 12"x6"? Doesn't have to be color, though bonus points for that...
- lanrat 5mo agoSomething like this? https://reviver.com/ https://reviver.com/
- NoMoreNicksLeft 5mo agoNah, I was thinking a raw eInk panel. Not one controlled by the state. One that can flip the numbers for 2 seconds, while driving past the surveillance cameras but be back on my real license plate number immediately just in case there are any cops watching. Hell, I could even run recognition against the rear dash cam, so that it overrides a flip if there are recognizable cop cars within view. Could be fun.
- hdgvhicv 5mo agoJames Bond had a solution for this decades ago
- kylehotchkiss 5mo agoI equate these license plates with terrible money management skills. $900 for a license plate: "a fool and his money are soon parted" regardless of what income bracket they're in
- __MatrixMan__ 5mo agoInstalling a license plate flipper, digital or mechanical, is likely more illegal than just putting bags over the readers. Source: https://legalclarity.org/are-license-plate-flipper-devices-illegal/ https://legalclarity.org/are-license-plate-flipper-devices-i...
- reenorap 5mo agoIt's probably never going to happen because neither party cares about protecting Americans rights, but we need to have some sort of law that creates a Chinese firewall between these mass surveillance data and the government, or whoever else. I don't know if you could ever collect this data and never have foreign entities or NSA moles infiltrate into it by sending their agents to work at that company and steal the data whenever they want. But I can see how this would be good at fighting crime but also a completely and absolute destruction of privacy. We need politicians that actually care about Americans and their rights but no one who cares is dumb enough to want to go into politics, which is the sad thing.
- wmf 5mo agoJust don't collect the data. If it's too dangerous for the government to have then private companies shouldn't have it either. The entire purpose of license plate readers is to assist law enforcement; if we decide as a society that we don't want to do it then just ban it completely.
- baby_souffle 5mo agoYou can't realistically ban cameras and character recognition software.
- wl 5mo agoIt’d be hard to keep individuals from doing this. But individuals aren’t running networks of cameras. Companies are. Those companies probably couldn’t fly under the radar selling LPR data if the practice was banned.
- tardedmeme 5mo agoHow do you know individuals aren't running ALPR networks?
- fragmede 5mo ago
- LocalH 5mo agoIf they do, doesn't that make the companies running those readers agents of the state during the collaboration?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- charcircuit 5mo agoThis information can be critical for understanding the movement of vehicles and can benefit law enforcement giving them more evidence and knowledge to work off of. As long as these systems are accurate and not being maliciously tampered with it keeps everyone accountable to their actions.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- __MatrixMan__ 5mo agoCorrupt government officials use this data to kidnap people. Not criminals, just people they don't like. Do you really think that's worth tolerating just because it'll help us catch more actual criminals?
- Dibby053 5mo agoHelping solve kidnapping cases is a direct and straightforward application of vehicle intelligence data.
- __MatrixMan__ 5mo agoEnabling state sponsored kidnapping is also a direct and straightforward application of vehicle intelligence data. We should only allow its use if the cases solved is likely more than the cases caused.
- charcircuit 5mo agoYes, I think it's worth tolerating and I think all queries should be logged and monitored for abuse. Kidnapping already is not legal to do.
- righthand 5mo agoBut if persons in power are already not being held accountable, what the heck is a log file going to do?
- black_13 5mo ago[dead]
- Zigurd 5mo agoNot that it will help for long distance travel, but if I was running strategy for the big E-bike cartel, I couldn't think of a better meme to promote than the surveillance state getting a chubby about ALPRs. Seriously, though, I think the Karens out there want E-bike licensed just so cops can keep hassling brown people even when they're not driving clapped out old Toyotas.
- dawnerd 5mo agoALPRs, from Flock in particular, track more than license plates. They've installed Flock cameras on pedestrian paths even.
- psadauskas 5mo agoThis will never change until we pass laws that make personal data a liability instead of an asset.
- mothballed 5mo agoHow about a law that says your documents, like your car registration number on a plate, doesn't have to be displayed except in case of reasonable articulable suspicion a crime has been committed. We could call it, the 4th amendment.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5mo agoYour plate is displayed because driving is a privilege, not a right (note that traveling is a right, but you can travel without driving). So your plate is really the proof that you've paid a bit for the infrastructure to drive on. It's like having a wrist band to an event. You're not required to attend the event, but if you do attend it, you're required to wear the wrist band.
- mothballed 5mo ago>Your plate is displayed because driving is a privilege, not a right (note that traveling is a right, but you can travel without driving). But the 4th amendment is a right, that applies even when engaging in a "privilege." See also the fact police can't just willy nilly check your driver license while engaging in a "privilege." >So your plate is really the proof that you've paid a bit for the infrastructure to drive on. False. Plates are required even on my own privately owned publicly accessible road, and a large portion of my trips happen on publicly available but 100% privately owned roads with 0 taxes to maintain them (in fact, I maintain a lot of the roads in my community myself because they are all private). In fact some of those roads, I 100% own and maintain, and yet since I legally can't bar anyone from driving on it the law in my state (AZ) requires a displayed plate (even for me). >It's like having a wrist band to an event. You're not required to attend the event, but if you do attend it, you're required to wear the wrist band. It's like citing me for not having a wrist band on my own owned road easement, which is the law in my state. There is no property right you are attempting to assert under which that makes sense. I can go about 90% of the way to "town" on privately owned roads in which none of the owners care if I have a "wrist band" yet the state can still cite me for not having it.
- god_n_stuff 5mo ago[dead]
- martinbfine 5mo agoAnother AI click bait article. Fake news. And a conspiracy theory.
- darkstar999 5mo agoIf you make a claim like that you should back it up in some way.
- foofyter 5mo agoThey already know where you are.
- tintor 5mo agoHow about digital license plates? That change the code displayed daily. Not unlike authenticator phone apps. Police can still use them to identify the vehicle, and verify registration, but mass surveillance and repo companies can't use them to track vehicles for more than a day OR to identify vehicles.
- rationalist 5mo agoFlock uses other vehicle characteristics to track vehicles: bumper stickers, dents, etc.
- HNisCIS 5mo agoThe gov will have that database though and it's a simple query to get all the displayed IDs and then search them in Flock's database. It makes it slightly harder for Flock to do things of it's own accord but that's not the problem here.
- vjvjvjvjghv 5mo agoPeople are usually afraid of government surveillance but I suspected already a long time ago that all the data that's being collected by private firms will eventually be used by government and companies. Basically we have been building and continue building an infrastructure that Hitler or Stalin would have been envious of. And as we have seen in the last year, companies will fall in line quickly with whoever is in power as long as the profits keep flowing. The only solution I see is to stop massive data collection no matter who does it. This is probably not going to happen so we will most likely end up with a surveillance society much worse than what "1984" described. And some day an authoritarian will use the data to its full extent.
- goshx 5mo agoWhat are the odds of Elon already providing this kind of service through Teslas?
- akimbostrawman 5mo agoThe same odds as any other modern car spying on you and selling that data (100%)
- oliwarner 5mo agoIt's a special American madness that prevents law enforcement for installing their own mass surveillance systems, with all the oversight that it'd come with, and instead buy all the data they need from shady techbros siloing all the data they can, at ten times the cost. If you don't like mass surveillance, you have to ban private companies doing it too. If you're okay with it, do it in-house. You still need to ban private companies doing it.
- spwa4 5mo agoThis has been the norm in the Netherlands for about 20 years now. Since then the number of license plate readers has expanded enormously. This is so old that the laws about it have been updated several times already. https://digitalfreedomfund.org/case-studies/collection-and-mass-storage-of-data-through-automatic-number-plate-recognition/ https://digitalfreedomfund.org/case-studies/collection-and-m... (dutch, sorry) https://anprcameras.nl/ https://anprcameras.nl/ (a partial list, oh and there's mobile "stations" doing it too) At one point they were very proud of having developed an algorithm to go much further than just license plate reading: "trajectory control". By placing ANPR cameras on every road and checking the traffic, they could not just detect when your license plate drove by a camera, but locate the vehicle down to a few meters at all times. This algorithm is now also used for traffic indicators, speeding fines, ... They also identify the vehicle (to check if you've paid correctly, and to give fines relating to vehicle type). They check how many people are in the car (there's a tax advantage for cars that never carry more than 2 people). And I'm sure this is not a full list. Oh and in case you're wondering about the GPDR: every EU state, as well as a looong list of international organizations (from the UK tax service to Interpol) have the right to grant permanent and transitive exceptions to the GPDR to anyone they want. The license plates are collected and processed by a private company. A blanket GPDR exception has been granted to them. They have other business deals involving the license plate data. The Netherlands is also doing face recognition in the public space, by the way. In a very similar way. The very thing the GPDR was explicitly "created to prevent", or so the story goes. It was even put into the GPDR law that without the GPDR face recognition would become commonplace. Well, GPDR passed, and it is commonplace. At airports + a lot of train stations + a number of locations in big cities. About 1.3% of all arrests in the Netherlands were made on the basis of face recognition cameras in 2023. https://algoritmes.overheid.nl/en/algoritme/oorg10264/35433239/catch-central-automatic-technology-for-recognition-of-persons https://algoritmes.overheid.nl/en/algoritme/oorg10264/354332...