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But we should not so readily give up the very freedoms that terrorists seek to destroy. The freedom to not have your license plate OCR'd? Is that what it's all

But we should not so readily give up the very freedoms that terrorists seek to destroy. The freedom to not have your license plate OCR'd? Is that what it's all about? Putting that in there is jingoistic and appealing to the same emotions that the other side abuses. Pervasive, often incidental monitoring (e.g. the growing proliferation of electronic toll roads) is absolutely inevitable. Cameras are everywhere. Recording costs close to nothing. Capacity is endless. Processing and OCR is achieved with negligible power on tiny, low-cost devices. Imagine what tomorrow will be like? Reactions that involve essentially trying to pretend that technology doesn't exist or can be suppressed will never and have never worked.

girvo 13y ago
I think it should be embraced... but transparent. Let me see when someone has looked up those details, let me view all my own records. Only then can the balance of power shift ever so slightly back towards regular people.
sp332 13y ago
Intentionally building a database whose sold purpose is to track tens of millions of mostly-innocent people as they go about their business for years on end is a bad idea.
- corresation 13y ago
  Monitoring license plates don't track people. They track vehicles. Vehicles that are heavily regulated. Humorously your smartphone probably is tracking you (with a much higher correlation with people, and accuracy, than vehicles), and logging it for years on end. And honestly I don't care whether there is a database of places where my car has been (this usually causes wildfire in most forums as the natural result is to hysterically proclaim that one can only allow some monitoring if they allow any and all monitoring for anyone, which is a nonsensical dichotomy). I can rationally see that there could be a lot of uses for it, in fact, in modernizing investigations and law enforcement. Presuming that it has appropriate checks and balances. e.g. audited access and look-ups, with every plate-holder having the right to use that same information themselves (whether the history of spots, and every look-up of the same).
  - jerrya 13y ago
    Presuming that it has appropriate checks and balances. e.g. audited access and look-ups, with every plate-holder having the right to use that same information themselves (whether the history of spots, and every look-up of the same). You seem to be begging the question (in the formal sense) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question)
  - sp332 13y ago
    audited access and look-ups Driver's license photos have audited lookups, but all that tells us is that the system is routinely abused and no one is stopping it. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/02/cop-database-abuse/ http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/02/cop-database-abuse/ Putting every car into the database will generate the maximum number of conflicts of interest possible. If a database only has interesting or suspicious plates in it, an average cop might not browse the database for funsies (risking a hit on the next audit). But if everyone the cop knows is in there, they might check up on spouses, exes, cute girls' habits, old bosses, friend's bosses... the list of reasons to risk a peek is endless.
    - notahacker 13y ago
      The flip side is I'd rather be found by idle browsers in a database of everyone than a database of people considered (sometimes arbitrarily) as suspicious. Ultimately the thoroughness of auditing lookups and clarity about what is and isn't acceptable enquiry is more important than who is in the database and how many months of data is accessible. Rogue cops might be able to misuse access to the system out of sheer curiosity but similarly rogue employees in certain positions at [mobile] telephone companies can abuse their position to tracking your whereabouts and call history, and financial organizations have access to your transaction history and card numbers - both far more sensitive than a few isolated datapoints from when your car passes police vehicles with their cameras switched on. I don't see the EFF campaigning against mobile telephony or credit cards.
      - steve_b 13y ago
        I don't see the EFF campaigning against mobile telephony or credit cards. The EFF is concerned about privacy matters involving mobile devices. https://ssd.eff.org/tech/mobile https://ssd.eff.org/tech/mobile
- goostavos 13y ago
  Seems like a system that's destined to be rife with false positives. I can only see this data being misused by lawyers and law enforcement to support a bad assumption. Anyone with a basic familiarity with statistics knows misinterpreting is remarkably easy to do; misrepresenting it is even easier. I'd hate to have a coincidental pattern become "proof" in some kind of court case.
  - AnthonyMouse 13y ago
    >I'd hate to have a coincidental pattern become "proof" in some kind of court case. Especially when the pattern is what the cops use to identify the suspect in the first place. There is a real problem with big data in the courtroom. Take the intersection of a victim, a crime and a suspect and look at a million data points and you'll find several thousand that match. Put only those in front of a jury and you have something that looks like a mountain of evidence but is really just systematically applying confirmation bias to random noise.
jedberg 13y ago
It sounds like they aren't trying to suppress the technology, just pushing for better rules around data retention.
jerrya 13y ago
The Court, including Scalia, has already ruled that technology can be suppressed when it comes up against Constitutional protections. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States (And at other times, various courts have ruled: * citizens cannot decrypt encrypted cable tv signals passing through their homes * citizens cannot monitor even unencrypted cell phone transmissions) (I think)
ihsw 13y ago
You're misinterpreting the author's point -- nobody anywhere is arguing that we should abandon useful technology due to blind fear, uncertainty, and doubt. The problem is the lack of oversight on how the data is managed.
- corresation 13y ago
  nobody anywhere is arguing that we should abandon useful technology due to blind fear, uncertainty, and doubt Except that the entire article was raising fear, uncertainty and doubt about the retention of that data. The "useful" part is retaining the information such that later on when someone is arrested in the commission of a rape, for instance, they could look at other historical appearances of that person's known vehicle and see if there's a correlation with other incidents (which at most would be circumstantial given that a vehicle can have many drivers, but it could instruct further investigations). This article warns that such logged data betrays "your political and religious beliefs, your social and sexual habits, your visits to the doctor", and then says " If this data is too private to give a week’s worth to the public to help inform us how the technology is being used, then isn’t it too private to let the police amass years’ worth of data without a warrant?" That does not mesh with your rebuttal at all.
jerf 13y ago
The "real" solution is to retrain society from top to bottom to break the conflation between what a law is and the outcome a law is intended to produce. As that phrasing implies, I don't think this is going to be an easy process. The purpose of a speed limit is not to make people not go more than 55 miles per hour. The purpose of a speed limit is to make driving safe, and particularly to make driving safe for society, even moreso than for the individual. If everybody is driving at 65 in the 55 zone, but everybody is safe, the higher purpose of the law is being met, and citations for speeding are just punitive for no gain. When conditions make 55 unsafe, people need to slow down enough to be safe, regardless of what the local speed limit is. Because we've never been able to rigidly enforce laws, it was very easy to conflate the two concepts. Now we are starting to develop some tech that does let us rigidly enforce laws. The solution is, don't do that. The laws we have on the books today were not designed for rigid enforcement. They were designed to be tools for creating public safety that could be used by the legal system, they are not themselves the specification of public safety. No such specification can really be created, and people are going to have to learn that. Hopefully we learn that before we really box ourselves in with even better tech. Either way we do seem very determined to learn this the hard way. This idea has applications to all sorts of modern day issues popular on HN; copyright law isn't really to prevent you from sharing a copy of a song with a friend, it's to prevent massive pirating enterprises that impact the market. Patent law isn't intended to provide mechanisms to sue end-user consumers of scanners that violate patents, it's intended to protect innovators from having their ideas taken without compensation by large engineering firms. Regulations in general are intended to produce certain results, usually some sort of social safety, they are not intended to becomes gods in and of themselves. But the actions of pretty much everybody in the system from top to bottom proves this idea is poorly understood.
- igouy 13y ago
  Distractions -- >>The purpose of a speed limit is to make driving safe...<< "I hoped that the national 55-mile per-hour speed limit--already in force--would help reduce gasoline consumption" http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=8017 http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=8017 >>When conditions make 55 unsafe, people need to slow down enough to be safe...<< "California has a 'Basic Speed Law.' This law means that you may never drive faster than is safe for current conditions" http://www.dmv.ca.gov/pubs/hdbk/speed_limits.htm http://www.dmv.ca.gov/pubs/hdbk/speed_limits.htm
mikeash 13y ago
It does seem terribly hypocritical to complain about the police capturing images from a public street, while simultaneously defending people's right to record the police in public. I wonder what people would make of it if someone released a highly popular smartphone app that did this same sort of thing, just crowdsourced rather than done by dedicated police. You could build a gigantic, publicly-accessible, searchable database that would absolutely destroy privacy in the same way that having the police do it would, except it would be available to all instead of just to the government. Somehow, I imagine that the same people fighting against this would fight for people's rights to run this app. It's a tough problem, certainly. I'm sympathetic to the privacy argument, but on the other hand, it seems like that ship has sailed. Maintaining privacy in public just because it's too hard to correlate all of the available data is becoming as anachronistic as riding a horse into town. Edit: it's so wonderful how people are downvoting me apparently because they disagree. Before you downvote, click the reply button to explain why you think I'm wrong, and then don't downvote. Seriously, you can't take a little bit of differing opinion? I didn't insult anyone or say anything unproductive here, I just went slightly against the hivemind. And yes, I realize that complaining about downvotes is against the rules, and I don't care.
- sp332 13y ago
  It does seem terribly hypocritical to complain about the police capturing images from a public street, while simultaneously defending people's right to record the police in public. Cops are only recordable on the job, because they are public servants doing a public job.
  - mikeash 13y ago
    I thought anyone in public could legally be recorded.
    - saraid216 13y ago
      It's a legal gray area because the physics of wave propagation are not good about obeying privacy laws. IANAL, so that's the extent of the opinion I should be giving.
Lambent_Cactus 13y ago
As far as I can tell from the article, EFF is asking for transparency into how ALPR records are used in the LA law enforcement. The only policy response even mentioned - and it's not even explicitly called for - is for the legislature to set retention limits. Both of those strike me as eminently reasonable requests, and neither of which claims a general "freedom not to have your license plate OCR'd."
- njharman 13y ago
  I don't agree with retention limits. Data is awesome. Tt is history and science. In 50 or 5000 years anthropologists will be salvilating over having the data we record today. Maybe in 5 years hobbyist, startup or evil corporation will come up with novel use that beneficial. The problem is not in the data or in the technology. It is with how it is used. It should be available to everyone free of restriction.
  - Lambent_Cactus 13y ago
    Victims of domestic violence, to name the most obvious example, probably feel differently about making their location indexed and searchable for anyone to look up without restriction.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
gyardley 13y ago
Yes, pervasive monitoring might be absolutely inevitable, technology is hard to suppress, and I may not be able to keep you from OCRing my license plate. However, the people do still have the ability to keep the government from doing this, or from accessing and utilizing the pervasive monitoring done by others. The government does not automatically get the right to do everything a private citizen can.
lgieron 13y ago
>Reactions that involve essentially trying to pretend that technology doesn't exist or can be suppressed will never and have never worked. It's not a matter of availability of technology, but essentially of values - for example, a technology for murdering people cheaply and effectively (guns) exists and yet murder is not ubiquitous precisely because people agree that it's wrong. The privacy folks are just arguing that being under near-constant surveilance when in public space is also wrong. I'm not saying that I necessarily agree with them, but saying that if technology exists, then its use cannot be (to a large degree) prevented, is just incorrect.
krichman 13y ago
This reaction isn't pretending technology doesn't exist. On the contrary, I believe they are very forward looking to oppose a seemingly innocuous thing that could become a tool of some imagined police state 50 or 100 years in the future. Legislating against this would be a good precedent for when those drones that can track X-centimeter objects from Y kilometers away become more commonplace. So no, it's not the freedom from having your license plate OCR'd: > And, according to recent research reported in Nature, it’s possible to identify 95% of individuals with as few as four randomly selected geospatial datapoints (location + time), making location data the ultimate biometric identifier. It's the freedom from having the government know exactly who was exactly where at all times, which may be important for peaceful groups (if the only possible victims were violent nobody would oppose this) that are against its policies. The question is not "how can we preserve our privacy by preventing technology from advancing" but "do we want the government or arbitrary private entities to be able to know what we are doing all day every day?"

girvo 13y ago

I think it should be embraced... but transparent. Let me see when someone has looked up those details, let me view all my own records. Only then can the balance of power shift ever so slightly back towards regular people.

sp332 13y ago

Intentionally building a database whose sold purpose is to track tens of millions of mostly-innocent people as they go about their business for years on end is a bad idea.

corresation 13y ago
Monitoring license plates don't track people. They track vehicles. Vehicles that are heavily regulated. Humorously your smartphone probably is tracking you (with a much higher correlation with people, and accuracy, than vehicles), and logging it for years on end. And honestly I don't care whether there is a database of places where my car has been (this usually causes wildfire in most forums as the natural result is to hysterically proclaim that one can only allow some monitoring if they allow any and all monitoring for anyone, which is a nonsensical dichotomy). I can rationally see that there could be a lot of uses for it, in fact, in modernizing investigations and law enforcement. Presuming that it has appropriate checks and balances. e.g. audited access and look-ups, with every plate-holder having the right to use that same information themselves (whether the history of spots, and every look-up of the same).
- jerrya 13y ago
  Presuming that it has appropriate checks and balances. e.g. audited access and look-ups, with every plate-holder having the right to use that same information themselves (whether the history of spots, and every look-up of the same). You seem to be begging the question (in the formal sense) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question)
- sp332 13y ago
  audited access and look-ups Driver's license photos have audited lookups, but all that tells us is that the system is routinely abused and no one is stopping it. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/02/cop-database-abuse/ http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/02/cop-database-abuse/ Putting every car into the database will generate the maximum number of conflicts of interest possible. If a database only has interesting or suspicious plates in it, an average cop might not browse the database for funsies (risking a hit on the next audit). But if everyone the cop knows is in there, they might check up on spouses, exes, cute girls' habits, old bosses, friend's bosses... the list of reasons to risk a peek is endless.
  - notahacker 13y ago
    The flip side is I'd rather be found by idle browsers in a database of everyone than a database of people considered (sometimes arbitrarily) as suspicious. Ultimately the thoroughness of auditing lookups and clarity about what is and isn't acceptable enquiry is more important than who is in the database and how many months of data is accessible. Rogue cops might be able to misuse access to the system out of sheer curiosity but similarly rogue employees in certain positions at [mobile] telephone companies can abuse their position to tracking your whereabouts and call history, and financial organizations have access to your transaction history and card numbers - both far more sensitive than a few isolated datapoints from when your car passes police vehicles with their cameras switched on. I don't see the EFF campaigning against mobile telephony or credit cards.
    - steve_b 13y ago
      I don't see the EFF campaigning against mobile telephony or credit cards. The EFF is concerned about privacy matters involving mobile devices. https://ssd.eff.org/tech/mobile https://ssd.eff.org/tech/mobile
goostavos 13y ago
Seems like a system that's destined to be rife with false positives. I can only see this data being misused by lawyers and law enforcement to support a bad assumption. Anyone with a basic familiarity with statistics knows misinterpreting is remarkably easy to do; misrepresenting it is even easier. I'd hate to have a coincidental pattern become "proof" in some kind of court case.
- AnthonyMouse 13y ago
  >I'd hate to have a coincidental pattern become "proof" in some kind of court case. Especially when the pattern is what the cops use to identify the suspect in the first place. There is a real problem with big data in the courtroom. Take the intersection of a victim, a crime and a suspect and look at a million data points and you'll find several thousand that match. Put only those in front of a jury and you have something that looks like a mountain of evidence but is really just systematically applying confirmation bias to random noise.

jedberg 13y ago

It sounds like they aren't trying to suppress the technology, just pushing for better rules around data retention.

jerrya 13y ago

The Court, including Scalia, has already ruled that technology can be suppressed when it comes up against Constitutional protections. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States (And at other times, various courts have ruled: * citizens cannot decrypt encrypted cable tv signals passing through their homes * citizens cannot monitor even unencrypted cell phone transmissions) (I think)

ihsw 13y ago

You're misinterpreting the author's point -- nobody anywhere is arguing that we should abandon useful technology due to blind fear, uncertainty, and doubt. The problem is the lack of oversight on how the data is managed.

corresation 13y ago
nobody anywhere is arguing that we should abandon useful technology due to blind fear, uncertainty, and doubt Except that the entire article was raising fear, uncertainty and doubt about the retention of that data. The "useful" part is retaining the information such that later on when someone is arrested in the commission of a rape, for instance, they could look at other historical appearances of that person's known vehicle and see if there's a correlation with other incidents (which at most would be circumstantial given that a vehicle can have many drivers, but it could instruct further investigations). This article warns that such logged data betrays "your political and religious beliefs, your social and sexual habits, your visits to the doctor", and then says " If this data is too private to give a week’s worth to the public to help inform us how the technology is being used, then isn’t it too private to let the police amass years’ worth of data without a warrant?" That does not mesh with your rebuttal at all.

jerf 13y ago

The "real" solution is to retrain society from top to bottom to break the conflation between what a law is and the outcome a law is intended to produce. As that phrasing implies, I don't think this is going to be an easy process. The purpose of a speed limit is not to make people not go more than 55 miles per hour. The purpose of a speed limit is to make driving safe, and particularly to make driving safe for society, even moreso than for the individual. If everybody is driving at 65 in the 55 zone, but everybody is safe, the higher purpose of the law is being met, and citations for speeding are just punitive for no gain. When conditions make 55 unsafe, people need to slow down enough to be safe, regardless of what the local speed limit is. Because we've never been able to rigidly enforce laws, it was very easy to conflate the two concepts. Now we are starting to develop some tech that does let us rigidly enforce laws. The solution is, don't do that. The laws we have on the books today were not designed for rigid enforcement. They were designed to be tools for creating public safety that could be used by the legal system, they are not themselves the specification of public safety. No such specification can really be created, and people are going to have to learn that. Hopefully we learn that before we really box ourselves in with even better tech. Either way we do seem very determined to learn this the hard way. This idea has applications to all sorts of modern day issues popular on HN; copyright law isn't really to prevent you from sharing a copy of a song with a friend, it's to prevent massive pirating enterprises that impact the market. Patent law isn't intended to provide mechanisms to sue end-user consumers of scanners that violate patents, it's intended to protect innovators from having their ideas taken without compensation by large engineering firms. Regulations in general are intended to produce certain results, usually some sort of social safety, they are not intended to becomes gods in and of themselves. But the actions of pretty much everybody in the system from top to bottom proves this idea is poorly understood.

igouy 13y ago
Distractions -- >>The purpose of a speed limit is to make driving safe...<< "I hoped that the national 55-mile per-hour speed limit--already in force--would help reduce gasoline consumption" http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=8017 http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=8017 >>When conditions make 55 unsafe, people need to slow down enough to be safe...<< "California has a 'Basic Speed Law.' This law means that you may never drive faster than is safe for current conditions" http://www.dmv.ca.gov/pubs/hdbk/speed_limits.htm http://www.dmv.ca.gov/pubs/hdbk/speed_limits.htm

mikeash 13y ago

It does seem terribly hypocritical to complain about the police capturing images from a public street, while simultaneously defending people's right to record the police in public. I wonder what people would make of it if someone released a highly popular smartphone app that did this same sort of thing, just crowdsourced rather than done by dedicated police. You could build a gigantic, publicly-accessible, searchable database that would absolutely destroy privacy in the same way that having the police do it would, except it would be available to all instead of just to the government. Somehow, I imagine that the same people fighting against this would fight for people's rights to run this app. It's a tough problem, certainly. I'm sympathetic to the privacy argument, but on the other hand, it seems like that ship has sailed. Maintaining privacy in public just because it's too hard to correlate all of the available data is becoming as anachronistic as riding a horse into town. Edit: it's so wonderful how people are downvoting me apparently because they disagree. Before you downvote, click the reply button to explain why you think I'm wrong, and then don't downvote. Seriously, you can't take a little bit of differing opinion? I didn't insult anyone or say anything unproductive here, I just went slightly against the hivemind. And yes, I realize that complaining about downvotes is against the rules, and I don't care.

sp332 13y ago
It does seem terribly hypocritical to complain about the police capturing images from a public street, while simultaneously defending people's right to record the police in public. Cops are only recordable on the job, because they are public servants doing a public job.
- mikeash 13y ago
  I thought anyone in public could legally be recorded.
  - saraid216 13y ago
    It's a legal gray area because the physics of wave propagation are not good about obeying privacy laws. IANAL, so that's the extent of the opinion I should be giving.

Lambent_Cactus 13y ago

As far as I can tell from the article, EFF is asking for transparency into how ALPR records are used in the LA law enforcement. The only policy response even mentioned - and it's not even explicitly called for - is for the legislature to set retention limits. Both of those strike me as eminently reasonable requests, and neither of which claims a general "freedom not to have your license plate OCR'd."

njharman 13y ago
I don't agree with retention limits. Data is awesome. Tt is history and science. In 50 or 5000 years anthropologists will be salvilating over having the data we record today. Maybe in 5 years hobbyist, startup or evil corporation will come up with novel use that beneficial. The problem is not in the data or in the technology. It is with how it is used. It should be available to everyone free of restriction.
- Lambent_Cactus 13y ago
  Victims of domestic violence, to name the most obvious example, probably feel differently about making their location indexed and searchable for anyone to look up without restriction.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]

gyardley 13y ago

Yes, pervasive monitoring might be absolutely inevitable, technology is hard to suppress, and I may not be able to keep you from OCRing my license plate. However, the people do still have the ability to keep the government from doing this, or from accessing and utilizing the pervasive monitoring done by others. The government does not automatically get the right to do everything a private citizen can.

lgieron 13y ago

>Reactions that involve essentially trying to pretend that technology doesn't exist or can be suppressed will never and have never worked. It's not a matter of availability of technology, but essentially of values - for example, a technology for murdering people cheaply and effectively (guns) exists and yet murder is not ubiquitous precisely because people agree that it's wrong. The privacy folks are just arguing that being under near-constant surveilance when in public space is also wrong. I'm not saying that I necessarily agree with them, but saying that if technology exists, then its use cannot be (to a large degree) prevented, is just incorrect.

krichman 13y ago

This reaction isn't pretending technology doesn't exist. On the contrary, I believe they are very forward looking to oppose a seemingly innocuous thing that could become a tool of some imagined police state 50 or 100 years in the future. Legislating against this would be a good precedent for when those drones that can track X-centimeter objects from Y kilometers away become more commonplace. So no, it's not the freedom from having your license plate OCR'd: > And, according to recent research reported in Nature, it’s possible to identify 95% of individuals with as few as four randomly selected geospatial datapoints (location + time), making location data the ultimate biometric identifier. It's the freedom from having the government know exactly who was exactly where at all times, which may be important for peaceful groups (if the only possible victims were violent nobody would oppose this) that are against its policies. The question is not "how can we preserve our privacy by preventing technology from advancing" but "do we want the government or arbitrary private entities to be able to know what we are doing all day every day?"