9 ms·

Police May Know Exactly Where You Were Last Tuesday

98 points by Libertatea 13y ago

jrabone 13y ago
I expect that applies equally well to the UK with gantries of ANPR cameras over major motorways as well as portable ones in laybys, like the one I saw this morning on the A1 leaving Edinburgh. It wasn't a police car, though, but a dedicated "road tax enforcement" vehicle running it. I was reminded by a colleague today of a quote attributed to Roger Needham, something along the lines of "privacy is a transient condition in between people realising there isn't an omniscient god, and government realising there was a vacancy" (quoting second hand from memory)
hvs 13y ago
In case you were looking for the necessary plea "for the children!" it was here: "God forbid if the day came that a child is abducted from that mall," he says. "We would have that tool available to us, to look at that data and see if we can't find a possible suspect vehicle."
- joering2 13y ago
  Of course. And fast forward 100 years from now when public is smart enough to call this BS and after spending trillions of tax payers dollars on programs like this one, the last resort would be something like this: "God forbids all those reports of people being abducted by aliens were real, we would have a tool to analyze the data from an alien abduction and like 44th President said once hundred years ago: if it saves one life, then it was worth it!"
  - pstuart 13y ago
    The public will likely never be smart enough.
    - CodeMage 13y ago
      Ah, the good old "people are stupid" saying. http://dreamcafe.com/2013/06/18/people-are-stupid/ http://dreamcafe.com/2013/06/18/people-are-stupid/
      - pstuart 13y ago
        Well your example was stupid. There are always exceptions, but "the public" as a whole is stupid. Why do you think election campaigns run on negative advertising instead of talking policy? http://boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=2012 http://boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=2012 "Lincoln" was #13. Here, let me rub your face in the stupidity: apparently almost half the United States population believes in ghosts and does not believe in evolution: http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-500160_162-994766.html http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-500160_162-994766.html I'm in no way coming from a position of intellectual superiority, rather from observational despair.
- mtgx 13y ago
  They always pick fringe cases that know the public would like, even if it's used for completely different things 99.9% of the time.
- rayiner 13y ago
  It's hilarious, because kids don't actually ever get kidnapped in the U.S. (by strangers). Thank you Anderson Cooper (http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/anderson.cooper.360/blog/2007/01/raw-data-kidnapping-statistics.html http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/anderson.cooper.360/blog/200...). > Despite these huge numbers, very few children are victims of the kinds of crimes that so-often lead local and national news reports. According to NCMEC, just 115 children are the victims of what most people think of as "stereotypical" kidnapping, which the center characterizes thusly: "These crimes involve someone the child does not know or someone of slight acquaintance, who holds the child overnight, transports the child 50 miles or more, kills the child, demands ransom, or intends to keep the child permanently." My mom is absolutely freaked out about our wife and I living in the city, because someone might kidnap our daughter. Because a crowded apartment building where hundreds of people can hear a child cry for help is so much less safe than an out-of-the-way suburban house when it comes to a crime that never happens.
  - 3825 13y ago
    I think what follows immediately deserves to be noted here as well. 115 is a very small number by itself but then over half of them return. >Of these 115 incidents, 57 percent ended with the return of the child. The other 43 percent had a less happy outcome.
    - anigbrowl 13y ago
      You seem to be assuming the return is voluntary and not the result of police activity. 115 incidents is not that many in the context of the whole population, but that's not going to be much comfort to you if it's one of your family members that goes missing, is it?
      - minimize_me 13y ago
        We should mandate subdermal GPS tags for everyone. Think of the children.
  - qq66 13y ago
    If the harm that a person suffers from their child being kidnapped and murdered is negative infinity, then even the smallest probability of it happening makes their expected harm from kidnapping negative infinity.
- bradbatt 13y ago
  "We would have that tool available to us, to look at that data and see if we can't find a possible suspect vehicle." The concept of collecting and storing all sorts of data and information on everyone just in case someone bad does something is a flawed one. The government is collecting all phone call information, numbers, location, duration, along with SMS, email, and who knows what else on everybody in order to have that data "just in case" a terrorist attack happens, so they can (possibly) track down the perpetrators. Now we have police collecting license plate data, along with GPS coordinates, video and still cameras mounted all over cities that can easily allow for facial recognition, combined with the tracking of your phone as mentioned above. It's not a stretch to assume that if the government (NSA/CIA/FBI) wants to know where you are at any given moment, they know. All this "just in case" one of the infinitesimally unlikely events such as a terrorist attack or kidnapping occurs. For the children. And because terrorism. The potential for abuse is huge and the cost/benefit is not even close to worth it—unless the stated purpose for collecting the data is not the real one.
  - mabhatter 13y ago
    85% of what people do is habit. So when they have a large set like this "habit" starts excluding people very quickly as they are just driving to common places. So if you are tracking somebody you dont know fleeing, they stick out in the numbers quickly... If you are tracking somebody you do know you can guess where they might be. Kidnappers and bank robbers aren't that smart when looking for hiding places, and you probably already have them tracked going there. To a certain extent, all it really does is SUGGEST you belong or don't belong in any given location. There might be a murder in an alley, but data shows you go to a comic book store blocks away every week so you probably aren't involved. Generally the data is going to clear more people than it makes guilty. Of course I'm a huge fan of Numb3rs and Criminal Minds that show this kind of stuff being used properly by honest people... Emphasis on HONEST people.
HPLovecraft 13y ago
http://www.aclu.org/files/FilesPDFs/ALPR/rhode-island/alprpra_cityofprovidence_providenceri_1.pdf http://www.aclu.org/files/FilesPDFs/ALPR/rhode-island/alprpr... haha its ok there are no records of anything anyway, im sure this is the same in other cities/towns
res0nat0r 13y ago
It is uncomfortable, but you shouldn't ever have had an expectation of privacy when driving around in public with a licensed, regulated and marked vehicle. Just because it can be done without much manual effort today vs. 50 years ago having people sit around town logging every car they see drive by doesn't mean really the privacy expectation has changed. Just because it is "scary" doesn't mean it is "illegal".
- 3825 13y ago
  I do not mind people collecting data about me. I do think that we need to have a restriction that if you collect data about me, you have to share it with me. All of it. In a accessible manner, at least as accessible as you do in your reports. Every day that you fail/delay to provide me those reports, you will pay me $100k in damages.
  - adestefan 13y ago
    For what damages?
    - 3825 13y ago
      Punitive damages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punitive_damages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punitive_damages
      - ihsw 13y ago
        Punitive damages never stand on their own, they're always accompanied with compensatory damages. Good luck proving privacy violations directly result in loss, injury, or harm suffered -- information sharing agreements between law enforcement agencies and those interested in this information precludes any claims of negligence or recklessness.
- ianterrell 13y ago
  There is a significant difference between the expectation of privacy as a platonic ideal and the real life expectation of privacy. For the former, you're of course right: not much has changed! The local police could have posted someone on every street corner to record every license plate that passed -- probably multiple people to account for traffic! That's no different than cameras, in theory. You have no less privacy with cameras! But in practice, the police didn't do that (to that scale). So, given that my expectations of privacy are not about logical possibilities, but rather about actual realities, they certainly have changed.
Shivetya 13y ago
I see these cars all over where I live. It really is no different than the meta data that the NSA is collecting and most likely we will see defense of the gathering using similar rebuttals, namely YOU have a right, the license plate/car/phone/database does not. Apparently they want to use indirect collection or collection by private groups as somehow not falling under the 4th because of how it was assembled. I guess they could take all of a grocery stores purchase records and do the same, after all they aren't look at you directly under the guise of fixing health issues. Eventually data, wherever it may exist, will have to land at the Supremes to declare how abstract it has to be before it is not subject to the Constitution. Based on past cases it may not bode well for us.
- rayiner 13y ago
  > It really is no different than the meta data that the NSA is collecting and most likely we will see defense of the gathering using similar rebuttals, namely YOU have a right, the license plate/car/phone/database does not. You're mis-characterizing the rebuttal in both cases. 1) With metadata the rebuttal is that the Constitution refers to the "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects..." There is a legitimate argument that AT&T's records about when you used their network is not your papers or effects. You didn't create the record, AT&T did. You don't usually even have access to the information, AT&T does. It's not something silly like "the phone doesn't have a 4th amendment right." 2) The rebuttal for gathering information from cameras is that the 4th amendment has never extended to what the government can observe about you in a public place. The 4th amendment doesn't mean "I have a right to have the government not track or monitor me without a warrant." It says exactly what it means: the police can't search your person or your house, your papers or effects, without a search warrant supported by probable cause. The farther you get from that plain language, the more tenuous your argument becomes. Vis-a-vis the Supremes, at least Sotomayor has questioned whether it might be necessary to rethink at least the third party doctrine, which is the basis for (1): http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/the_data_question_should_the_third-party_records_doctrine_be_revisited http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/the_data_question.... I don't think anyone any time soon would think about revisiting the rule for plainly visible activity in public spaces, which is the basis of (2).
president 13y ago
NPR sure is getting a lot of material from Reddit these days
- evan_ 13y ago
  You don't think the ACLU might have sent out a press release?
imgabe 13y ago
So I assume they're also using them to exonerate people who otherwise don't have an alibi but could be falsely accused, right? Right??
- ihsw 13y ago
  Absolutely not, this metadata is useful as leverage for getting plea bargains out of people. Exonerating someone removes leverage.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    Withholding potentially-exonerating evidence from the defense in a criminal prosecution is a big no-no. Of course it happens on a regular basis, but if you've got the money to fight it nicely sets up the basis for a reversal of a conviction on appeal. See: http://www.totalcriminaldefense.com/news/articles/criminal-evidence/exculpatory-evidence-punishment http://www.totalcriminaldefense.com/news/articles/criminal-e.... This is not a search or privacy problem per se. Most situations where exculpating evidence is withheld aren't so clear-cut as photographic evidence of the supposed perpetrator's car in a different place. It's usually something more like a statement by a witness whose exculpatory potential is ambiguous enough that a prosecutor can rationalize it as irrelevant. Indeed, I think technology ameliorates this problem. It's hard for prosecutors to withhold DNA evidence, for example, because juries know its widely used and take it so seriously. If use of photographic evidence in prosecutions becomes common, I think it will be difficult for prosecutors to withhold relevant information from the defense without compromising their ability to get convictions from juries.
- corresation 13y ago
  Your car being somewhere at a particular time is nothing more than an investigative hint. It proves neither guilt nor innocence.
  - imgabe 13y ago
    You are presumed innocent. That doesn't have to be proven. If your car is somewhere else, that could create a reasonable doubt.
swamp40 13y ago
Drudge headline just linked to a similar article: http://news.yahoo.com/driving-somewhere-theres-govt-record-140052644.html http://news.yahoo.com/driving-somewhere-theres-govt-record-1... It says the police cars can tag the location of 7K plates during a normal shift without burdening the officers at all. Doesn't sound like too much, but multiply that by about 10,000 (Chicagoland) and two shifts and it adds up fast. Also here in Chicago, they have an "Open Road Tolling" system that grabs your plate # on the fly at 80 mph. Then they mail you a ticket if the plate # doesn't match with a valid iPass (wireless box in most everyone's car). The thing is, there's no way to tell which car in a group has the iPass - so they must have to run every plate thru their database and match it up with valid iPasses. That means the Illinois tollway is grabbing and analyzing say 20 million plates and timestamps every day. If all that data is stored indefinitely - wow.
- joering2 13y ago
  I submitted it to HN minutes ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6057968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6057968 It seems to be a new scandal brewing. Surprises me how long it took. I recall in 2009 in Clearwater Florida when a Sherrif car had a gun-type looking devices pointing all 4 sides of the car. I asked what it was and he told me when he drives this thing picks up license plates and raises two alerts (if any): 1) if the tag is expired, OR if the owner of the car has a DL suspended/etc. If #2 then the picture of driver pops up and he visually checks if gender/look matches... if not, then he ignores the alert.
  - swamp40 13y ago
    Good stuff. It's going to take a lot of outrage to get them to give up tools like that. Those are money makers.
    - warmwaffles 13y ago
      Live in fear. Obey!
  - DanBC 13y ago
coldcode 13y ago
I wonder if one can use paint or some kind of odd wavelength light bulb to make recording the license # too blurred to use.
- imgabe 13y ago
  If that could be done, someone would be doing it to foil speed cameras and red light cameras already.
  - berberous 13y ago
    Well, they are. Google "red light spray" or something similar. I think it may be illegal in some jurisdictions.
- bionsuba 13y ago
  Your thinking to hard, just slap some mud on your plate and say you drive on a dirt road.
  - anywhichway 13y ago
    Committing an illegal and regularly enforced crime of driving with an obstructed license plate seems like a poor plan to try and defend your right to an abstract sense of privacy.
    - marvin 13y ago
      As I've said time and tim again: Hacks and technological tricks are not the right way to fight civil rights violations. It has to happen through the legal system. If you're just hacking your way around bad laws, you are setting yourself up to get in trouble somewhere down the road.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
riskable 13y ago
I don't think the police will have any empathy towards regular every day people (in regards to license plate databases) until private individuals start tracking the whereabouts of police 24/7 (and potentially posting the data online for everyone to see). Not only that but think about it this way: It doesn't cost that much for organized crime to put up cameras all over town for their own benefit. BTW: Heaven forbid if one of these license plate databases ever gets leaked! It's not like the government will re-issue everyone new plates for free.
speedyrev 13y ago
My nephew is a detective who just worked an Abduction/Murder case. The suspect was located (and later convicted) largely in part because of the license plate scanners. One thing you cannot argue, they are incredibly effective. My problem is the infinite retention of that data and the fact that many agencies use a private third party for the system. I think eliminating the scanners is a bad thing, but I would like to see some basic rules that would have to be followed.
- ck2 13y ago
  Yeah well knowing where EVERYONE is, ALL the time probably helps them know a lot of things, who is dating who, where you shop, where you work, etc. You okay with all that to "save the children" ? If they were allowed to use xray scanners to scan every car on every street in a city to see who and what is inside - you okay with that escalation? Because they are doing it "near" borders (backscatter on vehicles) and who knows where they will take it next.
  - knowaveragejoe 13y ago
    It's like you didn't read what he said: My problem is the infinite retention of that data and the fact that many agencies use a private third party for the system. I think eliminating the scanners is a bad thing, but I would like to see some basic rules that would have to be followed.
    - comrade_ogilvy 13y ago
      As I see it, we need more explicit rules about privacy that encompass both gov't and private parties. Whether we get rid of FISA or the NSA will ultimately not matter (fat chance, of course) -- if it seems important enough, gov't will always be able to entice the private owners of data to "voluntarily" share with law enforcement. This car location database is just the tip of the iceberg, and it happens to be absolutely unambiguously legal for gov't and corporations to do whatever they please with this data. I am not actually paranoid. I am quite confident that the norm is for the police to have reasonable procedures in place -- the last thing a police department wants is for a police officer or former police officer to be accused of using police resources in a creepy manner to stalk/spy on an ex-spouse or similar. They want an explicit paper trial of Officer X asked about car owned by person Y for reason Z. Even if the norm is pretty good, the public should have clear expectation that can be understood.
nodata 13y ago
See you next Tuesday.

98 points by Libertatea 13y ago

I expect that applies equally well to the UK with gantries of ANPR cameras over major motorways as well as portable ones in laybys, like the one I saw this morning on the A1 leaving Edinburgh. It wasn't a police car, though, but a dedicated "road tax enforcement" vehicle running it. I was reminded by a colleague today of a quote attributed to Roger Needham, something along the lines of "privacy is a transient condition in between people realising there isn't an omniscient god, and government realising there was a vacancy" (quoting second hand from memory)

hvs 13y ago

In case you were looking for the necessary plea "for the children!" it was here: "God forbid if the day came that a child is abducted from that mall," he says. "We would have that tool available to us, to look at that data and see if we can't find a possible suspect vehicle."

joering2 13y ago
Of course. And fast forward 100 years from now when public is smart enough to call this BS and after spending trillions of tax payers dollars on programs like this one, the last resort would be something like this: "God forbids all those reports of people being abducted by aliens were real, we would have a tool to analyze the data from an alien abduction and like 44th President said once hundred years ago: if it saves one life, then it was worth it!"
- pstuart 13y ago
  The public will likely never be smart enough.
  - CodeMage 13y ago
    Ah, the good old "people are stupid" saying. http://dreamcafe.com/2013/06/18/people-are-stupid/ http://dreamcafe.com/2013/06/18/people-are-stupid/
    - pstuart 13y ago
      Well your example was stupid. There are always exceptions, but "the public" as a whole is stupid. Why do you think election campaigns run on negative advertising instead of talking policy? http://boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=2012 http://boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=2012 "Lincoln" was #13. Here, let me rub your face in the stupidity: apparently almost half the United States population believes in ghosts and does not believe in evolution: http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-500160_162-994766.html http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-500160_162-994766.html I'm in no way coming from a position of intellectual superiority, rather from observational despair.
mtgx 13y ago
They always pick fringe cases that know the public would like, even if it's used for completely different things 99.9% of the time.
rayiner 13y ago
It's hilarious, because kids don't actually ever get kidnapped in the U.S. (by strangers). Thank you Anderson Cooper (http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/anderson.cooper.360/blog/2007/01/raw-data-kidnapping-statistics.html http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/anderson.cooper.360/blog/200...). > Despite these huge numbers, very few children are victims of the kinds of crimes that so-often lead local and national news reports. According to NCMEC, just 115 children are the victims of what most people think of as "stereotypical" kidnapping, which the center characterizes thusly: "These crimes involve someone the child does not know or someone of slight acquaintance, who holds the child overnight, transports the child 50 miles or more, kills the child, demands ransom, or intends to keep the child permanently." My mom is absolutely freaked out about our wife and I living in the city, because someone might kidnap our daughter. Because a crowded apartment building where hundreds of people can hear a child cry for help is so much less safe than an out-of-the-way suburban house when it comes to a crime that never happens.
- 3825 13y ago
  I think what follows immediately deserves to be noted here as well. 115 is a very small number by itself but then over half of them return. >Of these 115 incidents, 57 percent ended with the return of the child. The other 43 percent had a less happy outcome.
  - anigbrowl 13y ago
    You seem to be assuming the return is voluntary and not the result of police activity. 115 incidents is not that many in the context of the whole population, but that's not going to be much comfort to you if it's one of your family members that goes missing, is it?
    - minimize_me 13y ago
      We should mandate subdermal GPS tags for everyone. Think of the children.
- qq66 13y ago
  If the harm that a person suffers from their child being kidnapped and murdered is negative infinity, then even the smallest probability of it happening makes their expected harm from kidnapping negative infinity.
bradbatt 13y ago
"We would have that tool available to us, to look at that data and see if we can't find a possible suspect vehicle." The concept of collecting and storing all sorts of data and information on everyone just in case someone bad does something is a flawed one. The government is collecting all phone call information, numbers, location, duration, along with SMS, email, and who knows what else on everybody in order to have that data "just in case" a terrorist attack happens, so they can (possibly) track down the perpetrators. Now we have police collecting license plate data, along with GPS coordinates, video and still cameras mounted all over cities that can easily allow for facial recognition, combined with the tracking of your phone as mentioned above. It's not a stretch to assume that if the government (NSA/CIA/FBI) wants to know where you are at any given moment, they know. All this "just in case" one of the infinitesimally unlikely events such as a terrorist attack or kidnapping occurs. For the children. And because terrorism. The potential for abuse is huge and the cost/benefit is not even close to worth it—unless the stated purpose for collecting the data is not the real one.
- mabhatter 13y ago
  85% of what people do is habit. So when they have a large set like this "habit" starts excluding people very quickly as they are just driving to common places. So if you are tracking somebody you dont know fleeing, they stick out in the numbers quickly... If you are tracking somebody you do know you can guess where they might be. Kidnappers and bank robbers aren't that smart when looking for hiding places, and you probably already have them tracked going there. To a certain extent, all it really does is SUGGEST you belong or don't belong in any given location. There might be a murder in an alley, but data shows you go to a comic book store blocks away every week so you probably aren't involved. Generally the data is going to clear more people than it makes guilty. Of course I'm a huge fan of Numb3rs and Criminal Minds that show this kind of stuff being used properly by honest people... Emphasis on HONEST people.

HPLovecraft 13y ago

http://www.aclu.org/files/FilesPDFs/ALPR/rhode-island/alprpra_cityofprovidence_providenceri_1.pdf http://www.aclu.org/files/FilesPDFs/ALPR/rhode-island/alprpr... haha its ok there are no records of anything anyway, im sure this is the same in other cities/towns

res0nat0r 13y ago

It is uncomfortable, but you shouldn't ever have had an expectation of privacy when driving around in public with a licensed, regulated and marked vehicle. Just because it can be done without much manual effort today vs. 50 years ago having people sit around town logging every car they see drive by doesn't mean really the privacy expectation has changed. Just because it is "scary" doesn't mean it is "illegal".

3825 13y ago
I do not mind people collecting data about me. I do think that we need to have a restriction that if you collect data about me, you have to share it with me. All of it. In a accessible manner, at least as accessible as you do in your reports. Every day that you fail/delay to provide me those reports, you will pay me $100k in damages.
- adestefan 13y ago
  For what damages?
  - 3825 13y ago
    Punitive damages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punitive_damages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punitive_damages
    - ihsw 13y ago
      Punitive damages never stand on their own, they're always accompanied with compensatory damages. Good luck proving privacy violations directly result in loss, injury, or harm suffered -- information sharing agreements between law enforcement agencies and those interested in this information precludes any claims of negligence or recklessness.
ianterrell 13y ago
There is a significant difference between the expectation of privacy as a platonic ideal and the real life expectation of privacy. For the former, you're of course right: not much has changed! The local police could have posted someone on every street corner to record every license plate that passed -- probably multiple people to account for traffic! That's no different than cameras, in theory. You have no less privacy with cameras! But in practice, the police didn't do that (to that scale). So, given that my expectations of privacy are not about logical possibilities, but rather about actual realities, they certainly have changed.

Shivetya 13y ago

I see these cars all over where I live. It really is no different than the meta data that the NSA is collecting and most likely we will see defense of the gathering using similar rebuttals, namely YOU have a right, the license plate/car/phone/database does not. Apparently they want to use indirect collection or collection by private groups as somehow not falling under the 4th because of how it was assembled. I guess they could take all of a grocery stores purchase records and do the same, after all they aren't look at you directly under the guise of fixing health issues. Eventually data, wherever it may exist, will have to land at the Supremes to declare how abstract it has to be before it is not subject to the Constitution. Based on past cases it may not bode well for us.

rayiner 13y ago
> It really is no different than the meta data that the NSA is collecting and most likely we will see defense of the gathering using similar rebuttals, namely YOU have a right, the license plate/car/phone/database does not. You're mis-characterizing the rebuttal in both cases. 1) With metadata the rebuttal is that the Constitution refers to the "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects..." There is a legitimate argument that AT&T's records about when you used their network is not your papers or effects. You didn't create the record, AT&T did. You don't usually even have access to the information, AT&T does. It's not something silly like "the phone doesn't have a 4th amendment right." 2) The rebuttal for gathering information from cameras is that the 4th amendment has never extended to what the government can observe about you in a public place. The 4th amendment doesn't mean "I have a right to have the government not track or monitor me without a warrant." It says exactly what it means: the police can't search your person or your house, your papers or effects, without a search warrant supported by probable cause. The farther you get from that plain language, the more tenuous your argument becomes. Vis-a-vis the Supremes, at least Sotomayor has questioned whether it might be necessary to rethink at least the third party doctrine, which is the basis for (1): http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/the_data_question_should_the_third-party_records_doctrine_be_revisited http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/the_data_question.... I don't think anyone any time soon would think about revisiting the rule for plainly visible activity in public spaces, which is the basis of (2).

president 13y ago

NPR sure is getting a lot of material from Reddit these days

evan_ 13y ago
You don't think the ACLU might have sent out a press release?

imgabe 13y ago

So I assume they're also using them to exonerate people who otherwise don't have an alibi but could be falsely accused, right? Right??

ihsw 13y ago
Absolutely not, this metadata is useful as leverage for getting plea bargains out of people. Exonerating someone removes leverage.
- rayiner 13y ago
  Withholding potentially-exonerating evidence from the defense in a criminal prosecution is a big no-no. Of course it happens on a regular basis, but if you've got the money to fight it nicely sets up the basis for a reversal of a conviction on appeal. See: http://www.totalcriminaldefense.com/news/articles/criminal-evidence/exculpatory-evidence-punishment http://www.totalcriminaldefense.com/news/articles/criminal-e.... This is not a search or privacy problem per se. Most situations where exculpating evidence is withheld aren't so clear-cut as photographic evidence of the supposed perpetrator's car in a different place. It's usually something more like a statement by a witness whose exculpatory potential is ambiguous enough that a prosecutor can rationalize it as irrelevant. Indeed, I think technology ameliorates this problem. It's hard for prosecutors to withhold DNA evidence, for example, because juries know its widely used and take it so seriously. If use of photographic evidence in prosecutions becomes common, I think it will be difficult for prosecutors to withhold relevant information from the defense without compromising their ability to get convictions from juries.
corresation 13y ago
Your car being somewhere at a particular time is nothing more than an investigative hint. It proves neither guilt nor innocence.
- imgabe 13y ago
  You are presumed innocent. That doesn't have to be proven. If your car is somewhere else, that could create a reasonable doubt.

swamp40 13y ago

Drudge headline just linked to a similar article: http://news.yahoo.com/driving-somewhere-theres-govt-record-140052644.html http://news.yahoo.com/driving-somewhere-theres-govt-record-1... It says the police cars can tag the location of 7K plates during a normal shift without burdening the officers at all. Doesn't sound like too much, but multiply that by about 10,000 (Chicagoland) and two shifts and it adds up fast. Also here in Chicago, they have an "Open Road Tolling" system that grabs your plate # on the fly at 80 mph. Then they mail you a ticket if the plate # doesn't match with a valid iPass (wireless box in most everyone's car). The thing is, there's no way to tell which car in a group has the iPass - so they must have to run every plate thru their database and match it up with valid iPasses. That means the Illinois tollway is grabbing and analyzing say 20 million plates and timestamps every day. If all that data is stored indefinitely - wow.

joering2 13y ago
I submitted it to HN minutes ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6057968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6057968 It seems to be a new scandal brewing. Surprises me how long it took. I recall in 2009 in Clearwater Florida when a Sherrif car had a gun-type looking devices pointing all 4 sides of the car. I asked what it was and he told me when he drives this thing picks up license plates and raises two alerts (if any): 1) if the tag is expired, OR if the owner of the car has a DL suspended/etc. If #2 then the picture of driver pops up and he visually checks if gender/look matches... if not, then he ignores the alert.
- swamp40 13y ago
  Good stuff. It's going to take a lot of outrage to get them to give up tools like that. Those are money makers.
  - warmwaffles 13y ago
    Live in fear. Obey!
- DanBC 13y ago

coldcode 13y ago

I wonder if one can use paint or some kind of odd wavelength light bulb to make recording the license # too blurred to use.

imgabe 13y ago
If that could be done, someone would be doing it to foil speed cameras and red light cameras already.
- berberous 13y ago
  Well, they are. Google "red light spray" or something similar. I think it may be illegal in some jurisdictions.
bionsuba 13y ago
Your thinking to hard, just slap some mud on your plate and say you drive on a dirt road.
- anywhichway 13y ago
  Committing an illegal and regularly enforced crime of driving with an obstructed license plate seems like a poor plan to try and defend your right to an abstract sense of privacy.
  - marvin 13y ago
    As I've said time and tim again: Hacks and technological tricks are not the right way to fight civil rights violations. It has to happen through the legal system. If you're just hacking your way around bad laws, you are setting yourself up to get in trouble somewhere down the road.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

riskable 13y ago

I don't think the police will have any empathy towards regular every day people (in regards to license plate databases) until private individuals start tracking the whereabouts of police 24/7 (and potentially posting the data online for everyone to see). Not only that but think about it this way: It doesn't cost that much for organized crime to put up cameras all over town for their own benefit. BTW: Heaven forbid if one of these license plate databases ever gets leaked! It's not like the government will re-issue everyone new plates for free.

speedyrev 13y ago

My nephew is a detective who just worked an Abduction/Murder case. The suspect was located (and later convicted) largely in part because of the license plate scanners. One thing you cannot argue, they are incredibly effective. My problem is the infinite retention of that data and the fact that many agencies use a private third party for the system. I think eliminating the scanners is a bad thing, but I would like to see some basic rules that would have to be followed.

ck2 13y ago
Yeah well knowing where EVERYONE is, ALL the time probably helps them know a lot of things, who is dating who, where you shop, where you work, etc. You okay with all that to "save the children" ? If they were allowed to use xray scanners to scan every car on every street in a city to see who and what is inside - you okay with that escalation? Because they are doing it "near" borders (backscatter on vehicles) and who knows where they will take it next.
- knowaveragejoe 13y ago
  It's like you didn't read what he said: My problem is the infinite retention of that data and the fact that many agencies use a private third party for the system. I think eliminating the scanners is a bad thing, but I would like to see some basic rules that would have to be followed.
  - comrade_ogilvy 13y ago
    As I see it, we need more explicit rules about privacy that encompass both gov't and private parties. Whether we get rid of FISA or the NSA will ultimately not matter (fat chance, of course) -- if it seems important enough, gov't will always be able to entice the private owners of data to "voluntarily" share with law enforcement. This car location database is just the tip of the iceberg, and it happens to be absolutely unambiguously legal for gov't and corporations to do whatever they please with this data. I am not actually paranoid. I am quite confident that the norm is for the police to have reasonable procedures in place -- the last thing a police department wants is for a police officer or former police officer to be accused of using police resources in a creepy manner to stalk/spy on an ex-spouse or similar. They want an explicit paper trial of Officer X asked about car owned by person Y for reason Z. Even if the norm is pretty good, the public should have clear expectation that can be understood.

nodata 13y ago

See you next Tuesday.