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Police Documents on License Plate Scanners Reveal Mass Tracking

279 points by stfu 13y ago

Wingman4l7 13y ago
Ars Technica did a feature piece on ALPR systems about a year ago which was also discussed on here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4387657 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4387657
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stfu 13y ago
I always wondered on the legality of private license plate scanning. With just a bunch of people cooperating one could pretty much map out all the troop movement throughout the city.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  Well the argument usually heard for the government doing it is "they've always been able to watch where you go in public". I suspect that somehow would not fly if it were reversed. It's an interesting idea. Thanks to smartphones, the people have more cameras than their governments. The governments however have more targets.
  - mikeyouse 13y ago
    An interesting app idea would be to have a distributed palantir-like system that specifically targets Ambulances, Police Cars, City vehicles, etc. OCR a license plate or other identifying tag on it, geo-tag, etc. Given a decent proportion of people using the app, you could probably map out the location of most of the active government vehicles in a city. With the time-series data, you could add some analytics and probably predict where the cars were going to be at specific times and days. You could even gameify it, so catching a police car at a donut shop would win the user a little badge.
    - jlgreco 13y ago
      You might be able to publish data on a 24hr lag, and make money by selling live feeds (or live analysis on live feeds, if the raw data is difficult to handle) to local news stations, independent reporters/camera men/etc. Monetizing it might harm adoption by volunteers though, so that is important to consider. Gamification is a great idea though.
    - bigiain 13y ago
      I wonder how close the russian dash-cam eco-system is to making that come true? Inexpensive but ubiquitous and "always on" cameras, with a little bit of OpenCV smarts built in (or perhaps with a RaspberryPi-grade computer hanging off them) could probably manage a pretty good implementation of this. If you could somehow roll this out as part of some innocuous looking project (off the cuff idea - approach a taxicab company, tell them you want to put camera's on each cab - so you feed each driver back information about nearby traffic density/speeds and approximate counts of people standing on sidewalks correlated with the number of other cabs around. Slip in ALPR without mentioning it, and a whitelist of marked and unmarked police car licence plates. Sell access to the real-time police location data to high-speed courier services, boy-racers, and drug cartels.)
  - beedogs 13y ago
    Think of how quickly you'd end up in handcuffs if you created a website which tracked every NYPD vehicle in real-time. The laws apply to us, not them.
    - yen223 13y ago
      Some police scanners are open to the public, and I don't think anyone ended up in handcuffs for listening in.
      - Wingman4l7 13y ago
        That doesn't mean that there isn't a law on the books against it. No one would bother invoking it in a criminal prosecution unless they were really gunning for someone and they couldn't find anything else that would stick.
      - jlgreco 13y ago
        The public listening to police scanners is not new and frightening to those graced with the gift of a monopoly on violence. The unknown has a profound ability to frighten, and fear has a profound ability to inspire violence.
      - nly 13y ago
        I was under the impression police were moving to digital, encrypted broadcasts.
  - coldtea 13y ago
    >Well the argument usually heard for the government doing it is "they've always been able to watch where you go in public". The issue is that of technology being an enabler. Always being able to watch you (with some cost), and being able to watch everybody effortelsy and automatically, with instant retrieval is a game changer.
- devonbarrett 13y ago
  In somewhere like Russia where everyone owns a dashcam it could be very possible.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - ottoparts 13y ago
    The Russians are pretty clever, they probably have backdoors in the dashcams and have crowdsourced their surveillance at great savings.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- slyall 13y ago
  A problem seems to be that the state of open source plate recognition software isn't that great. There are a few projects around but none seem to be ready for production.
- _delirium 13y ago
  At least one person's been arrested for keeping track of and publicly reporting police movements. Guy in Brooklyn who aggregated information on police movements around Pittsburgh during a protest, and Tweeted them: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/04/elliot-madison-accused-of_n_309042.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/04/elliot-madison-accu... The charge seems to have been based on not the reporting itself, but a theory that he was conspiring with people committing crimes, like a lookout at a robbery. I wonder if it'd be on more solid ground if it were a website that just always updated with police movements, rather than only in connection with a specific event.
lvs 13y ago
It is fascinating to observe the proliferation of technological misadventures federally funded in the past decade+ since 9/11. There needs to be a real legal movement to place limits on these activities. The argument is already lost in many other countries (e.g. U.K.), but we have a fundamental legal doctrine, enshrined in the 4th Amendment, that should apply. That requires real congressional and judicial action to restrain these law enforcement and anti-terrorism activities. Unfortunately, since nobody can yet claim tangible harm from having their privacy invaded, the judicial route seems murky.
- anigbrowl 13y ago
  we have a fundamental legal doctrine, enshrined in the 4th Amendment You need a constitutional amendment specifically for privacy and data retention. The 4th amendment does not do what you think it does. Meanwhile, the argument is not lost in countries like the UK, but very much alive in terms of people invoking EU law via the charter of fundamental rights.
ics 13y ago
A few days ago I posted a document regarding NYC's relatively new booting program for cars which have accumulated too many tickets/fines. In it they point out that the system is backed by a team of vans which scour the city doing license plate recognition to find these cars. Obviously the consequence is that everyone's license plate gets photographed, but it's up to the NYPD what to do with that information. The ACLU doc has some stats, but if you want to see the document I'm talking about I've linked it below. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6049276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6049276 Though Bloomberg and the NYPD hardly have any trouble pushing these things through for the last decade, I imagine one impetus behind ramping these programs way up would be incidents such as the would be Times Square van bomber from a couple years ago. In that case however, the perpetrator had actually stolen license plates from another vehicle (which they learned after finding a VIN that wasn't scratched and the registration didn't match). http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Times_Square_car_bombing_attempt http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Times_Square_car_bombing...
tonywebster 13y ago
The other problem is that state laws aren't keeping up with law enforcement technology. FOIA-similar laws in Minnesota meant that every ALPR-captured license plate was public information, which I requested to prove a point. I got back 2.1 million license plates (+ timestamp and coordinates) on a USB stick. Without strong policies and laws, this data is ripe for abuse -- domestic abuse victims and stalking where someone eats, visits, and sleeps, or tracking regular routes of hazmat or cash trucks, etc. https://tonywebster.com/2012/12/minneapolis-police-license-plate-data/ https://tonywebster.com/2012/12/minneapolis-police-license-p...
- nullc 13y ago
  Yea, great so you complain about that and then they solve just that narrow case. Doing so reduces some fringe harassment risks, but actually makes the power inversion worse since then only a privileged minority has access to the data. In practice the stalking/harassment stuff isn't actually happening with any great frequency: The mentally ill people who would do this are generally not competent enough to go on a big data data mining exercise. Complaining about that just creates an excuse to remove access to the public to data they're paying to create while leaving access to it to authorities and commercial interests who might use it against them.
  - tonywebster 13y ago
    Despite being in public -- and on public streets -- I think anytime the government is tracking where I go, it should require probable cause and a judge's signature. I believe ALPR circumvents the judicial system. I use my cellphone in public, but it's obvious that the government shouldn't be able to automatically log when and where I placed a call. I use my credit card in public, but the government shouldn't be able to automatically log every penny going into or out of my bank account. I use my car in public too, and I don't think the government should track everywhere I drive. I don't think there's an acceptable amount of harassment that's tolerable. If the technology enables it to happen, it's worth challenging. There are three issues for me with ALPR: (1) limiting the scope of persons who have access to the data, (2) ensuring that law enforcement agencies have strong (ab)use and access policies with checks and balances, and (3) ensuring that logs of where innocent individuals drive is never stored. I think it's easier to progressively win a fight rather than going guns-blazing to a large issue that people don't understand. By first building the notion that 'yeah, this technology is actually somewhat scary' it's much easier to win a fight arguing that the police shouldn't be storing and accessing the data either. In my situation in Minnesota, the public finding out about the police releasing 2.1 million license plate tracking points to the public was enough pressure to get the state to make the data non-public and to have police departments voluntarily create more restrictive policies. It was also enough to get a fabulous bill passed through the state House that prohibited police from storing any data on non-hit (non-wanted) vehicles. Unfortunately, it didn't get to the Senate floor in time before the session ended, but I was shocked at the number of legislators who spoke out against ALPR data storage. They weren't necessarily anti-ALPR (and honestly I'm not vehemently anti-ALPR either), but the prospect of storage is wildly unpopular among non-police communities. There's another issue all together, which is privately owned and operated ALPR systems -- typically used by vehicle repossessors but it was also uncovered this week that a defense contractor had also been on the receiving end of Minneapolis Police ALPR data, which is somewhat unnerving.
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D9u 13y ago
Interestingly, my state Department of Transportation is the agency responsible for operating the ALPR systems, and according to my county Police Chief his department doesn't use ALPR technology, so I wonder how readily the various enforcemnt agencies have access to the the acquired database(s)?
marshray 13y ago
http://www.aclu.org/files/FilesPDFs/ALPR/kansas/alprpra_lenexapd_lenexaka.pdf http://www.aclu.org/files/FilesPDFs/ALPR/kansas/alprpra_lene... Page 364 mentions "PRISM".
- lvs 13y ago
  Good find. Control-F suggests there are three mentions of PRISM. On page 349 (pdf pagination): "LPR technology uses specialized cameras and computers to quickly capture large numbers of license plate photographs and compares them to the hot list (NCIC, ALERT/REJIS, KDOR, PRISM)."
- scoot 13y ago
  Without context, the PRISM references somewhat are abstract, although it's a remarkable coincidence if not reference to the same program. What was striking for me was the 10X markups for equipment provided under contract to the US government. Where is the governance in government?!
- flyt 13y ago
  PRISM is an acronym used all over the place, and may not be the NSA-specific program. http://waxy.org/2013/06/these_arent_the_prisms_youre_looking_for/ http://waxy.org/2013/06/these_arent_the_prisms_youre_looking...
  - marshray 13y ago
    Yeah, seems like it's more likely to be referring to the US Dept of Transportation Performance and Registration Information Systems Management "PRISM" program. https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/safety-security/prism/prism.aspx https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/safety-security/prism/prism.aspx
qz10 13y ago
It should be no surprise that this is happening. Give anyone unlimited surveillance power and it will always be abused. I live in a western EU country and have a friend in law enforcement. Last year, he brought me to see our city's traffic surveillance 'control room'. Almost every street corner and traffic junction here has a pole-mounted police camera transmitting video data back to servers accessible from this room and elsewhere. To summarize the demo: He was able to type a vehicle registration plate into this system, and instantly see every journey the car has taken plotted on a map, as well as the thousands of raw video clips of this vehicle that were used to generate the map.
achillean 13y ago
In case anybody's interested, these license plate scanners can be publicly found on the Internet: http://www.shodanhq.com/search?q=atz+executive http://www.shodanhq.com/search?q=atz+executive And this is how the web interface for such a system looks like: http://money.cnn.com/gallery/technology/security/2013/05/01/shodan-most-dangerous-internet-searches/2.html http://money.cnn.com/gallery/technology/security/2013/05/01/...
- Wingman4l7 13y ago
  That SHODAN search link doesn't return any results...
  - achillean 13y ago
    Ah crap, the above search requires you to be logged-in and have the "Telnet" add-on for your account. Here's a quick alternative that also returns some results, though they all require login over HTTP: http://www.shodanhq.com/search?q=title%3A%22PIPS+Technology%22 http://www.shodanhq.com/search?q=title%3A%22PIPS+Technology%...
coldcode 13y ago
I feel bad that I am not tracking anyone. It's so popular you see it every day now.
- otisfunkmeyer 13y ago
  FOMO for 2013!
anigbrowl 13y ago
From user qz10 (who seems to have been hellbanned absed on IP): It should be no surprise that this is happening. Give anyone unlimited surveillance power and it will always be abused. I live in a western EU country and have a friend in law enforcement. Last year, he brought me to see our city's traffic surveillance 'control room'. Almost every street corner and traffic junction here has a pole-mounted police camera transmitting video data back to servers accessible from this room and elsewhere. To summarize the demo: He was able to type a vehicle registration plate into this system, and instantly see every journey the car has taken plotted on a map, as well as the thousands of raw video clips of this vehicle that were used to generate the map.
- rayiner 13y ago
  I think as a practical matter, expecting police to stay stuck in the 20th century is futile. The public will never strongly oppose that kind of technology when they themselves are wearing google glass everywhere. The fear of this sort of thing depends on being suspicious and wary of the police, and people aren't. My wife thinks I'm crazy when I rant about cops, but as a practical matter she has no reason to be skeptical (as a young white woman). As long as most voters are either white, old, or female (groups cops tend to avoid harassing) you won't see the necessary skepticism to oppose this sort of thing. Heck, over the last 20 years people happily handed the police enormous amounts of power via drug laws. The white suburban moms in my school in the 1990's shrieking about "just say no!" had no reason to be skeptical.
  - bigiain 13y ago
    This is why I'm seriously of the opinion that surveillance data should be regulated somewhat along the lines of HIPPA or PCI rules. Storing a weeks worth of traffic camera data and allowing to be misused should result in a demotion, a small fine, and a personal civil liability towards people who've been affected by the misuse. Signing off on storing years worth of ALPR/surveillance-camera records and having _that_ misused or exposed should be a career ending and company destroying event. Collect that sort of data if you think it's of sufficient "value" - but make sure everyone is aware of the risks and the magnitude of the penalties of being "careless" with other people's personally identifying data.
cortesoft 13y ago
I have a personal experience with the harm that ubiquitous recording of location data can bring, even when you don't do anything wrong. When I was in college, I was called to the police station and accused of breaking a glass door in the dorms. I knew NOTHING about this. I told the police I knew nothing about the event, but they continued to press me. They asked me details about where I was that night (many weeks prior), and I had difficulty remembering where I had been. To make matters worse, I originally thought the day in question was another day, so I ended up giving information about my location that was incorrect. If the police decided they didn't like me, they could have easily pressed charges for lying, even though I thought I was telling the truth. Luckily, they eventually believed me and I was let go. How is this related to license plate readers? Well, the only reason they suspected I was the person who broke the door was because my ID card had been swiped at around the same time the door was broken. Simply because I was present near the time and location of a crime committed weeks prior, I was accused of a crime and nearly accidentally perjured myself. (Don't worry; I know now to never talk to the police!) If we start tracking everyone's movements, this sort of thing will happen more and more often. You will EVENTUALLY have driven by a place where a crime was committed. You may be called to account for your being nearby, even weeks or months later. When the police ask you why you were there, will you remember? Will your answers satisfy them? Will your general unease at being questioned make you appear suspicious? Will you fumble, and say things that contradict yourself, making you appear even more suspicious?
- Daishiman 13y ago
  At the point when they started asking about stuff you didn't know about I would have invoked my right to a lawyer.
  - cortesoft 13y ago
    Yes... as I said, I know much better now. Of course, invoking my right to a lawyer may have prolonged my experience. Whether the increased risk of being in trouble by talking was greater than the increased time to resolve the incident if I requested a lawyer would have been a tough call to make.
whyenot 13y ago
CALIFORNIA CONSTITUTION ARTICLE 1 DECLARATION OF RIGHTS SECTION 1. All people are by nature free and independent and have inalienable rights. Among these are enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining safety, happiness, and *privacy.* I've often wondered if the right to privacy in California's constitution actually means anything. I guess it doesn't.
- diminoten 13y ago
  What's private about your public movements?
  - eksith 13y ago
    Anonymity != Privacy. If you're in a crowd, by definition, you're not expected to have privacy, however you are allowed anonymity by virtue of being in a crowd. If you're in a cafe, you're naturally not afforded privacy, however you are still anonymous unless spotted by someone who recognizes you. If you lean over to tell something to this person, that conversation (despite being in public) is still private. Your public information still afforded you anonymity in a sea of data however since we now know it can conveniently be assembled into a dossier, it's being used to destroy your anonymity which, believe it or not, used to be taken for granted.
    - diminoten 13y ago
      > however you are allowed anonymity by virtue of being in a crowd. That's not true at all. Anonymity is the state of personally identifiable information being unknown. That's exactly what your license plate is, and it's displayed on the back (and front sometimes) of your car. You have never been anonymous while driving.
      - eksith 13y ago
        Completely false. Your license plate is the equivalent of a online pseudonym linked to a database. Common users aren't able to browse this database, however if someone's keeping a tally of the appearances of said license plate (the equivalent of a search engine), then they can infer a whole lot of information that goes beyond the scope of the purpose of license plates. That is the real problem here. You are anonymous in the crowd or should be as far as other ordinary people are concerned and that's clearly not what's happening. Incidentally, you should stop using the same username for everything.
medde 13y ago
thanks to those "red light" cameras...
squeed 13y ago
One of the scariest bits is that most of the operators of these cameras pool information. The result is an ad-hoc nationwide surveillance system operated by a private party. If you operate certain brands of cameras, you get access to the database: http://nvls-lpr.com/nvls/ http://nvls-lpr.com/nvls/
diminoten 13y ago
Can someone explain why your public movements should now be private? And when someone brings up the "pseudo-anonymity of the crowd", can you accompany that with a legal precedent for such a claim? Who actually came up with the "I'm acting privately in public" thing in the first place?
- knowaveragejoe 13y ago
  Yeah. If you don't like the prospect that some random person can know the intimate details of your <travel|communications|financial transactions>, you might as well just abstain from the services and institutions that make anything remotely like a modern standard of living possible. It's a fair tradeoff.
  - diminoten 13y ago
    If you don't like above said prospect, then maybe you should do those things in private instead of in public.
    - knowaveragejoe 13y ago
      Ah, why didn't I think of that? We could all just be traveling entirely in private and this would be a non-issue.
      - diminoten 13y ago
        I was speaking more to the "communications/personal finance" bits you mentioned. You can't be wholly private. Merely by existing, people will be able to learn some things about you. Nothing you can do about it.
        knowaveragejoe 13y ago
        Sure, and by natural extension there are some people, whom you will never meet (or even be aware of their doing so), who will get to become intimately familiar with the aforementioned data, journalized and cross-referenced in handy tables and graphs. Indefinitely. Nothing you can do about it! Might as well just accept it. Really, all of this hubbub around privacy concerns is totally unfounded. It's the way things have to be.
onedev 13y ago
It seems technology is always a double edged sword.
deutsch 13y ago
I'm not a cryptography guy, but do you think it would be possible to come up with a technical solution which has these properties: - License plate numbers are immediately encrypted at scan - A judges possess some sort of encryption key - Upon obtaining some sort of warrant, judge grants police specific encryption key - Key can only be used to decrypt certain kinds of data - say, only decrypts license plates in a certain geographical area or around a certain time
AlexanderHektor 13y ago
http://intertraff.com/ http://intertraff.com/ oh hey, at least they have olark :)
- AlexanderHektor 13y ago
  ah, it's actually a competitor..
coldtea 13y ago
A little off topic, but it will get to the point: Remember some of the biggest issues? Exploitation (wars, colonialism, imperialism, no labour laws), racism (slavery, Jim Crow laws), overeaching government (McCarthyism, Hoover, bureaucracy, protestors shot at, , surveillance, etc), rampant private interests (banana republics, RIAA, patent law, militias shooting strikers, corporate espionage, buying legislation), religious nuttery, etc? Those things are not solved by technology. If you're lucky, you might find some technology that can nullify one of those issues. But in general technology is an enabler. It can help those perpatrating those things to do them 1000 times more efficiently and far scarier. Science too, is neutral. Nazi germany was choke full or good scientists -- and they are behind all messed up inventions anyway too, not just the good ones. This, among other things, is such as case, of technology being an enabler for bad things. To really effect change you must change how people think about things -- and then, the laws.
gregors 13y ago
Some comments about being a software engineer on an ALPR system. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5962872 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5962872
cfesta9 13y ago
How do you feel about Onstar or Progressive insurance snapshot? Progressive Snapshot: We look at your driving habits to see if you could be saving more. You can track your projected savings online. "We look, you track"

279 points by stfu 13y ago

Ars Technica did a feature piece on ALPR systems about a year ago which was also discussed on here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4387657 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4387657

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stfu 13y ago

I always wondered on the legality of private license plate scanning. With just a bunch of people cooperating one could pretty much map out all the troop movement throughout the city.

jlgreco 13y ago
Well the argument usually heard for the government doing it is "they've always been able to watch where you go in public". I suspect that somehow would not fly if it were reversed. It's an interesting idea. Thanks to smartphones, the people have more cameras than their governments. The governments however have more targets.
- mikeyouse 13y ago
  An interesting app idea would be to have a distributed palantir-like system that specifically targets Ambulances, Police Cars, City vehicles, etc. OCR a license plate or other identifying tag on it, geo-tag, etc. Given a decent proportion of people using the app, you could probably map out the location of most of the active government vehicles in a city. With the time-series data, you could add some analytics and probably predict where the cars were going to be at specific times and days. You could even gameify it, so catching a police car at a donut shop would win the user a little badge.
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    You might be able to publish data on a 24hr lag, and make money by selling live feeds (or live analysis on live feeds, if the raw data is difficult to handle) to local news stations, independent reporters/camera men/etc. Monetizing it might harm adoption by volunteers though, so that is important to consider. Gamification is a great idea though.
  - bigiain 13y ago
    I wonder how close the russian dash-cam eco-system is to making that come true? Inexpensive but ubiquitous and "always on" cameras, with a little bit of OpenCV smarts built in (or perhaps with a RaspberryPi-grade computer hanging off them) could probably manage a pretty good implementation of this. If you could somehow roll this out as part of some innocuous looking project (off the cuff idea - approach a taxicab company, tell them you want to put camera's on each cab - so you feed each driver back information about nearby traffic density/speeds and approximate counts of people standing on sidewalks correlated with the number of other cabs around. Slip in ALPR without mentioning it, and a whitelist of marked and unmarked police car licence plates. Sell access to the real-time police location data to high-speed courier services, boy-racers, and drug cartels.)
- beedogs 13y ago
  Think of how quickly you'd end up in handcuffs if you created a website which tracked every NYPD vehicle in real-time. The laws apply to us, not them.
  - yen223 13y ago
    Some police scanners are open to the public, and I don't think anyone ended up in handcuffs for listening in.
    - Wingman4l7 13y ago
      That doesn't mean that there isn't a law on the books against it. No one would bother invoking it in a criminal prosecution unless they were really gunning for someone and they couldn't find anything else that would stick.
    - jlgreco 13y ago
      The public listening to police scanners is not new and frightening to those graced with the gift of a monopoly on violence. The unknown has a profound ability to frighten, and fear has a profound ability to inspire violence.
    - nly 13y ago
      I was under the impression police were moving to digital, encrypted broadcasts.
- coldtea 13y ago
  >Well the argument usually heard for the government doing it is "they've always been able to watch where you go in public". The issue is that of technology being an enabler. Always being able to watch you (with some cost), and being able to watch everybody effortelsy and automatically, with instant retrieval is a game changer.
devonbarrett 13y ago
In somewhere like Russia where everyone owns a dashcam it could be very possible.
- deleted 13y ago
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- ottoparts 13y ago
  The Russians are pretty clever, they probably have backdoors in the dashcams and have crowdsourced their surveillance at great savings.
deleted 13y ago
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slyall 13y ago
A problem seems to be that the state of open source plate recognition software isn't that great. There are a few projects around but none seem to be ready for production.
_delirium 13y ago
At least one person's been arrested for keeping track of and publicly reporting police movements. Guy in Brooklyn who aggregated information on police movements around Pittsburgh during a protest, and Tweeted them: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/04/elliot-madison-accused-of_n_309042.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/04/elliot-madison-accu... The charge seems to have been based on not the reporting itself, but a theory that he was conspiring with people committing crimes, like a lookout at a robbery. I wonder if it'd be on more solid ground if it were a website that just always updated with police movements, rather than only in connection with a specific event.

lvs 13y ago

It is fascinating to observe the proliferation of technological misadventures federally funded in the past decade+ since 9/11. There needs to be a real legal movement to place limits on these activities. The argument is already lost in many other countries (e.g. U.K.), but we have a fundamental legal doctrine, enshrined in the 4th Amendment, that should apply. That requires real congressional and judicial action to restrain these law enforcement and anti-terrorism activities. Unfortunately, since nobody can yet claim tangible harm from having their privacy invaded, the judicial route seems murky.

anigbrowl 13y ago
we have a fundamental legal doctrine, enshrined in the 4th Amendment You need a constitutional amendment specifically for privacy and data retention. The 4th amendment does not do what you think it does. Meanwhile, the argument is not lost in countries like the UK, but very much alive in terms of people invoking EU law via the charter of fundamental rights.

ics 13y ago

A few days ago I posted a document regarding NYC's relatively new booting program for cars which have accumulated too many tickets/fines. In it they point out that the system is backed by a team of vans which scour the city doing license plate recognition to find these cars. Obviously the consequence is that everyone's license plate gets photographed, but it's up to the NYPD what to do with that information. The ACLU doc has some stats, but if you want to see the document I'm talking about I've linked it below. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6049276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6049276 Though Bloomberg and the NYPD hardly have any trouble pushing these things through for the last decade, I imagine one impetus behind ramping these programs way up would be incidents such as the would be Times Square van bomber from a couple years ago. In that case however, the perpetrator had actually stolen license plates from another vehicle (which they learned after finding a VIN that wasn't scratched and the registration didn't match). http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Times_Square_car_bombing_attempt http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Times_Square_car_bombing...

tonywebster 13y ago

The other problem is that state laws aren't keeping up with law enforcement technology. FOIA-similar laws in Minnesota meant that every ALPR-captured license plate was public information, which I requested to prove a point. I got back 2.1 million license plates (+ timestamp and coordinates) on a USB stick. Without strong policies and laws, this data is ripe for abuse -- domestic abuse victims and stalking where someone eats, visits, and sleeps, or tracking regular routes of hazmat or cash trucks, etc. https://tonywebster.com/2012/12/minneapolis-police-license-plate-data/ https://tonywebster.com/2012/12/minneapolis-police-license-p...

nullc 13y ago
Yea, great so you complain about that and then they solve just that narrow case. Doing so reduces some fringe harassment risks, but actually makes the power inversion worse since then only a privileged minority has access to the data. In practice the stalking/harassment stuff isn't actually happening with any great frequency: The mentally ill people who would do this are generally not competent enough to go on a big data data mining exercise. Complaining about that just creates an excuse to remove access to the public to data they're paying to create while leaving access to it to authorities and commercial interests who might use it against them.
- tonywebster 13y ago
  Despite being in public -- and on public streets -- I think anytime the government is tracking where I go, it should require probable cause and a judge's signature. I believe ALPR circumvents the judicial system. I use my cellphone in public, but it's obvious that the government shouldn't be able to automatically log when and where I placed a call. I use my credit card in public, but the government shouldn't be able to automatically log every penny going into or out of my bank account. I use my car in public too, and I don't think the government should track everywhere I drive. I don't think there's an acceptable amount of harassment that's tolerable. If the technology enables it to happen, it's worth challenging. There are three issues for me with ALPR: (1) limiting the scope of persons who have access to the data, (2) ensuring that law enforcement agencies have strong (ab)use and access policies with checks and balances, and (3) ensuring that logs of where innocent individuals drive is never stored. I think it's easier to progressively win a fight rather than going guns-blazing to a large issue that people don't understand. By first building the notion that 'yeah, this technology is actually somewhat scary' it's much easier to win a fight arguing that the police shouldn't be storing and accessing the data either. In my situation in Minnesota, the public finding out about the police releasing 2.1 million license plate tracking points to the public was enough pressure to get the state to make the data non-public and to have police departments voluntarily create more restrictive policies. It was also enough to get a fabulous bill passed through the state House that prohibited police from storing any data on non-hit (non-wanted) vehicles. Unfortunately, it didn't get to the Senate floor in time before the session ended, but I was shocked at the number of legislators who spoke out against ALPR data storage. They weren't necessarily anti-ALPR (and honestly I'm not vehemently anti-ALPR either), but the prospect of storage is wildly unpopular among non-police communities. There's another issue all together, which is privately owned and operated ALPR systems -- typically used by vehicle repossessors but it was also uncovered this week that a defense contractor had also been on the receiving end of Minneapolis Police ALPR data, which is somewhat unnerving.

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D9u 13y ago

Interestingly, my state Department of Transportation is the agency responsible for operating the ALPR systems, and according to my county Police Chief his department doesn't use ALPR technology, so I wonder how readily the various enforcemnt agencies have access to the the acquired database(s)?

marshray 13y ago

http://www.aclu.org/files/FilesPDFs/ALPR/kansas/alprpra_lenexapd_lenexaka.pdf http://www.aclu.org/files/FilesPDFs/ALPR/kansas/alprpra_lene... Page 364 mentions "PRISM".

lvs 13y ago
Good find. Control-F suggests there are three mentions of PRISM. On page 349 (pdf pagination): "LPR technology uses specialized cameras and computers to quickly capture large numbers of license plate photographs and compares them to the hot list (NCIC, ALERT/REJIS, KDOR, PRISM)."
scoot 13y ago
Without context, the PRISM references somewhat are abstract, although it's a remarkable coincidence if not reference to the same program. What was striking for me was the 10X markups for equipment provided under contract to the US government. Where is the governance in government?!
flyt 13y ago
PRISM is an acronym used all over the place, and may not be the NSA-specific program. http://waxy.org/2013/06/these_arent_the_prisms_youre_looking_for/ http://waxy.org/2013/06/these_arent_the_prisms_youre_looking...
- marshray 13y ago
  Yeah, seems like it's more likely to be referring to the US Dept of Transportation Performance and Registration Information Systems Management "PRISM" program. https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/safety-security/prism/prism.aspx https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/safety-security/prism/prism.aspx

qz10 13y ago

It should be no surprise that this is happening. Give anyone unlimited surveillance power and it will always be abused. I live in a western EU country and have a friend in law enforcement. Last year, he brought me to see our city's traffic surveillance 'control room'. Almost every street corner and traffic junction here has a pole-mounted police camera transmitting video data back to servers accessible from this room and elsewhere. To summarize the demo: He was able to type a vehicle registration plate into this system, and instantly see every journey the car has taken plotted on a map, as well as the thousands of raw video clips of this vehicle that were used to generate the map.

achillean 13y ago

In case anybody's interested, these license plate scanners can be publicly found on the Internet: http://www.shodanhq.com/search?q=atz+executive http://www.shodanhq.com/search?q=atz+executive And this is how the web interface for such a system looks like: http://money.cnn.com/gallery/technology/security/2013/05/01/shodan-most-dangerous-internet-searches/2.html http://money.cnn.com/gallery/technology/security/2013/05/01/...

Wingman4l7 13y ago
That SHODAN search link doesn't return any results...
- achillean 13y ago
  Ah crap, the above search requires you to be logged-in and have the "Telnet" add-on for your account. Here's a quick alternative that also returns some results, though they all require login over HTTP: http://www.shodanhq.com/search?q=title%3A%22PIPS+Technology%22 http://www.shodanhq.com/search?q=title%3A%22PIPS+Technology%...

coldcode 13y ago

I feel bad that I am not tracking anyone. It's so popular you see it every day now.

otisfunkmeyer 13y ago
FOMO for 2013!

anigbrowl 13y ago

From user qz10 (who seems to have been hellbanned absed on IP): It should be no surprise that this is happening. Give anyone unlimited surveillance power and it will always be abused. I live in a western EU country and have a friend in law enforcement. Last year, he brought me to see our city's traffic surveillance 'control room'. Almost every street corner and traffic junction here has a pole-mounted police camera transmitting video data back to servers accessible from this room and elsewhere. To summarize the demo: He was able to type a vehicle registration plate into this system, and instantly see every journey the car has taken plotted on a map, as well as the thousands of raw video clips of this vehicle that were used to generate the map.

rayiner 13y ago
I think as a practical matter, expecting police to stay stuck in the 20th century is futile. The public will never strongly oppose that kind of technology when they themselves are wearing google glass everywhere. The fear of this sort of thing depends on being suspicious and wary of the police, and people aren't. My wife thinks I'm crazy when I rant about cops, but as a practical matter she has no reason to be skeptical (as a young white woman). As long as most voters are either white, old, or female (groups cops tend to avoid harassing) you won't see the necessary skepticism to oppose this sort of thing. Heck, over the last 20 years people happily handed the police enormous amounts of power via drug laws. The white suburban moms in my school in the 1990's shrieking about "just say no!" had no reason to be skeptical.
- bigiain 13y ago
  This is why I'm seriously of the opinion that surveillance data should be regulated somewhat along the lines of HIPPA or PCI rules. Storing a weeks worth of traffic camera data and allowing to be misused should result in a demotion, a small fine, and a personal civil liability towards people who've been affected by the misuse. Signing off on storing years worth of ALPR/surveillance-camera records and having _that_ misused or exposed should be a career ending and company destroying event. Collect that sort of data if you think it's of sufficient "value" - but make sure everyone is aware of the risks and the magnitude of the penalties of being "careless" with other people's personally identifying data.

cortesoft 13y ago

I have a personal experience with the harm that ubiquitous recording of location data can bring, even when you don't do anything wrong. When I was in college, I was called to the police station and accused of breaking a glass door in the dorms. I knew NOTHING about this. I told the police I knew nothing about the event, but they continued to press me. They asked me details about where I was that night (many weeks prior), and I had difficulty remembering where I had been. To make matters worse, I originally thought the day in question was another day, so I ended up giving information about my location that was incorrect. If the police decided they didn't like me, they could have easily pressed charges for lying, even though I thought I was telling the truth. Luckily, they eventually believed me and I was let go. How is this related to license plate readers? Well, the only reason they suspected I was the person who broke the door was because my ID card had been swiped at around the same time the door was broken. Simply because I was present near the time and location of a crime committed weeks prior, I was accused of a crime and nearly accidentally perjured myself. (Don't worry; I know now to never talk to the police!) If we start tracking everyone's movements, this sort of thing will happen more and more often. You will EVENTUALLY have driven by a place where a crime was committed. You may be called to account for your being nearby, even weeks or months later. When the police ask you why you were there, will you remember? Will your answers satisfy them? Will your general unease at being questioned make you appear suspicious? Will you fumble, and say things that contradict yourself, making you appear even more suspicious?

Daishiman 13y ago
At the point when they started asking about stuff you didn't know about I would have invoked my right to a lawyer.
- cortesoft 13y ago
  Yes... as I said, I know much better now. Of course, invoking my right to a lawyer may have prolonged my experience. Whether the increased risk of being in trouble by talking was greater than the increased time to resolve the incident if I requested a lawyer would have been a tough call to make.

whyenot 13y ago

CALIFORNIA CONSTITUTION ARTICLE 1 DECLARATION OF RIGHTS SECTION 1. All people are by nature free and independent and have inalienable rights. Among these are enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining safety, happiness, and *privacy.* I've often wondered if the right to privacy in California's constitution actually means anything. I guess it doesn't.

diminoten 13y ago
What's private about your public movements?
- eksith 13y ago
  Anonymity != Privacy. If you're in a crowd, by definition, you're not expected to have privacy, however you are allowed anonymity by virtue of being in a crowd. If you're in a cafe, you're naturally not afforded privacy, however you are still anonymous unless spotted by someone who recognizes you. If you lean over to tell something to this person, that conversation (despite being in public) is still private. Your public information still afforded you anonymity in a sea of data however since we now know it can conveniently be assembled into a dossier, it's being used to destroy your anonymity which, believe it or not, used to be taken for granted.
  - diminoten 13y ago
    > however you are allowed anonymity by virtue of being in a crowd. That's not true at all. Anonymity is the state of personally identifiable information being unknown. That's exactly what your license plate is, and it's displayed on the back (and front sometimes) of your car. You have never been anonymous while driving.
    - eksith 13y ago
      Completely false. Your license plate is the equivalent of a online pseudonym linked to a database. Common users aren't able to browse this database, however if someone's keeping a tally of the appearances of said license plate (the equivalent of a search engine), then they can infer a whole lot of information that goes beyond the scope of the purpose of license plates. That is the real problem here. You are anonymous in the crowd or should be as far as other ordinary people are concerned and that's clearly not what's happening. Incidentally, you should stop using the same username for everything.

medde 13y ago

thanks to those "red light" cameras...

squeed 13y ago

One of the scariest bits is that most of the operators of these cameras pool information. The result is an ad-hoc nationwide surveillance system operated by a private party. If you operate certain brands of cameras, you get access to the database: http://nvls-lpr.com/nvls/ http://nvls-lpr.com/nvls/

diminoten 13y ago

Can someone explain why your public movements should now be private? And when someone brings up the "pseudo-anonymity of the crowd", can you accompany that with a legal precedent for such a claim? Who actually came up with the "I'm acting privately in public" thing in the first place?

knowaveragejoe 13y ago
Yeah. If you don't like the prospect that some random person can know the intimate details of your <travel|communications|financial transactions>, you might as well just abstain from the services and institutions that make anything remotely like a modern standard of living possible. It's a fair tradeoff.
- diminoten 13y ago
  If you don't like above said prospect, then maybe you should do those things in private instead of in public.
  - knowaveragejoe 13y ago
    Ah, why didn't I think of that? We could all just be traveling entirely in private and this would be a non-issue.
    - diminoten 13y ago
      I was speaking more to the "communications/personal finance" bits you mentioned. You can't be wholly private. Merely by existing, people will be able to learn some things about you. Nothing you can do about it.
      - knowaveragejoe 13y ago
        Sure, and by natural extension there are some people, whom you will never meet (or even be aware of their doing so), who will get to become intimately familiar with the aforementioned data, journalized and cross-referenced in handy tables and graphs. Indefinitely. Nothing you can do about it! Might as well just accept it. Really, all of this hubbub around privacy concerns is totally unfounded. It's the way things have to be.

onedev 13y ago

It seems technology is always a double edged sword.

deutsch 13y ago

I'm not a cryptography guy, but do you think it would be possible to come up with a technical solution which has these properties: - License plate numbers are immediately encrypted at scan - A judges possess some sort of encryption key - Upon obtaining some sort of warrant, judge grants police specific encryption key - Key can only be used to decrypt certain kinds of data - say, only decrypts license plates in a certain geographical area or around a certain time

AlexanderHektor 13y ago

http://intertraff.com/ http://intertraff.com/ oh hey, at least they have olark :)

AlexanderHektor 13y ago
ah, it's actually a competitor..

coldtea 13y ago

A little off topic, but it will get to the point: Remember some of the biggest issues? Exploitation (wars, colonialism, imperialism, no labour laws), racism (slavery, Jim Crow laws), overeaching government (McCarthyism, Hoover, bureaucracy, protestors shot at, , surveillance, etc), rampant private interests (banana republics, RIAA, patent law, militias shooting strikers, corporate espionage, buying legislation), religious nuttery, etc? Those things are not solved by technology. If you're lucky, you might find some technology that can nullify one of those issues. But in general technology is an enabler. It can help those perpatrating those things to do them 1000 times more efficiently and far scarier. Science too, is neutral. Nazi germany was choke full or good scientists -- and they are behind all messed up inventions anyway too, not just the good ones. This, among other things, is such as case, of technology being an enabler for bad things. To really effect change you must change how people think about things -- and then, the laws.

gregors 13y ago

Some comments about being a software engineer on an ALPR system. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5962872 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5962872

cfesta9 13y ago

How do you feel about Onstar or Progressive insurance snapshot? Progressive Snapshot: We look at your driving habits to see if you could be saving more. You can track your projected savings online. "We look, you track"