5 ms·

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 movemen

by 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.

by 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.