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DHS to Launch Nationwide License Plate Reader Program

248 points by conorgil145 12y ago

conorgil145 12y ago
This related HN thread from 2 weeks ago has some good related conversation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9256322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9256322
msandford 12y ago
This is an end-run around the fourth amendment by using a private party to do a law enforcement function; namely finding "criminals" which has historically been the job of the police. I find it interesting that the supreme court recently ruled that GPS trackers are a form of search. I suspect that in a few years this will go before them, but given the differences (namely that nothing is attached to your vehicle) I'm a lot less confident that they'll rule against it. I REALLY hope they will, but I'm a bit doubtful.
- fweespeech 12y ago
  GPS trackers were only a form of search [and a violation of the 4th amendment] because they were placed by Government agents if I recall correctly. The collection of GPS records from your phone is still quite legal and this would be the license plate scanning equivalent.
  - berberous 12y ago
    Yes, Jones avoided the hard fourth amendment issues and said, if the government _physically_ places a tracker on your, that is definitely a search. Even in the absence of a trespass, however, Supreme Court precedence recognizes a search when the government violates a subjective expectation of privacy that society recognizes as reasonable. So, if the Government monitors your location by enlisting factory or owner-installed vehicle tracking devices or GPS-enabled smartphones, that could well be a search, but it's still a fuzzy and undecided area of the law. Sotomayor's concurring opinion in U.S. v. Jones is well worth a read if you are interested in this sort of thing.
    - lemonlyman87 12y ago
      Yes, the concurrance is fantastic in general, and really hits the nail on the head of why location data needs 4th Amendment protections today: "[Location data] generates a precise, comprehensive record of a person’s public movements that reflects a wealth of detail about her familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations ... trips to the psychiatrist, the plastic surgeon, the abortion clinic, the AIDS treatment center, the strip club, the criminal defense attorney, the by-the-hour motel, the union meeting, the mosque, synagogue or church, the gay bar and on and on. The Government can store such recordsand efficiently mine them for information years into the future. And because GPS monitoring is cheapin comparison to conventional surveillance techniques and,by design, proceeds surreptitiously, it evades the ordinary checks that constrain abusive law enforcement practices: limited police resources and community hostility. "Awareness that the Government may be watching chills associational and expressive freedoms. And the Government’s unrestrained power to assemble data that reveal private aspects of identity is susceptible to abuse. The net result is that [location tracking] making available at a relatively low cost such a substantial quantum of intimate information about any person whom the Government, in its unfettered discretion, chooses to track may alter the relationship between citizen and government in a way that is inimical to democratic society.
  - briandear 12y ago
    Could you copyright your license plate and then use a DCMA takedown notice against the private company storing your plate number? Just get a personalized plate; thus you are the 'author' and you've given the state a license to 'publish' your plate. Data mining by a private company of your copyrighted material would not constitute fair use, especially since they are using it for economic gain.
    - msandford 12y ago
      I doubt it because the text is too small to be copyrightable I suspect. Otherwise I'd just copyright a bunch of individual words and then make everyone stop writing or talking at all. But it's a nice idea!
  - kd5bjo 12y ago
    I suspect the issue here would be the requirement to place a tracking device (license plate) on your vehicle, not the installation of detectors for that device.
- ams6110 12y ago
  Not sure. One does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in one's travels on a public street. Anyone (including police) can follow you, record where you go, photograph you, etc. When it comes to large-scale, untargeted, collection and retention by traffic cameras, etc. then it may come into the realm of what is "reasonable."
  - parineum 12y ago
    You're right that there is no real expectation of privacy when you're in public but I think the difference between tracking/storing movements and seeing your neighbor at the bank is you expect the loss of privacy to end when you get home. The data something like this collects is so vast that it actually encroaches into the parts of your life you would reasonably expect to be private. For instance, you could determine that I'm seeing a psychiatrist, that I'm cheating on my wife or that I have cancer. That's private information you don't expect to be exposed by simply driving around. To push the limit of the broad interpretation of your public data, consider the following scenario. Imagine in the not-to-distant future that a technology exists that allows people to scan, from a distance, the electromagnetic field produced by your brain and use that data to map your thoughts and memories. Would me simply stepping into public be a tacit agreement between me and the government to forfeit that privacy?
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - ssmoot 12y ago
    > One does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in one's travels on a public street. Anyone (including police) can follow you, record where you go, photograph you, etc. I think people definitely do have a reasonable expectation that they aren't being followed everywhere they travel, and if you framed it in that way many would see it as a violation of privacy.
  - CWuestefeld 12y ago
    But traditionally one would have an expectation of privacy - not absolute, but in general - simply due to scalability. Even if you're walking down the street, there aren't enough police or other government agents to be able watch everyone. Technology fundamentally changes this. Taking the point a bit farther - we have no expectation of privacy for the exterior of our homes. Does this, then, make it OK for the government to use audio recording devices that can pick up sound waves based on the vibrations of the home's panes of glass (because this can actually be done in some cases)? Similarly, the exterior IR signature of our home is theoretically in public view, but should we let the government monitor which rooms are occupied based on changes in the heat signature of the walls?
- rhino369 12y ago
  Private companies working on behalf of the government are subject to the 4th amendment too. The real reason this is probably allowable is that you have no expectation of privacy while driving around. People see you. Cops can tail you everywhere you go. What we really need is some sort of anti dragnet amendment.
  - briandear 12y ago
    So what are alternative ways to catch criminals? Wait for them to show up at the police station? There's a big difference between mass surveillance and surveillance. I want cops to be able to do their job. I don't want my information collected to be used against me in a crime I haven't yet committed. This is the NSA debate: warrants should be required for a suspect that is under suspicion; but not everyone should be mass surveilled "just in case." I would feel better about this if the license plate readers simply pinged law enforcement on a real-time match. The storage and potential data mining aspects are where it crosses the line. Stasi stuff there.
    - tracker1 12y ago
      Or, make a warrant required, and only enable collection of data where a proper warrant for a specific plate is in place start collection, in a granularity of N-days (being as few as one and as many as say 30, without another warrant). The system should be unable (by design) to store information on plates without warrant.. as you mention, in terms of a ping... No historical logging of data outside that scope. Cops are able to start following someone... they aren't able to go back in time and start following someone three weeks ago.
      - mahyarm 12y ago
        That design is way too easy to switch into full recording mode. It feels like as much of a solution that DRM is.
        tracker1 12y ago
        True... and barring fictional "investigations" could be challenged in court. The problem is, we're rapidly reaching a point close to 1984 in terms of privacy (or lack of).
- Shivetya 12y ago
  the end run is instead of going up against individuals they have separated us from our property and assigned it a whole different set of rights. Hence they no longer have to worry about many rights enshrined in law or the Constitution as they are charging things instead of individuals.
AngrySkillzz 12y ago
Anyone got ideas for a CV Dazzle[1] equivalent for license plates? I'm imagining "dirt" used to partially obscure some of the characters, in such a way that a human police officer would be able to tell the difference but a text recognition algorithm would either fail or interpret it wrong. Maybe make an 'I' look like an 'F' or a 'T', that kind of thing. [1] http://cvdazzle.com/ http://cvdazzle.com/
- Zikes 12y ago
  Some states have laws against anything at all obscuring a license plate, even dealer or vanity frames.
- iancarroll 12y ago
  There was an Indiegogo campaign for a license plate frame which would flash a bright light if it detected a camera to blind it. http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/10/23/nophoto_license_plate_device_defeats_red_light_cameras.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/10/23/nophoto_l...
  - tlrobinson 12y ago
    That can only detect cameras which use flashes (red light cameras, etc). AFAIK the "license plate readers" don't have flashes. However, they apparently do have infrared LEDs, which could be detected: https://www.defcon.org/images/defcon-21/dc-21-presentations/Pukingmonkey/DEFCON-21-Pukingmonkey-The-Road-Less-Surreptitiously-Traveled-Updated.pdf https://www.defcon.org/images/defcon-21/dc-21-presentations/...
    - dublinben 12y ago
      Thanks for posting this presentation. I shouldn't be surprised that the most thorough examination of this issue would have been presented at Defcon.
- sp332 12y ago
  It would be difficult. Even CV Dazzle only works against a single popular algorithm that's stripped-down for speed. Human faces vary a lot; license plates, not so much. A license-plate reader would be more robust and harder to consistently fool.
jwally 12y ago
Is this doing anything that a private citizen couldn't do (taking pictures on public property and storing it in a computer)? Conversely, what would happen if someone took pictures of cars going in / out of NSA/CIA/FBI facilities on a regular basis and posted them online?
- sp332 12y ago
  This is a private database. The article speculates that it's owned by Vigilant Solutions.
  - sharemywin 12y ago
    wonder how longer before that database is broken into.
  - sitkack 12y ago
    Is there a word for government and corporations weaving themselves together?
    - jnbiche 12y ago
      Yes, it's typically a hallmark of fascism (seriously, look it up).
      - maxerickson 12y ago
        World War I is still playing out. http://mises.org/library/war-collectivism-world-war-i http://mises.org/library/war-collectivism-world-war-i (I don't really mean to endorse that article, but I do think it looks at the world through an interesting lens. WWI probably does represent some sort of transition point in history, where the idea of an actual global empire became realizable and we are still in the period of developing a global governance structure to deal with it. Maybe such a structure is not inevitable, but I think it is quite likely.)
      - briandear 12y ago
        And socialism would be the government owning the corporation..
niche 12y ago
0 and O look the same, at least in Maine...#hack
- Shivetya 12y ago
  I have seen all the tricks, O,0 I,1, WMN, and such, but likely the OCR process will be less fooled than the cop.
- evilduck 12y ago
  Not all permutations are issued as "standard issue" stamped plates and some states have a format where there wouldn't be any confusion about where number and a letter would be. Customized plates might have a chance but they're free to refuse to issue any plate they want and if there's an issued customized plate with any ambiguity in the OCR, they can just run through all the permutations and match it against secondary values like color, make and model or the registered owner's address. The odds of two people with a late model red Chevy truck living in the same areas of the state with similar travel routes, one with something like 'O0O0NMN' and the other with '0O0OMNM' is probably astronomically low.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Nice try, but it won't work. https://xkcd.com/1105/ https://xkcd.com/1105/
- Carrok 12y ago
  True... but when searching the database for plate numbers, the system already treats O and 0, I and 1, etc as interchangeable. #notahack
- cbhl 12y ago
  I would be more worried about a false positive in the OCR. Say your plate is 0000000 and someone steals a car with plate OOOOOOO and commits a crime. Now you get pulled over and have to deal with the police.
sharemywin 12y ago
That's why we need a privacy amendment to the constitution.
- pacala 12y ago
  Don't forget to leave it open for mega-business to track whatever the f*ck they want. Government is evil, but Google and Facebook are saints of commerce that do no evil :/
- wyager 12y ago
  The constitution already protects privacy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griswold_v._Connecticut http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griswold_v._Connecticut The government tries to violate the spirit of the constitution all the time. It will just require a supreme court ruling banning mass surveillance via licence plate scanning. Even then, I'm sure various LEAs will try to worm their way around the ruling.
  - LLWM 12y ago
    The supreme court also once ruled that black people could not be citizens and had no standing to sue in court. That's the problem of depending on interpretation. If a right to privacy is important, it should be explicit.
pacala 12y ago
Why stop at license plates? Partner with Facebook and do face recognition already.
- draugadrotten 12y ago
  > do face recognition already. Someone hasn't been paying attention. http://edition.cnn.com/2014/06/01/politics/nsa-facial-recognition/ http://edition.cnn.com/2014/06/01/politics/nsa-facial-recogn...
drivingmenuts 12y ago
Is reading a license plate on a public road an invasion of privacy, though? Looking inside your car might be, but anyone can read a license plate.
- Carrok 12y ago
  No, reading that information in one place and time is not an invasion of privacy. Storing that information from almost every intersection in the country for an indefinite period certainly is. For one example take the paparrazi. While many people consider what the paparrazi does to be an invasion of privacy, it is not legally defined as such, and is therefore legal. Now imagine if there was a paparrazi on every single street corner, wirelessly connected so that any time any person of interest passes through any intersection, a photo of them with a timestamp is uploaded to the internet instantaneously. Would that be an invasion of privacy? Now what if these same paparrazos on every street corner just so happened to not be real people, but cameras covering every angle of the intersection? How quickly what "isn't an invasion of privacy because you're in public" becomes a terrifying scenario.
  - Karunamon 12y ago
    So let me get this straight - what you do in public eye is, by legal and common definition, not private, unless the collection of that information is efficient, in which case it's a violation of privacy?! The words "reasonable expectation" come to mind, and in my mind, it's not "reasonable" to expect that anything you do in public remains private just because someone never bothered to connect the dots. That seems a mighty arbitrary line to draw in the sand, in other words. We already have laws against stalking and the like - how about we enforce those instead of creation of new, conflicting laws? There's also the problem of any laws conceived to address this problem have free speech concerns.
    - rev_bird 12y ago
      It's a very similar argument to one of the government's excuses for censoring collections of publicly available information -- sure, you COULD find all the stuff you need to build a nuke at the library and the internet and on microfilm, but it's really hard to do. Pulling that data together and selling it as an ebook makes it a much bigger concern. I'm not saying I agree with the whole "mosaic" definition of things, but I think the point is worth pondering: Sometimes the information itself isn't the point of contention, it's how the information is aggregated.
ck2 12y ago
One day before the decade is out it will be cheap enough to keep dozens of drones flying over a city with continuous high resolution recording so every person can be tracked back and forth from every start and endpoint, car or not.
coherentpony 12y ago
This is not an invasion of privacy. The UK has been doing this for years with ANPR to catch people speeding, stolen vehicles and people driving dangerously. Edit: It wasn't entirely clear, but when I said, 'This is not an invasion of privacy,' I meant this to come off as an opinion. Not fact. Please do not read it as fact.
- fweespeech 12y ago
  The UK [politically] thinks many things are not an invasion of privacy, including requiring people to submit their names to the pervert list for access to porn. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/22/war_on_erupts_in_britain/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/22/war_on_erupts_in_bri...
- sp332 12y ago
  None of that makes it less of an invasion of privacy. Taking a picture of a car in public is probably fine, but intentionally building a database of my movements over time just in case I do something bad is stalkerish and creepy.
- atom-morgan 12y ago
  You didn't tell us why this isn't an invasion of privacy. You simply referred us to another government that does similar things.
- switch007 12y ago
  "John Catt, an 80 year old pensioner at the time and his daughter Linda (with no criminal record between them) - were stopped in 2005, had their vehicle searched under section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 by City of London Police and were threatened with arrest if they refused to answer police questions. After making formal police complaints, it was discovered they were stopped after their vehicle had been picked up by roadside ANPR CCTV cameras, after a marker had been placed against their vehicle in the Police National Computer database as a result of them being spotted attending EDO MBM demonstrations in Brighton" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police-enforced_ANPR_in_the_UK#Criticism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police-enforced_ANPR_in_the_UK#...
detcader 12y ago
All the comments along the lines of "if a person looking at a license plate and remembering it isn't an invasion of my rights, why is a government database so bad?" make me wonder why my classmates had such a hard time grasping induction. Perhaps the concept is only intuitive when convenient to the user. As other commentors pointed out, the government is not a private citizen, and the world is not made of math.
transfire 12y ago
Why would waste so much gad-dam money? If you really have to track us all (which obviously is a very dubious proposition to begin with) then just require the car makers to put RFIDs in the cars. They cost like a whole $1. While you're at it please require them to print serial numbers on the back of the cars too so we no longer have to pay the State extortion fees for license plates.
- ck2 12y ago
  Most cars today do have RFID It's in the tires and broadcasts the VIN Part of the TPMS tire pressure monitoring.
  - maxerickson 12y ago
    Mandated in many countries: http://www.niradynamics.se/scripts/newsletter.php?id=55 http://www.niradynamics.se/scripts/newsletter.php?id=55
  - DenisM 12y ago
    How can tires broadcast the VIN? I bought my tire+wheel package on Tirerack, certainly didn't tell them my VIN.
    - ck2 12y ago
      I was under the impression factory TPMS have the vin. It's been mandatory in the US since 2008 to have TPMS so all 2008 and newer cars have an oem system.
      - digitalneal 12y ago
        Signal isn't really that strong, a few feet away and your not gonna be able to capture that data.
        jonlucc 12y ago
        I suppose it would be simple to embed the receiver in the street. You know with decent certainty where the tires will be, so if the signal works one wheel-diameter away it will be picked up.
lemonlyman87 12y ago
Hi all, Original Author of the article here - glad to see so much interest and discussion of this topic. There are a few threads going on here but the main one seems to be: Should we care about "privacy" of information available in public, and if so, how do we set rules (Given that it's in public)? I think the answer to the first question is undoubtedly yes because of the way technology is advancing. Yes, we've always been able to see people in public, but we've never been able to do it in a rapid automated fashion on a mass scale, or catalog and query natiowide databases. This creates new implications for privacy. In the past the government simply didn't have the resources to know exactly what religious ceremonies, political meetings, protests every American was going to. Now they do. This may mean an expansion of 4th Amendment protections (@sharemywin mentioned the idea of a new amendment, but I think this is exactly what the 4th Amendment is for). In Jones the Supreme Court said you can't attach GPS devices to cars without a warrant, and 5 Justices said we may need this type of protection for location data generally. Since then many lower courts have applied this protection to location data generated from cell phones (even public locations), which I think is correct. As far as setting a standard, I think the best approach is to require 4th Amendment protections for location data generated from an electronic source/device. This is what a number of states have been doing to address demands for cell phone location data and police use of stringrays. It also directly goes to the issue that electronic devices are given government unprecedented power to record, store, and query our location data, which makes that data more sensitive and suseptible to abuse.
- Xeoncross 12y ago
  "Yes, we've always been able to see people in public, but we've never been able to do it in a rapid automated fashion on a mass scale... ...This creates new implications for privacy. In the past the government simply didn't have the resources to know exactly what religious ceremonies, political meetings, protests every American was going to. Now they do."
- s_q_b 12y ago
  I agree. A change in quantity is a change in quality when it comes to privacy. The occasional flyover to look for narcotics operations may be permissible, because there is no expectation of privacy in a public space. But monitoring an entire city with aerostats and quadrotors, or storing the location information of the entire population through license plate readers, while justifiable under the same legal rationale, is a completely different situation. From a practical reading of the Constitution, it is clearly violative of the Fourth Amendment.
ctdonath 12y ago
How about a reverse response? Build a dash cam which watches plates & logs metadata, possibly even crowdsourcing the info. Outrageous? no different from what DHS would do. Leverage that outrage to get license plates dumped entirely.
- godgod 12y ago
  This! The majority of people would loose their lunch if they visit a webpage that tracked their every movement just to point out that the federal government and local police are doing EXACTLY That. 1. Get rasperrypi powered off cig ligher 2. Get Cheap webcam 3. Save data to SD card 4. Upload to website 5. Scare people into changing the surveillance state.
venomsnake 12y ago
And here is idea taken from the swingers party - car key lottery. We have a lot of cars everyone throws a key and takes random for the day ...
hellbanner 12y ago
Tor taxi for citizens, anyone? It's a shame that the railroad companies sold highways to car manufacturers so they could rip them up and sell individualism.
ianstallings 12y ago
IMHO this isn't about spying, or control. No, this is about the DC culture of spending and institutional power. DHS is trying to grow as fast as possible. Inside the US government, power is equal to how much funding you can grab and how many people you can employ. And the DHS is on a mission to grab as much as possible right now, while congress is willing to fund it all. Congress certainly wouldn't want to go against fighting terrorism.
orionblastar 12y ago
Some people put tinted plastic or mud over their license plate so the red light readers cannot read them. I figured by now the NSA ot DHS are putting RFID tags in license plates and stickers so that they can be read easier. I figure by the time they pass a law that all cars have to be driven by robots, the robots will be phoning home everywhere they go. Not to mention the GPS in smartphones that tells where you have beem
tekromancr 12y ago
Holy fucking shit... At this point, let's just GPS tag every car? It's the same fucking thing.
- ptaipale 12y ago
  Over here (Finland), the government (driven by Ministy of Treasury and Ministry of Traffic officials) really plans that. Put a mandatory GPS tracker in every vehicle, to collect tax based on where the vehicle was driven. Privacy concerns are brushed away with the usual "we will make it secure" and "if you have nothing to hide, there's no harm". And the usual promises "we will only use it for tax reasons, nothing else", which promise will of course be broken once the system is established, because "we need to all we can to prevent serious crime". The amazing thing is how completely predictable the whole path is.
tek-cyb-org 12y ago
I feel like the headline should include the term "publicly". They've had this implemented for quite some time now.
supergeek133 12y ago
I think people should get notified (or be able to look up) when/if their plate is scanned. You know every cop that follows you looks it up for no reason. At the very least, it's looking up my name and address, which people sue private companies for and credit card companies have regulations for.
- estebank 12y ago
  And then anyone able to spoof your identity (including a spouse worried about being cheated on) can get your entire location history.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
userbinator 12y ago
What a coincidence: http://i59.tinypic.com/2r24z5z.png http://i59.tinypic.com/2r24z5z.png (The two articles are completely unrelated, but the juxtaposition caught my attention.)
peterwwillis 12y ago
London's Metropolitan Police Service already have the same technology the US uses to track mobile phones (http://motherboard.vice.com/read/uk-police-wont-admit-theyre-tracking-peoples-phone-calls http://motherboard.vice.com/read/uk-police-wont-admit-theyre...) but refuses to comment on its use. Once we eventually uncover these programs and their use in full detail, programs such as the DHS's license plate reader will be used as the example of why it's totally OK to monitor the movements of innocent citizens and interfere with their communications. The slippery slope isn't that we're being tracked, or that we are losing our privacy. Our movements as well as all our communications already are being tracked. The slippery slope is that one surveillance program justifies another until anything is fair game because otherwise nothing would be. In terms of 'intelligence', we are very rapidly moving towards a world where privacy will be illegal.
aetch 12y ago
People seem think that the government/police will track their movements. Yes, that will happen but there are upsides to license plate readers as well. A few years back my car was stolen from in front of my residence. The local police were able to find the car in a nearby city through license plate scanning and I got the car back. Allowing license plate data to be kept for a reasonable amount of time is absolutely okay. You're driving on US soil in public so it's not outrageous for the government to monitor their territory.
Saturnaut 12y ago
We should honestly be doing away with traditional license plates anyway. First off, and I say this as a sports car enthusiast, it highly detracts from the design of a car. Second off, there are much better ways for law enforcement to identify a car other than limited sight. RFID or some other tech that could be required at a federal level. This could be tied into registration and inspection, as well as other services that would benefit drivers as a whole. There are of course privacy concerns, but I would rather deal with that than standing in line at the DMV.
CyberDildonics 12y ago
So if they are going to collect widespread data on Americans, it will be accessible to everyone right? And we will get to see everywhere cops and dhs vehicles go right?
baldeagle 12y ago
I think one of the problems with this collection is the asymmetric nature of the information. It will be readily accessible to convict but not to exonerate. I think that is the biggest problem in the coming days.
- Istof 12y ago
  I wonder if you would be able to do a FOIA request to get your data?
- orik 12y ago
  I wonder if you'd be able to have a GPS unit that you could use to exonerate yourself without having to have that system managed by a third party.

248 points by conorgil145 12y ago

This related HN thread from 2 weeks ago has some good related conversation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9256322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9256322

msandford 12y ago

This is an end-run around the fourth amendment by using a private party to do a law enforcement function; namely finding "criminals" which has historically been the job of the police. I find it interesting that the supreme court recently ruled that GPS trackers are a form of search. I suspect that in a few years this will go before them, but given the differences (namely that nothing is attached to your vehicle) I'm a lot less confident that they'll rule against it. I REALLY hope they will, but I'm a bit doubtful.

fweespeech 12y ago
GPS trackers were only a form of search [and a violation of the 4th amendment] because they were placed by Government agents if I recall correctly. The collection of GPS records from your phone is still quite legal and this would be the license plate scanning equivalent.
- berberous 12y ago
  Yes, Jones avoided the hard fourth amendment issues and said, if the government _physically_ places a tracker on your, that is definitely a search. Even in the absence of a trespass, however, Supreme Court precedence recognizes a search when the government violates a subjective expectation of privacy that society recognizes as reasonable. So, if the Government monitors your location by enlisting factory or owner-installed vehicle tracking devices or GPS-enabled smartphones, that could well be a search, but it's still a fuzzy and undecided area of the law. Sotomayor's concurring opinion in U.S. v. Jones is well worth a read if you are interested in this sort of thing.
  - lemonlyman87 12y ago
    Yes, the concurrance is fantastic in general, and really hits the nail on the head of why location data needs 4th Amendment protections today: "[Location data] generates a precise, comprehensive record of a person’s public movements that reflects a wealth of detail about her familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations ... trips to the psychiatrist, the plastic surgeon, the abortion clinic, the AIDS treatment center, the strip club, the criminal defense attorney, the by-the-hour motel, the union meeting, the mosque, synagogue or church, the gay bar and on and on. The Government can store such recordsand efficiently mine them for information years into the future. And because GPS monitoring is cheapin comparison to conventional surveillance techniques and,by design, proceeds surreptitiously, it evades the ordinary checks that constrain abusive law enforcement practices: limited police resources and community hostility. "Awareness that the Government may be watching chills associational and expressive freedoms. And the Government’s unrestrained power to assemble data that reveal private aspects of identity is susceptible to abuse. The net result is that [location tracking] making available at a relatively low cost such a substantial quantum of intimate information about any person whom the Government, in its unfettered discretion, chooses to track may alter the relationship between citizen and government in a way that is inimical to democratic society.
- briandear 12y ago
  Could you copyright your license plate and then use a DCMA takedown notice against the private company storing your plate number? Just get a personalized plate; thus you are the 'author' and you've given the state a license to 'publish' your plate. Data mining by a private company of your copyrighted material would not constitute fair use, especially since they are using it for economic gain.
  - msandford 12y ago
    I doubt it because the text is too small to be copyrightable I suspect. Otherwise I'd just copyright a bunch of individual words and then make everyone stop writing or talking at all. But it's a nice idea!
- kd5bjo 12y ago
  I suspect the issue here would be the requirement to place a tracking device (license plate) on your vehicle, not the installation of detectors for that device.
ams6110 12y ago
Not sure. One does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in one's travels on a public street. Anyone (including police) can follow you, record where you go, photograph you, etc. When it comes to large-scale, untargeted, collection and retention by traffic cameras, etc. then it may come into the realm of what is "reasonable."
- parineum 12y ago
  You're right that there is no real expectation of privacy when you're in public but I think the difference between tracking/storing movements and seeing your neighbor at the bank is you expect the loss of privacy to end when you get home. The data something like this collects is so vast that it actually encroaches into the parts of your life you would reasonably expect to be private. For instance, you could determine that I'm seeing a psychiatrist, that I'm cheating on my wife or that I have cancer. That's private information you don't expect to be exposed by simply driving around. To push the limit of the broad interpretation of your public data, consider the following scenario. Imagine in the not-to-distant future that a technology exists that allows people to scan, from a distance, the electromagnetic field produced by your brain and use that data to map your thoughts and memories. Would me simply stepping into public be a tacit agreement between me and the government to forfeit that privacy?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- ssmoot 12y ago
  > One does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in one's travels on a public street. Anyone (including police) can follow you, record where you go, photograph you, etc. I think people definitely do have a reasonable expectation that they aren't being followed everywhere they travel, and if you framed it in that way many would see it as a violation of privacy.
- CWuestefeld 12y ago
  But traditionally one would have an expectation of privacy - not absolute, but in general - simply due to scalability. Even if you're walking down the street, there aren't enough police or other government agents to be able watch everyone. Technology fundamentally changes this. Taking the point a bit farther - we have no expectation of privacy for the exterior of our homes. Does this, then, make it OK for the government to use audio recording devices that can pick up sound waves based on the vibrations of the home's panes of glass (because this can actually be done in some cases)? Similarly, the exterior IR signature of our home is theoretically in public view, but should we let the government monitor which rooms are occupied based on changes in the heat signature of the walls?
rhino369 12y ago
Private companies working on behalf of the government are subject to the 4th amendment too. The real reason this is probably allowable is that you have no expectation of privacy while driving around. People see you. Cops can tail you everywhere you go. What we really need is some sort of anti dragnet amendment.
- briandear 12y ago
  So what are alternative ways to catch criminals? Wait for them to show up at the police station? There's a big difference between mass surveillance and surveillance. I want cops to be able to do their job. I don't want my information collected to be used against me in a crime I haven't yet committed. This is the NSA debate: warrants should be required for a suspect that is under suspicion; but not everyone should be mass surveilled "just in case." I would feel better about this if the license plate readers simply pinged law enforcement on a real-time match. The storage and potential data mining aspects are where it crosses the line. Stasi stuff there.
  - tracker1 12y ago
    Or, make a warrant required, and only enable collection of data where a proper warrant for a specific plate is in place start collection, in a granularity of N-days (being as few as one and as many as say 30, without another warrant). The system should be unable (by design) to store information on plates without warrant.. as you mention, in terms of a ping... No historical logging of data outside that scope. Cops are able to start following someone... they aren't able to go back in time and start following someone three weeks ago.
    - mahyarm 12y ago
      That design is way too easy to switch into full recording mode. It feels like as much of a solution that DRM is.
      - tracker1 12y ago
        True... and barring fictional "investigations" could be challenged in court. The problem is, we're rapidly reaching a point close to 1984 in terms of privacy (or lack of).
Shivetya 12y ago
the end run is instead of going up against individuals they have separated us from our property and assigned it a whole different set of rights. Hence they no longer have to worry about many rights enshrined in law or the Constitution as they are charging things instead of individuals.

AngrySkillzz 12y ago

Anyone got ideas for a CV Dazzle[1] equivalent for license plates? I'm imagining "dirt" used to partially obscure some of the characters, in such a way that a human police officer would be able to tell the difference but a text recognition algorithm would either fail or interpret it wrong. Maybe make an 'I' look like an 'F' or a 'T', that kind of thing. [1] http://cvdazzle.com/ http://cvdazzle.com/

Zikes 12y ago
Some states have laws against anything at all obscuring a license plate, even dealer or vanity frames.
iancarroll 12y ago
There was an Indiegogo campaign for a license plate frame which would flash a bright light if it detected a camera to blind it. http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/10/23/nophoto_license_plate_device_defeats_red_light_cameras.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/10/23/nophoto_l...
- tlrobinson 12y ago
  That can only detect cameras which use flashes (red light cameras, etc). AFAIK the "license plate readers" don't have flashes. However, they apparently do have infrared LEDs, which could be detected: https://www.defcon.org/images/defcon-21/dc-21-presentations/Pukingmonkey/DEFCON-21-Pukingmonkey-The-Road-Less-Surreptitiously-Traveled-Updated.pdf https://www.defcon.org/images/defcon-21/dc-21-presentations/...
  - dublinben 12y ago
    Thanks for posting this presentation. I shouldn't be surprised that the most thorough examination of this issue would have been presented at Defcon.
sp332 12y ago
It would be difficult. Even CV Dazzle only works against a single popular algorithm that's stripped-down for speed. Human faces vary a lot; license plates, not so much. A license-plate reader would be more robust and harder to consistently fool.

jwally 12y ago

Is this doing anything that a private citizen couldn't do (taking pictures on public property and storing it in a computer)? Conversely, what would happen if someone took pictures of cars going in / out of NSA/CIA/FBI facilities on a regular basis and posted them online?

sp332 12y ago
This is a private database. The article speculates that it's owned by Vigilant Solutions.
- sharemywin 12y ago
  wonder how longer before that database is broken into.
- sitkack 12y ago
  Is there a word for government and corporations weaving themselves together?
  - jnbiche 12y ago
    Yes, it's typically a hallmark of fascism (seriously, look it up).
    - maxerickson 12y ago
      World War I is still playing out. http://mises.org/library/war-collectivism-world-war-i http://mises.org/library/war-collectivism-world-war-i (I don't really mean to endorse that article, but I do think it looks at the world through an interesting lens. WWI probably does represent some sort of transition point in history, where the idea of an actual global empire became realizable and we are still in the period of developing a global governance structure to deal with it. Maybe such a structure is not inevitable, but I think it is quite likely.)
    - briandear 12y ago
      And socialism would be the government owning the corporation..

niche 12y ago

0 and O look the same, at least in Maine...#hack

Shivetya 12y ago
I have seen all the tricks, O,0 I,1, WMN, and such, but likely the OCR process will be less fooled than the cop.
evilduck 12y ago
Not all permutations are issued as "standard issue" stamped plates and some states have a format where there wouldn't be any confusion about where number and a letter would be. Customized plates might have a chance but they're free to refuse to issue any plate they want and if there's an issued customized plate with any ambiguity in the OCR, they can just run through all the permutations and match it against secondary values like color, make and model or the registered owner's address. The odds of two people with a late model red Chevy truck living in the same areas of the state with similar travel routes, one with something like 'O0O0NMN' and the other with '0O0OMNM' is probably astronomically low.
TeMPOraL 12y ago
Nice try, but it won't work. https://xkcd.com/1105/ https://xkcd.com/1105/
Carrok 12y ago
True... but when searching the database for plate numbers, the system already treats O and 0, I and 1, etc as interchangeable. #notahack
cbhl 12y ago
I would be more worried about a false positive in the OCR. Say your plate is 0000000 and someone steals a car with plate OOOOOOO and commits a crime. Now you get pulled over and have to deal with the police.

sharemywin 12y ago

That's why we need a privacy amendment to the constitution.

pacala 12y ago
Don't forget to leave it open for mega-business to track whatever the f*ck they want. Government is evil, but Google and Facebook are saints of commerce that do no evil :/
wyager 12y ago
The constitution already protects privacy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griswold_v._Connecticut http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griswold_v._Connecticut The government tries to violate the spirit of the constitution all the time. It will just require a supreme court ruling banning mass surveillance via licence plate scanning. Even then, I'm sure various LEAs will try to worm their way around the ruling.
- LLWM 12y ago
  The supreme court also once ruled that black people could not be citizens and had no standing to sue in court. That's the problem of depending on interpretation. If a right to privacy is important, it should be explicit.

pacala 12y ago

Why stop at license plates? Partner with Facebook and do face recognition already.

draugadrotten 12y ago
> do face recognition already. Someone hasn't been paying attention. http://edition.cnn.com/2014/06/01/politics/nsa-facial-recognition/ http://edition.cnn.com/2014/06/01/politics/nsa-facial-recogn...

drivingmenuts 12y ago

Is reading a license plate on a public road an invasion of privacy, though? Looking inside your car might be, but anyone can read a license plate.

Carrok 12y ago
No, reading that information in one place and time is not an invasion of privacy. Storing that information from almost every intersection in the country for an indefinite period certainly is. For one example take the paparrazi. While many people consider what the paparrazi does to be an invasion of privacy, it is not legally defined as such, and is therefore legal. Now imagine if there was a paparrazi on every single street corner, wirelessly connected so that any time any person of interest passes through any intersection, a photo of them with a timestamp is uploaded to the internet instantaneously. Would that be an invasion of privacy? Now what if these same paparrazos on every street corner just so happened to not be real people, but cameras covering every angle of the intersection? How quickly what "isn't an invasion of privacy because you're in public" becomes a terrifying scenario.
- Karunamon 12y ago
  So let me get this straight - what you do in public eye is, by legal and common definition, not private, unless the collection of that information is efficient, in which case it's a violation of privacy?! The words "reasonable expectation" come to mind, and in my mind, it's not "reasonable" to expect that anything you do in public remains private just because someone never bothered to connect the dots. That seems a mighty arbitrary line to draw in the sand, in other words. We already have laws against stalking and the like - how about we enforce those instead of creation of new, conflicting laws? There's also the problem of any laws conceived to address this problem have free speech concerns.
  - rev_bird 12y ago
    It's a very similar argument to one of the government's excuses for censoring collections of publicly available information -- sure, you COULD find all the stuff you need to build a nuke at the library and the internet and on microfilm, but it's really hard to do. Pulling that data together and selling it as an ebook makes it a much bigger concern. I'm not saying I agree with the whole "mosaic" definition of things, but I think the point is worth pondering: Sometimes the information itself isn't the point of contention, it's how the information is aggregated.

ck2 12y ago

One day before the decade is out it will be cheap enough to keep dozens of drones flying over a city with continuous high resolution recording so every person can be tracked back and forth from every start and endpoint, car or not.

coherentpony 12y ago

This is not an invasion of privacy. The UK has been doing this for years with ANPR to catch people speeding, stolen vehicles and people driving dangerously. Edit: It wasn't entirely clear, but when I said, 'This is not an invasion of privacy,' I meant this to come off as an opinion. Not fact. Please do not read it as fact.

fweespeech 12y ago
The UK [politically] thinks many things are not an invasion of privacy, including requiring people to submit their names to the pervert list for access to porn. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/22/war_on_erupts_in_britain/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/22/war_on_erupts_in_bri...
sp332 12y ago
None of that makes it less of an invasion of privacy. Taking a picture of a car in public is probably fine, but intentionally building a database of my movements over time just in case I do something bad is stalkerish and creepy.
atom-morgan 12y ago
You didn't tell us why this isn't an invasion of privacy. You simply referred us to another government that does similar things.
switch007 12y ago
"John Catt, an 80 year old pensioner at the time and his daughter Linda (with no criminal record between them) - were stopped in 2005, had their vehicle searched under section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 by City of London Police and were threatened with arrest if they refused to answer police questions. After making formal police complaints, it was discovered they were stopped after their vehicle had been picked up by roadside ANPR CCTV cameras, after a marker had been placed against their vehicle in the Police National Computer database as a result of them being spotted attending EDO MBM demonstrations in Brighton" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police-enforced_ANPR_in_the_UK#Criticism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police-enforced_ANPR_in_the_UK#...

detcader 12y ago

All the comments along the lines of "if a person looking at a license plate and remembering it isn't an invasion of my rights, why is a government database so bad?" make me wonder why my classmates had such a hard time grasping induction. Perhaps the concept is only intuitive when convenient to the user. As other commentors pointed out, the government is not a private citizen, and the world is not made of math.

transfire 12y ago

Why would waste so much gad-dam money? If you really have to track us all (which obviously is a very dubious proposition to begin with) then just require the car makers to put RFIDs in the cars. They cost like a whole $1. While you're at it please require them to print serial numbers on the back of the cars too so we no longer have to pay the State extortion fees for license plates.

ck2 12y ago
Most cars today do have RFID It's in the tires and broadcasts the VIN Part of the TPMS tire pressure monitoring.
- maxerickson 12y ago
  Mandated in many countries: http://www.niradynamics.se/scripts/newsletter.php?id=55 http://www.niradynamics.se/scripts/newsletter.php?id=55
- DenisM 12y ago
  How can tires broadcast the VIN? I bought my tire+wheel package on Tirerack, certainly didn't tell them my VIN.
  - ck2 12y ago
    I was under the impression factory TPMS have the vin. It's been mandatory in the US since 2008 to have TPMS so all 2008 and newer cars have an oem system.
    - digitalneal 12y ago
      Signal isn't really that strong, a few feet away and your not gonna be able to capture that data.
      - jonlucc 12y ago
        I suppose it would be simple to embed the receiver in the street. You know with decent certainty where the tires will be, so if the signal works one wheel-diameter away it will be picked up.

lemonlyman87 12y ago

Hi all, Original Author of the article here - glad to see so much interest and discussion of this topic. There are a few threads going on here but the main one seems to be: Should we care about "privacy" of information available in public, and if so, how do we set rules (Given that it's in public)? I think the answer to the first question is undoubtedly yes because of the way technology is advancing. Yes, we've always been able to see people in public, but we've never been able to do it in a rapid automated fashion on a mass scale, or catalog and query natiowide databases. This creates new implications for privacy. In the past the government simply didn't have the resources to know exactly what religious ceremonies, political meetings, protests every American was going to. Now they do. This may mean an expansion of 4th Amendment protections (@sharemywin mentioned the idea of a new amendment, but I think this is exactly what the 4th Amendment is for). In Jones the Supreme Court said you can't attach GPS devices to cars without a warrant, and 5 Justices said we may need this type of protection for location data generally. Since then many lower courts have applied this protection to location data generated from cell phones (even public locations), which I think is correct. As far as setting a standard, I think the best approach is to require 4th Amendment protections for location data generated from an electronic source/device. This is what a number of states have been doing to address demands for cell phone location data and police use of stringrays. It also directly goes to the issue that electronic devices are given government unprecedented power to record, store, and query our location data, which makes that data more sensitive and suseptible to abuse.

Xeoncross 12y ago
"Yes, we've always been able to see people in public, but we've never been able to do it in a rapid automated fashion on a mass scale... ...This creates new implications for privacy. In the past the government simply didn't have the resources to know exactly what religious ceremonies, political meetings, protests every American was going to. Now they do."
s_q_b 12y ago
I agree. A change in quantity is a change in quality when it comes to privacy. The occasional flyover to look for narcotics operations may be permissible, because there is no expectation of privacy in a public space. But monitoring an entire city with aerostats and quadrotors, or storing the location information of the entire population through license plate readers, while justifiable under the same legal rationale, is a completely different situation. From a practical reading of the Constitution, it is clearly violative of the Fourth Amendment.

ctdonath 12y ago

How about a reverse response? Build a dash cam which watches plates & logs metadata, possibly even crowdsourcing the info. Outrageous? no different from what DHS would do. Leverage that outrage to get license plates dumped entirely.

godgod 12y ago
This! The majority of people would loose their lunch if they visit a webpage that tracked their every movement just to point out that the federal government and local police are doing EXACTLY That. 1. Get rasperrypi powered off cig ligher 2. Get Cheap webcam 3. Save data to SD card 4. Upload to website 5. Scare people into changing the surveillance state.

venomsnake 12y ago

And here is idea taken from the swingers party - car key lottery. We have a lot of cars everyone throws a key and takes random for the day ...

hellbanner 12y ago

Tor taxi for citizens, anyone? It's a shame that the railroad companies sold highways to car manufacturers so they could rip them up and sell individualism.

ianstallings 12y ago

IMHO this isn't about spying, or control. No, this is about the DC culture of spending and institutional power. DHS is trying to grow as fast as possible. Inside the US government, power is equal to how much funding you can grab and how many people you can employ. And the DHS is on a mission to grab as much as possible right now, while congress is willing to fund it all. Congress certainly wouldn't want to go against fighting terrorism.

orionblastar 12y ago

Some people put tinted plastic or mud over their license plate so the red light readers cannot read them. I figured by now the NSA ot DHS are putting RFID tags in license plates and stickers so that they can be read easier. I figure by the time they pass a law that all cars have to be driven by robots, the robots will be phoning home everywhere they go. Not to mention the GPS in smartphones that tells where you have beem

tekromancr 12y ago

Holy fucking shit... At this point, let's just GPS tag every car? It's the same fucking thing.

ptaipale 12y ago
Over here (Finland), the government (driven by Ministy of Treasury and Ministry of Traffic officials) really plans that. Put a mandatory GPS tracker in every vehicle, to collect tax based on where the vehicle was driven. Privacy concerns are brushed away with the usual "we will make it secure" and "if you have nothing to hide, there's no harm". And the usual promises "we will only use it for tax reasons, nothing else", which promise will of course be broken once the system is established, because "we need to all we can to prevent serious crime". The amazing thing is how completely predictable the whole path is.

tek-cyb-org 12y ago

I feel like the headline should include the term "publicly". They've had this implemented for quite some time now.

supergeek133 12y ago

I think people should get notified (or be able to look up) when/if their plate is scanned. You know every cop that follows you looks it up for no reason. At the very least, it's looking up my name and address, which people sue private companies for and credit card companies have regulations for.

estebank 12y ago
And then anyone able to spoof your identity (including a spouse worried about being cheated on) can get your entire location history.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

userbinator 12y ago

What a coincidence: http://i59.tinypic.com/2r24z5z.png http://i59.tinypic.com/2r24z5z.png (The two articles are completely unrelated, but the juxtaposition caught my attention.)

peterwwillis 12y ago

London's Metropolitan Police Service already have the same technology the US uses to track mobile phones (http://motherboard.vice.com/read/uk-police-wont-admit-theyre-tracking-peoples-phone-calls http://motherboard.vice.com/read/uk-police-wont-admit-theyre...) but refuses to comment on its use. Once we eventually uncover these programs and their use in full detail, programs such as the DHS's license plate reader will be used as the example of why it's totally OK to monitor the movements of innocent citizens and interfere with their communications. The slippery slope isn't that we're being tracked, or that we are losing our privacy. Our movements as well as all our communications already are being tracked. The slippery slope is that one surveillance program justifies another until anything is fair game because otherwise nothing would be. In terms of 'intelligence', we are very rapidly moving towards a world where privacy will be illegal.

aetch 12y ago

People seem think that the government/police will track their movements. Yes, that will happen but there are upsides to license plate readers as well. A few years back my car was stolen from in front of my residence. The local police were able to find the car in a nearby city through license plate scanning and I got the car back. Allowing license plate data to be kept for a reasonable amount of time is absolutely okay. You're driving on US soil in public so it's not outrageous for the government to monitor their territory.

Saturnaut 12y ago

We should honestly be doing away with traditional license plates anyway. First off, and I say this as a sports car enthusiast, it highly detracts from the design of a car. Second off, there are much better ways for law enforcement to identify a car other than limited sight. RFID or some other tech that could be required at a federal level. This could be tied into registration and inspection, as well as other services that would benefit drivers as a whole. There are of course privacy concerns, but I would rather deal with that than standing in line at the DMV.

CyberDildonics 12y ago

So if they are going to collect widespread data on Americans, it will be accessible to everyone right? And we will get to see everywhere cops and dhs vehicles go right?

baldeagle 12y ago

I think one of the problems with this collection is the asymmetric nature of the information. It will be readily accessible to convict but not to exonerate. I think that is the biggest problem in the coming days.

Istof 12y ago
I wonder if you would be able to do a FOIA request to get your data?
orik 12y ago
I wonder if you'd be able to have a GPS unit that you could use to exonerate yourself without having to have that system managed by a third party.