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> 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? I would im

by borgia 12y ago

> 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? I would imagine that person's life would be made very difficult. Even outside of these lettered agencies, I would imagine if someone created a system to capture the license plates of the cars used privately and publicly by government members or high ranking executives in organisations tied to the government they would create a very bad situation for themselves. If anything has been made more than blatantly apparent in recent years it is that there are one set of rules for us and another for them.

ics 12y ago
It will be an interesting future when the average person can anonymously set up a device to do these things without further human intervention at low cost.
- 13 12y ago
  With systems like this in place do you really believe anonymity is even an achievable goal?
  - yclept 12y ago
    It's a good point. At the end of the day, anything you do in this universe is observable :)
- zo1 12y ago
  I'd imagine that such a future also means that a lot of the devices capable of what you say would be made "illegal" by virtue of countless regulations, requiring of licenses and approvals, and even grey-areas that make it a nightmare for private individuals to pursue, etc. I phrase it like that, because all of these things (though some may be noble/necessary/etc) do effectively make things "illegal".
  - xrjn 12y ago
    You can essentially already do this with a Raspberry Pi, PiCam, battery pack and opencv. The hardware will cost you under $100, and there are already various libraries that can process the license plates [0]. With a 3g stick you could even collect this data remotely. Of course, performance won't be comparable to the commercial product here in question, but I'm certain that with some motivation you can get similar, if not better, results on better hardware. [0] https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr

by borgia 12y ago

ics 12y ago

It will be an interesting future when the average person can anonymously set up a device to do these things without further human intervention at low cost.

13 12y ago
With systems like this in place do you really believe anonymity is even an achievable goal?
- yclept 12y ago
  It's a good point. At the end of the day, anything you do in this universe is observable :)
zo1 12y ago
I'd imagine that such a future also means that a lot of the devices capable of what you say would be made "illegal" by virtue of countless regulations, requiring of licenses and approvals, and even grey-areas that make it a nightmare for private individuals to pursue, etc. I phrase it like that, because all of these things (though some may be noble/necessary/etc) do effectively make things "illegal".
- xrjn 12y ago
  You can essentially already do this with a Raspberry Pi, PiCam, battery pack and opencv. The hardware will cost you under $100, and there are already various libraries that can process the license plates [0]. With a 3g stick you could even collect this data remotely. Of course, performance won't be comparable to the commercial product here in question, but I'm certain that with some motivation you can get similar, if not better, results on better hardware. [0] https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr