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.
The 4th Amendment - and specifically its warrant requirement - is often misunderstood to be about protecting individuals from government searches. Warrants will generally be granted, and the search of any particular individual is going to happen if the government wants it to. The protection for individuals happens later when evidence that was improperly obtained could be ruled inadmissible by the exclusionary rule. The search will probably happen, but the results of that search may not apply in court.
The warrant requirement is an attempt to protect society in general against threats like the writs of assistance that were imposed upon the colonies. From the perspective of an individual search, obtaining a warrant is a trivial speed bump.
If you wanted to search an entire city, on the other hand, those speed bumps serve as a rate limiter. It is just not possible for even a large, corrupt, overfunded and overstaffed police force to "particularly describe" what each search is for and get each one rubber stamped by a judge. Our police and judicial systems have many inefficiencies like this by design.
In modern times, we probably need to extend this idea to the public space, to impose some kind of new rate-limiter. It doesn't matter if the government can ask for occasional data, but allowing a continual collection and a permanent database is the kind of "general warrant" style collection that we need to prevent. The problem is when data is the aggregated, so we need to strongly rate limit the collection so there is no data to aggregate.
By the way - while license plate data is bad enough, I hope everybody remembers that they are making a detailed map of their movements and a graph of probably relationships when they carry a cell phone thanks to COTRAVELER. That slide from the Snowden archive didn't get a lot of press, but it is probably one of the more easily abused programs out of all of the recent revelations.
>The 4th Amendment - and specifically its warrant requirement - is often misunderstood to be about protecting individuals from government searches. Warrants will generally be granted, and the search of any particular individual is going to happen if the government wants it to.
Yes, but at the time the Constitution was written warrants were a requirements for a search. If a British officer showed up on your property and demanded to search it without a warrant you could literally shoot him.
This led to the issuance of "general warrants," allowing British officers to search entire houses and estates. The Fourth Amendment was a direct reaction to that, which is enshrined in the language "no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
But you conveniently left out the most important part: the rationale at the beginning of the Amendment: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,[a] against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated"
The whole purpose of the Amendment was to protect individuals from government searches. The text says so right on its face: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated..."
The exclusionary rule or "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine, with which you seem to be confusing the Amendment itself, is a twentieth century invention of the Warren court.
> Yes, but at the time the Constitution was written warrants were a requirements for a search. If a British officer showed up on your property and demanded to search it without a warrant you could literally shoot him.
By the time of the Constitution, a British officer demanding to search your premises had more problems than whether or not they had a warrant.
Its true that by the time of the Constitution, most states required particular warrants -- these requirements were adopted in the Constitutions many states adopted when the declared independence. General "writs of assistance", which were transferrable blank checks issued to particular officers that lasted for the entire length of a monarch's reign (and for 6 months thereafter!) were permitted prior to that (perceived abuse of these by the British customs authorities was, in fact, one of the major source of tension leading to the revolution.)
But yes, the purpose of the Amendment was to protect individuals.
> The exclusionary rule or "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine, with which you seem to be confusing the Amendment itself, is a twentieth century invention of the Warren court.
Its worth noting that before the exclusionary rule, there was no remedy for most violations of the Fourth Amendment. The exclusionary rule doesn't substitute for the protection of the Amendment, it gives them some (though limited) teeth.
The fourth amendment is about protecting individuals from government searches. It says nothing about admissibility in court, despite your implication.
>The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Ah, religious metaphors. The fourth amendment is relevant in many instances, however it explicitly mentions preventing searches and says nothing about what to do if a government official decides to evade their restrictions.
> Warrants will generally be granted, and the search of any particular individual is going to happen if the government wants it to.
This is true but it protects against "unreasonable" searches. I'd much rather have my house be searched after a judge deems it necessary, rather than there being no accountability or oversight, and the police deciding on their own that they want to. Other than that, I agree.
> This is true but it protects against "unreasonable" searches.
It prohibits unreasonable searches. Whether it protects against them depends on the effectiveness with which its prohibition is enforced. Unfortunately, enforcement through the courts has been effectively limited to the exclusionary rule, which is perhaps a reasonably sufficient remedy against unreasonable searches for the purposes of criminal prosecution [0], but is completely useless against unreasonable searches for other purposes.
[0] though perhaps not, there's all kinds of exploitable limitations to the exclusionary rule even in the criminal domain.
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.
I just don't agree with the "technology is advancing" argument. If something is legal, ethical and moral then it doesn't matter if technology makes it easier to do or not. If it's right for the police to follow one person around to see what religious ceremonies, political meetings and protests that person is attending, then it's right for the police to do that same thing at scale.
The issue here is: is it right for the police to be able to perform physical surveillance of an individual? It's a yes or no question, regardless of what use the police make of technology. If you think the police shouldn't be able to follow you around to see what meetings you go to, which they can do now without a warrant, then it shouldn't matter if they do it with their feet or by automatically capturing and recording license plate numbers.
Technical capability doesn't alter the definition of right and wrong. This is why we should think through laws and rules carefully, so that they apply not only to the present, but to how things might be in the future. If it turns out that we need new laws, then there's a process for changing them. But I don't think that we should let the technical trends of the moment alter how we view our basic principles.
However, as the parent wrote, technology creates differences of degree that become differences of kind.
And it creates problems that just weren't problems when the law was written. Maybe the laws should have been written more carefully but that's a rather idealistic position. That laws regarding control of personal airspace over my house didn't anticipate the widespread use of consumer drones is pretty understandable. Ditto lots of laws regarding regulation of weaponry, etc.
In this case, we've been seeing nominally public info become more readily available for a while now. There are good reasons most public information (deeds, etc.) are public. But that used to mean someone had to have a good reason to look at them because they'd have to trudge down to the county clerk's office. And maybe the town clerk's office. And then some other clerk's office. Now it's all aggregated in one place at the touch of a button. The good reasons those records were public in the first place haven't gone away. But technology has fundamentally changed the scope of how that information can be used.
Surveillance of an individual because there is reasonable suspicion is accepted.
However, throwing a huge net and catching everybody, then later filtering out what you want is a totally different process. It is leading to a process where guilt is often presumed and you filter out those later who aren't guilty of something. These types of processes continue to reverse innocent until proven guilty to guilty until proven innocent.
@karmacondon, you argue that "If something is legal, ethical and moral then it doesn't matter if technology makes it easier to do or not," but I think sometimes - in situations such as this - technological advances can change society and government power so much that it changes what is ethical, moral, and even legal. Having a police officer walk a beat is certainly ethically acceptable; having drones monitor every single thing that occurs in every major city is not - scale and power of tech (especially regarding intrusiveness) matter.
In terms of reducing the scale to a single person (which I think has problems, but nonetheless), I don't think most people would classify police following someone around to see what religious ceremonies, political meetings, and protests he or she goes to is acceptable, however we don't worry as profoundly about this because police simply don't have the manpower to do it. License plate readers change this, making mass monitoring of individuals feasible.
There's a difference between starting a new surveillance of a suspect of their public activity starting on a given date with resources dedicated to that specific task and going back through a surveillance network (that should never have been established) that spies on everyone.
Not to mention scale... having a few thousand police officers patrolling a city is acceptable... Having several battalions of a hundred thousand soldiers, not so much.
That's an interesting argument and also perspective that I bet will be argued quite strongly in the legal circumstances. In many ways, however, it may not be one particular aspect of surveillance but rather the preponderance of all the surveillance that people are being subjected. That is, by and large a license plate only tells us where your car went but coupled with cell phone records and other means of tracking it gets scary quite quickly.
Do remember, that before this technological advance there was a decided cost to surveil someone. A unit or several would have to be placed on detail to monitor one person. That cost has gone down substantially and as a result, what might have seemed innocuous before has taken on a completely different character. We, as a country, tolerated many injustices towards minority groups because it didn't impact us. Now, we are faced with an impact that is total. It doesn't change the question but does reframe the question.
> is it right for the police to be able to perform physical surveillance of an individual?
Yes, this is something the police should be able to do. But that is not the question at hand, is it? This is about performing physical surveillance on all individuals, all the time. Those are two very different things!
There are municipalities in the bay area that are requiring new companies' new head quarters campuses to install these readers on their own properties to monitor ALL traffic driving by them.
And if you tell anyone about which city and which company, they threaten you with legal repercussions.
"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."
This is how I explain it to people: I can take a picture of you in public, but if I follow you around everywhere you are in public photographing you, it's stalking. There's a similar line somewhere for LE.
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.
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."
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?
> 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.
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.
It may be true that, in the US, one cannot reasonably expect privacy in the various instants of their public existence, but when you aggregate those instants into a timeline then a reasonable person very much does have an expectation of privacy (otherwise stalking would be perfectly acceptable in society).
Outside the US, I would not be surprised if other cultures have developed a much higher expectation of privacy (or at least discretion and confidentiality) than the US.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
If I were going to craft such an amendment, I'd probably make a distinction between active monitoring and passive monitoring and require reasonable suspicion to switch to active.
If I go shoot up a theatre, the police would allowed to put an active trace on me and query their database.
They wouldn't be allowed to just search for drug users by investigating who goes near drug corners.
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?
> 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.
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.
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".
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.
The government isn't a private citizen and is precluded from doing things, like keeping dossiers on non-suspects. But apparently the courts, which only respond to complaints by directly effected parties (which the litmus test for is preposterous), have made it ok to circumvent the spirit of the constitution by outsourcing surveillance. I would argue that if the government is precluded from doing something, of course they would still be precluded from doing the same action by proxy. We are, and so should they be.
And your second question, I would assume you would end up in jail for illegally monitoring government security employees.
(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.)
Geoffrey Perret, in his biography of Eisenhower, claims that, in one draft of the speech, the phrase was "military–industrial–congressional complex", indicating the essential role that the United States Congress plays in the propagation of the military industry, but the word "congressional" was dropped from the final version to appease the then-currently elected officials. http://schott.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/guest-post-james-...
> Is there a word for government and corporations weaving themselves together?
Several. The fact that the economic system of the early industrial period featured an arrangement of property rights which favored holders of capital (corporations exist only as ideas, but their owners are real beings) who then exerted disproportionate power over all institutions of society, including government, leaving those capitalists the dominant power in all domains of life is why critics of that early industrial economic system named it "capitalism", and the weaving together of corporate and government power driven by corporate influence over government remains a strong feature of capitalism. (Supporters of "capitalism" who have attempted to redefine "capitalism" to mean some ideal system of perfect market freedom rather than the actual system the term was coined to refer to often treat this as something other than capitalism, or as a failed form "crony capitalism".)
More formal integration of government, industry, and organized labor is corporatism, top-down forms dictated by the central government of corporatism were features of Italian fascism and many authoritarian movements of roughly the same time. This has sometimes led to the equation of corporatism with authoritarianism/fascism, though this is an error: corporatism is substantially older, and has substantially broader reach -- it is no more equivalent to fascism than anti-communism (also a feature of fascism) is.
And, despite the rhetorical differences in how the integration works, such integration is also a feature of those Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist Communist regimes that either don't go so far as to completely eliminate private industry, or which back off from it.
Which, taken together, illustrates the reason why there isn't a term in general use for corporations (which are, after all, creatures of government) and government weaving themselves together -- its a feature of every economic system that has actually practiced in which corporations exist, from capitalism to the various reactions against liberal capitalism.
Very interesting. This made me realize the outsourcing the extension of empire power via the East India Company, Hudson's Bay Company, etc. One could view corporations with a large enough <something> as a fifth branch of government.
Most of the other replies to your question have been with the answer "Fascism". However, as I discuss this sort of thing a lot both online/offline, I can tell you that a lot of people think this is some sort of weird property of "capitalism".
People who are ignorant of history don't realize that Mussolini was trying to sell fascism (which invented a new, top-down version of corporatism) as equivalent to corporatism (which had been discussed for many years, and defined in the late 19th century in a more organic, bottom-up way which was not "the merger of state and corporate power" by a group convened under the auspices of the Pope) because corporatism was a well-established, at the time, element of Catholic social teaching and a popular idea, and he wanted to steal the label to reinforce the political appeal of Fascism.
so you're saying the current oligarchy of Bilderberg and Legatus attendees is somehow superior and less tyrrannical, and therefore different than Mussolini's vision, because there are more of them?
The two are not mutually exclusive. Most "capitalist" countries really have mixed economies, which are perfectly compatible with the tenets of Fascism.
Untrue. I believe they lease equipment to repo-men, who get discounts (and possibly payments) based on the amount of plate data they feed back to Vigilant.
A private citizen could take the photos and store them on a computer.
A private citizen could not easily run them against license plate databases at scale and resolve the identity of the car's owner to the name of a real person.
A private citizen could not then take that real person's name and run it against LE databases to determine whether the registered owner of the car were a known arsonist, terrorist suspect, felon, firearms owner, or campaign contributor to whomever.
If the battle is to be fought and won, I would be surprised if "taking pictures" were the act found to be unconstitutional. I would be slightly less surprised if "storing every bit of metadata possible on every human possible" were found to be unconstitutional, and that storage / reconciliation should likely be the targets of our efforts.
License plate recognition capabilities are within the reach of decent programmers right now. I actually wrote such a thing on contract recently. The critical difference between me writing this kind of code and this initiative is the data mining. Government (with private mandate in this case) has huge capabilities to correlate data the individual does not have.
Yes, a private citizen couldn't do this, because a private citizen can only spend so much time and money taking pictures, storing them and providing database access.
If a group of private citizens were to pool their efforts, it would be conspiracy to break the law, just as if a group of private citizens or a corporation were to pool their efforts to displenish any other public resource like airwaves, water supply, clean water, quiet, clean air, etc.
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.
It's a really great primer on a number of issues concerning free travel in the USA and what law enforcement can and cannot do. Also covers other possible ways that the government can track your vehicle (toll transponders, tire sensors, etc). Read the whole thing when you have time.
I've seen a few attempts using IR LEDs to wash out cameras, but none that are very convincing. There may be some merit to this approach though, if implemented with more luminous LEDs at higher power, etc.
There are already a variety of covers, lens, lights, and reflective paint for obscuring your license plate (to avoid speed camera tickets and paying tolls). And of course, doing so is already illegal in many places. See e.g. https://www.phantomplate.com/
That would be a great business to go into if someone is shady.
Look, pay us $1000 to hide from police.
What are they going to do, call the police next time they are caught running a red light -- "please arrest this company they promised I could run red lights without being caught".
It would be kind of like people calling the police complaining their illegal drug stash was stolen.
Not the best source, but I recall Mythbusters testing some of these things years ago without any success. That site is particularly scammy ($500 to get started as a dealer! "I made over $21k in less than half a day!") but do you know of any that are actually verified to work?
Rectangular bumper stickers on either side that resemble a plate? Add some numbers on the side to resemble a plate? There are already a number of solutions for obscuring them from cameras, probably going to be hard to find something legal that works well and can't be coded against.
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.
CV Dazzle looks interesting. I suspect what we're looking at in those pictures is common everyday fashion of the future. As our governments start implementing automatic face/license plate/whatever detection people are going to implement measures to evade them which will make their way into general society as benign fashion statements.
I know people in Illinois used to avoid the toll booth license plate cameras by bending their motorcycle license plates upwards since it only looks for flat rectangles.
Another option would be opt out completely and ride a bike.
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.
When I worked on a TPMS system around 2007, we couldn't get the VIN off a sensor. We could get the sensor id and maybe the tire id (depending on the type of TPMS system). We had access to the VIN in our flash, as well as access to it over the CAN bus from a number of sources. I'd expect that you would have a very difficult time measuring random vehicles sensor ids and readings if they're just driving by because of how low throughput the system was.
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.
Direct TPMS sensors that use RFID transmit a serial number but probably not the VIN.
Many cars use indirect TPMS which uses the ABS sensors to measure rotational difference between wheels, thus indicating a low-pressure situation. No RFID is used.
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.
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...) 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.
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.
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.
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 :/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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"
'The Register has noted that "in theory a system could be organised in such a way that records of law-abiding drivers weren't generated at all, but that hasn't been the way things have panned out.'
The problem here is not ANPR. The problem here is the application of section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, a law that is, in my opinion, not sufficiently circumscribed. A law that was also deemed illegal by the European Court of Human Rights. That same law can be used to stop and search anybody for any reason whatsoever, ANPR or not. The solution is to fix the law to prevent abuse, not to remove ANPR leading to potentially, and in my opinion, more dangerous roads.
The point is that the harder it is to do something, the less likely it will be done.
If you have to post officers throughout a metro and distribute lists of plates to look out for, you have to contend with
1) The limited number of officers you can pull off of other police duties
2) The limited amount of space in each officer's head to keep that list of plates
3) The limited amount of focus each officer can give to the task of checking each plate that passes by
This means that you'll either put out APBs for only the most important cases, or you'll move more manpower from other police duties to surveillance. There's a natural limiter in play.
On the other hand, if you have your tireless friend whose powers of omniscience and perfect recall are only limited by the number of installed cameras in the city and hard drives in his array; you'll put out APBs for any case you feel like. Your friend will watch for all of them, 24/7/365.
Because you don't need assign more manpower to watch for more plates, there is practically no upper bound to your ability to track persons of interest [0] within your city.
I agree that improperly vague laws are a pox on all civil societies, but there's much more to this case than the Terrorism Act. The vast, inhuman ability of Those In Power to cheaply and easily surveil vast numbers of people is an issue that's no less important.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's not illegal for me to happen to walk down the street behind you for a couple of blocks; we both happen to be going in the same direction. Same for cars.
What happens if I make the same 20 turns as you, though, at the same intersections, right behind you? At first it was a coincidence, but after a certain number of turns, it's probably not.
What if I did this every day for a year? You could probably get a restraining order against me for stalking. But for two turns one day last year? Definitely not.
The outward behavior is exactly the same, I just happened to be following behind you (that's what I'll argue). Why should the courts treat a couple of blocks any differently than many miles for many days?
I've heard the "occasionally is nothing, repeatedly is stalking" argument on here repeatedly and (ianal but I know some) this is inaccurate. There are two requirements for a charge of stalking: willfully and repeatedly, and criminal intent.[0]
In other words, I can follow you all i want as long as I'm not trying to be stealthy, or I can be as stealthy as I want as long as I don't follow you repeatedly.
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.
I think the reasonableness issue comes into play in two ways:
First, its an objective test, which means reasonableness is based on factors such as democratic accountability, personal autonomy, threats of government abuse, etc.
Second, it's only "reasonable" at an individual level to expet your public locations are being logged if you expect the police have the resources to put a tail on every person in America, which is crazy (Kevin Bankston and Ashkan Soltani have a great paper on "costs" of surveillance and location tracking specifically: http://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/tiny-constables-and-the-...). The aggregate effect of monitoring everyone's location is a very new concept, and appears very unreasonable based on social norms.
As far as arbitrariness of drawing lines, I think a clear distinction can be made in use of electronic devices to generate location data (in establishing a legal standard the question gets more complex; I recommend looking at writings on topic by Prof. Susan Freiwald, who has done excellent research on the issue). Basing a rule on use of electronic devices is the path states are going down to address both demands for cell phone location data, and directly obtaining location data through devices such as stingrays. It's a simple approach with a clear line that directly gets to the problem of electronic generation of data giving the government unprecedented power regarding location data.
> 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?
quantitative change leads to qualitative change at some point.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.