License Plate Scanners - And More

[jyl]

License plate scanning systems - a camera connected to a computer and a database, which read license plates and record their location/time, check for violations, and alert the officer in the patrol car - are becoming more common.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/10/13/MNJFSO1NM.DTL

These can be used to find stolen cars, locate wanted persons, enforce parking regulations, and issue speeding tickets.

When the systems are common enough, law enforcement databases could know where every person's car is at all hours of every day.

Working facial recognition systems are further off, but eventually every person's movement on foot could also be tracked.

Thoughts? On this particular technology, or more generally on law enforcement information-gathering?

[onlycafe]

hello 1984.

[john70t]

There was an artical in the paper about how Onstar can deter car theft(and high speed police chases) by remotely slowing the GM vehicle "safetly to a halt." It's just a matter of time before the police unions, the insurance industry, various advertising groups push for it to be standard by law.

Good luck with any DIY hahaha. Of course, the manufacturer owns the proprietary code to repair the vehicle, which they can lease, or not, at their own discretion. Mabye Heck, they could even build in an extra surcharge to "unlock" the full HP in that sportscar you just bought.
Having "non-authorized tires" on the car will put the vehicle into "limp mode". Didn't you read the fine print?

There are too many people who all want to know where you are going, what you are doing and buying, who you are seeing, what you are communicating, how you are feeling.
Money and control. Your purchased vehicle is only leased from conglomerates and your daily lives shall be monitored in minutia. It's all for the best, commrade. All your base are belong to us.

[Moneyguy1]

ANd the software on your PCs is also controlled by the manufacturer already. It is "licensed" and, for example, re-installing a hard drive into another motherboard is problematical at best since the machine's software considers itself "pirated". (this according to a former computer guru at IBM)

[fingpilot]

I found aluminum foil on sale at Target today.

Bought enuf for a years' supply of hats.

Can't seem to do sheet about them damn helicopters, tho.

[p911dad]

A year and a half ago I was involved with an "intelligent transportation project" and several guys and myself got inside a large metro-type traffic control center. This particular center is international, and has sponsors in both USA and Canada, as the traffic is really flowing in and out of the metro area in both countries.
I was amazed at the technology involved and the also the high resolution of the cameras(also infrared spectrum is available in some). The operators sit in a large room with a monster screen that can be one giant screen or many smaller screens. These guys control signals, traffic message signs, etc.
The cameras can zoom on individual cars and you can see the plate #'s clearly, although they have software that ignore the #'s in the setting I saw in operation.
These operations are common in all large metros. If you are at all paranoid about this stuff, I think you may have good reason to be. They have cameras seemingly everywhere. They swear they don't share with the cops.

[stealthn]

We just got a new downtown parking system wherein you park where there used to be meters, you enter the zone code, your plate # in a corner box and pay with credit card. I thought "neat" now do they still have old guys checking licenses, but then I saw a little car with 8 external cameras pointing out at all angles, and a wireless transmitter on the roof.

So I guess this guy just drives around all day (and he wasn't going slow) and the cameras scan the plates of parked cars and relays/checks wirelessly back to the CO and I assume they dispatch a ticket writer if your time is past, or you haven't paid. Kinda cool.....now if I can just decrypt the encryption of the signal and scramble my plate each time it gets transmitted.....hmmmm

[Porsche-O-Phile]

Pretty soon the license plates won't actually be plates but microchips. I'm surprised there aren't bar codes or other such items on plates currently, actually. . .

[tcar]

There is a mall here in Denver that is advertising that they've put plate scanners in the parking garages. Aditional security.

[Porsche-O-Phile]

Car covers. Use 'em. Love 'em.

[Jeff Higgins]

I wonder just how much of a typical police department's equipment budget is spent on items used for traffic enforcement. I wonder what percentage of total man-hours are spent on traffic enforcement. I'm sure it varies with the nature of the community being policed; i.e. an upper middle class "bedroom" community vs. a big metropoliten area. It just seems as though there is a great deal of time and money being expended in this area of enforcement.

[MRM]

They have cameras everywhere but they don't share them with the cops because the video isn't being taped. It's live action only.

Haven't license plate scanners been used in Europe since the 70s?

[jyl]

My interest in this is broader than just license plate scanners.

Advances in data gathering and databases are going to force us to make some big policy decisions in the next couple years.

A tremendous amount of information about each of us is gathered every minute by business and goverment. Every penny we spend on credit and debit cards, every call we make on cellphones and landlines, every website we visit and email we send/receive, all our medical treatments and prescriptions, automated toll bridges we take, our airline flights, what magazines we subscribe to, what books we buy, what we watch on TiVO and etc etc - and now, with license plate scanners and security cameras, everywhere we drive and even walk.

If all that information were viewed together, each of us would be completely naked, so to speak.

At the same time, databases are getting bigger and better, and all this data is electronically accessible to a much greater extent than before. Our personal information is no longer buried in paper records stored in Iron Mountain, it can be accessed near-real-time and tied together, cross-referenced, and analyzed.

The final change is that the government has become far more aggressive in commandering and using this information. Since 9/11, we (via our Congress) have given the feds major new powers to demand individual's records from any business, without warrants. The current administration has claimed inherent power to go even further than the Patriot Act allows, in collecting individual information. The feds are aggressively using data mining techniques to sift through all this data, and are not limiting uses to "terrorism" investigations.

To date, we - "we" meaning US citizens and our representatives in Congress - have had very little debate about how the government should be allowed to use all this data, and we've had very little disclosure about how the government is in fact using this data.

That is my concern/interest in all this. I'd like to see the country, Congress and Administration actually debate what our individual privacy protections should be, in the new era of massive automated data collection.

[MRM]

That is a real and valid concern. previously we could be fast and loose with public data because it was so had to compile and cross reference. With the electronic new frontier all of our public but personal data can be obtained, indexed and cross referenced in seconds. There is a commercial database that is available to almost anyone where you can find out extremely accurate employment history, who lives with you, relatives, and people you have a relationship with - for five bucks a search. The database dumps public records from everything from property tax records to the DMV to magazine subscriptions to form an accurate picture of you.

The point is that while it is not private that you drive a certain car, take a certain toll road to a certain job, live with a wife dog and two and a half kids, it used to be that someone could find out one of these facts about you. But now technology allows people to learn all of these things about you at once and for five bucks they can use public data to know things it should take a stalker to find out.

The natural limiting factor of searching and compiling this data by hand is gone, transforming the power of data collection into something we will have to regulate by law since we can't count on nature to do it anymore.