License Plate Readers Exposed – How Public Safety Agencies Responded | Hacker News Reader

License Plate Readers Exposed – How Public Safety Agencies Responded

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85 pointsreitanqild33 comments

This joke always comes to my mind with plate readers:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-URBVGKEBRss/U0GgQetIwEI/AAAAAAAAC2...

Oh yes. little bobby tables we call him. https://xkcd.com/327/

I wish they wouldn't withhold information on locating such devices via shodan.io or other methods. The more people look at such issues, the better - and the victim's privacy has been compromised already, so it's unlikely that disclosure would cause so much more damage to them as to justify obstructing further security research.

Whenever something like this happens I am always left wondering if it would be better to legalize and organize some sort of "locking service" which goes around the (national) IPs, finds the holes, breaks in, fixes the hole and sends a message to owner (if it is possible to determine who it is).

I think I am mostly aware of the implications, but I wonder if net effect would be positive...

If that is all it will do why not write and release. Interesting analogy. Viruses are now understood to facilitate horizontal gene transfer. Viruses and the rest of our microbiome are functionally key constituents of the "human" organism. This relationship is not a one off. It is found, to a greater or lesser extent, in many biological systems. Yet, we have only formally welcomed one such distinction into the public discourse surrounding the Internet : Memes. I think there is an argument to be made that, software viruses are not absolutely bad, and that code once release has a life of its own. We should therefore accept, and in some circumstances embrace, such contributions to the code base of the Internet.

Unfortunately I doubt the net positive effect would be enough to bring in the money needed to fend of potential litigation when the service accidentally fixes something in a broken manner.

I am just dreading the day they move from license plate readers to face readers. The technology is advancing fast enough for it to happen

Truth to be told - I'll buy one

I'll buy them too. For every access point to our neighborhood/gated-complex.

As long as the privacy implications are solved, and reasonable. I don't see any reason why local communities can't use this to prevent crime by excluding undesirable individuals from gaining access.

I hope you mean whitelisting instead of blacklisting? otherwise, where would you get the list of "undesired" (whatever that means) individuals?

"Undesired" could mean anything the local community/neighborhood decides it to be. Personally, I would not want anyone with criminal records in my neighborhood/private property. Is that perfect? No, but it's a good start.

Whitelisting would also be more difficult to maintain, but is already done in a lot of gated complexes I've seen. Where the individual phones ahead, and get's given a ticket that has a day pass or something.

Ultimately, I believe this will get a lot of backlash as it will make a lot of people uncomfortable as to the implications.

So if you get a traffic ticket or points on your driving license - your run out of town does this also include smiling at white women

>"So if you get a traffic ticket or points on your driving license - your run out of town"

That's not what I said.

>"does this also include smiling at white women"

If people choose to be racist and prevent people from going onto their private property, that's their business as long as they're not physically hurting anyone.

You said criminal record - which driving offenses are.

And your housing estate is not private property in the same sense your house is - the public highway is the "public highway".

>"You said criminal record - which driving offenses are."

I was more referring to the part about "driving people out of town" if they happen to have some minor criminal record (due to a driving offence as you suggest). That's a gross misinterpretation of what I even vaguely suggested. Private people controlling access to their private property isn't the same as "driving" someone out of "town". At least not unless the entire town is owned privately, or most/all of the individual owners in the town decide collectively to "not allow" this individual. But if you're at that level, then they might as well be passing local laws that will affect said individual anyways.

>"And your housing estate is not private property in the same sense your house is"

I don't live in the US, so please take that phrase with a little bit of interpretation. Where I live, there are very specific laws governing what they call "sectional titles". It's owned cooperatively as far as I'm aware by all the owners of the individual stands. And it is in no way "public" property in that the public has a right to access it.

If you don't live in the US why are you commenting

You do know that the USA has had issues in the past with redlining and you said any criminal record.

You do know that in the USA in some areas they use driving offenses to disenfranchise Black and other ethnic Voters.

> You said criminal record - which driving offenses are.

In many jurisdictions, most moving violations are civil offenses, not criminal offenses; they have only fines and administrative penalties (not imprisonment or loss of protected liberty) as punishment and have only the civil "preponderance of the evidence" standard of proof rather than the criminal "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard.

But this varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and in some they are minor crimes rather than civil violations.

>>Personally, I would not want anyone with criminal records in my neighborhood/private property.

There are plenty of good people who get labeled criminals and plenty of people would really should have a criminal record but avoided it. Don't make the mistake of aligning morals/ethics with the law. What's legal often isn't morally sound, what's illegal doesn't make sense half the time until you follow the money.

>"Don't make the mistake of aligning morals/ethics with the law. "

I'm an anarcho-capitalist, so I don't align my morals/ethics with the law. All I'm implying is that being a convicted criminal, to some extent, is an undesirable property of individuals you want near your safe area.

>"There are plenty of good people who get labeled criminals and plenty of people would really should have a criminal record but avoided it."

You have to assume the process by which they were convicted was reasonable for the suggested idea. If that's not the case then of course you shouldn't give too-much weight to being convicted. Again, it's up to the individuals how they wish to restrict access to their private property. Some will take this as a good signal for exclusion, others (like you, perhaps) will not.

Who says it hasn't.

ALPR cameras are interesting. I've been looking at ALPR as a solution for understanding how traffic moves through your city/town. Transport planning feels like it is very much something done in the dark ages and primarily focused around traffic flow. Scheme results are hard to determine and even harder to reverse/tweak.

Creating a network of ALPR cameras that enable mapping of major routes and centres of interest (e.g. schools) can also enable Local Authorities to focus money "cleverly".

A case in point is Poynton, UK. Where a radical scheme has seen amazing results despite restricting traffic massively. http://www.sustrans.org.uk/our-services/what-we-do/route-des...

Poynton seems to have achieved its result without the massively disproportionate act of mass surveillance you seem to be advocating.

Admittedly transport behaviour through the scheme could be measured with cable vehicle counters, however determining the exact speed at which a vehicle travels through the scheme could not be done without ALPR.

In the UK, there is a push to implement 20MPH zones throughout most residential streets. Using ALPR you could easily measure the impact of these changes to the average speed of vehicles. Yes you could identify "speeding" drivers but I do not see that as a bad thing.

however determining the exact speed at which a vehicle travels through the scheme could not be done without ALPR

Of course it could. One way would be to ask for volunteers (compensated or not) to put stickers on their cars which would uniquely identify them.

Yes I have seen schemes like this used, but the analysis is at most done on one day only and can be exceptionally expensive (labour costs).

To reduce costs local authorities use the simpler and poorer cable counts. ALPR gives full visibility of traffic flow. Something other tracking systems are taking to their logical conclusion http://insights.strava.com/

Clearly using ALPR is convenient and produces better results. So would studying people's sex habits by surreptitiously using their laptop cameras instead of asking for volunteers.

Expectation of privacy in a private/public place.

> Expectation of privacy in a private/public place.

Private spaces have "always" been private.

Public spaces have "always" been pseudo-private. I used to live out in the country when I was younger with every house sitting on multiple acres. If I stopped in the street and had a conversation with a friend, it was a private conversation because we could see other people from a substantial distance.

In public people generally assume that what they're doing is basically private unless they can tell that they're being watched, or other humans are so close that there can be no privacy.

Technology has outstripped people's awareness of it though. It used to be, for all of history until 20 years ago that license plates were only for other people. Your car didn't care about it, the bridge didn't care about it, license plates were only for other humans (government, police, citizens, etc) to identify your car in some official-ish manner.

Now there are machines which can read them from a substantial distance through difficult lighting automatically, nearly flawlessly and retain that information with near perfect fidelity for very, very long time spans. It shouldn't be surprising that people don't know this, don't like it when they find out about it, and react negatively towards it.

It's like finding out that there is magic, and has been for years, and that you've been purposefully kept in the dark about it so that some entity with a lot of power has a little more in a vague and unsettling way.

The UK no longer issues car tax discs. They simply use ALPR on all major roads. This idea that driving on public roads affords you any privacy is an illusion.

Why do you need cameras for understanding how traffic flows? The start and end points of any particular driver's route are not required to map how traffic flows. You just need to count cars ('axles' technically) at strategic points - before and after key intersections.

One example that comes to mind would be four neighbourhoods in a row along a freeway. At each neighbourhood, traffic slows to 30mph to handle local traffic. Does it make sense to build a bypass to facilitate getting directly from neighbourhood A to D? Observing axle counts only tells you the volume from A to B, B to C, and C to D, but doesn't provide information about new roads or routes that might improve things.

Url changed from http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/lprs-exposed-how-..., which points to this.

I can almost guarantee the people against ALPR are most likely the same people who have no problem throwing a camera in somebody's face in your local Starbucks or something, and then when asked to stop recording, they say "but bro it's a public place".

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