Judge orders police to stop collecting data from license plate readers | Hacker News Reader

Judge orders police to stop collecting data from license plate readers

washingtonpost.com

178 pointsjatsign76 comments

What a pleasant surprise this ruling is. The DC area (of which Fairfax county is part) is probably one of the most government tracking heavy regions of the US. This is a curve-ball on par with the CA judge that overturned the mag ban recently. I would never have predicted this ruling.

>Nine states have passed laws limiting how long the police can maintain the data, ranging from three minutes (New Hampshire)

Now that I could have predicted. If any state is going to proactively curb law enforcement's capability to build a dragnet it's gonna be NH.

"This is a curve-ball on par with the CA judge that overturned the mag ban recently."

Wait, what ?

I had no idea this was the case ... fascinating.

https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2019/03/john-boch/breaking...

> If any state is going to proactively curb law enforcement's capability to build a dragnet it's gonna be NH.

License plate collection used to be outright prohibited there (with toll both exception) before they caved on Real ID.

>before they caved on Real ID.

I blame that on two things (in no particular order).

1) There's been tons of money dangled in front of state legislators incentivizing them to break from what their constituents actually want because both the national parties want to make the state theirs. If you have enough money (from voting how the people with the money want you to vote) to steamroll whoever you're running against you don't actually have to listen to your constituents that much.

2)The MA 5th column.

> If you have enough money (from voting how the people with the money want you to vote) to steamroll whoever you're running against you don't actually have to listen to your constituents that much.

Perhaps we need to reconsider the idea of running government on the basis of a popularity content. Perhaps we should give strange women lying in ponds dispensing swords a reconsideration.

> Perhaps we should give strange women lying in ponds dispensing swords a reconsideration.

Bring back Monarchy and Manifest Destiny? How would that be any different than what we have now? Money can be used to influence Kings and Kingdoms just as easily as politicians.

If we could ever secure mobile devices and servers well enough, I think a direct democracy could be interesting. Mob rule, for all it's faults, still works better than having a ruling class.

> Perhaps we need to reconsider the idea of running government on the basis of a popularity conte_s_t.

Have I spotted a Dvorak user in the wild? :)

>2)The MA 5th column.

Build the wall.

It would be an even more pleasant surprise if the judge put some teeth in the ruling and awarded every person whose license plate was in a surveillance database a penalty, to be charged to the Fairfax police.

  the CA judge that overturned the mag ban recently

Actually a Federal district judge, deciding a case against the CA Attorney General.

What makes NH so special?

NH state motto: "Live Free or Die"

Live free or die, baby!

Anyone have an open source license place reader software? I always thought this would be good for a neighbourhood watch kind of project.

This was a good read, along those lines:

https://medium.freecodecamp.org/how-i-replicated-an-86-milli...

iSpy is open source, but it's LPR plugin is proprietary and costs money: https://www.ispyconnect.com/

OpenALPR has it's library on GitHub, but I think the completed "solutions" are all paid for: https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr

I work in this space, building the tools to help LEAs seach their databases. I also have conflicting feelings about how this could be used. We built in access control down to the specific camera, auditing of every user action, requiring the reason you are performing an action, and mandating the user associate an open case in the same access group as the camera you are querying in order to view the data.

Its pretty locked down to help prevent abuse. I'm not saying abuse is impossible but LEOs or more likely, their administrators, but it is difficult to do it and get away.

I've heard from the higher ups, that abuse used to be rampant in other systems, but since switching to our software, only a handful of people have been found to abuse it.

Yes, until the government passes new laws which reduce those protections and allow the use of this data for other things. It's really great you built in decent protections, but that doesn't mean they'll always be in place. Us techies seem to think technology exists in a static environment, but it doesn't.

Always ask yourself before working on stuff, if the USA were to turn to fascism tomorrow, would your work be helping us fight it or helping it subjugate us?

yeah no thanks, i'll just take the paycheck

"Fuck you", then, since that's what you're saying to all of us.

And then the feed goes to the Feds, and they have their own tools to mine the dataset that aren't subject to your controls and audits. This is an area that requires laws.

We want to protect innocent people from snooping and harassment, but we also want law enforcement to have useful resources. These shouldn’t be mutually exclusive requirements.

It always baffles me that nobody thinks to set up a best-of-both-worlds system whereby all the data is gathered, but stored in a secure database under the control of an independent government entity, possibly the courts themselves. If you’re tracking a suspect, get a warrant and the court will supply the data.

The same should apply to all passive data gathering systems like body cams.

Don't see how that's a lot better. As long as the database exists, it has potential for abuse later. No reason to think the courts are more ethical than the police.

If the courts and the police are both colluding against you, then, I'm sorry to say, you don't actually have any rights. In that case, the ship has already sailed, and license plate readers should be the last of your worries.

Welcome to the reality of being poor in America. You summed up the exasperation we feel every day quite nicely, it's like the game is already over before I even got a court date.

retention rules, access rules, and verification of both, are what secure us from abuse. violations should be defined as criminal violation subject to prosecution.

except that where we have this three strikes for civilian criminal activities we should have a one strike and your out for public officials

Either way, abuses will happen. Would you rather be abused by the government or by random strangers?

In general, a random stranger - or even someone I knew from school, folks working for the parks department, and so on have little or no power over me.

The police or other law enforcement, however? These are folks that not only can abuse the power, but use it to factually or falsely accuse me of a crime. That's enough to ruin a life. You don't even need to be convicted for it to cause serious life issues, sometimes for years. These are the very people that I should be able to turn to when someone abuses it, and I am under the impression they would cover up their own abuses ... much like they do now.

The same really goes for politicians, but the scenario is different.

Honestly, random strangers.

Their motivations will be far more transparent than those of gov't level entities. Also, you can respond to your house getting robbed by adding locks, bars, camera's etc. If a gov't level entity is abusing you, your options are much more limited. That's why nipping over-reach in the bud is important.

Random strangers tend to abuse specific individuals. Governments tend to abuse classes of people. So I'll take the former, if those are my two options.

I think when the guys says random strangers, he's still talking about the police, just that if you leave it to individual police stations then anyone working there can basically wander in, not at every police station obviously, but if they're each doing their own info security, then many of them.

One large database that requires a warrant to access can at least be more easily held to higher standards.

On the flip side, 1. the local Sheriff is much easier to get rid of through elections for not keeping himself or his officers from such behavior 2. the local Sheriff can be impeached, meaning there is a higher authority to appeal to when abuse happens. If the highest authority is committing the abuse, what recourse do you have?

In general, it is always better to let the lowest possible authority level handle something. If parents can handle it, the city shouldn't take it over. If the city can, the state shouldn't. If the state can, the Fed shouldn't.

This isn't a question of different levels "handling" the issues, it's a case of different levels maintaining their own databases of highly sensitive information, I still think a local sheriff should be running local investigations, but think a local sheriff seriously should fucking not have unfettered access to the exact location of my car at all times without needing a warrant.

The choices are not mutually exclusive, and also things can happen like random strangers who work for the government abuse a citizen in their spare time.

I think we're not going to have easy wins here, and people will need to think about their values and make their own ethical decisions.

Prohibiting these databases will absolutely take a useful tool away from law enforcement, and it will also absolutely reduce the potential for abuse.

There might be some middle ground out there, but nonetheless at some point we, as a society, will have to decide if, when, and how we prefer liberty (and some criminal risk) to authoritarianism (less criminal risk).

The key point you bring up here makes me wonder what will happen in the future of society. Take this issue of liberty vs authoritarianism for the sake of security. We, as a society, are not going to come to any mutually agreeable decision on this topic. To see why simply try to go reductio ad absurdum on the topic. Imagine a device was built that could automatically track each and every person with complete and absolute identifiable detail at every single moment. There are people, probably quite a lot, that would fully support government deployment of such a device. It might not eliminate crime, but it would mean that 100% of criminals, whom the state chooses to pursue, would be able to be punished. Of course should the government become a bad actor it also means they could oppress whomever they wanted with absolutely ruthless efficiency and targeting.

People who trust governments to secure such a device and do not think modern governments can ever repeat something such as Nazi Germany will vehemently support the system and nothing short of the system. They'd see it as ushering in something approaching utopia. Those who do believe history has a habit of repeating itself will vehemently oppose the system in any way, shape, or form. They'd, in turn, see it as the first steps towards an unimaginable dystopia. And there are going to be big chunks of people on both sides. How are you supposed to solve this in a democracy? And as ever more issues become not only politicized but sharply polarized, this is going to be a recurring problem.

There seems to be no conceivable answer to this problem (the fundamental one, not necessarily just liberty vs security) outside of Balkanization. The founding fathers would have appealed to the conflict leading to a deadlock and thus no progress in either direction, but this itself cedes the case for one side or the other on topics like this. It's not a question of doing A or doing B. In such cases, deadlock would leave the question unanswered and thus neither side would get what they want. In this case it's a question of doing A or not doing A. And so deadlock is itself an answer to that question, giving one side exactly what they want.

Two possibilities:

1) Break the false dichotomy. Large swaths of the West don't have serious crime problems, although availability bias given sensationalist news outlets and the prevalence of crime dramas might cause public opinion to differ from reality. Extant automated enforcement mechanisms are often just automated revenue mechanisms. The benefits to individual citizens from crime reduction compared to the risks to individual citizens from the rise of a totalitarian/genocidal/'evil' state seem obviously lopsided. Why take on something an tremendous tail risk when it only has marginal potential benefits?

2) Federalism vs. Balkanization. Allow local governments to do what they think is best; allow people to move freely. This would work in the US and EU, at very least.

Body cams are a little bit more specific to "actual interactions with police", and I think it's worthwhile for both the officer and the private citizen to have access to that footage.

LPRs is interesting because this falls kinda in a "right to be forgotten" territory. The car "saw" you, in a public space, and we're recognizing that it's really not okay for police to remember everywhere they've seen a car. As an RTBF supporter, I'm alright with that. They arguably still can have a lot of value to police, if only able to record plates of cars of interest. Since an officer can't read every plate on the road, much less compare it to a list, an LPR can look for plates from BOLOs or open cases automatically, presumably, and notify the officer if it sees one, without hoovering up and storing every plate it sees.

But there's also a lot of interesting value in being able to track someone's location during an investigation, even for exculpatory reasons. I do track my own car, and the police could issue a warrant for that data, though they'd have to serve it to me directly. Perhaps onboard black boxes is more the direction this should be heading. (Most non-base model cars likely have GPS already and probably record their history already, mind you.)

Somehow, law enforcement once managed to do its job reasonably well even in the absence of pervasive surveillance.

That's debatable. Try going to law enforcement with anything non-trivial, and see how that goes. People routinely get murdered by someone that's a known and reported threat to them personally.

You might be shocked what the police are unable or unwilling to go after someone for. Things like aggravated assault, stalking, and breaking / entering. If you have a known address and whereabouts for someone, and you've checked there once (or a few times), what else can you really do? These tools can be used to automate things that would be extremely costly for an officer(s) to do.

I don't agree with pervasive surveillance btw, and there are other factors that cause law enforcement to be ineffective. I strongly disagree with your premise, though.

By "reasonably well" I don't mean "solves every crime." I mean well enough to keep society running smoothly, with affordable property insurance and the average person having low risk of violent injury or death.

There's a big difference between "solves every crime" and "is effective at solving crime". I think you're grossly overestimated what the police will do for you, if there isn't low hanging fruit, or some driving factor (someone "important" involved, multiple complaints, politics, ect.).

If there's single victim that hasn't died and the perpetrator isn't easy to find, they might just wait until they run into them or they murder someone. That's not an exaggeration, I've personally seen them unwilling to step in when a violent criminal is out to get someone, or someones being blatantly defrauded.

> I mean well enough to keep society running smoothly, with affordable property insurance and the average person having low risk of violent injury or death.

Well, that's a fairly heinous definition of law enforcement working well as it also covers, say, fascist secret police. Society running smoothly should not be prioritized over society running ethically. This is the core of why you could consider police primarily protecting the property rights of rich people: a disrupted rich person is enormously inefficient in terms of capital use, but a disrupted poor person is just another burden on society without much effect on the economic health signals to which people refer.

Mass surveillance is a favorite tool of secret police, most famously the Stasi of East Germany. If we want to avoid secret police, we should avoid mass surveillance, even if that means some criminals get away.

I agree, I just don't think you should be exaggerating the capabilities of the police.

I wonder if they actually did. It would be interesting to see a comparison of what percentage of petty crimes were caught in history compared to now.

Would it though? Didn't I just read an article pointed to by Hacker News about a woman in England, where they have millions of surveillance cameras, who's purse and laptop was stolen and it was pretty obvious who did it and where he went with it, and the police basically threw up their hands and said, "Well, nothing we can do about it!"? It seems as though they aren't targeting petty crimes with all this surveillance, so I'm not sure that what the comparison would show us would be meaningful.

The Black Panthers did the job reasonably well too.

That sounds an awful lot like the FISA court. No way to make sure they don't just rubber stamp such warrants.

Here's a little secret.

Courts already rubber-stamp warrants. There is no court on Earth where the average request for a search warrant will be declined.

The purpose of asking a court for a warrant that it will 100% approve is to permit targeted investigations, while preventing fishing expeditions. If the police wants to investigate someone, or something, courts will rubber-stamp their request. This is by design.

I don't understand, it sounds like you are contradicting yourself. First you say courts rubber stamp warrants, then you say they they distinguish between fishing expeditions and targeted investigations. Which is it?

Any judge worth their salt will rubber-stamp a search warrant for Bob Joe, with a justification of: "Officer Harry had a 'hunch' that Bob Joe may be a criminal of some kind."

Most judges will not approve a search warrant for an entire city block, with a justification of: "Officer Harry had a 'hunch' that a criminal may live somewhere there, or that criminal activity of some kind may be taking place in this area."

As long as warrants are targeted, they tend to be rubber-stamped. The purpose of the warrant process is to make sure that law enforcement is targeted.

> Any judge worth their salt will rubber-stamp a search warrant for Bob Joe, with a justification of: "Officer Harry had a 'hunch' that Bob Joe may be a criminal of some kind."

Is this based off of personal experience? I do have some experience with dealing with judges, and that has not been my observation, at least not as a hard and fast rule.

> The purpose of the warrant process is to make sure that law enforcement is targeted.

Partially, but the other side of it is that it's to make sure that the search activity is, well, warranted.

a secure database under the control of an independent government entity

I think that might be an implementation sticking point. You might as well ask to break the laws of physics.

Police prefer to work in a world that lacks transparency and accountability (it seems).

As with most other employees, police officers are not super fond of having every single action they take while on the job recorded, monitored, and scrutinized. I've heard horror stories about tech industry people who worked at offices where their bosses used remote desktop software to monitor employees work, and I think everyone mostly universally agrees that's horrible.

There's a perfectly legitimate argument that as cops have the ability to use deadly force, there's a lot of good reasons for the public to want their work to be scrutinized heavily, but it's also perfectly understandable why police aren't super fond of it.

It's also more complicated for cops than just "not wanting to be monitored all the time." There are interactions with innocent people, children, sex crimes victims, witnesses who need identity protection for their physical safety, etc. where they also need to turn off their cameras. There is definitely some funky stuff happening in a lot of places, but acting like it's a cut and dry issue of "watching the cops" or "not watching the cops," is underestimating the legal complexity here.

A lot of people who work in sensitive situations understand the need and welcome automated documentation, especially in a world where reputation is everything. Not everyone has to work in the same circumstance, and I think that's okay. I would argue that some work is inherently benefited by transparency, such as when people have power over you and nobody can really see.

I feel that in many ways the police handle a range of responsibilities more serious to citizen health than handling some level of classified government information.

Imagine a hospital system where employees had unfettered and unloggable access to any patient's health data. That sounds like the workplace you are describing.

> but it's also perfectly understandable why police aren't super fond of it.

Only in the sense that people aren't super fond of doing their job right.

So you would have no issue if your boss stood over your shoulder every hour of the day, evaluating how you spend your time?

I'm not a cop and my job is not to be violent on behalf of the state.

Additionally, monitoring can also be exonerating if you are confident in the justice system, so I don't buy this idea that cops are uniformly against monitoring.

I already acknowledged that public interest in accountability above. To which you suggested anyone who didn't want to be monitored "aren't super fond of doing their job right".

My point is that police officers, like you, find having someone staring over their shoulder while they work uncomfortable. So the fact that they don't like it and tend to oppose it doesn't mean they're inherently desiring to be corrupt or violent or bad cops.

And yes, it's definitely true that police are regularly accused of lying, and can find appealing having recorded proof of their interactions. There's a lot of extra rules and regs around body cams and when they have to be recorded, and how they can be used by the department that can make the issue cloudier.

>So the fact that they don't like it and tend to oppose it doesn't mean they're inherently desiring to be corrupt or violent or bad cops.

But that fact is the seed that causes such corruption.

> As with most other employees, police officers are not super fond of having every single action they take while on the job recorded, monitored, and scrutinized. I've heard horror stories about tech industry people who worked at offices where their bosses used remote desktop software to monitor employees work, and I think everyone mostly universally agrees that's horrible.

I hate to break it to you, but in any half-decently-ran company with an IT department, everything you do on your work computer, including reading this post, is monitored and recorded.

As I am the person in the IT department who sets up the logging and auditing, I'm surprisingly well versed on what is monitored and recorded. ;) There's a lot of nuance though to workplace monitoring, it's use should generally be for extreme circumstances, not everyday employee harassment.

(And no, I don't exempt myself from anything everyone else is subject to.)

How are they expected to work without a degree of opacity? If the police were transparent for the sake of vigilant privacy nerds and the public, their targets would stay two steps ahead of them and never get caught.

I agree on the accountability front - some agency somewhere needs to keep a comprehensive record of all of these 'black budget' 'operational secrecy' kind of things. Otherwise (as evidenced by the runaway CIA/NSA), having the option of secrecy becomes too alluring and therefore the norm.

At this point American citizens have pretty much zero idea what these agencies are doing on a daily basis - it's nice to believe they operate with our best interests in mind, but if not, how would we ever know?

They could start by describing and making accountable the systems that protect and audit access to surveillance data.

It is always a question of who will watch the watchers?

> set up a best-of-both-worlds system whereby all the data is gathered, but stored in a secure database under the control of an independent government entity, possibly the courts themselves

I love the sentiment behind this idea but thinking about this in practice makes me feel ill. The Federal Courts currently only have one system they're responsible for and it's the most archaic, inaccessible, and prohibitively expensive unless you're a business entity. The very last thing Federal Courts should be responsible for is PACER 2.0

Just because access to the data is secured and legal (according to present or future law), doesn't mean it's not being used for reprehensible purposes. Plenty of abuse was and still is legal.

The concern is innocent people could get implicated by a search, such as "all licence plates in location X at time T1 and location Y at time T2".

Or "where is my girlfriend right now?".

Or where is <plateX> that someone just gave me $5000 to look up.

By definition police deal with criminals and not all those criminals are stealing $200 from a cash register.

> but we also want law enforcement to have useful resources.

Speak for yourself; this is certainly not a universal sentiment.

It baffles me how one cannot understand humans are unpredictable with varying motivations. Never-mind the long standing relationships between police, judges, and district attorneys in the US.

What about stored securely by a private company with third party audit certifications in security, that is contracted to the local government to manage their data?

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