Maker of US border's license-plate scanning tech ransacked by hacker

Sure you could create a bunch of pi cams able to handle a few reads per second, but then say you want to know what plates have traveled with your target plate between multiple camera sets to see if someone is being followed, or you have cell phone pings and want to search all cameras in the radius of that tower for a plate.

The reading isn't hard, its fully solved, the economical and real-time searching of plates and evidence compilation is the much harder problem.

Tech is empowering, much moreso than playing politics.

Consider something like the Kafkaesque nightmare that is applying for (and keeping) food stamps. It doesn't need to be complicated (nor should it be!), but you can either try to convince elected officials to make the poor a priority and fix the process or roll up your sleeves and write a script to complete the forms in triplicate, generate mailing labels with delivery confirmation, remind users of deadlines and pull phone records to prove the social worker never called like they said they did in the denial letter.

Or you could petition, harass, bribe and cajole your way into enacting change, and have it all overturned with a change in administration.

In some part these technical solutions exist to fix people problems. Look at the internet itself-- where problems exist (a country's politicians/dictator makes the nation unroutable), you don't wait for a coup, you route around it.

But also in some part these solutions are just modern rent-seeking, so...

I bet a little digging and we will discover that this network was hopelessly undefended and their software is horribly riddled with holes and poor security practices.

It was obviously done to impact the company as an entity rather than to target individuals or the government. It's quite obvious, to me, that the attackers wanted to dump a large liability in someones lap and perhaps for good reason. If this company can't secure the data it collects about innocent civilians then it shouldn't be allowed to collect it.

It's important, but I am a bit frustrated by shallow encouragement that makes politics sound like it's easy. It's like saying "get a job" rather than providing actually helpful resources and training to find a job.

The point is that if you have access to their systems you can affect what is reported. For example you could add a bogus plate to the data stream, or remove one, or perform a substitution. I think we can all imagine cases were doing such a thing might be useful to someone.

Others have also pointed out that it’s possible that this company has some particularly interesting recognition technology, but I agree with you that this is really a second order issue.

Yes I can name (all) of my state's representatives. No I'm not going to write them. Your letter and sending information get filed under an equivalent of "dissenters". That's kind of the entire point here.

The explanation was that they were updating the stoplight controls. One of the inductive sensors in the road had failed, and it was cheaper to have a guy in a bucket truck stick a couple cameras on the pole than to rip up the road. The cameras are used to see the volume of vehicles in each lane and dynamically adjust light timings. And since I drive through the intersection multiple times a day, I have noticed an improvement. They skip the left turn sequence if no one is waiting, and rarely have a big backup when volume is high in one direction for the commute. Also, the left turn timer used to be very short (like 2 cars making it through on green, one on yellow, and the 4th car often took control and went on red), which was nice when there was only one car and you wanted to go straight, but annoying when you were one of 6 or 7 cars in line and an extra five seconds would let everyone make the turn but instead you had to wait through multiple light cycles. Now it seems to often hold the turn cycle long enough to let the whole line empty out.

But I totally agree that the idea of a soft update to either issue red light tickets or track license plate activity is extremely concerning. Might end up with a stray paintball from my backyard accidentally hitting the lens if they make that a policy change.

Cameras are already everywhere. As they become even more dirt cheap, that will only hyper-increase, even if governments somehow completely stays out of it.

Sometimes you enter into a new technological era, and you have to accept that things have changed.

This is the unfortunate weakness of the Western style democracies in the face of totalitarian states. We have a much more obvious divide between private and public entities. In China and Russia, the lines are blurred and often they get much better support from the government to defend and hack the opposition. Even to the point where China will hack US companies and just give the IP to Chinese companies.