SFPD refuses to say where they've placed 400 automated license plate readers | Hacker News Reader

SFPD refuses to say where they've placed 400 automated license plate readers

sfist.com

42 pointsanigbrowl34 comments

Visiting SF a few years back (pre covid), I was surprised to see how many cars had no license plates at all.

The owners weren’t particular about keeping a low profile or not being noticed. As an outsider, it seemed to me perfectly legal to have no plates.

Turns out, having asked around, it’s all those people going over the golden gate bridge and not wanting to pay the toll and instead rather taking the risk of being caught without plates - obviously cheaper than paying the daily toll.

Is this in anyway related to cracking down on this practice?

I wonder the legality of this. A parallel I think about is DUI checkpoints where the police have to announce their location because otherwise it violates 4th amendment. Would automated license plate readers not violate 4th amendment similarly if not disclosed?

No because you don’t need to be searched (or even identified) before being reasonably suspected of a crime if an ALPR detects you.

The issue with DUI stops is you have to be stopped before they can test you and the test itself is a “search.”

An ALPR detects your crime before it even takes a photo.

DUI checkpoints are a flagrant violation of the Constitution, and one of the most braindead rulings of SCOTUS ever (Michigan v. Sitz). Later cases would uphold that checkpoints for general crime control were violations of the 4th, but 'public safety' was apparently threatened more by drunk driving than by not catching individuals committing crimes that didn't involve intoxicated driving.

Our rights have been eroding for decades, and now it can be done at massive scale.

Internal immigration checkpoints and the Californian border fruit Nazis come to mind as well. There is always an excuse.

There is no expectation of privacy on a public street and certainly not for the license plate which you are required to display by law.

I’m not a lawyer and never a surveillance apologist, but I’m pretty sure that courts will find license plate readers legal.

If there’s a legal challenge the question will probably come down to the word “search”. Will law enforcement use this data to investigate crimes (yes). Will that use constitute search? Identifying who passed on a public street by way of their license plate is probably not search. But I could be wrong.

Fine, then throw out the requirement to display my plate which is an unlawful self-imposed search of my registration papers without probable cause nor reasonable suspicion. You can't just force people to affix their ID to their method of transportation to get around the fact you can't stop and ask them for it without RAS, it's a cheap sleight of hand around the 4th amendment.

The thing is, driving is a privilege and not a right since it can be revoked.

4th amendment still applies to those engaging in the 'privilege' of driving to work so they can pay the property taxes they must pay so they aren't locked in jail for being homeless.

Idea 4A doesn't apply to 'privileges' including the most common method of personal transport is totally nonsensical nor is any exception of the sort implied nor explicitly outlined by the amendment.

Your right to privacy is subordinate to the public's interest in identifying the drivers of cars.

It's not a 4A violation to require you to display ID when you're driving a machine that statistically is one of the leading killers of both adults and children. It's just good policy.

Identifying ( by essentially always-on search) everyone driving without RAS or PC sounds like a privilege and not a right, that can be revoked, unlike the 4A.

As ALPR become ubiquitous it's becoming clear that privilege is subservient to our rights.

Free, unattended, abandoned cameras with SIM cards in them with wide open data?

What's not to love? Thanks, SFPD and Flock!

they are probably on the wide open internet with hardcoded creds too. https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/ics-advisories/icsa-24-165-...

These cameras are taking about three million pictures A DAY of cars moving about San Francisco.

“…privacy advocates worry that that data could be used as a Trump administration tactic to track people getting abortions or gender-affirming medical care, or as a tool for mass deportations”

Is there any credibility to this?

Credibility that the paranoia exists or credibility of the readers being used for those purposes by the Trump administration?

Yes to the first, LOL WTF? to the second. Trump admin doesn't care one tiny bit about abortions. Although some of his supporters might, they aren't really going to be in power.

Would municipal traffic cameras be of any use to an illegal immigrant round-up?

Probably if they were actually going to do much of that.

My prediction is a big show, lots of tough talk for the xenophobes in the base, some criminals and egregious public assistance cases get gone, a few raids on Tyson Foods (or whoever doesn't contribute or support the administration) and not much more. Amnesty pretty quick by this admin or the next.

They want the working people here too. More tax base, more "motivated" workers.

> Probably if they were actually going to do much of that

I guess I’m struggling to imagine the utility of those cameras for tracing abortion-provider visitors and illegal immigrants versus all the other federal surveillance infrastructure.

My citations are for data brokers, but ALPR databases that are constantly updating from field sensors, and with porous data security and governance, they should not be dismissed. This is a commercial surveillance dragnet system, full stop. They aren't weapons until they suddenly are (shades of Salt Typhoon). There is precedence for the misuse of license plate data by law enforcement and adjacent private sector orgs.

https://epic.org/data-broker-helped-anti-abortion-group-targ...

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/03/location-data-tracks-a...

https://www.nacdl.org/getattachment/567b4c71-b702-47d7-a59c-...

https://americandragnet.org/

https://deflock.me/

Thanks, this is what I was looking for.

Always happy to help.

That too. I just don't track this kind of reasoning and also think people fundamentally misunderstand what is going to happen under a Trump administration.

It won't be about forced social conservatism so much as it will be about money.

Probably not required. Many of them were given debit cards and that's easier to track where a person was and will be again.

Re point two. The Trump admin is stacked with Heritage Foundation apparatchiks and Trump himself will sign anything put in front of him and presented nicely.

Is it really? Who are the apparatchiks?

San Francisco is a crooked city, as in "barbary coast" .. towing a car on Saturday night in the nightclub district, giving a speeding ticket with a 90 day wait to contest it only in-person, crazy rents for a tiny apartment somewhere downtown.. this is the tip of a history of back room, underground or flatly deceptive practices in that famous port city.

Next item - ascribing obviously negative behavior in a news story to your political rivals.. Does this need to be described? of course it takes the attention away from the three hundred Other dirty tricks being played, by both sides..

Now, the topic at hand.. tracking a vehicle over time to make a dossier... that is a contested privilege among the predatory and/or LEO crowds. Private detectives, insurance detectives, alimony cases, or say "blackmail" .. this behavior comes from before the automobile. It is genuinely impressive that modern toll bridges and parking areas can automate this. Are there motivated parties that want to do this at scale? Whatever the alignment or public posture? many, many science fiction detective novels start with this premise... fiction no longer fiction

That’s such a vague question as to feel either rhetorical or obvious. Can it be used for the stated purposes? Duh? Blatantly and obviously yes.

WILL it be used for such purposes? How could anyone here answer that? The fact it could be, and has very little useful other purposes should be enough to encourage everyone to ask for their removal.

“But amber alerts” - ok so we violate the privacy of every American for an event that rarely occurs and won’t be prevented by this technology?

License plate readers are about the only tool law enforcement has in my area to combat armed carjackings which happen with regular frequency in my neighborhood since the pandemic.

Those combined with police helicopters are the only way anyone is getting caught for this as chases are effectively banned. Before the deployment of this tech on major arteries there was effectively zero enforcement activity since nothing could really be done until it was far too late to matter.

It’s a weekly occurrence now just in my small neighborhood I pay attention to. The social tenor with police is such that very few support more aggressive proactive policing so this is what we are left with.

I don’t know what the correct balance here is, but saying they are only used for rare events is simply not true.

> License plate readers are about the only tool law enforcement has in my area to combat armed carjackings which happen with regular frequency in my neighborhood since the pandemic.

How on earth would a license plate reader prevent car jackings? The kids committing these crimes are almost universally under the age of 18 and get a slap on the wrist when caught which is why they’re doing it. A license plate reader won’t change any of that.

The other avenue of professionals swap plates on the cars almost immediately negating anything a plate reader would do.

Unless they're changing plates while speeding away, and if the cameras are giving real-time updates, it doesn't need to be the right plate, it just needs to be the same plate.

You may be right on the majority, but its still working on some https://www.berkeleyscanner.com/2023/08/17/uc-berkeley-crime...

Spray paint

With my family in the city. I am pro camera. The mobile units are provided by company LVT. Since deployed on market street, in addition to the national guard rollout, it’s much much safer at night.

However, I do worry about image storage. Primarily the use of the images by the private companies.

I do think the locations should be identified. Ideas for this:

1. Spectrum leakage by units themselves, I doubt these units are hard wired for data. Probably WiFi or Cellular.

2. Image detection - Google street view is quite active in SF. Train an LLM to detect the cameras at the intersection and run any street view images less than 12 months old through the model. Prioritize highest trafficked intersections.

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