Your car, tracked: the rapid rise of license plate readers | Hacker News Reader

Your car, tracked: the rapid rise of license plate readers

arstechnica.com

41 pointsevo_963 comments

On a stretch of highway near where I live, they have installed 'average speed' cameras. These are cameras roughly 20 miles apart, and they read your plate as you drive through, then read it again when you leave. If your time between the two cameras is too short, you get a speeding ticket in the mail.

The worst part about it is that, in order to make it effective, they closed several highway exits so that people couldn't short-cut the system by taking an exit before the second camera.

While I don't like excessive speeding, I think this is just revenue farming rather than a public safety initiative, and all the assurances about the data being safe just don't wash with me.

In Texas for now, speed camera's or any automated system is against the law. This is due to the same credo that a weapon safety is a mechanical device that can and will fail.

How do they identify the driver?

That's just it -- they can't. Better not let someone else drive your car; if it's registered under your name, you're responsible for the fine!

EDIT: I stand corrected; apparently, this is not the case in AU, and may not be the case in certain states in the US. That's the last time I don't fact-check my posts... =P

How does that even nearly meet the "guilty beyond reasonable doubt" criterion? I don't see how that could ever hold up in court.

Therein lies the problem.

I'm reminded of this "Artifact From The Future" from Wired Magazine's "Found" feature in their Feb. 2007 issue -- a speeding ticket in 2054: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.02/images/found.jpg

Very prescient, IMO.

in Iowa, the tickets they issue are civil citations, not criminal citations. Therefore, you have no right to confront your accuser and there is a lower criterion for guilt. Also, if you want to contest it to an administrative judge, it'll cost you an EXTRA $80

This is the state saying "We value the court's time & resources over actual justice."

Anecdata: A coworker once got ticketed for speeding on a highway on-ramp. Upon trying to contest his fine in court using photos of the roads, he was told by the judge that he would be fined an extra $[large sum] for every photo he attempted to show to him.

I believe with the red light cameras, the driver needs to be clearly visible for a ticket to get issued. I would imagine that any such camera-based system would need to be like this. I've heard of a stretch of toll road in FL that you actually go through toll booths and are issued an entry ticket that you give on your way out. If the entry and exit times equate to you speeding, the driver is issued a ticket. That solves the identification problem.

Is there a documented case of anyone successfully disputing a red-light camera ticket based on this?

I've been on one of those toll roads myself, and I don't think it was in FL (somewhere in New England maybe?), so other states probably do that too.

There is for automatic speed cameras in Australia. I'm constantly bemused by questions that pop up around this subject in the States. It's largely a solved problem here?

I'm guessing it'll be exactly the same in the states as it is in Australia.

On the speeding fine you receive in the mail, you indicate that you were not driving at the time and nominate who was. This is a legal declaration.

Now you'd think it's a slam-dunk to just lie and get out of fines this way, however a huge number of people including a Supreme Court judge have been caught lying, and in the case of the judge jailed for then .[1]

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Einfeld

It is in Australia.

The regular speed cameras (radar+photo) are high res and clearly show the driver - very difficult to argue you weren't driving the car.

My question is a bit rhetorical, and ridiculous, but I'll ask it anyway - is there any corresponding law in Australia that prohibits one from driving disguised or dressed in such a way that it is impossible to determine who is actually driving?

I don't think there would be, because you still have to sign a legal document to say it was you, or nominate the person it was.

So even if you had a gorilla suit on, you'd still have to sign it to say who was in the gorilla suit. So I don't think the photo is used as a legal argument - they still have them on at night - but merely to make it crystal clear to the owner of the vehicle who was driving it at the time.

Interestingly, there is a loophole whereby a vehicle registered to a company instead of an individual can foregoe the identification of the driver, but they must pay a much higher fine. This is to assist with companies that may own a fleet of vehicles and it's impossible to determine who was driving what car when.

It's a loophole people with cash + their own business use so their own licences don't get affected. Not many know about it.

They don't. Your car, your fine is the way things work with the local (Washington, DC) speed cameras.

This reminds me of the other big revenue-farming issue in driving which also masquerades as public safety: traffic light cameras. IIRC, there were cases of municipalities shortening the duration of the yellow light to below legal limits in an attempt to increase ticket revenues, and increased numbers of rear-ending accidents due to drivers stopping suddenly to avoid running the red & getting a ticket.

The exit-closing bit is a sign: if you have to "worsen" your infrastructure to enforce your new system, you're doing it wrong.

It never ceases to amaze me how much privacy people expect to have when they are out in public.

I don't expect privacy, just a reasonable degree of anonymity.

Fair enough.

To prevent problems, only Cronin and Hutton can add plates to the hot list. Each time a plate is run for historical data by either an officer or requested by an outside agency, the requester has to inform the chief by e-mail. Requests are tallied in an annual report for the town council.

The system parses license plates and matches them against a hot list. If a match is made, then a human gets notified. Some database somewhere knows the cars that have come and gone. But there is nothing to indicate that each license plate that gets captured is matched up to a person. The screen shot they have only shows the basic info captured from the camera. So unless your plate is on the hot list or someone with the authority requests to pull historical data about your plate number this does seem like a reasonable degree of anonymity.

It would be nice if this was regulated a bit. Data should get purged in a reasonable time frame. Solid auditing for data retrieval requests.

But you are not anonymous in public, at least not to the authorities. You never have been.

Japan was able to track their last two AUM fugitives via CC-TVs in Train stations and thos on public utility poles (yes, it seems Japan still has a significant amount of local transmission wires above ground). The difference being facial rather than number plate recognition. In addition to big-crime solving such as AUM, they are also able to solve weird crimes like a couple who was disposing of their trash in highway rest-stops[1].

So it's two faceted, at least. On the one hand it facilitates crime-solving with fewer resources, on the other hand one loses one's anonymity in the big city (in smaller cities where everyone knows of everyone, this may be a lesser point).

Exchange/forfeit privacy for money/fees/taxes. Google, Facebook would seem to point to people preferring convenience/paying fewer (taxes) than having anonymity. On the other hand, with Google and FB, you have a choice. Here it's either everyone opts in or opts out.

[1] http://www.asahi.com/national/update/1209/OSK201112090099.ht...

In case I'm not the only baffled by what an AUM is I think it's the group that carried out the sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aum_Shinrikyo

It's the automation of privacy-invading technologies that gets me. I feel more and more like I'm being governed by computers and machines, not humans. I think that society is accustomed to a certain kind of slack when it comes to authority. We can get away with things sometimes. We can make mistakes and not come home with a ticket or citation every time.

With all of these automated enforcement measures, we're all going to end up with rap sheets a mile long. There will be no such thing as someone having a clean record.

Alternatively, we as a society will pay more attention to what we are doing and stop doing things that we used to get away with. Sure I speed. Nearly everyone does. But just because there was no cop to see me and ticket me doesn't automagically make it legal. It just means I got away with it. If the stretch of highway I regularly commute on had speed cameras installed... it would not take too many tickets before that stretch of highway started to flow at the posted speed. People get pissed when a law that is largely unenforced starts to get enforced more strictly. So naturally they will want to strike down any new tech that assists in that stricter enforcement. I'm not sure how cops gave out speeding tickets before radar guns but I'll bet that tech dramatically increased their ability to enforce it. Not many people are up in arms about those these days.

it would not take too many tickets before that stretch of highway started to flow at the posted speed

Actually, it would have to flow quite a bit below the posted speed to be sure you didn't accidentally go above and get a ticket. An officer would probably decide that that was not a serious enough violation to warrant a ticket, but an automated system has no such discretion.

I haven't seen any statistics on whether automated speed enforcement actually lowers the accident rate. It seems perfectly plausible to me that it would be counterproductive, because getting rid of the small number of seriously unsafe speeders would be counterbalanced by the fact that people in general will be much more paranoid about their speed and direct more attention to that to the detriment of paying attention to more important things like what's happening down the road.

It depends on if it was a system that just put radar guns out and issued a ticket to any car that was speeding through its beam (I've never heard of this type) or a system that tracked your average speed between two points (I have heard of these). And automated systems do have discretion... it would depend on what +/- tolerance said system was given. I've heard anecdotal claims that a cop won't give you a speeding ticket unless you are exceeding the limit by some X amount.

I knew it! Roughly a year ago I was driving home from work at night. My registration was expired by a few days, and I drove past an officer in a parking lot. As I was passing him, I knew my plate was expired, so I was looking at his plate to see if I would be able to determine from that distance if the plates were expired. So I was scrutinizing his plates to see how much detail I could see. I have better than 20/20 eyesight, and I knew there was no way I could see that level of detail at the distance he was at. So imagine my surprise when he comes after me immediately and pulls me over.

More out of curiosity than anything I asked him how he knew my plate was expired, his response was "I have really good eyes". I've thought back on that experience over the last year, and I knew the technology for reading a license plate wasn't hard, but I didn't know how widespread the use was. After reading this piece and seeing the picture of those cameras, which are mounted in that area, I'd bet they are using it to give expired registration tickets too.

Not sure how registration works where you are, in Calif (and other states) the yearly registration sticker is color coded by year. So, while they may have sought to read the "month" sticker, they might have just looked for the color of the tag as an indicator.

I want to say that each month also has a unique color. So the two color combo can easily be translated to the month/year your tag expires. A friend of mine drove for a long time using stickers he had peeled off of other cars. As long as he kept is driving legal, he would pass the "color checks". However, once he did something that gave a LEO cause to run his plate... clearly he was busted for it. Kind of interesting when you think that these cameras would have caught him straight away.

Another scenario, when people have paid for their registration but for one reason or another have forgotten to place the sticker on their plate. Those people would not get hit with these camera since their plate would not come back as expired. They would still fail the "color check" which usually can be explained to the LEO. If not, it is usually just a fix-it ticket.

Data point: in Feb 2012 I got pulled over by CHP (California Highway Patrol) for exactly this (registration sticker was still stuck to the registration paper in my glovebox, as it was mailed to me). So he was actually using his eyes...

Sounds like that state needs to implement anti-tamper stickers like you see in retail stores. They're scored in several places, so if you try to unpeel them once they've been stuck to something, they'll come off in pieces.

I use a razor blade to (a) remove all existing annual stickers from the plate (makes it harder to remove the top sticker intact), and (b) cut an "X" in the new sticker once I've applied it.

Is registration tag theft a problem where you live? That seems totally incredulous to me.

I'm not aware whether it is or not. But once I saw how easy it was to remove a sticker-stack intact using a razor blade, I adopted the habit. The effort involved is minimal (I keep a single-edge razor blade in my toolbox for utility reasons), so why not? Just another part of car maintenance, like changing the oil & filter...

The tamper-resistant tags're a good idea --the only drawback I can see is that in the process of trying to apply the sticker, the person applying the tags might destroy the tag accidentally --so, on balance they might figure that they'll take the occasional scofflaw in exchange of fewer complaints.

They might already exist, actually. I know that a couple states do tamper-resistant stickers for the windshield registration sticker. It doesn't really make sense, though -- those are on the inside of the car, they're comparatively quite large, and they're a royal PITA to take off already due to the strong adhesive they use.

In Utah the year is the only one that changes color, all of the months are white. That's why I was looking at his plates, to see if I could see even the letters on his plate. Granted I'm not a trained observer of registration violations and maybe it was observable to someone who is. Given the distance and the visibility during the night I'm pretty skeptical. It's just a sneaking suspicion I've had - because I know I'd want to use those license plate readers in exactly that why if I was in their place.

Can you lose your license for stealing other people's registration stickers? I know some states will take your license if you steal gas from a gas station.

Is this really a novelty in the states?

In the UK most police forces have traffic units with ANPR cameras on their vehicles, hooked up to the various national databases to provide details of the vehicle, whether it is insured, MOT'd (tested), stolen, has any markers on it (previously linked to drugs, firearms etc.) and so on.

No, it's been around for years AFAIK -- I guess we're just now getting around to making a stink about it.

It'll be interesting to see how this industry will adapt as cars become more automated.

That's a good point. As cars become more automated and perhaps evolve into a fleet of roving cars one "hires", or even the personal ones, I can see where a driver or passenger has to be "authenticated" as they are let in. In addition, the automobiles would be in constant communication about any state with a central office.

Something to this effect would obviate the need for external cameras, as one might assume this level of automation would allow for the autonomous vehicle to know if it was able to drive/ambulate legally or not (i.e., I'm not in compliance, do you wish to override, you can override 5 times before having to take it into a shop to have it re-registered and validated and authorized to carry people, etc.

As a passenger, why would you have to authenticate? You don't have to do this for taxis. At the most, you'd just have to prove up-front you could pay, and/or put a deposit down against damage to the interior.

If automated vehicles become common enough, the tracking issue might solve itself, as you'd be making micro-payments to a service, traveling anonymously, instead of owning your own vehicle.

I was thinking that in the scenario where there is a roving fleet of non-chauffeured cars for hire, one would auth (or identify oneself) so that it was known who to charge back in a non-repudiable way.

As a side-effect, it could be enhanced to check to see if the person did't have any outstanding warrants, leans, etc. against them. The system could, if allowed be programmed in such way, to take the person in, if it was certain/verifiable the person was "wanted" by the authorities. It sounds very dystopian, but it could happen, if the circumstances are right.

Again, why would you need to authenticate yourself? As an example, you usually don't have to authenticate when you pay for something with a card -- you just authenticate that the card is valid / has sufficient funds. That's why fraud detection for cards exists -- because you can use a card without being the owner. Also, there are prepaid cards, and cash (assuming that still exists).

As for your other idea, Minority Report beat you to it -- when the authorities find out that the protagonist they are pursuing is riding in a certain taxi-car-pod, they lock it down and try to bring it in.

Auth to make it non-repudiable. Right now with peopled (staffed) services, one can ask to check ID, if there is a level of suspicion, that's a type of authentication, the way I see things. Since these cars would not have an "agent" they'd, given circumstances and business model, may have a need to ID people in a non-repudiable way.

I wasn't trying to beat a sci-fi scenario out. Just saying that this kind of automation would make the scenario possible, given the right legal allowances. It would be both useful (from a crime-fighting POV) and also very big-brother controlling. So I guess it depends on the balance people might find acceptable.

In a few months RFID chips will start to be installed in all vehicles in Brazil, reaching 100% of the fleet in 2014. It seems like a much more reliable way to track cars and will hopefully bring enhancements in traffic control. The transit authorities also say it will "help fight vehicle theft" but I can't imagine how, since a tag on the windscreen it's pretty easy to remove...

We've also had plate scanning in highway patrol checkpoints for many years, they will probably be shut down in the next year or so. Any reason this is not being considered in the US?

Think of a "crowd sourced" tracking system. Most people these days have phones that are capable of taking pictures, OCRing, GPSing and uploading this data in real time. It wouldn't be hard to build a system based on volunteers that maps most cars most of the time. And with facial recognition, mapping people as well.

And it's not even illegal.

Speaking of which -- anyone know a good open source ocr that can run reasonably on a mobile phone?

Ugh... shit like this makes me want to wear a tin foil hat, but then I realize how much work that would be so I remain a lazy tracked american.

That's a nonstarter. The NSA started putting back-doors into aluminum back around the time of the Roswell Incident.

Probably a remote shutdown exploit by now, too.

The article mentions potentially using LPRs to catch illegal immigrants -- how? Wouldn't this fall under the umbrella of just catching unregistered vehicles? You need a driver's license to register a car, and you need a birth certificate to get a driver's license.

Pure FUD. If you click through to the CNN article, you'll see that the ICE has asked companies to help them figure out a way to do it. It is largely based on the idea that they will compile a list of license plates that can be associated with "at-large, convicted criminal aliens". I'm not sure why they need to throw the word "alien" in there when just being able to capture "at-large, convicted criminals" is reason enough. It shouldn't really matter that they were aliens. I'm guessing it is to garner some bias against such a system since specifically targeting illegal aliens seems to be a constant hot button.

Here's the surprisingly thorough Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recognit...

I wonder how long before they just put mandatory tracking chips in cars, rather than monkey patching it with expensive OCR machines on the road and in patrols vehicles.

Probably not too long, especially if they offered insurance premium discounts for willing early-adopter participants.

I'm a little surprised there aren't already insurance premium discounts for installing a "black box" to record accident data.

EDIT: Apparently there already are, both in the US and elsewhere -- see below comments. Next time I'll Google this before posting, I promise! =D

Insurance companies offer this in some countries.

I'm in a driving study right now that installed a black box (plus a couple of cameras) in my car, to see how people drive. The study took care to make sure that the recorded footage and sensor data can't be accessed during any incident; it's encrypted, they resist requests from the police, etc.

In a related note, I can't cross US borders until the driving study is over; the border police are Not Amused at being recorded, and the researchers really discourage trying to cross a US border in the car that the gear is installed in.

There are already discount programs for people willing to install monitors in their cars (Progressive Snapshop, among others).

Chipping the license plates would make more sense -- those change regularly, regardless of vehicle age, and might prove harder to shield. Likewise if it was an E-ZPass style RFID transponder on the back of your front windshield registration sticker.

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