Automated License Plate Readers Threaten Our Privacy
eff.org
eff.org
Sure, if the officer thought several thousand times faster and had an encyclopedic memory. In practice it's like having an entire team of officers hanging around on the street corner noting down the numberplates of every single car. And people would, I think, find that far more objectionable. Having large amounts of law enforcement in any area tends to put people's backs up.
There's a difference of degree going on. People may allow the occasional surveillance, but it was occasional - and because it was relatively expensive it was liable to be used for reasonably good reasons. It doesn't really seem a great idea to have these systems in place as a matter of routine.
And there's a worrying liberty angle to the whole thing too - in many ways how advanced a society is seems like it can be judged by the degree of privacy that it allows its members. The need to confirm that everyone's following the rules, acting appropriately, smacks of tribalism and oppression. Inevitably we're going to have the ability, but that doesn't imply the will. And seeing these things actualised is consequently rather troubling.
I actually work on a system like this, including creating and training specialty neural networks for a state I will not name. Although it sounds like California's DB is a lot more sophisticated in the amount of data it captures and the amount of data mining that they plan to happen, it's hard to imagine that more states aren't doing things like we're doing. My department works directly with law enforcement as basically an R&D arm of state/local police. The extent of our work on this particular domain is mostly limited to running automated NCIC checks on the licenses (reveals warrants and stolen cars) - not really tracking total location and piecing together where this car has been in the past (though that probably could be gleaned with a few well-defined db queries).
They certainly have a valid point about the need for limits on data retention however I feel they're going too far in demanding "public disclosure of the actual license plate data [(a week’s worth)]" just to highlight the issue.
For reference on how this is handled in other countries take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_data_retenti...
Releasing that data publicly could be dangerous. Which kind of goes to show that the police shouldn't have that kind of data to begin with.
I really wish they had just used that bloody system to look for hits on wanted and stolen vehicles. That's fine, everyone's ok with that. Mass collection and tracking of every single car that gets recorded? Why did they have to torpedo such a useful technology by doing something so stupid?
That's the point the EFF is trying to make, but it's also absurd. It would obviously be dangerous for them to release their donors' credit card details in public (or even store them in a non-encrypted database and non-PCI compliant manner), but that's an argument for limiting who has access to how much of the records and not an argument that credit cards and financial transactions data shouldn't exist.
Of course, there are slightly different semantics here -- the ALPRs in the 407 are stationary (mounted at every on-ramp and off-ramp), and you can choose to avoid them by simply using other roads running in parallel to the toll road.
However, this tech is at least a decade old (the 407 was first opened in 1997). It seems odd to me that people are up in arms about the tech now, especially since you can build a rudimentary ALPR with just a webcam and the right image processing algorithms.
That is precisely why people are up in arms. What was once rare is now ubiquitous. When every police car has an ANPR capable of reading 60+ plates per minute and is feeding plate numbers plus timestamps and gps coordinates into a backend database with poorly defined access controls the potential for abuse skyrockets.
Good to know, and just another reason to live in NH :)
I found Professor Orin Kerr's discussion of United States v. Jones (2012) at the Volokh Conspiracy both enlightening and depressing. Professor Kerr's analysis there, if I recall it correctly, was that any violation occurred when the GPS device was physically placed on Jones' car violating the seizure part of unreasonable search and seizure. That the search itself was legal.
And I think that's how the government's attorney and Scalia and the Court saw it. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jones_(2012))
But presumably according to Kerr, and I am very likely distorting his views since a) I ain't a lawyer and b) sometime has passed, that if the same tracking information against Jones was obtained by having ALPR devices mounted on city street lights, freeway overpasses and freeway ramps, then Jones (and us!) would have no more expectation of privacy than if Jones had been seen by a cop walking a beat.
I think there is a fundamental difference between a cop walking a beat recognizing a citizen and having an array of massively cheap cameras hooked into an ALPR network tracking all citizens 24x7.
But that's not the point. There is a societal benefit to tracking people this way. Well, there is expected to be one - of road pricing, congestion and crime reduction.
The handling of loss of privacy, which seems pretty much inevitable, is something we do need to deal with - just not try to stop it.
I am sure they will object to this with the usual arguments about security implications and executive right. Amusingly citizens could reply "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear".
It will only convince the qualified candidates, especially those who are (themselves) concerned about privacy, to not go into that field.
It will also make politicians used to the idea of ubiquitous privacy invasion. "Oh, see? I can live just fine underneath this," they think, "so why can't the general public?"
Over my dead body it is.
For all the talk about how privacy is dead, the reality is that normal adults have secrets and would be very angry if those secrets were revealed.
I'm pretty happy about this because I don't drive. I ride a bicycle, and the two times I've been involved in a genuine aggressive altercation with another vehicle, the car had stolen license plates.
One of those times the police had planned to charge the passenger with attempted murder (We were both travelling south, I was going about 25 km/h, they pulled in close beside me, and opened the car door into me). When it turned out the license plate was stolen/hadn't been registered for 10 years, I was at a loss as to why anyone would want to drive around with stolen plates on their car (me being a law abiding citizen), and the police said it's to avoid speed cameras and to steal petrol (turn up to petrol station, fill up, drive off). Apparently petrol theft is like one of the number one crimes here
I actually started doing some experimenting with IR LEDs since they emit light outside the visible spectrum, but do show up on cameras (as long as the cameras don't have an IR filter). The LEDs just weren't powerful enough.
There is this http://www.nophoto.com/
I was about to post the same thing. This is a technological problem, it could do with a technological solution: We need a way to make sure that license plates are not machine readable.
Or maybe this: Make them explicitly machine readable, but then have the vehicle alert the owner when something reads it. So instead of a license plate you have a radio transceiver with a range of a few hundred yards, which broadcasts the vehicle's make and model and allows anyone to request the VIN. You can request the VIN with a mobile device but every request gets logged and notifies the vehicle owner, and making a request would require probable cause by law.
Everyone in the U.S. will soon have a mobile device anyway (if only one without a data plan that was discarded by someone with more money and only used for wifi), so this actually serves the original purpose of a license plate better than existing license plates do, because you can read the VIN from a vehicle after witnessing a violation of the law even if it's at an angle that you couldn't have read the plate or is far enough away that you couldn't have made it out.
On the other hand, it prevents passive surveillance or surveillance without probable cause, which has always been a misfeature of license plates outside of their original purpose.
Behold, the Legal Singularity.
Cops would probably start shooting babies in the streets.
If anybody is interested in playing with ALPR data, we put it up on github but removed the license plate numbers: https://github.com/johnschrom/Minneapolis-ALPR-Data
Thanks, EFF.
The freedom to not have your license plate OCR'd? Is that what it's all about? Putting that in there is jingoistic and appealing to the same emotions that the other side abuses.
Pervasive, often incidental monitoring (e.g. the growing proliferation of electronic toll roads) is absolutely inevitable. Cameras are everywhere. Recording costs close to nothing. Capacity is endless. Processing and OCR is achieved with negligible power on tiny, low-cost devices. Imagine what tomorrow will be like?
Reactions that involve essentially trying to pretend that technology doesn't exist or can be suppressed will never and have never worked.
Humorously your smartphone probably is tracking you (with a much higher correlation with people, and accuracy, than vehicles), and logging it for years on end.
And honestly I don't care whether there is a database of places where my car has been (this usually causes wildfire in most forums as the natural result is to hysterically proclaim that one can only allow some monitoring if they allow any and all monitoring for anyone, which is a nonsensical dichotomy). I can rationally see that there could be a lot of uses for it, in fact, in modernizing investigations and law enforcement.
Presuming that it has appropriate checks and balances. e.g. audited access and look-ups, with every plate-holder having the right to use that same information themselves (whether the history of spots, and every look-up of the same).
You seem to be begging the question (in the formal sense) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question)
Driver's license photos have audited lookups, but all that tells us is that the system is routinely abused and no one is stopping it. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/02/cop-database-abuse/
Putting every car into the database will generate the maximum number of conflicts of interest possible. If a database only has interesting or suspicious plates in it, an average cop might not browse the database for funsies (risking a hit on the next audit). But if everyone the cop knows is in there, they might check up on spouses, exes, cute girls' habits, old bosses, friend's bosses... the list of reasons to risk a peek is endless.
Rogue cops might be able to misuse access to the system out of sheer curiosity but similarly rogue employees in certain positions at [mobile] telephone companies can abuse their position to tracking your whereabouts and call history, and financial organizations have access to your transaction history and card numbers - both far more sensitive than a few isolated datapoints from when your car passes police vehicles with their cameras switched on. I don't see the EFF campaigning against mobile telephony or credit cards.
The EFF is concerned about privacy matters involving mobile devices. https://ssd.eff.org/tech/mobile
In other words, you feel that these people do not have enough power over the public, and should be given more:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:San_Bernardino_police_swa...
"Presuming that it has appropriate checks and balances"
It will almost certainly not, except under the most far-right definition of "appropriate."
"with every plate-holder having the right to use that same information themselves"
Have you ever tried to file a FOIA request? The public will have a substantially harder time accessing that information than the government will.
Nope, they track people, too. According to the article, "just four randomly selected geospatial datapoints (location + time)" can uniquely identify an individual person 95% of the time. When you live in a place where cars are the only practical way of getting around (like the LA area), then this is de facto person tracking.
The owner of the vehicle is identifiable through owner's documents and insurance and etc. The driver of the vehicle is identified either through a police office confirming ID, or by a camera taking a photograph of the driver, or people making sworn statements and risking jail time if they lie.
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21737627)
She lied and said she was driving, so she took his penalty. They both got prison sentences for that lie.
> And honestly I don't care whether there is a database of places where my car has been
At the moment there's probably no need to care. Would you care if you were living in a little tin-pot country where kidnap was common and corruption was rife?
As you say there are plenty of uses for this data. How about some that inconvenience you? Demographics to target billboard ads along your route? Introduction of toll roads for traffic management?
Especially when the pattern is what the cops use to identify the suspect in the first place.
There is a real problem with big data in the courtroom. Take the intersection of a victim, a crime and a suspect and look at a million data points and you'll find several thousand that match. Put only those in front of a jury and you have something that looks like a mountain of evidence but is really just systematically applying confirmation bias to random noise.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States
(And at other times, various courts have ruled:
* citizens cannot decrypt encrypted cable tv signals passing through their homes
* citizens cannot monitor even unencrypted cell phone transmissions) (I think)Except that the entire article was raising fear, uncertainty and doubt about the retention of that data. The "useful" part is retaining the information such that later on when someone is arrested in the commission of a rape, for instance, they could look at other historical appearances of that person's known vehicle and see if there's a correlation with other incidents (which at most would be circumstantial given that a vehicle can have many drivers, but it could instruct further investigations).
This article warns that such logged data betrays "your political and religious beliefs, your social and sexual habits, your visits to the doctor", and then says " If this data is too private to give a week’s worth to the public to help inform us how the technology is being used, then isn’t it too private to let the police amass years’ worth of data without a warrant?"
That does not mesh with your rebuttal at all.
The purpose of a speed limit is not to make people not go more than 55 miles per hour. The purpose of a speed limit is to make driving safe, and particularly to make driving safe for society, even moreso than for the individual. If everybody is driving at 65 in the 55 zone, but everybody is safe, the higher purpose of the law is being met, and citations for speeding are just punitive for no gain. When conditions make 55 unsafe, people need to slow down enough to be safe, regardless of what the local speed limit is.
Because we've never been able to rigidly enforce laws, it was very easy to conflate the two concepts. Now we are starting to develop some tech that does let us rigidly enforce laws. The solution is, don't do that. The laws we have on the books today were not designed for rigid enforcement. They were designed to be tools for creating public safety that could be used by the legal system, they are not themselves the specification of public safety. No such specification can really be created, and people are going to have to learn that.
Hopefully we learn that before we really box ourselves in with even better tech. Either way we do seem very determined to learn this the hard way.
This idea has applications to all sorts of modern day issues popular on HN; copyright law isn't really to prevent you from sharing a copy of a song with a friend, it's to prevent massive pirating enterprises that impact the market. Patent law isn't intended to provide mechanisms to sue end-user consumers of scanners that violate patents, it's intended to protect innovators from having their ideas taken without compensation by large engineering firms. Regulations in general are intended to produce certain results, usually some sort of social safety, they are not intended to becomes gods in and of themselves. But the actions of pretty much everybody in the system from top to bottom proves this idea is poorly understood.
>>The purpose of a speed limit is to make driving safe...<<
"I hoped that the national 55-mile per-hour speed limit--already in force--would help reduce gasoline consumption"
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=8017
>>When conditions make 55 unsafe, people need to slow down enough to be safe...<<
"California has a 'Basic Speed Law.' This law means that you may never drive faster than is safe for current conditions"
That's clearly not the current reason.
And more than just California has a law like that. I know Michigan does, I imagine most states do. It does show that somebody at some point understood the purpose. By no means am I saying all laws or bad, or that laws are bad, or even in a way that any particular law is bad; I'm saying people all to frequently conflate the letter of the law with its purpose.
It's been shown that in some cases US speed limits make roads less safe and are lower than the speed limits recommended by the engineers who designed the roadway.
"The design speed for the project was 110 km/h (68 mph). The design speed is like a warranty: nothing in the road design requires a driver to go slower than 68 mph, not even on a wet road at night (the design conditions).
The average speed is not far from the design speed. The 85th percentile speed, which is supposed to be used for setting speed limits, is around 75 mph. A little over by my measurement, which found 1% compliance with the speed limit."
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/09/be-...
Having speed limits where a large percentage of drivers regularly violate them teaches people to break the law casually. (Similarly, COPPA basically teaches kids to lie about their age online.)
But I entirely agree with your larger point that violation of arbitrary speed limits because of obvious engineering considerations does train people to break the law casually.
I'd have no problem with variable speed limits on roads - I think it would make a lot of sense to have speed limit displays that change based on time of day, weather conditions, etc. But until that's practical, speed limits will be set based on worst-case, with a proviso that drivers ALSO have to exercise discretion and further reduce speed in exceptional conditions like fog or snow.
I'd suggest that there's also a widespread lack of understanding that there's a difference between having a law, enforcing a law, and potentially even having the capability of enforcing the law. It's part of the reason why "law" isn't the answer to every societal problem.
I sure wish more people like you had stronger control over the legislative process.
In theory they could be deployed across the motorway network with ease, and overnight force people to abide by the maximum speed limits (which a majority of people do not currently do) or face fines and points on their licence (ultimately leading to a ban)
Which means the conclusion is wrong. The solution is not to have a lower speed limit, it's to require the internalization of externalized costs: Impose a fuel tax that accounts for the full cost of the pollution created to society. Require drivers whose speed has caused a collision to pay higher insurance premiums. Then drivers will have to weigh the cost to others in their decisions and the identified problem goes away.
Similarly: the 1990s dominate van Bentham's numbers and correspond to the introduction of OBD-x. Cars are more efficient now, but by how much? There are hybrids on the roads, but most people don't drive them, and we won't be outlawing Volvos from 2000 any time soon.
http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx
1995 fatalities per 100M VMT: 1.73
1996 fatalities per 100M VMT: 1.69
...
2010 fatalities per 100M VMT: 1.11
2011 fatalities per 100M VMT: 1.10
>What mainstream automotive advances lead you to believe that cars are so much safer that van Benthem's numbers are wildly off?
Crumple zones, passenger safety cage, airbags, anti-lock brakes. Better handling to avoid accidents. These things existed in 1996 but weren't present on much of the installed base of cars driven in that year. They were even less common in 1987. And that's just the cars. Light trucks and SUVs were deathtraps on wheels through the 1990s.
>the 1990s dominate van Bentham's numbers and correspond to the introduction of OBD-x.
That's what I'm saying. The new emissions controls had only just been introduced and weren't present on the installed base of cars that were driven on the roads in the years the speed limits were changed.
>There are hybrids on the roads, but most people don't drive them, and we won't be outlawing Volvos from 2000 any time soon.
The problem isn't Volvos from 2000, it's Impalas and Broncos from 1990. Which there were a lot more of on the road in 1996 than there are in 2013. And, once again, if your concern is air pollution, you do better to remove polluting vehicles from the road entirely and replace them with vehicles with modern emissions controls than you do by continuing to operate them at scale and then trying to mitigate the environmental damage of that choice by slowing everybody down.
The purpose of a speed limit is not to make people not go more than 55 miles per hour. The purpose of a speed limit is to make driving safe, and particularly to make driving safe for society, even moreso than for the individual. If everybody is driving at 65 in the 55 zone, but everybody is safe, the higher purpose of the law is being met, and citations for speeding are just punitive for no gain. When conditions make 55 unsafe, people need to slow down enough to be safe, regardless of what the local speed limit is.
The 55 MPH speed limit was enforced by congress to reduce the consumption of fuel (gasoline). It has nothing to do with safety.
The second sentence doesn't follow from the first. I guarantee there were congress-critters for whom the safety justification tipped their vote.
Sometimes it seems like the majority of the legal code is archaic if not completely corrupt. I wish there was a way for the public to revoke laws that were ridiculous. Jury nullification? If there is a way they should be teaching it in the schools.
I wonder what people would make of it if someone released a highly popular smartphone app that did this same sort of thing, just crowdsourced rather than done by dedicated police. You could build a gigantic, publicly-accessible, searchable database that would absolutely destroy privacy in the same way that having the police do it would, except it would be available to all instead of just to the government. Somehow, I imagine that the same people fighting against this would fight for people's rights to run this app.
It's a tough problem, certainly. I'm sympathetic to the privacy argument, but on the other hand, it seems like that ship has sailed. Maintaining privacy in public just because it's too hard to correlate all of the available data is becoming as anachronistic as riding a horse into town.
Edit: it's so wonderful how people are downvoting me apparently because they disagree. Before you downvote, click the reply button to explain why you think I'm wrong, and then don't downvote. Seriously, you can't take a little bit of differing opinion? I didn't insult anyone or say anything unproductive here, I just went slightly against the hivemind. And yes, I realize that complaining about downvotes is against the rules, and I don't care.
Cops are only recordable on the job, because they are public servants doing a public job.
IANAL, so that's the extent of the opinion I should be giving.
(IANAL also)
The government is not 'one' in 'everyone'.
We pay the bills so we can make some requirements.
The police have great power over the general public; we must keep that power in check, and one of the ways to do that in the modern world is to record police abuses and police brutality and publish those recordings on the Internet. I would rather see people who are dissatisfied with law enforcement aim cameras at the police than to have guns aimed at the police. We generally do not want our cities to become war zones.
On the other hand, when the police record the general public, the balance of power is further tipped toward the police. They already have paramilitary teams, armored vehicles, even attack helicopters, and they have vast surveillance powers; it is hard enough to prevent such an organization from become an oppressive, tyrannical force. Further expansion of police power is unnecessary and dangerous.
The police have a very special and privileged place in our society. They apply the law which means that they individually (and as a group) are given special rights by society for our protection. However, they are in a unique (and uniquely easy) position to abuse those extra rights.
How can we fight corruption if the people who's job it is to fight corruption are corrupt? How can we prove that they aren't? The extra powers the police are given make it very easy for them to be corrupt and to hide the fact.
Complaints against the police force are rarely about them recording their work, it is about them recording private citizen't going about their business for no good reason. Legitimate protestors legitimately protesting.
The police complain that they shouldn't have to be recorded going about their business as no-one else puts up with that. But they are wrong. They apply the law, the final step in the chain — and that isn't recorded. Everything said in parliament is recorded, everything said in court is recorded.
Hell, even truck drivers have tacographs!
Should police cars have dash-cams in this day and age? Yes. Should police have google-glass-like recorders recording what they see and what they do? Yes probably. Should a police gun record everything it shoots? definitely.
And the same applies for prisons and prison officers.
These are exactly the people who society has a valid, just reason to record in their duty.
A good cop has nothing to fear from more cameras. Even better—automating the process should, if done correctly, mean the death of a ton of paperwork.
The other argument for the police recording themselves is the fact that recording equipment is now so prevalent on walls and in the hands of the citizenry that they would surely need their own evidence to back up what the cops say. How many jury's will continue to take the word of a cop over two conflicting video recordings? Imagine how persuasive video footage of a cop being punched in the goggles would be? Surely the cops need that?
It is false. Actions made by Government, and actions made by private people has different effects on society.
A transparent government is a good thing. it allows for accountability and protects the individual. Its the only defense against power abuse.
A lack of privacy for the individual is a bad thing. It destroy modern society, breaks the court system, and encourage politics to focus on conservative efforts against political threats. Suddenly, one can identify any future political leaders before they has risen to a point of power.
If a popular smarthpone allowed people to identify any movement of an other person, FSF would likely not cheer on. Such app would be used to steal identify, provide stalkers with location data, allowed thieves to know where house owners are, and so on.
Data is awesome. Tt is history and science. In 50 or 5000 years anthropologists will be salvilating over having the data we record today.
Maybe in 5 years hobbyist, startup or evil corporation will come up with novel use that beneficial.
The problem is not in the data or in the technology. It is with how it is used. It should be available to everyone free of restriction.
However, the people do still have the ability to keep the government from doing this, or from accessing and utilizing the pervasive monitoring done by others. The government does not automatically get the right to do everything a private citizen can.
It's not a matter of availability of technology, but essentially of values - for example, a technology for murdering people cheaply and effectively (guns) exists and yet murder is not ubiquitous precisely because people agree that it's wrong. The privacy folks are just arguing that being under near-constant surveilance when in public space is also wrong. I'm not saying that I necessarily agree with them, but saying that if technology exists, then its use cannot be (to a large degree) prevented, is just incorrect.
So no, it's not the freedom from having your license plate OCR'd:
> And, according to recent research reported in Nature, it’s possible to identify 95% of individuals with as few as four randomly selected geospatial datapoints (location + time), making location data the ultimate biometric identifier.
It's the freedom from having the government know exactly who was exactly where at all times, which may be important for peaceful groups (if the only possible victims were violent nobody would oppose this) that are against its policies.
The question is not "how can we preserve our privacy by preventing technology from advancing" but "do we want the government or arbitrary private entities to be able to know what we are doing all day every day?"