How License-Plate Scanners Are Eroding Our Privacy
popularmechanics.com
popularmechanics.com
The police aren't the only ones doing it.
Data brokers have hooked up with repomen who put scanners on their dashboards and upload every plate they scan to the data broker's databases:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/adamtanner/2013/07/10/data-broke...
US Customs has been handing over plate scan data to insurance companies:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/08/21/documen...
[1] http://appleinsider.com/articles/11/10/27/steve_jobs_stayed_...
Let p(x) be a proposition that means that doing x is a violation of someone's expectation of privacy.
Some people seem to assume that (not p(x)) and (not p(y)) implies that not p(x union y). In other words, the assumption is that if x is not a violation of someone's expectation of privacy, and doing y is not a violation of someone's expectation of privacy, then doing both x and y is also not a violation of someone's expectation of privacy.
However, the 'mosaic theory' suggests that the above assumption is not valid - doing x and y individually might be perfectly reasonable, but doing both could be a violation of someone's expectation of privacy.
I actually support his getting his job back, because it seems to have been found that the police department overstepped their boundaries in their investigation of him. If that is indeed true, then it's imperative that any illegal evidence against him should be discarded.
I don't know whether they violated his rights or not, but it's pretty clear from the reporting (all of which I've read, since he makes $150K as my neighborhood cop) that he's guilty in the pure sense of "he did it." And they originally discovered him in some other context - not while illegally pursuing him. (While "they" continue to illegally tap your phone, and your emails, and mine.)
The defense attorney can bring up claims that the evidence was ill-gotten, and if the claim is upheld, then the judge can throw out everything gained afterward, unless they can prove that it would have been discovered unrelated to the ill-gotten loot.
For example, if a police officer searches your home without a warrant and finds the murder weapon, that murder weapon ceases to exist, legally, and the suspect will likely get away scot free.
However, if a different officer pulls him over for a DUI a week later, not as a result of information provided by the unlawful search, and finds blood in the back seat of the car, which leads to an arrest, prosecution could claim that they would have obtained a warrant to his home that would then have likely surfaced the murder weapon.
Edit, all that was fairly random rambling, re-reading it in context, but what I meant to say was that I agree, and that his confession ought to be enough grounds to keep his termination permanent.
And yes, you can find this out just by physically following someone wherever they go, but since that's impractical to do on a mass scale, it's not likely to be done for people who aren't targets of specific criminal investigations. License plate scanning collects this personal information indiscriminately about totally innocent people.
And this information is likely to be abused by people in positions of power, just like existing records about people are. I can't count how many times have I've heard about cops getting in trouble for running unauthorized database searches on ex-girlfriends, etc. Detailed data about a person's every movement would be even more tempting to abuse.
Guys from Palantir would know better i guess what Suspicious Activity Reports are cooked there:
http://www.palantir.com/_ptwp_live_ect0/wp-content/uploads/2...
"...many Fusion Centers have gradually shifted to a broader mission of providing general criminal intelligence and all-crimes, all-hazards analysis support for constituent agencies."
Inevitable given that terrorism is effectively non-existent in the US. When you have a great big expensive hammer, you just have use it on something.
As for potential for abuse, guns can be abused too - that doesn't mean guns aren't allowed at all. Or if your country does ban guns, think of something else that might be abused but is allowed anyway.
Just because something could be abused doesn't mean that's a valid reason for not doing that thing.
Also, misusing a gun is different than misusing information.
When one is moving across several disparate geographical locations, there is indeed an expectation of privacy.
The simple "hurf durf you're in public ergo no privacy ever" argument is horseshit, to put it bluntly.
Also, what's "horseshit" about "you don't have privacy when you act in public"? I'm not recording your conversations as you're in public, only what you do. Why is that horseshit?
Because historically (and also legally) the bounds between what is private and public have been defined by what was plausible at the time, not by what was hypothetically possible.
We know live in a world were what used to a be a hypothetical dream (or science fiction novel) has now become the mundane. The law can either adapt (via judicial rulings), be changed by voters or become an absurd anachronism that's good for nothing but justifying invasive surveillance.
It's morally wrong to try and stop me from automatically recording the license plates of the people who drive by my house.
It is more complicated when you start talking about whether you should sell derivations of those recordings or someone aggregating the recordings made by many people.
It's the exact same thing as CCTV, fundamentally. How can you construct an argument that prevents me from doing this without preventing many things we already are okay with?
There is also the problem where you are talking about morality as if it is clear cut and all settled.
Anyway, I'm pretty well in favor of trying to find a meaningful definition of a space that exists between public and private, where shared space activities are not just a free for all. Mostly, because I think I would/will be more comfortable in shared spaces if I can expect that other people will mostly have some respect for my wish to not be followed around with technology.
(I would argue this space exists, it's plenty easy to irritate someone by 'getting in their face' in public. This is them expressing strident disapproval of your behavior...)
The only point anyone's been able to make is that it could possibly be abused, but frankly, everything the government can do can be abused. You'll need more than "it could be abused" to argue against it.
I don't have a right to go into a place where you have privacy. If you come out of a private place, or act in a way that is public, I have every right in the world to track you.
Personally, I have not trouble tracking every car.
And yes abuse is a perfectly valid reason to ban something. Dangerous things that are allowed are because the amount of abuse is thought to be less than the amount of benefit. Is that true for surveillance? I honestly don't know.
"It could be abused" is not a valid reason not to do something, because everything is abused. It's human nature to abuse power. "The consequences of inevitable abuse are too severe to risk." is a better argument. What are the consequences of the abuse of this information? What, of these consequences, are possible only by the abuse of this information? What can go wrong when this system gets abused?
Those are the relevant questions, and what we should be discussing, not quietly yelping, "my privacy" as we're each drug out of our beds into the night.
You can say the benefit of it makes it worth it, but I don't see how you can believe these things won't happen at all.
http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metada...
In my understanding, license plates were created for two reasons:
* To enforce registration requirements for cars and drivers in order to enforce training standards (for drivers) and safety standards (for the construction and inspection of cars)
* To allow the easier identification of the party responsible for an accident (and maybe for certain other infractions, like speeding, parking violations, or abandoning a vehicle)
That means that other uses to which license plates have been put are a kind of mission creep. Where they harm motorists' privacy, we can reasonably see them as a failure in the design and implementation of the license plate system.
If we had a license plate system that let people responsible for accidents and traffic infractions be identified and that ensured cars were safe without also making it easy to figure out individual people's travel patterns, I'd view that as a strict improvement over the status quo -- and more legitimate, because it wouldn't impose unrelated burdens on motorists.
Right now we're creating and deploying lots of other systems that assign unique identifiers to people and their possessions. Those systems are meant for specific purposes, which their users may see as legitimate, but designing them in the simplest, most obvious way will cause collateral damage to privacy by allowing often invisible kinds of tracking and profiling of people's activities, whereabouts, and relationships. If those uses are not the intended purpose, we should demand more careful designs that end up enabling them.
They were designed in an age in which pervasive video-cameras and back-end databases that never forget were pure science fiction at best.
In effect, the terms of the public's contract with the state regarding license plates have changed. It's time we re-negotiate that contract in light of the new circumstances.
Vid of the Defcon talk titled "Drinking from the firehose known as Shodan. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhNWwFu1Qjs&list=PLCDA5DF85AD...
"The trick is that that the frame is basically a optically-triggered slave-mode flash unit that’s placed right up to the subject (the license place). A sensor at the top of the frame detects when a flash is fired, which in turn instantly triggers two xenon flashes built into the sides. The powerful flash will turn your license plate into a rectangle of blown-out highlights."
It's illegal, of course.
I much prefer the idea of getting a custom plate that's something like 00000O0000 or 1111l11111 etc. depending on the font.
It doesn't work. Mythbusters tried it.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/adamtanner/2013/07/10/data-broke...
Also, the plate readers, they don't even use flashes. They are essentially video cameras.
We didn't.
In Australia, at least, red light cameras are cameras, and they do have a flash (you can see it go off). The plate readers on the freeways for tolls are more like video cameras.
For example here's data from Minneapolis (with anonymized license plates): https://github.com/johnschrom/Minneapolis-ALPR-Data
Privacy concerns aside, there's definitely something really cool about so much data.
I can't imagine a license scheme being repealed these days, as these things are all about the fees that can be collected, as well as the feature-creep that bureaucrats can promote. A drivers' license today goes well beyond driving, now, in its various official (and unofficial) uses.
Like calculus, it has a sort of epsilon/delta construct -- given a differential privacy concern epsilon, under what circumstances (how tight a bound on delta) do I need to prevent that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy
Perhaps this theory could quantify the intuition that while it's ok to snap my license plate now and then (very little differential privacy loss on my part), enough times and it becomes invasive, and dreadfully so.
This puts some teeth into the vague talk about a mosaic theory. The key idea is whether the aggregate information in the data set can triangulate you, to within say 10000 persons (not much privacy invation), or 100 (quite a bit). There seems to be a tipping point around clusters of 100-1000 persons or so, that is the typical size of small organizations or groups of people, such as churches and schools.
Now, as an application: license plates are nearly unique identifiers and the attacker has a database of who's who for all intents and purposes, so it is little different from asking everyone for their ID just because they are on the street. That's illegal by the way, even for the police.
The argument that was formerly deployed here is that using a vehicle on public roadways was a privilege that cost you natural expectation of privacy (non-intrusion) in public places.
The real crux of the issue here is that the public-private tradeoff was once predicated on the individual (the individual atom has protection, because data collection is sparse, so tagging the individual but not the path was meaningful). Now the data collection is dense, and even single particle tracks become visible.
If you think in terms of fluid mechanics, there's a sort of Euler view / Lagrange view here (as there is with tagged dollar particles and tagged wallets or accounts).
That is, tracking individuals and tracking their paths become duals of each other, if the data collection is dense enough. It doesn't matter whether the item tracked is the tagged individual, or the flows and transactions -- either way, complete reconstruction of the system becomes possible.
With any data set, there is a sort of 'phase transition' in its size, where you suddenly can see the underlying trajectories of all the tagged particles. Things that made perfect sense when data collection was sparse, just as allowing the police to jot down you license number and chase you with a bicycle, turn into totalitarian surveillance when the observations become dense enough -- in a way we can quantify in terms of a sudden jump in information gain that goes from nearly complete ignorance of where people are and what they are doing (the former phase), to near complete knowledge of everything. Very much like percolation theory.
That is not illegal at all. Anyone can ask for ID, including the police. Doesn't mean you have to give it to them. In the case of the police, refusing to show your ID can't be used as cause to arrest you. But they can still ask for it.