Los Angeles Cops Argue All Cars in LA Are Under Investigation
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There is a network of number plate recognition cameras to enforce the congestion charge. But there were initially assurances that this wouldn't lead to a blanket database for policing, they can just request particular images.
Pretty rapidly there was an exception for "national security" purposes, and more recently the mayor has proposed giving the police full access to the camera network[1].
[1] http://www.london.gov.uk/media/mayor-press-releases/2014/02/...
The data in the system is legally protected and cannot be used by the police. In the ten years that have passed, "security politicians" have been relentlessly hammering this restriction in the hope that it will fall[1].
So far they haven't been successful, but who knows what the future brings. You can be certain they won't stop to try.
[1] http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&pre...
I am writing to let you know that you can give the Mayor of London your views on his proposals to allow the Metropolitan Police to have access to Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras for crime prevention reasons.
We use these cameras to monitor and enforce Congestion Charging and the Low Emission Zone.
For more information and to share your views, please click here:[http://talklondon.london.gov.uk/content/your-views-cutting-c...]
To take part in this consultation, please use the link above. Any responses to this email will be passed to the Greater London Authority along with your name and email address, so that they can reply to you directly.
This consultation will close on Tuesday 8 April. Yours sincerely,
Paul Cowperthwaite General Manager Congestion Charging
My personal view is that scanning and checking against lists is fine but the data for any vehicles not believed to be wanted/committing an offence should then be immediately destroyed. I haven't fully signed up for the consultation to understand what question is being asked though.
That's reasonable. I would add that at no point should any picture ever be committed to nonvolatile memory unless it has been confirmed to match one of the watchlists. If the license plate is not on a list at the time of scanning, it should never be stored outside of RAM.
The idea would be that this still creates a lot of opportunity for people to notice they don't like what the police are up to.
Assume that either checks of the database or certain types of additions to the database would have some period of latency (additions is probably the better way).
Police begin some investigation. For whatever reason, they don't want to reveal this investigation to particular potentially involved parties. Police go to judge and ask for 'order of leeway' or whatever it would be called. They get it. All it means is that the police don't have to publish ongoing details regarding a specific investigation. New traffic tickets go right in the database, checks of the database do not reveal the investigation.
Where's the problem? Take it one step further, is there a problem without a straightforward remedy?
Destruction of evidence is more interested in whether you are doing it to cover up something that you reasonably know is a crime than it is in what the police know about what you did, so I'm not real worried about it here.
It's creates a new and unstoppable asymmetry where wealthy people can avoid this tracking mechanism, but the poorer people cannot, and anyone can exploit the poorer people in society.
Politicians and powerful people will never feel the effects of this.
I wish people would understand that "losing perceived power", such as recognizing that an information asymmetry exists, is a completely different situation than "never having had power".
There are valid arguments for creating information symmetry, but it's not going to actually fix anything except lack of symmetry.
The choice of no one gets access is apparently not an option.
There are huge benefits to such systems but if the gateway is controlled by a small number of people then most of those benefits are null and most likely the system will prove to not be beneficial at all.
Well, not beneficial to the people outside of the group in control that is.
Note, I'm explicitly not talking about making it illegal or other feel-good measures. I'm talking about actually preventing the actions.
We're living a tech shift here. The way we used to respond to absolutism has been to require the our layman policeman doesn't have enough info to bully us. It has proven not to be possible, since technology is so accessible and pervasive that all our info is spilled.
So how would we write the Fourth Amendment today? "Information that is not public is against the constitution"?
My worry about abuse of this data goes beyond public officials. I think the right to privacy is worth protecting, even in the face of changing technology.
If these are the choices for the future, and I really hope we can do better, then you'll find me living the hermits life somewhere in the mountains. Enjoy spending all your days watching what others do to make sure they're not screwing you over.
Data will continue to be collected, be it by state entities, corporations, or private citizens. It will keep happening whether it's declared illegal or not, as it's become clear that there's no working oversight of the state actors in particular.
I don't have any magical solution to the privacy issue (wish I did). My current approach is to try to be active in discussions on the topic, educate people about the risks, and trying to give a counterpoint to the David Brin-inspired peeping tom paradise a lot of tech people seem to love.
Is it time to start talking about civil disobedience and removing large numbers of number plates from cars in an organised protest?
Having a barcode on all our cars is turning out to be very bad for civil liberties now there's all this auto-recognition software coming in to play.
Similar to another discussion[1], the problem has arisen because it is now possible to collate this information to make up detailed map of a person's life whenever a malicious actor wants.
Judging by the number of people who go screaming past me when I'm driving near London, and how they set off speed cameras all over the place with no apparent concern, I am assuming that plenty of people already did remove their own number plates and install clones of someone else's, though possibly not for quite such ethical purposes as you mentioned.
It may be the case that the cameras, if limited to only giving fines and not "points" (or the equivalent) on your license, do little more than create a two-tiered system: poor people who cannot speed, and rich people who are free to speed if they are willing to pay a token 'speeding tax'.
At least in the states I checked the last time I looked into it, things like red light cameras will not put points on your license, even though being caught running a red light by an actual police officer certainly would. If you are driving somebody else's car and a police officer catches you running a red light, you will receive a ticket and points on your license; if a camera catches you then the vehicle owner will receive a fine.
People already do this very frequently in LA, you'd have to convince the entire city to do it for the cops to notice. A friend of mine took off her license plate to avoid the red light cameras, and has been driving around without plates for two years. Never been pulled over for it. I see at least one car without plates every day on my drive to work, and it's a ten minute drive.
But, of course that would never happen. Cops, judges, politicians want protection from retaliation and etc. Well so fucking do the rest of us.
Sounds like the "utopia" described by David Brin et al. Count me out of that future society. My desire for privacy is not affected by others desire for same.
EDIT: I also think public servants, including cops and judges, absolutely deserve privacy. It's just that privacy does not apply to actions taken on the job or in the capacity of a public servant.
But this idea that all this surveillance-state stuff would actually be great if only we could all have access to the data is quite common in the tech community and here on HN. Books have been written on the subject. I vehemently disagree with this outlook, hence my comment.
However, I do think that that the outcome of universal access to surveillance is the best one that has any slim likelihood at all of coming to pass - all of the other actually possible outcomes are worse.
The likely outcome of this kind of openness law is that powerful and wealthy people use a car service, making them untrackable, while poor people are stuck being tracked not only by the currently powerful, but anyone that feels like attempting to gain power over them.
You've simply widened the market for who can exploit the data without causing any damage to the people who initially did so - something I think is strictly worse than the current state of affairs.
I personally don't see a path to an end point where there is no collection and aggregation of personal data, be it by state actors, corporations, or private citizens.
The actual most likely outcome that I see is official regulation of personal data collection and aggregation by corporations and private citizens as in the EU. Those laws explicitly allow state actors to actively collect and aggregate tracking data.
However, nothing technical actually prevents corporate and private actors from doing so, at the cost of a fine if they are caught. The actions that might have some effect on data collection (like obscuring license plates) are prohibited by laws that ease the collection of data by state actors.
This will continue to be exploited, although additional resources available to certain groups - the wealthy, those associated with corporations and state actors, and (to some extent) the technically skilled that put much of their available skills and resources toward staying private - will enable concealing of some private data.
This is already essentially the current state of affairs, though. Anyone with the required resources can use either legal, quasi-legal, or illegal means to do this sort of thing. Note the recent discussion of the system for intel available to repo operators.
I expect that we won't see any kind of effective prohibition on corporate or private behavior, at least in the United States, but contend that various measures mentioned above are reasonably effective at curbing this as well. (This could be aided by amending laws to say that plates must only be visible while the vehicle is actively driving on the road.)
Ideally, privacy preserving laws, which recognize the fundamental role of anonymity in society would be enacted, but I find this unlikely to actually happen in the US.
Ultimately, there are limits on what people care about, and anonymity is one of the things that requires cover traffic and statistical noise to be effective. However, I do think there are things that concerned people can do to raise the bar on collecting information about individual - ie, use ZipCar, start services which bulk order things off Amazon and ship to a locker/mailbox facility, etc. These won't necessarily stop someone looking in to what you're doing, in particular, from tracking you, but they increase the difficulty sufficiently to make bulk tracking difficult (assuming wide enough adoption).
The fundamental problem, just like it is online, is that anonymity and signal mixing needs to be built in to the system, and that's just kind of inconvenient. So it requires people to proactively do it, even when they're not hiding, and tends to just not get done (often enough).
Giving authority over another should be the rarest granted power. Instead, (US society) passes it out willy nilly to law enforcement, companies, and any one else willing to tell us what to do, e.g. HOAs.
Also cars are a massive cause of death and heavily used in violent crimes so it can actually be useful to track them, unlike trying to catch near-non-existant terrorists.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/private-firms-arg...
This is because we give the government an exclusive license on force.
This is part of the reason all sorts of government surveillance is structured as private companies that curate data with the goal of providing it to the Government. Companies are much more free to generate whatever databases they like, however they want. Government use then falls under the vague category of accessing "business records" which Congress ultimately doesn't seem to regulate much (except perhaps for medical records and wiretapping).
I wonder how the Government would like it if many hobbyists sat in front of the NSA car park and started writing down every license plate and put them on a searchable database.
Now this is a project I would fund. Kickstarter anyone?
The Washington Post suggests there was at least some journalistic field work plane spotting in the US [3].
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/jan/23/usa.eu
[2] http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/news-room/content/2012...
[3] http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/ten-ye...
I'm wondering if anyone is working on an app like Metadata for CIA renditions. Basically to to track when someone just disappears, because it's not like they got a day in court before they were tortured and/or murdered.
Probably not in the US, but in lots of EU countries, just collecting identifying data with an automated system is illegal, or at least has to be declared.
And I think that it's a very good thing.
Here's the article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/09/12/e-zpasses...
EDIT: Seems that New York Department of Transportation is doing this.
Your "less invasive" point is wrong, even if what you 'presume' is correct.
Walking around outside is not considered private. Following someone in public is considered stalking and is illegal. You can do things in public and still claim some semblance of privacy.
Actually, simply following someone around in public is not stalking and not illegal in itself. Private investigators, process servers, and repo men do this all the time.[1] Stalking requires some sort of contact, direct or indirect (e.g., making your presence known).
[1] Regardless of your opinion of those trades and the people who ply them, their activities are legal.
I'm not licensed nor bonded in any way of any profession.
What am I to be charged with exactly?
Also: collecting data on a human by a human does not scale. Large-scale automated data collection on the other hand takes on a wholly different character. Let's say someone became your political adversary fifteen years from now and you don't know it today because he is in college. You needed to dig up dirt on him, and you find out that while in college he was a prolific consumer of "My Little Pony" porn. Automation makes such a scenario possible. Without it you would have to send staffers through archives, and that's only worth it for the biggest targets.
As it stands for now, the privacy implications of regular surveillance cameras are limited by storage and the computing & manpower needed to analyze every frame. It's pretty certain your local police department isn't storing every frame recorded by area highway cameras for several years back; they are doing that for license plate readers, though.
So if you forced police to manually go through the list of license plates every camera recorded, and find the one they want, that would be ok? But if they made a script to do the exact same thing automatically, it's illegal?
Leave the house with the zipper down on Monday. Have a silly argument with a neighbor on Friday. Isolated incidents that will end up in the "Worst of Houshalter" - file, either available for everyone, or just a group of decisionmakers.
Am I seeing this right, or am I exaggerating?
I see warning signs all over the place, that this train/building/place etc. is under video surveillance.
Cool story bro. Details? Who's looking at the data? How long will it be stored? How is that data protected?
I tried out SimpleCV recently, and was fascinated how much already works out of the box. Face recognition from a video is basically the "Hello World" program.
The phrase "Wake up sheeple" has been discredited as wannabe-enlightened, but in this case I feel like opening my window and shouting it out loud. Sigh.
These privacy laws could be really damaging to progress. In some cases it basically makes it illegal to make a machine do the same thing as a human.
No, we virtually eliminate crime of anyone that isn't friends with the bureau that manages the cameras
I don't automatically have a problem with that. Progress at any cost isn't something I take as "obviously good" and machines don't have rights to employment.
That's ignoring the fact that you want the machine to do it because it's not doing "the same thing", it's doing something slightly different.
If you make a comb with teeth too fine, it will rip out your hair.
You don't want omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient mechanical enforcement of the law. You may think you do, but you really don't.
'“It may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties,” Sotomayor wrote in 2012. “This approach is ill suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks.”'
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/how-sotomayor-undermined-obamas-n...
Otherwise stop it, a computer is no different a tool than a dog.
Maybe we should re-examine the analogy -- are computers with perfect vision, that never look away, and perfectly record any observation they are able to make, really comparable to cops? Are the resulting huge bodies of data that can be retroactively searched, really comparable to anything that existed before?
This is a half-developed thought admittedly; I'm not sure it's a good argument, or what should be done.
You'll start using skateboards. They'll require plates for skateboards.
You'll start doing it on foot. They'll require us to wear hats with our number printed front and back.
I would prefer you use fake plates while committing your organized crime so that we don't slip further down that slope.
I'm sure cops wouldn't like it if they happened to be behind you; in an ideal world it would be something you could control with a flip of a switch.
Edit: I worded this poorly - surely it's illegal, I was more wondering how much fun it would be to f with the man like that, but I forget that people these days lack the 'fuck with the man' gene that was so prevalent in the 60's. I think people need to take more LSD or something.
No, not only can you not act to conceal them, you have a positive obligation to actively keep them readable. See, California Vehicle Code Section 5201(a): "License plates [...] shall be maintained in a condition so as to be clearly legible. [...]"
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/pubs/vctop/d03/vc5201.htm
5201. (a) License plates shall at all times be securely fastened to the vehicle for which they are issued so as to prevent the plates from swinging, shall be mounted in a position so as to be clearly visible, and so that the characters are upright and display from left to right, and shall be maintained in a condition so as to be clearly legible. The rear license plate shall be mounted not less than 12 inches nor more than 60 inches from the ground, and the front license plate shall be mounted not more than 60 inches from the ground...
and
(c) A casing, shield, frame, border, product, or other device that obstructs or impairs the reading or recognition of a license plate by an electronic device operated by state or local law enforcement, an electronic device operated in connection with a toll road, high-occupancy toll lane, toll bridge, or other toll facility, or a remote emission sensing device, as specified in Sections 44081 and 44081.6 of the Health and Safety Code, shall not be installed on, or affixed to, a vehicle.
"(f) Records of complaints to, or investigations conducted by, records of intelligence information or security procedures of [cops]"
"intelligence information" is essentially things like files on suspected gang members. The contention seems to be that this is intelligence information on all drivers, and to that extent, all drivers are under suspicion of "everything".
The entire presentation is a great read and everyone checking out this thread should at least scan it:
https://www.defcon.org/images/defcon-21/dc-21-presentations/...
His little ALPR detectors are fun as well.
EDIT: Ok maybe it can be explained. I just don't like it.
It's an invasion of the privacy of the occupants of the car, not the car itself.
I used to think a lot of things were justified, because on balance they would help to protect innocent people against relatively minor illegal activities, and while they could theoretically be used for major abuses by governments no democratically elected administration would ever get away with doing it. Many of those had to do with balancing everyone being accountable under the law with anonymity and privacy.
Unlike some people, I prefer to learn the lessons of history and change my views when the evidence warrants, and I am increasingly of the view that the democratic accountability of our governments is far too weak and the price of trusting governments with the power afforded by a surveillance state is far too high to pay for some modest benefits.
A case in point: 'omh mentioned the London Congestion Charge in another post to this discussion, linking to news that (contrary to clear assurances given when the cameras were rolled out) the London mayor now wants to give police direct access to the cameras. Now, to be fair, this isn't an absurd idea: no doubt these cameras do help to catch some people who are trying to escape justice after breaking the law (they are careful to cite examples of this) and reportedly this was in the Mayor's manifesto at the last election so it does have some degree of democratic mandate.
Of course, there have also been stories where the system has gone horribly wrong and incorrectly fined people[1], or just not been understood and penalised people who were trying to behave reasonably and do the right thing[2]. Given that the way our court system works means that it can be prohibitively expensive to challenge automated penalty notices issued by such systems if you live a long way away and were just visiting (assuming you really were ever there in the first place) I have significant reservations about how easy this kind of "enforcement" becomes under a surveillance state, and whether even the genuine benefits of better enforcement against minor offenders are enough to justify such schemes, which makes me even less trusting of the long-term motivations of those involved.
[1] I can't immediately find a link, but the one I most remember was an elderly gentlemen who lived in the north of England and rarely if ever visited London any more, yet who wound up getting many fines sent to him, presumably because someone cloned his plates.
[2] http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/jan/23/congesti...
Far too many abusers were elected in democratic elections. The key is not only have democratic elections (and legal mechanisms to remove abusers when needed - to prevent coups), but actual checks and balances that can, effectively, prevent abuses and punish and remove abusers.
Would you like to disclose this information?
Sorry, which information? If you mean which country am I in, the answer is England.
There are probably some arcane Parliamentary mechanisms where some sort of no confidence vote might trigger that result, but we don't directly elect the leader of our government, who by convention is the leader of the dominant political party in the House of Commons[1], nor the various ministers of state who will have executive authority (who are appointed by the PM[2]). This is probably the most significant of the "arm's length" mechanisms I mentioned before.
This can lead to obvious abuses of the system like Gordon Brown becoming Prime Minister in the final years of the New Labour administration, even though the electorate were promised repeatedly and explicitly at the last general election before that happened that anyone voting for New Labour was voting for Tony Blair to serve a full third term and would not get Gordon Brown as PM.
In fact, that situation is a textbook example of why I think a power of recall is long overdue. Whatever your political views or your opinion of the individual politicians involved, the facts are clear, the people exercised their right to vote on the one chance they were given, and then they got something they had explicitly been told they wouldn't get and had no recourse.
[1] Slightly different things may happen in a coalition where no party has an outright majority, as we discovered recently, but the position is still determined by the make-up of Parliament rather than a direct vote by the general population.
[2] Technically speaking, a lot of this is probably up to Her Majesty, but I suspect any refusal by the monarch to follow convention in this respect would start the countdown to our becoming a republic, so I consider this a formality.
The PM is appointed by the Sovereign, and actually doesn't need to be an MP. While there's doubt over whether a Sovereign would appoint someone who isn't, it would be constitionally simple to shuffle them off to a safe seat. So no, it's not simple to get rid of a bad PM at all.
Slippery slop much? That's not even a slope. It's one step away from "People are too dangerous to not be tracked."
That is, your assets (e.g., your car) have no rights. If the police think it's guilty of being an accomplice in a drug sale, for example, the police can lock it up without giving it due process.
This is a horrible foundation for getting around our civil rights.
So are cops.
Worst part is, in a stretch of road with for instance 15 camera's . they won't take the average speed between camera 0 and 14, they'll fine you for the most expensive one.
So:
if you average 100 Km/h from 0-14,
and average 115 Km/h from 0-5,
and average 117 Km/h from 8-9.
You get a fine for the 117 km/h
The EFF isn't seeking data on the operation of the Automatic License Plate Reader (like LAPD internal documents on how the system should be configured or the protocols for handling data), it's seeking a week's worth of output from the information gathering system - presumably with a view to pointing out how many vehicles have had their license plates recorded.
The LAPD most certainly did not argue that all cars are under investigation. Rather they argued that:
a) such bulk data release would include information pertaining to criminal investigations, which is privileged from release; and
b) that such bulk data contains so much personally identifying information that it should not, by law, be made public. Yes, that means the LAPD has access to it and the general public doesn't; the the LAPD has institutional responsibilities and is subject to institutional oversight in a way that private actors are not. finally,
c) the EFF has already been given abundant data on how the system operates in accordance with CA public records request policies. Asking for the output of the system is superfluous.
This argument is completely counter to our criminal justice system, in which we assume law enforcement will not conduct an investigation unless there are some indicia of criminal activity.
Well, you know what they say about assumptions...our Constititution says that no warrants will issue without specific indicia. The EFF is basically arguing that the police must be blind until such time as a crime is reported; by this standard it would be illegal for an LAPD officer to observe or act on events in the street unless and until s/he had been dispatched to investigate a specific crime. In fact, police officers are entitled to observe public comings and going in search of patterns, or even to follow people on a hunch as long as they don't interfere with a person improperly, eg by searching without some probable cause. Observations are not the same thing as a search, nor do they by themselves comprise an investigation. Such observations don't interfere with Constitutional guarantees of freedom of assembly; it's a long-established principle that people do not have any expectation of privacy for their movements and behavior in public, but the EFF's position appears to be that government should be forbidden from storing any data about such movements.
I get that the EFF is saying that the LAPD shouldn't be able to engage in such bulk data gathering. But to claim that the LAPD considers itself to be investigating all cars in LA is twisting the department's argument into a pretzel. The EFF says:
Taken to an extreme, the agencies’ arguments would allow law enforcement to conduct around-the-clock surveillance on every aspect of our lives and store those records indefinitely on the off-chance they may aid in solving a crime at some previously undetermined date in the future. If the court accepts their arguments, the agencies would then be able to hide all this data from the public.
Well, no it wouldn't, but let's accept the similar premise that law enforcement would be able to conduct round-the-clock surveillance of every aspect of our public lives. The LAPD might keep that data confidential from the public, but they wouldn't be able to hide its use in a criminal case, which would be a violation of someone's civil rights.
They also make the argument that the license plate reader data is "investigatory" even if it is not connected to a particular criminal activity, and also claims that these records do not have to result in a "concrete and definite" prospect for enforcement action.
Sounds like the headline is pretty close to me.
[1] https://s.eff.org/files/2014/03/17/20140224lapd_p_as_in_opp_...
Keep your car clean.
I haven't had a license plate on my car in 4 years. I'll never have one.