DHS to Launch Nationwide License Plate Reader Program
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There are a few threads going on here but the main one seems to be: Should we care about "privacy" of information available in public, and if so, how do we set rules (Given that it's in public)?
I think the answer to the first question is undoubtedly yes because of the way technology is advancing. Yes, we've always been able to see people in public, but we've never been able to do it in a rapid automated fashion on a mass scale, or catalog and query natiowide databases. This creates new implications for privacy. In the past the government simply didn't have the resources to know exactly what religious ceremonies, political meetings, protests every American was going to. Now they do.
This may mean an expansion of 4th Amendment protections (@sharemywin mentioned the idea of a new amendment, but I think this is exactly what the 4th Amendment is for). In Jones the Supreme Court said you can't attach GPS devices to cars without a warrant, and 5 Justices said we may need this type of protection for location data generally. Since then many lower courts have applied this protection to location data generated from cell phones (even public locations), which I think is correct.
As far as setting a standard, I think the best approach is to require 4th Amendment protections for location data generated from an electronic source/device. This is what a number of states have been doing to address demands for cell phone location data and police use of stringrays. It also directly goes to the issue that electronic devices are given government unprecedented power to record, store, and query our location data, which makes that data more sensitive and suseptible to abuse.
...This creates new implications for privacy. In the past the government simply didn't have the resources to know exactly what religious ceremonies, political meetings, protests every American was going to. Now they do."
The occasional flyover to look for narcotics operations may be permissible, because there is no expectation of privacy in a public space.
But monitoring an entire city with aerostats and quadrotors, or storing the location information of the entire population through license plate readers, while justifiable under the same legal rationale, is a completely different situation.
From a practical reading of the Constitution, it is clearly violative of the Fourth Amendment.
The 4th Amendment - and specifically its warrant requirement - is often misunderstood to be about protecting individuals from government searches. Warrants will generally be granted, and the search of any particular individual is going to happen if the government wants it to. The protection for individuals happens later when evidence that was improperly obtained could be ruled inadmissible by the exclusionary rule. The search will probably happen, but the results of that search may not apply in court.
The warrant requirement is an attempt to protect society in general against threats like the writs of assistance that were imposed upon the colonies. From the perspective of an individual search, obtaining a warrant is a trivial speed bump.
If you wanted to search an entire city, on the other hand, those speed bumps serve as a rate limiter. It is just not possible for even a large, corrupt, overfunded and overstaffed police force to "particularly describe" what each search is for and get each one rubber stamped by a judge. Our police and judicial systems have many inefficiencies like this by design.
In modern times, we probably need to extend this idea to the public space, to impose some kind of new rate-limiter. It doesn't matter if the government can ask for occasional data, but allowing a continual collection and a permanent database is the kind of "general warrant" style collection that we need to prevent. The problem is when data is the aggregated, so we need to strongly rate limit the collection so there is no data to aggregate.
By the way - while license plate data is bad enough, I hope everybody remembers that they are making a detailed map of their movements and a graph of probably relationships when they carry a cell phone thanks to COTRAVELER. That slide from the Snowden archive didn't get a lot of press, but it is probably one of the more easily abused programs out of all of the recent revelations.
This is true but it protects against "unreasonable" searches. I'd much rather have my house be searched after a judge deems it necessary, rather than there being no accountability or oversight, and the police deciding on their own that they want to. Other than that, I agree.
It prohibits unreasonable searches. Whether it protects against them depends on the effectiveness with which its prohibition is enforced. Unfortunately, enforcement through the courts has been effectively limited to the exclusionary rule, which is perhaps a reasonably sufficient remedy against unreasonable searches for the purposes of criminal prosecution [0], but is completely useless against unreasonable searches for other purposes.
[0] though perhaps not, there's all kinds of exploitable limitations to the exclusionary rule even in the criminal domain.
>The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
He/She is exactly right – the fourth amendment is highly relevant even after a search has taken place.
Yes, but at the time the Constitution was written warrants were a requirements for a search. If a British officer showed up on your property and demanded to search it without a warrant you could literally shoot him.
This led to the issuance of "general warrants," allowing British officers to search entire houses and estates. The Fourth Amendment was a direct reaction to that, which is enshrined in the language "no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
But you conveniently left out the most important part: the rationale at the beginning of the Amendment: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,[a] against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated"
The whole purpose of the Amendment was to protect individuals from government searches. The text says so right on its face: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated..."
The exclusionary rule or "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine, with which you seem to be confusing the Amendment itself, is a twentieth century invention of the Warren court.
By the time of the Constitution, a British officer demanding to search your premises had more problems than whether or not they had a warrant.
Its true that by the time of the Constitution, most states required particular warrants -- these requirements were adopted in the Constitutions many states adopted when the declared independence. General "writs of assistance", which were transferrable blank checks issued to particular officers that lasted for the entire length of a monarch's reign (and for 6 months thereafter!) were permitted prior to that (perceived abuse of these by the British customs authorities was, in fact, one of the major source of tension leading to the revolution.)
But yes, the purpose of the Amendment was to protect individuals.
> The exclusionary rule or "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine, with which you seem to be confusing the Amendment itself, is a twentieth century invention of the Warren court.
Its worth noting that before the exclusionary rule, there was no remedy for most violations of the Fourth Amendment. The exclusionary rule doesn't substitute for the protection of the Amendment, it gives them some (though limited) teeth.
And if you tell anyone about which city and which company, they threaten you with legal repercussions.
The issue here is: is it right for the police to be able to perform physical surveillance of an individual? It's a yes or no question, regardless of what use the police make of technology. If you think the police shouldn't be able to follow you around to see what meetings you go to, which they can do now without a warrant, then it shouldn't matter if they do it with their feet or by automatically capturing and recording license plate numbers.
Technical capability doesn't alter the definition of right and wrong. This is why we should think through laws and rules carefully, so that they apply not only to the present, but to how things might be in the future. If it turns out that we need new laws, then there's a process for changing them. But I don't think that we should let the technical trends of the moment alter how we view our basic principles.
Do remember, that before this technological advance there was a decided cost to surveil someone. A unit or several would have to be placed on detail to monitor one person. That cost has gone down substantially and as a result, what might have seemed innocuous before has taken on a completely different character. We, as a country, tolerated many injustices towards minority groups because it didn't impact us. Now, we are faced with an impact that is total. It doesn't change the question but does reframe the question.
And it creates problems that just weren't problems when the law was written. Maybe the laws should have been written more carefully but that's a rather idealistic position. That laws regarding control of personal airspace over my house didn't anticipate the widespread use of consumer drones is pretty understandable. Ditto lots of laws regarding regulation of weaponry, etc.
In this case, we've been seeing nominally public info become more readily available for a while now. There are good reasons most public information (deeds, etc.) are public. But that used to mean someone had to have a good reason to look at them because they'd have to trudge down to the county clerk's office. And maybe the town clerk's office. And then some other clerk's office. Now it's all aggregated in one place at the touch of a button. The good reasons those records were public in the first place haven't gone away. But technology has fundamentally changed the scope of how that information can be used.
In terms of reducing the scale to a single person (which I think has problems, but nonetheless), I don't think most people would classify police following someone around to see what religious ceremonies, political meetings, and protests he or she goes to is acceptable, however we don't worry as profoundly about this because police simply don't have the manpower to do it. License plate readers change this, making mass monitoring of individuals feasible.
Yes, this is something the police should be able to do. But that is not the question at hand, is it? This is about performing physical surveillance on all individuals, all the time. Those are two very different things!
Not to mention scale... having a few thousand police officers patrolling a city is acceptable... Having several battalions of a hundred thousand soldiers, not so much.
However, throwing a huge net and catching everybody, then later filtering out what you want is a totally different process. It is leading to a process where guilt is often presumed and you filter out those later who aren't guilty of something. These types of processes continue to reverse innocent until proven guilty to guilty until proven innocent.
I find it interesting that the supreme court recently ruled that GPS trackers are a form of search. I suspect that in a few years this will go before them, but given the differences (namely that nothing is attached to your vehicle) I'm a lot less confident that they'll rule against it. I REALLY hope they will, but I'm a bit doubtful.
The collection of GPS records from your phone is still quite legal and this would be the license plate scanning equivalent.
Even in the absence of a trespass, however, Supreme Court precedence recognizes a search when the government violates a subjective expectation of privacy that society recognizes as reasonable.
So, if the Government monitors your location by enlisting factory or owner-installed vehicle tracking devices or GPS-enabled smartphones, that could well be a search, but it's still a fuzzy and undecided area of the law.
Sotomayor's concurring opinion in U.S. v. Jones is well worth a read if you are interested in this sort of thing.
"[Location data] generates a precise, comprehensive record of a person’s public movements that reflects a wealth of detail about her familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations ... trips to the psychiatrist, the plastic surgeon, the abortion clinic, the AIDS treatment center, the strip club, the criminal defense attorney, the by-the-hour motel, the union meeting, the mosque, synagogue or church, the gay bar and on and on. The Government can store such recordsand efficiently mine them for information years into the future. And because GPS monitoring is cheapin comparison to conventional surveillance techniques and,by design, proceeds surreptitiously, it evades the ordinary checks that constrain abusive law enforcement practices: limited police resources and community hostility.
"Awareness that the Government may be watching chills associational and expressive freedoms. And the Government’s unrestrained power to assemble data that reveal private aspects of identity is susceptible to abuse. The net result is that [location tracking] making available at a relatively low cost such a substantial quantum of intimate information about any person whom the Government, in its unfettered discretion, chooses to track may alter the relationship between citizen and government in a way that is inimical to democratic society.
When it comes to large-scale, untargeted, collection and retention by traffic cameras, etc. then it may come into the realm of what is "reasonable."
The data something like this collects is so vast that it actually encroaches into the parts of your life you would reasonably expect to be private. For instance, you could determine that I'm seeing a psychiatrist, that I'm cheating on my wife or that I have cancer. That's private information you don't expect to be exposed by simply driving around.
To push the limit of the broad interpretation of your public data, consider the following scenario. Imagine in the not-to-distant future that a technology exists that allows people to scan, from a distance, the electromagnetic field produced by your brain and use that data to map your thoughts and memories. Would me simply stepping into public be a tacit agreement between me and the government to forfeit that privacy?
I think people definitely do have a reasonable expectation that they aren't being followed everywhere they travel, and if you framed it in that way many would see it as a violation of privacy.
Taking the point a bit farther - we have no expectation of privacy for the exterior of our homes. Does this, then, make it OK for the government to use audio recording devices that can pick up sound waves based on the vibrations of the home's panes of glass (because this can actually be done in some cases)? Similarly, the exterior IR signature of our home is theoretically in public view, but should we let the government monitor which rooms are occupied based on changes in the heat signature of the walls?
It may be true that, in the US, one cannot reasonably expect privacy in the various instants of their public existence, but when you aggregate those instants into a timeline then a reasonable person very much does have an expectation of privacy (otherwise stalking would be perfectly acceptable in society).
Outside the US, I would not be surprised if other cultures have developed a much higher expectation of privacy (or at least discretion and confidentiality) than the US.
The real reason this is probably allowable is that you have no expectation of privacy while driving around. People see you. Cops can tail you everywhere you go.
What we really need is some sort of anti dragnet amendment.
I would feel better about this if the license plate readers simply pinged law enforcement on a real-time match. The storage and potential data mining aspects are where it crosses the line. Stasi stuff there.
The system should be unable (by design) to store information on plates without warrant.. as you mention, in terms of a ping... No historical logging of data outside that scope.
Cops are able to start following someone... they aren't able to go back in time and start following someone three weeks ago.
If I go shoot up a theatre, the police would allowed to put an active trace on me and query their database.
They wouldn't be allowed to just search for drug users by investigating who goes near drug corners.
http://mises.org/library/war-collectivism-world-war-i
(I don't really mean to endorse that article, but I do think it looks at the world through an interesting lens. WWI probably does represent some sort of transition point in history, where the idea of an actual global empire became realizable and we are still in the period of developing a global governance structure to deal with it. Maybe such a structure is not inevitable, but I think it is quite likely.)
The phrase was thought to have been "war-based" industrial complex before becoming "military" in later drafts of Eisenhower's speech, a claim passed on only by oral history. http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-12-10-eisenhower-ad...
Geoffrey Perret, in his biography of Eisenhower, claims that, in one draft of the speech, the phrase was "military–industrial–congressional complex", indicating the essential role that the United States Congress plays in the propagation of the military industry, but the word "congressional" was dropped from the final version to appease the then-currently elected officials. http://schott.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/guest-post-james-...
James Ledbetter calls this a "stubborn misconception" not supported by any evidence; likewise a claim by Douglas Brinkley that it was originally "military–industrial–scientific complex". http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/2001/6/...
Additionally, Henry Giroux claims that it was originally "military–industrial–academic complex". http://www.paradigmpublishers.com/Books/BookDetail.aspx?prod...
However, Fascism is generally used because its scary and [frankly] that kind of Government/Megacorp relationship in general is scary.
- Benito Mussolini, 1935, "The Doctrine of Fascism," Firenze: Vallecchi Editore.
Several. The fact that the economic system of the early industrial period featured an arrangement of property rights which favored holders of capital (corporations exist only as ideas, but their owners are real beings) who then exerted disproportionate power over all institutions of society, including government, leaving those capitalists the dominant power in all domains of life is why critics of that early industrial economic system named it "capitalism", and the weaving together of corporate and government power driven by corporate influence over government remains a strong feature of capitalism. (Supporters of "capitalism" who have attempted to redefine "capitalism" to mean some ideal system of perfect market freedom rather than the actual system the term was coined to refer to often treat this as something other than capitalism, or as a failed form "crony capitalism".)
More formal integration of government, industry, and organized labor is corporatism, top-down forms dictated by the central government of corporatism were features of Italian fascism and many authoritarian movements of roughly the same time. This has sometimes led to the equation of corporatism with authoritarianism/fascism, though this is an error: corporatism is substantially older, and has substantially broader reach -- it is no more equivalent to fascism than anti-communism (also a feature of fascism) is.
And, despite the rhetorical differences in how the integration works, such integration is also a feature of those Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist Communist regimes that either don't go so far as to completely eliminate private industry, or which back off from it.
Which, taken together, illustrates the reason why there isn't a term in general use for corporations (which are, after all, creatures of government) and government weaving themselves together -- its a feature of every economic system that has actually practiced in which corporations exist, from capitalism to the various reactions against liberal capitalism.
Vigilant are not setting up their own cameras to collect this.
And your second question, I would assume you would end up in jail for illegally monitoring government security employees.
If a group of private citizens were to pool their efforts, it would be conspiracy to break the law, just as if a group of private citizens or a corporation were to pool their efforts to displenish any other public resource like airwaves, water supply, clean water, quiet, clean air, etc.
I would imagine that person's life would be made very difficult. Even outside of these lettered agencies, I would imagine if someone created a system to capture the license plates of the cars used privately and publicly by government members or high ranking executives in organisations tied to the government they would create a very bad situation for themselves.
If anything has been made more than blatantly apparent in recent years it is that there are one set of rules for us and another for them.
Of course, performance won't be comparable to the commercial product here in question, but I'm certain that with some motivation you can get similar, if not better, results on better hardware.
A private citizen could not easily run them against license plate databases at scale and resolve the identity of the car's owner to the name of a real person.
A private citizen could not then take that real person's name and run it against LE databases to determine whether the registered owner of the car were a known arsonist, terrorist suspect, felon, firearms owner, or campaign contributor to whomever.
If the battle is to be fought and won, I would be surprised if "taking pictures" were the act found to be unconstitutional. I would be slightly less surprised if "storing every bit of metadata possible on every human possible" were found to be unconstitutional, and that storage / reconciliation should likely be the targets of our efforts.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/10/23/nophoto_l...
However, they apparently do have infrared LEDs, which could be detected: https://www.defcon.org/images/defcon-21/dc-21-presentations/...
Another option would be opt out completely and ride a bike.
Something like this
http://blog.workingsi.com/2011/06/improved-high-power-ir-led...
http://www.sunflexzone.com/product/stealth-anti-tracking-ir-...
Look, pay us $1000 to hide from police.
What are they going to do, call the police next time they are caught running a red light -- "please arrest this company they promised I could run red lights without being caught".
It would be kind of like people calling the police complaining their illegal drug stash was stolen.
https://www.defcon.org/images/defcon-21/dc-21-presentations/...
It's a really great primer on a number of issues concerning free travel in the USA and what law enforcement can and cannot do. Also covers other possible ways that the government can track your vehicle (toll transponders, tire sensors, etc). Read the whole thing when you have time.
It's in the tires and broadcasts the VIN
Part of the TPMS tire pressure monitoring.
It's been mandatory in the US since 2008 to have TPMS so all 2008 and newer cars have an oem system.
Direct TPMS sensors that use RFID transmit a serial number but probably not the VIN.
Many cars use indirect TPMS which uses the ABS sensors to measure rotational difference between wheels, thus indicating a low-pressure situation. No RFID is used.
As other commentors pointed out, the government is not a private citizen, and the world is not made of math.
The slippery slope isn't that we're being tracked, or that we are losing our privacy. Our movements as well as all our communications already are being tracked. The slippery slope is that one surveillance program justifies another until anything is fair game because otherwise nothing would be. In terms of 'intelligence', we are very rapidly moving towards a world where privacy will be illegal.
The government tries to violate the spirit of the constitution all the time. It will just require a supreme court ruling banning mass surveillance via licence plate scanning. Even then, I'm sure various LEAs will try to worm their way around the ruling.
Someone hasn't been paying attention.
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/06/01/politics/nsa-facial-recogn...
Edit: It wasn't entirely clear, but when I said, 'This is not an invasion of privacy,' I meant this to come off as an opinion. Not fact. Please do not read it as fact.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/22/war_on_erupts_in_bri...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police-enforced_ANPR_in_the_UK#...
'The Register has noted that "in theory a system could be organised in such a way that records of law-abiding drivers weren't generated at all, but that hasn't been the way things have panned out.'
The problem here is not ANPR. The problem here is the application of section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, a law that is, in my opinion, not sufficiently circumscribed. A law that was also deemed illegal by the European Court of Human Rights. That same law can be used to stop and search anybody for any reason whatsoever, ANPR or not. The solution is to fix the law to prevent abuse, not to remove ANPR leading to potentially, and in my opinion, more dangerous roads.
Here's a list of other abusive applications of this law that do not involve ANPR: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_Act_2000#Section_44_2
If you have to post officers throughout a metro and distribute lists of plates to look out for, you have to contend with
1) The limited number of officers you can pull off of other police duties
2) The limited amount of space in each officer's head to keep that list of plates
3) The limited amount of focus each officer can give to the task of checking each plate that passes by
This means that you'll either put out APBs for only the most important cases, or you'll move more manpower from other police duties to surveillance. There's a natural limiter in play.
On the other hand, if you have your tireless friend whose powers of omniscience and perfect recall are only limited by the number of installed cameras in the city and hard drives in his array; you'll put out APBs for any case you feel like. Your friend will watch for all of them, 24/7/365.
Because you don't need assign more manpower to watch for more plates, there is practically no upper bound to your ability to track persons of interest [0] within your city.
I agree that improperly vague laws are a pox on all civil societies, but there's much more to this case than the Terrorism Act. The vast, inhuman ability of Those In Power to cheaply and easily surveil vast numbers of people is an issue that's no less important.
[0] No matter how small the interest.
EDIT: And that's an interesting thing, because it seems like they're doing alright by their citizens and keeping them happy.
And we will get to see everywhere cops and dhs vehicles go right?
I figured by now the NSA ot DHS are putting RFID tags in license plates and stickers so that they can be read easier.
I figure by the time they pass a law that all cars have to be driven by robots, the robots will be phoning home everywhere they go.
Not to mention the GPS in smartphones that tells where you have beem
Looking inside your car might be, but anyone can read a license plate.
For one example take the paparrazi. While many people consider what the paparrazi does to be an invasion of privacy, it is not legally defined as such, and is therefore legal. Now imagine if there was a paparrazi on every single street corner, wirelessly connected so that any time any person of interest passes through any intersection, a photo of them with a timestamp is uploaded to the internet instantaneously. Would that be an invasion of privacy? Now what if these same paparrazos on every street corner just so happened to not be real people, but cameras covering every angle of the intersection? How quickly what "isn't an invasion of privacy because you're in public" becomes a terrifying scenario.
The words "reasonable expectation" come to mind, and in my mind, it's not "reasonable" to expect that anything you do in public remains private just because someone never bothered to connect the dots.
That seems a mighty arbitrary line to draw in the sand, in other words. We already have laws against stalking and the like - how about we enforce those instead of creation of new, conflicting laws?
There's also the problem of any laws conceived to address this problem have free speech concerns.
I'm not saying I agree with the whole "mosaic" definition of things, but I think the point is worth pondering: Sometimes the information itself isn't the point of contention, it's how the information is aggregated.
First, its an objective test, which means reasonableness is based on factors such as democratic accountability, personal autonomy, threats of government abuse, etc.
Second, it's only "reasonable" at an individual level to expet your public locations are being logged if you expect the police have the resources to put a tail on every person in America, which is crazy (Kevin Bankston and Ashkan Soltani have a great paper on "costs" of surveillance and location tracking specifically: http://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/tiny-constables-and-the-...). The aggregate effect of monitoring everyone's location is a very new concept, and appears very unreasonable based on social norms.
As far as arbitrariness of drawing lines, I think a clear distinction can be made in use of electronic devices to generate location data (in establishing a legal standard the question gets more complex; I recommend looking at writings on topic by Prof. Susan Freiwald, who has done excellent research on the issue). Basing a rule on use of electronic devices is the path states are going down to address both demands for cell phone location data, and directly obtaining location data through devices such as stingrays. It's a simple approach with a clear line that directly gets to the problem of electronic generation of data giving the government unprecedented power regarding location data.
quantitative change leads to qualitative change at some point.
What happens if I make the same 20 turns as you, though, at the same intersections, right behind you? At first it was a coincidence, but after a certain number of turns, it's probably not.
What if I did this every day for a year? You could probably get a restraining order against me for stalking. But for two turns one day last year? Definitely not.
The outward behavior is exactly the same, I just happened to be following behind you (that's what I'll argue). Why should the courts treat a couple of blocks any differently than many miles for many days?
At the very least, it's looking up my name and address, which people sue private companies for and credit card companies have regulations for.
Privacy concerns are brushed away with the usual "we will make it secure" and "if you have nothing to hide, there's no harm". And the usual promises "we will only use it for tax reasons, nothing else", which promise will of course be broken once the system is established, because "we need to all we can to prevent serious crime".
The amazing thing is how completely predictable the whole path is.
(The two articles are completely unrelated, but the juxtaposition caught my attention.)