<i>> Law enforcement agencies claim that ALPR systems are no different from an officer recording license plate, time and location information by hand. </i><p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
This is just a throwaway account.<p>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).
The issue isn't license plate readers, it's data retention.<p>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.<p>For reference on how this is handled in other countries take a look at <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_data_retention" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_data_retenti...</a>
In the Toronto, Ontario area, ALPRs were built into the 407 Electronic Toll Route to accompany the RFID readers. This eliminated the need for toll booths entirely, because the license plate reader could be used to find the car's registration and send a bill.<p>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.<p>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.
<i>states including Maine, New Jersey, and Virginia have limited the use of ALPRs, and New Hampshire has banned them outright.</i><p>Good to know, and just another reason to live in NH :)
I am not a lawyer.<p>I found Professor Orin Kerr's discussion of <i>United States v. Jones (2012)</i> 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.<p>And I think that's how the government's attorney and Scalia and the Court saw it. (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jones_(2012)" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jones_(2012)</a>)<p>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.<p>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.
Here in Australia there is a move towards this same technology. Vehicle registration stickers are being phased out because the registration of vehicles are auto queried by police vehicles, RTA cameras, etc<p>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.<p>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
We need CAPTCHA-style license plates :)<p>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.<p>There is this <a href="http://www.nophoto.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.nophoto.com/</a>
Does a license plate, legally speaking, have to be visible when the car is parked? If not, then covering it would be a stop-gap against cops driving through a parking lot and collecting the info on who is in that area.
Imagine what would happen if we had technology that made breaking the law impossible. I don't mean top-down Orwellian-style tech, but bottom-up.<p>Behold, the Legal Singularity.<p>Cops would probably start shooting babies in the streets.
In Minneapolis, they started collecting and retaining ALPR data, but the sunshine laws hadn't caught up to the retention period. So, one of my buddies made a request for all of the data, and it was fulfilled.<p>If anybody is interested in playing with ALPR data, we put it up on github but removed the license plate numbers:
<a href="https://github.com/johnschrom/Minneapolis-ALPR-Data" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/johnschrom/Minneapolis-ALPR-Data</a>
Maybe we should switch off our smartphones first? Who cares about OCRing number plates if you can track an individual's EVERY move using his mobile phone data?
<i>But we should not so readily give up the very freedoms that terrorists seek to destroy.</i><p>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.<p>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?<p>Reactions that involve essentially trying to pretend that technology doesn't exist or can be suppressed will never and have never worked.