Hi all, Original Author of the article here - glad to see so much interest and discussion of this topic.<p>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)?<p>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.<p>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.<p>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 is an end-run around the fourth amendment by using a private party to do a law enforcement function; namely finding "criminals" which has historically been the job of the police.<p>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.
Is this doing anything that a private citizen couldn't do (taking pictures on public property and storing it in a computer)? Conversely, what would happen if someone took pictures of cars going in / out of NSA/CIA/FBI facilities on a regular basis and posted them online?
Anyone got ideas for a CV Dazzle[1] equivalent for license plates? I'm imagining "dirt" used to partially obscure some of the characters, in such a way that a human police officer would be able to tell the difference but a text recognition algorithm would either fail or interpret it wrong. Maybe make an 'I' look like an 'F' or a 'T', that kind of thing.<p>[1] <a href="http://cvdazzle.com/" rel="nofollow">http://cvdazzle.com/</a>
Why would waste so much gad-dam money? If you really have to track us all (which obviously is a very dubious proposition to begin with) then just require the car makers to put RFIDs in the cars. They cost like a whole $1. While you're at it please require them to print serial numbers on the back of the cars too so we no longer have to pay the State extortion fees for license plates.
All the comments along the lines of "if a person looking at a license plate and remembering it isn't an invasion of my rights, why is a government database so bad?" make me wonder why my classmates had such a hard time grasping induction. Perhaps the concept is only intuitive when convenient to the user.<p>As other commentors pointed out, the government is not a private citizen, and the world is not made of math.
London's Metropolitan Police Service already have the same technology the US uses to track mobile phones (<a href="http://motherboard.vice.com/read/uk-police-wont-admit-theyre-tracking-peoples-phone-calls" rel="nofollow">http://motherboard.vice.com/read/uk-police-wont-admit-theyre...</a>) but refuses to comment on its use. Once we <i>eventually</i> uncover these programs and their use in full detail, programs such as the DHS's license plate reader will be used as the example of why it's totally OK to monitor the movements of innocent citizens and interfere with their communications.<p>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.
This related HN thread from 2 weeks ago has some good related conversation: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9256322" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9256322</a>
How about a reverse response? Build a dash cam which watches plates & logs metadata, possibly even crowdsourcing the info. Outrageous? no different from what DHS would do. Leverage that outrage to get license plates dumped entirely.
One day before the decade is out it will be cheap enough to keep dozens of drones flying over a city with continuous high resolution recording so every person can be tracked back and forth from every start and endpoint, car or not.
I think one of the problems with this collection is the asymmetric nature of the information. It will be readily accessible to convict but not to exonerate. I think that is the biggest problem in the coming days.
People seem think that the government/police will track their movements. Yes, that will happen but there are upsides to license plate readers as well.
A few years back my car was stolen from in front of my residence. The local police were able to find the car in a nearby city through license plate scanning and I got the car back. Allowing license plate data to be kept for a reasonable amount of time is absolutely okay. You're driving on US soil in public so it's not outrageous for the government to monitor their territory.
IMHO this isn't about spying, or control. No, this is about the DC culture of <i>spending</i> and institutional power. DHS is trying to grow as fast as possible. Inside the US government, power is equal to how much funding you can grab and how many people you can employ. And the DHS is on a mission to grab as much as possible right now, while congress is willing to fund it all. Congress certainly wouldn't want to go against <i>fighting terrorism</i>.
This is not an invasion of privacy. The UK has been doing this for years with ANPR to catch people speeding, stolen vehicles and people driving dangerously.<p>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.
We should honestly be doing away with traditional license plates anyway. First off, and I say this as a sports car enthusiast, it highly detracts from the design of a car. Second off, there are much better ways for law enforcement to identify a car other than limited sight. RFID or some other tech that could be required at a federal level. This could be tied into registration and inspection, as well as other services that would benefit drivers as a whole. There are of course privacy concerns, but I would rather deal with that than standing in line at the DMV.
Tor taxi for citizens, anyone?
It's a shame that the railroad companies sold highways to car manufacturers so they could rip them up and sell individualism.
So if they are going to collect widespread data on Americans, it will be accessible to everyone right?<p>And we will get to see everywhere cops and dhs vehicles go right?
Some people put tinted plastic or mud over their license plate so the red light readers cannot read them.<p>I figured by now the NSA ot DHS are putting RFID tags in license plates and stickers so that they can be read easier.<p>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.<p>Not to mention the GPS in smartphones that tells where you have beem
I think people should get notified (or be able to look up) when/if their plate is scanned. You know every cop that follows you looks it up for no reason.<p>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.
What a coincidence: <a href="http://i59.tinypic.com/2r24z5z.png" rel="nofollow">http://i59.tinypic.com/2r24z5z.png</a><p>(The two articles are completely unrelated, but the juxtaposition caught my attention.)