Wasn't there a Supreme Court case a while ago that ruled it illegal for the government to put a tracking device on your car? Given this recognition technology, could someone challenge the visible license plate requirement as an illegal tracking device?
ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US
41–50 of 191 posts
Re: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US
#42Wasn't there a Supreme Court case a while ago that ruled it illegal for the government to put a tracking device on your car? Given this recognition technology, could someone challenge the visible license plate requirement as an illegal tracking device?
That would be United States v. Jones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jones_(2012)
Re: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most plate cameras rely in part on the reflectiveness of the plate. You can definitely modify a plate to be mostly illegible to these cameras but easily human readable.
Given that most cameras are sensitive to IR (but human eyes are not), it seems like you could also wire up some super bright IR LEDs to obscure the plate too. Hmm... idea for a new license place 'holder'...
Wouldn't it be better to use IR to saturate the camera?
I think they use IR to 'light' up the plates at night, otherwise the exposure time would be too long to pickup a license plate.
Should make your car invisible to dashcams too.
I want an IR detector for my car, so I can know when I'm getting hit by one of these things. Not that it will accomplish much.
Re: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US
#44Is it possible to fight back by poisoning the data? Is it legal to set up a display by the roadside that shows randomly generated license plates, filling their automated cameras with garbage data? Or is their data collection smart enough to recognize a non-car, either technologically or by filtering everything through a Turk-like equivalent?
Or create a vinyl wrap on your car of license plates that don't exist.
Re: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US
#45New license plates in my jurisdiction are $59... Maybe something to do every few years...
Re: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
In general, the individual engineers do. The point of ethics training is to recognize that you have ethical obligations that extend past your job responsibilities, and that when your ethics conflict with your work tasks, it's not your ethics that should compromise. For some of us, that might mean not working on a project that we could reasonably foresee would result in the deportation of children who don't speak Span…
For some of us, that might mean not working on a project that we could reasonably foresee would result in the deportation of children who don't speak Spanish and have only ever known this country to some foreign country. For others, it might mean not working on projects that assist women in obtaining an abortion. Unfortunately it seems a lot of engineers either don't have much in the way of ethics, or truly believe w…
People have different morals and ethics. I don't have a problem with DRM, for instance, and even if we debated to the point where I had to concede some theoretical problem with it, it'd be pretty far down my list of ethical priorities.
I'm not commenting to advocate for the notion that people should get an ethics education so they'll all turn out to be good Democratic Socialists. I'm saying, our field would be better off if people recognized that their ethics intersect with the field heavily, and they should do this work mindfully.
Re: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US
#47I said this before, and i will say it again.
Call your representative and voice your opinion. Donate to eff and aclu or any other civil and digital liberties organizations, to help them protect our privacy and rights through legal means.
Privacy evasion is slippery slope and it only gets worse.
Take this as your daily or weekly reminder to do something, even if that something is donating just the price of a coffee.
Re: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US
#48One of my clients does license plate reading and tracking. They have hundreds of tiny customers, and a handful of VERY LARGER customers, so I can say with 100% certainty, there are hundreds of agencies across the USA already doing this. For fun, I tracked my rental car from Georgia to Texas after a vacation a few months back to see how often I hit one of my client's customer's cameras. It was a lot. I saw myself hit…
IIRC there's an episode of Jay Leno's Garage that features a cop with a license plate reader. He can sit on the side of the road and every car that passes is scanned and checked for warrants. The answer comes back about as quickly as the speed reading on a radar gun. What they don't tell you is that all those plate numbers are going into a database, time- and location-stamped.
Yep, and there are agencies all over the US that share data between themselves to get access to much larger sets of data. So when a cop pulls you over in Dallas because you have a warrant in Atlanta, you now know how he figured that out.
Re: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US
#49New license plates in my jurisdiction are $59... Maybe something to do every few years...
You can buy car and keep it license plate free legally for sometime. I think this is what steve jobs was doing.
New license plates wont help as it needs to get registered with the state.
Re: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US
#50Wasn't there a Supreme Court case a while ago that ruled it illegal for the government to put a tracking device on your car? Given this recognition technology, could someone challenge the visible license plate requirement as an illegal tracking device?
I think eff is doing exactly that:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/01/california-senate-hear...
Is among many. Eff challenges state and local law enforcement in court for their use of automated license place readers.