New license plates in my jurisdiction are $59... Maybe something to do every few years...
What would that do besides cost you $59? It's not like cross-referencing your historical, government-issued license plates would add to the difficulty...
ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US
61–70 of 191 posts
Re: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US
#62Anyone care to comment on the legality of the whole thing? Why are people allowed to snap pictures of my car and store them in a database?
Do roads come with Terms of Service these days?
Re: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US
#63I 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.
I am feeling pessimistic man. We had a few decades of privacy and human rights progress post World Wars. But with Terrorism on the rise there is no way for privacy or human rights to make a comeback. We will see increasingly clever ways to water down laws we already have in place.
Re: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US
#64Yet another piece of evidence that the US is turning into an authoritarian state - as, to be fair, others do too (especially China!), but the US have the unique advantage of being the technologically most advanced civilization. In earlier times, when situations got too authoritarian, there were rebellions and revolution. With the level of militarization in police and military and the abilities made possible by today'…
> promising their citizens that they will bring back the "good old times" Are they wrong? Low-skilled immigration seems like the worst possible idea at a time when millions of low skilled locals are going to be out of work. With no net immigration most western countries are slowly shrinking which would help a fair bit as well.
There are many facets to this debate that aren't discussed in the news. One is that without immigration, the population of the US would decrease based on birth / death rates. If the population of the US decreases, social security and other social programs become insolvent. In other words, our social programs are based off the current working generation paying for the current retired generation, and has since their inception.
It's a complex issue, and benefits vary from region to region. The powers (with big microphones) that are trying to sway you one way or the other only focus on a few simple things.
Re: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US
#65Anyone care to comment on the legality of the whole thing? Why are people allowed to snap pictures of my car and store them in a database? Do roads come with Terms of Service these days?
In the US, anything you do in a public place is considered fair game. The inside of your car does require consent, a warrant, or probable cause.
Re: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US
#66I 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.
I am feeling pessimistic man. We had a few decades of privacy and human rights progress post World Wars. But with Terrorism on the rise there is no way for privacy or human rights to make a comeback. We will see increasingly clever ways to water down laws we already have in place.
The incentives are huge, and digital life makes it all the more easy. The more information someone has, the more lucrative it is collect even more.
You can find someones property address online - it used to take wuite a bit of effort in the past. Now the effort is on the property owner to protect his privacy - using land trusts or other estate structures.
What is worse is now people volunteer information on social networks. If you dont, your friends do - nullifying your effort.
I am not optimistic either, but i will do whatever i can ti protect my own privacy whenever i can. I stopped using fb, and making an effort to learn estate planning and so on.
Re: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US
#67Wasn'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?
Plate scanning is against the spirit of the law; it's a workaround for not being able to place a tracking device on your car. Unfortunately, since your car is in a public place, and your plates are in the open, I don't think place scanning will be ruled unconstitutional.
Of course congress could always pass a law making it illegal, but both our major parties have authoritarian with regards to privacy.
Re: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yes, 'saturate' is the word I wanted to use. Basically, the light source(s) are pointed at the camera, and it is unable to make out anything near the light source(s) as a result.
Re: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US
#69I remember reading a paper on confusing road sign recognizers by adding certain bits of noise to the sign that completely baffled the recognizer. I wonder if one could do this to the license plate which would still look normal to a human but be unreadable to an AI.
This sort of technology only works for a particular training of a particular neural net. Text recognition of a fixed font is easy enough that I'm sure there are several different competing readers. Defeating even one of them requires having access to its inference results. Defeating all of them simultaneously is almost certainly infeasible, even if you did have its inference results available.
Re: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US
#70Yet another piece of evidence that the US is turning into an authoritarian state - as, to be fair, others do too (especially China!), but the US have the unique advantage of being the technologically most advanced civilization. In earlier times, when situations got too authoritarian, there were rebellions and revolution. With the level of militarization in police and military and the abilities made possible by today'…
> promising their citizens that they will bring back the "good old times" Are they wrong? Low-skilled immigration seems like the worst possible idea at a time when millions of low skilled locals are going to be out of work. With no net immigration most western countries are slowly shrinking which would help a fair bit as well.
Flooding the US with vast quantities of low skilled labor for four decades, is also why wages for the bottom 50% do not climb like they should. It's simple, and obvious, supply & demand.
It's bizarre that so many tech workers easily spot this concept in effect when big companies try to undercut their salaries in exactly the same manner by importing cheaper tech talent from other nations, yet they're oblivious to the exact same being done to lower income Americans.
It's also why the Koch brothers are aggressive supporters of unlimited low skill labor immigration. It's good for certain types of businesses involving traditional labor. The Kochs use it to suppress wages for their blue collar workers.
There's a reason why Canada - and most prosperous, developed nations - have strict immigration policies against flooding their nations with large amounts of low skill labor. Scandinavia flirted with it briefly, and now they've almost entirely shut down the immigration spigot. Most of Europe has turned back against the same thing, because it's harmful to the weakest working classes.
The primary argument is whether the US should match eg Canada and switch to a merit system. At a time when low skill labor is going to be automated away, it's extremely obvious which way the US will have to move. And if the US does not move that way, the cost will drown the fiscal budget and continue to hammer the poorest workers.