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Judge orders police to stop collecting data from license plate readers

washingtonpost.com

11–20 of 82 posts

Re: Judge orders police to stop collecting data from license plate readers

#11
post #2

We want to protect innocent people from snooping and harassment, but we also want law enforcement to have useful resources. These shouldn’t be mutually exclusive requirements. It always baffles me that nobody thinks to set up a best-of-both-worlds system whereby all the data is gathered, but stored in a secure database under the control of an independent government entity, possibly the courts themselves. If you’re tr…

The concern is innocent people could get implicated by a search, such as "all licence plates in location X at time T1 and location Y at time T2".

Re: Judge orders police to stop collecting data from license plate readers

#12
post #2

We want to protect innocent people from snooping and harassment, but we also want law enforcement to have useful resources. These shouldn’t be mutually exclusive requirements. It always baffles me that nobody thinks to set up a best-of-both-worlds system whereby all the data is gathered, but stored in a secure database under the control of an independent government entity, possibly the courts themselves. If you’re tr…

[deleted]

Re: Judge orders police to stop collecting data from license plate readers

#13
post #2

We want to protect innocent people from snooping and harassment, but we also want law enforcement to have useful resources. These shouldn’t be mutually exclusive requirements. It always baffles me that nobody thinks to set up a best-of-both-worlds system whereby all the data is gathered, but stored in a secure database under the control of an independent government entity, possibly the courts themselves. If you’re tr…

Police prefer to work in a world that lacks transparency and accountability (it seems).

Re: Judge orders police to stop collecting data from license plate readers

#14
post #2

We want to protect innocent people from snooping and harassment, but we also want law enforcement to have useful resources. These shouldn’t be mutually exclusive requirements. It always baffles me that nobody thinks to set up a best-of-both-worlds system whereby all the data is gathered, but stored in a secure database under the control of an independent government entity, possibly the courts themselves. If you’re tr…

Body cams are a little bit more specific to "actual interactions with police", and I think it's worthwhile for both the officer and the private citizen to have access to that footage.

LPRs is interesting because this falls kinda in a "right to be forgotten" territory. The car "saw" you, in a public space, and we're recognizing that it's really not okay for police to remember everywhere they've seen a car. As an RTBF supporter, I'm alright with that. They arguably still can have a lot of value to police, if only able to record plates of cars of interest. Since an officer can't read every plate on the road, much less compare it to a list, an LPR can look for plates from BOLOs or open cases automatically, presumably, and notify the officer if it sees one, without hoovering up and storing every plate it sees.

But there's also a lot of interesting value in being able to track someone's location during an investigation, even for exculpatory reasons. I do track my own car, and the police could issue a warrant for that data, though they'd have to serve it to me directly. Perhaps onboard black boxes is more the direction this should be heading. (Most non-base model cars likely have GPS already and probably record their history already, mind you.)

Re: Judge orders police to stop collecting data from license plate readers

#15
post #2

We want to protect innocent people from snooping and harassment, but we also want law enforcement to have useful resources. These shouldn’t be mutually exclusive requirements. It always baffles me that nobody thinks to set up a best-of-both-worlds system whereby all the data is gathered, but stored in a secure database under the control of an independent government entity, possibly the courts themselves. If you’re tr…

Police prefer to work in a world that lacks transparency and accountability (it seems).

As with most other employees, police officers are not super fond of having every single action they take while on the job recorded, monitored, and scrutinized. I've heard horror stories about tech industry people who worked at offices where their bosses used remote desktop software to monitor employees work, and I think everyone mostly universally agrees that's horrible.

There's a perfectly legitimate argument that as cops have the ability to use deadly force, there's a lot of good reasons for the public to want their work to be scrutinized heavily, but it's also perfectly understandable why police aren't super fond of it.

Re: Judge orders police to stop collecting data from license plate readers

#16
post #4

Anyone have an open source license place reader software? I always thought this would be good for a neighbourhood watch kind of project.

iSpy is open source, but it's LPR plugin is proprietary and costs money: https://www.ispyconnect.com/

OpenALPR has it's library on GitHub, but I think the completed "solutions" are all paid for: https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr

Re: Judge orders police to stop collecting data from license plate readers

#17
post #2

We want to protect innocent people from snooping and harassment, but we also want law enforcement to have useful resources. These shouldn’t be mutually exclusive requirements. It always baffles me that nobody thinks to set up a best-of-both-worlds system whereby all the data is gathered, but stored in a secure database under the control of an independent government entity, possibly the courts themselves. If you’re tr…

Police prefer to work in a world that lacks transparency and accountability (it seems).

How are they expected to work without a degree of opacity? If the police were transparent for the sake of vigilant privacy nerds and the public, their targets would stay two steps ahead of them and never get caught.

I agree on the accountability front - some agency somewhere needs to keep a comprehensive record of all of these 'black budget' 'operational secrecy' kind of things. Otherwise (as evidenced by the runaway CIA/NSA), having the option of secrecy becomes too alluring and therefore the norm.

At this point American citizens have pretty much zero idea what these agencies are doing on a daily basis - it's nice to believe they operate with our best interests in mind, but if not, how would we ever know?

Re: Judge orders police to stop collecting data from license plate readers

#18
post #5
post #2

We want to protect innocent people from snooping and harassment, but we also want law enforcement to have useful resources. These shouldn’t be mutually exclusive requirements. It always baffles me that nobody thinks to set up a best-of-both-worlds system whereby all the data is gathered, but stored in a secure database under the control of an independent government entity, possibly the courts themselves. If you’re tr…

Don't see how that's a lot better. As long as the database exists, it has potential for abuse later. No reason to think the courts are more ethical than the police.

Either way, abuses will happen. Would you rather be abused by the government or by random strangers?

Re: Judge orders police to stop collecting data from license plate readers

#19
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Police prefer to work in a world that lacks transparency and accountability (it seems).

How are they expected to work without a degree of opacity? If the police were transparent for the sake of vigilant privacy nerds and the public, their targets would stay two steps ahead of them and never get caught. I agree on the accountability front - some agency somewhere needs to keep a comprehensive record of all of these 'black budget' 'operational secrecy' kind of things. Otherwise (as evidenced by the runaway…

They could start by describing and making accountable the systems that protect and audit access to surveillance data.

Re: Judge orders police to stop collecting data from license plate readers

#20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Police prefer to work in a world that lacks transparency and accountability (it seems).

As with most other employees, police officers are not super fond of having every single action they take while on the job recorded, monitored, and scrutinized. I've heard horror stories about tech industry people who worked at offices where their bosses used remote desktop software to monitor employees work, and I think everyone mostly universally agrees that's horrible. There's a perfectly legitimate argument that a…

Imagine a hospital system where employees had unfettered and unloggable access to any patient's health data. That sounds like the workplace you are describing.
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