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Judge orders police to stop collecting data from license plate readers

washingtonpost.com

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

#31

Post by faceplanted »

pureliquidhw wrote: post #24
umvi wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Honestly, random strangers. Their motivations will be far more transparent than those of gov't level entities. Also, you can respond to your house getting robbed by adding locks, bars, camera's etc. If a gov't level entity is abusing you, your options are much more limited. That's why nipping over-reach in the bud is important.

I think when the guys says random strangers, he's still talking about the police, just that if you leave it to individual police stations then anyone working there can basically wander in, not at every police station obviously, but if they're each doing their own info security, then many of them.

One large database that requires a warrant to access can at least be more easily held to higher standards.

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

#32

Post by dsfyu404ed »

What a pleasant surprise this ruling is. The DC area (of which Fairfax county is part) is probably one of the most government tracking heavy regions of the US. This is a curve-ball on par with the CA judge that overturned the mag ban recently. I would never have predicted this ruling.

>Nine states have passed laws limiting how long the police can maintain the data, ranging from three minutes (New Hampshire)

Now that I could have predicted. If any state is going to proactively curb law enforcement's capability to build a dragnet it's gonna be NH.

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

#33

Post by thatguy0900 »

DennisP wrote: post #25
sjwright wrote: 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…

Somehow, law enforcement once managed to do its job reasonably well even in the absence of pervasive surveillance.

I wonder if they actually did. It would be interesting to see a comparison of what percentage of petty crimes were caught in history compared to now.

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

#34

Post by P_I_Staker »

DennisP wrote: post #25
sjwright wrote: 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…

Somehow, law enforcement once managed to do its job reasonably well even in the absence of pervasive surveillance.

That's debatable. Try going to law enforcement with anything non-trivial, and see how that goes. People routinely get murdered by someone that's a known and reported threat to them personally.

You might be shocked what the police are unable or unwilling to go after someone for. Things like aggravated assault, stalking, and breaking / entering. If you have a known address and whereabouts for someone, and you've checked there once (or a few times), what else can you really do? These tools can be used to automate things that would be extremely costly for an officer(s) to do.

I don't agree with pervasive surveillance btw, and there are other factors that cause law enforcement to be ineffective. I strongly disagree with your premise, though.

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

#35

Post by jermaustin1 »

I work in this space, building the tools to help LEAs seach their databases. I also have conflicting feelings about how this could be used. We built in access control down to the specific camera, auditing of every user action, requiring the reason you are performing an action, and mandating the user associate an open case in the same access group as the camera you are querying in order to view the data.

Its pretty locked down to help prevent abuse. I'm not saying abuse is impossible but LEOs or more likely, their administrators, but it is difficult to do it and get away.

I've heard from the higher ups, that abuse used to be rampant in other systems, but since switching to our software, only a handful of people have been found to abuse it.

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

#36

Post by drb91 »

sjwright wrote: 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…

> but we also want law enforcement to have useful resources.

Speak for yourself; this is certainly not a universal sentiment.

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

#37

Post by drb91 »

DennisP wrote: post #25
sjwright wrote: 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…

Somehow, law enforcement once managed to do its job reasonably well even in the absence of pervasive surveillance.

The Black Panthers did the job reasonably well too.

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

#38

Post by snarf21 »

sjwright wrote: 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…

It is always a question of who will watch the watchers?

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

#39

Post by drb91 »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #15
sixothree wrote: post #13

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…

> but it's also perfectly understandable why police aren't super fond of it.

Only in the sense that people aren't super fond of doing their job right.

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

#40

Post by ocdtrekkie »

drb91 wrote: post #39
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> but it's also perfectly understandable why police aren't super fond of it. Only in the sense that people aren't super fond of doing their job right.

So you would have no issue if your boss stood over your shoulder every hour of the day, evaluating how you spend your time?
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