Interestingly, my state Department of Transportation is the agency responsible for operating the ALPR systems, and according to my county Police Chief his department doesn't use ALPR technology, so I wonder how readily the various enforcemnt agencies have access to the the acquired database(s)?
Police Documents on License Plate Scanners Reveal Mass Tracking
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Re: Police Documents on License Plate Scanners Reveal Mass Tracking
#12I always wondered on the legality of private license plate scanning. With just a bunch of people cooperating one could pretty much map out all the troop movement throughout the city.
Well the argument usually heard for the government doing it is "they've always been able to watch where you go in public" . I suspect that somehow would not fly if it were reversed. It's an interesting idea. Thanks to smartphones, the people have more cameras than their governments. The governments however have more targets.
An interesting app idea would be to have a distributed palantir-like system that specifically targets Ambulances, Police Cars, City vehicles, etc. OCR a license plate or other identifying tag on it, geo-tag, etc.
Given a decent proportion of people using the app, you could probably map out the location of most of the active government vehicles in a city. With the time-series data, you could add some analytics and probably predict where the cars were going to be at specific times and days. You could even gameify it, so catching a police car at a donut shop would win the user a little badge.
Re: Police Documents on License Plate Scanners Reveal Mass Tracking
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well the argument usually heard for the government doing it is "they've always been able to watch where you go in public" . I suspect that somehow would not fly if it were reversed. It's an interesting idea. Thanks to smartphones, the people have more cameras than their governments. The governments however have more targets.
An interesting app idea would be to have a distributed palantir-like system that specifically targets Ambulances, Police Cars, City vehicles, etc. OCR a license plate or other identifying tag on it, geo-tag, etc. Given a decent proportion of people using the app, you could probably map out the location of most of the active government vehicles in a city. With the time-series data, you could add some analytics and pro…
You might be able to publish data on a 24hr lag, and make money by selling live feeds (or live analysis on live feeds, if the raw data is difficult to handle) to local news stations, independent reporters/camera men/etc.
Monetizing it might harm adoption by volunteers though, so that is important to consider. Gamification is a great idea though.
Re: Police Documents on License Plate Scanners Reveal Mass Tracking
#14http://www.aclu.org/files/FilesPDFs/ALPR/kansas/alprpra_lene... Page 364 mentions "PRISM".
Re: Police Documents on License Plate Scanners Reveal Mass Tracking
#15It should be no surprise that this is happening. Give anyone unlimited surveillance power and it will always be abused.
I live in a western EU country and have a friend in law enforcement. Last year, he brought me to see our city's traffic surveillance 'control room'. Almost every street corner and traffic junction here has a pole-mounted police camera transmitting video data back to servers accessible from this room and elsewhere.
To summarize the demo: He was able to type a vehicle registration plate into this system, and instantly see every journey the car has taken plotted on a map, as well as the thousands of raw video clips of this vehicle that were used to generate the map.
Re: Police Documents on License Plate Scanners Reveal Mass Tracking
#16http://www.aclu.org/files/FilesPDFs/ALPR/kansas/alprpra_lene... Page 364 mentions "PRISM".
Good find. Control-F suggests there are three mentions of PRISM.
On page 349 (pdf pagination): "LPR technology uses specialized cameras and computers to quickly capture large numbers of license plate photographs and compares them to the hot list (NCIC, ALERT/REJIS, KDOR, PRISM)."
Re: Police Documents on License Plate Scanners Reveal Mass Tracking
#17In case anybody's interested, these license plate scanners can be publicly found on the Internet:
http://www.shodanhq.com/search?q=atz+executive
And this is how the web interface for such a system looks like:
http://money.cnn.com/gallery/technology/security/2013/05/01/...
Re: Police Documents on License Plate Scanners Reveal Mass Tracking
#18http://www.aclu.org/files/FilesPDFs/ALPR/kansas/alprpra_lene... Page 364 mentions "PRISM".
Without context, the PRISM references somewhat are abstract, although it's a remarkable coincidence if not reference to the same program. What was striking for me was the 10X markups for equipment provided under contract to the US government. Where is the governance in government?!
Re: Police Documents on License Plate Scanners Reveal Mass Tracking
#19I always wondered on the legality of private license plate scanning. With just a bunch of people cooperating one could pretty much map out all the troop movement throughout the city.
A problem seems to be that the state of open source plate recognition software isn't that great. There are a few projects around but none seem to be ready for production.
Re: Police Documents on License Plate Scanners Reveal Mass Tracking
#20I feel bad that I am not tracking anyone. It's so popular you see it every day now.