A vast hidden surveillance network, powered by the repo industry • Hacker News Board

Re: A vast hidden surveillance network, powered by the repo industry

#131

Post by bertil » Wed, Mar 05, 2014, 7:53 PM UTC

maxerickson wrote: post #51

bertil wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iamsalman offers a great response. Legally (and conceptually) there is the idea of a collection, a compilation being valuable in and on itself: this has been enforced to prevent people from selling phone books and TV programs without paying the original ‘compilers’, phone companies and TV stations, not as operators but original authors of an exhaustive description. Collecting changes useless information into, anecdot…

U.S. law has moved away from that idea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural But it should still be straightforward to make laws saying that the tags on a vehicle are a particular type of information and then restrict the way that businesses are allowed to use it.

Indeed on the copyright of collection -- which as a fact was abused; but not the change of nature of the information.

I really don’t think that you can make enough information particular enough to get away with disanonymisation techniques: you standing anywhere in a city, with a block accuracy is enough to identify most people on a transport map; even whether you like a handful of movies, and in what order or when you saw them is enough to isolate individuals from a VoD database.

Re: A vast hidden surveillance network, powered by the repo industry

#132

Post by Crito » Wed, Mar 05, 2014, 7:55 PM UTC

emiliobumachar wrote: post #54

>repo industry When I saw the title, first think to cross my mind was "what the hell does GitHub have to gain from it?"

Correlate an account with a license plate, and now you can have not only an approximate dataset of where people tend to be while commits were made (which you can get with far less precision from IPs), but a decent idea if that location is their home, a business (locating new stealth-startups and identifying their employees by finding new clusterings of people making personal commits during lunchbreaks in a new office?), etc.

Re: A vast hidden surveillance network, powered by the repo industry

#133

Post by PeterisP » Wed, Mar 05, 2014, 7:57 PM UTC

me_again wrote: post #128

PeterisP wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, this is a very valid point that laws can and make a distinction based on quantity. However, in this point no such distinction has been made, and thus they should be treated equally. There is clear law on the "low quantity" case, and no distinct law on the "high quantity" case - so the same principles should be applied even for thousandfold or millionfold increases unless/until the lawmakers (not the courts) dra…

This article is specifically about a lawmaker trying to draw a line, and the lobbying around that process. At least as far as this article goes, no court case is underway, nor is there a claim that this is currently illegal.

On the other hand, I'm very very worried about the risk of making it illegal - because those justifications can be used to make the low-scale personal activities into 'victimless crimes', leaving the government with a monopoly on surveillance while criminalizing citizens who do the same thing.

I'd rather prefer if everyone was permitted to do this at all scales, rather than risk restrictions on what people can do with their minds and devices with stuff that they can plainly see - it's similar to various restrictions on recording police officers in action, so as "to protect their privacy".

The government will do their thing anyways (as Snowden showed us), so if any restrictions are implemented then they will only restrict us, but not protect us.

Re: A vast hidden surveillance network, powered by the repo industry

#134

Post by Crito » Wed, Mar 05, 2014, 7:58 PM UTC

RyJones wrote: post #114

hengheng wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parent's point was valid though, I can't imagine these devices to cost more than $170 in a couple of years, making this discussion quite relevant.

Until the cost of grinding glass comes way down, this won't be true.

They don't need pictures that look nice. They just need to extract information from them. Better image processing will facilitate this.

Re: A vast hidden surveillance network, powered by the repo industry

#135

Post by countrybama24 » Wed, Mar 05, 2014, 8:12 PM UTC

dntrkv wrote: post #103

300bps wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this as a general trend of misattributing problems to technology that are actually caused by one's own behaviour. I see. So stop doing anything controversial and you'll be just fine, right? We better tell closeted homosexuals that someone tracking their movements isn't the problem; their behavior is the problem. How about atheists? They're more disliked in the U.S. than just about any group out there ( http://w…

I see. So stop doing anything controversial and you'll be just fine, right? No. But if you are lying, you have to realize that you can be caught. The fact that some kind of technology makes it easier for you to be caught is not the technologies fault. Phones, cameras, computers, internet, all make it easier for you to be caught doing something you weren't supposed to be doing. Should it be illegal for photographers t…

> It's not that the plates are being logged, it's that the data is being used in a malicious manner

Is it easier to prevent abuse post-hoc or ban types of data gathering prone to abuse?

Re: A vast hidden surveillance network, powered by the repo industry

#136

Post by countrybama24 » Wed, Mar 05, 2014, 8:15 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #105

300bps wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this as a general trend of misattributing problems to technology that are actually caused by one's own behaviour. I see. So stop doing anything controversial and you'll be just fine, right? We better tell closeted homosexuals that someone tracking their movements isn't the problem; their behavior is the problem. How about atheists? They're more disliked in the U.S. than just about any group out there ( http://w…

> We better tell closeted homosexuals that someone tracking their movements isn't the problem; their behavior is the problem. No, my point is that it's the people doing the checking to then hurt others that are the problem, not the tools used to track, and not even the act of tracking. > You really can't imagine a scenario where a rogue cop pulls over a young girl, becomes obsessed with her and then begins stalking h…

> Everything we do, everything we say, has consequences that spread through the great web of causation

Like tracking, which could be used by political authorities to suppress political dissidents, employers to discriminate against homosexuals, or police to stalk or sexually harass a young woman.

Just because Google or Facebook or ALPRs don't intend for tracking to be used maliciously doesn't mean it won't. In fact, this is the entire argument against the NSA dragnet.

Re: A vast hidden surveillance network, powered by the repo industry

#137

Post by logfromblammo » Wed, Mar 05, 2014, 8:22 PM UTC

dntrkv wrote: post #103

300bps wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this as a general trend of misattributing problems to technology that are actually caused by one's own behaviour. I see. So stop doing anything controversial and you'll be just fine, right? We better tell closeted homosexuals that someone tracking their movements isn't the problem; their behavior is the problem. How about atheists? They're more disliked in the U.S. than just about any group out there ( http://w…

I see. So stop doing anything controversial and you'll be just fine, right? No. But if you are lying, you have to realize that you can be caught. The fact that some kind of technology makes it easier for you to be caught is not the technologies fault. Phones, cameras, computers, internet, all make it easier for you to be caught doing something you weren't supposed to be doing. Should it be illegal for photographers t…

Did you forget Murphy's Law? If it is possible for the data to be used in a malicious manner, someone will eventually use them with ill intent.

The key to preventing abuse is to make it more difficult by several orders of magnitude than allowable uses. One way to do this is to only store plate scan records where there is a pre-existing reason to track the location of the vehicle, and purge those records once that reason is no longer valid.

You can't search what is not stored.

Re: A vast hidden surveillance network, powered by the repo industry

#138

Post by njharman » Wed, Mar 05, 2014, 8:39 PM UTC

Avenger42 wrote: post #76

njharman wrote: post #71

"ban most uses of license plate readers, ... making exceptions only for law enforcement, toll collection, and parking regulation." That is the worst thing. Either allow everyone or no one. Giving more and more capability to special interests is how we have gotten into being a surveillance state and become very unbalanced authority / responsibility between different segments of society.

I'd allow law enforcement, with the strict rule that the scanner system would have to immediately throw away any plate that they hadn't received a warrant to search for. So they could have the scanner operating at all times, but they'd never get a notification until they happen across one of the (very few) cars they're specifically allowed to track.

Ok, but then why not same rule for others, such as repo?

Re: A vast hidden surveillance network, powered by the repo industry

#139

Post by logfromblammo » Wed, Mar 05, 2014, 8:43 PM UTC

trhway wrote: post #126

the privacy as we know it has been obsoleted by technology, just like many other things in the past and will be in the future. Instead of trying to save terminally ill patient - privacy - we need to look into the future. The real fight is who owns the data, not whether the data is collected. For example can we just force that all the data anybody has about anybody is to be public?

Privacy returns when all surveillance becomes a two-way channel. If someone watches you, you would know who it is and can watch them right back, change your behavior for as long as they watch, or demand that they stop entirely.

The problem we are having now is not just that people are watching us, it is that we also don't know who they are or when they are doing it.

Re: A vast hidden surveillance network, powered by the repo industry

#140

Post by maxerickson » Wed, Mar 05, 2014, 9:18 PM UTC

bertil wrote: post #131

maxerickson wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

U.S. law has moved away from that idea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural But it should still be straightforward to make laws saying that the tags on a vehicle are a particular type of information and then restrict the way that businesses are allowed to use it.

Indeed on the copyright of collection -- which as a fact was abused; but not the change of nature of the information. I really don’t think that you can make enough information particular enough to get away with disanonymisation techniques: you standing anywhere in a city, with a block accuracy is enough to identify most people on a transport map; even whether you like a handful of movies, and in what order or when yo…

A company can make use of the observations without aggregating them. For instance, if they have a documented interest in a tag, I don't really have a problem with them disseminating it to their vehicles and checking it against live scans.