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ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US

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Re: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US

#71

Post by mastax »

confounded wrote: post #35
mschuster91 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only difference is this is captured by governments --who at least in theory represent the voting public. Actually I trust a megacorp like Google, Amazon, Twitter or Facebook more with my data than I trust the state. The state can arrest me based on that data. The tech giants not, and they are fighting like hell that the government does not get access to that data (as that would compromise trust, and by that the…

Anything Google, Amazon, Twitter or Facebook store on you is available to the government. If they want to get hold of it to get something to arrest you with, all they have to do is ask. While they may push back on some requests, there's actually very little they can do with FISA/NSA requests, they're almost always complied with. I've heard them grumble about mass surveillance laws, but I haven't heard about them open…

The difference is that, the government has to ask for the data, they can't just casually sift through the universe.

(I'm assuming that FISA courts, at the very least, won't agree to a warrant for "all of your data on everyone forever")

Re: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US

#72

Post by adventured »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #32
dogma1138 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand, Europe has national ID laws I can fill up a form and get the details including owner details for any license plate in the EU (you need cause but it’s not verified in most cases it would land you in trouble if it’s abused tho), and automated license plate tracking is pretty darn common across all EU countries yet no one here yells Stasi about this.

> and automated license plate tracking is pretty darn common across all EU countries yet no one here yells Stasi about this. A huge chunk of Europe doesn't use driving as their primary means of transportation.

I'd love to see you break out the stats on that, country by country, and support it.

There are 300 million cars in Europe. France as one example, has about one passenger car per adult between the ages of 18-65. The high prevalence of diesel autos in Paris, is why the city started to look like Beijing not so long ago due to pollution.

So exactly how big is a huge chunk?

Re: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US

#73

Post by dredmorbius »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #32
dogma1138 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand, Europe has national ID laws I can fill up a form and get the details including owner details for any license plate in the EU (you need cause but it’s not verified in most cases it would land you in trouble if it’s abused tho), and automated license plate tracking is pretty darn common across all EU countries yet no one here yells Stasi about this.

> and automated license plate tracking is pretty darn common across all EU countries yet no one here yells Stasi about this. A huge chunk of Europe doesn't use driving as their primary means of transportation.

Are those alternative modes of transportation subject to tracking? E.g., electronic transit tickets or the like?

Re: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US

#74

Post by dredmorbius »

tehlike wrote: post #53
pavel_lishin wrote: post #16

Is it possible to fight back by poisoning the data? Is it legal to set up a display by the roadside that shows randomly generated license plates, filling their automated cameras with garbage data? Or is their data collection smart enough to recognize a non-car, either technologically or by filtering everything through a Turk-like equivalent?

Sql injection in license plate would be funny.

I'm not sure if "it's been done" is accurate, but it's been attempted:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/cdndevs/2010/03/22/sql-inje...

Re: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US

#75

Post by dredmorbius »

EduardoBautista wrote: post #3
cup wrote: post #2

Disgusting development and a horrible example of how destructive technology can be. This reinforces my belief that engineers and scientist need to go through mandatory ethics classes throughout their education.

Who gets to determine what is considered ethical?

Someone who is very good at it.

There's a process for coming to group concensus on contended questions, in which individual volition and choice isn't possible. It's called "politics".

It's messy, but I'm unaware of any better options.

Re: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US

#76

Post by WalterBright »

I decided to get my garage queen back on the road after 10 years. The tabs being expired, I went down to the DOL to get new tabs. They claimed that the auto records were purged after 7 years, and that there was no record of my car in their system. I needed to present the original title to prove the car existed and was mine.

Re: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US

#77

Post by confounded »

mastax wrote: post #71
confounded wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything Google, Amazon, Twitter or Facebook store on you is available to the government. If they want to get hold of it to get something to arrest you with, all they have to do is ask. While they may push back on some requests, there's actually very little they can do with FISA/NSA requests, they're almost always complied with. I've heard them grumble about mass surveillance laws, but I haven't heard about them open…

The difference is that, the government has to ask for the data, they can't just casually sift through the universe. (I'm assuming that FISA courts, at the very least, won't agree to a warrant for "all of your data on everyone forever")

> "all of your data on everyone forever"

As far as we know (which is as little as possible), they can get all the data on you as an individual, if you’re on a data retention list. This is outside of data you generate happening to hit certain search terms

I qualify for such a list; I was/am a subscriber to The Linux Journal, an ‘extremeist publication’ according to the NSA, at least at the time of the Snowden leaks.

Am I still? It’s illegal for me to know. But it’s reasonable to assume that the maximalist approach to data collection is shared by the government and Google et al quite happily.

Re: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US

#78

Post by nol13 »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #31
coldcode wrote: post #25

I 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.

Most plate cameras rely in part on the reflectiveness of the plate. You can definitely modify a plate to be mostly illegible to these cameras but easily human readable.

Which would result in getting instantly pulled over then?

Re: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US

#79

Post by AnthonyMouse »

mc32 wrote: post #22
mschuster91 wrote: post #6

Yet 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'…

To quote madam secretary, "at this point, what difference does it make". People have been more then willing to give up their data to FB, Google, Apple, etc. The only difference is this is captured by governments --who at least in theory represent the voting public. It'll be interesting to see what the outcome is. Will the public demand the government regulate industry as well as ask it to rein in its own capabilities…

The license plate cameras are actually a special case.

If you don't like most types of surveillance there are a lot of countermeasures a concerned party can use. Run your own servers, use encryption, etc.

The problem with license plates is that the equivalent thing is to obscure your license plate, which is prohibited by law. So it's not just that the government is collecting publicly available information, it's that you're prohibited by law from not making the information public. Which is a different kind of thing that deserves to be treated differently.

Re: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US

#80

Post by mehrdadn »

ams6110 wrote: post #39
jermaustin1 wrote: post #37

One of my clients does license plate reading and tracking. They have hundreds of tiny customers, and a handful of VERY LARGER customers, so I can say with 100% certainty, there are hundreds of agencies across the USA already doing this. For fun, I tracked my rental car from Georgia to Texas after a vacation a few months back to see how often I hit one of my client's customer's cameras. It was a lot. I saw myself hit…

IIRC there's an episode of Jay Leno's Garage that features a cop with a license plate reader. He can sit on the side of the road and every car that passes is scanned and checked for warrants. The answer comes back about as quickly as the speed reading on a radar gun. What they don't tell you is that all those plate numbers are going into a database, time- and location-stamped.

> The answer comes back about as quickly as the speed reading on a radar gun.

This isn't surprising. Why wouldn't it? They just need to cache that day's data, right?

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