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Police Documents on License Plate Scanners Reveal Mass Tracking

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Re: Police Documents on License Plate Scanners Reveal Mass Tracking

#91

Post by diminoten »

knowaveragejoe wrote: post #90
diminoten wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was speaking more to the "communications/personal finance" bits you mentioned. You can't be wholly private. Merely by existing, people will be able to learn some things about you. Nothing you can do about it.

Sure, and by natural extension there are some people, whom you will never meet (or even be aware of their doing so), who will get to become intimately familiar with the aforementioned data, journalized and cross-referenced in handy tables and graphs. Indefinitely. Nothing you can do about it! Might as well just accept it. Really, all of this hubbub around privacy concerns is totally unfounded. It's the way things hav…

They have to be this way because of how we structured the English language. When you act in public, you are, definitionally, not acting privately. There is literally nothing to be done about that short of changing what words we use.

Your movements in public are in absolutely no way equal to your conversations in private. You're trying to equate things which aren't equal, and you're taking an extremist, hard-line stance on what should and shouldn't be private.

It's utterly silly to think that a person can exist in society without anyone else knowing they exist. Soon you'll claim it's a violation of privacy to even look at other people.

Re: Police Documents on License Plate Scanners Reveal Mass Tracking

#92

Post by cortesoft »

Wingman4l7 wrote: post #81
quantumpotato_ wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which doesn't go so well in court. Oh wait.. forceful decryption of private keys..

Well, supposedly TrueCrypt has plausible deniability, but I don't know if that's ever actually been tested in practice.

It would be impossible to know if it has ever been utilized in practice.

Re: Police Documents on License Plate Scanners Reveal Mass Tracking

#93

Post by chrischen »

eliasmacpherson wrote: post #76
chrischen wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying more surveillance == better. I'm saying more surveillance would resolve that guy's specific problem, therefore his example is false.

I'm saying more surveillance == worse. And I'm saying that it would not necessarily resolve his specific problem. It would resolve the problem of whoever controls the footage.

Why wouldn't more surveillance have solved his specific problem? His specific problem arose because nobody knew the truth about where he was or what he was doing. Imperfect information caused him to be falsely accused.

Here's a though experience. If you believed in an all-knowing God, do you think He would know that the OP was innocent? If yes, then that's because the God knows and sees everything right?

Again, I'm not saying more surveillance is good in any way. One of the problems is that it's a lot of concentrated power and whoever gets a hold of it could abuse it. However, one way to ameliorate this would be to implement lots of surveillance, and make it all public data. A more open society would probably be a good thing though.

Re: Police Documents on License Plate Scanners Reveal Mass Tracking

#94

Post by eliasmacpherson »

chrischen wrote: post #93
eliasmacpherson wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm saying more surveillance == worse. And I'm saying that it would not necessarily resolve his specific problem. It would resolve the problem of whoever controls the footage.

Why wouldn't more surveillance have solved his specific problem? His specific problem arose because nobody knew the truth about where he was or what he was doing. Imperfect information caused him to be falsely accused. Here's a though experience. If you believed in an all-knowing God, do you think He would know that the OP was innocent? If yes, then that's because the God knows and sees everything right? Again, I'm n…

Because unless I am mistaken, you had not mentioned it being public data. Private surveillance is not really much use to him. I've worked in places where the surveillance tapes were wiped or mislaid when it wasn't in the interest of the footage owner to have its existence known. Making it all public data would be totally different. That opens another can of worms: Would it then be a crime to delete the data if you were the owner of the footage?

Re: Police Documents on License Plate Scanners Reveal Mass Tracking

#95

Post by chrischen »

eliasmacpherson wrote: post #94
chrischen wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't more surveillance have solved his specific problem? His specific problem arose because nobody knew the truth about where he was or what he was doing. Imperfect information caused him to be falsely accused. Here's a though experience. If you believed in an all-knowing God, do you think He would know that the OP was innocent? If yes, then that's because the God knows and sees everything right? Again, I'm n…

Because unless I am mistaken, you had not mentioned it being public data. Private surveillance is not really much use to him. I've worked in places where the surveillance tapes were wiped or mislaid when it wasn't in the interest of the footage owner to have its existence known. Making it all public data would be totally different. That opens another can of worms: Would it then be a crime to delete the data if you we…

Regardless of it being public or not, fundamentally it still stands that more surveillance means the OP would have been vindicated. If you want to talk about abuse of the data, that's a whole other issue. The question is, if surveillance is benevolent, would it have helped the OP? Yes. It would have.

Re: Police Documents on License Plate Scanners Reveal Mass Tracking

#96

Post by Wingman4l7 »

cortesoft wrote: post #92
Wingman4l7 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, supposedly TrueCrypt has plausible deniability, but I don't know if that's ever actually been tested in practice.

It would be impossible to know if it has ever been utilized in practice.

Well, technically, yes. However, if we had a court case where the prosecutor thought the defendant had a key for some encrypted data, and they claimed that they didn't, and they weren't thrown in jail for "refusing to divulge a key to the data that we totally know they have", then I might call that a theoretical win for the plausible deniability "defense".

Re: Police Documents on License Plate Scanners Reveal Mass Tracking

#97

Post by cortesoft »

Wingman4l7 wrote: post #96
cortesoft wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be impossible to know if it has ever been utilized in practice.

Well, technically, yes. However, if we had a court case where the prosecutor thought the defendant had a key for some encrypted data, and they claimed that they didn't, and they weren't thrown in jail for "refusing to divulge a key to the data that we totally know they have", then I might call that a theoretical win for the plausible deniability "defense".

The way the truecrypt hidden volume works, the defendant WOULD give up the key (it would just be the key for the REGULAR encrypted volume, not the hidden one) The prosecution would get the key, use it to decrypt the drive, see a bunch of files, and assume the defendant had complied and given them the correct key.

What they wouldn't know is that there is also a SECOND encrypted volume inside the one they decrypted. There is actually no way for them to know if there is this second volume or not.

http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/hidden-volume

If there were any news reports on it, the reports would just say "Defendant X gives up encryption key; no incriminating data found"

Re: Police Documents on License Plate Scanners Reveal Mass Tracking

#98

Post by eliasmacpherson »

chrischen wrote: post #95
eliasmacpherson wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because unless I am mistaken, you had not mentioned it being public data. Private surveillance is not really much use to him. I've worked in places where the surveillance tapes were wiped or mislaid when it wasn't in the interest of the footage owner to have its existence known. Making it all public data would be totally different. That opens another can of worms: Would it then be a crime to delete the data if you we…

Regardless of it being public or not, fundamentally it still stands that more surveillance means the OP would have been vindicated. If you want to talk about abuse of the data, that's a whole other issue. The question is, if surveillance is benevolent, would it have helped the OP? Yes. It would have.

That's a big if. The owner of the footage can be ambivalent, malevolent or benevolent. If I was ambivalent over an incident, I wouldn't be motivated to get involved and hand over my footage.

Re: Police Documents on License Plate Scanners Reveal Mass Tracking

#99

Post by knowaveragejoe »

diminoten wrote: post #91
knowaveragejoe wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, and by natural extension there are some people, whom you will never meet (or even be aware of their doing so), who will get to become intimately familiar with the aforementioned data, journalized and cross-referenced in handy tables and graphs. Indefinitely. Nothing you can do about it! Might as well just accept it. Really, all of this hubbub around privacy concerns is totally unfounded. It's the way things hav…

They have to be this way because of how we structured the English language. When you act in public, you are, definitionally, not acting privately. There is literally nothing to be done about that short of changing what words we use. Your movements in public are in absolutely no way equal to your conversations in private. You're trying to equate things which aren't equal, and you're taking an extremist, hard-line stan…

> When you act in public, you are, definitionally, not acting privately. There is literally nothing to be done about that

It seems that lately we're redefining what "public" is when it comes to the other privacy issues that are in the media spotlight recently.

> It's utterly silly to think that a person can exist in society without anyone else knowing they exist

There's no disagreement there, but do note that in no way did I attempt to make that equivocation either.

There is a distinct difference between someone knowing you exist or seeing you drive by, and someone having extensive, journalized, cross-referenced data, stored potentially indefinitely for perusal at their discretion. You will never know of this person or the fact they're studying your data.

Right now, there are only 3 states even pretending to place responsible restrictions on the usage of this particular data. That is the issue. Of course we will not be getting rid of ALPRs, but we can certainly make sure they're used for reasonable things. The potential for abuse is huge, and that's why there's outrage over the issue.

Re: Police Documents on License Plate Scanners Reveal Mass Tracking

#100

Post by tonywebster »

JosephHatfield wrote: post #41
tonywebster wrote: post #9

The other problem is that state laws aren't keeping up with law enforcement technology. FOIA-similar laws in Minnesota meant that every ALPR-captured license plate was public information, which I requested to prove a point. I got back 2.1 million license plates (+ timestamp and coordinates) on a USB stick. Without strong policies and laws, this data is ripe for abuse -- domestic abuse victims and stalking where someo…

The ACLU report appears to claim that Minnesota is actually one of the few states that keep recording plate data for a maximum of 48 hours. Was that a recent result of this disclosure? See the callout on the map at http://www.aclu.org/alpr

There is no state law limiting retention to 48 hours. The Minnesota State Patrol -- one single statewide agency -- has voluntarily chosen to limit to 48 hours. Any local police department or county sheriff's department can retain for whatever they want under state law. Or the State Patrol could be lying.
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