We have two cars equipped with plate readers at worker. It does gather raw data and save it. One or two people have the authorization and access to get to that data under specific circumstances. Generally the data is never looked at. For a few cases (like missing persons) we have tried to find specific vehicles. It’s never worked. So in general this data is never looked at. The only useful purpose is giving real time alerts to the operator of that particular police car that the vehicle it just read was stolen or whatever. In the future? No idea. But I don’t see the data being very useful at a local level.
The same way the govt. can run a license plate for no reason as it is NOT a search under the 4th AM. Some disagree and argue it is a search, therfore requires a warrant per the 4th.
And there is absolutely no chance for abuse? If someone that can access the data suspects their SO is cheating on them (not a crime) might they be tempted?
As others have said (including Nixon) I am not a crook. But I’ll admit that I’m no angel either.
Why would you worry about your car being stolen? You have insurance, do you not?
The last time we did this thread I registered my objection, and I continue to object to this sort of thing.
If it were one of the two people on the department I guess they could. But it would only show when that car passed one of our cars that are equipped with the readers. We only have access to the plate reads in our town with our equipment. Those two supervisors are not generally on patrol so they would not be operating the vehicles. And if they were close enough to read the plate they would be following the car anyway. Add to that the fact that the state comes in and audits the use of the system as well as if guidelines are being followed with regards to other more traditional methods of looking up information.
I never like the slippery slope argument and I don’t know where the technology will take us. But right now as its used there really isn’t enough useful information being gathered to infringe on anyone’s rights. At most it will say that your car was at 8th and Main at the same time as the police car with a reader. And then someone will have to have a reason to look for that information. What the future brings, I don’t know.
The thing to learn from all this is that if the government has the power to do it, you can assume they will, and assume they probably already have.
Do what?
Anything.
Everything
There’s always chance of abuse. There always has been chance of abuse for anything anybody does, that’s what “abuse” means. But when it’s not abused, which will be the majority of the time, and occasionally even 100% of the time (depending on what it is), it will reduce crime and keep you safer.
Safety isn’t the most important consideration for many of us. Privacy is a consideration on its own. In fact, that is how the Supreme Court justified Roe Versus Wade to give women abortion rights. I work on large databases for a living so I know what they can do quite well and I a fan in technological sense but certainly not in the public policy sense. I have the security clearances to work on them and I am trustworthy but I wouldn’t bet my life that some of the coworkers I have had over the years are the same.
You may have noticed that I asked people to give out some private information that is all technically publicly available now but not readily accessible or easy to get by the average person. No one was willing to do it because I am not a law enforcement officer which presumably means that they happily share that same information with anyone wearing a badge.
What is the difference between me and the minimum requirements to be a law enforcement officer? I have a college degree, no criminal background, and closely checked security clearances.
To be a law enforcement officer in most states requires the following:
- High School Diploma or GED
- A valid Driver’s License
- 21 years of age or older (lower in some states)
- No felony convictions
- 6 - 9 months in the Police Academy depending on the state.
After all those stringent requirements, should that give someone potential access to everything you do? The technology is only going to grow more powerful over time if strict policies aren’t put in place. We already went through this with the NSA (they are reading this right now and they can fuck the hell off) and I don’t think it is tolerable in American society. It isn’t so much as slippery slope as much as it is falling ass backwards down a mountain picking up speed on the ice with a cliff at the end.
I don’t want to impugn the Law Enforcement profession as a whole and certainly not the LEO members we have on this board but it is insane to think that pinning a badge on a 21 year old makes them any more or less capable of doing great harm than any other random professional with an excess of personal information.
I have insurance. I also want my car back. This helps that. I support this
They’re doing it to minimise or even solve a crime. You’re doing it because you think you’re making some kind of point.
You can certainly access a lot of public information about us with a minimum of investigation. Go for your life, I don’t care. I’m not going to volunteer that information to you, though, as there is no practical need for you to have it that would benefit anybody. It will not increase my safety, it will not assist in any investigation. If you want my details, find it on your own time.
The Government is not peering through your window and watching you jerk off. They’re not investigating the details of your life so that they can point and laugh at your mistakes. They’re not going to steal your identity and run up a debt on your credit cards. Their intent is to prevent criminal activity like that from happening to you.
There is no ‘government’ at that level of detail. It is just individual people with all their flaws that now have the enhanced ability to spy on mostly innocent people. I am not a government paranoia freak or a conspiracy theorist in the least. I just know how these things play out at the fringes and shouldn’t be allowed under the U.S. Constitution especially given some high-profile precedent cases.
Have you ever been falsely accused of felony that you had absolutely nothing to do with and had your family’s house searched for collaborating evidence? I have. Thankfully it was fairly easy to prove my innocence because I had an air-tight alibi but they didn’t even stop there and moved on to other family members. Forensic evidence eventually proved that all of us had no knowledge of the crime so no charges were filed but it wasn’t welcome or fun. It doesn’t always work out that well however. I have a friend sitting in a Texas prison with a life sentence for a crime he didn’t commit. Luckily, he had strong resources and he isn’t a minority. He has been granted a new trial that will eventually get him out. Others aren’t so lucky.
There is a very real statistical problem that can be introduced when law enforcement collects too much information. The problem is highlighted in the movie My Cousin Vinnie (that is not a joke, it is the most realistic movie featuring a trial ever made according to law schools). In the movie, two young men were charged with murder and eligible for the death penalty strictly based on the fact that they were driving a rare vehicle that stopped at the scene around the time the crime occurred. Just after they left, the clerk at the store was shot and killed. They eventually got off thanks to some talented lawyer work but it doesn’t always work that way in the real world.
Huge data sets like we are talking about will always create spurious correlations between innocent people and certain crimes if enough details are recorded in large databases. Innocent people that had nothing to do with it were spread over the front pages of major papers after the Boston Bombings for example. It could be the only reason they were eventually cleared was that it was such a high-profile case but most aren’t. It isn’t just a law enforcement problem, it is a math and statistical problem as well as a judicial problem. It is a completely different technique if you investigate people that you have other reasons to suspect and match up the details afterwards as opposed to doing it the other way and scanning huge databases for suspects. The latter would create way too many false positives for a society to qualify as free.
Then how do you know? Huh?
Just wait until the digital license plate craze really catches on. Someone is trying to get this started here in CA.
I’m not the Government.
In the U.S., we are all supposed to be but it isn’t working out that way these days unfortunately.
Echo, echo, ehco …
I actually know an instance where being able to scan a license plate is a good thing; I have worn out two bridge toll transponders, but each time I went through a “transponder-only” lane with a broken one, my license plate got scanned and checked against the database to confirm that I did have a valid transponder.