Patrol car video cameras capture 3000 licence plates in 1 hour - automatically

[SpeedyCorky]

automatic licence plate recognition

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=456978796d


i'm really not so sure how i feel about this technology. on one hand i'm glad that now uninsured, unregistered, and stolen vehicles will now be easier to spot. and i'm not so sure how much i like every patrol car driving around, each with their own computer that has the international 'hot list'. thats a lot of important data at a very high risk.

At the end of the day, i'm gonna have to side with law enforcement on this one. if anything, it gives the officer more information when they are out in the field. cops are people too, they got a job to do; i want them to have as much awareness and information as they can, so they can do the best job they can. so much of 'whats the right thing to do?' is based on having all the information.

granted, it would really suck to blow by a parked cop while pushing triplle digits, and to know they likely got your plate on camera. the rules of when they can give u a ticket would have to change. ie, i would be OK with LEOs using the image to positivily ID you if they caught up to you and pulled you over; it would NOT be ok for them to use the image to just mail you a ticket. if they could just mail you one, then basically, any violating vehicle that is within camera range of a patrol car, would be subject to a citation... and that'd be super lame

... but if anything, i'd hope the technology would help put the LEOs priorities in order by keeping them busy chasing the unregistered, uninsured, and stolen vehciles, leaving them less time to chase speeders :devil

[}Dragon{]

I posted something similar last year. The info that I was given is that the auto-theft task force uses it for recovering stolen vehicles.

If they want to use it to enforce uninsured vehicles on the roads: go for it :thumbup

[NorCalBusa]

Bitchin technology!

The data is secure enough- its just a list, I don't believe it can be edited (and pushed back into the system) if the laptop gets misplaced.

The only issue I have with the notion is how it is used. Is the information kept? Or does it look for a match and delete/go to the next plate?

If the info (plate, time, place) is kept- I have some privacy concerns. The up side is cops could quickly track the movement patterns of criminals/terrorists, just by accumulating a mondo database of who/what/where/when.

But they could also accumulate that on law abiding citizens. Next, the insurance industry wants access to it for rate calculations? Your medical provider wants to know where ya go too. How about your employer- where ya go at lunch and on weekends or DURING work?

Slippery slope in my book.

[Nick]

Worried about brass finding out how many times you stop at Starbucks while 10-8? :laughing

[}Dragon{]

Originally posted by Nick
Worried about brass finding out how many times you stop at Starbucks while 10-8? :laughing

No, just how *far* you were out of your beat :laughing

[Nick]

Beat poaching or neighboring city poaching? lol

[Bronto]

Oakland PD has a few of those up and running. They expect to identify stolen vehicles.

[silversvs]

www.platescan.com
www.pipstechnology.com


Pretty incedible technology. Not only does it run every plate it reads through SVS (Stolen Vehicle System) it can also be loaded with plates for vehicles we are interested in finding such as wanted persons, suspeneded license, repeat DUI drivers etc.

You can download all the plates that have been read each shift and upload them onto the company's webpage (including time and GPS location). Then other agencies can do queries on all the cars that have been captured by every agency. Imagine if you got a plate or partial plate of a bank robbery suspect vehicle. Simply log on to the website and see if any agencies have captured that plate, when and where. Then you would know where to go looking for your bad guy.

Many agencies in our area are getting on board with this new technology. Alameda County Sheriff, Oakland PD, Fremont PD, Tracy PD, Manteca PD, etc. Car thieves beware!

[Traq]

Originally posted by silversvs
You can download all the plates that have been read each shift and upload them onto the company's webpage (including time and GPS location). Then other agencies can do queries on all the cars that have been captured by every agency. Imagine if you got a plate or partial plate of a bank robbery suspect vehicle. Simply log on to the website and see if any agencies have captured that plate, when and where. Then you would know where to go looking for your bad guy.

Many agencies in our area are getting on board with this new technology. Alameda County Sheriff, Oakland PD, Fremont PD, Tracy PD, Manteca PD, etc. Car thieves beware!
....

Wow...that's...wow...

So this tracking of private citizens gets uploaded onto a commercial website which can just turn around and sell the information to who ever they want? Leading exactly to the scenarios that were listed above by NorCalBusa....

Un-fucking-real!

While I can appreciate the legitimate uses for this technology, it is way too big of an infringement on privacy. I wouldn't be surprised to see a fat lawsuit to shut this down.

[CykoKlr]

Sounds like another loss of privacy for 99.999999% of the citizens of this country to ease the leg work of the agencies we pay for by working everyday of our lives.

The software should drop every plate that has no flags come up within a determined time frame. The agencies should also be liable for selling this information or it being leaked to non government agencies like our insurance carriers.

I do see the benefits as I have had two cars stolen. But would I trade my insurance check for those vehicles for being tracked for the rest of my life by every passing officer? Not to mention anybody who steals this information. It is no where near 100% fail safe as nothing is.

I think not..........

[Nick]

Originally posted by CykoKlr
Sounds like another loss of privacy for 99.999999% of the citizens of this country to ease the leg work of the agencies we pay for by working everyday of our lives.

It's not though. Go on a ride-a-long with your local PD/SO and see how many plates they run during a shift. Here's a hint: Just about every stoplight, they're on the MDT running plates. If you're at a stoplight, and you have a cop behind you, chances are, he's running your plate and you'd never know. The problem is, with the current technology, you can't get more than 5-6 during one light. This just increases productivity. There is no legitimate loss of privacy issue.

[silversvs]

Conspiracy theorists unite!

Its law enforcement use only. No data can be released. It simply allows law enforcement agencies using the system to see if a specified target vehicle has been captured by another agency's camera.

Nobody will be tracking the movement of Joe citizen.

[saizai]

Originally posted by silversvs
Conspiracy theorists unite!

Its law enforcement use only. No data can be released. It simply allows law enforcement agencies using the system to see if a specified target vehicle has been captured by another agency's camera.

Nobody will be tracking the movement of Joe citizen.

The moment it went to a commercial site, they painted a big huge target on that database server.

How much do you want to bet that a competent hacker would not have both the ability and desire to get into it? And that there aren't plenty of bidders for that sort of information outside of LE?

IMO: it is ONLY a matter of time before the database is available to anyone... for a price. That includes employers, private detectives, and of course whoever the next Senator McCarthy turns out to be. (Think about what he would have done with a database saying where people traveled and when. Then, tell me why it won't happen again the next time some powerhungry demagogue feels like it - i.e. what has so dramatically changed since then.)

Also, your saying that it isn't used to track the movement of Joe Average is, IMO, false. You run the plate, right? It captures a few thousand while you cruise down the street. The only reason that Joe Average would not get tracked is if the database server (which IS getting pinged for every single plate in the first place) is set explicitly not to file that info away for later use.

How can you vouch for whether a little switch is set in the software to log just the ones that it searches the database and flags as "bad people", or everyone?

IMO as a professional software developer and occasional database admin: it is quite plausible that someone will make the decision to go with the "buy more storage space" vs "buy more processors" route, and that that switch will get turned OFF, so that instead you have a database of every single plate, time and place stamped, ever seen by any camera on the system.

They will later justify that by saying, for example, "what if we don't yet know that it was stolen? Someone might report on Friday that it was stolen on Monday, and we might have plate shots somewhere inbetween. So we want to know where they were so we can arrest them and give back the car."

The problem is, yes there are legitimate uses, and yes it saves effort, and yes it does what is already being done in some ways etc... but there are also *lots* of illegitimate or just plain creepy uses, and such a database is VERY VERY EASILY scaled up to very seriously creepy.

And in 99% of cases I have seen, I will bet my money on the hackers, not on the government, for having good security. ([Modern] NSA excepted. :P)

Especially if it is a widely available, multiagency, third party run system. SOMEONE will fuck up or leak, and you only need one to have a total compromise.

[saizai]

To be clear: I am not suggesting that this is any sort of deliberate conspiracy.

I AM suggesting that it is
a) probably not going to be secure against all the people with a desire to know, and
b) ABSOLUTELY easy to get scaled up to track everyone.

IMO bad things happen not because of a lack of sincerity and goodwill on the part of 99% of the people involved, but because of effects that occur as epiphenomena of systems. Effects that can then be taken advantage of by the 1%.

As it is, it is already true that any private detective worth anything can look up all of my records. Have a database that logs where someone is when, or - you know it's inevitable - the simple compilation of a 'flight path', patterns of travel, road trips, frequent places I park, etc - and it'll be available, sooner rather than later, to anyone - for the right price.

Thus the question becomes, do we want that info available to everyone?

If not, then it shouldn't be compiled.

[silversvs]

I guess what everyone really needs to realize is that if they are out and about in public they can't complain if they are seen there. Where ever they drive or park their vehicle in the public view there is no right to privacy. Once you enter into the public domain you lose your expectation of privacy.

Law enforcement is finally catching up with the technology to make our work more efficient. The public demands that we work smart and we work hard (how many times have we all heard "I pay your salary"). Now someone has come up with a way to help law enforcement out, and now the masses are saying that they don't want what they do out in public to be noted.

If your car gets stolen, you want us to find it, if you get hit by an unlicensed or uninsured motorist you complain that they never should have been driving, if your house gets burglarized or business gets robbed, you demand that we find the bad guys, but mention that we are going to use some new technology to allow us to do these things better and watch out nobody is happy.

Sheesh...

[saizai]

Originally posted by silversvs
I guess what everyone really needs to realize is that if they are out and about in public they can't complain if they are seen there. Where ever they drive or park their vehicle in the public view there is no right to privacy. Once you enter into the public domain you lose your expectation of privacy.

Essentially, indeed, this is the social (not legal, imo) question here.

How much expectation of privacy do we or should we have in the public domain?

Is it OK, for example, for someone to follow us around whenever we're not in a building we control, and post a complete log online of everything we do along with video, times and dates, license plates and full profiles of everyone we meet, when we meet them, high-power directional microphone recordings of conversations that take place in public places, etc?

All of that is public info. It might even be legal to do, though if cops are doing it it's even harder to attack legally.

So, this is already the case - partially - for celebrities (which, IMO, is disgusting, but seems to be accepted). It isn't for Joe Public.

Would you be OK with having everything you do in public, be truly public and easily accessible knowledge?

It would include things like who you're friends with, where you go when, easily predicted your travel patterns in case someone wants to drop in on you uninvited, etc.

This is of course a slippery-slope argument, and it is unlikely that it will happen to the extent I describe any time soon. But I am using this to try to highlight the question of what exactly we feel is an expectation of privacy in public. I think you are wrong to say that we have none; it might be legally true but it is certainly not true socially or psychologically.

That in turn informs what we feel and why about the use of info produced by this system - namely, an account of where you go and when. (Perhaps not if you walk or use public transit paying cash only... yet)

That *can* and will be put together to also get info about where you meet whom, what your travel patterns are, etc. Certainly it is extremely useful information for a LEO wanting to make a bust; nobody is disputing that.

The dispute, as you pointed out, is about whether we *really* have an expectation of privacy about that "public" information.

If your car gets stolen, you want us to find it, if you get hit by an unlicensed or uninsured motorist you complain that they never should have been driving, if your house gets burglarized or business gets robbed, you demand that we find the bad guys, but mention that we are going to use some new technology to allow us to do these things better and watch out nobody is happy.

I think we all agree that we want to make it easier for LEOs to do their (legitimate) job. It is when that make-it-easier strays into the broader, and rather prickly, issue above that it becomes a matter of balancing. At some point, LEO convenience and power will lose out to civil liberties concerns.

[SPD RACER]

I demoed one. There were a few flaws. Read the plates incorrectly. It also tried to read and iron fence.

[}Dragon{]

Originally posted by SPD RACER
. It also tried to read and iron fence.

The fence could have been stolen :p

[CykoKlr]

Originally posted by silversvs
I guess what everyone really needs to realize is that if they are out and about in public they can't complain if they are seen there. Where ever they drive or park their vehicle in the public view there is no right to privacy. Once you enter into the public domain you lose your expectation of privacy.


Sheesh...

What about the plates they read when you parked in your drive way? Or if your garage is open and it reads those plates. I know how most of it works my father in-law was a SC sheriff for 26 years. I don't care if they read my plates if I'm in front of them either. But I do have a problem with them compiling data on my every move that will eventually be non LE accessible. I understand you only see the good in this as most law officials are very one sided when it comes to law enforcement. As in they only see the good. These devices are also designed to work on stationary cameras that could be at stop lights or any public area for that matter. Who's to say they wont end up there too. This could go any which way at this point. Hell if I wanted I could just set up a camera in front of my house and film every car running the stop sign. I live only 5 blocks from the PD station here and most of the runners or California stops are the patrol cars.

[Traq]

Originally posted by silversvs
I guess what everyone really needs to realize is that if they are out and about in public they can't complain if they are seen there. Where ever they drive or park their vehicle in the public view there is no right to privacy. Once you enter into the public domain you lose your expectation of privacy.

Law enforcement is finally catching up with the technology to make our work more efficient. The public demands that we work smart and we work hard (how many times have we all heard "I pay your salary"). Now someone has come up with a way to help law enforcement out, and now the masses are saying that they don't want what they do out in public to be noted.

If your car gets stolen, you want us to find it, if you get hit by an unlicensed or uninsured motorist you complain that they never should have been driving, if your house gets burglarized or business gets robbed, you demand that we find the bad guys, but mention that we are going to use some new technology to allow us to do these things better and watch out nobody is happy.

Sheesh...
What's next? Microchip implants?

Seriously.

You don't seem to understand the concerns we're talking about... I have no problem with checking plates vs a list of wanted plates.

I have a problem with TRACKING time, date, and location of plates that you have no legitimate reason to be looking for. What's hard to understand about that?

You seriously think there's no reasonable expectation to not be tracked by the government? You're wrong. I, and most likely anyone you ask, would expect that.

And that's not even going into the part where you're giving the information to a commercial entity to do with whatever they want to do.

Check all you want. Don't track. You have no business tracking me. This is not a police state. And yes, tracking people is most definately a first step to making it a police state. That's not conspiracy, that's out right fact.

[saizai]

Originally posted by CykoKlr
What about the plates they read when you parked in your drive way? Or if your garage is open and it reads those plates.

IIRC the case law, both of those cases count as public. Viz. failure to prosecute papparazi when they take pictures (possibly via long range telephoto lens). What matters is whether it's visible while standing on public property, or private property upon which you have a right to be.

The argument is basically, light / sound / radio / whatever waves/rays/particles escape the location; you are recording them when they reach you. Thus, you are recording things that are (at the moment) on public property.

I don't remember how the case worked out for basically the same with police helicopters or stakeout vehicles equipped with infrared to track plants and people *within* houses, but I do remember there being something about that a couple years ago. Might be worth looking up, since it's a good test case. (Namely, you're inside your house and therefore have an *expectation* of privacy, but the equipment is still "merely recording information that is escaping the house and is now on public property"... so it is a good way to test whether that is the standard you want.)

These devices are also designed to work on stationary cameras that could be at stop lights or any public area for that matter. Who's to say they wont end up there too.

I bet they will be there within 5 years unless there is a major reversal of either law or society.

This could go any which way at this point. Hell if I wanted I could just set up a camera in front of my house and film every car running the stop sign. I live only 5 blocks from the PD station here and most of the runners or California stops are the patrol cars.

Indeed you could. They might not bother to prosecute though.... and the cops can always claim they were on call at the time.

[saizai]

Originally posted by }Dragon{
The fence could have been stolen :p

Or unregistered.

(I think you missed a fence = guy who buys stolen goods pun.)

[Junkie]

Originally posted by saizai
Indeed you could. They might not bother to prosecute though.... and the cops can always claim they were on call at the time. I had thought that the only VCs that applied to LE vehicles being driven by on duty LEOs were DUI and hit & run, whether or not they are on call.

[saizai]

Originally posted by Junkie
I had thought that the only VCs that applied to LE vehicles being driven by on duty LEOs were DUI and hit & run, whether or not they are on call.

IIRC (cops please correct), most VCs don't apply when responding to urgent call (= lights & siren on).

But the rest of the time they're protected anyway because they can claim it was "in the course of duty" and the only recourse is the internal affairs dept (which might or might not care).

And of course, you have to find a cop to write the ticket... and a DA to prosecute it... so unless it's seriously fucked up probably nothing will happen. (Or unless you can file a civil suit... but again there, "in line of duty" is a major defense.)

[silversvs]

All vehicles, including those driven by LEOs must obey all rules of the road. There is one exception and that is found here:

21055. The driver of an authorized emergency vehicle is exempt fromChapter 2 (commencing with Section 21350), Chapter 3 (commencing with Section 21650), Chapter 4 (commencing with Section 21800), Chapter 5 (commencing with Section 21950), Chapter 6 (commencing with 22100), Chapter 7 (commencing with Section 22348), Chapter 8 (commencing with Section 22450), Chapter 9 (commencing with Section 22500), and Chapter 10 (commencing with Section 22650) of this division, and Article 3 (commencing with Section 38305) and Article 4 commencing with Section 38312) of Chapter 5 of Division 16.5, under all of the following conditions:
(a) If the vehicle is being driven in response to an emergency
call or while engaged in rescue operations or is being used in the
immediate pursuit of an actual or suspected violator of the law or is responding to, but not returning from, a fire alarm, except that
fire department vehicles are exempt whether directly responding to an emergency call or operated from one place to another as rendered desirable or necessary by reason of an emergency call and operated to the scene of the emergency or operated from one fire station to another or to some other location by reason of the emergency call.
(b) If the driver of the vehicle sounds a siren as may be
reasonably necessary and the vehicle displays a lighted red lamp
visible from the front as a warning to other drivers and pedestrians.

[saizai]

silversvs - Could you please translate all those exemption citations into plain English?

[GhostRider]

Originally posted by saizai

How much expectation of privacy do we or should we have in the public domain?



there is no more privacy!
and George Orwell was an optimist!

reading stuff like this realy makes me :barf !

10 more years, and brain implants will be mandatory, and people will cheer to it, because life is gonna be so much safer.

after all, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear!