The Tulsa Forum by TulsaNow

(TULSA, Okla.) March 19 - An extra set of high tech eyes could be making
its way to the Tulsa Police Department.  This new equipment can spot a
stolen car with in seconds.
http://www.fox23.com/news/local/story.aspx?content_id=856a5ca0-76e2-4ca8-a256-6382af8368ff

So now TPD is testing the MPH 900 cameras that can read a license plate.
 “All you got to do is drive and it's going to do it for you."  In that
time, the machine will alert Officer David Hickman if the tag is from a
stolen car.

It can even spot cars Officer Hickman didn't see.  “It reads it and
there’s no way I could turn around and get all the information on the
tag. It can do it so much faster than a human can."

Officer Hickman says it's not just reading stolen car information.  The
system is linked directly to the National Crime Information Center.

So any cars that police believe are linked to crimes will set off the
alarm.  "That's going to lower the crime rate, because you're going to
get the shooting suspects and violent crime suspects off the streets."

Right now the Tulsa Police Department is doing a test with the camera
for about two weeks. They cost $20,000.

http://www.wired.com/cars/energy/news/2005/06/67864
http://www.remingtonelsag.com/mobile_hunter.htm
http://webserver.computoredge.com/editorial/2449/in1print.htm

If it's the same one, I saw the test car a few weeks ago by UDE.  It had two large black camera boxes mounted to the trunk pointing forward off the car.  Hopefully they'll get the smaller ones that mount on the roof and have almost 360 degree viewing.  Of course that's a pretty penny for that system.  I didn't realize they were that expensive.

Oh nos! Big brother, Real ID, skynet!


I would park these things on the major roadways going out of town. Theoreticaly, many stolen cars are driven straight out of town (or to a junk yard) and it'd be nice to stop them on the way out, or at least catalog where they're headed.

They can't afford cameras to help keep their officers safe and honest, but they can spend double that amount....    

Whatever... This just shows how broken the system is.

quote:

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Originally posted by TeeDub


They can't afford cameras to help keep their officers safe and honest, but they can spend double that amount....    

Whatever... This just shows how broken the system is.

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You wouldn't rather spend money to catch bad guys?  Really?

quote:

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Originally posted by Wilbur


You wouldn't rather spend money to catch bad guys?  Really?

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Honestly?   I think the protection of the public's civil liberties is more important than the few stolen cars a year this might catch.   According to the report, there are only 3500 cars stolen in the Tulsa area each year.  After viewing the crime map, from the TPD website, a surprising few of those are from south Tulsa.  (Apparently you need a car to get to where the nice cars are to steal.)

Long story short, no, protect my rights, those aren't covered by insurance.

quote:

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Originally posted by TeeDub

quote:

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Originally posted by Wilbur


You wouldn't rather spend money to catch bad guys?  Really?

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Honestly?   I think the protection of the public's civil liberties is more important than the few stolen cars a year this might catch.   According to the report, there are only 3500 cars stolen in the Tulsa area each year.  After viewing the crime map, from the TPD website, a surprising few of those are from south Tulsa.  (Apparently you need a car to get to where the nice cars are to steal.)

Long story short, no, protect my rights, those aren't covered by insurance.

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YEAH!  CRIME BE DAMNED!  To he!! with giving the police tools to catch the crooks.

Sad.

So this system compares license plate images to a stolen car database as a patrol car moves past parked cars.  Would it be difficult to compile a database of ALL the cars it scanned and couple that to GPS information?  Then the police would have a list of cars parked outside a nightclub or a political rally.  On one hand, it might have a value in crime prevention but on the other it would have a chilling effect on free speech.

Or would I be wrong in imagining that police would find other uses for this system besides locating stolen cars?

How about we protect the police we have now before we start worrying about a few dollars worth of stolen cars.  

How about this:   If the insurance companies think car theft is so rampant, maybe they can buy these for the cops?    Oh wait...

quote:

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Originally posted by Wilbur

YEAH!  CRIME BE DAMNED!  To he!! with giving the police tools to catch the crooks.

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Maybe the point he was trying to make is that weeding out the bad cops is part of fighting crime, and that the tools to strengthen and defend the integrity of the department are worth more than the tools to address only a small niche of crime.

If this were "prioritized" over an honest dashcam system it would pretty well make a statement as to that integrity.

quote:

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Originally posted by TeeDub


How about we protect the police we have now before we start worrying about a few dollars worth of stolen cars.  

How about this:   If the insurance companies think car theft is so rampant, maybe they can buy these for the cops?    Oh wait...

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a few dollars of stolen cars? did you read the article? Do you know how NCIC works?? If someone gives the police a vehicle description and a tag # they can enter that into their police report, for example a hit and run, or a drive by.  Or vandalism, etc.  The system would then "flag" that car as a hit by NCIC.  This system does alot more then just scan for stolen cars.  I imagine it would also "hit" vehicles that have tickets/warrants tied to that particular tag # as well.

Umm, didn’t anybody else notice that it reads and sends off an alarm if the plates come back with any info from the National Crime Information Center? Seems like a good idea to me to clean up the streets and take care of a lot of people with possible felony warrants and who knows what sort of trash from other states they would be able to catch and process here. Seems like the cameras would eventually pay for themselves.

quote:

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Originally posted by Ed W

Would it be difficult to compile a database of ALL the cars it scanned and couple that to GPS information?  Then the police would have a list of cars parked outside a nightclub or a political rally.  On one hand, it might have a value in crime prevention but on the other it would have a chilling effect on free speech.

Or would I be wrong in imagining that police would find other uses for this system besides locating stolen cars?

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In theory, the system could catalog a parking lot full of tags while driving by at 75 MPH, or oncoming traffic at 120 MPH, amassing huge amounts of data to be poured into a national database.  The potential for abuses ranging from data-mining to profiling stagger the imagination.

It would take some atrocity -- some real act of terrorism -- for us to dismiss this with a "its what we need to stay safe" erosion of civil liberty.  Meanwhile we'll have to keep our eye on those crazy Air National Guard pilots the old fashioned way... [;)]

Do you all really believe this crap?

If there are warrants out for me they aren't associated with my car.   Tickets are written to a person.

Are you really going to start pulling over cars because someone who owned it (and could have since sold it) has tickets?   Come on, let's get real here.

Dear car thieves,

I know you are all really stupid, you can figure out how to pick locks and ignitions, arrange illegal titles, transfer stolen property to the highest bidder and run apperently complex rackets - but let me help you.  Before you steal the car steal a license plate from someone else.  Then when you steal the car you actually want just throw the plate in the river and replace it.

You have just defeated this amazing new system.
Bet they NEVER would have thought if that without me.  What?  They already do that?

Crazy.

quote:

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Originally posted by TeeDub


Do you all really believe this crap?

If there are warrants out for me they aren't associated with my car.   Tickets are written to a person.

Are you really going to start pulling over cars because someone who owned it (and could have since sold it) has tickets?   Come on, let's get real here.

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maybe you should watch a show on A&E every tuesday night called "Parking Wars".  When you get a traffic citation, and you don't show up for court, a warrant is issued.  It will also be tied to that vehicle.  For example, when I interned with TPD we ran a tag in the apts behind the QT at 48th and Yale.  It came back a hit from NCIC for the registered owner having warrants out of California for Sexual Assault.  Maybe my post earlier was a bit confusing and unclear, I apologize!

quote:

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Originally posted by TUalum0982


maybe you should watch a show on A&E every tuesday night called "Parking Wars".  When you get a traffic citation, and you don't show up for court, a warrant is issued.  It will also be tied to that vehicle.  For example, when I interned with TPD we ran a tag in the apts behind the QT at 48th and Yale.  It came back a hit from NCIC for the registered owner having warrants out of California for Sexual Assault.  Maybe my post earlier was a bit confusing and unclear, I apologize!

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The point isn't that the cops shouldn't be able to run plates, rather, that a police state isn't justifiable by a very minor amount of stolen vehicles or traffic violations.  Of course your sympathetic that the police have a tough job, as am I, but their job _should_ be tough.  The price of freedom requires it.  I understand that you embrace the automated orwellian end of reasonable search and seizure, since this is exactly what this is.  The same people can be retrieved with competent officers who understand that they are here to serve the community instead of government spies.  Is it to much to ask that police actually investigate rather than be technological taxi drivers.  If it is, they need to be paid minimum wage.

How long before every car sold has an RFID tag built in?  Sort of like the OnStar program for big brother...

quote:

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Originally posted by PonderInc

How long before every car sold has an RFID tag built in?  Sort of like the OnStar program for big brother...

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The current on-board computers record time and speed giving derived acceleration as well as whether the brakes are applied.  I think the duration is something like the last 5 minutes of operation.  So in a crash investigation, the police and insurance company can look at the data and determine how you were driving in the moments before the crash.  There's even a parental data recorder that gives the same information over a longer time span so an adult can monitor his teen's driving.

Also, it records and holds the highest speed the vehicle attained.  This can be used to deny warranty repairs.

The thing is if the car is stolen it will be a total loss anyhoo, since police chases more offten than not end in crashs. The policy is to chase till crash. At least it is in most departments. Why not just follow the car or use a air chopper. soooner or latter the driver is going to have to stop.

I think there are arguments from both sides of the coin going on here, problem is you are missing one critical point.

Law enforcement has been HIRED to catch stolen cars, people with warrants, etc.  If you don't want them to spend any or much time on these tasks, the laws need to be changed.  

For example, if you made me Chief of Police and then a book of local laws, I am going to want to find as many creative but effective ways to make me look like I am doing my job (pride booster included).  Funny, so many people are against cameras that find stolen cars or people with warrants because of the potential that they would actually be trying to do their job.  Also, the fear of law enforcement using their job's abilities or equipment to target innocent civilians strikes me as strange.  Again, 99% of the cops out there just want to do their job and go home...they are still human like you and I don't forget.

Does that mean that there are those out there who abuse their job?  Of course, but if we use poor logic (conspiracy theory)to make all of our decisions, then it is also a good idea to take away their guns too.  After all, there are probably bad cops who are going to shoot someone that was innocent (happened many times).

The reality is, we can't.  They need weapons to catch the bad guys and we need them to do it.  We can't /won't so we HIRE people to catch bad guys and stolen cars.

ERGO, they go out and find new and yes, "cool" ways to do this.  If you don't want your license plate scanned they or ran against a database of criminals, then go ahead and take it off.   Then you can have your name in that database too! [:D]

Truth is this technology is great for small towns.  In many small towns all across Oklahoma, tens of thousands of cars drive through and the respective PD's are unequipped to cross check cars with potential drug traffickers, stolen cars, etc.  

Again, if you think that we should not have them looking for the people trafficking drugs as best they can (legally), then change the laws, but don't hire these guys then tell them they have to  use ineffective equipment.  It isn't fair to the officers.  Should we not allow them access to computers with internet because someone might exploit it?  Or should we instead give them the tools and resources they need to do the job we have asked them to do.

Hats off to the TPD for looking for innovative and new solutions for doing their job better.  Wish more city officials did it.  

Cannon_Fodder:  Do you think we should not have laws and enforce them because someone will try to find a loophole?  So we should just give up altogether?  I agree, some crooks are smart, but come on, you are stretching things a bit don't you think?  Every casino in Vegas would shut down if they had to because they could not catch everyone that out smarted them.  It is funny you brought up the equipment being used to steal cars.  Are you aware of the advancement in technology there has been in the tools car thieves use?  

Don't worry, I get it, we shouldn't bring that in to the discussion because even if the crooks are using more and more advanced equipment to steal cars, even if we DID know how to help stop it, we wouldn't want to because SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE, would abuse the system and we will all end up in a concentration camp where we wont even need cars.  (sorry, not saying you are implying this, it just seems like that is where the conversation  always goes)

HIRE good people, PROMOTE innovation, REWARD excellent results.  That is how you will keep ahead of crime, IMO.

Sid

TeeDub:

Are you kidding?  Are you saying that NOT having my car stolen isn't a right?  I don't know what constitution you are ready, but mine says that you can't come take my car.  If you do, I am going to use the third branch of the government, the judicial system, and they are going to catch you with my car, prove your guilt, then sentence you.

Since we carry life insurance should we allows murders to run wild too?  PLEASE, PLEASE clarify before I die of laughter.  

quote:

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Originally posted by Ed W

So this system compares license plate images to a stolen car database as a patrol car moves past parked cars.  Would it be difficult to compile a database of ALL the cars it scanned and couple that to GPS information?  Then the police would have a list of cars parked outside a nightclub or a political rally.  On one hand, it might have a value in crime prevention but on the other it would have a chilling effect on free speech.

Or would I be wrong in imagining that police would find other uses for this system besides locating stolen cars?

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First, it doesn't do just parked cars, it also does cars as you drive along with them.

Second, the system doesn't work as you mentioned, recording and working with GPS, although, I suppose you could make it work that way.  Although, a pen and a piece of paper does the same thing for a lost less $$$.

Third, it will do any database you have a list for.  Stolen cars?  Sure.  People with traffic warrants?  Sure.  The list would just have to have license plates as part of the data.

quote:

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Originally posted by TeeDub


How about we protect the police we have now before we start worrying about a few dollars worth of stolen cars.  

How about this:   If the insurance companies think car theft is so rampant, maybe they can buy these for the cops?    Oh wait...

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First, in-car cameras for police do nothing to protect the police from harm.  They only record what happened to give investigators as start afterwards.

Second, several cities have had insurance companies buy these systems for them.  Recover one car and you've paid for the system already.

quote:

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Originally posted by TeeDub


Do you all really believe this crap?

If there are warrants out for me they aren't associated with my car.   Tickets are written to a person.

Are you really going to start pulling over cars because someone who owned it (and could have since sold it) has tickets?   Come on, let's get real here.

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Actually, warrants are tied to both people AND the car you were driving at the time.  Police can run your license plate and, if you have an arrest warrant because you didn't pay a ticket, that license plate will show an arrest warrant associated.

quote:

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Originally posted by Ed W

quote:

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Originally posted by PonderInc

How long before every car sold has an RFID tag built in?  Sort of like the OnStar program for big brother...

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The current on-board computers record time and speed giving derived acceleration as well as whether the brakes are applied.  I think the duration is something like the last 5 minutes of operation.  So in a crash investigation, the police and insurance company can look at the data and determine how you were driving in the moments before the crash.  There's even a parental data recorder that gives the same information over a longer time span so an adult can monitor his teen's driving.

Also, it records and holds the highest speed the vehicle attained.  This can be used to deny warranty repairs.

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Sorry, but the longest crash data recorder only records for 5 SECONDS, not five minutes.  Ford is coming out with a power module that will record for 25 seconds, but most police don't have the ability to read that device yet.

And, we're only talking a few vehicles so far.  Most Fords and GMs, a few Dodges, with Volvo and Toyota coming on line.  

And not all of them provide all the data you mention.  Only a few record speed, most record whether your seatbelt was on.  Some record braking and accelerator operation.

quote:

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Originally posted by sauerkraut

The thing is if the car is stolen it will be a total loss anyhoo, since police chases more offten than not end in crashs. The policy is to chase till crash. At least it is in most departments. Why not just follow the car or use a air chopper. soooner or latter the driver is going to have to stop.

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Would LOVE to see your source for anything you just mentioned in this post.  Most pursuits do NOT end in crashes and I don't know of one department whose policy is to 'chase 'till crash."

Tulsa's policy is to turn pursuits over to the helicopter, who follows the bad guy (usually home).

wow.. interesting...

I don't see Tulsa buying any of these because of the cost ($20,000), since they cost almost as much as the car you are putting it in.

I like the concept, but the systems are very big and must be mounted on the outside of the car, which makes them prone to theft and vandalism.

Perhaps once the technology catches up and makes them small enough to mount inside a car, much the same as a radar system, perhaps they'll be a little more user friendly.

quote:

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Originally posted by patric

(TULSA, Okla.) March 19 - An extra set of high tech eyes could be making
its way to the Tulsa Police Department.  This new equipment can spot a
stolen car with in seconds.
http://www.fox23.com/news/local/story.aspx?content_id=856a5ca0-76e2-4ca8-a256-6382af8368ff

So now TPD is testing the MPH 900 cameras that can read a license plate.
 “All you got to do is drive and it's going to do it for you."  In that
time, the machine will alert Officer David Hickman if the tag is from a
stolen car.

It can even spot cars Officer Hickman didn't see.  “It reads it and
there’s no way I could turn around and get all the information on the
tag. It can do it so much faster than a human can."

Officer Hickman says it's not just reading stolen car information.  The
system is linked directly to the National Crime Information Center.

So any cars that police believe are linked to crimes will set off the
alarm.  "That's going to lower the crime rate, because you're going to
get the shooting suspects and violent crime suspects off the streets."

Right now the Tulsa Police Department is doing a test with the camera
for about two weeks. They cost $20,000.

http://www.wired.com/cars/energy/news/2005/06/67864
http://www.remingtonelsag.com/mobile_hunter.htm
http://webserver.computoredge.com/editorial/2449/in1print.htm

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It is a shame on us, and it is a bad testament of society that we resort to these devices rather than trusting in God, who is able to persuade men to not do crime, especially when we convince them that the Lord is with us.

quote:

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Originally posted by PonderInc

How long before every car sold has an RFID tag built in?  Sort of like the OnStar program for big brother...

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Believe it or not, the PikePass transponder was originally intended to be just that.  It was designed to be a permanent electronic license tag that could be read by pointing an antenna at the vehicle from a distance, but it is only effective at speeds up to 90 mph.

As far as OnStar, the idea behind that was a GPS tracking device that would let police fall back and wait for the vehicle to reach it's destination, without a dangerous high-speed chase.  It's that later part some departments dont yet understand:  http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?articleID=071127_1_A15_hAsto22486

quote:

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Originally posted by patric

quote:

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Originally posted by Wilbur

Sorry, but the longest crash data recorder only records for 5 SECONDS, not five minutes.

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This one captures the 15 seconds prior to the accident, and five after:
http://technabob.com/blog/2007/07/23/clarion-driveeye-records-car-crashes-automatically
(http://technabob.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/clarion_drive_eye.jpg)

This one captures 25 sec before impact through to 5 secs after:
http://www.truscene.com
(http://www.truscene.com/App_Themes/Truscene/Images/CameraLabelled.gif)

Manufacturer claims up to one hour recording time for this one:
http://www.brickhousesecurity.com/car-camera-recorder.html
(http://us.st11.yimg.com/us.st.yimg.com/I/yhst-81126207287951_1995_90079745.gif)

and a maximum of 1,920 minutes with this one:
http://www.save-on-security.com/accident_DVR.htm
(http://www.save-on-security.com/images/%20Accident_Recorder.1.jpg)

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Those are nothing but video cameras.  They do not record anything as mentioned in the earlier post, such as speed, seat belt usage, air bag deployment, delta v, braking, .........

quote:

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Originally posted by Wilbur


Sorry, but the longest crash data recorder only records for 5 SECONDS, not five minutes.  Ford is coming out with a power module that will record for 25 seconds, but most police don't have the ability to read that device yet.

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You're right.  A cursory search lead to some articles that said the longest memory only covers the last 20 seconds, though there are add-on units for parents that have considerably more memory.  These articles were a couple of years old.  One said that a printout of the stored data yielded 6-8 pages of information.  That's a lot for a couple of seconds.

What sparked this originally was a friend's interest in a device that measured acceleration, braking, and cornering forces through the use of a ring laser gyro.  We knew that acceleration may be one parameter available via the car's computer data port, but cornering G's obviously were not.

quote:

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Originally posted by Ed W

quote:

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Originally posted by Wilbur


Sorry, but the longest crash data recorder only records for 5 SECONDS, not five minutes.  Ford is coming out with a power module that will record for 25 seconds, but most police don't have the ability to read that device yet.

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You're right.  A cursory search lead to some articles that said the longest memory only covers the last 20 seconds, though there are add-on units for parents that have considerably more memory.  These articles were a couple of years old.  One said that a printout of the stored data yielded 6-8 pages of information.  That's a lot for a couple of seconds.

What sparked this originally was a friend's interest in a device that measured acceleration, braking, and cornering forces through the use of a ring laser gyro.  We knew that acceleration may be one parameter available via the car's computer data port, but cornering G's obviously were not.

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The six-eight pages is mostly just computer code jiberish.  Useful data is usually just a page or so.  It varies greatly by manufacturer.

To see if your car has a crash data recorder that can be read by police visit:

http://www.harristechnical.com/downloads/cdrlist.pdf

If your car is not on the list, it may be that the manufacturer makes the data only available to their own technicians.  It does not necessarily mean you cars does not have a recorder.

If you're referring to OBDII data from vehicle "black boxes," commercial readers have been available to the public the better part of a decade at places like Sears, NAPA, AutoZone, Oreilly etc.  The car's owner can do as they please with the data but in some states, other parties (insurance, police) either need permission from the owner or a warrant to search the computer.

quote:

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Originally posted by mrhaskellok

TeeDub:

Are you saying that NOT having my car stolen isn't a right?  I don't know what constitution you are ready, but mine says that you can't come take my car.  If you do, I am going to use the third branch of the government, the judicial system, and they are going to catch you with my car, prove your guilt, then sentence you.

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While I am all in favor of catching criminals, I think there are some priorities out of whack here.

Yes, you should catch and prosecute car thieves.  (If you don't shoot them first)

They still want it, just a new pretext this time:
 

By MICHAEL McNUTT NewsOK.com
Published: 11/27/2009  1:16 PM

OKLAHOMA CITY - State officials are looking at beefing up the state’s electronic insurance verification system by setting up cameras across the state to randomly record vehicle tags.

Cameras set up at about 200 locations along selected highways would focus in on a tag’s bar code — found at the bottom of each tag — and record it. Bar code scanners would match the tag numbers with a national database containing real-time vehicle insurance information.

Vehicle owners without valid insurance would be mailed a ticket.

"That’s a horrible idea,” said Rep. Mike Reynolds, R-Oklahoma City. "It’s Big Brother at its finest.”


"Random"?  As in ALL, in a big fat database?

No, It appears you are not wrong at all.  Im sure "state officials" (like the secretive DPS that's exempt from most accountability laws like the Open Records act) have a long list of why we absolutely cant live without this sort of surveillance.

CORRECTION:  The article incorrectly stated that the traffic scanners read barcodes at the bottom of license tags.  They actually read the tag numbers themselves.

Apparently the DPS lied to legislators about the purpose of the barcodes on the new license tags Oklahomans were required to switch to this year:

"Having cameras and bar code scanners record random Oklahoma vehicle tag information is possible because of the new tags that motorists are required to buy this year. Oklahoma’s new vehicle tags include a bar code. All vehicle tags are to be replaced by the end of this year.

(State Representative) Reynolds during this year’s session raised questions about the bar codes on the plates, but was told they were simply for inventory purposes by the state Tax Commission. Now, he said the Public Safety Department’s plans confirm his suspicions."
http://www.newsok.com/article/3420697?searched=insurance%20verification&custom_click=search#ixzz0Y88dIAZm

To make matters worse, the system is supposed to be run the same way "speed cameras" work, with the company running the hardware deciding who gets tickets and giving a cut of the take to the local politicians, to the tune of about $300 million annually.

Now, who thinks this surveillance will be run honestly and ethically, considering they lied about it from the beginning?

Haha, the barcode on mine is hidden by my tag frame!

Suckers!

Most tag frames hide it, so they obviously didn't put much thought into it.

...until you get pulled over for an "unreadable tag" or some such nonsense.

You do know where they have the barcode, right?

It's in the 1/2 centimeter indentation around the margins of all tags.  The indentation and angle the reader must have unless mounted on fender flaring would make it nearly impossible to read the codes.  I smell a LOT of litigation over this if it were to come to pass.

Apparently the major reason we had to get new tags was because the DPS wanted machine-readable tags for "automated enforcement" systems that use optical character recognition to read the tag numbers.

OCR actually works on both (the new and old style numbers; that is to say, the digitized or new, vs the metal stamp or old).  It has to do with contrast between the characters and the background.  But having DPS or police officers pull you over for 'unreadable tag' because you're hiding the barcode won't be enforceable in this instance, unless two things happen.

The law changes
The barcode position is in a more obvious and readable location

You know how in that CSI show, they can take really grainy surveillance camera and enhance it to some super sharp detail? Well, they made all that up, and I am pretty sure there is nothing that will be able to scan that tiny barcode from a distance of over 8 ft; well, not in Oklahoma anyway.

Nothin a sharpie wont take care of.....

I'm sure the technology is available but I agree with the Oklahoma assessment.  For now, a sharpie (actually a bluntie) it is.

It's not just that; at the angle you'd have to get the barcode from, even if you didn't have a tag frame, would rely on the camera being mounted nearly at ground level with the bevel of the tag around the margin being so severe.

And yet the Department of Public Safety is installing 200 cameras (for starters) specifically to scan the new tags.
My guess is the barcodes are for hand-held equipment, while the highway scanners read the numbers on the tag.
Either way, Im a bit concerned that the agency that oversees an impeccable outfit like the OHP might not be completely upfront as to the breadth and purpose of the huge surveillance database they intend to amass.

OCR with tags is quite common...

that bar code probably just tells what inmate "stamped" it..  :)

not sure about OK, but in many states squad car cameras routinely scan any tags that pass in front of the camera...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recognition

What I don't get is why do we need 200 cameras to see what license plates are on the roads.. do we not issue them?

Bingo.
From BkDotCom's link:
"Automatic Number Plate Recognition is a mass surveillance method that uses optical character recognition on images to read the license plates on vehicles."

An example of how it's used:
"The UK has an extensive automatic number plate recognition CCTV network. Effectively, the police and Security services track all car movements around the country and are able to track any car in close to real time. Vehicle movements are stored for 5 years in the National ANPR Data Centre to be analyzed for intelligence and to be used as evidence.
In 1997 a system of one hundred ANPR cameras, codenamed GLUTTON, was installed to feed into the automated British Military Intelligence Systems in Northern Ireland."

And lastly:
"There are numerous other electronic toll collection networks which use this combination of Radio Frequency identification and ANPR. These include:
    * Pike Pass in Oklahoma."


My take is that DPS is counting on us to surrender some of our freedoms for the illusion of safety, in this case, letting them catalog our daily vehicle usage in exchange for the promise of being safe from uninsured motorists.

Ian Flemming gave James Bond rotating license plates a long time ago.  (Either I.F. or the movie industry.)

That didn't address my comment. It's like saying we need to by high tech cameras to read a book we wrote to see what it says. We know what plates are issued, renewed, etc. Why put out a camera to see what license plates are in use when we issue them? We already know!

Did they put bar codes on each side?  :P

Its probably not just about what license plates are in use but, where the vehicle is and when it was where it was (might be helpful in an Amber Alert situation for instance), is this license legal, does this vehicle have insurance, etc.

Yep, a small picture of a vodka martini.

“I would gladly give up my privacy for national security—that’s why I don’t mind that Google street view that caught me fighting a raccoon over a Tasty Kake wrapper.”

Forget catching "uninsured motorists", unpaid tickets and data mining is where the cash is at.
Competing manufacturers like Motorola, CitySync, ELSAG, ADT and PIPS will even loan cities the expensive equipment for a cut of the revenue.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrrZSjmObWg[/youtube]

You can even create your own database to watch, like "cars driven by Tulsa World employees" or "cars that park at family planning clinics".  The sky's the limit.

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.    ;D

What adds so much to the cloak-and-dagger is that approval for DPS to begin was done by Governors Executive Order during the Christmas break. 
The legislature exempted the records from the Open Records Act, so theres no accountability or public paper trail.

What happened to all that government transparency?

You can't see it, it must be transparent.  We got fooled by another political definition for a word.   ;D

This does not sound too good, but like the old saying goez, if ya have nothing to hide why worry? Actually Oklahoma is not bad in many ways the state has only one red light camera at Peoria & 41st and Oklahoma has no speed cameras. I was looking at a web site that lists speed cameras & red light cameras and many states have them all over the place, My old hometown of Columbus, Ohio has almost 100 of 'em, Fort Worth Texas also has 'em all over the place. I found the web site thru google, one site even lists the fines.

Would you mind going to 41st and Peoria and taking a photo of what you think is a "red light camera"?
...because they have not been allowed by state law.
(I still dont know how the OTA skirts that, btw. Maybe pikepass cameras have been "deputized"?).

That's what I have been told, but I'm just going by the web site told me. I found the site thru google and I typed in "Oklahoma" & "Tulsa" and the corner of Peoria & 41st came up as having red lite camera, either it's a mistake on the web site or something- ???

Someone who doesnt know what a traffic enforcement camera looks like probably just phoned it in, which casts doubt on the value of the rest of the website.
Now that I think about it, the state law forbidding "red light" cameras in Oklahoma may have gone down the toilet when our outgoing Governor signed an executive order for the DPS to start installing a variation of them (all without a vote of the people or legislature, and essentially in secret).

Columbus Ohio?? Are you former Tulsa Mayor Dick Crawford?

You bring up good points, plus the web site could be wrong- just like those gasoline pump price check web sites that depend on people reporting the current gasoline prices. Yes I know what those cameras look like they are set up in big boxes, normally they come with a warning sign that says it's a "photo enforced" traffic light. I have not been to the Peoria & 41st street area so I dunno if it's there or not. That can make a good homework assignment for someone who wants to drive there and check it out in person & report back. :D

It's a mile from where you jog all the time.  Go take a look and describe what you see.

snap...

And thats round trip not one way. Oh, wait a minute, he won't do it because there are no milage markers of any kind on 41st so he can keep his speed right. ::)

I don't run on the streets I run on the RiverSide Trail, but I think I did go that way when they blocked off the I-44 RiverSide Drive exit, I got off at Peoria and then turned left at a QT store side street that I think was 41st street and I took that west to RiverSide Drive, I did not see notice any traffic camera there if it was there nor a sign warning it was a "Photo enforced traffic light" I'm pretty sure that was 41st street where I turned. ???

Beltronics GX-65,I needent say more  8)

That was almost topical, but better that ive been seeing lately.

Some good political wrangling in the article, which unfortunately omits that the system is a Mass-surveillance technology with wide-reaching privacy implications.  In Oklahoma, "insurance verification" is simply a pretext...


A proposed traffic camera system being counted on by state budget officials to generate at least $50 million in revenues off uninsured drivers this fiscal year has run into roadblocks.

BY RANDY ELLIS Oklahoman, Published: August 1, 2010
http://www.newsok.com/article/3481381


A proposed traffic camera system being counted on by state leaders to generate at least $50 million in revenues from uninsured drivers this fiscal year may have run into roadblocks.
Advertisement

American Insurance Association attorney Jeramy Rich says the technology has weaknesses and claims many insured Oklahoma motorists are going to be harassed with undeserved fine notices if the system is implemented.

Jonathan Miller, chairman of a company that is part of a consortium competing for the contract, disagrees. Miller contends a good system can be put in place, but says continued delays could jeopardize the system's ability to produce $50 million this fiscal year.

Bids for the project were opened more than 2 ½ months ago.

Wellon Poe, general counsel for the Oklahoma Department of Public Safety, can't predict how much longer the bid review process might take.

"We're trying to evaluate everything from how it's going to be done to who's going to do it. There have been no final decisions on any of it.”

Oklahoma Insurance Department officials estimate between 18 and 23 percent of vehicles on Oklahoma roads are uninsured. The contract calls for fixed or mobile cameras to photograph license plates on moving vehicles. Computers would transmit the data and match it to insurance verification information on national, state and insurance company databases.

Industry officials say technology has advanced to the point it is possible to almost instantaneously determine whether a car is listed as having insurance. If no insurance is found, the owner of the vehicle would be sent a letter giving the individual the opportunity to show that a mistake has been made or pay a $250 fine.

Former University of Oklahoma and Dallas Cowboys football coach Barry Switzer is among the vocal advocates of the program.

Once a company is selected, competing bidders say it is expected to take three months to get a system up and operating.

"It's not a simple deal,” Poe said.

Problems predicted
Rich said he sees several problems. His association was involved with the four-year development of the electronic database system Oklahoma law enforcement officers now use to determine if a motorist has insurance when they make traffic stops.

Fleet and company owned vehicles are special problems because blanket insurance policies don't electronically link the policies to each vehicle identification number in the fleet, Rich said. Law enforcement officers must rely on paper insurance verification card checks to determine whether fleet vehicles are covered.

"I don't know how you would ever coordinate that with the camera enforcement system,” Rich said. "The way that system is going to work is that when you don't show up in the data search done by any of these companies ... then you get a ticket.”

Company officials will get irritated if they start getting lack of insurance fine notices, he said. There would be an appeals process, but people won't want to have to deal with it.

Rich also questions whether the state has the authority to implement the program, whether it will really generate the $50 million a year and whether it is appropriate to allow a private contractor to issue ticket notices and keep a portion of ticket revenue.

Rich recommends scrapping the bids and relying on increased enforcement by state, county and local law enforcement.

"This system is not up and running and fully functional in any other state in the union,” Rich said.

Concerns discounted
Miller discounted Rich's concerns, saying they are "simply not true.”

He said insurance companies are against the camera insurance verification program because it will drive down insurance rates and that will cut into profits of insurance executives.

"They know that this will work,” said Miller, chairman of Chicago-based InsureNet. "We know our business very, very well. ... Our technology allows us to know if it's a fleet vehicle.”

Miller said he is "mystified” by delays in awarding the contract and hasn't heard anything from Oklahoma officials in a long time.

Poe thinks any problem with fleet vehicles can probably be resolved before tickets are issued.

However, he said, when a driver carries motor vehicle insurance, but the vehicle itself is not insured, a camera system won't detect that and owners of the vehicles likely will get ticket notices that will have to be corrected later. It's not a big problem in Oklahoma because insurance usually goes with the vehicles rather than the driver, he said.

The chairman of MV VeriSol, another company competing for Oklahoma's insurance verification contract, agrees with Miller that fleet vehicles should not be a problem.

Chairman Charles Pecchio said he is more concerned about out-of-state vehicles.

Pecchio thinks additional legislation is needed before issuing citations to out-of-state drivers.

Miller thinks reciprocity agreements among states would allow the consortium he is with to enforce tickets issued to out-of-state vehicles as well as Oklahoma vehicles.

Budget impact
State officials contacted by The Oklahoman did not seem overly concerned about the potential impact on the budget that a loss of some or all of the $50 million in anticipated revenues would have.

Paul Sund, spokesman for Gov. Brad Henry, said revenues from some budget sources usually produce more money than expected and some produce less.

He also pointed out the state is only allowed to appropriate 95 percent of anticipated revenues, so a cushion is built in.

Senate President Pro Tem Glenn Coffee and House Speaker Chris Benge expressed similar sentiments.



Im guessing there will be a bloodbath as competing corporations fight over the percentage of revenue they get from operating this system (like the profits red-light camera operators now make in other states). 

This just cannot be proven effective in this manner (scanning the tag numbers) because too many errors can happen.  The only truly reliable method would be to use something like RFID, but I think that's probing a little too far into 'Big Brother' territory.

Database information is even shared (or sold) to tow truck operators and Repo Men, who will chase down a vehicle in traffic once their scanner scores a "hit".
http://blog.cucollector.com/hot-topics/alpr-technology-repossessions-the-lender-and-the-aclu/

And now those "other uses" for the surveillance system:

Camera acts as a rolling tax collector

County officials last month began using the BootFinder, a small, hand-held camera that scans license plates of parked cars to identify people with delinquent property-tax bills and unpaid parking tickets.

Two treasury workers patrol the city in a van, aiming the camera at the license plates of parked cars. The camera is connected to a laptop computer that compares the license owner's name against a database of persons with outstanding taxes or fines.

If a car's owner has any unpaid taxes or fines, the computer audibly informs the camera's operator, who calls the treasurer's office for verification. After the information is verified, the workers remove the car's license plates and place a bright green levy sticker on the driver's side windshield.

In extreme cases, a wheel boot is placed on a tire, or the vehicle is impounded. The owner then has 10 days to pay the tax or fine before the car is auctioned.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2004/may/27/20040527-103628-7477r/

It seems an easy 'fix' for this would be to back your car into the driveway so the tag isn't visible.  But then, this may constitute probable cause for further investigation.

Or if you live in a gated community, the problem is moot.  They can't get in to scan tags, leading to yet another perk for the rich.

From the country that brought us Nineteen Eighty-Four and this technology, a way around your strategy:

160 MPH spy helicopter would track cars from 2000 feet.
http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/03/320.asp

The fictional police spy helicopter from the movie Blue Thunder is taking a big step toward becoming a reality. Police in the UK have successfully tested a 160 MPH helicopter that can read license plates from as much as 2,000 feet in the air. The Eurocopter EC135 is equipped with a camera capable of scanning 5 cars every second. Essex Police Inspector Paul Moor told the Daily Star newspaper: "This is all about denying criminals the use of the road. Using a number plate recognition camera from the air means crooks will have nowhere to hide."

The use of Automated License Plate Recognition (ALPR) is growing. ALPR devices photograph vehicles and then use optical character recognition to extract license plate numbers and match them with any selected databases. The devices use infrared sensors to avoid the need for a flash and to operate in all weather conditions.

Within the U.S., cities are using the technology in a device called "Bootfinder" to identify and tow vehicles with unpaid parking tickets or even overdue library books. One woman's car in Connecticut was towed out of her driveway because she had $85 in unpaid parking tickets.

Originally intended to detect stolen vehicles and cloned cars, ALPR is increasingly being used to issue tickets. For instance, drivers who have expired insurance face a £200 fine or if they haven't paid their car tax, they face a £60 fine. In 2004, ANPR teams stopped 180,543 vehicles and issued 51,000 tickets for offenses including failure to wear a seatbelt, use of a mobile phone while driving, and various insurance and road tax infractions.

One of the companies that sells the camera scanning equipment touts it's potential for marketing applications. "Once the number plate has been successfully 'captured' applications for it's use are limited only by imagination and almost anything is possible," Westminster International says on its website. UK police also envision a national database that holds time and location data on every vehicle scanned. "This data warehouse would also hold ANPR reads and hits as a further source of vehicle intelligence, providing great benefits to major crime and terrorism enquiries," a Home Office proposal explains.

Ol' Patrick goes through alot of tinfoil.......

I wouldn't go that far.  Many of our laws have had unintended consequences.  For instance, Al Capone was tripped up over delinquent taxes rather than the numerous crimes he's committed.  And the RICO statutes which were originally meant for organized crime have been used successfully in other types of prosecutions.

An attorney acquaintance said that new laws always bring those possibilities. 

It probably wont hit the fan until DPS or some other agency is caught selling the information to data miners.

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — Little Rock may not be a likely terrorism target or a gang crime hotspot, but the Arkansas capital has decided to follow the example of high-security cities by expanding electronic surveillance of its streets.

A police car with a device that photographs license plates moves through the city and scans the traffic on the streets, relaying the data it collects to a computer for sifting. Police say the surveillance helps identify stolen cars and drivers with outstanding arrest warrants.

It also allows authorities to monitor where average citizens might be at any particular time. That bothers some residents, as well as groups that oppose public intrusions into individual privacy. The groups are becoming more alarmed about license plate tracking as a growing number of police departments acquire the technology.

Privacy advocates worry about the potential uses for such outside law enforcement, from snooping by stalkers and private investigators to businesses that sell personal data.

"Given how few rules are currently on the books to protect our privacy, it's plausible that private investigators and data-mining companies could acquire this location data," said Catherine Crump, a New York-based staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union.

Rogers County jumps on the mass surveillance bandwagon:


The technology package includes an automated license-plate reader that scans tags and relays information to officers.

Rogers County has at least $19 million in outstanding warrants, he said.
"We could pay for this system if we just got a little bit of that."

http://www.tulsaworld.com/article.aspx/Rogers_County_Sheriffs_Office_to_get_patrol_car_cameras/20130605_11_A12_CUTLIN724016


The Tulsa Whirled photo shows them using the same Panasonic dashcam that TPD has had so much trouble installing.

You agree to drive around with a visible tag on the back of your car to identify you to government both passively and actively.  So that is obviously not the issue.

Is the issue that government may track your movements?

. . .or log your associations through your travel?


I mean come on, it's not like the government is monitoring your phone calls or anything.  Sheesh!  ::)
http://www.tulsanow.org/forum/index.php?topic=20056.msg269382#msg269382

They can start with cataloging those pesky journalists' personal vehicles.
Bounty:  A week off with pay for the first officer to find a Tulsa World reporter parked at a gay bar, or a city councilor at a crack hotel.

Perhaps they could call upon some favors for PR purposes?

"We are interested in a flattering story about our ____ program, would you be interested in writing it?"
"No?"
"Well, perhaps we could meet over at the Sunrise Motel and discuss.  You are familiar with the Sunrise, aren't you?"
"No need?, Excellent!  We'll send you some ideas for the article."

You would be shocked to find how often that happens in this market's television news (the World seems relatively immune, though), where objectivity takes a back seat to "exclusive access" and the stories are written by the PIOs.

Or one of Jim Inhofe's family....

TulsaNow, ahead of the curve...




Police across the USA are using automatic cameras to read and snap digital photos of millions of car license plates to help solve
crimes, but in the process storing information on millions of innocent people, the American Civil Liberties Union says in a report out Wednesday.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2013/07/17/license-plate-scanners-aclu-privacy/2524939/

The digital dragnet mostly collects data that is unrelated to any suspected lawbreaking or known activity of interest to law enforcement. It is a fast-growing trend ripe for misuse and abuse, the ACLU says.

License plate scanners are "in effect, government location tracking systems recording the movements of many millions of innocent Americans in huge databases," said ACLU staff attorney Catherine Crump, the report's lead author. The ACLU says there is little supervision or control over the data that was recorded, usually without motorists realizing their locations have been recorded.

"This is a way to track all Americans all the time, regardless of whether they're accused of any wrongdoing," said Crump, calling the readers "the most widespread location tracking technology you've probably never heard of."

The ACLU report is based on information compiled from Freedom of Information requests a year ago in 38 states and the District of Columbia.

One striking finding is the lack of standardized procedures for dealing with license plate information.

In Minnesota, population 5.3 million, the State Patrol purges scanned data after 48 hours and has fewer than 20,000 license-plate readings on file, ACLU found.

But Milpitas, Calif., population 68,000, has 4.7 million license-plate scans on file and no policy for erasing them. Police Sgt. Frank Morales says Milpitas, "is a small community, but we attract very many visitors. We have a large mall here, the Great Mall," and that could account for the outsize number of license plate records. "A person who gets his (stolen) car back probably would see (scanners) as a success," he says.

The plate scanners generally are mounted on the rear fender, trunk or roof of police cars and parking enforcement vehicles. Some also are mounted on road signs, toll gates or bridges. They're rarely part of the larger debate on government surveillance, but a 2012 survey by the not-for-profit Police Executive Research Forum found that 71% of police agencies now use them.

Thursday's ACLU findings come just over a month after Americans first learned of a massive National Security Agency electronic surveillance program that, since 2007, has tracked millions of phone records and e-mails. The program was secret until early last month, when disclosed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. He has left the U.S. and faces espionage charges.

And unlike the mountain of mostly anonymous calling data gathered by the NSA, the plate data includes a specific location and can be, via a separate police inquiry, correlated to personal data in the state motor vehicle registration records.

The ACLU report says the plate scanning casts a wide net for little gain -- that only "a tiny fraction of the license plate scans are flagged as 'hits.' For example, in Maryland, for every million plates read, only 47 (0.005%) were potentially associated with a stolen car or a person wanted for a crime." In one Sacramento shopping mall, private security officers snapped pictures of about 3 million plates in 27 months, identifying 51 stolen vehicles -- but that's a success rate of just 0.0017%.

"Yet the documents show that many police departments are storing – for long periods of time – huge numbers of records on scanned plates that do not return 'hits.' For example, police in Jersey City, N.J., recorded 2.1 million plate reads last year. As of August 2012, Grapevine, Texas, had 2 million plate reads stored and Milpitas, Calif., had 4.7 million," the report says.

Police Sgt. Frank Morales said Milpitas, pop. 68,000, "is a small community, but we attract very many visitors. We have a large mall here, the Great Mall," and that could account for the outsize number of license plate records. It's a discount mall situated between two interstate highways and two freeways.

Report: License plate date on millions of innocent motorists kept indefinitely  http://www.aclu.org/alpr

Civil liberties activists say the data could be used to track innocent drivers' whereabouts and private lives, including where they worship. Even the International Association of Chiefs of Police has said there's a potential for invasion of privacy, as plate readers can snap pictures of a car at a political gathering, psychologist's office, abortion clinic or church and have recommended tight control over use of the data.

In perhaps the most high-profile case, police in New York City used the readers to record license plates of congregants as they arrived to pray at a mosque in Queens.

Part of their appeal for police is that they are efficient and relatively cheap. They can scan plates about eight times more quickly than a cop with a laptop driving down the road, a recent study found.

As the device costs drop, said Crump, "Even small-town police departments have it within their budget to buy one." The cost of storing data has also dropped she said, so police can store images "not just for days but for weeks or months or even years." Eventually, she said, agencies could share the data to build a detailed travel profile "of all Americans simply because they chose to drive a car."

Over the past few years, federal anti-terrorism funding also has helped more police agencies get them. Police in New Castle County, Del., used a $200,000 federal grant to purchase 10 cameras that they've mounted on vehicles, said police spokesman Cpl. John Weglarz.

"For us it's an effective tool. It's one of those things that we've obviously researched and we feel (that) as long as our officers are using it within proper guidelines and within the policy, it acts as an effective tool."

He said his agency keeps the license data for one year and said any officer misusing the data "would be subjected to a disciplinary action."
He said drivers shouldn't be concerned about privacy breaches. "We use (the data) within the proper channels and ... it gets stored for a year and that's it."

That's the policy there, but the ACLU says that in 45 states there are no laws on how long police can keep the records.

"More and more cameras, longer retention periods, and widespread sharing allow law enforcement agents to assemble the individual puzzle pieces of where we have been over time into a single, high-resolution image of our lives," the report says.

Perhaps the best known incident involving the abuse of an ALPR database in North America is the case of Edmonton Sun reporter Kerry Diotte in 2004. Diotte wrote an article critical of Edmonton police use of traffic cameras for revenue enhancement, and in retaliation was added to a database shared among officers of "high-risk drivers" in an attempt to monitor his habits and create an opportunity to arrest him. The police chief and several officers were fired as a result, and The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada expressed public concern over the "growing police use of technology to spy on motorists."

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that police need a court order to attach a GPS tracker to a suspect's car, but ACLU says the USA's growing network of license readers could someday allow police to do the same thing without a warrant as they tie together individual snapshots of innocent drivers' cars.

Police say that drivers have no expectation of privacy on a public streets.
Privacy activists see it less clear-cut.

"There's a difference between walking down a public sidewalk and being observed, vs. walking down the next sidewalk and being observed, and walking down the next sidewalk and being observed, and walking down another sidewalk and being observed, and walking down the sidewalk next week and being observed," says Amie Stepanovich, lawyer at the Electronic Privacy Information Center and director of the group's domestic surveillance project.

"The prevalent use of automatic plate readers is a threat to privacy. They can be used to track the location of individuals. And there are no laws governing the retention of the information," she says. "This is an issue we've been following for quite some time. We've had quite a few inquiries," she says.

Mobile readers don't discriminate between public and private settings. In one case, a San Leandro, Calif., man got police to hand over all the photos of his Toyota Tercel for the past two years and found that they were photographing him almost weekly, according to The Wall Street Journal. One snapshot captured him and his two daughters getting out of a car in their driveway.

In another case, the Minneapolis Star Tribune found last August that Mayor R.T. Rybak's city-owned cars were photographed 41 times by license readers over the course of a year.

Last summer, the ACLU filed nearly 600 Freedom of Information Act requests in 38 states and Washington, asking federal, state and local agencies how they use the readers. The 26,000 pages of documents produced by the agencies that responded – about half – include training materials, internal memos and policy statements.

The civil liberty organization has more than a dozen recommendations for government use of license plate scanner systems and the data collected, including:

•Police must have reasonable suspicion that a crime has occurred before examining the data.

•Unless there are legitimate reasons to retain records, they should be deleted within days or weeks at most.

•People should be able to find out if their cars' location history is in a law enforcement database.

And the federal government is giving grants to pay for these cameras so long as they share the information back with DHS (and then NSA).......

Goes back to the slipery slope, cameras started with those red light cameras back in the 1990's then they went to "speed" cameras to nab speeders, now they start with thease license plate cameras. Oh well like they say if you have nothing to hide...

We're already at the bottom of the slippery slope....just in case anyone isn't already freaked out enough yet - you are gonna love what has been going on in recent years...

Look at them in this order...but be sure you watch both!!  The future has been here for a while, now.

Waiting to see what Apple does in this market space - do you think they have been planning on this for some time now?  Wouldn't surprise me...they started with the iPod so they would work their way up to iRobot!!  I bet Asimov's estate would be glad to license that to them!  ( I wonder how the vacuum cleaner company gets away with it?)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1czBcnX1Ww

http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1318959&itc=eetimes_node_189&elq=0b583c2d3fa441f89455479df794e907&elqCampaignId=370

There is also a Darpa horse.

Clue:  Red light cameras are for revenue.

PHILADELPHIA — Two men face third-degree murder, involuntary manslaughter and other charges in a crash that killed a mother and three young sons crossing a 12-lane highway plagued by pedestrian deaths, police said.

Samara Banks, 28, and her three youngest sons were killed as they crossed Roosevelt Boulevard at a point with grassy medians dividing the traffic lanes, but no crosswalk or traffic light.

Roosevelt Boulevard had the nation's 2nd and 3rd most dangerous intersections in a 2001 insurance company study, which tallied 618 crashes at those two intersections alone in a two-year period.

Last August, 43-year-old Michael Romano died after pushing his 5-year-old son out of danger just before he was struck by a hit-and-run driver at 11 p.m. His death came just days after another man was killed in a 2 a.m. hit and run nearby.

And 36-year-old pedestrian Brenda Rodriguez was struck and killed in June 2009 after she and a friend picked up Chinese food. Witnesses said she was struck as two drivers were racing each other; both of them fled.

The deaths continued even after the city started installing red-light cameras to try to calm traffic.

WoW that is something, who knows what other kind of robots they have that we don't know about. IMO There is no question red light/speed cameras are for money, "safety" is used as a excuse to use them plus the camera companies get a cut of the money. It's also strange that you can't fight a camera ticket in court, you don't have the right to face your accuser when it's a camera. In the past people tried to fight camera tickets in court but it does not work out. Each state is different though.

There is also a Darpa horse.  Pretty cool stuff.

http://www.fox23.com/news/local/story/ACLU-upset-about-license-tag-scanners/uN2H0mb-LEydPz20VQosUQ.cspx

Regular drivers can get dash cameras in cars now, that's not a bad idea for accidents, the court can see who was at fault. In Russia most drivers have car dash cameras. The dash cameras keep recording as long as your driving.

Consumer dash cameras usually dont have Optical Character Recognition that catalog the license plates of every vehicle they encounter, nor do real-time lookups on a variety of databases possibly ranging from NCIC to "Hostile Tulsa World Reporters" or "cars found outside mosques."

No but they can be great if someone fails to yeild and  turns in front of you, or your get hit by a hit & run driver, a video record of it is hard to beat.

~Or as our Hoss would say "WoW" Just "WoW"!

Homeland Security is taking bids for private companies to amass permanent, nationwide databases of car tag "captures" to catalog the movements of American motorists:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/homeland-security-is-seeking-a-national-license-plate-tracking-system/2014/02/18/56474ae8-9816-11e3-9616-d367fa6ea99b_story.html


“Ultimately, you’re creating a national database of location information,” said Jennifer Lynch, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “When all that data is compiled and aggregated, you can track somebody as they’re going through their life.”

ICE issued a notice last week seeking bids from companies to compile the database from a variety of sources, including law ­enforcement agencies and car-repossession services.  The agency said the length of time the data is retained would be up to the winning vendor. Vigilant Solutions, for instance, one of the leading providers of tag-reader data, keeps its records indefinitely.

Vigilant’s National Vehicle Location Service (NLVS), which holds more than 1.8 billion records, is offered to law enforcement agencies across the country.

The ACLU said it has no objection to law enforcement officials checking license plates to see whether they’re associated with a stolen car or a felon evading arrest. But the government’s access to vast amounts of data on ordinary, law-abiding citizens raises concerns about potential abuse, advocates said. “This is yet another example of the government’s appetite for tools of mass surveillance,” said Catherine Crump, staff attorney for the ACLU, which issued a report last year that criticized the growing use of the devices without adequate privacy protections.

About 20 states have passed or proposed legislation that would restrict the use of such readers or the storage of the data. Utah has a law prohibiting commercial companies from using automated high-speed cameras to photograph license plates.



"No disassemble!"  
The smashability test.  Apparently you have to dress as a stereotype for the right effect.
(http://brightcove.vo.llnwd.net/e1/pd/104403126001/104403126001_1231199589001_ari-origin05-arc-147-1319226232396.jpg?pubId=104403126001)

U.S. Agency Told to Cancel License Plate Database Solicitation

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security demanded the cancellation of a plan to access or buy commercial databases for tracking license plates nationwide after criticism from privacy advocates.

“The solicitation, which was posted without the awareness of ICE leadership, has been canceled,” Gillian Christensen, a deputy press secretary at the agency, said in an e-mail. “While we continue to support a range of technologies to help meet our law enforcement mission, this solicitation will be reviewed to ensure the path forward appropriately meets our operational needs.”

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2014-02-19/u-dot-s-dot-agency-told-to-cancel-license-plate-database-solicitation



Oh, mass-surveillance technology in the hands of rogue government officials.  I feel so much safer.

. . .and today there is this.
http://www.fastcompany.com/3026690/internet-of-things/cisco-gains-traction-in-the-connected-road-race
Some people may find the AGT-Cisco product a bit creepy--after all, it's a traffic management system that reads license plate numbers and integrates social media. Nevertheless, it's part of a much larger trend in which city, state, and federal agencies use sensors to monitor the smallest aspects of everyday urban life.

TULSA, Okla. - The city of Tulsa is considering investing in cameras that scan license plates in order to combat unpaid parking tickets.
http://www.fox23.com/news/local/story/Tulsa-exploring-new-ways-to-fight-unpaid-parking/9Jm2wjdFtU2uHB8jphnTfA.cspx


It's fighting parking offenses, what could go wrong?



Police lieutenant pleads guilty to extortion after looking up the plates of vehicles near a gay bar and blackmailing the vehicle owners.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10000872396390443995604578004723603576296
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/longterm/library/dc/dcpolice/stories/stowe25.htm


Mass Surveillance of All Car Trips Is Nearly Upon Us: "Drive somewhere in 2014, and 10 years from now a bureaucrat could look up where you went on a given Tuesday"
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/02/mass-surveillance-of-all-car-trips-is-nearly-upon-us/283922/


VA bill to include “vehicle license plate number” in the definition of “personal information” and add a section that says police agencies “shall not use any technology to collect or maintain personal information in a passive manner where such data is of unknown relevance and is not intended for prompt evaluation.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/va-delegate-files-bill-to-limit-police-forces-ability-to-maintain-license-plate-databases/2014/01/17/b1b5e818-7fbf-11e3-95c6-0a7aa80874bc_story.html

Does the offence follow the car or the owner?

When I saw a car pull into my neighbors driveway and steal UPS off his front porch, I wrote down a description and his license tag. I was told that unless I could identify the driver and be willing to testify against him that it was useless. The owner maintained his car was loaned out to a relative who let another person drive it.

Make parking free and eliminate the whole thing. Save tons of money. Charge an admittance fee to enter downtown. Sell pike passes to collect those fees silently.

The law seems to swing both ways.  Oklahoma doesnt permit red-light revenue cameras because of a state law saying vehicles dont commit crimes, but that doesnt stop the PikePass system from issuing automated tickets based on machine-reading tag numbers.

After a high-profile screw-up in Kansas where an attorney was mistakenly puled over at gunpoint,
http://watchdog.org/139668/police-plate-reader-error
vendors of the mass-surveillance technology go on the defensive:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140502/08382227098/company-uses-bogus-polls-gag-orders-to-protect-image-license-plate-scanning.shtml

 

http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/06/opinion/crump-police-surveillance

What few people understand is that police increasingly make use of sophisticated surveillance equipment... NSA-style mass surveillance technologies are making it possible for local police departments to gather information on each and every one of us, on a scale never before been possible.

One key area in which the government is amassing large pools of data is location tracking, particularly of automobiles. You might think that location data isn't sensitive. After all, when you're out in public other people can see you. But that's not the right way to think about it. 

Most Americans drive everywhere. Most can't go to a therapist, a church, a gun range, a bar, or a casino without driving. And when all of that information about where we go is amassed into a large database stored by a government agency and held for months, or years, that's a sensitive collection of information. History has shown that once the government has access to massive pools of data, it's just a matter of time before it's abused -- for political retribution, or even simple voyeurism.

An important driver of this trend toward mass surveillance of Americans' movements is the automatic license plate reader. They sound innocuous -- and if they were used in a limited and appropriate manner, they would be innocuous. These devices snap a photo of every passing license plate.

If all the police did was check the captured plates against lists of cars associated with people wanted for crimes, there would be no problem. But in the era of cheap data storage, police are increasingly using the technology to amass vast pools of data tracking where people have been over time—and hanging onto it for months or even years.

The question is not whether law enforcement agents should be permitted to use license plate readers: The question is how they should be permitted to use them. You can agree that license plate readers are useful for identifying wanted criminals who are driving around, but disagree that the government should amass vast pools of data about everyone, given that most of us are not criminals. 

(http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/dam/assets/141002192410-crump-license-plate-reader-story-top.jpg)

I think it's great Oklahoma does not have any traffic cameras, one less hassle for drivers. In Arlington, Texas residents are taking up a petition drive to have the cameras removed with a vote of the people- they seem to cause more accidents and are a big money maker for the city. I'm surprised Oklahoma does not have license plate scanners, many states use them. Many car repo agency's use license plate scanners to track a cars location over a period of time and then the computer predicts where the car will likely be when it's time to repo it.

Dubai police will get Google Glass with facial recognition. What could possibly go wrong?

http://petapixel.com/2014/10/06/dubai-police-will-start-using-google-glass-facial-recognition-automatically-sniff-bad-guys/ (http://petapixel.com/2014/10/06/dubai-police-will-start-using-google-glass-facial-recognition-automatically-sniff-bad-guys/)

Ed W

If they can get people to show their faces it might work.
 

Hijab recognition?

I'm just wondering what happens when TSA agents all have G-glasses. Or mall security guards.

Geez.....


Not only mentally checked out, but temporally 50 years out of phase.....


Guess what sauer....there ARE cameras!!  You got your tin foil hat on??

New York and New Jersey have a PikePass system like ours, called E-ZPass. 
Guess who got caught using surveillance data from that system against political foes?




The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey was under fire. It was 2012 and the agency had just hiked tolls on area bridges and tunnels. Inside a hearing room on Capitol Hill, the Port Authority's deputy chief, Bill Baroni, was absorbing withering criticism from Sen. Frank Lautenberg, the late New Jersey Democrat.

"Respectfully, Senator, you only started paying tolls recently," Baroni said, according to a transcript of the exchange. "In fact, I have a copy of your free E-ZPass," he continued, holding up a physical copy of the toll pass Lautenberg had received as a benefit from his tenure as a Port Authority commissioner. "You took 284 trips for free in the last 2 years you had a pass."

Within days, Christie himself disclosed further detailed information about Lautenberg’s private travel records. At a press conference, he alleged that the senator didn't "pay for parking at Port Authority facilities" and said Lautenberg went "through the tunnel to New York three or four times a week in 2005 and 2006."

But the data that Baroni and Christie unleashed in assailing Lautenberg was not publicly available. Indeed, in a recent letter responding to an open records request, the Port Authority deemed those very same travel records off-limits to the public. Tim Feeney, a spokesman for the New Jersey Turnpike Authority, confirmed to International Business Times that under New Jersey law, E-ZPass records can be obtained only with a civil court order or criminal subpoena.

Christie’s office rebuffed an open records request from IBTimes seeking the data about Lautenberg's E-ZPass usage that the governor had himself detailed at a 2012 press conference, asserting that it had no such records. Neither Baroni, Christie nor the Port Authority responded to questions about how they had been able to obtain such details.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Attorney in New Jersey issued a subpoena to members of the state legislature seeking records related to Baroni’s testimony at a 2013 hearing on the Bridgegate scandal. At that hearing, Baroni disclosed that he possessed E-ZPass customer data showing the traffic histories of constituents of state lawmakers who were interrogating him.

Experts tell IBTimes that the disclosure of E-ZPass records appears to have violated state law protecting the privacy of drivers and also raises serious questions about the degree to which government agencies can keep tabs on the comings and goings of citizens.

“This is the kind of thing that reminds everyone why privacy is important: Information is power and always raises the temptation for abuse,” said Jay Stanley, a privacy expert at the American Civil Liberties Union. “Any kind of data that reveals our locations and travels is potentially very powerful stuff that lends itself to abuse for Nixonian dirty tricks, embarrassment of rivals or leverage over critics. If officials feel comfortable using information against a prominent person like Frank Lautenberg, what is the ordinary person supposed to think about how data could be used against them?”

The apparent use of private traffic data as a tool in New Jersey's political jockeying underscores concerns about whether such information is being used in less public ways by government officials who have access to the data. Such concerns are particularly acute in an era in which technology has made transit and communications histories easily searchable to those with access to the pertinent data.

http://www.ibtimes.com/bridgegate-chris-christie-used-port-authority-political-weapon-1778062

This ought to make it a 'lock' with Oklahoma voters - that they will vote for Chris Christie for President....

I have to say that I have had an experience on the Golden Gate Bridge where a license plate camera was a help. Going across the bridge there is a toll charge for going south across the bridge into SF, no charge going north into Marin Co. To alleviate traffic snarls on the bridge, there are no toll attendants going south. (otherwise it would back up to Santa Rosa) They have an account that you can set up that is attached to your plate number for billing. The system is also set up so that if you go across the bridge with out a plate account or FasTrak Pass, you have 48 hours afterwards to pay the toll. If not then they send you an invoice for the amount. They give you a couple of chances before they fine you $25.00.

http://goldengate.org/tolls/tollpaymentoptions.php#paybyplate (http://goldengate.org/tolls/tollpaymentoptions.php#paybyplate)

When the shoe is on the other foot ...



Police say Google's cop-tracker function threatens them

The GPS app Waze crowdsources a lot of real-time data, and with 50 million users contributing information in 200 countries, the app can show a lot. There are traffic updates, accident reports, and toll warnings. Users can even contribute the location of police they happen to spot, so drivers behind them know to stay within the speed limit and generally drive safely. But law enforcement agents are not happy about it.

Though the feature has existed since around the time Waze launched in 2008, law enforcement officials are increasingly concerned about it since two New York police offers were shot to death in December. The shooter, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, does not seem to have used Waze to locate the two officers he killed (because he was not carrying his smartphone for a few hours prior to his attack).

Waze is owned by Google, and as the Associated Press reports, Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck sent the company a letter on Dec. 30 explaining that Waze could "endanger police officers and the community" by tracking law enforcement.

During the National Sheriffs Association winter conference in Washington, D.C., over the weekend, Bedford County, Virginia, Sheriff Mike Brown said, "The police community needs to coordinate an effort to have the owner, Google, act like the responsible corporate citizen they have always been and remove this feature from the application even before any litigation or statutory action."

But civil liberties advocates say that as long as Waze users are reporting police sightings that occur in public, they are conveying information in a reasonable and protected way. Nuala O'Connor, head of the Center for Democracy and Technology, told the AP, "I do not think it is legitimate to ask a person-to-person communication to cease simply because it reports on publicly visible law enforcement."

Given the extensive data and geolocation tracking techniques law enforcement is able to use on both a state and federal level (often without a warrant) to monitor United States citizens—and others—it seems contradictory that citizens shouldn't be able to share information about police officers who are in plain sight.


http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2015/01/26/waze_has_a_police_tracking_feature_that_law_enforcement_opposes.html

https://www.waze.com

Its not the toll-collection cameras that are the problem, but bulk spying by agencies or rogue officials (who have occasionally targeted individuals or groups for blackmail).


Even the FBI Had Privacy Concerns on License Plate Readers

Law enforcement’s use of automated license plate readers has drawn increasing controversy in recent years amid concerns that the devices pose a threat to privacy. Now, internal documents show that the FBI, based on a recommendation from its own lawyers, was told to stop buying the devices for a time in 2012.

The documents, obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union through a public records request, show the FBI’s own Office of General Counsel was grappling with concerns about the agency’s use of the technology and the apparent lack of a cohesive government policy to protect the civil liberties of citizens whose vehicles are photographed by the readers. That apparently prompted an order from the OGC to temporarily put the brakes on further purchases.

It’s not known when the FBI resumed purchasing the devices, but the revelations show that even within the FBI there are those who have questioned the privacy implications of a technology widely seen by some as invasive.

Civil liberties groups argue that the readers, widely used not only by the FBI but by local police departments around the country, and the databases that store the license plate images pose a fundamental risk to privacy because in the aggregate they can reveal sensitive information about a person’s travels and activities. Critics of the technology also say the readers capture more than just license plate numbers. A California man who filed a public records request to receive copies of images collected by his local law enforcement agency obtained more than 100 images of his vehicle in various locations, including one that showed him and his daughters exiting their car while it was parked in their driveway.

“Automatic license plate readers are a sophisticated way of tracking drivers’ locations, and when their data is aggregated over time they can paint detailed pictures of people’s lives,” notes Bennett Stein of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project in a blog post published today about the documents.

Little is known about the government’s use of automated license plate readers or how long it has been deploying the technology. The documents obtained by the ACLU show that the FBI was testing automated license plate readers in 2007 but seem to indicate the agency started using the tech earlier than this.

A Virginia man recently sued the Fairfax County Police Department in his state for unnecessarily collecting and retaining images of his license plate. The man was not a suspect in a criminal investigation and asserts the database violates a state law prohibiting government agencies from unnecessarily collecting, storing, or disseminating the personal information of individuals.


http://www.wired.com/2015/05/even-fbi-privacy-concerns-license-plate-readers/

Saw a guy in a red or maroon dually pickup truck with license plate scanners on his hood driving around Sunday night near Memorial.
Had an insidious looking car-stealing rig on his back bumper.

That be the repo man that works for all of those pay as you go use car lots.

Absolute vindication of using warrant-less mass-surveillance to automate another tedious police chore, because they never could have found the vehicle and suspect just by the detailed descriptions and normal good police work.

or as CF put it on another thread


Could save us money, though.  Dont need to hire more patrolmen when we can have robots at every intersection.  8)

And then there's this...using mass surveillance to round up the guilty along with the innocent:

https://medium.com/@nselby/los-angeles-just-proposed-the-worst-use-of-license-plate-reader-data-in-history-702c35733b50#.y88mudhjs (https://medium.com/@nselby/los-angeles-just-proposed-the-worst-use-of-license-plate-reader-data-in-history-702c35733b50#.y88mudhjs)

Wow. Can you imagine being a business owner in the Pearl District early on if it was on a government list for prostitution and your customers received a letter for traveling to your establishment? A new employee at your factory? You name it, it looks bad.

I read a book like that once...

That book used to be required reading to keep whats happening from happening.

The detective's article is really well done, as well. Whatever happened to that type of policeman?

Oklahoma House approves bill that would allow automated license plate readers

Senate Bill 359 would allow law enforcement officials to compare a license plate number with an Oklahoma Insurance Department list to determine if the owner of a plate has insurance.

“With the passage of this legislation, we are one step closer to addressing the uninsured motorist problem in Oklahoma,” said Rep. Ken Walker, R-Tulsa. “Uninsured motorists drive up the cost of car insurance and often drive away from the scene of collisions, leaving the other party to foot the bill. With this, we can help law enforcement spot uninsured motorists and give them an opportunity to come into compliance before they face larger consequences.”

The bill comes with privacy concerns for some, including Walker. The legislation requires that license plate photographs for insured vehicles must be destroyed.

A second proposal, Senate Bill 1144, would create the Automatic License Plate Reader Privacy Act, which would make the misuse of data subject to legal action.

Senate Bill 359 was approved by a vote of 52-38.



Here we go again.  The same "uninsured motorist" pretext, the same promises of "we wont abuse it."

Why does it seem mass-surveillance is the answer to so many problems?

District Attorneys Approve License Plate Scanner Contract, Bringing Uninsured Drivers Closer to Automatic Tickets
http://oklahomawatch.org/2017/11/15/district-attorneys-approve-license-plate-scanner-contract-bringing-uninsured-drivers-closer-to-automatic-tickets/

Oklahoma finalized a deal this week with a company to use license-plate scanners to catch uninsured drivers, and the firm expects to issue an eventual 20,000 citations a month starting as early as next year.

The program, believed to be the first of its kind in the nation, involves setting up automated scanners on highways around the state to detect uninsured vehicles and mailing their owners a citation with a fine of $184, according to the District Attorneys Council.

Gatso USA, a Beverly, Massachusetts-based company that specializes in red-light-running and speeding detection systems, will initially get $80, or 43 percent, of each fine.

It will be overseen by the District Attorneys Council rather than law enforcement, and the state’s 27 district attorneys’ offices are expected to receive millions of dollars in citation revenue a year.

People have been blackmailed, lost their jobs and gone to prison for abusing this technology, but isnt having your daily travels cataloged a small price to pay for catching uninsured drivers?  We'll worry about oversight later.

Mass-surveillance under the pretext of catching uninsured motorists:

Plaintiffs in lawsuits in Florida and Iowa have accused cities of trying to outsource police powers to the Massachusetts-based traffic camera company Gatso USA.
 
http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/government/outsource-company-hired-to-catch-uninsured-drivers-in-oklahoma-is/article_28fe653f-1cb0-5b34-83d9-a77857695475.html

Repo man is not exactly warrantless - it is the lenders exercise of his contractual rights with the deadbeat driver.

I remember a security guard at work stopping a repo man driving a red truck modified as a tow truck (with ALPR cameras just randomly scanning tags on private property) after the repo zeroed in on the security guards car.  
My only other experience with repos was when a family member had to call TPD when one of them hooked up the car he had clear title to, and TPD refused to even look at the paperwork when they threatened to arrest the owner for interfering, in his own driveway.

It appears the powers to be are banking on the DA's association not being subject to the same accountability as police.  An older article from The Oklahoman:


A proposed traffic camera system being counted on by state leaders to generate at least $50 million in revenues from uninsured drivers this fiscal year may have run into roadblocks.

American Insurance Association attorney Jeramy Rich says the technology has weaknesses and claims many insured Oklahoma motorists are going to be harassed with undeserved fine notices if the system is implemented.

Jonathan Miller, chairman of a company that is part of a consortium competing for the contract, disagrees. Miller contends a good system can be put in place, but says continued delays could jeopardize the system's ability to produce $50 million this fiscal year.

Wellon Poe, general counsel for the Oklahoma Department of Public Safety, can't predict how much longer the bid review process might take.
"We're trying to evaluate everything from how it's going to be done to who's going to do it. There have been no final decisions on any of it.”

Oklahoma Insurance Department officials estimate between 18 and 23 percent of vehicles on Oklahoma roads are uninsured. The contract calls for fixed or mobile cameras to photograph license plates on moving vehicles. Computers would transmit the data and match it to insurance verification information on national, state and insurance company databases.

Industry officials say technology has advanced to the point it is possible to almost instantaneously determine whether a car is listed as having insurance. If no insurance is found, the owner of the vehicle would be sent a letter giving the individual the opportunity to show that a mistake has been made or pay a $250 fine.

Rich said he sees several problems. His association was involved with the four-year development of the electronic database system Oklahoma law enforcement officers now use to determine if a motorist has insurance when they make traffic stops.

Fleet and company owned vehicles are special problems because blanket insurance policies don't electronically link the policies to each vehicle identification number in the fleet, Rich said. Law enforcement officers must rely on paper insurance verification card checks to determine whether fleet vehicles are covered.

"I don't know how you would ever coordinate that with the camera enforcement system,” Rich said. "The way that system is going to work is that when you don't show up in the data search done by any of these companies ... then you get a ticket.”

Company officials will get irritated if they start getting lack of insurance fine notices, he said. There would be an appeals process, but people won't want to have to deal with it.

Rich also questions whether the state has the authority to implement the program, whether it will really generate the $50 million a year and whether it is appropriate to allow a private contractor to issue ticket notices and keep a portion of ticket revenue.

Rich recommends scrapping the bids and relying on increased enforcement by state, county and local law enforcement.
"This system is not up and running and fully functional in any other state in the union,” Rich said.

Miller discounted Rich's concerns, saying they are "simply not true.”

He said insurance companies are against the camera insurance verification program because it will drive down insurance rates and that will cut into profits of insurance executives.
"They know that this will work,” said Miller, chairman of Chicago-based InsureNet. "We know our business very, very well. ... Our technology allows us to know if it's a fleet vehicle.”
Miller said he is "mystified” by delays in awarding the contract and hasn't heard anything from Oklahoma officials in a long time.

Poe thinks any problem with fleet vehicles can probably be resolved before tickets are issued.

However, he said, when a driver carries motor vehicle insurance, but the vehicle itself is not insured, a camera system won't detect that and owners of the vehicles likely will get ticket notices that will have to be corrected later. It's not a big problem in Oklahoma because insurance usually goes with the vehicles rather than the driver, he said.

The process stinks of big brother....    But, now that I am not poor anymore, I keep insurance.   

My wife was hit by a guy who only had insurance long enough to get his tags.   It was a fiasco.   I have little or no sympathy for that.   

I can't imagine that it will generate the numbers they claim.   If they don't have enough money to afford the insurance, what makes you think they can pay the fines?

Jail.   It is amazing how fast one comes up with cash - mostly from family and close friends - when one is sitting downtown in lock up.

So you say.

http://www.newson6.com/story/34395227/tulsa-county-court-system-eases-burden-on-failure-to-pay-offenders

Im sure they know that.  Once we have been desensitized to being surveilled there will follow enough "mission creep" that you would be dismissed as "soft on crime" to suggest the mass-surveillance apparatus be scrapped because its failing in its one stated objective. 

Camera acts as a rolling tax collector
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2004/may/27/20040527-103628-7477r/


...and once installed, it will be "too expensive" to remove them.

Judge Scott D. Rosenberg earlier in the day had released an order allowing the cities to keep the cameras in place as long as they are not issuing citations because of the “substantial” cost the cities would bear to remove them.
Judge calls it 'significant omission' about who covers cost of camera removal.
http://www.thegazette.com/subject/news/government/judge-des-moines-cedar-rapids-misinformed-court-in-speed-camera-case-20170518

GATSO USA had estimated it would cost $22,000 to remove each camera location. Meanwhile, the cameras continue to gather surveillance data for the corporation.


Then there's Gaspar's media scenario:

"We are interested in a flattering story about our ____ program, would you be interested in writing it?"
"No?"
"Well, perhaps we could meet over at the Sunrise Motel and discuss.  You are familiar with the Sunrise, aren't you?"
"No need?, Excellent!  We'll send you some ideas for the article."

The "database" these scanners alert to can be anything you put on a thumb drive, NCIC, CAIR, unfriendly reporters, gay bars, my daughters boyfriend etc., and there's no mechanism for accountability that puts limits on how this is used, especially for "custom" databases that can be traded and sold privately by individuals and corporations.
https://wtop.com/national/2015/10/private-database-lets-police-skirt-license-plate-data-limits/

Yeah - I'll have to call bollocks on that one.

You never had a family member or friend call at 2:00 am asking for bail..??

Lucky you!   I say let them sit - won't get it from me.  If they are grown up enough to get themselves into that, they are grown up enough to get themselves out of it.  They will cut 'em loose in a few hours anyway on OR...too much overcrowding to keep them for long.

Not far from the truth....

http://www.fox23.com/news/broken-arrow-police-track-down-possible-clients-after-prostitution-hiv-spreading-bust/655173517
(emphasis mine)

    Dear (REDACTED),

    On October 31, 2017 at approximately 10:00 a.m. a (REDACTED) registered in your name with Oklahoma license plate (REDACTED) was observed at 804 C South 9th Street, Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, which is an area of concern about crimes that affect quality of life, including prostitution. The police department is actively addressing chronic pr oblems in the community through criminal investigations, surveillance, patrols, and Neighborhood Watch programs. For the public's safety, we encourage everyone to be aware of his or her surroundings and to report any suspicious activity to 911. If you no longer own the above vehicle or if this notice was sent in error, please disregard it.

    The Broken Arrow Police Department recently arrested an employee of this business for knowingly transmitting an infectious disease.

    The Broken Arrow Police Department is working closely with citizens to improve the quality of life in our community. If you have any questions or would like more information about our efforts to reduce crime, fear and disorder in Broken Arrow, please call the Special Investigations Unit at 918-451-8200 ext. 8793.

It looks like Fox23 buried the lead... that happens when you cut-and-paste media handouts and call it reporting.
The underlying story is only a few steps removed from:

An FBI affidavit made public yesterday in court identified (Police lieutenant Jeffery Scott) Stowe as the person who had attempted to extort $10,000 from a married man after the man visited the Follies Theater, a gay bar in Southeast Washington, in September.

The affidavit also alleges that Stowe used a law enforcement computer system to identify the man and at least two others who visited the club through their automobile license plates.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/longterm/library/dc/dcpolice/stories/stowe25.htm

The courts have ruled that the license plate data of millions of law-abiding drivers, collected indiscriminately by police across the state, are not “investigative records” that law enforcement can keep secret.

California’s highest court ruled that the collection of license plate data isn’t targeted at any particular crime, so the records couldn’t be considered part of a police investigation.

 “The Supreme Court recognized that California’s sweeping public records exemption for police investigations doesn’t cover mass collection of data by police, like the automated scanning of license plates in this case. The Court also recognized that mere speculation by police on the harms that might result from releasing information can’t defeat the public’s strong interest in understanding how police surveillance impacts privacy."
https://www.eff.org/press/releases/electronic-frontier-foundation-aclu-win-court-ruling-police-cant-keep-license-plate

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has officially gained agency-wide access to a nationwide license plate recognition database, according to a contract finalized earlier this month. The system gives the agency access to billions of license plate records and new powers of real-time location tracking, raising significant concerns from civil libertarians.

 “Are we as a society, out of our desire to find those people, willing to let our government create an infrastructure that will track all of us?”

https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/26/16932350/ice-immigration-customs-license-plate-recognition-contract-vigilant-solutions

Don't you already pay for privilege of carrying a portable GPS tracker?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/apps/g/page/world/how-the-nsa-is-tracking-people-right-now/634/

You have the option not to carry a phone, but dont have as much an option if you have to drive to work or buy food. There is of course mass transit, but...

If this isnt something with great potential for abuse, why go to so much trouble to dodge public accountability by using private-industry databases and running it out of the D.A.'s union?

You don't have to drive....

I am also not sure how ICE needs the database as illegals can't register cars.

When this mass-surveillance was first floated in Oklahoma it was to "find stolen vehicles." 
Then it was to find people with warrants. 
Then it was to find uninsured vehicles in Oklahoma. 
In other states the dangling carrot of mission creep has lept to claims of finding terrorists and pedophiles.  Now with billions of data hits at their fingertips, the data merchants like Vigilant and Digital Recognition Network have sued states like Arkansas and Utah for putting restrictions on the use of their privately-owned, warrantless surveillance databases.



Vigilant's point remains that what it does in terms of collection is not a violation of privacy because it does not have access to DMV databases holding personally-identifiable information. It glosses over the fact that it provides access to hundreds of law enforcement agencies around the US, all of which can acquire the connecting data. But that does seem to put the onus on law enforcement agencies to provide adequate privacy protections, including timely disposal of non-hit data.

In the singular (as Vigilant's argument goes), this isn't a privacy violation -- no different that someone taking a picture of a vehicle in public. But several months of time and location data creates something that can only be achieved through dedicated surveillance, something that does raise privacy questions, especially in light of the recent court decision finding that law enforcement officers need warrants to track cell phone users' locations. This is the same principle. Law enforcement agencies shouldn't be accessing months of plate location/time data unless it's part of an investigation -- and if it is, someone neutral needs to be deciding whether or not every license plate hit is relevant to the situation.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140613/09224127569/license-plate-reader-company-sues-another-state-violating-its-first-amendment-right-to-build-18-billion-image-database.shtml


The ultimate hypocrisy of it all is that both Vigilant and law enforcement agencies defend the mass capture of license plate/location data as just gathering publicly-available information. But when it comes to their info, everything's a secret, enforced by contract if necessary. Then they go even further and claim the public information gathered is private and can't be released, even to the owner of the license plates captured. It's a one-way street of data that's disingenuous, dishonest and, above all, an insult to the very public these agencies are meant to serve.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140502/08382227098/company-uses-bogus-polls-gag-orders-to-protect-image-license-plate-scanning.shtml

Maybe I'm just bored on a plane right now (I spend way too much time on planes), but this is really interesting.    Holding the public agencies aside for a bit and looking at this from just the Vigilant side.   It does seem that - assuming they are just driving around and recording license plates (or however, but only recording LPs that are viewable publicly) - that this public info that anyone (assuming they want to invest the time and money) could do.  And, also taking their word that they don't have the personal info on any of the car owners, why couldn't they sell that data to whoever?  Why couldn't, for example, they provide it to the general public?  (For a charge, of course.)  It's not illegal to hire a private eye to follow a someone around (say a cheating spouse...) and track where they go, etc.  Why couldn't  someone request this data from Vigilant?   An on-line request to provide, say, the "last three months of tracking for License Plate XXXXXX"?

They aren't going to make this data public for free, because it took money to get and it has a value.  But while it is on a grand scale, I am having trouble discerning how this is different than any other type tracking that is already legal.

Sometimes it is
http://www.tulsaworld.com/homepagelatest/oklahoma-lawmaker-sues-private-investigator-in-spying-case/article_df736004-84cb-5baf-b958-843dfe693645.html


If it could be argued that you are requesting data about an identifiable individual, it might fall under the category of stalking.
Its already common knowledge that ALPR data peddlers license their databases to corporations and private individuals who have no articuable privacy policies or public accountability (repo men, collection agencies, credit bureaus, insurance companies) but those transactions are secret.
Here's the actual wording in Vigilant's contract, as uncovered by the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

 You shall not create, publish, distribute, or permit any written, electronically transmitted or other form of publicity material that makes reference to LEARN [Law Enforcement Archival and Reporting Network] or this Agreement without first submitting the material to LEARN-NVLS and receiving written consent from LEARN-NVLS. This prohibition is specifically intended to prohibit users from cooperating with any media outlet to bring attention to LEARN or LEARN-NVLS. Breach this provision may result in LEARN-NVLS immediately termination of this Agreement upon notice to you.

So in practice, the data merchants claim the rights guaranteed to a free press while simultaneously hiding in the shadows.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation supports S.B. 712, a California bill that would allow drivers to cover their plates when they’re parked. This simple privacy measure would create an opportunity for drivers to protect sensitive information about their travel and whereabouts from mass collection by law enforcement and private data brokers.

The threat is all too real. Police agencies have surveilled Muslims by collecting plates in parking lots at mosques. Police officers have used license plates of vehicles parked at gay clubs to blackmail patrons. Anti-choice activists are trained to amass license plates of doctors and patients parked at reproductive health centers. Immigration & Customs Enforcement plans to use private license plate databases, effectively dodging state restrictions on data sharing, as it ramps up its deportation efforts.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/01/california-police-chiefs-misrepresent-license-plate-privacy-bill

Broken Arrow did something similar with a "massage parlor" recently.....

Here is the article:
http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/crimewatch/police-warn-of-potential-need-for-hiv-testing-after-prostitution/article_4a2f6b5a-99be-50cd-9e14-5bbb9e7216a4.html

Police sent letters to the registered owners of vehicles observed at a massage parlor at 804C S. Ninth St., according to a redacted copy of one of the letters.

The massage parlor owner and an employee were arrested last week on prostitution complaints. The letter says the employee also was arrested for “knowingly transmitting an infectious disease.”

The letters informed the vehicle owners that the address was “an area of concern about crimes that affect the quality of life, including prostitution.”

If Oklahoma followed California's lead I would imagine the first people to cover up the tag numbers of their parked vehicles would be police, but if you allow it for one group you have to allow it for everyone.   Backing into every parking space wont always be an option.

Meanwhile, more assurances mass-surveillance will only be used in an honest, legal manner:

Police Admit They Disguised a Spy Truck as a Google Streetview Car
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bmvjwm/this-isnt-a-google-streetview-car-its-a-government-spy-truck

https://t.co/0z4yo2rVoR

Found him!    1600 Pennsylvania Ave.


Congress is investigating USA Gymnastics.  Will likely soon investigate USA Swimming (same reason).   When are they gonna investigate USA Pedophile in Chief ??

Whats law:

S.B. 359  Signed by Governor. Chap. 365
Relates to uninsured motorists; creates the Uninsured Vehicle Enforcement Program; provides the Program shall be implemented and administered by the district attorneys; allows participating agencies to use automatic license plate reader systems; creates a central database; creates an exemption relating to Oklahoma Open Records Act; requires a report; creates an Uninsured Vehicle Enforcement Diversion Program; creates a fund; requires a report; provides an effective date.


What lobbyists killed:

S.B. 1144  Status: Failed - Adjourned.
Relates to license plates; creates the "Automatic License Plate Reader Privacy Act"; provides definitions; prohibits certain use of automatic license plate reader systems; provides exceptions to restrictions; prescribes certain preservation and access; stipulates reporting requirements; requires certain compliance; defines penalties; requires certain privacy; States certain severability; provides for codification; provides an effective date.


Emphasis mine. Experience has taught us that any government moving around millions of dollars without public accountability ultimately ends in scandal.

ICE has contracted with Vigilant Solutions, a company that helps law enforcement agencies track license plates on cars in real time. Russell Brandom, who reported the story for The Verge, says police departments mount cameras on their cars or in fixed locations to read license plates. Those numbers are then cross-checked with databases to see if a car has been stolen or if the owner has an active warrant or expired license.

Brandom says municipalities have different agreements with Vigilant. But many have agreed to let the company service the cameras at a discount or for free in exchange for feeding data back to the company.

“It really is this sort of nationwide surveillance network that's been built up privately outside of the reach of a lot of the safeguards that would normally exist if ICE had built this database itself or if we were getting it, sort of, from federal agency,” Brandom says.

ICE could tap into Vigilant’s database, search for a specific license plate and see where it’s been. ICE could also potentially enter a license plate into a “hot list,” so that the agency would be alerted if the plate was spotted, says Brandom.

“You have ICE becoming much more aggressive and much less targeted and, sort of, coherent,” Brandom says. “And I think when you have that being mediated by a private corporation, it gets even more complicated.”

https://www.pri.org/stories/2018-02-16/no-immigration-bill-feds-ink-contract-monitor-license-plates

A couple of questions....

Would you rather have spent millions and millions of taxpayer dollars to deploy a duplicate system?

Will you have the same problem when (not if) Facebook/Google/Uber contract with the PRIVATE COMPANY to get the data for mining?  Or just because ICE is using it that you have issues.   

What if ICE is excluded but the FBI/NSA/EPA/FAA/whoever is allowed...   Does that make it better?

Went to eat at The Brook the other night when an old black surplus detective car starts snaking thru the parking lot.
The woman driving wasnt paying attention to the unbelted kid playing in the back seat, probably because she was busy with her Automatic License Plate Reader.  Im guessing she was trolling ahead of a towtruck looking for repo opportunities.

If anyone tells you this mass-surveillance technology is under control and wont be abused, they are lying.
I didnt get a picture fast enough, but imagine this example with some bad spraypainting:



(http://media.al.com/news_mobile_impact/photo/gspd-license-plate-recognition-reader-8202aa7fdbae2cae.jpg)

O my bucking gawd...Did they surveil any speed humps....???

My son is a patrolman with a local security company. He's had both positive and negative interactions with these repo guys. They're not supposed to use license plate scanners on private property without permission, though they often do. Son has run them off for that reason, though one of them wanted to dispute the fact in a physical manner. A collapsible baton to the knee ended it. Two nights later the same guy got a dose of pepper spray and became an overnight guest of TPD.

Seems silly that people would try to get back property that is legally theirs.   Who the hell do they think they are?

Lol...Jesus wept...

LOL...You are on the internet and your worried about mass surveillance...???

Someones way overdue for a Laura Ingraham-style pre-planned vacation.

I'm freaking out over speed humps....LOL...!!

So triggered. Having a rough week?

Lol..You have been having a rough year and a half...

The next time you drive past one of those road signs with a digital readout showing how fast you’re going, don’t simply assume it’s there to remind you not to speed. It may actually be capturing your license plate data.
https://qz.com/1400791/that-road-sign-telling-you-how-fast-youre-driving-may-be-part-of-a-us-government-surveillance-network/

(https://www.eff.org/files/2017/05/03/mkl_walnut_creek_trailer.jpg)

https://ktul.com/news/local/legal-troubles-surround-license-plate-scanning-company

OHP trooper used license plate system to stalk and harass women

https://www.normantranscript.com/news/ohp-trooper-accused-of-using-state-records-to-stalk-harass/article_85b231fe-d307-11e8-9159-6fe76c0b1b7b.html

State officials Tuesday unveiled plans to implement an automated license plate scanner system designed to clamp down on uninsured motor vehicles.
https://www.tulsaworld.com/homepagelatest/state-prepares-to-unveil-license-plate-reading-system-to-hunt/article_4f148635-2902-5d01-9832-8003a0d1b415.html

The system, the first of its kind in the country, will be operational by Nov. 1 and use technology that can issue up to 10,000 violation notices per day, officials said during a news conference held in Tulsa.

Noble said the system will not retain plate information for vehicles that meet state insurance requirements.
“We’re not taking pictures of every car going past the camera. It’s just those that don’t have insurance.”

Thats not true.
Automatic License Plate Readers photograph and store every single vehicle and every single driver...they are incapable of distinguishing "bad" from "good" they just stockpile data that has a history of being abused and mismanaged.
NYPD still uses it to track Muslims, and then there's the pedigree of stalking and blackmail...

Missing from the "extensive public awareness campaign" is what it costs you when the corporation mails you a ticket by mistake.

(https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/tulsaworld.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/7/4b/74b375b3-4b19-5f9d-bfc2-63958bbd96bd/5c1d832c7d27b.image.jpg?resize=500%2C320)

Thousands of uninsured vehicles are flagged during first weeks of new program that scans license plates

Vehicle violation notice letters will be sent to registered owners in coming days, said Amanda Arnall Couch, prosecutor for the Uninsured Vehicle Enforcement Diversion Program, a unit of the Oklahoma District Attorneys Council.

The program, the first of its kind in the country, launched Nov. 1, with four vehicle-mounted plate scanners traveling “all over the state,” Arnall Couch said.

Cameras mounted on vehicles scan license plates on automobiles as they are encountered. The tags are compared to a state database that includes vehicles with liability insurance.

The state agency is contracting with Massachusetts-based Sensys Gatso Group, which is providing the license plate scanners and supporting technology in return for a cut of the revenue.

https://www.tulsaworld.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/thousands-of-uninsured-vehicles-are-flagged-during-first-weeks-of/article_92f1f6fc-ea7b-5acb-93cc-8792c301a15c.html

Do you view this as a good thing or bad thing?  Enforcing the liability laws isn't a bad idea, JMO.

I already hear the tin foil hat squad warming up. I don't have a problem with it. Will it help? Some, probably boost the business at General/Safe Auto and those other insure anybody companies with people getting insurance long enough to get legal and then drop it again. So I will keep paying for full coverage with uninsured and under insured coverage because it will never end.

Wholesale cataloging of people's movements has all sorts of uses. 
Some may serve society while others may be nefarious.  Just reading thru the abuses on this thread alone makes it painfully obvious that taking the state's word that this will only be used to verify car insurance is just wishful thinking.

Keep in mind these are the same people behind asset forfeiture.
https://www.readfrontier.org/stories/cash-seized-forfeited-oklahoma-law-enforcement-nearly-doubled-last-year-data/

I particularly dislike that it's a private company doing it and they will get a huge slice of the fines and most of all, what do they plan on doing with all the data they collect? Do you trust the state of Oklahoma to competently set and enforce rules that protect citizens? I certainly don't.

Based on the fine to fee structure and given that the contractor appears to have all the up-front cost, I don't think the fees are out of line unless I skimmed over a huge up-front fee for the purchase of the equipment.

As far as data collection, the state issued the tag in the first place, they already have:  tag number, owner's name, VIN, registered address, and whether or not there is a liability policy which references said vehicle.  There's not much data for this company to use against you.  If it ends up helping LEO's catch a fugitive, I really don't see where that is different from any other form of surveillance.

The state has as much or more information on file with your driver's license.  Tracking my movements? It's of no use to law enforcement since I conscientiously observe the laws.  Yes, I get mildly annoyed when I purchase a bottle of wine at the grocery store and I'm asked to swipe my license to verify my age, but seriously, what use to the state or Feds is my alcohol use?

Literally, I cannot figure anything that my personal data, other than the explicit electronic keys to one of my financial accounts, would be of benefit to someone else.  As long as I pay rightful taxes and obey laws, scanning my license plate to verify if I have liability insurance is pretty low on the list of what I view as personal liberty violations.

Was that your car parked at the brothel?
Its been there about every Tuesday and Thursday around 1:30, according to our data, and going back a few years it looks like a regular habit ever since we started scanning tags there.  Oh is that a furry costume last October?  Keeping it fresh.
Pretty sure its the brothel and not the family planning clinic you give those ladies rides to.  So generous of you, and if we look closer at your travels you would think you have a second family in Salt Lake. I guess thats the thing.  Suzie needs braces, BTW, her mom spends too much time at the bar...

but you could use a Guinness right now
https://youtu.be/oBaiKsYUdvg



Try to see past the car insurance pretext and look at the track record of how this technology has been used (and abused) elsewhere.
As far as the value of a database of people's habits, Facebook makes their millions somehow...

Department of Public Safety brings in millions by selling personal data
https://newsok.com/article/3451253/oklahoma-brings-in-millions-by-selling-personal-data

Leaky database leaves Oklahoma police vulnerable to intruders
https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/oklahoma-highway-patrol-midfirst-bank-data-breach/

The state provided the company the database with the plate info. The cameras look to cost about $2000 online and the company bought four of them so maybe they have spent $50k, maybe. The cameras went into service starting November 1st and less than two months 2,100 violations are being issued. They make $80 a pop. That works out to annualized revenue of just over a million dollars.

And then they have all that data about you from the state. And can match that data with location data, they know when and where you were when you passed their cameras. Maybe four cameras isn't scary, but since they are making that kind of money with four cameras, hell, let's buy 400. Or 4,000.  

Enforcing the auto insurance requirement is long overdue, but there are a lot less intrusive ways to ensure compliance.

I'm not even against the use of cameras, but I would prefer it be done by police and courts system and also that there be privacy laws that require the camera equipment to dump the logs of all non-offender plates and never send that data out of the car.

Something like this:

S.B. 1144  
Relates to license plates; creates the "Automatic License Plate Reader Privacy Act"; provides definitions; prohibits certain use of automatic license plate reader systems; provides exceptions to restrictions; prescribes certain preservation and access; stipulates reporting requirements; requires certain compliance; defines penalties; requires certain privacy; States certain severability; provides for codification; provides an effective date.

Not only did a certain group kill that, they got another exemption from the open records act, allowing them to operate in secret and not share the profits with schools etc.

I would be a very low value target to law enforcement.  My whereabouts should be of very little to no interest to them.

How about a private corporation given police powers and allowed to operate in secret and with no accountability?

I would be of little to no interest to these "quasi" cops as well.

If you think about it, your credit card company and bank are able to not only track your movements but purchases and whatever odd proclivities you have which might end up on a card.  They also have all of your personal information which does matter to people with more nefarious ideas.  If I were a worrier, I'd be far more concerned about that than a third party license plate scanner. 

Credit card companies have layers of regulations to address fraud, privacy etc.

Red-Light Camera companies (operating the ALPR hardware) have a history of bribery, racketeering, fraud, etc. etc. and no oversight.

How Agencies Track Your Car and Overshare Its Info With Anyone Who Asks
https://www.lataco.com/police-sharing-license-plate-information-with-any-agency/

Former City Official Gets 10 Years In Red Light Camera Bribery Case
https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2016/08/29/former-city-official-gets-10-years-in-red-light-camera-bribery-case/

Private Companies Continue To Amass Millions Of License Plate Photos, Hold Onto The Data Forever
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150308/14332230253/private-companies-continue-to-amass-millions-license-plate-photos-hold-onto-data-forever.shtml

Red-light cameras figure given 14 months in prison for Ohio bribery scandal
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/watchdog/redlight/ct-red-light-cameras-karen-finley-met-20161019-story.html

Red-light cameras come under fire, at least 7 states trying to ban them
https://www.foxnews.com/us/red-light-cameras-come-under-fire-at-least-7-states-trying-to-ban-them

FBI probing Philadelphia Authority, sources say
http://www.philly.com/philly/business/transportation/fbi-investigation-philadelphia-parking-authority-red-light-cameras-20171210.html

The Missouri Supreme Court Has Ruled Red Light Camera Laws Unconstitutional
https://www.inverse.com/article/5445-the-missouri-supreme-court-has-ruled-red-light-camera-laws-unconstitutional

Why Cities Hit the Brakes on Red Light Cameras
http://www.governing.com/topics/public-justice-safety/gov-cities-hit-brakes-red-light-cameras.html

Outsource company hired to catch uninsured drivers in Oklahoma is being sued in other states
https://www.tulsaworld.com/news/government/outsource-company-hired-to-catch-uninsured-drivers-in-oklahoma-is/article_28fe653f-1cb0-5b34-83d9-a77857695475.html

License Plate Readers Catch Few Terrorists But Lots of Poor People
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2016/08/what-are-license-plate-readers-good-for/492083/

License plate reader error leads to traffic stop at gunpoint, court case
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/after-being-held-at-gunpoint-due-to-lpr-error-woman-gets-day-in-court/

L.A. Politician Proposes Bold Plan To Wreck Homes, Destroy Lives And Abuse License Plate Reader Technology
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151127/08561332917/la-politician-proposes-bold-plan-to-wreck-homes-destroy-lives-abuse-license-plate-reader-technology.shtml

2004 police sting of Edmonton Sun reporter
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerry_Diotte#2004_police_sting

Red light cameras and license plate scanners are separate issues but share the same concerns about privacy and "mission creep" as new uses are found for their massive databases.

The Brits installed both speed cameras and red light cameras, and saw traffic deaths cut in half. And getting uninsured motorists off the road is certainly laudable. None of are are blind to the possible downsides, though.

There are three legally required items you need to have the privilege to drive; A valid state issued drivers license, a valid state issued license plate and registration for the car, and valid proof of financial responsibility (insurance) in case you are at fault and cause damage to property or injure some one.

Without one of those you are driving illegally, and have no privileges to drive. Period.

Oklahoma's license tag scanning is being operated by a red light camera company that has already been sued in other states for violating motorists' constitutional rights by denying the due process and equal protection under the law, if that helps.
https://newsok.com/article/5572995/company-with-contract-to-catch-uninsured-drivers-in-oklahoma-faces-legal-challenges-in-other-states


This is not a discussion of driving privileges but rather one of whether private entities can be given police power, amass and share your personally identifiable information without oversight or regulation.





Virginia Supreme Court Sees Through Police Claim That License Plate Data Isn’t ‘Personal’
https://www.aclu.org/blog/privacy-technology/location-tracking/virginia-supreme-court-sees-through-police-claim-license

When the police keep records of the times and places where our cars have been spotted by an automatic license plate reader, does that implicate our privacy? That question lay behind an important victory that the ACLU won on Thursday in the Virginia Supreme Court.

It might seem obvious that license plate data threatens our privacy. Automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) have the ability to capture location data that can reveal details about Americans’ religious, sexual, political, medical, and associational activities. Yet we have seen repeated efforts around the country to claim that license place information does not constitute “personally identifiable information” and so is not worthy of the kind of privacy protection that such information deserves.

The Virginia case involved a challenge to the collection of ALPR data under a Virginia privacy law called the “Government Data Collection and Dissemination Act,” which says that personal information “shall not be collected” by state agencies “unless the need for it has been clearly established in advance.” The Virginia court ruled that police license plate data collection is not exempt from the requirements of this law.

In 2013, the (conservative) former Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli issued a strong official advisory opinion stating that under the law, “active” use of an ALPR to identify vehicles that were already involved in wrongdoing was permissible, but that “passive” use of the devices to sweep up raw location data about Virginia residents was not permissible. Nevertheless, in 2014 Harrison Neal, a Virginia resident, found that the Fairfax County Police Department was doing just that, and asked the ACLU of Virginia to file suit challenging the practice on his behalf.

One of the arguments that the Fairfax County police made in its defense was that a “license plate number is not personal information.” The department argued that a license plate tag is associated with a vehicle, not with a person, and a vehicle can be driven by multiple people. A plate number, it argued, “says absolutely nothing about an individual, his personal characteristics… or his membership in an organization.” It argued that its ALPR equipment does not “photograph or otherwise identify the owner or driver of the vehicle,” and that its ALPR database can only be searched by plate number.

But obviously a license plate number should be considered personally identifying information. While in some ridiculously literal sense it may not describe a person, it functions as an effective “index” that allows law enforcement to learn facts (and potentially very intimate ones) about a person with the click of a mouse. There are 268 million registered vehicles in the United States, but only 221 million licensed drivers, which strongly supports the common sense observation that most vehicles, most of the time, are driven by the same person, or at most a handful of family members. Even if there is some fuzziness at the margins about who exactly may have been driving a car in a particular instance, there is a strong assumption that it was the vehicle’s registered owner. Most people do not loan out their cars often, if ever. Even when it comes to corporate vehicle fleets, a plate number and time of day combined with a fleet owner’s records is probably enough to identify a driver.

Nor does the police department’s argument hold any weight that the ALPR database itself does not contain names or other personally identifiable information. The department pretends that databases exist in isolation, rather than being distributed across increasingly cross-referenced and interlinked sets of data. In fact, the Virginia Supreme Court could not find information in the record about how the police can link plate numbers with vehicle owners, so in its ruling it sent the case back to the lower court for fact-finding on that question. But is there any doubt that if the police want to identify the owner of a vehicle captured by an ALPR device, they can easily do so?

Virginia’s data act defines “personal information” as including “all information that… affords a basis for inferring personal characteristics.” It’s becoming easier and easier to connect separate sets of data about people, and data scientists are getting increasingly good at inferring things through fancy analytic techniques. So it’s good that Virginia’s privacy law includes that language, because hidden inferences will likely become an ever-growing threat to privacy. 

But no sophisticated analytics are necessary to cross-reference “vehicle location data” and “registered vehicle owner” datasets, or to understand that license plate location data is “personally identifiable” and a threat to privacy. The fact that the Fairfax County police made these arguments is a reminder that law enforcement and security agencies will push the interpretive flexibility of language past its limits when they want to preserve their power — something we've also seen with the National Security Agency. Drafters of privacy-protecting rules everywhere, take notice.

Like private prisons, there’s a basic problem with the state allowing people to use its law enforcement power for profit. The people trust the government with that power because the government is answerable to the people. Should it be sold to the high bidder?

https://www.tulsaworld.com/opinion/editorials/tulsa-world-editorial-insurance-bounty-hunters-are-looking-for-uninsured/article_4e6eaf6c-f837-5fd9-abb3-7b22cd2afab3.html

I'm still very meh on this.  Much of what you posted is about bribery to get companies in the door with a city, not so much rogue companies selling my schedule of visiting strip clubs, dispensaries, my drug dealer in jail, and how many times I go to liquor stores during the day.

Maybe it's my mindset since I live in a village which is so small we don't even have one traffic light.  We have a small police force and they pretty well know the comings and goings of people but I've never been aware of them using that for nefarious purposes.  I like to joke that I'm probably the most reliable kidnapping target in our village since I'm generally at my B & B or brewery at any given time.  ;D

We all need to party with you more.

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CXaaEOQUkAATGCj.jpg)

You are a madman! When you stole that cow, and your friend tried to make it with the cow. I want to party with you, cowboy.

"He that lieth down with dogs shall rise up with fleas"

We should be more careful which corporations we outsource our law enforcement to.  At the absolute minimum there should be some mechanism of accountability.

Operating outside of the Oklahoma Open Records Act doesnt pass the smell test.

I have no idea if there will be a country-wide government conspiracy to track individuals using this tech.

I feel there is a good chance that an employee/contractor name Dave will track his ex-girlfriend using this tech.

Fortunately, I never dated anyone named "Dave" so I think I'm in the clear.

Again, we'll have to take your word

Sorry Conan, we have you on tape with Dave.

https://youtu.be/rtDAK7Umk7A (https://youtu.be/rtDAK7Umk7A)

I think "collaboration" and "meeting minimal metrics" are their preferred terms.

On average, agencies are sharing data with a minimum of 160 other agencies through Vigilant Solutions’ LEARN system, though many agencies are sharing data with over 800 separate entities.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/11/eff-and-muckrock-release-records-and-data-200-law-enforcement-agencies-automated


Public surveillance for private profit is spreading into communities under the cover of promises of convenience and increased safety.
Police in Texas faced pressure from contracts with Vigilant which included vague references to quotas for how many cars the agencies needed to pull over. Failing to meet that quota would mean losing the system for the department.
https://www.lohud.com/story/news/investigations/2018/04/11/cashless-tolls-dark-future/439131002/


Here's the secret details of 200 cities' license-plate tracking programs
https://boingboing.net/2018/11/15/find-yourself-a-city-to-live-i.html


Automated license plate readers are collecting and sharing tons of data across state lines
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/12/automated-license-plate-readers-privacy-data-security-police/576904/


Automatic License Plate Readers, Vigilant Solutions, and ICE
https://psmag.com/magazine/not-all-surveillance-is-created-equal


California malls are sharing license plate tracking data with an ICE-linked database
https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/10/alpr-license-plate-recognition-ice-irvine-company/

Don't forget about the REPO guys.  My car is paid-for but many are not.  They need to stay off private parking lots.  We see them driving through my employer's parking lot occasionally.  >:(

They need permission to be on private property, though many of them don't bother to ask. My security guard son has had a few run-ins with them. The scanner car cruises the parking lot and if he gets a hit, he then calls for a tow truck.

They make extra money selling their scans to the ALPR data brokers, and there is no law to stop them.  People who had the misfortune of parking near gay bars have been forced to pay blackmailers who use these scanners with impunity.

Seriously, there needs to be regulation.  There isnt any.

A south Tulsa neighborhood has installed new technology to help catch criminals.

They installed a Flock Safety system that includes wireless cameras that read license plates. As cars drive through the neighborhood, the camera takes a series of pictures of the vehicles and their license plates with a date and time.

In a FOX23 investigation, FOX23's Janna Clark learned some people argue the system is more "big brother" than crime fighter, but others say it makes them feels safe.

Tulsa police said it could help them solve crimes because they rarely get video that shows license plates that are legible.

The neighborhood homeowner's association leases the cameras from Flock. The company takes care of any issues with the technology.

https://www.krmg.com/news/local/fox23-investigates-tulsa-neighborhood-installs-new-tech-catch-criminals/M9oEV3WlbyrQATkOeAffAJ/

Surprise! The data goes to Amazon Web Services...

https://www.cnet.com/news/neighborhood-security-cameras-sacrifice-privacy-to-solve-crimes/
https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Snap-The-local-HOA-just-captured-your-license-13450561.php

(https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/Lo4aD3s57WFwUW3ql9iCWsmSQic=/1484x0/arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/V2GCBZCM7QI6RBOBSMTMIUIQGM.jpg)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/the-surprising-return-of-the-repo-man/2018/05/15/26fcd30e-4d5a-11e8-af46-b1d6dc0d9bfe_story.html

The company’s goal is to capture every plate and use that information to reveal patterns. A plate shot outside an apartment at 5 a.m. tells you that’s probably where the driver spends the night, no matter their listed home address. So if a repo order comes in for a car, the agent already knows where to look.

Repo agents are responsible for the majority of the billions of license plate scans produced nationwide. But they don’t control the information. Most of that data is owned by Digital Recognition Network (DRN), a Fort Worth company that is the largest provider of license-plate-recognition systems. And DRN sells the information to insurance companies, private investigators — even other repo agents.

I saw a car just like that yesterday...was wondering what that stuff was all about on the trunk...

" The Oklahoma Tax Commission’s list of registered vehicles and the OID’s policy registry are cross-referenced, making a narrowed list of license plates to scan rather than every Oklahoma-tagged vehicle. "

That is flat out wrong. Every single vehicle pasing a scanner is scanned. The scanner doesnt know who has insurance or worships at a mosque or synagogue. With revenue being the sole motive for the surveillance, we have no assurance that the personally-identifiable data the scanners collect doesnt find its way to for-profit databases (like Vigilant Solutions), or those operated with questionable accountability (like ICE:  https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/06/10/us-customs-border-protection-says-photos-travelers-into-out-country-were-recently-taken-data-breach).

"Prosecutor Amanda Arnall Couch said the program’s three law enforcement officers have reviewed more than 22,000 images for accuracy in four months.
Since November, the program has sent more than 14,000 violation notices to drivers.
Of the violation notices issued, drivers have contested 692 tickets, and 663 of those tickets were dismissed.
946 people payed a $174 fine.

https://www.tulsaworld.com/news/state-and-regional/uninsured-drivers-decreasing-since-automated-ticketing-system-launched-nearly-got/article_639895d6-1e57-507e-8958-badf521b7b54.html

(https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/tulsaworld.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/7/4b/74b375b3-4b19-5f9d-bfc2-63958bbd96bd/5c1d832c7d27b.image.jpg?resize=600%2C380)

And here comes the mission creep. A bill to "regulate" data collection actually expands it, and skirts accountability by exempting it from the Open Records Law. License plate scanners collect and store data from all tags regardless of vehicle type so the article is somewhat misleading by only referencing one particular use for the data.



OKLAHOMA CITY — Oklahoma lawmakers are considering legislation that would regulate how information captured by automated license plate readers as vehicles enter the state is retained and distributed.

The bill requires that individual data collected by the Corporation Commission be exempt from the Open Records Act, which grants citizens unrestricted access to public records, The Oklahoman reported.

The measure would allow the collected data to be published and released but it would not authorize revealing the activities or identifying specific vehicles or carriers. Other agencies would be allowed to use the information for law enforcement and regulatory activities.

"It's to allow them the ability to use the license plate readers and to allow them access to the (Department of Public Safety) information database," said state Rep. Ross Ford.

As a commercial vehicle approaches a weigh station, the readers scan the license plate and verify licensing details, Ford added. If the data isn't accessible, the driver must then stop at the weigh station.

The state only keeps images of license plates attached to heavier commercial vehicles, semi-trucks and trailers.

The reader system does not collect other information, such as the details of license plates from non-commercial vehicles.

Matt Skinner, spokesman for the Corporation Commission, said the system saves a substantial amount of time for truckers as they drive through ports of entry, and past weigh stations.

"The real beauty of it is it speeds things up for trucks enormously. It used to be back in the day, you'd see long lines of truckers backed up at those tiny weigh stations, so much that it was dangerous," Skinner said. "Now, many trucks don't even need to stop."

The House Transportation Committee passed the proposal Wednesday. Rep. Roger Ford's sponsored bill can now be heard on the House floor.



Cleveland and Rogers counties, Oklahoma City, the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Control and the Oklahoma Department of Public Safety have implemented license plate scanners. However, none is using them to catch uninsured drivers.
https://oklahomawatch.org/2017/04/20/scanning-license-plates-is-latest-revenue-boosting-move-by-das/

Jonathan Miller will not be selling his automated insurance citation system in Texas. On Monday, state Attorney General Ken Paxton shot down the proposal of Miller's firm, the Texas Public Safety Consortium, to deploy automated license plate readers (ALPR, also known as ANPR) in Bowie County to ticket motorists for driving with lapsed insurance.

Miller was behind a similar failed effort in Puerto Rico last year, then operating as the "National Public Safety Consortium." He is more commonly associated with his other company InsureNet, which led an ultimately unsuccessful insurance ticketing effort in Oklahoma and several other states. Miller has been desperate to do business in the Lone Star State, having worked to influence state officials there for more nearly a decade.

"What is proposed herein can accomplish four important tasks for Texas," Miller wrote in a 31-page presentation prepared for then-Texas Governor Rick Perry. "It can generate an estimated $1.295 billion dollars in new gross revenues by simply enforcing the state's existing laws and do this without cost of any kind to government or insurers."

To the annoyance of InsureNet investors, the promised windfall never materialized. Despite heavy investment in well connected lobbyists and celebrities like football legend Barry Switzer, the insurance ticketing programs have never panned out in any state. Miller's "exclusive" connections with the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System (NLETS) were supposed to be the key to ensuring no other photo ticketing company would be able to compete for the insurance ticketing business.

"This NLETS-hosted and approved solution, (the only system hosted or approved by NLETS), was developed specifically by and for law enforcement to provide accurate, instant, non-invasive vehicle insurance verification," Miller wrote to then-Governor Perry.

The claimed exclusivity is what allowed recent deals such as the one with Puerto Rico to come in the form of no-bid contracts. As a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, however, NLETS would have a hard time explaining a truly exclusive arrangement if it did keep other automated ticketing industry competitors from attempting to offer a similar service. Such a service would never fly in Texas because state law only gives authority to cities and counties to use of a red light camera system.

"The system may be used 'only for the purpose of detecting a violation or suspected violation of a traffic-control signal,' and it is an offense to use the system to create an image in any other manner or for any other purpose," Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton wrote in his formal opinion. "These provisions illustrate that when the legislature has authorized automated photographic or similar technology for the enforcement of traffic or vehicular laws, it has been specific about the circumstances and permissible uses of the technology. It has enacted no law granting counties authority to utilize an automated photographic insurance enforcement system."

Paxton's opinion also ends efforts by counties to deploy speed camera systems.
https://www.thenewspaper.com/news/49/4946.asp

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials said Monday that photos of travelers had been compromised as part of a “malicious cyberattack,” raising concerns over how federal officials’ expanding surveillance efforts could imperil Americans’ privacy.

Customs officials said in a statement Monday that the images, which included photos of people’s faces and license plates, had been compromised as part of an attack on a federal subcontractor.

CBP makes extensive use of cameras and video recordings at airports and land border crossings, where images of vehicles are captured. Those images are used as part of a growing agency facial-recognition program designed to track the identity of people entering and exiting the U.S.

The Register, a British technology news site, reported late last month that a large haul of breached data was being offered on the dark web.

Perceptics and other companies offer automated license-plate-reading devices that federal officials can use to track a vehicle, or its owner, as it travels on public roads.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/06/10/us-customs-border-protection-says-photos-travelers-into-out-country-were-recently-taken-data-breach/

The Oklahoma District Attorneys Council concedes their license tag scanning program raises revenue for DAs,  (https://oklahomawatch.org/2017/11/16/district-attorneys-approve-license-plate-scanner-contract-bringing-uninsured-drivers-closer-to-automatic-tickets)  and that would likely include selling their surveillance data to large law-enforcement databases like CPB, for example, meaning its probably too late to close the barn door.

(AP) — A federal jury in Minnesota has awarded $585,000 to a police officer who alleged that 58 fellow officers from the Minneapolis Police Department broke a federal privacy law by searching for her driver's license data without a lawful purpose.

https://www.tulsaworld.com/jury-awards-k-to-minneapolis-cop-over-license-lookups/article_97d0c5c9-965d-5335-a98b-12f4239fa489.html

The longtime maker of license-plate scanners and other surveillance equipment used along the U.S. border was suspended Tuesday from federal contracting by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials, who cited “evidence of conduct indicating a lack of business honesty or integrity,” federal records show.

The company was attacked by an unknown hacker and had much of its internal data — including images of travelers’ faces and license plates, surveillance-equipment schematics and sensitive contracting documents — made available for download on the open Web.

The suspension is a crushing blow to one of the central cogs of the U.S. border-surveillance machine and comes at a time of growing questions over CBP conduct, security and oversight. Lawmakers and civil rights advocates said the breach illustrates the danger of the federal government’s reliance on private companies to collect and stockpile sensitive data on people’s locations and identities.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/07/02/border-surveillance-subcontractor-suspended-after-cyberattack-misuse-traveler-images/

One nightmare scenario -- that could happen very soon -- would be if a cop running an ALPR license plate scanner was using the Oklahoma Law Enforcement Telecommunications System database to stop any motorist who has a medical marijuana license, knowing that he could arrest that motorist for DUI based solely on the expectation of finding residual metabolites in their system. 

Oklahoma law considers motorists to be in the commission of driving under the influence of drugs if they have any amount of a schedule 1 substance or its metabolites in their system. Despite hemp recently becoming federally legal, state law continues to define “marihuana” and metabolites such as THC as a schedule 1 drug, which means that patients could be targeted for DUI arrests based on prior knowledge of cardholder status.

https://www.tulsaworld.com/news/local/marijuana/attorney-suing-omma-dps-says-potential-of-police-accessing-medical/article_417486e7-3a43-5c93-91b9-78572f7354fa.html

Under Trump, the fishing has only become easier. In December 2017, as first reported by the technology website The Verge, ICE gained long-sought access to the world’s largest privately run database of license-plate scans — more than five billion historic images captured continually and automatically, thousands per minute, by infrared devices attached to lampposts and police cars and repossession-agent vehicles across the United States.

Plates are scannable because D.M.V.s now design them that way: In a 2012 A.A.M.V.A. best-practices guide partly funded by ICE’s sister agency within D.H.S., Customs and Border Protection (C.B.P.), A.A.M.V.A. advises its members to use opaque inks and “retro-reflective” surfaces and to always keep letters and numbers away from any bolt holes that could confound the machines.

The database ICE uses is run by Vigilant Solutions, a California company recently acquired by Motorola that has agreements with more than a thousand law-enforcement agencies nationwide. ICE’s roughly $200,000-a-month contract — a previous version was batted down over privacy concerns during the Obama administration — lets deportation officers map immigrants’ daily rhythms with true granularity. Now they can see precisely when and where vehicles of interest have been spotted during the previous five years, and they can upload 2,500-plate “hot lists” that trigger immediate iPhone alerts whenever a target is scanned by a camera in the network.

A key benefit of CLEAR is that it isn’t restricted by protections on what data the government can collect or keep — because it isn’t government-owned.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/02/magazine/ice-surveillance-deportation.html

The license plate scans Oklahoma police indiscriminately collect on millions of law-abiding drivers was exempted from the state's Open Records Act. Other states cry foul on that.

“After six years of litigation, EFF and ACLU SoCal are finally getting access to millions of ALPR scans that will shed light on how the technology is being used, where it’s being used, and how it affects people’s privacy,” said EFF Surveillance Litigation Director Jennifer Lynch. “We persevered and won a tough battle against law enforcement agencies that wanted to keep this information from the public. We have a right to information about how government agencies are using high-tech systems to track our locations, surveil our neighborhoods, and collect private information without our knowledge and consent.”

It set a groundbreaking precedent that mass, indiscriminate data collection by the police can’t be withheld just because the information may contain some data related to criminal investigations.

https://www.eff.org/press/releases/victory-eff-wins-access-license-plate-reader-data-study-how-law-enforcement-uses
https://www.eff.org/pages/automated-license-plate-readers-alpr

(https://cdn2.newsok.biz/cache/large960_blur-76f36b20cb5ba4f9298704c2f3a8af42.jpg)

Photo from a provided handout.  None of the Oklahoma newspapers that carried it made any mention of wholesale collection of personally identifiable location data (or sale to data merchants), violation of privacy, revenue-collection by quasi-legal entities like the Oklahoma District Attorneys Council or why the state suddenly changed vendors to one that aspires to use video doorbells like Ring as part of its surveillance network.
https://www.cnet.com/news/this-company-could-turn-every-homes-camera-into-a-license-plate-reader/

https://oklahoman.com/article/5676108/oklahoma-inks-deal-for-statewide-camera-network-to-catch-uninsured-drivers

"Part of the training for the ALPR systems, police officers are taught to 'grid' neighborhoods during their downtime – systematically driving up and down every street in an area, indiscriminately scooping up information on vehicles."
https://www.azmirror.com/2019/07/08/arizona-police-agencies-gather-share-license-plate-data-but-few-ensure-rules-are-being-followed/

(The original vendor, Gatso USA: "A private national company with a lucrative contract to catch uninsured drivers in Oklahoma using license-plate scanning cameras faces legal challenges in at least two other states for alleged breaches of motorists' civil rights." 
https://oklahoman.com/article/5572995/company-with-contract-to-catch-uninsured-drivers-in-oklahoma-faces-legal-challenges-in-other-states)

Now who still believes this just about "uninsured drivers?"        (https://brite.app.box.com/v/RekorEdgeSpecSheet).

bring it on

(https://i.makeagif.com/media/5-05-2015/rN6RjR.gif)

I gotta get one of those...!

More mission creep:

Under House Bill 1814, by Rep. Mark McBride, R-Moore, work zone speeders and other safety scofflaws could be ticketed even with no law enforcement officer in sight. The bill authorizes the use of automatic cameras and other equipment to catch violators in the act.

McBride has been working on the legislation for several years but told members of the House Transportation Committee on Thursday that "we think we're coming to the end. We think we've got some of the language we need."

The current version of HB 1814 allows the Department of Public Safety to "establish automated traffic control systems in construction or maintenance zones" of the Oklahoma Department of Transportation and the Oklahoma Turnpike Authority. It gives DPS considerable latitude in determining what those systems would look like and how they would operate.

They would, however, only be in effect while work crews are on the job, and would have to produce clear photographs of drivers and license plates.

The committee advanced McBride's bill on a 9-0 vote, but lawmakers remain uneasy about ticketing motorists solely on videos and photographs. McBride acknowledged changes to HB 1814 are possible, including a provision that the evidence gathered by an automated system could only be used in cases involving actual injury or damage.

https://tulsaworld.com/news/local/bill-would-crack-down-on-road-construction-zone-violators/article_6644f116-6ca8-11eb-9f28-330eb8bdcd14.html

Data privacy bill dead, but author vows to continue to fight

OKLAHOMA CITY — Rep. Collin Walke on Thursday accused the Senate Judiciary chairwoman of putting profits over privacy after she declined to hear his bill that would protect the public against unauthorized data collection.

Walke’s House Bill 1602 passed the House on March 4 by a vote of 85-11. Rep. Josh West, R-Grove, is the co-author.

The measure would require companies collecting data on individuals to have the subject opt into it, Walke, D-Oklahoma City, said. It would give consumers in Oklahoma the right to request from companies the information that is being collected and the right to ask that the information be deleted, Walke said.

The measure was assigned to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Sen. Julie Daniels, R-Bartlesville, is chairwoman.

Daniels’ refusal to hear the bill silenced the voices of 3.1 million Oklahomans, the constituents of the 85 House members who voted for it, Walke said.

Walke said Daniels “had decided that profits are more important that privacy.”

People needed to be educated about how to protect their data “because right now it is the wild west,” Walke said.
https://tulsaworld.com/news/data-privacy-bill-dead-but-author-vows-to-continue-to-fight/article_80b440f6-931d-11eb-8993-133efd865cdf.html

Who didnt see this coming?



Tulsa County Sheriff's Office cameras would provide limited but critical information, officials say

The camera system that the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office plans to install in unincorporated parts of the county will provide clear images of vehicles and their license plates, but that’s about where the data gathering ends.

“It’s just a still photo. It’s really just a photo of the car,” said Holly Beilin, a spokeswoman for Flock Safety, the company providing the cameras. “It’s not even a video.”

Beilin’s remarks were not intended to downplay the significance of the cameras but to allay fears that installing them would be a step toward creating a Big Brother network of nonstop surveillance.

Tulsa County commissioners approved a contract with Flock Safety on Monday on behalf of the Sheriff’s Office. Under the terms of the one-year agreement, the Sheriff’s Office will partner with the National Police Foundation on a study of the “efficacy of license plate reader technology.”

The Sheriff’s Office will receive 25 cameras at no cost. Should the office decide to continue using the technology after the pilot program ends, it will cost $2,500 per camera per year with a one-time $250 installation fee for each camera.

“We were always looking at ways that we could utilize technology in what we do to better reduce crimes in neighborhoods and where people live,” said TCSO spokeswoman Casey Roebuck. “And I think this is a great asset in terms of doing that because we are able to have basically 24/7 surveillance of areas where we know we need it.”

The Sheriff’s Office has yet to determine where the cameras will be installed, but they are expected to be up and operating within four to six weeks.

Roebuck said the ultimate goal would be to link into similar camera systems all over the region.

“If you have our 25 cameras linked in with all these other cameras, you are creating basically this web throughout the entire community where we can exchange information and help each other out with the ultimate goal of catching people who are committing crimes,” Roebuck said.

Beilin said five or six law enforcement agencies in Oklahoma are using Flock Safety cameras. The company’s software is integrated into state and national crime databases to identify vehicles law enforcement agencies are looking to find.

“They can get it (alerts) on their patrol car; they can get it on their phone; they can get it on their laptop,” Beilin said. “We call that a hot list alert.”

The cameras do not have facial recognition technology, nor are they used to search for expired tags or to assist in the repossession of vehicles, Beilin said.

“We don’t want residents to feel like we are just trying to monitor law-abiding citizens, because that is not the case; we are trying to protect law-abiding citizens,” Roebuck said.

The launch of the pilot program comes as the Tulsa Police Department moves toward implementation of a Real Time Information Center. That program would use video cameras to monitor high-crime areas in the city.

City officials are expected to meet with residents in the 61st Street and Peoria Avenue neighborhood before the end of the month to discuss possibly installing cameras there.

https://tulsaworld.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/tulsa-county-sheriffs-office-cameras-would-provide-limited-but-critical-information-officials-say/article_4f646b64-a557-11ec-b71e-af9d7ad04c52.html

All the surveillance cameras make for a good NCIS Los Angeles.  Is the gun-play next?

Are we importing this equipment from Vladimir Putin?

The cameras record and transmit license plates and photos of all nearby vehicles and drivers to the operator's database.
There is currently no law regulating how long the information is stored and who it is shared with or sold to.  Other states have put limits on this, but not Oklahoma.
The surveillance is indiscriminate since the system isnt capable of distinguishing good guy from bad; everyone who drives past is cataloged and stored.
Anyone accessing the database can build a profile of any individual: Where and what you drive, how long you are parked, who you associate with, where you work, shop or go to church, etc.  A stalkers dream.


The Sheriff’s Office isn’t the only local law enforcement agency about to install license plate readers.

The Tulsa Police Department said Thursday it plans to place six to nine Flock Safety cameras in and around the 61st Street and Peoria Avenue neighborhood as part of a yearlong program to test license plate reader technology.

In all, the city will receive 25 cameras to use for one year at no cost to the city.
Deployment of the cameras and other public-safety issues will be discussed at a public meeting 5:30-6:30 p.m. Tuesday at Spirit Life Church, 5345 S. Peoria Ave. The event is being hosted by Tulsa Police Department and Tulsa Crime Stoppers.

“It’s just to get the conversation going with the Hope Valley community and Crime Prevention Network about what’s going on in the area — some of the high-profile incidents — but with that tie into this new initiative, which is the Flock Safety camera system using license plate readers,” Maj. Luther Breashears said.
The meeting is one of several the Police Department plans to hold across the city in upcoming weeks.

The motion-activated cameras do not record video but instead provide still images around the clock. Using a national crime database integrated into the Flock Safety system, officers are sent alerts via email or text when stolen vehicles or vehicles they are searching for appear on camera.

“Or, if a crime occurs, (we) go back and pull that information and look at cars going through the area and develop good leads on vehicles and suspects,” Breashears said.

Breashears said the cameras will be mounted on public utility poles where they will be clearly visible to the public.

Capt. Jacob Johnston said Tulsa Police Department is participating in the same camera program as the Sheriff’s Office. Under the terms of the agreement, Tulsa Police Department is partnering with the National Police Foundation on a study of the effectiveness of license plate technology.

The cameras have the ability to read license plates and identify vehicles by their make, model, color and other distinguishing characteristics, Johnston said, providing another tool not just for solving crimes but for responding to Amber and Silver alerts.

“Our policy restricts officers from using the alert as the sole probable cause to stop a car,” Johnston said.

Johnston said the city signed the agreement with Flock Safety several months ago and that Tulsa Police Department has used the time since to draw up a policy for how the technology is to be used.

In a separate memorandum of understanding, Tulsa Police Department is working with Flock Safety to receive alerts from neighborhoods that have installed cameras at their own expense.
Johnston said he is aware of about three or four neighborhoods that are interested in sharing their camera images with police.

Breashears said the cameras planned for the 61st and Peoria neighborhood will be installed from Interstate 44 and Riverside Drive to Interstate 44 and Peoria Avenue.
“The reason is, you want to capture vehicles coming into a neighborhood,” Breashears said.

“So we are not sitting there just kind of perusing to see who is in the neighborhood. It really ties into what our detectives do already, (getting) leads from the public or camera systems that are already in place from QuikTrip or neighborhoods,” Breashears said. “... We often rely on the public to give us leads for car information and we put that out.

Tulsa Police Department is exploring the possibility of establishing a Real Time Information Center that would include video cameras, monitored 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But that program is still in the planning stages.

“I could see a license plate reader technology being utilized in a Real Time Information Center,” Johnston said.

https://tulsaworld.com/news/local/tulsa-police-to-begin-deploying-license-plate-reader-cameras-to-test-new-program/article_24f6ce24-a63a-11ec-b3ba-ab1be722f322.html

We're Flocked.

https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/flock_1.pdf

“And, we are talking about surveilling citizens, right? We’re talking about post-George Floyd climate. So, it’s not like the need to have independent oversight somehow went away.”

https://tulsaworld.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/city-council-contemplating-putting-police-oversight-to-a-vote-of-the-people/article_5d449214-aeb6-11ec-a81c-8baf4c12710f.html

Following China's lead here.

(https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/tulsaworld.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/d/c9/dc974daa-f19f-11ec-b423-0fddca8a68ce/62b22897d7faf.image.jpg)

There has not been a lot of discussion about the safety of the data police collect on citizens, or in this case, where the data first goes when you pass by an internet-connected surveillance camera. Whether its Flock, Ring, Hikvision, ADT, Wyze, etc., its likely the data is first sorted by a remote server, and often times those servers are hosted in countries like China.

And we know thats safe...

In what may be one of the largest known breaches of personal data, a hacker has offered to sell a police database that could contain information on perhaps one billion citizens.
Although the country has been at the forefront of collecting masses of information on its citizens, it has been less successful in securing and safeguarding that data. Over the years, authorities in China have become expert at amassing digital and biological information on people’s daily activities and social connections. They parse social media posts, collect biometric data, track phones, record video using police cameras and sift through what they obtain to find patterns and aberrations. 
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/05/business/china-police-data-breach.html

I just passed the newly-installed tag-reading surveillance camera photographing everyone on Riverside Drive at 49th.
Not quite sure how that keeps us safe... maybe its more of a revenue stream?


The location data industry is an estimated $12 billion market, made up of hundreds of apps that collect location data, data brokers who trade that information among each other, and buyers who look to use that data for purposes such as advertising and law enforcement.

Because the U.S. has no federal privacy laws to rein the industry in, location data sales have gone largely unchecked for the past decade and allowed data brokers to sell millions of people’s whereabouts to whoever’s buying.

Location data has been sold in the past to help the U.S. military identify Muslim populations and was available on Planned Parenthood visitors. A blog also used location data to out a gay priest in 2021. In 2020, The Wall Street Journal revealed that federal agencies including DHS, ICE and CBP were using commercial location data for immigration enforcement. The documents published by the ACLU on Monday give a glimpse into just how much location data these agencies obtained, and how they viewed using that information.

“The way that they use the phrase ‘opt-in,’ they’re talking about the fact that you have to give permission on your phone for an app to access location,” the ACLU’s Tewari said, “but it’s very clear that when people are doing that, they’re not expecting that that’s going to be potentially creating this massive database of their entire location history that’s available to the government at any time.”

“These agencies seem fully aware that they are exploiting a massive privacy disaster in this country,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project’s deputy director. “These agencies understand that the same data dumps that they are able to buy access to for whatever they want can also be bought by anyone else to try to target their agents.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/18/dhs-location-data-aclu-00046208

(KOTV) TPD now has a couple of cars equipped with license plate reading cameras.
According to TPD, the cameras scan license plates non-stop, looking for stolen cars and officers say the system has been very effective.
Police say they rolled out the new technology at the beginning of summer and say so far, they've been able to recover more than a dozen stolen cars.

Auditor Releases Damning Report About Law Enforcement’s Use of Automated License Plate Readers
“Instead of ensuring that only authorized users access their ALPR data for appropriate purposes, the agencies we reviewed have made abuse possible by neglecting to institute sufficient monitoring.”
“A member of law enforcement could misuse ALPR images to stalk an individual or observe vehicles at particular locations and events, such as doctors’ offices or clinics and political rallies. Despite these risks, the agencies we reviewed conduct little to no auditing of users’ searches.”
“[A]gencies have not based their decisions regarding how long to retain their ALPR images on the documented usefulness of those images to investigators, and they may be retaining the images longer than necessary, increasing the risk to individuals’ privacy.”
“We found that the three agencies storing ALPR data in Vigilant’s cloud do not have sufficient data security safeguards in their contracts.”
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/02/california-auditor-releases-damning-report-about-law-enforcements-use-automated

Privacy advocates are warning that the extensive surveillance network could be weaponized against people seeking abortions in states that have enacted bans and restrictions on the practice following the US supreme court’s decision to repeal federal abortion protections, including by allowing police to monitor abortion clinics and the vehicles that are seen around it.

Technology like Flock’s could be used to “criminalize people seeking reproductive health and further erode people’s ability to move about their daily lives free from being tracked and traced”, said Chris Gilliard, a tech fellow at Social Science Research Council, an independent nonprofit research organization.

Flock says the supreme court’s decision on abortion and warnings about how law enforcement may use its services in abortion-related prosecutions haven’t prompted it to reconsider its mission: “Flock’s mission as a business is to eliminate crime,” Josh Thomas, the vice president of external affairs at Flock said. “Our position at Flock remains consistent in response to the Dobbs decision. Our perspective is that we do not enact laws, and our mission is not specific to any particular laws.”

Thomas said the company “trusts” and “provides technology for” the “democratically-elected governing bodies, and their chosen law enforcement personnel, to enforce the laws that they enact”.
“We expect cities in California may operate differently than cities in Texas or Illinois or Rhode Island,” he continued. “So it would be inaccurate to characterize Flock as being for or against any particular issue. We support local governments enforcing their local laws.”

License plate reader companies are just one of several tech companies that are facing scrutiny for the ways in which they provide data or technology to law enforcement seeking to prosecute abortion cases. In August, for instance, Facebook came under fire for providing Nebraska police with the private messages between a mother and daughter who were being investigated for allegedly conducting an illegal abortion.

The information collected by companies like Flock is particularly alarming, experts say, because it can help police paint a deeply detailed picture of the movements of specific vehicles and individuals.

License plate readers, which are usually installed on streetlights, highway overpasses, or police squad cars, capture the details of passing cars and help police keep track of the vehicles that pass through certain locations or neighborhoods.

The information is collected in a database, which police can search to see where certain vehicles have been or what cars have been in a certain area during a specific time frame.

In addition to contracting directly with hundreds of police departments, Flock says in its privacy policy that it may share data the company stores with any government agency in response to legal requests like subpoenas or warrants.

Flock’s Talon platform, its national law enforcement search network, also allows police departments it works with to share their license plate footage with hundreds of other police departments across the country. Therefore, law enforcement in a state where abortion is legal can share data with police in a state where abortion is banned. For instance, in California, the Vallejo police department, which has detected nearly 400,000 vehicles in the last month, shares its license plate reader data with law enforcement in Texas and Arizona.

“The cities and/or law enforcement agencies own the data and they decide – not Flock – with whom they share their footage and how they wish to enforce their laws,” Thomas said.

Dave Maass, the director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties organization, said he hopes current and prospective Flock clients in places where abortion is legal will scrutinize the company’s stance on abortion laws and “ask themselves the question: Can I trust this company with our people’s data”?

Many surveillance companies pitch their services as a way to increase public safety, but “Flock Safety’s position illustrates how surveillance isn’t actually about benefiting society or protecting people – it’s about enforcing the political goals of those in power,” he argued.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/06/how-expanding-web-of-license-plate-readers-could-be-weaponized-against-abortion

The response time seems too good to be true...

Two people are in custody following an overnight chase on I-44 in south Tulsa.
The chase began after one of the Tulsa Police Department’s flock cameras captured an image of a license plate from a stolen car.
A stolen Toyota SUV was captured by a camera near I-44 and Riverside around 3 a.m.
The driver refused to stop for officers. The chase eventually reached speeds of 90 miles per hour on I-44.

https://www.krmg.com/news/local/tpd-flock-cameras-spot-stolen-suv-sparks-overnight-chase-i-44/BT7WQPHCBBHOZE5FLOQQVE5FDY/

That's only 10 over the limit on some spots of the Turner Turnpike.

Absolutely absurd on city streets.

You cant really tell from the "reporting" which is probably just a verbatim handout.

Sort of like a high "rate of speed" instead of just "high speed".

In August, the Tulsa police department held a press conference about how its new Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs), a controversial piece of surveillance technology, was the policing equivalent of “turning the lights on” for the first time. In Ontario, California, the city put out a press release about how its ALPRs were a “vital resource.” In Madison, South Dakota, local news covered how the city’s expenditure of $30,000 for ALPRs “paid off” twice in two days. 

All these stories have two things in common: One, they are all about the same brand of ALPRs, Flock Safety. And two, they’re all reminders of how surveillance technology companies are coaching police behind the scenes on how best to tout their products, right down to pre-writing press releases for the police.

Flock Safety has distributed a Public Information Officer Toolkit, providing “resources and templates for public information officers.” A Flock draft press release states:

    The ___ Police Department has solved [CRIME] with the help of their Flock Safety camera system. Flock Safety ALPR cameras help law enforcement investigate crime by providing objective evidence. [CRIME DETAILS AND STORY] ____ Police installed Flock cameras on [DATE] to solve and reduce crime in [CITY].

This Mad Libs of a press release is an advertisement, and one Flock hopes your police departments will distribute so that they can sell more ALPRs.

These kinds of police department press releases, and the news coverage that too often quotes them verbatim, should give you an itchy feeling—the same one you get when you know something is being sold to you by a voice leveraging its public standing. And that’s because police have become salespeople. Brand ambassadors. Advertisers.

The trend has been growing for years. Police, on the hunt for easy solutions to the ebbs and flows of crime, are quick to reassure residents they have found the technological silver bullet. But police must also overcome growing community concerns about surveillance technology, and find ways to justify license plate readers that result in innocent people being pulled from their car by gunpoint, face recognition that too often misidentifies people, and acoustic gunshot detection technology shown by studies to not work well. To do this, police and companies work together to justify the often-shocking expenditures for some of this tech (which these days might be coming from a city’s COVID relief money).

Flock is not alone. A 2021 yearly report to the SEC filed by ShotSpotter, an acoustic gunshot detection company, reports that their marketing team “leveraged our extremely satisfied and loyal customer base to create a significant set of new ‘success stories’ that show proof of value to prospects…. In the area of public relations, we work closely with many of our customers to help them communicate the success of ShotSpotter to their local media and communities.”

What do police get out of these relationships? For one, they can get easier access to digital evidence. Why knock on doors or get a warrant to access a doorbell camera’s footage, when an officer can send an email request to the company that manages the equipment?

But some police get more than just surveillance out of it. One investigation into Amazon’s surveillance doorbell, Ring, found that Los Angeles Police Department officers were given discount codes—and the more devices purchased with that code, the more free devices were given to the officer. In this situation, how would a person know whether the officer encouraging them to purchase a security camera is making an independent recommendation, or hoping to win increased perks from the company? The LAPD has since launched an investigation into their officers’ relationships with the surveillance company.

In police, surveillance technology companies have found the perfect advertisers. They are omnivorous buyers with deep pockets, they want to show voters they’re being proactive about crime, and the news apparatus all too often takes their word as sacrosanct and their motives as unquestionable.

In his farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower warned of the formation of a military-industrial complex, a financial arrangement in which producing the tools of war would be so lucrative that there would be vested interest among manufacturers to ensure the United States always stay on a wartime footing. We must also beware of a police-industrial complex. As people’s fear of crime continues to grow, regardless of the reality of crime in America, companies and police will be all too eager, for profit or reputation, to apply balm to that panic in the form of increasingly expensive surveillance technology.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/11/rise-police-advertiser

Spewing verbal vomit.   Can't think of enough good information to convey, so they add words and bloviate ad nauseam.

The SkyCop camera that captured the beating is one of more than 2,000 that have been stationed around the city, all of which send back live feeds to the Police Department’s real-time crime center.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/01/us/skycop-camera-tyre-nichols-memphis.html

Have to log-in to read.   :(

Camera didn't help much.  Nobody watching anyway. 

More likely would have been a bunch gathered around cheering on... 

It looks like someone was operating it:  https://www.usatoday.com/videos/news/politics/2023/01/28/memphis-police-release-graphic-video-tyre-nichols-beating/11137026002/

Unlike a targeted ALPR camera system that is designed to take pictures of license plates, check the plates against local hot lists, and then flush the data if there’s no hit, Flock is building a giant camera network that records people’s comings and goings across the nation, and then makes that data available for search by any of its law enforcement customers. Such a system provides even small-town sheriffs access to a sweeping and powerful mass-surveillance tool, and allows big actors like federal agencies and large urban police departments to access the comings and goings of vehicles in even the smallest of towns. And every new customer that buys and installs the company’s cameras extends Flock’s network, contributing to the creation of a centralized mass surveillance system of Orwellian scope.

We don’t find every use of ALPRs objectionable. For example, we do not generally object to using them to check license plates against lists of stolen cars, for AMBER Alerts, or for toll collection, provided they are deployed and used fairly and subject to proper checks and balances, such as ensuring devices are not disproportionately deployed in low-income communities and communities of color, and that the “hot lists” they are run against are legitimate and up to date. But there’s no reason the technology should be used to create comprehensive records of everybody’s comings and goings — and that is precisely what ALPR databases like Flock’s are doing. In our country, the government should not be tracking us unless it has individualized suspicion that we’re engaged in wrongdoing.

https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/how-to-pump-the-brakes-on-your-police-departments-use-of-flocks-mass-surveillance-license-plate-readers