Surveillance Cameras To Scan License Plates

[patric]

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

[patric]

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

[patric]

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).

[tulsabug]

bring it on

[heironymouspasparagus]

bring it on

I gotta get one of those...!