Police May Know Exactly Where You Were Last Tuesday

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/07/17/202801282/police-may-know-exactly-where-you-were-last-tuesday

by Libertatea • 13 years ago

98 74 13 years ago

jrabone• 13 years ago

I expect that applies equally well to the UK with gantries of ANPR cameras over major motorways as well as portable ones in laybys, like the one I saw this morning on the A1 leaving Edinburgh. It wasn't a police car, though, but a dedicated "road tax enforcement" vehicle running it.

I was reminded by a colleague today of a quote attributed to Roger Needham, something along the lines of "privacy is a transient condition in between people realising there isn't an omniscient god, and government realising there was a vacancy" (quoting second hand from memory)

hvs• 13 years ago

In case you were looking for the necessary plea "for the children!" it was here:

"God forbid if the day came that a child is abducted from that mall," he says. "We would have that tool available to us, to look at that data and see if we can't find a possible suspect vehicle."

joering22• 13 years ago

Of course. And fast forward 100 years from now when public is smart enough to call this BS and after spending trillions of tax payers dollars on programs like this one, the last resort would be something like this:

"God forbids all those reports of people being abducted by aliens were real, we would have a tool to analyze the data from an alien abduction and like 44th President said once hundred years ago: if it saves one life, then it was worth it!"

pstuart2• 13 years ago

The public will likely never be smart enough.

mtgx• 13 years ago

They always pick fringe cases that know the public would like, even if it's used for completely different things 99.9% of the time.

rayiner5• 13 years ago

It's hilarious, because kids don't actually ever get kidnapped in the U.S. (by strangers).

Thank you Anderson Cooper (http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/anderson.cooper.360/blog/200...).

Despite these huge numbers, very few children are victims of the kinds of crimes that so-often lead local and national news reports. According to NCMEC, just 115 children are the victims of what most people think of as "stereotypical" kidnapping, which the center characterizes thusly: "These crimes involve someone the child does not know or someone of slight acquaintance, who holds the child overnight, transports the child 50 miles or more, kills the child, demands ransom, or intends to keep the child permanently."

My mom is absolutely freaked out about our wife and I living in the city, because someone might kidnap our daughter. Because a crowded apartment building where hundreds of people can hear a child cry for help is so much less safe than an out-of-the-way suburban house when it comes to a crime that never happens.

38253• 13 years ago

I think what follows immediately deserves to be noted here as well. 115 is a very small number by itself but then over half of them return.

Of these 115 incidents, 57 percent ended with the return of the child. The other 43 percent had a less happy outcome.

qq662• 13 years ago

If the harm that a person suffers from their child being kidnapped and murdered is negative infinity, then even the smallest probability of it happening makes their expected harm from kidnapping negative infinity.

corresation4• 13 years ago

You say that kids don't actually ever get kidnapped (which is "hilarious"), then refer to some 115 children a year being kidnapped (where it must meet a list of conditions, and excludes the 50,000+ yearly who are temporarily abducted, often by sexual predators) as proof of your absolute statement.

You have some very confused notions of numbers.

And personally I find 115 children being abducted (in the more-than-a-day-taken-60-miles sense) about 115 too many (and it's simply incredible that the other poster observes that half "return", as if anything less than death is child's play).

Did you know that only three to five children are killed by lightning each year? Yet preventative efforts to avoid children being hit by lightning are extremely widespread. We all know to fear lightning.

rdouble• 13 years ago

Not that I think you need to worry about kidnapping, but in the city people are acclimated to ignoring their neighbors, whereas in small towns and exurbs there are a lot of nosey busybodies up in your business.

jivatmanx• 13 years ago

Yep, this is why "Stranger Danger" fear-mongering is counterproductive. The kidnappers are usually familiar, and Strangers are really one's greatest chance of help.

bradbatt• 13 years ago

"We would have that tool available to us, to look at that data and see if we can't find a possible suspect vehicle."

The concept of collecting and storing all sorts of data and information on everyone just in case someone bad does something is a flawed one.

The government is collecting all phone call information, numbers, location, duration, along with SMS, email, and who knows what else on everybody in order to have that data "just in case" a terrorist attack happens, so they can (possibly) track down the perpetrators.

Now we have police collecting license plate data, along with GPS coordinates, video and still cameras mounted all over cities that can easily allow for facial recognition, combined with the tracking of your phone as mentioned above. It's not a stretch to assume that if the government (NSA/CIA/FBI) wants to know where you are at any given moment, they know.

All this "just in case" one of the infinitesimally unlikely events such as a terrorist attack or kidnapping occurs. For the children. And because terrorism.

The potential for abuse is huge and the cost/benefit is not even close to worth it—unless the stated purpose for collecting the data is not the real one.

mabhatter• 13 years ago

85% of what people do is habit. So when they have a large set like this "habit" starts excluding people very quickly as they are just driving to common places. So if you are tracking somebody you dont know fleeing, they stick out in the numbers quickly... If you are tracking somebody you do know you can guess where they might be. Kidnappers and bank robbers aren't that smart when looking for hiding places, and you probably already have them tracked going there.

To a certain extent, all it really does is SUGGEST you belong or don't belong in any given location. There might be a murder in an alley, but data shows you go to a comic book store blocks away every week so you probably aren't involved. Generally the data is going to clear more people than it makes guilty.

Of course I'm a huge fan of Numb3rs and Criminal Minds that show this kind of stuff being used properly by honest people... Emphasis on HONEST people.

HPLovecraft• 13 years ago

http://www.aclu.org/files/FilesPDFs/ALPR/rhode-island/alprpr... haha its ok there are no records of anything anyway, im sure this is the same in other cities/towns

res0nat0r4• 13 years ago

It is uncomfortable, but you shouldn't ever have had an expectation of privacy when driving around in public with a licensed, regulated and marked vehicle.

Just because it can be done without much manual effort today vs. 50 years ago having people sit around town logging every car they see drive by doesn't mean really the privacy expectation has changed. Just because it is "scary" doesn't mean it is "illegal".

38253• 13 years ago

I do not mind people collecting data about me. I do think that we need to have a restriction that if you collect data about me, you have to share it with me. All of it. In a accessible manner, at least as accessible as you do in your reports.

Every day that you fail/delay to provide me those reports, you will pay me $100k in damages.

adestefan• 13 years ago

For what damages?

ianterrell2• 13 years ago

There is a significant difference between the expectation of privacy as a platonic ideal and the real life expectation of privacy.

For the former, you're of course right: not much has changed! The local police could have posted someone on every street corner to record every license plate that passed -- probably multiple people to account for traffic!

That's no different than cameras, in theory. You have no less privacy with cameras! But in practice, the police didn't do that (to that scale).

So, given that my expectations of privacy are not about logical possibilities, but rather about actual realities, they certainly have changed.

res0nat0r4• 13 years ago

The point is: just because it is easier doesn't mean the rules have changed. It is still and always has been legal for someone to track you driving around town, be that by paper and pen, Polaroid, or streetcorner mounted camera with wifi.

superuser2• 13 years ago

So why not make it illegal to record the location of a license plate, unless related to a specific traffic stop or target of a specific criminal investigation?

ANPR is an excellent system for finding stolen cars, fugitives, etc and responding to the hits immediately. The issue is archiving the data. So don't ban ANPR, ban the retention of license plate geolocation data without suspicion.

Shivetya• 13 years ago

I see these cars all over where I live. It really is no different than the meta data that the NSA is collecting and most likely we will see defense of the gathering using similar rebuttals, namely YOU have a right, the license plate/car/phone/database does not.

Apparently they want to use indirect collection or collection by private groups as somehow not falling under the 4th because of how it was assembled. I guess they could take all of a grocery stores purchase records and do the same, after all they aren't look at you directly under the guise of fixing health issues.

Eventually data, wherever it may exist, will have to land at the Supremes to declare how abstract it has to be before it is not subject to the Constitution. Based on past cases it may not bode well for us.

rayiner5• 13 years ago

It really is no different than the meta data that the NSA is collecting and most likely we will see defense of the gathering using similar rebuttals, namely YOU have a right, the license plate/car/phone/database does not.

You're mis-characterizing the rebuttal in both cases.

1) With metadata the rebuttal is that the Constitution refers to the "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects..." There is a legitimate argument that AT&T's records about when you used their network is not your papers or effects. You didn't create the record, AT&T did. You don't usually even have access to the information, AT&T does. It's not something silly like "the phone doesn't have a 4th amendment right."

2) The rebuttal for gathering information from cameras is that the 4th amendment has never extended to what the government can observe about you in a public place.

The 4th amendment doesn't mean "I have a right to have the government not track or monitor me without a warrant." It says exactly what it means: the police can't search your person or your house, your papers or effects, without a search warrant supported by probable cause. The farther you get from that plain language, the more tenuous your argument becomes.

Vis-a-vis the Supremes, at least Sotomayor has questioned whether it might be necessary to rethink at least the third party doctrine, which is the basis for (1): http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/the_data_question.... I don't think anyone any time soon would think about revisiting the rule for plainly visible activity in public spaces, which is the basis of (2).

jarrett2• 13 years ago

With metadata the rebuttal is that the Constitution refers to the "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects..." There is a legitimate argument that AT&T's records about when you used their network is not your papers or effects. You didn't create the record, AT&T did. You don't usually even have access to the information, AT&T does. It's not something silly like "the phone doesn't have a 4th amendment right."

You caused the record to come into being by making or receiving the phone call. No human intervention was required on the carrier's part. Your action triggered an automated response by a machine. The records are about you, were generated by your actions, and exist pursuant to a service contract you hold. To say it is not "yours" is to cherry-pick a certain definition of "yours:" one based solely on who holds the property rights. But there are other reasonable definitions of "yours." Ordinary English usage illustrates this. I could talk about "your records at the phone company," and nobody would find my turn of phrase the slightest bit odd, even though you don't own those records. It should be noted that Constitutional interpretation generally looks to the ordinary meaning of words first. Indeed, in Katz, the Court held:

"The existence of a property right is but one element in determining whether expectations of privacy are legitimate."

By a narrow reading of "their persons, houses, papers, and effects," phone data might not be your papers or effects. However, one ought not read the 4th amendment narrowly. The Supreme Court said in Griswold:

"The foregoing cases suggest that specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance. See Poe v. Ullman, 367 U.S. 497, 516-522 (dissenting opinion). Various guarantees create zones of privacy...These cases bear witness that the right of privacy which presses for recognition here is a legitimate one."

The cases cited in Griswold and those which cite it lay out a doctrine of broadly interpreting privacy rights provided by the 4th and other Amendments. Words like "their" should not be construed narrowly to limit a person's privacy rights.

Instead, we have the doctrine of "reasonable expectation of privacy." That is, where a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy, 4th Amendment protections come into play. For a telephone call, one should reasonably expect the phone company to generate logs, if only for billing purposes and aggregated, anonymized data analysis. However, one would not reasonably expect the sum total of their personal call history to be available to the government.

The rebuttal for gathering information from cameras is that the 4th amendment has never extended to what the government can observe about you in a public place.

This is not true. See, for example, US v Jones (the GPS tracking case). Jones strengthened the doctrine of "reasonable expectation of privacy," enshrining a new application in public places. I expect that we'll see a case about facial recognition, license plate tracking, or something similar where the government assembles a database of your movements in public. Alito's concurrence in Jones reads a prelude to these future cases:

"In the pre-computer age, the greatest protections of privacy were neither constitutional nor statutory, but practical. Traditional surveillance for any extended period of time was difficult and costly and therefore rarely undertaken. The surveillance at issue in this case—constant monitoring of the location of a vehicle for four weeks—would have required a large team of agents, multiple vehicles, and perhaps aerial assistance. 10 Only an investigation of unusual importance could have justified such an expenditure of law enforcement resources. Devices like the one used in the present case, however, make long-term monitoring relatively easy and cheap...But the use of longer term GPS monitoring in investigations of most offenses impinges on expectations of privacy. For such offenses, society’s expectation has been that law enforcement agents and others would not—and indeed, in the main, simply could not—secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period."

codyb2• 13 years ago

It's the indefinite retaining the data which concerns me.

I don't believe in everything in black and whites. Perhaps you collect data and save it for a fortnight and within that fortnight presumably any crimes which may have occurred within a certain area will be known and one might start looking for cars which were within the area. After a fortnight if nothing comes to pass, then presumably you really don't need the data from that locale. And the case might even be made for up to 6 months or a year since sometimes criminal investigations do take some time. Perhaps you make the case that within a fortnight an area needs to be declared a crime scene in order for the license plate collection data to be maintain for up to a year.

But then you save the data for the foreseeable future and who knows what happens with it. Sheriff Arpaio or some gung ho type like that decides computer programmers needed to be monitored and bam, every where I've been for years on end shows up on a map? That seems a little iffy even if the scenario seems far fetched right now (really far fetched since I don't have a license much less a car at this point in my life, but asides aside).

speedyrev2• 13 years ago

I think you quoted me and posted in the wrong place.

What about a system that had no data retention but could actively scan and compare to a list of plates that had warrants, Amber Alerts or BOLO's. Surveillance is only going to get easier with tech. Rules of use is what is important.

president• 13 years ago

NPR sure is getting a lot of material from Reddit these days

evan_• 13 years ago

You don't think the ACLU might have sent out a press release?

imgabe3• 13 years ago

So I assume they're also using them to exonerate people who otherwise don't have an alibi but could be falsely accused, right?

Right??

ihsw2• 13 years ago

Absolutely not, this metadata is useful as leverage for getting plea bargains out of people. Exonerating someone removes leverage.

rayiner5• 13 years ago

Withholding potentially-exonerating evidence from the defense in a criminal prosecution is a big no-no. Of course it happens on a regular basis, but if you've got the money to fight it nicely sets up the basis for a reversal of a conviction on appeal. See: http://www.totalcriminaldefense.com/news/articles/criminal-e....

This is not a search or privacy problem per se. Most situations where exculpating evidence is withheld aren't so clear-cut as photographic evidence of the supposed perpetrator's car in a different place. It's usually something more like a statement by a witness whose exculpatory potential is ambiguous enough that a prosecutor can rationalize it as irrelevant. Indeed, I think technology ameliorates this problem. It's hard for prosecutors to withhold DNA evidence, for example, because juries know its widely used and take it so seriously. If use of photographic evidence in prosecutions becomes common, I think it will be difficult for prosecutors to withhold relevant information from the defense without compromising their ability to get convictions from juries.

corresation4• 13 years ago

Your car being somewhere at a particular time is nothing more than an investigative hint. It proves neither guilt nor innocence.

imgabe3• 13 years ago

You are presumed innocent. That doesn't have to be proven. If your car is somewhere else, that could create a reasonable doubt.

swamp402• 13 years ago

Drudge headline just linked to a similar article: http://news.yahoo.com/driving-somewhere-theres-govt-record-1...

It says the police cars can tag the location of 7K plates during a normal shift without burdening the officers at all. Doesn't sound like too much, but multiply that by about 10,000 (Chicagoland) and two shifts and it adds up fast.

Also here in Chicago, they have an "Open Road Tolling" system that grabs your plate # on the fly at 80 mph.

Then they mail you a ticket if the plate # doesn't match with a valid iPass (wireless box in most everyone's car).

The thing is, there's no way to tell which car in a group has the iPass - so they must have to run every plate thru their database and match it up with valid iPasses.

That means the Illinois tollway is grabbing and analyzing say 20 million plates and timestamps every day.

If all that data is stored indefinitely - wow.

joering22• 13 years ago

I submitted it to HN minutes ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6057968

It seems to be a new scandal brewing. Surprises me how long it took. I recall in 2009 in Clearwater Florida when a Sherrif car had a gun-type looking devices pointing all 4 sides of the car. I asked what it was and he told me when he drives this thing picks up license plates and raises two alerts (if any): 1) if the tag is expired, OR if the owner of the car has a DL suspended/etc. If #2 then the picture of driver pops up and he visually checks if gender/look matches... if not, then he ignores the alert.

swamp402• 13 years ago

Good stuff. It's going to take a lot of outrage to get them to give up tools like that. Those are money makers.

DanBC2• 13 years ago

The UK has had automatic number plate recognition for years; first around Heathrow and the City of London (the financial district, the "square mile", not the entire London city) and then on motorways and elsewhere.

We even had a law change to specify the type of fonts you can use for licence plates.

I can understand it if they're catching uninsured drivers, or stolen vehicles. But I can't understand why they'd keep it for longer than a month. (I recognize that I'm on the lenient end when I say "a month" and that some people don't want the data to be kept at all.)

coldcode• 13 years ago

I wonder if one can use paint or some kind of odd wavelength light bulb to make recording the license # too blurred to use.

imgabe3• 13 years ago

If that could be done, someone would be doing it to foil speed cameras and red light cameras already.

berberous• 13 years ago

Well, they are. Google "red light spray" or something similar. I think it may be illegal in some jurisdictions.

bionsuba• 13 years ago

Your thinking to hard, just slap some mud on your plate and say you drive on a dirt road.

anywhichway• 13 years ago

Committing an illegal and regularly enforced crime of driving with an obstructed license plate seems like a poor plan to try and defend your right to an abstract sense of privacy.

riskable• 13 years ago

I don't think the police will have any empathy towards regular every day people (in regards to license plate databases) until private individuals start tracking the whereabouts of police 24/7 (and potentially posting the data online for everyone to see). Not only that but think about it this way: It doesn't cost that much for organized crime to put up cameras all over town for their own benefit.

BTW: Heaven forbid if one of these license plate databases ever gets leaked! It's not like the government will re-issue everyone new plates for free.

speedyrev2• 13 years ago

My nephew is a detective who just worked an Abduction/Murder case. The suspect was located (and later convicted) largely in part because of the license plate scanners. One thing you cannot argue, they are incredibly effective. My problem is the infinite retention of that data and the fact that many agencies use a private third party for the system. I think eliminating the scanners is a bad thing, but I would like to see some basic rules that would have to be followed.

ck2• 13 years ago

Yeah well knowing where EVERYONE is, ALL the time probably helps them know a lot of things, who is dating who, where you shop, where you work, etc. You okay with all that to "save the children" ?

If they were allowed to use xray scanners to scan every car on every street in a city to see who and what is inside - you okay with that escalation? Because they are doing it "near" borders (backscatter on vehicles) and who knows where they will take it next.

knowaveragejoe• 13 years ago

It's like you didn't read what he said:

My problem is the infinite retention of that data and the fact that many agencies use a private third party for the system. I think eliminating the scanners is a bad thing, but I would like to see some basic rules that would have to be followed.

TeMPOraL• 13 years ago

If they were allowed to use xray scanners to scan every car on every street in a city to see who and what is inside - you okay with that escalation?

I wouldn't, but mostly because x-ray'ing is harmful to health.

nodata• 13 years ago

See you next Tuesday.

Police May Know Exactly Where You Were Last Tuesday

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