The Alexandria Police Department is taking pictures of everyone’s cars

http://capitolcityproject.com/police-are-keeping-records-of-when-i-visited-my-girlfriend/

by danso • 12 years ago

78 51 12 years ago

rafekett• 12 years ago

troubling, but i can't see any way in which this is illegal on the part of Alexandria PD.

VLM• 12 years ago

How much do repo men pay for access to the license plate DB? So if he declines to pay his loan, the repo truck drives past his GFs apartment...

drdaeman5• 12 years ago

While I don't like mass surveillance (feels uneasy), I don't like the idea of forbidding someone to remember things they've seen (heard, received, observed - whatever verb's appropriate).

My belief is - if one wants privacy - they should park in the backyard (i.e. area restricted to general public), shield the license plates (if that's illegal while the vehicle's parked at appropriate place - it's another issue) from observers or do whatever seems reasonable to not emit information. If you don't emit anything, there's nothing to receive thus nothing to store - privacy problem ultimately solved. Otherwise, there's a tricky issue to recognize where lies the barrier between "that's okay" (say, neighbors notice a car and unconsciously recognize the pattern - one really can't complain about that) and "that's violation of my privacy."

Oh, and I presumed he parked in a publicly observable place, like a public parking lot or on a driveway just in front of the house or something like that. If PD'd would've used special hardware to peek into private areas that are inaccessible to a "naked eye" - that would be another (tricky) issue.

State keeping track of their citizens from their funding (taxes) is another issue, but it's not about privacy anymore.

jarrett4• 12 years ago

I believe the plates are recorded while driving as well, in most cases. By law, you must display plates while driving. The only way to opt out is to refrain from driving. Does that change your feelings on the matter?

drdaeman5• 12 years ago

This is like a law that forbid me from disguising myself (like wearing a mask) in a public places.

I can complain about such law, but can't really complain about others remembering my face - that would be unfair to others.

maerF0x02• 12 years ago

I like your point of emitters. I dont want to get slapped with a ticket for looking at an attractive woman in public. Her: "He looked at me", Me: "She's emitting beautiful light!"

bitJericho• 12 years ago

Rather than emitting, she'd be reflecting the light in a beautiful way.

jarrett4• 12 years ago

With whom are you disputing, though? Who's suggesting the type of law you mentioned? When people express concerns about surveillance tech, we aren't talking about one pedestrian looking at another pedestrian. It's not hard to imagine a world in which a) there are no mass license plate recording devices, and b) it's perfectly legal to look at another person on the street.

sirseal• 12 years ago

When it comes to the State, we have to actively limit its activities. Especially when it comes to indiscriminate information gathering. Don't you find it odd that there's no record of the real crimes -- homeless people fighting, gunshots, attempted burglary -- but there's the time and location information of this man's vehicle? Seems like the Alexandria PD has a clear bias in the types of information that they're interested in collecting and retaining.

drdaeman5• 12 years ago

That's right. Taxpayers money should be spent on a things that help taxpayers, not make problems for them.

But I feel that's only tangentially about the privacy - it's all about state-to-citizen relationships.

AndrewKemendo2• 12 years ago

Except there is a record of those crimes - and largely due to other persistent sensors like gunshot sensors that have been put into high crime areas [1]. This one individual was not involved in those activities so he did not see them in his FOIA request.

What you see with these types of sensors are easily deployable, fairly cheap, useful sensors that are doing what cops already do (license plate searches) only more quickly with the addition of geo-tagging.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunfire_locator

sirsar• 12 years ago

Would you be bothered if someone followed you daily on the sidewalk, noting your paths? I would.

Would it be any better if, rather than one person following you, it was one guy on every street corner, who collaborated to reconstruct the paths you walked, and kept a record?

For me, that would be just as offensive. Now consider that by collecting data points from every car, anywhere, the police can do this kind of tracking to everybody. I don't find that any better than hiring one stalker per citizen.

You remembering that you met me in a coffee shop wouldn't bother me. You following me everywhere certainly would.

randallsquared4• 12 years ago

I'm not the grandparent commenter, but your first example would indeed bother me, while the second wouldn't. The scenario of someone following me around holds worrisome import quite apart from the mere knowledge of what I'm doing or where I'm going (which I used to worry about, but tried to avoid worrying about after I realized that in a decade or two, there would be no way of knowing if someone had a camera (other than their eyes, of course...) pointed at me).

jack-r-abbit• 12 years ago

The first one would be a little bothersome... but as much (or more) from a personal safety aspect than a privacy aspect. I would feel just as uncomfortable if the person was just following me and not even recording my movements. The physical presence of some one and their close proximity all the time would make me nervous about physical harm coming to me.

The second one would be much less bothersome but I would still feel a little uncomfortable about it. Being singled out would be curious. And while it would not be the same person the whole time, we still have the physical presence and close proximity focused solely on me that would make nervous about physical harm.

So a third scenario: rather than one person following you, it was one guy on every street corner, who collaborated to reconstruct the paths everyone walked, and kept a record. This scenario is much more akin to that of the article.

I would hardly care. Sure there is still the physical presence but it is not focused solely on me. I would be much more at ease knowing that each person standing there, noting the paths of everyone that walks by, doesn't actually care about me individually. If they are not concerned about me then they are far less likely to cause me harm.

Parking enforcement has used License Plate Recognition tech for quite a while. They drive around and it records plate, location, time, etc. If your vehicle is in violation of the local parking limits, it sounds an alarm and they stop and issue you a ticket. They can also detect if your vehicle is in need of a boot/tow due to excessive tickets, etc. Just because they have records of where and when you parked, doesn't mean they are "tracking" you.

smacktoward2• 12 years ago

My belief is - if one wants privacy - they should park in the backyard (i.e. area restricted to general public)

Old Town Alexandria (http://www.visitalexandriava.com/about-alexandria/old-town-a...) is a very dense, built-up historic district. Because space is at such a premium there, lots of residences there are not going to have backyard or garage parking available; it's on-street parking or nothing.

(Source: I live in Alexandria, though not in Old Town -- that neighborhood is crazy expensive. Like, SF expensive.)

If you don't emit anything, there's nothing to receive thus nothing to store - privacy problem ultimately solved

We've assigned Officer Smith here to follow you around and make notes about what buildings you enter and exit, and when. He won't follow you into the buildings, of course -- we respect your privacy! He'll just be waiting there for you outside whenever you step out a door.

If this makes you uncomfortable, you are free to cover yourself in a tarp or plastic garbage bag whenever you go outside. Problem solved.

Right?

drdaeman5• 12 years ago

You have a point. A serious one.

Not sure, but I guess, the distinction here is active vs passive surveillance. If there's an attack on my privacy (i.e. a stalker or a bunch of ones targeting me) - that would be problematic, because I'm quite limited on (legal) options to stop that behavior.

If someone walks around the city and records everything they see, systematizing the collected data - well, we all do this. Our brains do this, our smartphones do this, some of the cars do this, and as tech progresses a number of examples would only rise. Technology just enhances our vision and memories, and I think it would be very bad idea to limit that.

Yet, I don't know the solution. I just say, that I believe "make it illegal to record things" is a bad option too - maybe not as bad as "make everyone wear garbage bags", but certainly not a good solution.

Added: I say that because I have somehow bad memory (medium-term one, like remembering dialogs after half an hour or faces of the people I met yesterday) and really happy that modern tech helps me to mitigate this issue. Obviously, I'm not thinking of spying on anyone, but I think having an ability to remember anything that happened around has a value.

oakwhiz• 12 years ago

In my opinion, "stop emitting information if you want privacy" is just as weak an argument as "stop spying on me by remembering information that you perceive." There is a continuum between privacy and convenience, and a certain amount of privacy must be given up in order to actually get things done. Mass surveillance takes advantage of the necessity of leaking information in order to control people. Taking extreme measures just to get a little bit of privacy should not be necessary - you should have a "reasonable" amount of privacy by default.

It is the intent and reasoning behind the collection of this information that is usually found to be objectionable, not the actual process of perceiving and remembering it. And the opposite applies here - just as a certain amount of information must be leaked in order to get things done, a certain amount of information must be spied upon in order to regulate things. It's all about balance.

andrewpi• 12 years ago

I don't like the idea of forbidding someone to remember things they've seen

There's a huge difference between a human, who can typically only remember a fairly limited amount of information, and a machine that is only limited by its hard drive capacity.

pessimizer2• 12 years ago

I don't like the idea of forbidding someone to remember things they've seen (heard, received, observed - whatever verb's appropriate).

The state is not people. The state is a fiction that we use to do things in the way that we've collectively decided is appropriate. We order it to forget things all the time e.g. illegally discovered evidence, juvenile criminal histories, things ordered struck from the record in court, etc.

Anthropomorphizing the state is dangerous.

mpyne• 12 years ago

And yet the courts have already affirmatively confirmed that the police are not required to "pretend not to see" something in public view, or that they saw in plain sight in the course of a legal search.

By the way, knowing what is normal for a neighborhood is very much in the definition of "good old fashioned police work" that I've seen trotted out around here before.

angersock• 12 years ago

You've hit the nail on the head--infringing on an individual's right to remember something is nuts, but requiring that group entities (governments, corporations, etc.) have certain forms of acute amnesia is quite reasonable.

One of the reasons for this is that most of those entities are not able to be reasoned with or to show empathy in any meaningful capacity--they'll bear stances which appear to be petty grudges for years, sometimes decades, because that's the sort of timescale they can operate on.

Intuitions for individuals do not and can not apply to organizations.

Loughla• 12 years ago

And that argument is what's wrong with surveillance in the US. There is a very drastic difference between someone remembering things they've seen and heard and a database full of points marking exactly when and where I have been in the last year.

Your argument of avoiding a barrier between what's okay and what isn't is good, but I argue the opposite of your first point. It's not that I'm emitting the information for you to take at your will, public or not. It's impossible to do anything at all without interacting with the public.

It's that you can now easily store, retrieve and correlate my information in an unprecedented way. That's bad. So very bad.

bri3d• 12 years ago

My belief is - if one wants privacy - they should park in the backyard (i.e. area restricted to general public)

You should read Kozinski's dissent in United States v. Pineda-Moreno: http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2010/08/12/08...

Kozinski makes a compelling argument that allowing police and federal agents to apply surveillance in publicly visible areas even though they're part of someone's curtilage disproportionately favors the rich.

Should we really grant privacy only to those who can afford gated communities, garages, or other barricades against the same state employees that are supposedly serving them?

danielweber• 12 years ago

Side note: mousing over an image should not make it harder to see

MichaelApproved• 12 years ago

Clicking on the images darken the whole page. Looks like they have a broken implementation of an image gallery. The page dims but the larger image doesn't appear.

zorpner• 12 years ago

For the curious, the EFF has a post on a similar situation in Los Angeles which addresses some of the legal implications of mass license plate data collection: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/03/los-angeles-cops-argue...

batmansbelt• 12 years ago

This is why I ride a bike. That way no one can take a picture of it!

DanielBMarkham• 12 years ago

I read recently that some startups are collecting this data and providing it back to police departments. So you could search on a license plate number and receive hits on every where and every time it was used. Of course, it's only available for LE and they have to promise not to talk about where they got the data from.

Just imagine a similar system using facial recognition and Google glass/FB/G+/Instagram/etc.

AndrewKemendo2• 12 years ago

There is an inherent conflict in the demands of the citizens. We all want to be kept safe from crime and have law enforcement and state protection actually keep us safe, vindicate us when falsely accused and resolve our case when we are hurt. We also don't want them to have data that they could misuse.

As this community knows well, you can't solve problems without data and data collection for policing historically was anecdotal and varied wildly by jurisdiction. beat cops would walk around and use their own internal sensors to take data and make correlations. This of course is subject to all the common human failings and would more often than not fail the community more than it helped - but it was rarely considered invasive.

So we have two options: Build and apply to our civic lives effective tools for persistent collection/analysis of public data and take the chance that oversight is improper or that the data will be misused. Or do we accept fewer resolved cases of homicide/speeding/kidnapping/parole etc... and have a higher probability that our PII is only kept within private companies?

Zigurd• 12 years ago

Most low-performing police departments, in terms of solution rates, have more serious problems than a lack of data.

Finbarr• 12 years ago

There is a precedent for this in the United Kingdom[1]. The nationwide Automatic Number Plate Recognition system (ANPR) tracks vehicles in real time.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police-enforced_ANPR_in_the_UK

zaroth• 12 years ago

How about the CCTV cams that are appearing at every single *^#% intersection in the Bay Area? Obviously they are recording everything and probably running the same license plate detection as well.

It's like someone (Homeland Security grants I assume) figured, we have all these mounting points already wired (traffic signals) might as well add a camera.

I figure the camera will just be built into the traffic signal in the future, and the whole unit will be IP addressable. Saves on having two different things to mount, and the light's probably already at the right orientation.

thomble• 12 years ago

Across the Potomac, DC also tracks plate information. They at least use this technology to track new DC residents that fail to register their vehicles with the District. I once received a "warning" because my car had been parked overnight on the street X number of times with VA plates. I was told to either register my car with the city or get an Out Of State Registration[1]. My girlfriend lived there at the time.

[1] http://dmv.dc.gov/service/registration-out-state-automobiles...

nateabele• 12 years ago

Obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc

(Summary: the job of a police officer is not to 'solve crime' -- it is to apprehend suspects and assist district attorneys in obtaining convictions; hence, if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, the more information they have about you, the greater the danger to your freedom & safety).

logfromblammo• 12 years ago

Machines are mindlessly obedient. The technology is not an actor here.

What matters is who controls the data. That person is the one effectively performing the surveillance. If you eliminate the force multiplier as a separate entity, what you see is that one or more Alexandria cops are ruthlessly hounding everyone that enters their city.

I presume that the collected data are not being published freely, probably using "ongoing investigation" and "officer safety" as a cover. I further presume that the data are being correlated and mined for the purpose of identifying criminals and assembling evidence against them, and the algorithms in use do not likewise search the records for exculpatory evidence for those who already stand accused.

The failing is not that cops are using powerful technologies to aid their work. The failing is that the police departments themselves have no technology remedy for their long-standing human failings. Rather than tracing a verifiable harm from victim to perpetrator, focusing on the facts of the case, and leaving matters of justice to the mechanisms of the courts, cops are increasingly filling quotas for their citations and encounters, punishing people on their own prerogative, and enjoying an asymmetric relationship with the public.

You want to watch us? We must ask qui custodiet custodes? Before training your cameras on the public, first point them at yourselves, and show us that you are trustworthy. Are cops prepared to confront the video evidence that they engaged a prostitute while on duty and then took a nap in their patrol car? Stop pretending that a smartphone camera is in any way equivalent to a gun. Before I am willing to tolerate in any way the trappings of the panopticon, every last cop out there, from bicycle patrol rookie to the city commander, should be willing to have a camera on his badge and uniform from the moment it is donned to the instant it is doffed, with an uncut record freely available at some point to the public.

Now, I wouldn't like having someone hanging over my shoulder all the time making sure I'm not reading HN at work, either. But sometimes you have to experience it personally before you can empathize with the person you intend to inflict that upon.

diminoten• 12 years ago

License plates were designed around identification. The whole point of having license plates is so the police know who your vehicle is registered to.

Combine that with the fact that you're driving around on publicly funded roads, and you find yourself without any right to privacy whatsoever. You're in public, the very definition of "not private".

Where your car goes on public roads isn't private, even if you want it to be. It never has been.

That being said, just because your car is somewhere doesn't mean you are. Any competent defense lawyer in a criminal case would point that out. In some states, traffic cameras can't be used to issue tickets unless the camera has a clear picture of the driver.

The Alexandria Police Department is taking pictures of everyone’s cars

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