U.S. Spies on Millions of Cars

http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-spies-on-millions-of-cars-1422314779

by dctoedt • 11 years ago

393 247 11 years ago

wsj.com

sehugg• 11 years ago

FWIW, you can search for the headline on Google News and read the full article from there.

ihsw• 11 years ago

The law-enforcement scanners are different from those used to collect tolls.

Much to the chagrin of our rent-seeking overlords, whom see speed traps and red-light cameras as a means of revenue generation rather than safety measure.

girvo• 11 years ago

Speed traps I'll grant you, but how are red light cameras not a safety measure?

robotkilla3• 11 years ago

Safety measure or not, red light cameras are a joke. Chicago's red light cam program is a failure.

Edit: I have to agree with the other commenter though - red light cams were meant to bring in revenue to the city of Chicago. They bought into the program by outsourcing to a third party company (big shock, most of chicago looks like the poster child for a corporation owned city). They're not making the money they expected on the deal though.

davepage• 11 years ago

The revenue stream tempts governments to reduce the yellow interval, which then decreases safety: http://www.copradar.com/redlight/

fnordfnordfnord6• 11 years ago

The part about how they are a complete scam? http://blog.motorists.org/illinois-red-light-cameras-scam/

sroerick3• 11 years ago

I first learned about automobile tracking from red light cameras here in Montana.

A company called RedFlex installed cameras here. They subsidized the installation cost in exchange for a cut of tickets.

RedFlex admitted to bribing city officials to get them to install cameras.

antimora• 11 years ago

Here is a link that avoids the paywall:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

brudgers• 11 years ago

Not for me.

osconfused• 11 years ago

this link is non functional for me on Mac Chrome.

solocshaw• 11 years ago

This does not work for me.

msoad• 11 years ago

This link is safer to say "always works"

https://www.google.com/#q=U.S.+Spies+on+Millions+of+Cars

Basically you can Google the title and click on first result to see it without limitations of a paywall

zaroth2• 11 years ago

Cool, HN is listed as the 2nd "News" result for that query.

coding4all• 11 years ago

You can use ref control to make it look like your the Google news bot https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/refcontrol/ .

stingraycharles• 11 years ago

Isn't it illegal according to Google to serve different content based upon the Googlebot's User-Agent ?

bdamm• 11 years ago

Worked for me, also Mac Chrome.

stegosaurus4• 11 years ago

Same deal in the UK with the national ANPR system (Automatic Number Plate Recognition).

Ostensibly to reduce the amount of uninsured/untaxed drivers on the roads.

Don't want to sit around in databases? Well, here's a nice list of just a few of the things you can't have:

Bank account; Car/motorcycle; Mobile telephone; Internet-connected computer; Credit/debit card; Visible face (oh, we might be safe there, for a few years)

Unless of course you're a criminal, in which case you can handily avoid a lot of this!

I used to think we could escape surveillance using technology. Fool's errand. We'd need an entire culture change. It's gone.

If blanket video coverage of public areas is fine, why not blanket audio coverage? Add in facial and audio recognition. Now consider you're running about with a microphone webcam combo in your pocket, the power and battery life of which will only increase.

I hate it with every ounce of my being, but I can't see a way out here. I can't see the 'line', any more.

woodman20• 11 years ago

There is no way to reverse this. Trying to cage this with paperwork will just lead to more of the same creative interpretations à la NSA. So the rulers don't feel the rules apply to them, big surprise. With that in mind, the futility of fighting the tide, what is the next step? As the ideal solution of reversal is unavailable, we need to go with harm reduction - but what is the harm that we would reduce? Most would say the harm is the loss of privacy, but I disagree. I believe the harm is further consolidation of power by those with the means to abuse it. So I would advocate for a democratization of all these spy programs. If the DEA can spy on us, we should be able to spy on the DEA. Any funding request for government programs should include a documented method of direct public access (not FOIA, operator level).

It is no mystery why the Constitution included the provision allowing citizens to arm themselves with the same class of weapons that the government possessed. The memory of tyrannical governance was fresh. Information is no different, if the government posses this information - so should the citizens.

isho• 11 years ago

+1, I totally agree. Easier said than done though.

tim333• 11 years ago

In principle it could be reversed politically by the government just saying no. In practice no one seems that bothered though.

joliv2• 11 years ago

Some things the public should not be able to spy on. Using the example of the DEA, we can't have cartels knowing the identities of the DEA's informers, or when and where they're planning to make a bust. We can't have our citizens' tax records getting out of the IRS. And public relations would break down if we can't keep our allies secrets, either. Our military's plans shouldn't be made known to the enemy, of course. Many secrets are kept for good reason—letting it all out indiscriminately just doesn't make sense.

click170• 11 years ago

America has a gum problem, we can all agree.

That said, I feel like the right to bare arms was included specifically for overthrowing oppressive governments (and in case the British came back?).

At what point does a government become sufficiently oppressive as to be overthrown by the people? Without defining that, I feel like government can just keep employing the "but terrorists" excuse and the overton window to keep stripping us of more and more of our privacy and rights.

alexqgb• 11 years ago

Well, there is a way actually. But first you need to restore the power of the vote so that legislators are accountable to the people and the people alone.

This means dismantling the five main pillars that are used to nullify, misdirect, or otherwise diminish the power of the vote - both a a signaling mechanism that members of the electorate can use to unify themselves, and as a reliably severe punitive tool that the electorate can use to avenge themselves when their "representatives" betray their interests. Listed in no particular order, they are

1. Gerrymandering (aka partisan redistricting) 2. Closed primaries 3. Private campaign finance 4. The "revolving door" that allows private industry to offer well-paid sinecures to public "servants" who have systematically betrayed the public's trust. 5. Myriad restrictions on ballot access.

It's important to recognize that while each of these pillars diminishes the power of the vote, the really insidious effect comes from their interaction. But those knock-on effects can all be stopped by addressing the fundamental - and fundamental anti-democratic - structures at their roots.

Eliminating any one of these abominations tilts the balance back in favor of the good guys. All of them together can be lethal to the ambitions of people who's own ambitions are anathema to a self-governing republic.

weaksauce• 11 years ago

There was an lapd officer(s) that were murdered within the last few days and the murderer used the waze app that shows the reported locations of speed traps and the government is already asking google to prohibit that information in some form. Knee jerk reactions to current events are never going to end well for openness of data.

themartorana3• 11 years ago

Who remembers when Cheney removed his house from Google Earth? All the while the NSA et al were building insane domestic surveillance systems.

That's pretty much when I understood what "oligarchy" meant and how very much there we were.

Snowden didn't help my mental picture of the country.

derefr3• 11 years ago

I was thinking recently that the best thing that could happen to Internet privacy would be for someone to build a Palantir clone with an open API, such that anyone could dox anyone else for $0.10 a pop. Being able to dox yourself (like Googling yourself, but PRISM-er) in real time would basically give you an OPSEC REPL, perfect for figuring out how to reduce your exposure.

zaroth2• 11 years ago

The only way within the system is I guess the Supreme Court. They have already laid a framework establishing that tracking requires a warrant, even if it's just making the police's job more efficient and it's data they can get from a tail.

If the license plate tracking gets to that point within metropolitan areas (presumably where cameras are most dense) or they start doing it from blimps or whatever, at least there is precedence for striking it.

It's not going to stop the collection but it should at least prevent the data being used against you in court. Of course, parallel construction. Sigh...

tomphoolery• 11 years ago

Much like the Constitution you mentioned, I feel we need some sort of document that explains the intentions behind surveillance and the limitations by which it can be legally used. We have no problem upholding the bill of rights, so why would it be hard to create a set of guidelines for future regulation of surveillance? Making it open is not a complete solution (though it's still a good idea), because we're still not setting any limitations as to how this information can be legally used. We need to do more to protect the rights of the citizens involved.

People like Edward Snowden have said surveillance can be used for good purposes. For example, fast forward and imagine auto insurance companies using this traffic monitoring data: Instead of structuring their prices based around age/gender/racial/class discrimination, they can use actual statistics to determine a little more about how safe someone is driving. Or instead of civil engineers having to waste time, money and other resources doing traffic studies...what if they could see the effects of their work in real-time? I think this technology could be used for very good purposes if there was just some transparency and rules surrounding it.

AnthonyMouse4• 11 years ago

There is no way to reverse this.

It's easy to reverse some of this. If they're recording license plates and they or someone else will do it regardless, then stop having license plates. The justification for having them doesn't really apply to self-driving cars anyway.

Your argument seems to be that you can't effectively prohibit something that technology makes practical. That clearly isn't the case -- the constitution has been preventing police from searching your home without a warrant since 1789, even though they absolutely do have the operational capability to do that.

More to the point, even if they're not prohibited from spying, as long as we're not prohibited from defending against that spying we haven't lost. Encryption works. Tor works. In many cases the lack of prohibition on spying would be irrelevant if not for the existing prohibitions and impediments to strong anonymity, as with regulations on digital money transfers.

What's interesting is that your conclusion is still mostly right. Government secrecy is the cancer of democracy. But governments being transparent to their people in no way requires people to be transparent to their governments.

orbifold3• 11 years ago

This kind of defeatism is not helpful. Through history people were able to eventually overthrow much more brutal oppressors. The kind coercion used in western societies might appear to be more effective, but there is no reason to think that direct political action could not work. When it happens, like in the case of the occupy movement, you can see by the media reaction, how uncomfortable it is for the powerful.

Your suggestion of a democratization of spy programs is actually one of the premises of "The Circle", the book is meant to paint a dystopian future.

stainednapkin4• 11 years ago

You are wrong. As citizens we can grant and revoke government powers at will. Cutting off or significantly curtailing their revenue would have a similar effect.

EDIT: There would need to be a concomitant cultural change as well. As it stands folks are not aware of or engaged with what their government is doing.

Even if we replaced every government official today, it could quickly devolve back to its current state.

spenvo• 11 years ago

Thought experiment: if gov programs were forced to be transparent, would they be any less brazen?

Not at this rate. I think officials see the Snowden-fallout and say, "hey, that wasn't so bad. the public barely cares. Yo Comey, hit the press & equate encryption to child abuse; we can win this narrative." Lack of transparency is certainly an issue, but i'd say the bigger one how to make sense of this information to the public.

TeMPOraL3• 11 years ago

It is no mystery why the Constitution included the provision allowing citizens to arm themselves with the same class of weapons that the government possessed.

It's worth noting that no longer do citizens have the ability to arm themselves with "the same class of weapons" as the government. Unless you're willing to sell APCs and cruise missiles to private parties, there's no way a rebellion can outgun country's military.

mikegioia• 11 years ago

I agree with you that the fight for privacy seems insurmountable, and the sacrifices (that you mentioned) far too great. But I think the solution lies not in sacrificing the conveniences, but in creating enough isolation between each service to reduce/remove any correlating.

blhack• 11 years ago

You could move out of the city.

greeneggs• 11 years ago

A direct attack on this surveillance technology might be a losing battle. But what about passing laws to mitigate its effect, and possibly in the long run help fight it? Two examples:

1. A law requiring the government to delete this data after a certain amount of time.

2. Legal penalties for abusing this data. Perhaps standards for how the data must be protected.

themartorana3• 11 years ago

The problem is even prescribed penalties against authority figures are rarely enforced. There are a few low-level people in jail for torture of prisoners, but not one administrator. Bush and Cheney should have been hauled before The Hague, much as they would have demanded of any leader of any other country that had unilaterally broken the Geneva Convention, but Obama wanted to "look forward," not backward.

There is/was almost zero prosecution of individuals involved in the global financial collapse of 2008. Occupy Wall Street protestors, on the other hand, were beaten, arrested, maced, and so on.

Rules against authority figures in this country are for show at best. Didn't used to be that way, but here we are.

visarga3• 11 years ago

I used to think we could escape surveillance using technology. Fool's errand. We'd need an entire culture change. It's gone.

True. Network effects negate the advantages of encryption. You can't use TOR to hide when posting to FB, in other words.

spain• 11 years ago

I used to think we could escape surveillance using technology. Fool's errand. We'd need an entire culture change. It's gone.

I seem to remember one of the Pirate Bay founders said something along those lines. Not even because it's "already lost" but because we need to start treating the cause and not the symptom. Yeah it's great that we can use encryption to avoid government snooping for now, but how long will that be feasible? The long-term solution would be to stop them from doing it in the first place.

toadi• 11 years ago

"Unless of course you're a criminal, in which case you can handily avoid a lot of this!"

Actually it's even more serious. If you try to avoid it it's a criminal act and your labeled as a criminal. To be very honest I'd rather move to a remote place getting away of this evolution.

onion2k• 11 years ago

To be very honest I'd rather move to a remote place getting away of this evolution.

Honest question: What's stopping you?

A huge number of people say they'd readily give up life in a nation that infringes their privacy for a different life away from prying eyes, but very, very few people actually bother to do it. There are plenty of nations where surveillance is still at the 'none' level, beyond a few paper records for things like passports and car registration. And generally they're quite cheap to live in and have nice weather. So why are you still living in the apparently awful conditions where you are now?

Could it be that privacy is actually much less important to you than ready access to, say, a good internet connection?

JonCox5• 11 years ago

I sometimes feel the Hacker News crowd are a bit out of touch with the rest of the population.

Here in the UK most people I know feel safer with surveillance, it's used primarily to keep law and order.

We don't live in some authoritarian state where it's used for nefarious means, it's used to keep the public safe.

And seriously, why would you care if you're sitting on a database? What difference does it make to anything?

And I want to know when this mythical time was when we all had total privacy? I don't understand what bothers people so much about a person in a CCTV monitoring station looking at them sitting on a bus, or a spook reading the emails I send to my parents. Honestly, no-one cares.

radiorental• 11 years ago

"it's used primarily to keep law and order."

Except when it's not. No one disagrees the advantages afforded to us with access to data. However with great power comes great responsibility and our leaders, including the institutional powers behind them, invariably show a lack of the latter.

"Honestly, no-one cares."

That is patently untrue. People who understand the disadvantages and pitfalls of unfettered access to data care very much and fight for our rights even if we are too busy to make it a priority in our lives. The EFF have made it their job to care for example.

josephlord3• 11 years ago

It doesn't make a difference until someone trawls the databases and can reconstruct much of your life. Also even if it doesn't matter to you don't you want journalists and lawyers free from communication (and who they contact) surveilance?

I'm actually fine with a CCTV operator in a monitoring station viewing the feeds. I'm also OK with the recordings being kept a short time in case they are needed to investigate something not spotted at the time. What I'm not comfortable with is them being kept more than a month or so. CCTV footage kept long term may be linked with Face recognition for detailed and personal tracking.

Likewise with the ANPR, I would be OK with it kept and accessible for a month or so (although I think a judge should approve searches both on a particular event (time and location) and for searches on a particular number plate.

We may not yet live in a authoritarian state but can you rule out one occuring in the next 50 years? What if legal and reasonable things today are outlawed, gay rights roled back and they search the ANPR for people who may have frequented gay bars or the archived communications data for anyone who used Grindr.

In my view the collected knowledge is more dangerous than the terrorists to a free society and oversight and limits on retention are required.

You are right though that the majority of the public do not feel this way yet. That doesn't mean we shouldn't oppose the surveilance where not fully justified and try to educate them.

I would also note precisely what you said "people I know feel safer with surveilance" and while I think you may be right I'm really not sure how much safer they actually are.

realusername• 11 years ago

I does not matter until you are a journalist investigating on some issues with the country, it happened multiple times.

ionised• 11 years ago

Don't presume to speak for people in the UK.

I'm from the UK and I absolutely, utterly disagree with what you are saying, most of which is baseless.

There have been abuses, there are corrupt intentions at work and there most certainly are people who do not think this level of surveillance is a good thing.

tsenart• 11 years ago

"Innocent data does not exist, it is only a matter of the right time and the wrong hands to turn it into a weapon." - https://www.trilightzone.org/board/viewtopic.php?t=3190

stegosaurus4• 11 years ago

The key point is interpretation and use of the data.

I don't particularly mind CCTV coverage of cities, if we still live in 1970 and technology limits it to essentially manual viewing of feeds to follow criminal suspects. In that world, ordinary citizens walking around a city centre are items of data that are discarded forever as soon as the tape reels run out. Even if they're kept, the volumes of data involved are so huge that they're effectively lost in time anyway.

The world we live in today is not that world. We are not far from being able to use facial recognition to track the whereabouts of every single citizen and save it forever, indexed along with the video recording of them at the time. We already have the capability to do that using cellphones. We can save the entire life history of individuals using these records and collate them into a viewable form near-instantly.

As I alluded to in my earlier post, the way we're going it's not a huge leap to imagine voice recognition allowing for phone calls to follow suit. Why is voice recognition important? Because it turns weeks and weeks of trawling through transcripts into a search query with instant results.

It's a completely different ball game. It's permanent, searchable, indexable super-fast memory. 'Forgetting' becomes obsolete.

In the old world of tape CCTV cameras, my neighbours knew more about me than the Government. Now, it's almost certainly the other way around, and if not, only because they've decided not to type 'stegosaurus' into the Big Database of Everything.

Squarel• 11 years ago

I am less worried about the government agencies as a whole having my data, I am more worried about so random person who works there taking a dislike to an individual, and making their life hell with the access they have.

throwawayaway• 11 years ago

I think making access to records of you, paper, video etc could be made a legal right. If somebody is filming in an area, they are required to provide you access to the footage. If somebody has accounts of yours, same deal.

If someone is logging your access to a something, they are required to provide you with the logs on request.

I think Europe at least would go for it. In Japan telephone cameras are required to make a clicking sound. This is an extension of the concept.

jakeogh• 11 years ago

How long until the propaganda about "e-plates" starts?

DanielBMarkham5• 11 years ago

So the mailman remembers everyone you've ever sent or received mail with. The DOJ remembers every time your car pulls in front of a police vehicle with a LPR. The NSA is tracking what people you call, when, how long, and where you are when you call them.

For the life of me I do not understand why both major parties aren't having conniption fits right now. Are these the same parties that, on a bipartisan basis, told Nixon to get lost? Shut down some of the intelligence community's overreach in the 70s? Impeached a U.S. President for lying under oath?

Both parties over the previous 50 years have taken strong stands -- both separately and together -- in regards to strong oversight of privacy and freedom. Would Reagan have put up with this? Carter? Ike? JFK? It's inconceivable. During those times, yes, there was plenty of illegal mucking around -- but wholesale bulldozing of citizen's privacy? It's something from a dystopian sci-fi novel of just 15 years ago.

Surely this has to come up there somewhere near as important as all those other political scandals. Surely it would be a popular measure. But instead, what I'm seeing is somebody trying to introduce a bill to nibble around the edges, then others adding amendments so that the bill to reduce NSA spying actually increases it. It's like they're being incentivized to go in exactly the wrong direction.

It just doesn't make sense to me. There is some missing piece to this puzzle. When I see guys like Hayden, with his cocky attitude; there's something he knows that I don't know, and it's not that AQ is some kind of clear and present danger. It's something else. (Sorry to sound so mysterious. I'm truly at a loss.)

stainednapkin4• 11 years ago

I think it's a phenomenon worth examining. There isn't a simple answer. Part of it must be changes in American culture. What those changes are is debatable.

jsprogrammer• 11 years ago

The "problem" is that it is increasingly easy to assemble these databases and to update them in real time. If a government agency isn't doing it, a corporation could be (and some are, for certain pieces of data), and soon (if not now) an individual or loose collection of individuals could achieve nearly the same results.

We might need to embrace it, make everything transparent and collaborative, and figure out how to make use of the information to create a state that is better than what currently exists.

DanielBMarkham5• 11 years ago

Thank you. Just to clarify, even though I'm a libertarian, this isn't a "Big Gummit" problem. If DOJ wasn't doing this, Yellow Cab would. Or Uber. Or the guys who build traffic lights. The data is simply too valuable to ignore.

This is a tech problem. We created this, all while saying something like "Yeah, but all that ethical and philosophy stuff isn't really anything I need to worry about. What I need are eyeballs"

The government takes the blame in many cases because they hold all the trump cards -- they can take the data from anybody that's collecting it. They can also send you to jail, which commercial providers cannot directly do (yet). But the problem is with the tech. We have met the enemy and he is us.

a3n2• 11 years ago

Probably something like regulatory capture is at work, but here it's the overseen agencies that have captured Congress.

javajosh3• 11 years ago

The USA is automatically photographing millions of cars and putting the data in a giant database used by all law-enforcement.

It reads like the premise of a dystopian science fiction novel.

I can't help but guess that the reaction is going to be a big shoulder shrug, because, to but it bluntly, things aren't that bad for most people. If you are white, have a good job, follow the law, and make sure to richly kiss ass if and when you come in contact with the police, life in the USA is rich, full; it's like heaven.

If I have heaven, am I going to risk it just because of some law enforcement techniques which are only questionable in the abstract?

DanielBMarkham5• 11 years ago

You may be on to something there. I wonder, however, how people are going to reconcile what the government is doing now with all of those previous works of fiction? It's going to have to add up to something -- a narrative must be formed. Were those just the halcyon days of yore? And now we've somehow "grown up" to face the realities of a scary world?

Even more troubling, people are people, and when this is seriously abused -- and my money says it'll happen within the next 20 years -- how are people going to explain it all away?

I am left with the troubling thought that we are creating for ourselves a dystopian society never dreamed of even by sci-fi writers. Rome had nothing on this, nor does North Korea. The attention a known dissident would receive in former East Germany is a cakewalk compared to the kind of surveillance we're giving each citizen who's guilty of nothing. The only thing we're waiting for is the logical and natural corruption of large systems of people to take place.

jkaunisv13• 11 years ago

Um, I really don't think it's at East German Stasi-levels. Known dissidents were gaslighted, had objects in their homes moved around, and had informants reporting on them in their apartment buildings/family/workplace.

It's bad, it's dystopian, but it doesn't seem to be THAT bad yet.

javajosh3• 11 years ago

how people are going to reconcile what the government is doing now with all of those previous works of fiction?

I don't think we should over-estimate how widely read those works of fiction actually are, so there may not be a reconciliation. This, reality, is literally the first time some people have thought about the implications of mass surveillance with modern technology. SF geeks are, once again, ahead of the curve. :)

Movies like Minority Report are good primers for the concept of a panopticon. But I must have read 10's of stories involving panopticons in Analog and F&SF on all sides of the issue, in all variants. I remember a particularly good one involving how to get away with murder in a panopticon society. Iain Banks' The Culture with it's benevolent, quite desirable panopticons (the Minds).

Oddly, I don't remember any stories that remind me of what's going on now, which is a battle between those who want to protect security at any cost, and those who simply don't trust the government, any government, with the kind of power necessary to even come close to the level of protection they seem to be aiming for, which is total.

sliverstorm3• 11 years ago

To put it even more bluntly, automatic license plate scanning doesn't really seem to have been bad for anybody, aside from people on the lam.

Though I am open to examples to the contrary.

a3n2• 11 years ago

This would seem to be a great database for the police to watch for juicy civil forfeiture targets to stumble through their jurisdiction, to seize a car or its possible contents.

How would they know that you have good stuff inside the car? Other databases.

angersock2• 11 years ago

This is the sort of apparatus that, once installed, lies dormant until one day it is called into action and springs shut, clamping down on freedom.

Just because they're building the gallows slowly and using such wonderful rope doesn't make the eventual hanging any less troublesome.

EDIT:

You know, 70 years ago today the Red Army found out what could be done with good record keeping and decent surveillance, and at what scale.

Imagine, just imagine, if you could type your favorite demographic into a terminal, get a list of everyone fitting that and some other criteria, and then a list of addresses and doors to knock on.

Mankind and government has never done well with such power.

r00fus• 11 years ago

If you are white, have a good job, follow the law, and make sure to richly kiss ass if and when you come in contact with the police, life in the USA is rich, full; it's like heaven.

Sure, until any of the above changes. Or you piss off the wrong person with connections. Some of which you may have little control over.

And to be honest - to not be raked over the coals simply to exercise my right to freedom of movement is not exactly "heaven" to me, it's the basics of a free society based on laws.

javajosh3• 11 years ago

Don't mistake my description for advocacy - heaven should not be for so few, nor should it be so judgmental and so brittle.

As for your comments about movement - try to keep some perspective! While the TSA is an icon of everything wrong with our security climate (security theater, irrational assessment of risk, irrational assignment of resources, and a banal humiliation meted out to those who can't afford to skip the lines) it is, at least theoretically, under our control. The next President could dismantle the whole thing (although I'm not sure what statutory restrictions there are - certainly the President and Congress could change things if they wanted).

No one wants to be the one to dismantle the TSA, because when the next attack happens (not if, when) they'll get the blame.

ulfw• 11 years ago

If you are white, have a good job, follow the law, and make sure to richly kiss ass if and when you come in contact with the police, life in the USA is rich, full; it's like heaven.

How exactly does this sound like heaven? Sounds incredibly restrictive and authoritarian to me. Always make sure you're not saying or doing the wrong thing. What happened to 'land of the free; home of the brave'?

treelovinhippie2• 11 years ago

It's happening in Australia too. I spoke to a CEO of a company here a few years ago which provides software and services to the government and RTA/RMS. There are cameras setup under overpasses which automatically take photos of each individual car and it's passengers.

In this particular incident their company was tasked with processing all of those photos to identify/track a guy who had murdered his wife and was on the run. Sure enough the system had snapped a pic of him driving, with his dead wife in the passenger seat.

A good use of the tech in that scenario, but I'm sure it's being used for mass surveillance as well.

ryan-allen2• 11 years ago

Which murder case was this in particular? Do you have a link to the news article?

treelovinhippie2• 11 years ago

No idea sorry. I was just chatting with this CEO at a networking event back sometime in 2011-2012. I'd been playing with the face.com api for facial recognition and he was interested in using it to automatically blur faces in these photos of car passengers. Being told that those cameras under overpasses were taking and storing photos of every car that passes by really stuck with me.

Sevrene2• 11 years ago

A few years ago NSW Police had several cars fitted with Automatic number plate recognition and after a year of use they already had read more license plates than people living in that state.

I don't necessarily mind police using this for their benefit, but not long ago we didn't have all this technology and information so easily available. So there must be oversights and appropriate usage, or we are just giving them unfettered access. Warrants should have to be obtained to get this sort of information, I think.

ChuckMcM3• 11 years ago

I always found it much more interesting to consider that smart stop light sensors could read the RFID tags that are required for tires [1]. You can change your plates but how often do you change your tires?

[1] http://www.rfidjournal.com/articles/view?10880

IvyMike• 11 years ago

I dunno if I'm gonna change my tires but I imagine if I didn't want to be tracked it would be not too difficult to smash/electrocute/burn the tags into nonfunctionality.

delbel• 11 years ago

Its extremely unfortunate that if you were to use an arc welder near your tires, the RFID tag may no longer work properly.

zevyoura• 11 years ago

How do you do that if they're embedded in the rubber material?

ryan-allen2• 11 years ago

Tyres have RFID tags in them??! What an unusual thing to put RFID tags in. I wonder what other common items could have tags in them that people are generally unaware of.

I'm quite in to cars and I had NO IDEA this was a thing.

robotkilla3• 11 years ago

I was also unaware of this. That said, RFID chips are used for inventory systems. The inclusion in a tire is most likely innocuous and doesn't seem that unusual to me.

acveilleux• 11 years ago

Owners of commercial vehicle fleet trying to manage the timely replacement of tires would welcome the ability to scan their vehicles and know the serial numbers of the tires. That would let them track age and make sure they're all replaced in a timely manner. Or switched to winter tires where it makes sense to do so (like Quebec, where it's the law to have winter tires after Nov 15.)

ChuckMcM3• 11 years ago

Yup, embedded right into the rubber. There are a couple of reasons for this, one is to provide serial numbers which allows you to 'age' the tire. Older tires are less reliable than fresh tires and there are laws in states like California that disallow selling "old" tires as new. You can read the tag and see when the tire was made. The sensors are not used to indicate inflation as far as I know that is a completely separate system. When they were first proposed, some folks showed they could be read from side of the road although that was unreliable. Reading them from the roadbed itself however was quite reliable as you ended up, worst case, with the tag being one wheel diameter away from the reader, and they were spec'd to be readable like that as folks doing inventory on a stack of tires did not want to rotate the tires in the stack. The last set of tires I 'read' (to show this off to a disbelieving friend) had a 18 digit serial number and a 6 digit date code. I'm sure there is some IEEE standard now for what your tire should report.

kxo• 11 years ago

TPMS sensors or RFID tags?

yaddayadda• 11 years ago

According to the linked article - RFID. They are physically embedded in the tires during the production process and intended for inventory management.

Zombieball• 11 years ago

Doesn't that average consumer change their tires more frequently than their license plate over the lifespan of their car?

I ask as your question seemed a bit strange to me.

I am not sure if you are alluding to the fact that individuals trying to evade the law wouldn't know to change their tires, or if car licensing & insurance is much different than I imagined in the US (and individuals get a new license plate each year or something crazy).

Edit: also thanks for the link! I really had no idea RFID was hidden in tires! Makes me wonder what else they are hidden in...

ChuckMcM3• 11 years ago

   > Doesn't that average consumer change their tires more
   > frequently than their license plate over the lifespan
   > of their car?

Yes, of course. And the RFID tag is really not helpful outside of inventory as far as I can tell. When they started this project I expected something like the microwave tags they glue inside a DVD case to detect shoplifting that you could remove from the tire innards before you mounted it. But nope, its embedded in the tire material.

sliverstorm3• 11 years ago

You don't normally get new plates often, but you can if you want (report them lost or stolen and pay ~$20), and it is also rather easier to steal someone else's plates than their tires.

gcb02• 11 years ago

that is moronic. it is yet another point of failure on the tire!

a rfid label on the inside of the tire would work exactly the same and not compromise the tire structure.

kevin_thibedeau• 11 years ago

I've been mulling ideas to defeat ANPR without breaking state laws. The simplest may be to use a tilted/warped surrounding frame that interferes with the skew correction of the captured plate. Another thought is to project bright infrared patterns to disrupt unfiltered B&W cameras.

stegosaurus4• 11 years ago

In the UK, some police cars have the technology integrated so that officers can pursue uninsured drivers.

I suspect if your plate failed to read you may well end up being pulled over - not sure on the punishment.

The obvious solution of using another car's plate is defeated by noticing that a car appears to be driving on opposite ends of the country simultaneously :D

SkyMarshal• 11 years ago

Another way is travel by other means, eg taxi, bus, subway, train, bike, etc.

stegosaurus4• 11 years ago

UK perspective again, though may be useful for a possible glimpse into the future:

In London, cash is no longer accepted on the bus. Same deal for subways. The smart card (Oyster) is purchasable without ID but not disposable without showing ID and a deposit is charged. Paper travelcards are available at much higher cost per journey.

Smaller towns have cash bus tickets :)

Taxi may be viable but it's a matter of chaffing; are you hailing, or calling a private hire company/using Uber? The former is far more expensive here and also not really viable in many cities.

The train is also drastically more expensive unless you buy advance tickets online (on the day tickets can be obscene, hundreds of pounds for a 200 mile journey).

Bicycle is viable, for now.

Basically, most methods are trackable, there just might be levels of indirection. Buying a ticket online or using a bank card is just an algorithm away from entering the 'log where you are' zone.

But then, we're all carrying cellphones right? :D

josaka• 11 years ago

Custom plates: 8BB8 8BB8.

herbig• 11 years ago

http://xkcd.com/1105/

adrr• 11 years ago

Probably could use the same technologies used to defeat lidar speed enforcement. Active jamming with high powered IR emitting LEDs or covering the plate with an IR absorbing lacquer or film.

ewams• 11 years ago

Repo-groups use this already. Police cars have them too.

http://www.popsci.com/article/technology/scan-artist

TheLoneWolfling• 11 years ago

One could potentially try to exploit the high framerate of such cameras.

(For example, imagine 10 LEDs arranged so that each LED illuminates 1/10th of the license plate, where 1 LED is on at a time. If the frequency is high enough, to human eyes it'll appear as though the entire plate is illuminated equally, but any photo will have one spot (or two spots) illuminated much more than the others.)

Torgo2• 11 years ago

As far as I know, in every state there are laws preventing you from either covering your license plate with something, or from using any sort of active defense mechanism. I have seen people experiment with reflective letters all around their license plate that are then detected by ANPR, resulting in it unable to determine what the real plate numbers are. This would seem to be legal. I suspect you could even make them reflective to IR while being invisible to the naked eye so your car wouldn't look like crap.

oaf357• 11 years ago

Because DMV databases weren't enough? No... We need to know where all those cars are. Come on.

morgante• 11 years ago

I kind of assumed this technology had always existed. Nearly every crime movie I've ever watched included a scene where they mentioned picking up the criminal's plates on the highway.

iamdanfox• 11 years ago

I had thought that ALPR data would be quite a very tool for detectives, but a related article [1] is quite disparaging about their use in Vermont. Apparently in 2013, for a ~$1m investment, 106 queries were made resulting in just 3 cases of useful information.

I think combining each states' databases as described in the WSJ will actually improve this number and is actually a prudent decision.

1: http://digital.vpr.net/post/license-plate-scanners-raise-pri...

marknutter• 11 years ago

What about motorcycles?

harry82• 11 years ago

Theory: This is actual news, people are shocked. So we haven't got apologists because they'll just look ridiculous. The follow up stories will be full of apologists once that shock wears off. It's just sad to watch the utterly relentless trashing of the constitution and the rule of law. Get out and vote! (for either another Clinton v another Bush?)

dnm• 11 years ago

I first encountered these checkpoints in New Mexico and Texas this summer. They're really kind of interesting. It looks like a truck weigh station, except the interstate lanes are closed and everyone is forced to exit. They stop everyone at the checkpoint. They have some kind of terminal under a hood, but the officer (C&BP) looked at the terminal, asked me what country I'm from (USA) and sent me on my way (I'm white, and so were all of my passengers). The license reader cameras were obvious and about 4 car lengths from the terminal/stop sign. There's a separate line for trucks and busses. I was stunned the first time I saw one driving from Albuquerque to Las Cruces south on I-25/US-85. It was only on the northbound side, about 40 miles north of Las Cruces. It was obvious what it was. I encountered others on US-70 and I-10 in TX. Same drill at every one. I was never stopped by the officer for more than 15 seconds.

desdiv• 11 years ago

What you encountered was probably a C&BP interior checkpoint[0].

Whenever DHS apologists use the "air travel is a privilege, not a right" line, this is what I point them to. Between random C&BP highway checkpoints and TSA patrols on Amtrak, harassment-free travel of any form seems to be a privilege nowadays.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Border_Patrol_int...

rdtsc• 11 years ago

Basically anything you couldn't do in 1700s is a priveledge. Driving -- privelage, flying -- priveledge, getting on Amtrak -- they have TSA there too now.

"Arms" are hunting shotguns, pistols. Can't own fully automatic ones, or rocket launchers or fighter planes.

Drones will be illegal soon as well probably.

Basically you can get on your horse and start traveling through the country roads and woods, besides that you need to have "papers".

javert• 11 years ago

In your case I'm preaching to the choir, but this might help:

There is only one fundamental right, and it is to not have force initiated against you. (Why? Simply because that is in the self-interest of each rational adult human.)

Ergo, the government cannot properly stop you from air travel, moving about freely in the country, etc.

deathanatos• 11 years ago

Thanks for that list. A family member was recently stopped at one of these; I'm amazed there are so many. (I was also stopped once on a Greyhound bus, I think by CBP; they asked each person "are you a citizen?" — on a bus ride that was entirely within the US, of course. This was a few years back.)

"air travel is a privilege, not a right"

Travel is a right. It's a constitutionally granted right.

I find the whole argument that interfering with the travel of every single person on a single _particular_ mode of travel is somehow constitutional a bit vacuous. What about that mode of travel is so special? (AFAICT, "safety"). That the government is also interfering with road travel is ridiculous.

Travel, within the United States, is a constitutional right, one that has been upheld by the Supreme Court (see [1] and [2]): "Since the Constitution guarantees the right of interstate movement…"; the decision in [2] cites even earlier [3] Supreme Court cases that asserted this right.

  This Court long ago recognized that the nature of our Federal Union and our
  constitutional concepts of personal liberty unite to require that all citizens
  be free to travel throughout the length and breadth of our land uninhibited by
  statutes, rules, or regulations which unreasonably burden or restrict this
  movement. That [394 U.S. 618, 630]   proposition was early stated by Chief
  Justice Taney in the Passenger Cases, 7 How. 283, 492 (1849):

  "For all the great purposes for which the Federal government was formed, we are
  one people, with one common country. We are all citizens of the United States;
  and, as members of the same community, must have the right to pass and repass
  through every part of it without interruption, as freely as in our own States."

  We have no occasion to ascribe the source of this right to travel interstate to
  a particular constitutional provision. 8 It suffices that, as MR. JUSTICE
  STEWART said for the Court in United States v. Guest, 383 U.S. 745, 757 -758
  (1966):

  "The constitutional right to travel from one State to another . . . occupies a
  position fundamental to the concept of our Federal Union. It is a right that
  has been firmly established and repeatedly recognized.

  ". . . [T]he right finds no explicit mention in the Constitution. The reason,
  it has been suggested, is [394 U.S. 618, 631]   that a right so elementary was
  conceived from the beginning to be a necessary concomitant of the stronger
  Union the Constitution created. In any event, freedom to travel throughout the
  United States has long been recognized as a basic right under the
  Constitution."

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Guest

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapiro_v._Thompson

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crandall_v._Nevada

deadfall• 11 years ago

Just last night I watched an older episode of Jay Leno's Garage and they brought in a few of California Highway Patrol (CHP) cars to show off. The officer explains that new cars are equipped with a license plate scanner find wanted people.

whoopdedo• 11 years ago

Something I've learned from listening to police scanners is the majority of warrants are for unpaid traffic tickets and guys behind on alimony.

pokstad• 11 years ago

Get rid of license plates. They can also be used by private parties to track car movements. They aren't safe anymore in this time and age. Once someone builds a proof of concept of a real time car tracker using crowd sourced license plate trackers, we'll realize that.

jessriedel• 11 years ago

That really only buys you a couple of years, if any. If they can do face recognition, they can do car recognition. Just determine the make/model/year/color/trim, and then look for some individually identifiable marks, scratches, color imperfections, tire type, etc.

fru2013• 11 years ago

It doesn't stop there. How about high-def video feeds of the entire planet via satellite? With heat tracking/infrared? Combine that with smart tracking software and NSA-level eavesdropping and there would be no escape.

Personally, I think we'll have the technological capability to do this within a couple decades.

fnordfnordfnord6• 11 years ago

Just buy a silver camry. Let them try to track them all.

sliverstorm3• 11 years ago

So long as cars are uniquely identifiable, car movements can be tracked.

Cars will never be allowed to not be uniquely identifiable, for hopefully-obvious reasons that have nothing to do with Big Brother.

fnordfnordfnord6• 11 years ago

They don't have to be uniquely identifiable to everyone. A better system would be an rfid tag that recorded each access, thus allowing the owner to know when they were tracked.

nl2• 11 years ago

This can cut both ways.

Back in the early 2000's, plane spotters identified CIA planes used for extraordinary rendition by recoding registration numbers and locations.

Maybe David Brin was right after all[2]. Automatic license plate scanning is trivial now. It would be pretty easy for anyone to build a node of a system like this.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/dec/10/usa.terrorism1

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society

elihu• 11 years ago

The weird thing about license plate scanning is that basically anyone could do it, and there's no obvious way to stop it. Any group of ordinary citizens (including private businesses) could create a distributed network of license plate scanners by installing devices in their cars and around their houses/buildings.

It would be an interesting act of protest to track the movements of powerful people, so as to compel them to take privacy more seriously.

nl2• 11 years ago

Precisely.

We see the start of this with dash cams. Sure, they don't do the recognition thing, but they do decentralise surveillance.

I think it's worth considering possibilities in this area as a supplement to outrage and protest.

wahsd• 11 years ago

Can we please stop acting like the USA is somehow a "good guy" anymore? We have to realize that the authoritarian demons have the battering ram at the door and I really don't want to find out what happens when the USA turns into an authoritarian militaristic regime. We're way more than half way there already and people support it. Our very own government is a threat to us all, or at least those who will find themselves on the wrong site of the inner circle.

crimsonalucard• 11 years ago

I think it's also naive to think of the government as the "bad guy" as well. Classifying the government as bad or good is basically trying to assign a singular attribute to the aggregate actions of thousands of people in politics and government agencies. The truth is neither black or white, and extremely complicated.

riter• 11 years ago

+bump

NhanH• 11 years ago

It depends on whether you're classifying based on intentions or on results. When you're using the word "bad guy", it implied the intentions to be bad/evil. However, it's easy to see that a complex system can't (normally) be assigned an intention. But even if every actors within the system is acting in good faith, the emergent behaviour can still have bad result.

In the case of government, it's definitely not complicated to classify the aggregate behaviour as unqualified bad (in term of result), regardless of the intention of the individuals working within the systems.

wickedlogic• 11 years ago

Can we all agree that a minimum, they are intentionally misleading their citizens?

superuser22• 11 years ago

Do you read the news? Because here are some things that other states are up to that we aren't (at least, not in this decade):

- Systematic execution for the crime of belonging to a particular ethnic group or religion

- Open and openly arbitrary disappearing, detention, and torture of intellectuals for the crime of writing articles critical of state-sponsored religious and political doctrine

- Use of force against people who commit such crimes as selecting their own sexual partners, disobeying their parents, being seen in public with members of the opposite sex, texting members of the opposite sex, being homosexual, etc. Or, more commonly in the "developed" world, failure to investigate or pursue family-based vigilante "justice" against same.

- Failure to acknowledge women as people and rape as a crime

- Committing violence against, or being complicit in violence against, children who dared to go to school

- Corruption to a degree that renders the public health infrastructure so dysfunctional that tens of thousands of people die needlessly

- Outright censorship of any reporting that paints the state in a negative light

---

"Knowing things about citizens" is dangerous because it enables the state to be far more effective in pursuing policies like the above. We ought to limit the government's knowledge of the lives of its citizens because that makes it much harder to effectively implement policies like these.

HOWEVER, HN sounds downright ridiculous when it declares that being listed in a database is comparable to being summarily executed for criticizing state religion.

themartorana3• 11 years ago

These points are horrible, but have no bearing at all on whether or not the US government is friend or foe.

The existence of worse does not make better good.

The state of things in the US is scary, and Saudi Arabia existing doesn't make it less so.

Edit: I'd argue that corruption of The State by lobbyists, special interest groups, and shadowy Super PACs cost thousands of lives a year in the USA.

flycaliguy2• 11 years ago

Can somebody good with their logical fallacies let me know if this falls under "Fallacy of relative privation"?

This definition [1] even uses this very argument as an example:

"The counter to the relative privation argument when applied, for example, to compare America with other more tyrannous countries is to note that the proper comparison to make should not be between America and other tyrannies but between America and the ideal of freedom."

I find it a scary way to look at the world and to me it always comes off as less an honest argument and more like somebody who understands fallacy using it to persuade the reader for their own benefit.

Like the sort of thing they'll tell you as they are locking up your cage. "Hey, you're lucky it's dry unlike the cages the bad guys use!" the voice under the helmet said.

[1] http://www.hevanet.com/kort/KING6.HTM

sroerick3• 11 years ago

1. The War in Iraq killed over a million people. We have death robots that kill people from the sky.

2. Snowden, Manning, Barrett Brown, Jeremy Hammond

3. Don't know about this one. I think it's worth mentioning Racism, Islamophobia and Islam or race related violence here.

4. #opDeathEaters

5. I don't know about this one either, but school seems mostly like a tool to incur debt. So not necessarily a plus.

6. You watched the Healthcare debate, right?

7. Surveilled reading is more dangerous than censoring books, full stop. But if you're looking for censorship, there's plenty to go around. Try finding a copy of the Sony leaks these days. Look at what is happening to social media.

rosser2• 11 years ago

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Not_as_bad_as

enraged_camel• 11 years ago

>HOWEVER, HN sounds downright ridiculous when it declares that being listed in a database is comparable to being summarily executed for criticizing state religion.

Here's the thing: countries can transition into totalitarianism quickly.

1930 Germany was very, very different than 1940 Germany. Hitler's rise to power happened in the blink of an eye, before most people understood what was happening.

This is why "oh, being listed in a database is nowhere as bad as being summarily executed" should be consolation. Such mindsets breed complacency, whereas what we need is constant vigilance and an extreme intolerance for policies that grant the government more power without any oversight.

jacquesm2• 11 years ago

You don't get to perpetrate your crimes because others are doing worse things. All crimes are reprehensible some more than others but no perpetrator of any crime gets off (or should get off) by pointing to others that do worse things.

mike_hearn• 11 years ago

Open and openly arbitrary disappearing, detention, and torture of intellectuals for the crime of writing articles critical of state-sponsored religious and political doctrine

Al-Awlaki? He was not accused of killing anyone himself, but got drone striked for writing terrorist propaganda. So did his son (for having Al-Awlaki as a father, no less). That seems like a pretty close fit.

Corruption to a degree that renders the public health infrastructure so dysfunctional that tens of thousands of people die needlessly

That's a funny example. Most people in western non-US countries would say the US meets this definition handily.

All that said, your point stands. There are worse governments than the US government. But lots better too.

josephlord3• 11 years ago

Others are worse. I don't think anybody would deny that. But that in itself does not make it a good state.

But when did the US and UK start comparing themselves to the most oppressive rather than the freest in the world?

Normati2• 11 years ago

Use of force against people who commit such crimes as selecting their own sexual partners, being seen in public with members of the opposite sex, texting members of the opposite sex, being homosexual, etc.

This happens but you tolerate it because it's consistent with your arbitrary local culture. Consider pedophilia (having "wrong" sexual feelings) which comes with chemical castration and an attempt to "cure" it along with imprisonment of course. You don't even have to abuse anyone to suffer some of these consequences. Sound familiar? Have you ever met any self-confessed pedophile who hadn't been arrested for a related crime? Until they're outed, they're forced to keep their feelings secret from everyone because it's a kind of western thought crime. This leads us to imagine that all pedophiles rape children. They don't any more than 60 years ago all homosexuals raped children.

knorby• 11 years ago

I'd rather have tracking of cars than most things. As a frequent pedestrian, cars scare me. Few common things can cause as much damage to humans and property. Would these efforts be more palatable if the goal was Vision Zero rather than the various low-output anti-terrorism efforts?

randomname2• 11 years ago

WASHINGTON—The Justice Department has been building a national database to track in real time the movement of vehicles around the U.S., a secret domestic intelligence-gathering program that scans and stores hundreds of millions of records about motorists, according to current and former officials and government documents.

The primary goal of the license-plate tracking program, run by the Drug Enforcement Administration, is to seize cars, cash and other assets to combat drug trafficking, according to one government document. But the database’s use has expanded to hunt for vehicles associated with numerous other potential crimes, from kidnappings to killings to rape suspects, say people familiar with the matter.

Officials have publicly said that they track vehicles near the border with Mexico to help fight drug cartels. What hasn’t been previously disclosed is that the DEA has spent years working to expand the database “throughout the United States,’’ according to one email reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Many state and local law-enforcement agencies are accessing the database for a variety of investigations, according to people familiar with the program, putting a wealth of information in the hands of local officials who can track vehicles in real time on major roadways.

The database raises new questions about privacy and the scope of government surveillance. The existence of the program and its expansion were described in interviews with current and former government officials, and in documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union through a Freedom of Information Act request and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. It is unclear if any court oversees or approves the intelligence-gathering.

A spokesman for Justice Department, which includes the DEA, said the program complies with federal law. “It is not new that the DEA uses the license-plate reader program to arrest criminals and stop the flow of drugs in areas of high trafficking intensity,’’ the spokesman said.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, senior Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the government’s use of license-plate readers “raises significant privacy concerns. The fact that this intrusive technology is potentially being used to expand the reach of the government’s asset-forfeiture efforts is of even greater concern.’’

The senator called for “additional accountability’’ and said Americans shouldn’t have to fear ”their locations and movements are constantly being tracked and stored in a massive government database.’’

The DEA program collects data about vehicle movements, including time, direction and location, from high-tech cameras placed strategically on major highways. Many devices also record visual images of drivers and passengers, which are sometimes clear enough for investigators to confirm identities, according to DEA documents and people familiar with the program.

The documents show that the DEA also uses license-plate readers operated by state, local and federal law-enforcement agencies to feed into its own network and create a far-reaching, constantly updating database of electronic eyes scanning traffic on the roads to steer police toward suspects.

The law-enforcement scanners are different from those used to collect tolls.

By 2011, the DEA had about 100 cameras feeding into the database, the documents show. On Interstate 95 in New Jersey, license-plate readers feed data to the DEA—giving law-enforcement personnel around the country the ability to search for a suspect vehicle on one of the country’s busiest highways. One undated internal document shows the program also gathers data from license-plate readers in Florida and Georgia.

“Any database that collects detailed location information about Americans not suspected of crimes raises very serious privacy questions,’’ said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the ACLU. “It’s unconscionable that technology with such far-reaching potential would be deployed in such secrecy. People might disagree about exactly how we should use such powerful surveillance technologies, but it should be democratically decided, it shouldn’t be done in secret.’’

License-plate readers are already used in the U.S. by companies to collect debts and repossess vehicles, and by local police departments to solve crimes.

In 2010, the DEA said in internal documents that the database aided in the seizure of 98 kilograms of cocaine, 8,336 kilograms of marijuana and the collection of $866,380. It also has been connected to the Amber Alert system, to help authorities find abducted children, according to people familiar with the program.

One email written in 2010 said the primary purpose of the program was asset forfeiture—a controversial practice in which law-enforcement agencies seize cars, cash and other valuables from suspected criminals. The practice is increasingly coming under attack because of instances when law-enforcement officers take such assets without evidence of a crime.

The document said, “…DEA has designed this program to assist with locating, identifying, and seizing bulk currency, guns, and other illicit contraband moving along the southwest border and throughout the United States. With that said, we want to insure we can collect and manage all the data and IT responsibilities that will come with the work to insure the program meets its goals, of which asset forfeiture is primary.’

A number of lawmakers have been planning to offer legislation to rein in what they call abuses of asset-forfeiture laws. The Justice Department recently announced it was ending its role in one type of asset seizure, known as “adoptions,’’ a process by which local officials take property, then have the assets adopted and sold by the federal government. Often, that allows the local agency to keep a higher percentage of the money from the seizure. The policy change doesn’t affect the bulk of asset seizures in the U.S.

The national vehicle database program was launched in 2008 and opened to participating state and local authorities a year later. The initial focus was on tracking cars moving on or near the Southwest border, in order to follow the movements of drugs and drug money, according to officials and documents. Requests to search the database are handled by the El Paso Intelligence Center in Texas, which is known as EPIC in law enforcement circles. EPIC is staffed around the clock to both take in and send out information about “hits’’ on requested license plates.

The effort began in border states like Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico and Texas, but the goal has always been expansion, according to current and former federal officials and documents. Officials wouldn’t say how many other states are now feeding data into the system, citing concerns that disclosing such information could help criminals avoid detection.

The federal program hasn’t always been embraced by states. At a 2012 hearing, Utah lawmakers balked when DEA officials sought to have license-plate readers in the state feed into the database—one of the few times the agency has provided even limited facts about the program. That same year, a DEA official made a general reference to the program at a congressional field hearing about the Southwest border, saying it was built to monitor and target vehicles used to transport bulk cash and other contraband.

Under questioning from Utah lawmakers, the agency said the program began with an effort to track drug shipments on the Southwest border, and the government wanted to add monitors on major drug-trafficking routes like Utah’s Interstate 15, in order to hunt a wide array of criminals. That alarmed privacy advocates, who noted at the time that the DEA’s map of major drug routes included most of the national highway system.

The agency has reduced the time it holds the data from two years to 3 months, according to a Justice Department spokesman.

The EPIC database allows any police agency that participates to quickly search records of many states for information about a vehicle. One May 2010 redacted email says: "Anyone can request information from our [license-plate reader] program, federal, state, or local, just need to be a vetted EPIC user.…’’

The data are also shared with U.S. border officials, according to an undated memorandum of understanding between the DEA and Customs and Border Protection officials. That document shows the two agencies specifically said that lawmakers might never specifically fund the work, stating: “this in no way implies that Congress will appropriate funds for such expenditures.’’

The disclosure of the DEA’s license-plate reader database comes on the heels of other revelations in recent months about the Justice Department, as well as the agencies it runs, gathering data about innocent Americans as it searches for criminals.

In November, The Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. Marshals Service flies planes carrying devices that mimic cellphone towers in order to scan the identifying information of Americans’ phones as it searches for criminal suspects and fugitives. Justice Department officials have said the program is legal.

Earlier this month, the DEA filed court documents indicating that for more than a decade it had gathered the phone records of Americans calling foreign countries, without judicial oversight, to sift through that data looking for drug suspects. That program was canceled in 2013.

znowi• 11 years ago

Can we please not post links behind a paywall or that require registration?

r109• 11 years ago

This doesn't surprise me, use to live in Bellingham WA. There are "DOT" cameras that go from south Bellingham all the way to the Canadian border on both sides of i5. I forget how often there are, perhaps 2-5 miles? I understand that some are used for DoT cams, but I always theorized that if the lenses are good enough they could zoom in and potentially read plates. The camera's look like regular light poles, you have to be paying attention to actually see them.

awjr• 11 years ago

In the UK, there is something called the 'ring of steel' around Birmingham. In effect all UK motorways and most main routes have ANPR on them. I would expect as costs decline, eventually most street light systems will be 'upgraded' to have ANPR.

I am surprised that a consumer ANPR solution isn't on the market.

bunkydoo2• 11 years ago

It goes deeper than even what this article describes - a ford exec admitted last year that they put GPS in all vehicles (post 2004 i think) but they "don't release the data" not sure how much I trust that statement in today's world...

bunkydoo2• 11 years ago

and thats a hidden GPS - I own a 2004 ford that apparently has this and there is no navigation interface in the vehicle.

forthefuture4• 11 years ago

I've lived my entire life thinking that anything I do or say anywhere could be picked up by phones or cameras or gps. I can't express enough how liberating it is to accept that and move on. The idea that you should be doing anything ever that you couldn't explain to anyone watching is a fantasy to me; something so far from reality you might as well be wearing a tin foil hat.

spacemanmatt2• 11 years ago

Congratulations on your privileged life.

forthefuture4• 11 years ago

I'd be living a lot more privileged life if I thought the government owed me privacy.

known• 11 years ago

"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else." --Winston Churchill

stillsut• 11 years ago

Who would EVER approve this?

Didn't the majority of the country agree this summer that police should wear cameras at all times. And the police protested this development. (Remember police brutality debate?)

I'm against the license plate system, but people on this site often don't seem to appreciate there is democratic support for many of these programs.

claypoolb• 11 years ago

We've been hacked! According to an article in the Washington Post, we've been misled since 1961. We really do not need all those cars - its just a love affair with the "american dream".

"This “love affair” was coined, in fact, during a 1961 episode of a weekly hour-long television program called the DuPont Show of the Week (sponsored, incidentally, by DuPont, which owned a 23 percent stake in General Motors at the time). The program, titled “Merrily We Roll Along,” was promoted by DuPont as “the story of America’s love affair with the automobile.”

The show aired at a time when cars were facing steep criticism, as plans for the new interstate system threatened to destroy or disrupt neighborhoods in many U.S. cities.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/01/27/d...

U.S. Spies on Millions of Cars

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