The small and surprisingly dangerous detail the police track about you [video]

http://www.ted.com/talks/catherine_crump_the_small_and_surprisingly_dangerous_detail_the_police_track_about_you

by ColinWright • 11 years ago

51 46 11 years ago

jessaustin3• 11 years ago

Transcript:

https://www.ted.com/talks/catherine_crump_the_small_and_surp...

TL;DR: Local cops have Automatic License Plate Readers that run all the time tracking every car that drives by, also that data is kept forever because why not.

dmix2• 11 years ago

Oh I assumed the piece of data was IMSI. Which IMO is far worse as you're not always in public.

Those Cessna planes flying all over American cities can collect far more in a single day than all police cars on patrol can: http://www.startribune.com/nighttime-flight-circles-low-over...

giancarlostoro2• 11 years ago

I wonder who hosts the data for them? Cops aren't usually this "advanced" in surveillance unless I'm wrong?

dmix2• 11 years ago

Someone I know works for a company in Florida that runs the servers and sells the license plate cameras to the police. One of many companies I presume.

SilasX• 11 years ago

Thank you. Could we please change the title to something less clickbaity like "Police are tracking license plates via cameras, revealing lots of private info"?

I'm making comments like this disturbingly often...

ChuckMcM5• 11 years ago

Here is a startup idea, the "License Plate Club" ...

For $10 a month users register their license plate and state, then every month they get a printout of two random plates (at 75% size so as not to be confused with the car's real license plate) which you just stick to the side of your car doors. Of course being on the side of your car no police officer is going to think you're passing it off as your own plate, but every camera trained to detect and record license plates will add a 'hit' to their database right then and there. As more people join more license fuzzing data will be dumped into the databases and eventually all automatically collected license plate data will be useless without manually going through and verifying each sighting by hand, which will make it cost prohibitive.

Hell you could pay pedestrians to walk around with license plates as they go from intersection to intersection. That would be hilarious.

morganvachon3• 11 years ago

Of course being on the side of your car no police officer is going to think you're passing it off as your own plate

How would you know this? In some jurisdictions you can be pulled over and cited for putting a government issued temporary license plate (i.e. one assigned to your vehicle) in the back window instead of the normal mounting spot. At the very least, fake license plates plastered all over a car would raise suspicion, especially if they return information about another vehicle. This is a bad idea all around.

ams6110• 11 years ago

Having multiple license plates displayed is generally prohibited. As I found out when I had not had time to change my plate after it expired: I had the old one in the usual location, and the new one in the rear window. Got pulled over for it, but got only a warning.

dragonwriter• 11 years ago

For $10 a month users register their license plate and state, then every month they get a printout of two random plates (at 75% size so as not to be confused with the car's real license plate) which you just stick to the side of your car doors.

This is probably illegal in most jurisdictions. For instance, it is definitely illegal in California. Standard licenses plates are 12"x6". 75% size is 9"x4.5". California Regulations (13 CCR Sec. 150.02) requires "facsimile or decorative" plates to be smaller than 9"x3" or larger than 15"x9".

anonbanker• 11 years ago

Replying as breadcrumbs to a fantastic idea.

jessaustin3• 11 years ago

More info from this researcher on this topic here:

https://www.aclu.org/blog/police-documents-license-plate-sca...

[2013]

Mithaldu• 11 years ago

Oh good. Clickbait title and TED. Wonder what would make the trifecta complete.

kzhahou• 11 years ago

Paywall?

atap• 11 years ago

Ray Kurzweil.

jasonhansel• 11 years ago

A BuzzFeed article about it?

schoen• 11 years ago

License plates have seen such an enormous mission creep, starting out by enforcing safety inspections and liability for car accidents and finding stolen cars, and continuing down to letting the public and private sectors routinely track motorists' whereabouts.

When license plates were introduced, the technology to make them more privacy-protective didn't exist. Today, it might, but it would be expensive to switch and challenging to get police to give up monitoring powers they've become accustomed to.

justonepost• 11 years ago

What I find amusing are body cameras. We want them so bad to protect against police officers violating civil rights, but think how fast they'll ramp them up to doing things like face recognition. And why not? Imagine being able to spot criminals with warrants on them by just walking around in a crowd. Of course, it won't stop there. Hmm, I better go pay off those speeding tickets that are due...

CyberDildonics• 11 years ago

At least that is only where the police physically are.

whoopdedo• 11 years ago

You can justify that, and license plate cameras for that matter, because the camera is only automating a process that the police could still have done manually although it would have taken more time and been less reliable. Namely, if a police officer is told that a person is wanted and he sees a picture of him, then he could walk around a crowd looking for people who resemble the wanted person. The camera is doing the same thing his eyes and memory does, only faster.

The problem is not so much the data collection, it's the retention. Because computers never forget, the police are then given a power the existing limits on their authority did not consider. So new laws need to be drafted to limit the actions of a police force that has infinite memory.

Which many states are doing now. Until the police unions tell a bunch of scary "think of the children" stories about why they need unlimited surveillance power. Then the issue shifts from the police to the influence of money in politics. (And perhaps also whether public employees should be allowed to unionize. Or at least, whether a union of public employees should be allowed to lobby.)

upofadown• 11 years ago

I sold my car so I was doing pretty good up until the part about the cell phone tracking. Time to get a pager I guess...

pdkl954• 11 years ago

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/08/11...

Pagers are probably a good idea.

cozzyd• 11 years ago

Good thing I don't drive (but my Ventra card tracks me just the same).

pdkl954• 11 years ago

Automatic license plate scanning is bad enough, but at least some people are concerned about it. Meanwhile, the much more detail information that the phone companies gather for themselves and the NSA as part of COTRAVELER[1] has apparently been entirely forgotten.

Building a map of where your license plate has been is bad enough. The map of which {micro,pico,femto}cell you phone has been near will contain far more detailed travel information. It didn't even require any clever hacks or software vulnerabilities; COTRAVELER only required writing a few INNER JOIN / WHERE clauses. It doesn't even use any private information: it only needs the metadata.

Unfortunately, I expect that the conclusion - that it is probably a bad idea in the long run for everybody to be carrying a radio transponder in their pocket - is going to be ignore (or actively avoided). Cognitive dissonance can be a powerful motivator, and these properties - necessarily common to all mobile communication devices are very dissonant with the common socially-acceptable addiction to social media and "being available" that keeps everybody tied to cell phone.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/apps/g/page/world/how-the-nsa-...

new2992• 11 years ago

necessarily common to all mobile communication devices

I think there are possible technical solutions if there was a will to adopt them. The main problem is authenticating with the network, if unauthenticated wireless networks were generally available then it would likely make tracking harder.

I think even if you are paying for network access then there could be technical solutions to the problem. Perhaps authentication tokens which were purchased but not linked to a user.

I guess fundamentally, breaking apart network access authentication and user identification/authentication would be good.

But I agree, I doubt people are motivated enough to seek out a solution.

pdkl954• 11 years ago

While I don't completely rule-out the possibility of finding a technical solution, if such a solution exists it is going to be really hard to find. Re-associating "anonymized" tokens is a lot easier than it looks in many situations, and it doesn't take much data leakage to JOIN tables together. I would love to be wrong on this topic. It would be absolutely incredible if someone can invent a way to make mobile devices still work without leaking any information that can be tracked.

I totally agree with separating authentication from authorization; we need to do that anywhere it is possible, not just for mobile devices. Unfortunately, the trend has been in the reverse direction. :/

pdkl954• 11 years ago

Hmm... as the multiple down-voters left no explanation... I wonder which motivation is more likely: cell-phone addicts that don't want o think about long-term consequences of their habit, JTRIG-style trolling that doesn't like discussion about COTRAVELER, or one of the enemies I've made that like to down-vote most of my posts.

javajosh• 11 years ago

To paraphrase an old saying, "When all you have is threat analysis, everything looks like a threat." Law-enforcement in the US has become a victim of it's own unrelenting focus on threat-mitigation, to the extent that they are all too happy to use tools that have always been anathema to American Culture. We have mass surveillance, abusive police, and huge gulags full of people who's first crime was to be poor and under-educated. It used to be these were the things we pointed to when asked, "Why is the USSR/DDR so much worse than you?"

Epic fail, USA. Epic.

dredmorbius• 11 years ago

I've likened the situation to an auto-immune disease: a hopped-up defense mechanism which false-positive categorizes non-harmful elements as harmful.

I like your threat-analysis line.

infectoid• 11 years ago

Does anyone know of any good open source automatic number plate reading software?

Was thinking if could be a fun project for my rPi 2 maybe.

The small and surprisingly dangerous detail the police track about you [video]

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