The FBI Wants 'Near Real-Time' Access to US License Plate Readers

roxolotl

There’s a lot of local US candidates running this year on pushing back on the federal government. Realistically there’s not a ton that can be done at the level of a mayor or even state senator. However removing local passive surveillance is something that can make a genuine impact. I’d love to see people running on banning red light/license plate cameras and other passive surveillance tools. If the data is never collected it can’t be abused.

hsuduebc2

I must shamefully admit that after vaguely watching American tv shows like CSI for last twenty years I was convinced this is already a thing for a long time. Does it mean you can't see a perfect reflection on a slightly rusted screw?

morgoths_bane

I am so glad the party of small government is in charge.

SubiculumCode

Are license plates a federal or state requirement?

majorchord

SCOTUS has already ruled that tracking people's movement over time without a warrant is a Fourth Amendment violation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_v._United_States

edot

Wait, but I was told that my local police department owned the Flock data, and that Flock doesn't own it and cannot share it? Was I lied to, to further expand the surveillance state?

hombre_fatal

The "15 minute city conspiracy" (anti bike lane, anti mass transit, car = liberty) people sure seem to gloss over inconvenient facts like this. Frankly I don't see a way out from this. Since you must register and insure your vehicle and have a government license to drive it and it hauls two tons at 80mph, it seems like natural creep for the government to know where it is, and the tech to infer it without explicitly scanning plates is only getting better and better. Maybe having just one euro/asian-style dense city with bike lanes in the US wouldn't be such a bad thing to try out?

tptacek

This article is literally blogspam of an article that got significant front-page coverage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48184350

lifeisstillgood

This is a personal opinion, so please be careful, but technology enables new forms of behaviour and opportunity that we can’t always predict. And so …. We will live in a almost totally transparent world - our daily interactions, voice, text and visual are likely recorded by someone at some point - how bosses interact with their employees, how nurses talk to patients and cashiers to customers, how parents talk to children - all of this will be recorded And that can be a Good Thing. Imagine your boss getting real time feedback on coaching style, or you getting pointers on how not to argue with your wife. The challenge is fairly simple - if we lose all secrets, the privacy is just the politeness of our neighbours. And while we can and should have strong laws on this, we need a social chnage to make serving someone ads based on their observable behaviour about the same level of social acceptability as crapping on their doorstep and then pouring petrol on and lighting it. But we could see a world where privacy is protected but epidemiologists can pick apart the most thorny problems, human beings will be raised to be the very best they can be, and society become more communal and robust. It’s possible - tech is neutral And those societies and countries that embrace it will probably have that boost everyone thinks is coming from AI

ChuckMcM

We really should build an open source ALPR system of cameras that gives real time information on the position of every law enforcement vehicle. Including the cars driven by the officers to and from work. That would have been helpful in finding license violations in California by ICE officers. EDIT: We could call it "CopAware" :-)

abacadaba

Is this as a backup for the system that reads the rfid in our tires? / I assumed this had long been the case

reaperducer

120,000,000 license plate readers in America, and still no sign of Guthrie. I feel safer already.

techteach00

The FBI is a good analogy for the political choices Americans have between Democrats and Republicans. They are completely non-ideological. It's just about power and control over the population. We need to get our rights back somehow.

mannanj

This is IMO the only legitimate use case of a montana-LLC vehicle registration. The corporate veil acts as a privacy protection mechanism from government outreach. IMO we hear a lot of Straw Mans of "Tax evasion!!" here yet the legitimate use remains.

ChrisArchitect

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48184350