Homeland Security is seeking a national license plate tracking system

[IDemo]

The Department of Homeland Security wants a private company to provide a national license-plate tracking system that would give the agency access to vast amounts of information from commercial and law enforcement tag readers, according to a government proposal that does not specify what privacy safeguards would be put in place.

The national license-plate recognition database, which would draw data from readers that scan the tags of every vehicle crossing their paths, would help catch fugitive illegal immigrants, according to a DHS solicitation. But the database could easily contain more than 1 billion records and could be shared with other law enforcement agencies, raising concerns that the movements of ordinary citizens who are under no criminal suspicion could be scrutinized.

A spokeswoman for DHS’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) stressed that the database “could only be accessed in conjunction with ongoing criminal investigations or to locate wanted individuals.*”

The database would enhance agents’ and officers’ ability to locate suspects who could pose a threat to public safety and would reduce the time required to conduct surveillance, ICE spokeswoman Gillian Christensen said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/homeland-security-is-seeking-a-national-license-plate-tracking-system/2014/02/18/56474ae8-9816-11e3-9616-d367fa6ea99b_story.html?hpid=z1

*

[hobbit709]

1. But it's NOT a police/surveillance state

EXTREME

And there are those, even here, who will defend this in the name of safety.

[lapfog_1]

2. 9 years ago

I wrote a paper about creating such a tracking system.

I had a small silicon valley startup that was doing mobile entertainment systems.

Somebody that made police car video recorders (at that time it was all video tape) wanted to see if my system could be used to record instead of playback (sure, no problem).

So I started thinking about such a system... what it would do or could do.

The interesting thing about digital video systems is that they can record all the time... you simply don't have to keep all that they record.

So here were the features of the system I came up with.

1. Video on always... and the recording is kept from 30 seconds BEFORE the video trigger event (various actions like turning on the emergency lights or removing the shotgun from the holder, etc already trigger the analog recording to start, I would simply keep the video from before the trigger, to better show why the police triggered the event).

2. there would be up to 5 or 6 cameras... dash board forward, rear dash board, dome camera facing backseat, and possibly mobil cameras attached to microphones on the police uniforms.

3. Since the cameras are on all the time, and we have GPS, we could take a still picture and do license plate recognition for every car that any of these cameras see. These would be saved and tagged (date, time, GPS location, license plate number, and jpg of the vehicle) and added to a nationwide database. The data would be kept essentially forever. Anytime in the future, should the police have a person (car) they want to locate, the database could be consulted for any matching license numbers... and a pattern of locations might be established which should help the police locate the suspect.

I even figured out (by building a prototype) how much data that would be... and while large, it turns out to be very doable and not that expensive (millions not billions). The company that contacted me provided me with data on the number of police cars with video capability and the expected growth rate, etc.

I also designed a method to use wifi to empty the on board video system of all of the collected license data and triggered videos as the car goes back to the police station for shift change or service or whatever.

After writing this all up in 2005... I never submitted it to the company. It was too much big brother and a tool that could be used against anyone. I did check with lawyers on the legality of what I was going to propose... and the scary thing is that there is nothing illegal about it. If police today took paper notes on every car they encounter... and saved those notes and could compare them later... it is the same thing.

I also knew that someone else would think of this later. But at least it wasn't me.

[Javaman]

3. nothing to see here consumer, move along...

since we tracked you on our millions of cameras, tapped into your cell phone and recorded all your calls since infancy and watched which car you drive here in, we know who you are and when you drive away, we will still know who you are, were you are going and montior where you live, so it's best you don't get any crazy ideas about opening your mouth about us "violating" your "4th amendment rights" because the law says we can do this, regardless of it still being "technically" illegal.

so have a nice fucking day consumer and now get out of my sight before I arrest you for loitering.

[2pooped2pop]

4. already have local ones

I got stuck in the snow the other day. Police came and picked me up but couldn't get car out. He says "oops, I forgot to get your plate number" So he backs up to about a half block of the car where you could still not read the plate visually. He turned his light on it and boom, there it was up on his monitor. He went on to tell me that he can catch car plates even when passing from the opposite direction. Just automatically reads them.

[L0oniX]

5. If you believe this tracking shit wouldn't be shared/bought by corporations you might be an.......

american idiot.