Boston Police halt license scanning program

[Newsjock]

Source: Boston Globe

The Boston Police Department has indefinitely suspended its use of high-tech scanners that automatically check whether drivers have outstanding parking tickets, lapsed insurance or other violations after a Globe investigation raised serious privacy concerns.

The police inadvertently released to the Globe the license plate numbers of more than 68,000 vehicles that had tripped alarms on automated license plate readers over a six-month period. Many of the vehicles were scanned dozens of times in that period alone.

The accidental release triggered immediate doubts about whether the police could reliably protect the sensitive data. It also raised questions about whether police were following up on the scans, since numerous vehicles repeatedly triggered alarms for the same offenses. One motorcycle that had been reported stolen triggered scanner alerts 59 times over six months, while another plate with lapsed insurance was scanned a total of 97 times in the same span.

... “It’s not realistic to think that law enforcement will police itself when it comes to technologies like license plate readers,” said state Representative Jonathan Hecht, a Watertown Democrat who has filed a bill to regulate use of scanners and the sensitive data they collect.

Read more: http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/12/14/boston-police-suspend-use-high-tech-licence-plate-readers-amid-privacy-concerns/B2hy9UIzC7KzebnGyQ0JNM/story.html

[Fred Sanders]

1. What you talking about Willis? Bring In The Judges.

People seem not to care or be aware of how police scanners whether automatic or not, including the manual ones in police cars, represent the working tip of the state surveillance lance.

I have mentioned this to my friends and workers, who are not intellectual slouches, and even they look at me askew as if it is I that am out of my mind to be concerned.

After all, the license plates are just license plates, right? All they are checking is the CAR, not YOU!

People I think have been hammered into a kind of Svengali like state where they accept whatever the state wants to do without having the energy or even the inclination to step back and say this is not right. Or if they get it it they conclude their is nothing they can do.

But they can and it is simple. There is a third branch of government that democracy has created to deal with abuse of state powers.

It is called the judicial system, they are known as judges, and it is high time the Judges be consulted.

Ignorance is bliss, my friends, and there seems to be a depressing amount of it out their.

[bigred84]

3. You got that right, Fred!

I am SO with you on this one, Fred! Like you, my friends think I'm nuts worrying about this sort of thing. "What do you care...you're not doing anything wrong?", they utter en mass. That's not the point, I tell them. The license plate scanners create a map of where you've been. If you visit a certain church, political event, AA meeting or whatever---if youv'e been scanned, the information is on file, and most states don't have laws regarding how long they can keep the info. Even in states where there are time limits, in this digital age---do we really trust it'll ever truly be deleted?

[Fred Sanders]

4. Spying on idle

You are right, and it is not just that. The very idea that some donut eating policeman sits around punching in license plate numbers and knows who I am and where I live and whatever else is in the database, just for their pure voyeristic amusement, angers me

[billhicks76]

8. Repeal funding

People shouldn't be funding their own oppression.

[MannyGoldstein]

2. It's nice to live in our Liberal bastion

The cops are doing the right thing.

Happens.

[passiveporcupine]

5. making sure wrong doing is 100% captured and punished

is not the definition of freedom. I don't want to live in that kind of world. Not to say that in many cases video is not good to have...like in places where robberies can occur. But not this way.

[blkmusclmachine]

6. The cameras perched at every stoplight/intersection input your plate number into a Gov't database

to check your "threat level," and monitor your movement over city streets and freeways, day and night. And these tracking cameras are also perched high over interstates and highways that run through the cities; they're typically placed about 1/4 mile apart, and have 360 degree viewpoints. And Obama's 30,000 Drones are coming to surveil everything else in what the Gov't is terming "Operation Persistent Stare." You wonder WHO the Gov't thinks it will need to be looking for, doesn't it??? Yay, 9/11...

[Mopar151]

7. And then there is the matter of "who sez"

MA Registry (=DMV, kind of) is notorious for corruption, mismanagement, and dysfunction. There is no effective reciprocity between MA and surrounding states - who's to say that the beef that caused the system to alert on you is legitimate? Particularly with the f-d up system that MA uses for insurance and registration - where you register your car thru a private insurance agent, and they notify the Registry if you don't make your insurance payments. Do the alerts get cleared if you pay up? Maybe......