License Plate Tracking for All

[IDemo]

By Luke O'Brien
02:00 AM Jul, 25, 2006

WASHINGTON -- Jealous lovers may soon have an alternative to sniffing for perfume to catch a cheating mate: Just follow their license plate.

In recent years, police around the country have started to use powerful infrared cameras to read plates and catch carjackers and ticket scofflaws. But the technology will soon migrate into the private sector, and morph into a tool for tracking individual motorists' movements, says former policeman Andy Bucholz, who's on the board of Virginia-based G2 Tactics, a manufacturer of the technology.

Bucholz, who designed some of the first mobile license plate reading, or LPR, equipment, gave a presentation at the 2006 National Institute of Justice conference here last week laying out a vision of the future in which LPR does everything from helping insurance companies find missing cars to letting retail chains chart customer migrations. It could also let a nosy citizen with enough cash find out if the mayor is having an affair, he says.

Giant data-tracking firms such as ChoicePoint, Accurint and Acxiom already collect detailed personal and financial information on millions of Americans. Once they discover how lucrative it is to know where a person goes between the supermarket, for example, and the strip club, the LPR industry could explode, says Bucholz.

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71436-0.html?tw=wn_index_17

[Redstone]

1. Easy enough to put an optically-clear, IR-filtering piece of glass

over your plate. This stuff becomes real, that's what I'll do.

Redstone

[midnight]

2. Redstone where do you get -filtering pieces of glass?

Boy that technology that the police have in their hands might explain how a cop showed up at my door one eve. Several hours after I pulled to the side of the rode for a cop to chase down a car, the cop showed up at my house and wanted to ticket me. Very bizarre.

[Redstone]

4. Poke around Kodak's website. They have stuff that will filter out pretty

much any wavelength, and let pretty much any other wavelength through.

Another source might be Edmund Scientific. Lots of optical goodies there too.

By the way, why did the cop want to give you a ticket for getting out of his way? Isn't that what you're SUPPOSED to do?

Redstone

[lapfog_1]

5. I did some work in this area 5 years ago

The idea was this:

Police cars have dashboard cameras. They are not recording all the time, they start recording whenever an "event" happens (turning on the siren or lights, removing the shotgun from the holder, car microphone or lapel remote triggered, or manual switch).

Police cams are going digital, even if they are using tape as the media of choice.

So the proposal was: Leave the camera on 24/7 (when in service). Record everything, but throw it away if the event doesn't happen.
If the event happens, keep the last X minutes of recording (before the event) as well as everything after the event.
Since the camera is on and digitally recording, run every frame through an onboard computer that has LPR software.
After the OCR scan of the license plate is finished, record the time/date/location with the tag (and maybe with 1 frame).
Match the plate number against a database (either local in the computer or remote) for wants/warrants.
If a match, indicate to the officers in the police car and back to the central station.
If no match, keep the number,time,date,location and store in a central database (possibly nation wide) for later inquiries (up to
months or years later).
So... if later on (6 months down the line), someone reports this car stolen or involved in a crime, you run the search and out pops a list of locations where this car HAS BEEN (and now you know where to look).

It's very scary big-brother stuff.

And I'm sure somebody is doing just this thing now.

And there is no law being broken here (unlike the illegal wire taps and other shenanigans we know that they are up to).

Most LPR systems do not need to use the infrared band, visible light is good enough. And you can't legally obscure your plate number.

[Kerrytravelers]

3. When is it going to stop?

No one has any self-control. The mind set is "if we can, let's do it," not "should we?" So, when people are tracked down and killed because we're able to track them even easier, what will the outcome be?

Personally, I left an area to get away from someone dangerous in my life. I still have the same car and the same license plate. It's been years now, so I don't think I'll be in danger, but what if my incident was more recent? What if I left to get away, and this person tracked me? I know you can always follow someone the old fashioned way, but should we really make it easy to follow someone?

Although I am sitting here, typing away on the Internet, I'm really not into technology. I actually fear it a bit.