Police eye possibilities of license plate scanning (speeding tickets!)

[Newsjock]

Source: San Francisco Chronicle

The swift arrest of a San Jose man in the abduction of a 12-year-old girl this week was aided by an eye-opening gadget that can scan the license plates of a street full of cars and instantly alert police to which vehicles have been reported stolen.

It was a breakthrough moment for license plate recognition, a technology that is spreading to law enforcement around the Bay Area - and is prompting privacy concerns.

... Officers use the readers to look for vehicles that are stolen or tied to crimes. Parking officers hunt for unpaid-ticket scofflaws and slap boots on their wheels. In Petaluma, the devices are used to enforce time limits for parking downtown.
Airport workers in San Jose use the readers to catch parking-lot cheaters who claim they arrived much later than they actually did. Oakland International Airport soon will start doing the same.

At UC Berkeley, researchers working with Caltrans are exploring whether roadside billboards that tell drivers how long it will take to get from Point A to Point B could use license plate recognition. Cameras mounted at different spots would note how long cars take to move between them.

The readers also could be used to deduct tolls automatically at bridges and to nab speeders. If a driver's plate is scanned at two points separated by 100 miles, and only an hour has passed, it makes for easy mathematics.

"The possibilities are endless in terms of what we can do with this," said Sgt. Troy Rivers of the California Highway Patrol, which has put license plate readers on 16 cruisers and four fixed locations in the state, including at a Mexican border crossing. "The only limitations to the technology are the limitations we place on it ourselves."

... "Where our cars are is where we are," said Nicole Ozer, technology and civil liberties policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. "There needs to be public discussion, and safeguards need to be put in place."

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/10/12/MNJFSO1NM.DTL

[villager]

1. time to make sure our license plates are "accidentally" "muddy" all the time?

n/t

[lligrd]

2. So Much For Privacy At All

This stuff scares the bejeebus out of me.

[TahitiNut]

3. "The possibilities are endless ..."

Yeah. Tell me about it. New World order.

[Lasher]

4. Big brother is watching you

George Orwell was such a visionary.

[spoony]

5. Ah good old ANPR

Only thing that did in Britain was to create a neverending cat and mouse game between the police and people figuring out clever new ways to confuse the scanners :P