License plate cameras
It may be a bit scary but the techonology is pretty cool:
The department has three black and white patrol cars and one unmarked car equipped with the ALPR system, created by Pips Technology Inc., based in Tennessee.
The four vehicles are outfitted with a camera and sensors attached to each corner of the car.
The system works by scanning every plate that comes in the path of the sensor. Every time it reads a plate, the computer inside the patrol car dings and both a picture of the actual plate as well as the plate number the computer reads appear on the screen. The plate number is then run through a database, which has highlighted plates that fall in the category of lost or stolen, and drivers who are wanted for a felony.
The system runs in the background, so it does not distract the officer from scanning the streets, Morgan said. An alarm sounds if a matching plate is found.
If a plate matches a warranted plate in the computer’s database, an alarm sounds and the warrant information appears on the screen. This information tells the officer specifically what the plate has been warranted for, but does not say if it is currently still wanted.
May 8th, 2006 at 9:31 am
I don’t have problems with technology like this, except for the fact that the limited uses of the device is not coded into law.
For example, one could easily add a GPS to the whole setup, then recored the location of the plates that you scan and the current time, and upload that all to a big database. Over time, the police could build a profile of where it’s sheeple tend to work, shop, visit, etc. The storage space for a years worth of data for a small town should be very reasonable ( a plate should be 7 bytes, a date would be 2 or so bytes, location ought to be 5 or so bytes, how much data could you store on a 300 GB drive?). The collection of the raw data is very inexpensive. This is called data warehousing. The science of digging through all that raw data is called “data mining”.
This database of where citizens could be mined for all kinds of useful and privacy infringing data. The married man who parks near his mistress’s apartment. What bars, grocery stores, and video stores one goes to. Who’s at the concert, who at the union hall or the gun range?
In this case, I’d like to see laws that prohibit the police from retaining the data on everything except stolen tags.
Bottom line, before potentially privacy invading technology ought to be handed to the police, there ought to be strict limits to what the police can do with it coded into law. Please make sure the laws have some real teeth (meaning prison terms) to them. Unfortunately, that seems to be the rule rather than the exception. More than once I’ve seen privacy invading technology put in place by the police or the government without public debate (red light money cameras, traffic flow surveillance cameras, etc)
But if it saves one child’s life, isn’t it worth it?
May 8th, 2006 at 1:43 pm
Color me incredulous, but I am pretty sure that this will be used 1% of the time for finding stolen cars and 99% of the time identifying cars with out of date registration, inspection or insurance (otherwise known as “State Revenue Streams”.) Why, it will probably pay for itself in 100 tickets, at which point it will start paying for the outfitting of the next patrol car…
May 8th, 2006 at 2:47 pm
Good point. And the article doesn’t mention those ‘minor infractions’ at all. Not really sure it could be used for insurance though, unless it’s also linked to databases of every available insurance carrier. But expired tags and expired/suspended license, sure.
May 8th, 2006 at 3:17 pm
ALPR meet Bootfinder.
http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200503/msg00099.html
May 8th, 2006 at 4:39 pm
There’s going to be a piece on PIPS Technology (the ALPR equipment manufacturer based in Knoxville) tomorrow evening (May 9) on channel 6 (WATE) 6:00pm news.
May 8th, 2006 at 7:10 pm
I bet you it’s going to be used as a revenue collection device almost immediately to catch people with expired insurance/tags/licenses/unpaid tickets.
The system will be unable to:
-search for plates that arent currently in the state system, either due to lack of renewal or being out of state motorists
-find unlicensed or uninsured drivers that arent already in the system as paying customers (like illegal aliens)
-scan dirty license plates
-catch plates that are removed or replaced with a non-offending plate (like a car thief would do if he drove your car off)
May 8th, 2006 at 11:44 pm
Me thinks whichever poor sap of an officer is driving that car will be pulling over vehicles every 10 seconds. Warrants that are non-extraditable are extremely plentiful… and a system that isn’t designed for specific counties of the state will be red flagging tons of non-extraditable warrants. Thus leaving one more revenue generator NOT generating revenue, (something that will not be tolerated).