In order to put a tracking device on your vehicle, the police are (supposed) to require a warrant. The same for tapping your phone.

Apparently, law enforcement thinks that simply recording everything - tapping everyone's communications, watching everyone's movements - somehow exempts them from the need for a warrant.

Sorry, meant to continue with:

"absent clear legal limits..."

Of course, there are clear legal limits: No surveillance without a warrant. They just don't want to let this be classified as surveillance...

" . . . law enforcement is in an exploratory mode."

Those are, indeed, chilling words.

The ALPRs (Automated License Plate Recognition systems) are troublesome. The license plates are generally tied to the owner and not necessarily the driver. And most of the systems only look at the plate, not the driver.

So John Smith gets a third DUI. He has someone driving him around or running errands in his car.

They are stopped because he isn't allowed to drive for a year, but he isn't the driver. Is car on the road probable cause?

The car was reported stolen on a Friday five days ago in a neighboring jurisdiction. The car was recovered (whatever reason) on Saturday. The database wasn't updated. The owner is stopped and treated like a grand theft, auto criminal and gets taken to jail. Was it a legal arrest? What if the owner had an open container when he was stopped?

I've heard that IR LED lights can play merry hell with CCD based cameras, as they're not actually optical sensors like the MK I MOD 0 eyeball.

If I were to make a license plate holder with an adequate amount of IR LEDs, would that defeat these sorts of optical scanners?

@JimP: The ALPRs (Automated License Plate Recognition systems) are troublesome. The license plates are generally tied to the owner and not necessarily the driver. And most of the systems only look at the plate, not the driver.

Which is why when my daughter got caught by one of those speed cameras in downtown DC, the ticket was sent to me, as her car was registered to me at the time. The fine was payable on-line by credit card, though no points were assessed.

Reading Dear Prudence on Slate yesterday. The letter was from a young woman whose relative is in the hospital and he rather hysterically demanded that no one enter his home in his absence. Because family talk has it that he has "frequently stalked" women who have been polite to him, LW thinks he is Ariel Castro and wants to know how to get his house searched for evidence of his wrongdoing. The ownership of the house is unclear-he lived with Mom and continued in the house after her death.
I was floored by the sheer number of people who were all about entering this man's house. Despite the fact he'd never been arrested, or possibly even reported and seemed more an immature social inept more than a stalker.

Many commenters held various opinions that he was a hoarder, bad housekeeper, porn collector, pot grower, or secret drinker and not a sex-slaveholder, but felt LW needed to violate his home anyway, on the off chance, and to ease her mind... They advocated family breaking in because they knew there were no grounds for a warrant. They considered filing false reports to get in.

Anyone saying "MYOB, respect his privacy" was shouted down. I was sickened that about 90% were ready to storm this odd, sick man's home with no kind of evidence against him but gossip. A majority of people do not value privacy today, which somehow shocked me.
I'm almost hoping his doors are booby-trapped. Some are hoping for evidence to convince the women who did not report his "stalking" to police that they should...I can see them going through his papers with a fine-tooth comb...It is just sick.

... Some are hoping for evidence to convince the women who did not report his "stalking" to police that they should
And if the claims are unfounded, does the accuser face any kind of punishment? No.

I R A Darth, you should think about pulsing the IR detectors to get more apparent power. I bet that would mess up red light cameras as well.

IR emitters, not detectors. What the ??? was I typing...

I read that Prudence. I fall into the " gain entry and see" camp. That it legally WAS his home certainly wasn't made clear by the letter. His mom he lived with died, he put locks on the doors and refused his siblings entry. Seems to me sans a probated will stating otherwise, they have every right to enter. He would either have to buy their portions out or sell the place and split the proceeds.

This is a tough one because circumstances suggest that a paradigm shift is necessary... figuring out where it needs to shift to is the hard part. It's always been the case that you can be observed when in public, and anything you do in public is fair game. If I stood out by the side of the road, waited for your car to go by, and made a note of what time it was and what direction you were heading, that was perfectly legal and you had no recourse. This was tolerable in part because I had limited ability to record this information on every car that went by, nor was it practical for me to plant agents all over town doing the same thing for me, and even if it was, I had no easy way to store and tabulate the information. This was true even for police agencies.

What's changed is that technology has made indiscriminate data-gathering easy and inexpensive. Instead of standing out by the road and waiting for your car to go by, I now have a gadget that will collect the info for every car that goes by, 24/7. Further, I have hundreds of these gadgets, all over town. I don't need to target cars I'm interested in; I collect all of the data and then I search the database for your car when I please. Although in prinicple, it's the same thing as standing out beside the road with a clipboard, in practice it can do a bunch of things the guy with the clipboard could never do.

People rightly feel uncomfortable with this new capability. The thing is, it could have legitimate law enforcement uses. So that raises a bunch of questions: What should be allowed? How should it be controlled? And what if a police agency says "screw that, we'll do what we want"? How do you know they are doing it? How do you stop them?

What should be allowed? How should it be controlled? And what if a police agency says "screw that, we'll do what we want"? How do you know they are doing it? How do you stop them? -- Cousin Dave at July 1, 2013 9:41 AM

At minimum:

I would do it that it has a two man rule to access the database. The access has to be court approved or an emergency (i.e. Amber Alert).

The court approval would be that the charge is a nominally a felony charge. So looking for vehicles surrounding a bank heist would be limited to that search warrant. So the bank tellers say the car was a white Honda or Hyundai with a OK license plate that starts with "RH". So the warrant to search the database is limited to that and two individuals have to verify that it is a legal search.

That would also stop them from checking on the guy under suspension for his first DUI, but the seventh DUI, he is fair game.

Just throwing out some ideas.

If I were to make a license plate holder with an adequate amount of IR LEDs, would that defeat these sorts of optical scanners?

I have a better and cheaper idea.

Where I live, Anchorage, these optical scanners would be useless. There's a lot of glacial silt. Whenever the roads are wet, the license plates get too dirty to read. When it snows, the plates also get unreadable.

Hence my idea -- hide your license plate in plain sight. Mix some dirt with a liquid glue that dries clear to look like mud, then artfully spatter it over your license plate. Not enough to cover it, but just enough to make a 0 indistinguishable from an 8, C for G, etc.