License Plate Scanners Are Eroding Our Privacy
Terrific piece by Glenn Harlan Reynolds in Popular Mechanics on automated license plate scanners, mounted on police cars, telephone poles, and elsewhere in order to build a huge database of where people are driving:

This might seem like a small intrusion compared with the electronic spying carried out by the NSA. But not all threats to privacy involve the tracking of emails and other communications.

Right now, the law suggests that license-plate scanners don't invade your privacy because they record only events that occur in public. After all, anyone could see you driving down the road or parked in front of a motel. But if officials add up enough bits of information like that, they gradually can construct what the ACLU has termed a "single, high-resolution image of our lives."

There's a legal term for this idea: the mosaic theory. The New York Times ran a story last year about how a man angrily confronted a Target store manager to complain that the company was sending his teenage daughter coupons for baby goods. Were they trying to encourage her to get pregnant? Nope. Target's data-mining operation had found a strong correlation between purchases of about 25 items--scent-free lotions, certain nutritional supplements, and so on--and different stages of pregnancy. The teenager's purchases had fit the pattern. The father apologized to Target a few days later, when it turned out that his daughter was, in fact, pregnant.

Law enforcement agencies may not know or care what toiletries you buy, but they can access credit reports and property tax records, which are public information. Setting that aside, simply tracking our movements can erode our privacy. The Supreme Court recently held that police need a search warrant to attach a GPS tracker to an individual's car, even though the device would just be recording travel along public roads. The decision turned largely on the idea that placing a locating device on your car is a trespass on your property. But five justices also suggested some sympathy to the mosaic theory as a legal argument; whether the court actually adopts such an approach will have to wait for a later case.

The Supreme Court, though, isn't the first step in protecting privacy; it's the last.

He notes that we need to speak up -- to Congress, to state legislatures -- to stop the privacy invasion.

"The Boston Police Department (BPD) has indefinitely halted its use
of license plate readers (LPR) following an investigation published
on Saturday into their use by the investigative journalism
organization MuckRock and the Boston Globe."

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/boston-police-indefinitely-suspends-license-plate-reader-program/

Ron at December 15, 2013 5:32 AM

Amy Alkon

https://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2013/12/license-plate-s.html#comment-4117872">comment from Ron

Quoting the Boston Globe from that piece:

One Harley Davidson motorcycle that had been reported stolen passed license plate scanners a total of 59 times between Oct. 19, 2012, and March 13, 2013. It was often recorded on sequential days or multiple times in a single day, all by the same scanner and almost always within the same half-hour span in the early evening.

Boston police chief technical officer John Daley indicated that each of these scans prompted an e-mail alert to the department’s Stolen Car Unit, but there is no indication that the motorcycle was ever apprehended or even stopped.

As I've learned, the police don't care about the small crime you're a victim of and aren't going to look for your stolen car if that takes legwork. They will only find it if they stop it and check the plate.

The ass who couldn't/didn't find my pink Rambler despite being handed a platter of information about the thief was promoted to sergeant.

Amy Alkon at December 15, 2013 6:22 AM

So yeah, we have the worst of all possible worlds: a huge database to use for political persecution, while actual, you know, crimes are ignored. Welcome to American Big Brother.

And yes, the DoD has long identified that data that is unclassified in isolation can become classified when aggregated.

Cousin Dave at December 15, 2013 7:36 AM

Alt-news site SOTT.net has some interesting views about WHY the Powers-That-Be are so interested in our every private moment: The ultimate goal is to accurately create a virtual country complete with virtual population... Sim City on a bigger scale!
When we refer to the "PTB", we're not talking about government officials. Instead, we mean the characters behind the government, the untouchable, unknowables who pull the real strings.

jefe at December 15, 2013 12:51 PM

Slap some mud over that plate so that it looks like you ran through a puddle - that shouldn't be considered "defacing" the plate so there shouldn't be criminal charges; nor can the plate be read by the scanners. no?

Charles at December 15, 2013 6:46 PM

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