License Plate "Guns" and Privacy

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Jul 20
2005

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License Plate "Guns" and Privacy

This October 2004 Bruce Schneier blog entry on wholesale surveillance just showed up again on Dave Farber's IP list. Worth a read. Some excerpts:

New Haven police have a new law enforcement tool: a license-plate scanner. Similar to a radar gun, it reads the license plates of moving or parked cars and links with remote police databases, immediately providing information about the car and owner...

Technology is fundamentally changing the nature of surveillance. Years ago, surveillance meant trench-coated detectives following people down streets. It was laborious and expensive, and was only used when there was reasonable suspicion of a crime. Modern surveillance is the policeman with a license-plate scanner, or even a remote license-plate scanner mounted on a traffic light and a policeman sitting at a computer in the station. It's the same, but it's completely different. It's wholesale surveillance.
The effects of wholesale surveillance on privacy and civil liberties is profound; but unfortunately, the debate often gets mischaracterized as a question about how much privacy we need to give up in order to be secure. This is wrong. It's obvious that we are all safer when the police can use all techniques at their disposal. What we need are corresponding mechanisms to prevent abuse, and that don't place an unreasonable burden on the innocent.

I like Schneier's last point. We haven't blocked other forms of police data gathering, just put in place checks and balances.

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Comments: 12

a [07.20.05 10:21 AM]

I was puzzled about licence plate spray I saw in a catalog.. Now I'm begining to understand (although I think the spray only works with "flash" based license plate readers.
see:
" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/search?q=license+plate+spray

""You have zero privacy anyway," Scott McNealy

larry [07.20.05 12:16 PM]

actually what is the difference between this, or a camera and a cop on the beat with a notepad. Its not as if its happening in your house, it in the public areas, so how is it a violation of privacy. If you are in public, then where's the privacy.

Tim O'Reilly [07.20.05 12:23 PM]

Larry, the difference is the difference between overhearing a conversation on the streetcorner and setting up a surveillance microphone. If you build this data into a database, you create a difference not just in quantity, but ultimately in kind.

John Dowdell [07.20.05 01:14 PM]

... and how will we prevent other civilians from combining such video-analysis systems with database IDs installed in their cars? "Hmm, that person in the Ferrari looks attractive, I wonder where they live...."

More importantly, how will such new abilities be safe from use by outlaws?

"The effects of wholesale surveillance on privacy and civil liberties is profound" This frames it as an emphasis on curbing governmental use of new technology, while I'm more concerned about general public use of new technology. We still haven't completely digested the ability to find Social Security Numbers of the web, for instance. The general strategy of minimizing centralized power seems to address that special-case of government use, although I realize lotsa folks like to keep their cognitive-dissonance on that latter point.... ;-)

Tim O'Reilly [07.20.05 01:33 PM]

Great comment, John. As we see from the recent identity theft crisis, when data is aggregated into massive databases, it's subject to misuse.

For example, there was an NYT article the other day in which a dispatcher for paparazzi described his ability to track the whereabouts of any celebrity at any time.

Mike Perry [07.20.05 01:34 PM]

Actually, the primary use for this sort of system would be in spotting stolen cars. No cop is going to park on a busy street and enter, by hand, every car tag he sees into his on-board computer. This'll make that sort of thing a bit like the bar code scanner at grocery stores. Easy and quick.

I, for one, fail to see how making the capture of genuine criminals more likely threatens my rights. My rights go if I'm entered into a criminal database for no valid reason. They don't go when actual criminals have a greater chance of getting caught. We all benefit from seeing them pulled off the street.

And the biggest threat to our rights isn't coming from the gadgets a cop might use on the beat. It's coming from a news media that wants to be able to manufacture any sort of story about those they dislike for political or ideological reasons, true or false, and conceal their sources from public scrutinity. We can't be accused in court without being able to confront and expose our accusers. It should be illegal for the media to accuse us in the court of public opinion without bringing out their sources and allowing us to confront them and their credibility. I trust the average cop on the beat to be honest far more than I trust CBS or the NY Times.

And that press demand for an absence of accountability scares me far more than any car tag scanner.

--Mike Perry, Seattle, Dachau Liberated

Tim O'Reilly [07.20.05 01:39 PM]

Mike, you missed the point of Schneier's article. He was actually saying that this was indeed good for catching criminals, and so it is a good thing, but that it has possible downsides that we need to think through too. So, for example, he suggested that the data not be retained if no problem is found.

Ian Smith [07.20.05 08:56 PM]

Isn't this more about anonymity than privacy?

Anonymity is the ability to interact with society without being recognized or having your actions be attributed to you. In contrast, privacy is the expectation that your activities outside of society are unobserved and uncataloged. Since the Internet and the Web are abstract environments frequently instantiated in solitude and under a pseudonym, there is a perception that they are private places and a blanket of anonymity covers what one does there and what is stored there.

It seems that Schneier's point is to ask whether we should be focused on protecting the observability of our actions outside of society or should we be working to assure the accuracy of the attributions of our interactions with society. It also seems that the accuracy of any given catalog of attributions is currently uncertain and has relatively few reasons to be opened up for validation by the collectors and controllers of the data.

There isn't much of a market force (yet) to cause a business to vouch for the accuracy of any infomation shared with another. The Market would, I expect, want this to be decided by the Market, whereas there are some who would think that this is squarely in the domain of the State. I think that if there continues to be negligent releases of consumer information at frequent and regular intervals the patience of citizens and customers will wane and some sort of forced reaction.

Jeroen Wenting [07.21.05 12:28 AM]

Mike, that's how the will try to justify 24/7 surveillance of everyone (that and "fighting terrorism".

The US is late to the game again, in Europe such systems are already becoming commonplace.

In reality they're starting to be used to indeed track everyone constantly.
Police are now starting to track cars through cameras on all major roads, combined with tracking all cellphones 24/7 (cellphones send I'm alive messages every few minutes, these can be traced) and tracking all internet traffic by ip address (which they can under anti-terrorism laws now combine in near realtime with accounts and thus real people).
When (probably in 2007 in the Netherlands) all those systems are combined the police can trace me and everyone else in this country day and night unless we walk everywhere, don't have a cellphone, and don't log into an internet account at any time (in other words, unless we stay within walking distance of our homes which are known and stay incommunicado as fixed phones are also traced).

Up until now a court order is needed for any one of these means of tracing someone, and those were only given when someone is already a suspect.
Now they're going to change all that and effectively say that everyone is a suspect by definition and only your actions will clear you temporarilly.

In effect this will end freedom of speech and movement as saying something or meeting someone the government doesn't approve of can now be detected near instantly by the government.

Given that a Maost party is likely to become a very major player here after the next elections, I think you can see the end result...

Ross Stapleton-Gray [07.21.05 12:08 PM]

Mike, your problems come when a lot of aggregated information about you is abused for someone's gain and your loss. I think we're seeing a particularly interesting (and vicious) application of data mining in the recent case of American technical reps ejected from US Government-sponsored delegations because public FEC records indicate they donated to Kerry's presidential campaign. These were standards people, concerned about technical standards issues. A similar thing has been happening with the "K Street Project," where lobbying groups are being pressured to remove their Democratic Party-aligned members, or face being cut off by the Republicans.

Now map that to various of your interests, habits, affiliations, associations, and assume that People Who May Oppose Your Views (in whatever position they might be... representative, employer, insurer, neighbor, etc.) have a full dossier on all that.

alan mcf [07.21.05 03:07 PM]

"Police are setting up a national network of cameras across England and Wales which they hope will dramatically increase the number of arrests.
The automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) can tell police when a vehicle has been stolen or involved in crime.
"