Big Brother or smart policing?

The part about locating stolen cars through reading the license plates is a good idea.

It's likely mostly useless for that. Why would anyone who steals a car leave the original license plate on it?

--Hawk

... but perhaps higher rates of stolen vehicle identification will result in higher rates of apprehension & recovery, which might result in a lowering of local insurance rates. Imagine that. Finally a win-win with this type of technology for legit motorists.

your breath on the lower insurance rates.

I agree.

the article said that it happened.

170 vehicles in Dallas alone does not seem to warrant a "mostly useless" description.

I guess next step will be placing surveillance cameras at private homes. It will definitely help to cut down on burglary and increase arrest rate of thieves. How we lived so far without this Big Brother watching over every move we take? Because as example of NSA spying program shows it will never be used in illegal way.

I am more concerned with those who will take this data and abuse it in some manner. Oh, that's right, they're politicians, why would I not trust them?

If you believe the data will only be kept for 90 days, like the story says, you are sadly mistaken. There are way too many ways to retrieve data even after it has been "erased". Even if it is erased from the system all you need to do is get it back from one of the daily backups of the system which were done while the data was there. Not to mention where it was stored by the other agencies who accessed it for their various reasons.

There is a lot of truth in the concerns expressed. Among the many things I have done is manage a computer system for a now defunct Federal Agency. We did daily backups of our Unix server and the daily tapes were recycled on a 90 day cycle. The monthly backups were stored for 7 years as part of the requirements for Federal Records Retention. Data from our server was shared with other agencies so even though a file was deleted from our server, we had no control of the copies.

This plays out in the old saw "once past the lips, forever on the hips" which has been updated to "Once posted on the 'Net, forever on the 'Net." With the creation of the major search engines such as Google, postings never go away. The same with virtually all electronic data and records. Someone, somewhere has a copy of that data you thought was deleted years ago.

... then again it is important to remember that it maybe many hours before the the 'dawn (and this fever) breaks.' In the mean time: "keep following the money" if you really want to know "what is going on, up or down."

One offshoot of the plate Readers: In Sarasota FL if they spot your vehicle in a seedy part of town frequented by prostitutes, or talking to one, they will send you a warning letter to the registered owner of the vehicle regardless if you were just asking for directions.

Any logic that calls keeping records of where everyone has been by the name "smart policing" might as well apply the term smart policing to other things that could be done in the name of policing too, such as stopping everyone on the streets and searching them, or coming into you home and searching for unspecified illegal items or using high tech devices to look straight through your walls to see what you are up too, after all, it might be criminal.

If they are doing this to catch stolen vehicles (they are not), they don't need to keep the records at all. They could instantly check each plate against a stolen vehicle watch list and know instantly which cars to chase. There is no valid reason to keep any record of the cars that are not reported stolen.

In my state we have a local toll road that works by an ez-pass type device (yet another tracking nightmare) or, for those without a pass their tags are scanned and they get a (higher cost) bill in the mail for the toll road use. Local news has repeatedly mentioned one person who has had his car stolen and he keeps getting bills in the mail because his car is repeatedly scanned using the toll road. I've yet to hear that they have caught the guy who stole the car, or even tried, even though the technology scans him when he enters the limited access highway, and he does this repeatedly, using the same entrances and exits. They are simply not even trying to catch the stolen car.

of when Napster first started. (It may have been another per-to-peer software) I believe a developer posted the program on the net for about an hour. After it went public, that was it for the 'rights of the legal copyright holders'. It spread like a drop of oil on a pond on a windy day...

Most Do leave th eoriginal plates on and that's why this tool can be effective. If plates were changed and the vehicle plate was ran the info wouldn't match the vehicle at all guaranteed to get you stopped.

on toll roads it likely does not cross reference people passing on a toll road with a hot sheet or data base of stolen cars. Most police agencies on the other hand my guess is an alert goes off in the police car as soon as the plate is read indicating a stolen car.

"Once on the Internet always on the Internet" is a true statement. Two years ago I was in Alexandria, Egypt at their famous library and learned that is where they have a copy of the Internet! Currently, the archive has a capacity to hold up to 3.7 petabytes of varying data on 1, 636 computers. Believe it or not.

http://www.bibalex.org/internetarchive/ia_en.aspx

Here is another site if your intrested..

Internet Archive: Wayback Machine

http://archive.org/web/

Big Brother

Been in our places for a while, so not that much for big news..

I was in Sarasota last week. I don't know if I was in a seedy part of town, but there was a traffic backup at every red light camera on route 41 from Nokomis to Sarasota airport! The interstate would have been better!

dobs108 Long Island NY

to the "trail" as it's known locally (the Tamiami Trail). It's the historical route between Tampa and Miami and was a serious bottle neck 25 years ago when I lived in Sarasota.

Scary stuff. People tracking.

But it isn't going to happen. Insurance companies are here to make money, not save you money. They don't lower rates to save you money, they would only do it for competitive reasons.
The technology is one that unfortunately will be abused.

If you owned a company that provided a service and you found that technology would allow you to provide that service at a lower cost and give you a competitive advantage, would you not do so? I think you would. Would you abuse the technology? I think not.

Why then do you assume that everyone else in business would abuse technology?

Think of it as a 'jobs program' (you know: "jobs, jobs, jobs.)" That is the mantra that is used to justify everything now, isn't it?

Since the Constitution issues are irrelevant to most the question becomes: are taxpayers, local or otherwise, getting their money's worth? ...

Strikes me as a rationalization of the power-hungry statist who want to lord over us plebs/civilians, but I know that's my paranoia speaking. Just that their attempt to alleviate my concern does nothing to actually alleviate my concern. In fact, it does the opposite.

It's good to be paranoid when I know they're out to get me.

These plate readers are exceedingly efficient at doing what an officer can do...radio in to check a plate number.

Being human, eventually the officer will forget.
The archive is where these cameras get into Big Brother territory.

I would say two weeks is long enough to keep this data before it should be erased to DOD erasure standards. In the United States, we used to be presumed innocent. So there is no need to stockpile time/date/location of innocent people's movements, eh?

Funny thing about these plate readers, in Ohio they were paid for thru HomeLand Security funding. They have snared plenty of citizens, but nary a terrorist yet.