Judge slams Ohio village's speed cameras

[Ed Anger]

Such as watching pre teen ass in the Target parking lot.

[Berkut]

There was an article in the local rag on Sunday about the growing use of license plate readers on police cars.

Basically, it is a high speed camera mounted on the police car that can read up to 2000 license plates per minute, and then in real time check them against a database. Obvious utility in finding stolen vehicles, cars with expired registration, etc.

Of course, that also means that the data is storing where your car is at some particular moment in time even if you've done nothing wrong. And if they take that data and store it somewhere, and then take data from other plate readers and store that in a way that can correlate it all, you can start putting together some rather interesting data about private citizens movements in their cards, where they have been, when, etc., etc.

On the one hand, this is creepily similar to the eye readers in Minority Report - except it is your car. You could imagine that if these were all over the place, say every single police car?, you could pretty quickly create a rather serious amount of data about otherwise perfectly innocent people's whereabouts. There aren't really any laws dealing with this yet - should there be?

On the other hand, none of this data is "private" per se - it's not like the fact that you are driving on some particular road and some particular time carries any expectation of privacy with it - these devices are not doing anything that in theory could not be done by some guy jotting down plates as they go by, but of course in reality they do so in a manner that is simply not possible manually.

Right now, at least in New York, most police departments using them have one or two cars with them, they use them to check for expired tags and such, and the data is wiped out every thirty days or so. But that is all pretty much voluntary on their part, and mostly driven by them

1) Not having them on every car,
2) Not having the resources to actually use them if they were on more cars, and
3) The technology not yet existing to actual store/process/report on the data from multiple systems in one place.

But none of these issues are particularly difficult to overcome, if the NSA or someone like that wanted to create some kind of database of citizens vehicles movements...

[Alcibiades]

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57559105-71/speed-camera-gives-ticket-to-stationary-car/

Speed camera gives ticket to stationary car

A speed camera in Baltimore declares that a Mazda is doing 38 mph in a 25 mph zone. It wasn't. It was standing still at a red light.



Something's wonky about technology in Baltimore.
Earlier this week, I shivered at the idea that the city had been at the forefront of putting audio surveillance in its buses.
Now I hear that its speed cameras appear to have been buying street drugs from extremely disreputable sorts.
You see, a Baltimore camera issued a ticket to Daniel Doty. It claimed that he and his Mazda wagon were going 38 mph in a 25 mph zone.
I hadn't been aware that Mazda wagons could go that fast. Doty, on the other hand, hadn't been aware that you can go 38 mph while standing completely still.
As the upstanding Baltimore Sun has it, the photograph that Doty received with his $40 citation showed that his Mazda wasn't moving. At all.
It showed its brake lights offering an illuminating detail to the scene. Doty told the Sun that it was "shockingly obvious" his Mazda wasn't moving.
For its part, the city was incapable of explaining how it might possibly be that such an injustice could occur.

It seems that citations go through not one, but two reviews -- just in case, you know.
Some might experience involuntary spasms on hearing that one of those reviews involves an actual police officer who must swear that this car was going at least 12 mph over the limit.
Oh, and he or she must swear it "based on inspection of the recorded images."
Speed cameras have often been criticized for their ineffectiveness -- or merely for their utterly venal purposes.
But the city of Baltimore has withheld comment -- beyond describing any error as "unacceptable" -- until a task force meeting on Friday.
I imagine that Doty may have a good chance of contesting the ticket. Conveniently, he happens to be a lawyer.

Baltimore and all

[CountDeMoney]

Yeah, sounds about right.

[viper37]

Don't speed. Problem solved.

increase the speed limits.  Problem solved.
Stop shuffling the speed signs to create ticket traps.  Problem solved.
Legalize high speed instead of marijuana.  Problem solved.

[Valmy]

Don't speed. Problem solved.

On the contrary, it makes the problem of reaching ticket quotas all the more difficult.

[CountDeMoney]

But none of these issues are particularly difficult to overcome, if the NSA or someone like that wanted to create some kind of database of citizens vehicles movements...

License plate readers have been deployed for "homeland security" purposes at <insert certain bridges and tunnels in a certain mid-atlantic state> for several years already, just sucking up all sorts of data that wasn't for us.  I worked on the program.  LULZ TO TEH EVILDOERZ