San Jose May Put License Plate Scanners On Garbage Trucks 258
An anonymous reader writes: It's bad enough that some places have outfitted their police vehicles with automated license plate scanners, but now the city of San Jose may take it one step further. They're considering a proposal to install plate readers on their fleet of garbage trucks. This would give them the ability to blanket virtually every street in the city with scans once a week. San Jose officials made this proposal ostensibly to fight car theft, but privacy activists have been quick to point out the unintended consequences. ACLU attorney Chris Conley said, "If it's collected repeatedly over a long period of time, it can reveal intimate data about you like attending a religious service or a gay bar. People have a right to live their lives without constantly being monitored by the government." City councilman Johnny Khamis dismissed such criticism: "This is a public street. You're not expecting privacy on a public street."
To Fight Car Theft (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:To Fight Car Theft (Score:4, Interesting)
So, if fighting car theft is the reason, will they agree up front to abandon the effort if a significant drop in car theft is not realized? I betcha not.
No, if there is a significant drop then the more likely conclusion is that the method is effective in preventing car theft. This would only strengthen the argument in favor of such devices.
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"No, I'm an idiot who can't read what the parent wrote."
No, I'm an idiot that doesn't recognize clarity.
There, FTFY.
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Of course they will. Governments are historically quite benevolent about giving up broadened surveillance and other sources of information when actual evidence surfaces it might not be as effective as first thought. I'm sure they are happy to eat the loss of funds for purchase/installation/maintenance of said systems, too.
sigh.
I really DO NOT get California. If there was ONE state I thought you *might* be able to get an anti-government-monitoring consensus in....
Re:To Fight Car Theft (Score:4, Insightful)
It will only be a matter of time before San Jose recognizes the revenue stream they could generate by selling this data.
Re:To Fight Car Theft (Score:4, Insightful)
I really DO NOT get California. If there was ONE state I thought you *might* be able to get an anti-government-monitoring consensus in....
Why would you think that? Nanny's are all about monitoring the children and California is quite the nanny state.
Re: To Fight Car Theft (Score:2, Funny)
You clearly know nothing about California except what Faux News tells you to think. Leave California to the Californians lest you further reveal your own ignorance.
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He hasn't lived in California, the land of rules and regulations. He has the media cartoon version of the place in mind.
Re:To Fight Car Theft (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, the property taxes are quite related to the schools. The current property tax law (Prop 13) was sold on the presumption that it would enable equal funding of all school districts...which required that the state provide the funding, so the state got to control the schools rather than the cities and counties which had done so previously. Somehow the schools didn't get equitable funding out of it, but the state did get control of the (previously) local school system. AFAIKT the funding for the poor school districts hasn't gotten any better, but it does seem as if the funding in the rich districts has gotten harder to come by, and there has been a rise in the number of private schools.
Also ignored was the effect caused because people eventually die, but corporations don't necessarily do the same. This has lead to an increasing proportion of corporately owned land being assessed at a minimal rate.
I can't really claim that all of the effects of this measure were intended by it's sponsors, but it's hard to think of any that they wouldn't have approved of. Look up "Donald Rumsford".
Re:To Fight Car Theft (Score:5, Insightful)
They won't do this.
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Smart! Wish I had mod points.
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The first thing theives do is change the plate.
If that's true then how exactly will the scanners we're talking about ever do anything useful to deter or recover after vehicle theft?
Re: To Fight Car Theft (Score:4, Insightful)
It's also not illegal in California to put a temporary cover on your license plate when it's not in motion, parked on public or private property. When in motion on public streets/lots, it's fair game.
The scanners, if they're in radio contact with something, can easily give up GPS information about the locus of what was seen. Whether or not a governmental body/public safety unit will dash out and do something remains to be seen.
License plate covers can easily made from scrap cardboard. But what will happen next is a closeup of the VIN # on the dash. When VINs eventually go to an RFID tag, there'll be covers for the tag to prevent identification. This cat and mouse game will go on until California actually *does* run out of water, at which point, who cares?
Re: To Fight Car Theft (Score:4, Interesting)
It's also not illegal in California to put a temporary cover on your license plate when it's not in motion, parked on public or private property.
Do you have a cite for this? It is relevant to my interests.
Re: To Fight Car Theft (Score:4, Informative)
CAL. VEH. CODE Â 5201 .....paste
(1) The installation of a cover over a lawfully parked vehicle to ....end paste.
protect it from the weather and the elements does not constitute a
violation of this subdivision. A peace officer or other regularly
salaried employee of a public agency designated to enforce laws,
including local ordinances, relating to the parking of vehicles may
temporarily remove so much of the cover as is necessary to inspect
any license plate, tab, or indicia of registration on a vehicle.
(2) The installation of a license plate security cover is not a
violation of this subdivision if the device does not obstruct or
impair the recognition of the license plate information, including,
but not limited to, the issuing state, license plate number, and
registration tabs, and the cover is limited to the area directly over
the top of the registration tabs. No portion of a license plate
security cover shall rest over the license plate number.
(c) A casing, shield, frame, border, product, or other device that
obstructs or impairs the reading or recognition of a license plate
by an electronic device operated by state or local law enforcement,
an electronic device operated in connection with a toll road,
high-occupancy toll lane, toll bridge, or other toll facility, or a
remote emission sensing device, as specified in Sections 44081 and
44081.6 of the Health and Safety Code, shall not be installed on, or
affixed to, a vehicle.
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The first thing theives do is change the plate.
If that's true then how exactly will the scanners we're talking about ever do anything useful to deter or recover after vehicle theft?
Not that I'm defending it, but it'd be a simple matter of checking all plates against the registry, which would only be feasible on the backend:
1. collect all plates seen
2. run each to see if it's listed as stolen (naive check for stolen plate found). If found, do manual review of the car, and possibly dispatch.
3. run each to see if it's registered. If not, then do manual review, etc. If yes, then attempt other checks (does the vehicle match description (color, type (truck/car/bike/etc), make/model if possi
Or restrict it to only the auto theft squad (Score:3)
Or restrict the info to only the auto theft squad.
My guess is how it works out is that the data goes directly to the "intelligence" squad and they don't even share it with the auto theft squad for fear that it will be used to deduce the Mayor's car is parked at his girlfriend's or something.
Re:To Fight Car Theft (Score:4, Insightful)
They will drop it when the councilman is found parked in front of the strip club.
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Police state San Jose (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Police state San Jose (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. I read this
"This is a public street. You're not expecting privacy on a public street."
and my immediate reaction was "then perhaps you should be".
You aren't expecting not to have your car seen by someone passing in the street who wouldn't give it a second glance or remember it 10 seconds later. However, that's a totally different thing to having its identity and location digitally scanned, recorded indefinitely, and searchable in combination with arbitrary other data sources, giving rise to the reasonable privacy concerns mentioned in TFS and many more.
Re: Police state San Jose (Score:5, Insightful)
This. The whole 'no expectation of privacy' argument is and always has been stupid, and this councilman is a moron for saying it.
I don't expect to be invisible on a public street. I do expect that unless I do something memorable that people who observe me aren't going to recall seeing me or do anything anything all concerning their observation of me hours, days, months, or years later.
This business is completely different and totally beyond what I expect when out and about.
Re: Police state San Jose (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. The issue here isn't "right to privacy", it's "right to be forgotten".
Re: Police state San Jose (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course in smaller communities there is very little anonymity, and I suppose that's the next discussion. What is reasonable to demand as far as a sense of being anonymous?
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What is reasonable to demand as far as a sense of being anonymous?
I'd suggest that a good starting point for discussion might be "What would the situation be if these monitoring technologies were not used and you just went about a normal life?"
From an ethical perspective, I don't see much distinction between the issue we're talking about here and things like a modern-day Peeping Tom flying a drone with a camera outside your bedroom window, or modern transport infrastructure requiring smart cards to pay and then tying those smart cards back to their owners so everyone's pe
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I think scale matters. One or two people recognising you as you go about your day is probably no big deal whether you live in a city or a little country village.
On the other hand, a system recognising you visiting the same house after school every Tuesday, knowing from other information that the owners are out at that time so their 15-year-old daughter is home alone, knowing you are an unmarried 50-year-old male and knowing that you googled the girl's school recently as well starts to look like a recipe for
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I believe some courts (not sure if it's SCotUS) have either ruled or commented that there's a significant difference between "no (individual) expectation of privacy" and "no expectation not to be wholesale surveiled using automation." The councilman quoted in the article must not have heard this - or is banking that his audience hadn't.
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He's not a moron. He just knows that most people would object to his real motives, and most will buy this one.
You trust too much in the honesty of politicians.
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Indeed. I read this
"This is a public street. You're not expecting privacy on a public street."
and my immediate reaction was "then perhaps you should be".
You aren't expecting not to have your car seen by someone passing in the street who wouldn't give it a second glance or remember it 10 seconds later. However, that's a totally different thing to having its identity and location digitally scanned, recorded indefinitely, and searchable in combination with arbitrary other data sources, giving rise to the reasonable privacy concerns mentioned in TFS and many more.
And don't forget, that the scanners read everything within their field of vision... so they will also collect information for vehicles sitting on the driveway as well as in the garage, if the door is up.
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It seems likely that that tactic would be very effective at getting you arrested and charged with something silly, except not that silly if you think about it. Which is the point, of course, but I'm not sure it's a price worth paying to make that point.
there's privacy and there's privacy (Score:3)
Sure someone might notice your car near a strip club. But they won't notice it every 3pm on Wednesday like a systematic scanning system would. Similarly,they might notice your car but they won't necessarily know that the car next to it belongs to your nanny. Not to mention people likely won't be certain in most cases (do you know your friends license plate?)
Not a 100% expectation of privacy shouldn't mean that the government is free to search and track whatever you do. Stupid loopholes like a cop pulling yo
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How is it any different from instructing the garbage men to write down the lisence plates they see?
Unless they also go back to base and feed those licence plate records into a permanently stored, searchable database that is cross-referenced with arbitrary other data sets, I think it's quite different.
In any case, how many garbage men do you see systematically writing down the time and location of every vehicle they pass? None, I'm guessing, because it's not something anyone would normally expect a garbage man to be doing. Moreover, if someone really was going down your street making careful notes of all
Already being done commercially ... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Police state San Jose (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Police state San Jose (Score:5, Insightful)
It is invasive, because it allows the wholesale collection of information on people without any effort, and the create a massive database on every vehicle owners movements.
I'd be fine if they read the plates, checked whether or not it is stolen, and then dumps the data, never storing it, but we know this won't happen. They will keep the data for years. And my faith in any police force of government body has been shaken enough that I no longer trust them, and the data will ultimately be abused by someone, whether it's an officer checking up on their spouse, or a politician looking for dirt on their opponent.
No, if they want to use the garbage collection resources as a means to read plates, then have the garbage men write every plate down on paper, or manually type it into the computer. Because the city is right, on public streets there is no expectation of privacy. Back in the day, law enforcement had to do the legwork by hand, let that continue.
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Hold up... it's the collection of information on cars. More specifically, it's the collection of information in license plates.
Every time somebody tries to argue that a speed ticket is not for them because they cannot be identified in a photo as having been the driver, a lot of people are ready to accept that license plate != person(s) for the same reasons that they would argue that IP address != person(s)
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Bad analogy, IP's are not owned by the person it is registered to at the time. It can also change over time depending on the providers DHCP setup, and ISPs keep terrible logs at times.
Your license plate, is registered to you, or at least to the owner, this is also why camera tickets are a fine, but no points, when it comes to these types of things, it is the owners responsibility to know who is in control of their vehicle, and will suffer the consequences should the person in control do something stupid.
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The Luddites have used that very same argument for centuries.
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Back in the day, law enforcement had to do the legwork by hand, let that continue.
So you're all for pervasive recording of your movements and indefinite storage and cross referencing of that information ... but you want it to require hugely more manpower, be very expensive, and on those rare occasions where it might actually help find a missing person or solve a murder or such, you want to make sure the process is much slower and less efficient. But keep up the process, right?
I imagine you're also a fan of your employer putting huge payroll resources into rooms full of people operati
I don't see the justification (Score:2)
Looking at the numbers from the San Jose police website, with over 7000 cars stolen a year, I really can't blame them for trying this.
I can. If that many cars are being stolen then they need to get busy on doing the things that will deal with the root of the problem. Even if a system like this worked it won't solve the problem. You need to look at other cities with less of a stolen car problem and figure out what they are doing differently. Areas with high crime rates rarely have the problem solved by having the government become more oppressive. It sounds like they if they have that many cars stolen that they have some form of organi
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Google Maps (Score:5, Insightful)
City councilman Johnny Khamis dismissed such criticism: "This is a public street. You're not expecting privacy on a public street."
This argument did not work for Google Maps, who have been forced by various state and municipal governments to blur the license plates and faces of people captured.
But I guess they aren't the government... if the government does it, it's fine.. (???)
Re:Google Maps (Score:4, Insightful)
You're not expecting privacy on a public street.
Yes I am. I am expecting that there are no vast armies of spies on every corner or every street. I am expecting that I can go up in the masses, and that I am alone in empty streets.
Yes, I expect that sometimes people can see me. That is something hugely different from monitoring me. I expect that my neighbour can see me leave in the morning. I expect that my boss can see me coming in the morning. It is a huge violation of privacy if my neighbour checks with my boss, or if my boss checks with my neighbour. "Everyone present can see" is totally different from "surveillance 24/7".
Actually people can scan license plates (Score:4, Insightful)
And license plate scanning and logging is something corporations and individuals are allowed to do. Car repo and bail bondsmen have been doing this for a while. Going far beyond what the garbage trucks will do. For example the repo/bond guys in addition to logging while driving down the street they also cruise parking lots of grocery stores, walmart, etc to log plates. There is a huge national database of these logs. Many police departments actually subscribe to this database.
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But I guess they aren't the government... if the government does it, it's fine.. (???)
That's the entire premise [twitter.com] of government, dude - they're people with extra rights once they put on their funny costumes. The market rules of reason, logic, and justice don't apply - only vaguely expressed intentions and platitudes (see any recent Supreme Court decision). And if you disagree, there's a SWAT team with AR-15's to change (or eradicate) your mind.
OK, now you can skip day one of law school. [bloombergview.com]
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Not saying it's right, but if you/something is in a publicly-visible portion of your private property, you have no legal expectation of privacy there.
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so, if you back your car in to the carport, only have a rear plate, and
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I'm not sure about San Jose.. but in DC (I learned this the hard way when I was ticketed for out of state plates while living there), even if your car is in your driveway, and there is a gate (obviously with a closed fence they would not be able to see it) around your property, the city can enforce all ordinances and laws while your vehicle is on your private property. The reason I kept out of state plates was I was living in DC temporarily (okay a year), but using public transport, and besides, it was reg
Re:Google Maps (Score:4, Interesting)
also, circuit past every donut shop in town (Score:2)
I can't wait until autonomous delivery drones are so ubiquitous that we can check up on the locations of all our elected officials, unelected bureaucrats and police officers 60 x 24 x 365.
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I doubt most people are using software to farm license plates or do facial recognition from those videos, nor would they throw any data derived from that into a central database that would be used for unknown government purposes.
It's an interesting issue since it does touch on a number of things.
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Your argument is only valid if we the citizens get to utilize public tax payer funds to outfit every citizen with a camera (and maybe a salary) to follow the police around on their route every day.
Too many questions and chances for abuse (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, in this case yes, the government is allowed to do it - police cars already do it.
Police officers have to operate under fairly specific guidelines and we expect them to be monitoring to some degree. That doesn't mean the government should have carte-blanche to put tracking technology everywhere. A LOT of questions have to be satisfactorily answered before I'd even consider whether this application of the technology is acceptable. Who is paying for it? How do we ensure that it isn't used for other purposes? Who has access to the data? Under what conditions? How do we ensure the safety of citizens from false-positive results (even one is unacceptable)? How do we know this isn't yet another revenue generating scheme like red-light cameras? Is this really the least invasive and most effective measure available? Is the problem of sufficient scale to warrant an expensive and potentially (likely) invasive technology?
I have a LOT of questions about this and I very much doubt they will be answered to my satsifaction
The question is one of degree.
Yes it is and that question is in no danger of being answered.
Nobody expects the spanish inquisition (Score:2)
City councilman Johnny Khamis dismissed such criticism: "This is a public street. You're not expecting privacy on a public street."
I'm also not expecting the spanish inquisition...
Just because I don't have a legal expectation of privacy does not mean the government gets the right to give me a rectal exam every time I set foot outside my house. The real question is whether there is a compelling public interest in the government having and using this technology. They might claim it is to fight car theft but is the problem of such significant as to justify automated monitoring of the entire populace? I'm guessing probably not. We all
Time for shoe-on-the-other-foot tactics. (Score:5, Interesting)
"...City councilman Johnny Khamis dismissed such criticism: "This is a public street. You're not expecting privacy on a public street."
Really Johnny?
So you won't mind if I just set up this webcam on the public street outside of your home and feed that stream to the internet, right?
Or perhaps we'll find some volunteers to follow you and your family around day and night as you drive around. That won't seem creepy or invasive at all, I'm sure. And after all, we're just driving around on public streets, right?
Sometimes I really wonder what the hell it would take to get these morons to wake about privacy and how it feels to be monitored day and night.
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So long as you are careful not to cross the line into harassment, I don't see why he would mind at all.
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So long as you are careful not to cross the line into harassment, I don't see why he would mind at all.
So, you would not find any of the prescribed actions invasive or an invasion of your privacy?
If you question those actions yourself, I fail to see how you can assume he wouldn't.
Understand that today's plate scanners are tomorrow's drones with your mentality. This can only get worse without proper legislation and control around what privacy should imply for anyone anywhere.
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"...City councilman Johnny Khamis dismissed such criticism: "This is a public street. You're not expecting privacy on a public street."
Really Johnny?
So you won't mind if I just set up this webcam on the public street outside of your home and feed that stream to the internet, right?
Or perhaps we'll find some volunteers to follow you and your family around day and night as you drive around. That won't seem creepy or invasive at all, I'm sure. And after all, we're just driving around on public streets, right?
Sometimes I really wonder what the hell it would take to get these morons to wake about privacy and how it feels to be monitored day and night.
Firstly, I am all for privacy. That said, I agree with "Johnny" Khamis. The idea that someone could possibly learn something about any particular individual if they wanted to has always been feasible even without scanners. As for the suggestion that volunteers follow an individual around -- that sounds a bit like stalking to me (for which there is legal recourse).
Re:Time for shoe-on-the-other-foot tactics. (Score:4, Insightful)
The difference between just and unjust is the difference between easy and feasible.
A lawful search is every bit as feasible as an unlawful one; the difference is the miniscule administrative impediment of securing a search warrant.
Surveillance, even in a nominally public setting, is unjust without cause. Pervasive surveillance is unjust specifically because it's done so without cause or suspicion (other than the despot's constant suspicion of everyone).
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So you won't mind if I just set up this webcam on the public street outside of your home and feed that stream to the internet, right?
Here are a couple of things wrong with your statement;
1. The garbage truck is not parked in front of your home 24/7
2. Only pictures of license plates are save. No pictures of people are saved. No vehicles parked off the road are photographed.
3. Access to the database is restricted and there will be retention policies in place.
A webcam and license plate scanning are very different and equating the two is invalid.
Or perhaps we'll find some volunteers to follow you and your family around day and night as you drive around.
That is not what is being proposed.
Sometimes I really wonder what the hell it would take to get these morons to wake about privacy and how it feels to be monitored day and night.
Considering that the garbage truck will be on your street for
Re:Time for shoe-on-the-other-foot tactics. (Score:4, Insightful)
Here are a couple of things wrong with your statement; 1. The garbage truck is not parked in front of your home 24/7 2. Only pictures of license plates are save. No pictures of people are saved. No vehicles parked off the road are photographed. 3. Access to the database is restricted and there will be retention policies in place. A webcam and license plate scanning are very different and equating the two is invalid.
I cannot believe you actually accept all of this as truth, as if we haven't found rampant abuse of monitoring systems after promises like this shit are made up front to justify the "innocent" program. Hell, I couldn't even make it past #2 in your list without thinking of the stories that came out regarding images gathered by TSA body scanners.
The level of blind faith here fucking floors me.
Considering that the garbage truck will be on your street for a few minutes every week or two it is not monitoring day and night.
I'm not worried about the garbage truck and the "few minutes". I'm worried about years of data being collected and used and abused in ways you've not even thought of by law enforcement.
Do you think streetlight camera databases are never tapped into to track movements of "suspects" (gotta love parallel construction), even though the entire system was justified in order to curb people who cause accidents by running red lights?
Do you think your travel information isn't kept for years to benefit pattern analysis even if you've never even been accused of a crime?
Do you enjoy the fact that you could end up on the No-Fly list with zero explanation as to how you got on the list, or how you could be removed due to your obvious innocence?
How will you feel when they come back in a few years complaining about the limited capability of vehicle mounted cameras and instead propose a fleet of drones to capture images in driveways and parking lots? (of course, they'll pinky-swear they won't point them in your windows or otherwise invade your privacy, and none of that footage will ever be leaked.)
On top of all this, statistics will likely show this monitoring will do fuck-all to stop or curb auto theft. I sure as hell don't expect my auto insurance company to hand me a huge refund if I move to a "monitored" community next week, and chop shops don't usually worry about keeping license plates intact.
Privacy isn't boolean (Score:5, Insightful)
This is only partially true. I'm not expecting that no one in the world will see my car. I am expecting that it's rather unlikely that if I park on a random street for a couple hours, anyone I know will see and notice my car and actually realize it's mine.
I very much DO expect the level of privacy that excludes someone frequently taking note of the exact location of my car. If John Q. Public were doing that, I'd be very put off. I might even consider it stalking. In no sane world do we then say, "Well, it's fine if it's the government and they're stalking EVERYONE."
Yes, Mr. Khamis, I do expect that level of privacy, and it's not for you to decide what the public gets to expect. Your job is to do what we want, not the other way around.
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I agree, actually, that neither privacy or public safety is always most important. We're arguing where the line should be drawn.
I'd resist things like this less if they were invariably (or ever) built with reasonable protections for all the innocent people whose data gets hoovered up. You want to check my license plate and make sure it's not listed as stolen, then delete the data? Go ahead. I'd like some truly independent confirmation you're actually deleting it, though.
False positives (Score:5, Insightful)
The real problem isn't the public nature of your data; it's the private nature of aggregate data.
Because you carry out your activities in public, any individual who legitimately wants information about you can, without violating any laws, personally keep track of your public activities. Without publication or any direct action, the person is not harassing you or whatnot. The things you do are completely public and not subject to privacy protections.
That, of course, implies someone is interested in you, personally, in the first place.
With aggregate data, we can put together lists of all people whose public functions follow a certain pattern. This, then, draws our attention to those people.
Most people don't realize the very criminal nature of human existence. A lot of folks have... mischief in their histories. Hanging in parks at night, casual adultery, illegal gambling between friends... hell, there's estimates that some 40%-70% of 20-year-olds have hooked up with underaged teens. These are all things that can put you in jail, and may or may not distress people in your community--some more than others, some not at all (nobody cares about your poker games in your basement with your drinking buddies). As it stands, these activities aren't actually harmful to society, or distressing at large.
That's why we have strict, constitutional controls for searches and seizure: if your criminal activities aren't drawing any attention, your criminal activities aren't harmful to society. The police rifling through your belongings and arresting you on bureaucratic technicalities *would* harm society at large, creating a constant state of paranoia and resentment among the population, along with costly economic and social disruption.
Aggregate public data collection and profiling similarly draws attention to people's behaviors, focusing legal scrutiny where it does not necessarily do the most good. As this scrutiny broadens, it necessarily dilutes the attention of legal enforcement from the important criminal activities which actually harm society. Persons whose activities are of no consequence are more frequently investigated and arrested, while persons whose quiet activities invoke a greater injury to their peers enjoy reduced law enforcement attention and a consequential lower risk for expanding their operations even further. Such aggregation could, as consequence, allow petty criminals to build and operate more substantial criminal networks with even less likelihood of police detection.
Many forget the police are not law enforcement officers, but peace officers. Their job is to keep the peace; they are not lawyers and not expected to know the law. This is because police detect crime by detecting its effects: injury, death, property loss, and, above all, distress among the population. This fits well with the explicit prohibition on police actively looking for crimes without first having a crime brought to their attention by the public nature of its activities.
Broad data collection and aggregation changes the public nature of people's activities. It distorts this function, leading to false positives and arrests of harmless members of society.
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Broad data collection and aggregation changes the public nature of people's activities. It distorts this function, leading to false positives and arrests of harmless members of society.
That is a pretty broad statement. Can you tell me how license plate scanning can lead to false positives and arrests of harmless members of society.
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The entire passage written before that explained that a lot of people's criminal activities are harmless.
Did you know a guy in Virgina was shot in the heart by the SWAT team that invaded his house? They got a tip that he was having a poker game with his friends. Illegal gambling. $40 pot; not exactly high rollers here. The swat team kicked his door in, and one of them shot him due to an error in judgment in which they mis-evaluated him as a threat; he didn't even make a threatening gesture.
Your neig
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I'm curious of your definition "casual adultery", and how that is any less damaging than a more formal adultery.
And your implication that 20 year olds having sex with teenagers isn't harmful to society strictly because it hasn't been discovered yet is a little more than slightly disturbing.
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your implication that 20 year olds having sex with teenagers isn't harmful to society strictly because it hasn't been discovered yet is a little more than slightly disturbing.
It happens, and I have plenty of friends who have stories of doing it when they were growing up. Lots of girls who were hooking up with college guys when they were in 10th grade. Doesn't seem to have caused the world to collapse.
Thump your bible harder. Maybe someone who actually cares will hear.
Expectation of Privacy misses the point (Score:2)
Everyone's carrying a personal tracking device... (Score:2)
Everyone's already carrying a personal tracking device called a cell phone, and we're worried about adding in data about where you parked your car? (For the record, I've parked my car in business/church/bar lots that I haven't patronized.) That's kind of like worrying about the can of gas in the garage when your house is on fire, isn't it?
Typical Republican response (Score:3)
...City councilman Johnny Khamis dismissed such criticism: "This is a public street. You're not expecting privacy on a public street."...
The party of freedom from government is turning into the Big Brother party.
.
And from a Republican who was not even born in the US.
Maybe that's how privacy is viewed in Lebanon where he was born....
Re: (Score:2)
San Jose; 9 of 11 city council seats Democrat and 100% Democrat mayors going back to the 60's and the one token Republican get singled out by you and your press....
Keep knock'n back that kool-aid.
Track the City Consel! (Score:2)
Please track Mayor Sam Liccardo and Councilmen Johnny Khamis and Raul Peralez's every move, and post it!
Public or private? (Score:2)
So if they go ahead and collect the data on the theory that it is "public", how much do you want to bet that they will later refuse to give the data up under access to information on the theory that it has become "private" in the mean time?
This slippery slope brought to you by Astroglide (Score:3)
I'm surprised, no, shocked that they didn't manage to work in a 'for the children!' angle to this.
So tell me, asshole San Jose officials: How long after that do you plan on adding facial recognition and audio recording to your garbage truck surveillance network, hmm?
Come on, assholes, I know your type, why don't you just cut to the chase: What you really want, I'll bet, is barcodes tattooed on everyone, or RFID implants, with readers on every lamppost and telephone pole, and in people's houses too if you can get away with it, so you can track people everywhere they go. You know, to cut down on crime, and for the children!
..OK, I'm being extreme on purpose (or am I?). But enough with the gods-be-damned surveillance state bullshit!
Memo to Idiot Politicians: IT DOESN'T WORK.
Re: (Score:2)
Slippery slope arguments are, by definition, logical fallacies [wikipedia.org].
How long after that do you plan on adding facial recognition and audio recording to your garbage truck surveillance network, hmm?
"Never" is a plausible answer. Facial recognition/ audio recordings is not an inevitable extension of license plate scanning.
What you really want,
How about license plate scanning to find stolen cars and parking violators.
I'll bet, is barcodes tattooed on everyone, or RFID implants, with readers on every lamppost and telephone pole, and in people's houses too if you can get away with it, so you can track people everywhere they go.
No, that is many orders of magnitude more expensive and complex that putting scanners we already use on parking enforcement vehicles onto garbage trucks.
.OK, I'm being extreme on purpose (or am I?). But enough with the gods-be-damned surveillance state bullshit!
By making extreme statement you just show how weak your real argument is.
Ah, the public street (Score:3)
This whole not-expecting-privacy-on-a-public-street is as laughable as it's always been. There's a missing concept here.
It's not about PRIVACY. It's about RECORDING.
You don't expect privacy when you're talking to a friend in public either. But it's illegal to record the audio of that conversation without permission.
It's the difference between expert testimony (i.e. video evidence) and heresay. One's convincing, always, while the other is completely inadmissable as evidence -- which is a good thing.
Surprisingly, I'm not actually against all of this scanning for data. I'm only against keeping that data in the absence of a crime.
Scan the cars, check the plates, see that it's fine, destroy the data. Let's say within 5 business days. No aggregates, no data-based stats (number of scans made by the truck is fine, number of blue cars is not).
"NO CRIME = NO RECORD", plain and simple.
Privacy, no; Relative anonymity, yes (Score:2)
There's an expectation that, while public, what you do in your day to day life tends to be an anonymous undertaking. nobody is tracking and cataloging all of your various excursions and foibles.
Being private and being functionally anonymous are two very different things.
I live in San Jose if anyone wants some opinion (Score:3, Interesting)
I grew up here, I can explain why the city council is seeking this.
A few years back the city implemented huge cuts to it's police department in salary and benefits. Before the cuts, we had 1400 officers (not bad for a city of a million people) After the cuts our police has dropped as low as 700 officers.
With a reduction in the number of officers we have, bay area criminals have taken it as a "Vacancy" sign to do business here. Every type of crime has shot up. Violent crimes, we're a magnet for package theft, prostitution runs rampant, with one spot having as many as 50 girls walking one particular street corner, and car theft.
San Jose just voted to restore some of the pay last week, but it still won't be anywhere near 2010 levels. Cops continue to leave.
So now San Jose is in a situation of having to make due with what they have. Cops won't even consider this place for a job any more. Since they can't get another 700 officers to replace the ones lost, they're leveraging technology to fill the gap. Myself, and many other residents welcome any effort to clean up the streets.
Re: (Score:2)
There's no money to hire police. The money goes to pensions for people who worked for the city in the past.
Religious ceremonies and gay bars? (Score:3)
I believe about the only useful information they will be able to get is that certain people are not home at certain times of the day, which will likely serve as a valuable information source for house thieves, and that certain people tend to park on the street, which will be valuable information for car thieves. The most likely statistic from this endeavour is a sharp uptick in car thefts and burglary.
We should make a new game (Score:4, Funny)
.
Do the police run the dept. of sanitation? (Score:2)
Then how the f- do they think it's okay to have the guy who picks up your trash doing the job of a cop?
Privacy in Public (Score:2)
This is true to a degree. If you are walking down a public street, you can't object that my taking a photograph of you is an invasion of your privacy. So long as said photograph is of something that you can normally see - e.g. upskirts wouldn't count as a "photograph in a public place." Along the same lines, while I might see you in public and be able to take a photo of you, I wouldn't normally be following you around everywhere y
privacy on a public street (Score:2)
City councilman Johnny Khamis dismissed such criticism: "This is a public street. You're not expecting privacy on a public street."
The public also does not expect continuous surveillance from the government either.
The politican is right (Score:2)
What happens in the public is and should be accessible by the public. That's the sort of law that allows us to have security cameras on homes and businesses, to take cell phone video of friends - or police. It's why we can tell someone what we saw, or try to reproduce a noise we heard, making a "pwooosh!" and spreading our hands for effect.
Did you know that the government isn't even doing the data aggregation? It's civilian companies that produce and distribute the hardware, that make deals with other co
Buy a license plate hider (Score:2)
Then all the data should be public (Score:2)
If you have nothing to hide, then nothing to fear (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Are they thefts or just people reporting their car is stolen when they woke up in the morning and discovered that all the cars on the street had been towed.
Re: (Score:2)
nah,
Just figure out who are cops, city hall big wigs and staffers.
Then post it on a web site.
There no difference with what they are doing.
Just because you CAN do something doesn't mean you SHOULD.
Re:Delete the data (reasonable compromise) (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
"City councilman Johnny Khamis dismissed such criticism: 'This is a public street. You're not expecting privacy on a public street.'"
If your citizens have no choice but to keep their private property on your public streets, you better be ready for people to argue that, Johnny Khamis, you *piece of fucking shit*.
That's not even an argument. Your car may be private property, but it's still out in public on a street, and it had to be registered to get plates. Now, the people who park in their driveways, they're on their own property, they have a valid argument.
Exactly. It is the citizens fault for openly displaying a license tag on a public street. if they didn't want that information to be public, they should have taken their tag off.
Re: (Score:3)
How about a guy that never pays his child support but parks outside a strip joint five nights a week? Don't you want the ability to arrest him and show the courts where his money is spent?
Why do you want their bartender fired? Five times a week sounds like he works there.