License Plate Scanners Also Taking Photos of Drivers and Passengers

[eridani]

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/02/05/license-plate-scanners-also-taking-photos-drivers-and-passengers

The Drug Enforcement Agency is using its license plate reader program not only to track drivers’ locations, but also to photograph these drivers and their passengers, according to newly disclosed records obtained by the ACLU via a Freedom of Information Act request.

One internal 2009 DEA communication stated clearly that the license plate program can provide “the requester” with images that “may include vehicle license plate numbers (front and/or rear), photos of visible vehicle occupants [redacted] and a front and rear overall view of the vehicle.” Clearly showing that occupant photos are not an occasional, accidental byproduct of the technology, but one that is intentionally being cultivated, a 2011 email states that the DEA's system has the ability to store “up to 10 photos per vehicle transaction including 4 occupant photos.”

The DEA documents are just the latest indication that license plate scanners are not always focused just on license plates.

<snip>

Some law enforcement agencies that employ ALPRs recognize that the technology should not be used to capture photos of vehicle occupants. We obtained an ALPR policy from Tiburon, California that speaks to our privacy concerns. The policy states that “cameras will be directed only to capture the rear of vehicles and not into any place where a ‘reasonable expectation of privacy’ might exist.” This means that the ALPRs “will not be able to ‘see’ or photograph vehicle occupants because the camera will only be photographing the rear of vehicles, it will not be able to create a record of its occupants.” Tiburon’s policy shows that there are precautionary measures that can be taken to (at least partially) avoid infringing on individual privacy. Unfortunately, there is no evidence to suggest that most law enforcement agencies are taking such measures.

[Downwinder]

1. Why pay for OnStar when you have DEA?

[blkmusclmachine]

2. We'll discover why they're doing this all this, soon enough.

[blkmusclmachine]

3. https://bluesageacademy.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/wpid-photo-201409232136094.jpg?w=500

?w=500

[Octafish]

4. If you haven't done anything wrong, you have nothing much to fear.

Here's the worry part:

The goal of wholesale surveillance, [font color="green"]as (Hannah) Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” is not, in the end, to discover crimes, “but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.” [/font color]And because Americans’ emails, phone conversations, Web searches and geographical movements are recorded and stored in perpetuity in government databases, there will be more than enough “evidence” to seize us should the state deem it necessary. This information waits like a deadly virus inside government vaults to be turned against us. It does not matter how trivial or innocent that information is. In totalitarian states, justice, like truth, is irrelevant.

Chris Hedges, The Last Gasp of American Democracy

[woo me with science]

5. We are ruled by criminals.

These, and the rest of the outrageous abuses being perpetrated on Americans by our own government, are the tactics of a totalitarian state, not a representative democracy.

WE'RE STILL FREE! WE CAN TYPE ON THE INTERNETS!!!!111!!1
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=5721303

Our "Justice" Department
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=5709758

[hunter]

6. One of my brothers flipped off the U.S.A "license plate" camera driving into Mexico.

Upon return a few days later border agents pulled him aside and "inspected" him in great detail, a process that took about six hours; this after waiting through the usual hours-long traffic jam at the border.

Coincidence? Probably not.

If we, in the U.S.A. abandoned the drug war, simply by treating addiction as a medical condition, and if we abandoned our imperial ambitions and the tight coupling of the dollar to the international oil trade, then we wouldn't "need" all this shitty fascist security.

But I think that's exactly the point. Leftist, environmentalist, just-plain-humanist, democracy is incompatible with the oligarchs' business models. They prefer the "papers please" sorts of government we now have here in the U.S.A. and in China.

[CrispyQ]

7. Privacy is dead. -nt

[woo me with science]

8. kick