Something weird is going on between Red Bug Lake Road and 417 in Seminole County.

[Baitball Blogger]

I saw four different kinds of police cars in the short time it took to make an errand. Three of the cars were parked along the side of the road and I spotted one driver leaning forward, with some kind of weird device in his hand pointed at me. I'm guessing they're doing a traffic analysis.

[marble falls]

1. Or reading your license plates.

[Baitball Blogger]

2. Speed readers?

yuk, yuk.

[marble falls]

3. Not so funny, really:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recognition

Automatic number plate recognition
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The system must be able to deal with different styles of license plates
License-plate recognition process

Automatic number plate recognition (ANPR; see also other names below) is a mass surveillance method that uses optical character recognition on images to read vehicle registration plates. They can use existing closed-circuit television or road-rule enforcement cameras, or ones specifically designed for the task. They are used by various police forces and as a method of electronic toll collection on pay-per-use roads and cataloging the movements of traffic or individuals.

ANPR can be used to store the images captured by the cameras as well as the text from the license plate, with some configurable to store a photograph of the driver. Systems commonly use infrared lighting to allow the camera to take the picture at any time of the day.[1][2] ANPR technology tends to be region-specific, owing to plate variation from place to place.

Concerns about these systems have centered on privacy fears of government tracking citizens' movements, misidentification, high error rates, and increased government spending.


Other names

ANPR is sometimes known by various other terms:

Automatic license-plate recognition (ALPR)
Automatic license-plate reader (ALPR)
Automatic vehicle identification (AVI)
Car plate recognition (CPR)
License-plate recognition (LPR)
Lecture Automatique de Plaques d'Immatriculation (LAPI)
Mobile license-plate reader (MLPR)

Here's how the ACLU feel about it.

https://www.aclu.org/alpr



A little noticed surveillance technology, designed to track the movements of every passing driver, is fast proliferating on America’s streets. Automatic license plate readers, mounted on police cars or on objects like road signs and bridges, use small, high-speed cameras to photograph thousands of plates per minute.
ALPR Interactive Map: Police Responses to ACLU Records Requests

The information captured by the readers – including the license plate number, and the date, time, and location of every scan – is being collected and sometimes pooled into regional sharing systems. As a result, enormous databases of innocent motorists’ location information are growing rapidly. This information is often retained for years or even indefinitely, with few or no restrictions to protect privacy rights.

Read the report: You Are Being Tracked »

In July 2012, ACLU affiliates in 38 states and Washington sent public records act requests to almost 600 local and state police departments, as well as other state and federal agencies, to obtain information on how these agencies use license plate readers. In response, we received 26,000 pages of documents detailing the use of the technology around the country. Click on the map icon on the right to learn how police in your state use license plate readers to track people's movements.
Learn what’s happening to your location information from this interactive slideshow:




Its well worth the short read and the video is sobering.

[Baitball Blogger]

4. Great. Another thing to worry about.