In reading this piece at Wired, would you reach that conclusion? Or would you think instead that there is a real chance the federal government might stick a thumb in the eye of every law enforcement agency in the country by blanket-banning ALPRs?
If you really want to end ALPRs where you live, organize and pass an ordinance. It is extremely doable.
You’ll have to cite your sources there, friend. As a constituent of one of those districts myself, I certainly do not oppose it! All my homies hate ALPRs.
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> A recipient of assistance under Title 23, United States Code, may not use automated license plate readers for any purpose other than tolling
This one-liner amendment is its own poison pill: it will also outlaw traffic enforcment, cameras used to ticket people who run red lights or speed, since neither are tolling.
Sponsors from both parties, but the effect is anti-Democratic. Currently per rough search:
- 9 states prohibit speed and red-light cameras - 8 Republican (and Maine)
- 5 states expressly permit speed cameras - 4 Democrat (and Tennessee) (CA permitting red-light)
Obviously this reduces revenues (in democratic cities) and also drives police/traffic employment. Perhaps ICE abuse and union employment motivates the Democratic sponsor (Jesus "Chuy" García - parents are Teamsters, himself in a retail union). I would have encourage him to permit the use for tolling AND traffic enforcement.
* Toll enforcement (the only thing allowed by the law)
* Speeding enforcement
* Parking enforcement
* Real-time alerting for vehicles that could be pulled over if you knew nothing other than the vehicle's identity. Stolen, unregistered, uninsured, amber-alert, etc. [1]
I think the following are all unreasonable, and I think most people would agree with me:
* Selling the data for any commercial purposes (perhaps with the exception of aggregated statistical data)
* Mining the data "suspicious patterns of activity".
I think the following is reasonable, but some people may disagree:
* Retaining the data for a limited time, so that if a crime is reported involving a specific vehicle, you can look back for sightings of the vehicle contemporaneous with the crime to help catch the bad guys.
Given my thoughts on what is and is not reasonable, I think the ideal policy is one that focuses on limiting retention, limiting sharing, and limiting the types of queries that can be performed on the data. Something like:
* Can retain the data for 90 days. Data that is evidence of a specific crime can be kept longer with the evidence file for that crime, and destroyed when the investigation is done.
* Can use the data where knowing a series of (time, place) pairs for a vehicle is probable cause of an infraction (or toll due). This covers speeding and parking and tools and red lights and registration/etc, but doesn't allow looking for suspicious patterns of activity.
* Can query the data for sightings of a specific vehicle with reasonable suspicion that the vehicle was involved in a crime. Need to keep records of these queries to identify abuse. Maybe need to notify owner when such a query is made.
* Can not disclose the data to third parties, except in the case when they agree to follow all these same rules (so you can share with other departments or law enforcement service providers, but that doesn't enable an end-run around the rules)
[1]: And I think it's important here that if data about a vehicle be eligible to be pulled over knowing nothing but it's license plate is out of date or otherwise wrong, then someone gets in serious trouble. Otherwise nobody is incentivized to keep their database up to date.
First is that local and state governments have been deploying 1984 for enforcement of petty matters for which dispensing "real" enforcement labor can't be justified economically politically a or both. The feds are fine with this because they can get at that data. What they're not fine with is that it's pissing people off. The feds are worried that this could turn into court and legislative precedents that make things harder for them. For example the DEA doesn't want their flagship I95 surveillance corridor to get nerfed because NYC went too far with it's own pet project and laws got made in response. They'll happily tell the states "no you can't do this thing we do" in order to preserve their own ability to do the thing.
Second is that the feds don't like that the public is becoming soured on the regulatory hackjobs of the 1970s that were hailed as great successes at the time. As the country becomes more divided people are realizing that the current "have the feds grand fund everything at least in part" paradigm results in strings that nobody wants being attached to everything. So doing one little thing that everyone agrees on is seen as a way to say "look we can do good with this power we really shouldn't have in the first place".
You want to search a database? Go to a judge, give your probable cause, get approval. No exceptions and no automated aggregation of tracking across jurisdictions.
Lots of other evidence was provided along it too. The defendant also left his phone on which was more damning, but it definitely helped us, as jurors, arrive to the "without reasonable doubt" conclusion
Because of the global jurisdictions involved, and because of the immense, pressures against this from the governments and their private owners, we need an international information bill of rights. It needs to be adopted by every country that values humanity, privacy, and freedom. Its scope would encompass things like ALPRs.
No, I don't think it will be possible in the current climate.
Even "freedom of speech" is a fairly understandable, and more basic, right, and it is definitely a non-starter internationally.
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All that could be changed/upgraded of course.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
You are giving up your right to privacy for some modicum of security that they train AI on and gets added to a national database.
I want to see Flock banned as much as the next person, but we can't throw the baby out with the bathwater here.
[1] https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/pr2025/nyc-dot-speed-camer...
How did traffic enforcement work before these systems?
A city parking lot near me just switched to license-plate readers, and operates far later than local on-street parking - meaning they'll catch almost all parking violations there, and lure in unsuspecting people who think it isn't taking tolls that late.
As I get older, I have less and less patience for the traffic libertarian I used to be. Lax traffic enforcement kills a huge number of people in the US; it's the single largest component of our reduced life expectancy.
(To be clear, for other readers, we are talking about red light cameras, not ALPRs. ALPRs like Flock generally can't be used for traffic enforcement!)
The only reason they aren't deemed unconstitutional is because technically they don't quite meet the qualification for being legal action as they are "merely" fines. Even though if you ignore the fines you face legal consequence.
If a jurisdiction wants to ticket drivers, they should be constitutionally mandated to have a person with authority out on the street writing tickets. It should not be acceptable for an automated system to hand out monetary and legal damages entirely unsupervised and unaccountable. That flies directly in the face of constitutional rights.
YES, and,
It is not just the legal consequence of the fines for speeding. When you get a ticket, you get points against your license, and end up paying more in insurance, often for up to seven years.
If they want actual automated enforcement, make it a toll, like a congestion fee.
It is free to drive at the basic speed (e.g., 65mph on the highway), but higher speeds cost more, up to a limit where it becomes a criminal offense requiring an actual Law Enforcement professional involved. The speeds could even be adjusted for time of day, weather, and traffic. So, you want to go faster, stay in the fast lane, and pay $X/mph/mile.
With the average speeds on highways often over 75MPH, collecting $0.10/mph/mile over the limit would result in good revenues.
AFAICT this not the case in the vast majority of states that allow automated enforcement. Of the three I saw in that list that do: California replaced theirs with purely civil penalties earlier this year, and Arizona and Oregon require law enforcement officers to manually review and sign off on the ticket and offer legal avenues for you to respond.
https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/red-light-running/safety...
Usually they work around that issue by having a cop manually review the footage after.
That's not true. The Sixth Amendment, which talks about the right to face one's accuser is explicitly referencing criminal prosecution only.
In fact, the traffic argument was the original poisoned pill - once those went in, everyone was fine with the gains, until LEO's and the government, assisted by nearly unregulated private companies were like "well, we already have the data..."
The problem with these types of tools are that they provide a foothold into absolute enforcement, not just for current laws you find reasonable, but for all future laws from all future administrations which may not be reasonable.
Why should these cameras used for speeding enforcement today be used to track down protesters the admin decides to label as terrorists or legal immigrants who attended a pro Palestine rally tomorrow? They shouldn't.
What would stop that from happening? Nothing.
In a country where people expect the government to act unreasonably and to flout legal constraints, the fear of the scope creep and total surveillance outweighs the perceived benefits of legitimate use.
By answering this question, it's easy to determine how people feel about their country :-/
You have 10k+ arrest a year for social media posts. I'm sure most people also thought the initial legal precedent was reasonable.
If a ALPR search was gated by a search warrant, upon probable cause by witness and signed by judge, I would have much less concern. Its still surveillance capitalism, but that at least would be due process.
What does it cost a police force to abuse this technology? Maybe down the road they'll have to spend an afternoon in court explaining how they were just following orders or they were doing as directed by the department's policies at the time. What does it cost a citizen? Beyond the legal costs, it could cost their job when they don't show up because they were unjustly arrested, it could be a chilling effect on their speech when they see their politically active neighbor targeted.
I stand by my statement that nothing prevents the creep from happening. There is no realized cost to those who make it happen.
I'm not. Tolls are fine since the "enforcement" there is of a known cost that you have to pay to use the road.
But I don't think speeding laws, or indeed any traffic laws that allow people to be fined or punished just because they broke some administrative rule, should exist at all as they exist now, let alone be enforced by automated cameras.
Even with cameras, it's obvious to anyone who drives that such laws are not even close to being actually enforceable as they're written. Raise your hand if you've gone faster than the posted speed limit on a US road, along with probably 95 percent or so of all the other cars on that road. Raise your other hand if you've not come to a complete stop at a stop sign because you can see that there are no other cars coming. And so on.
Such laws should not exist because "enforcement" becomes an arms race between the police and the citizen. It would be better to get rid of them and make things like speed limit signs, etc., advisory--you can't be ticketed just for not obeying them, but if you get in an accident and it's found that you weren't obeying a sign, you're presumed to be at fault. Then this whole issue would evaporate. The cameras could still be there--and their footage would be admissible evidence in any dispute about an actual accident. But they couldn't just trigger an automated ticket to be sent to you if no accident took place.
This will ALWAYS lead to full tracking by slowly boiling the frog.
You multiply the "well we should allow it for uses X Y and Z" takes by every issue and the end result is that there's just enough political will to let the government walk all over everyone and everything else.
You have to draw a line in the sand otherwise you get the political equivalent of everyone littering "a little" and the cumulative result is things being crappy.
Absolutely not. The 4th Amendment, among others, are intended to make law enforcement more difficult. The alternative is tyranny. The power that these cameras provide is far beyond what they seem, and police have shown zero ability to be trusted with this sort of thing, and deserve zero benefit of the doubt, or trust to maintain logs only for x days, or not to use them for stalking people.
We optimize for law enforcement efficiency at our peril.
This gives me "minority report" vibes.
A friend entertained the idea of a startup focused on a social dashcam site, where users can upload clips of bad drivers tagged with their license plate number, and smart dashcams can alert to bad drivers in real time. They got as far as asking a lawyer before it fell apart.
Publicly posting the behavior or unaffiliated parties is nothing like the stasi.
I am in favor of traditional traffic cameras, I just don't think analytics and facial recognition systems should be hooked up to them. They should be used for archival purposes, scrubbing back to a date of a crime to get the full picture.
You mentioned "more serious crimes", but what about the case where LEOs in Texas track women who go to get an abortion in another state? Or police officers who stalk their exes? Or an oppressive government that wants to know who went to a protest? Once the tool exists you can't assume it's only going to be used in a way you like.
The point of these cameras is not to "catch" people speeding or running red lights, but to prevent them from doing it in the first place; the idea is that normal law abiding drivers are more likely to drive carefully if they are likely to be fined for their mistakes. Optimizing for the 90% case would mean supporting their rollout.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
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In Aotearoa I noticed the same effect in tye early 1990s with "speed cameras", as we called them
It took six months, but the change in traffic flows was dramatic, and good.
The same cameras could also alert the police down the road about a car with unreadable or missing license plates.
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Garcia's own municipality, with a progressive mayor, vehemently disagrees with this proposed amendment. So does the blue state he represents.
...assuming people don't change their behaviors.
And then it would be a win for the advocates of everyone slowing down, which was never achievable with ordinary enforcement that claims to be about safety but is actually about revenue.
Plus, this would almost definitely be on a price/demand curve. If the price is too high, almost everyone will change behavior to avoid getting billed, i.e., they'll "sell" very few speeding tickets. If the price is low, almost everyone will go fast because they can afford it like they afford parking when they arrive. There will be some optimum that maximizes revenue.
They could even bend the price curve to optimize revenue but minimize real excess speeds. E.g., $0.10/mph/mile»65mph for 69-77mph, then 77-88 it's $0.40, and over that it's $1.50.
If the goal is to change behavior, this would do it, as the cost would be very reliable, not just taking your chances with a human-issued ticket with a big fine and insurance consequences for years. You really need to get to that meeting? OK, is it worth 15 miles x $1.50 x (90-65mph) = $562, or is it better to stay below 87mph and pay only $132? And if it's raining so they doubled the rates, almost no one will do it.
OFC the actual values would differ from these examples, but it seems like a far better system. And they can well and truly decide between revenue vs desired speed. They could even have algorithms to increase rates in zones that see higher accident rates and decrease tolls in areas seeing fewer accidents.
Why wouldn't this work? If you robbed a house while nobody was around, and later caught you thanks to surveillance footage, do you think you'll be able to argue it doesn't count because the cop wasn't around?
Interestingly, the contributors may also be profiling themselves as able to and willing to surveil fellow citizens, should the opportunity arise.
Random unpaid members of the public posting the most outrageous behavior they see is not a surveillance state. The chance that any one incident will be recorded is low.
This page has some more background (and the most amusing map legend I've seen in awhile):