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very interesting article at Los Angeles Gizmodo
wrote about this and it comes to do with surveillance privacy in law enforcement
and we talked about this a little bit before
and according to the LA police department and the LA sheriff's
department your car
is part %uh a vast criminal investigation if you are simply driving
in the Los Angeles area
this came up because I've a controversy involving some briefs filed
in the EF back that the elec- tronic read 'em
a foundation route top Beltronics freedom frontier
and the ACLU of Southern California's Public Records Act lawsuit
where they are looking for a lot automatic license plate
reader data and they've argued that all
license plate data is investigatory is the point of view of the
Los Angeles a but law enforcement departments
and the fact that it's not associated with any specific
crime or suspicion of a crime doesn't matter
this is ridiculous this means if you just driving through
the license plate capture data
which remember can point out what your
route has been it can point out where you've been within the city and when in
band
and with what frequency you travel from here to there
that is okay to be capped
by these law enforcement agencies indefinitely
and not provided to the public based on records are just because it's part of an
investigation in the sense that
it is investigatory by its very
nature this is obviously ridiculous this goes completely counter to the criminal
justice system
were we assume law enforcement doesn't conduct
so-called investigations unless there is something to
indicate or suggest criminal activity this could be called probable cause in
many cases in fact
the fourth amendment with added to the constitution
exactly to prevent law enforcement from conducting these mas
suspicion list investigations to use their term
under general warrants that don't target anybody specifically
no location specifically no actions or no people
specifically and that's exactly how these license plate readers
work and I it's just the it's amazing that this is yet another instance if
this Louis
right i mean but how different is this
from let's say a police officer in the small town we come from pulling up to a
parking lot
I and just so we driving bruin running all the plates I mean that happens
everywhere all the time so is this that different well
it's different in the sense that the police officers saying
eat it manually being done even though technically yes the officer has no
specific reason
to run all of those plates the officer is running the plate and again if if
you're
if you're simply running plates that are sitting there as an individual police
officer
that to me is very different then a record that includes
remember through the meta-data the
travels and locations have individuals who are not suspected of any crime
at all period and they are being collected in bulk buy these machines
I think it is different and this is the same issue that we have with the phone
records right
we hear well it's just meta-data it's just the list up who called who it
doesn't really tell us anything
and as we saw you can identify easily like off the bat
thirty to forty percent of people based on phone numbers
just by putting the phone number into Google okay and then by doing slightly
more information investing a little more time you can get up to about 70 percent
identification so
to me the idea that this is just balkan data not connecting to people
specifically it doesn't fly and as the ACLU nuff for arguing this is just a
violation of how our justice system is designed
what I find interesting about this is the financial aspect that it I mean when
I
when I stand back and look at this I think here are a buncha
while law enforcement agencies that have new toys to play with
there's some company that is making tens of millions if not more
a dollars of a bit steel yeah and what is it really achieving
probably not much this is part a I i wouldn't call this
parted the millet there's nothing too militaristic about the license plate
readers
but when we talk about the militarization of police and law
enforcement a lot of it has to do
with the same types have business deals that we look at in the military
industrial complex
it the it's a very similar thing in Lewis is completely right and extends to
our airports remember the *** scanners that a lot of the airport still have
that was a huge huge financial
explosion for the company which Michael chaired of had actually
ties to an and and profited from the the money trail is absolutely huge here and
it's hard to separate it because we can have
simply legal and moral arguments but we're forgetting that
those don't matter ultimately when there are such significant financial interest
to play are there
I right it's it's it's hard to stop these big deals from going down i mean
there's bears lobbying happening all over the place for