{"id":25912,"date":"2014-05-24T09:44:23","date_gmt":"2014-05-24T14:44:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=25912"},"modified":"2014-05-24T09:44:23","modified_gmt":"2014-05-24T14:44:23","slug":"the-technological-democratization-of-law-enforcement-and-the-rise-of-little-brother","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/05\/24\/the-technological-democratization-of-law-enforcement-and-the-rise-of-little-brother\/","title":{"rendered":"The technological democratization of law enforcement and the rise of “Little Brother”"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you care about your privacy, you’re equally worried about the intrusive surveillance state and the unconstrained snooping of corporations. You may now need to worry about your snoopy neighbours also getting in on the act, as Declan McCullagh<\/a> explains on Google+<\/em>. This is a response to someone on a private mailing list for Silicon Valley folks, who said that he had no issue with automated collection of license plate data:<\/p>\n

Tomorrow one of your PV [Portola Valley] neighbors will set up a computer-connected camera on private property and aimed at the street. It records all those \u201cplates exposed” going by and, by doing optical character recognition with free software such as ANPR MX (C# code, BSD-licensed), it records every time a car goes by. The DMV will happily provide drivers\u2019 names based on the license plate*; there\u2019s even a process for \u201cbulk quantities\u201d of data.** That information doesn\u2019t include a home address, but that\u2019s easy to come by through other searches.<\/p>\n

Then the neighbor launches PVPeopleTracker.com<\/em>. It updates in real time showing whenever someone is at home, and marks their house in bright red if they\u2019re gone on an extended trip. If there are odd patterns of movement compared to a baseline \u2014 perhaps suspicious late-night outings \u2014 those can be flagged as well. Any visitor to PVPeopleTracker.com<\/em> can sign up for handy free email alerts reporting at what time their targeted house becomes vacant each weekday morning. Other network-linked cameras in PV can supplement the PVPeopleTracker.com<\/em> database, so that everyone driving in town will have their movements monitored, archived, and publicly visible at all times.<\/p>\n

With more than one network-linked camera separated by a known distance by roads with known speed limits, it would be simple to calculate speeding violations and send automated alerts, with MP4 videos attached as evidence, to the sheriff and CHP. PVPeopleTracker.com<\/em> can also be cross-referenced against databases showing, say, marijuana convictions; if your movement profile matches a known drug trafficker, law enforcement can be alerted. (Sorry about those false positives!)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you care about your privacy, you’re equally worried about the intrusive surveillance state and the unconstrained snooping of corporations. You may now need to worry about your snoopy neighbours also getting in on the act, as Declan McCullagh explains on Google+. This is a response to someone on a private mailing list for Silicon […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,15,13],"tags":[35,111,343,154,911],"class_list":["post-25912","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","category-technology","category-usa","tag-california","tag-cars","tag-crimeandpunishment","tag-privacy","tag-surveillance"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6JW","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25912","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25912"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25912\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25913,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25912\/revisions\/25913"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}