San Jose may deploy license plate readers on garbage trucks

[tsai3904]

San Jose May Deploy Crime-Spying Garbage Trucks

San Jose may enlist garbage trucks as eyes on the ground for a short-staffed police force.

Equipping trash haulers with license plate readers would turn them into roving scouts for the San Jose Police Department. Already, the trucks travel every city street every single week, covering more ground than a cop car.

Mayor Sam Liccardo proposed the idea with support from council members Raul Peralez—a former policeman—and Johnny Khamis.

“As we continue to struggle to recruit and retain police officers, it is imperative that we utilize any technologies at our disposal to thwart crime,” reads a joint memo submitted to Wednesday’s Rules and Open Government Committee.

The city tabbed $68,400 in this year’s budget for two new plate scanners. Typically, the high-speed cameras are mounted on police cruisers, where they photograph thousands of plates a minute.

“Mounting these readers on … garbage trucks would be a unique and effective strategy,” per the memo signed by Liccardo, Khamis and Peralez.

Garbage trucks traverse the entire city every week, which would allow police to scan every car along the way. City officials say they could run plates for warrants and check for stolen vehicles.

...

More:
http://www.sanjoseinside.com/2015/08/18/san-jose-may-deploy-crime-spying-garbage-trucks/

City staff memo:
http://sanjose.granicus.com/MetaViewer.php?meta_id=528167

Edit:

This line is straight from the city staff memo:

"Garbage trucks cover the entire city every week and, in doing so, provide us with an opportunity to scan all vehicles parked or abandoned on our residential streets."

[phill4paul]

The Panopticon continues to grow.

[Occam's Banana]

San Jose May Deploy Crime-Spying Garbage Trucks

The Panopticon continues to grow.

Would you like some tiger blood with that ... ?

http://thesupernaughts.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/pranks-menatwork-590.jpg

[JK/SEA]

hmmm...garbage day...take cans to curb...take your roll of duct tape..rip off 2 pieces a foot long...place over plate...garbage gets picked up...you get your cans and remove tape....

see ya next week assholes.

[phill4paul]

hmmm...garbage day...take cans to curb...take your roll of duct tape..rip off 2 pieces a foot long...place over plate...garbage gets picked up...you get your cans and remove tape....

see ya next week assholes.

I'd say just back into your spot but CA likes to identify you coming and going.

[DamianTV]

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/08/forget-license-plate-readers-on-police-cars-how-about-on-garbage-trucks/


San Jose, California, America’s 10th largest city, isn’t just content to put license plate readers on police cars anymore—rather, it now wants to deputize garbage trucks to be an additional tool in its ongoing surveillance.

According to the San Jose Mercury News, the mayor and one city councilman put forward a new proposal Wednesday that would allow sanitation vehicles to use the scanning devices and feed the data automatically to city police.

"We can cover every street at least once a week and possibly deter thieves from coming into our city," Councilman Johnny Khamis told the paper.

If passed, the city would likely become the first in the country to expand the law enforcement tool to another public entity besides parking enforcement.

Currently, only six San Jose Police Department cars currently have license plate readers (LPRs), but there are plans to acquire two more to cover this city of over one million people.

By contrast, the nearby city of Oakland, California, with a population of 390,000, has 33 LPRs mounted on police vehicles.

In March 2015, Ars obtained the Oakland Police Department’s 4.6 million reads of over 1.1 million unique plates, which were gathered between December 23, 2010 and May 31, 2014, as part of a public records request. The dataset showed precisely how revelatory such information can be.

The council member justified the use of LPRs with a refrain common among proponents of the technology—that people driving on public roads have no reasonable expectation of privacy.

...

Bull shit. They want to watch me 24 / 7? Get a fucking warrant. 4th Amendment does not limit the scope of privacy to only things inside ones home without probable cause.

When you have no locational privacy, it becomes subject to approval.

[timosman]

dup http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?480782-Forget-License-Plate-Readers-on-Police-Cars-How-About-on-Garbage-Trucks

[euphemia]

How does spying on people deter thieves?

[DamianTV]

How does spying on people deter thieves?

It doesnt. It is intended to manufacture new criminals out of ordinary men and women.

Problem is it wont stop there. It will only continue to bolster the Prison Industrial Complex and parastic nature of traffic violations. How many paychecks of police are paid for almost entirely by traffic citations? If we really needed cops so bad, we'd all pay a flat tax and there would be no incentive to give more tickets than is necessary.

Locational Privacy is also important because of guilt by accusation and association. Pick up your buddy who lives next door to an accused criminal (like a pot smoker) and there is now enough evidence to convict you of conspiracy to sell an illegal substance, again, turning ordinary men and women into criminals with the flip of a pen.

---

Without Privacy, EVERYTHING becomes subject to approval.

Not every single shred of information or data or metadata will be life ruining. But the cumulative effects will be devestating to society as a whole. Eat one piece of bacon too much? Your Obamacare provider will fine you. Not a lot, but a bit. Drive 2 miles an hour over the speed limit? Wont get a traffic ticket, but your insurance just went up by a couple cents. If you drive over the speed limit a lot, youre gonna be paying out the ass. Add that up with your next Obamacare bill and you'll be one step closer to financial ruin. Put both of those things on your Credit Report and you pay a higher interest rate than someone else who is blindly obedient. Put Car Insurance + Health Insurance + Higher Interest Rate together and the effects begin to build. THIS is the real cost of lack of privacy.

Then you have us. The Ron Paul crowd. Ron Paul supporter? Insurance willl charge us more than an Obama supporter or whoever the next president is. Then it starts getting dangerous. We will be the ones thrown in prisons and jails and summarily executed. Wanna know another group of people that would have survived if not for the invasions of their Privacy? Jews. We will be the Jews of the 21st century. Any who believe that Liberty and Freedom are what humanity needs to not only survive, but thrive will be the ones who are targetted, labeled terrorists, black bagged in the middle of the night never to be seen or heard from again.

Without Privacy, REVOLUTION and any truly meaningful change becomes nearly impossible. END GAME.

[timosman]

http://www.mercurynews.com/scott-herhold/ci_28693191/herhold-license-plate-readers-garbage-trucks-it-doesnt

http://extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/site568/2015/0819/20150819__hotcars~1.JPG


Once you get past the jokes ("Trash Stalking," one wit called it), the idea of equipping garbage trucks in San Jose with license plate readers for the police settles with a thud. It's a bad and intrusive idea.

First proposed by Councilman Johnny Khamis -- and endorsed for exploration by Mayor Sam Liccardo and Councilman Raul Peralez -- the idea is to let the trucks record the plates and locations of every vehicle along their routes.

With the license plate numbers, the advocates say, the police can quickly identify stolen cars and deter thieves.

But the cost to our privacy -- our notion of how to lead our lives without government interference -- runs unacceptably high. This idea should be buried as soon as possible in the nearest unmarked grave.

Khamis proposed the license plate readers on the garbage trucks for a rational reason. Unlike regular city vehicles, they traverse every city street every week.

"I got this idea from a police captain, and I thought it was a great idea," Khamis said last week at a meeting of the council's rules committee. "We're merely looking for advice to see if it's doable."

INTIMATE DETAILS

Here's the problem, well-enunciated by Chris Conley, a policy attorney for the ACLU. If this is done repeatedly and over a long time, it can reveal intimate details of anyone's life.

Was that you who parked outside a gun store five times in the last month? Was that your car outside the gay bar or in the parking lot of the bail bondsman? Why did you visit a gang neighborhood last week?

If the technology is good enough, it might reveal a history of your behavior and habits in the last year. And that information is both powerful and dangerous.

Liccardo said at the council's rules meeting that there is no expectation of privacy on a public street. That doesn't mean the government should monitor all your moves.

"There's a huge difference between the idea that when you're walking down the street, you may be seen by a neighbor, and the notion that someone is recording everything you're doing," Conley says.

PROTECTING DATA

And that's only the beginning. With information this valuable, there's a question about how securely it's maintained. What kind of protection is there against hackers?

For that matter, who will see this information aside from police? Will it be given to the IRS or the FBI? What if it's legally demanded by divorce attorneys wanting evidence?

If you began with a list of the license plates of stolen cars, and the reader said only yes or no (green or red) as the truck passed, it might be acceptable. This is technology directed to a narrow purpose.

Without that limitation, this is a dangerous idea. We have other ways of recovering stolen vehicles, among them through GPS devices or old cell phones hidden in your car.

"I'm a big fan of technology," said Councilman Chappie Jones, who was the lone dissenter in the 4-1 rules vote last week to explore the issue. "But this particular proposal is a little too extreme. It almost feels like 1984."

Amen, Mr. Jones. Only there's no "almost" about it.

[kpitcher]

I'm waiting for the tech to quickly parse license plates to become very cheap, which isn't far away. Then roll out a website that automatically shows where every government licensed vehicle is. Two can play at this game.

[Dianne]

I just keep waiting for that major earthquake to rid of us from CA. What a glorious day that will be. I hope no one will be hurt, but hope they will disappear somewhere in outer space with Governor Moonbeam.

[anaconda]

San Jose is the most Fascist police force that I know of.

[RonPaulIsGreat]

I'm waiting for the tech to quickly parse license plates to become very cheap, which isn't far away. Then roll out a website that automatically shows where every government licensed vehicle is. Two can play at this game.

https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr

Pretty much your results will largely be a result of camera quality / frames per second / resolution / quantity of cameras used on the vehicle. The software isn't the problem. For a hobbled together setup, you just need a gps tracker that logged your position like every second, and then make sure the position logger and the camera were time synced well. Then you could just upload your logs, and videos to your server, and it'd search the video, and insert finds in your database, same with the logs, then output to a map for you.

Total cost excluding labor

Cost of computer, which could be zero cost, the better the server the faster the job would get done. So 0-15000.

Camera:????? Don't think gopros would work to well they distort the video to get wider angles, and thus mess up straight lines unless you do prepossessing to correct, but then you'd lose a bit of quality, and that would require more computer time. So.... Not sure, but if you wanted to do it right, I'd guess 6 cameras of moderate price place around the car, would yield better results than a 1 really good camera in the front and back. Not sure...

Gps logger:???? you could use an android phone, for relatively accurate readings. It is hard on your battery if you constantly do location calls, but if you had it plugged in a good charger shouldn't matter much.

Probably would be looking at 2000-????? then of course how you are going to mount the cameras, I assume 3 on the front bumper and 3 on the rear bumper would yield the most results.

Good luck.

[kpitcher]

https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr
Good luck.
Oh I know it's doable for a dedicated geek. To be a wide spread and used system it needs to be as easy as putting a cell phone on your dash while each user does their daily drive. That's where things need some more improving to make it worthwhile. Getting far closer to a real world solution every cell phone iteration.

[Keith and stuff]

New Hampshire Axes License Plate Reader Bill
Legislation would have authorized law enforcement use of license plate readers in the state.
http://www.govtech.com/public-safety/New-Hampshire-Axes-License-Plate-Reader-Bill.html

Widespread use banned since 2007 in New Hampshire. The first and only state to do so.

[The Bavarian]

This helps me sleep soundly.