This is a good point...when discussing the controversies behind surveillance and privacy, a frequent issue is that most people have no idea what's possible, even though it should be as clear as day. An obvious example is back when Facebook's API was more publicly accessible, youropenbook [1]
But there are other things to be mindful of...when publicizing how easy it is to be surveilled/attacked, how easy is it to for a mischievous person to make use of that information versus how long would it take to fix? I'd have mixed feelings about anyone publishing a user-friendly one-button-SWATter, even if it would most certainly spur some kind of movement to strengthen our emergency response systems (eventually).
But something that is basically an object detector plus OCR? No doubt that if many people run this software, and then feed into a system that makes it as easy (and ubiquitous) as Google to look up any license plate and see instantly all locations where it has been photographed, we would have a situation that would make most people a bit unhappy...but without those network effects, the personal use of this software would seem to be relatively benign, while at the same time educating people how easy it is to be tracked.
On remote locations collected data could be transmitted into this public LPR system over free LoRaWAN networks like The Things Network https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10438352
That's a pretty dystopic view. I'd rather the government not collect the data at all. The massive perpetual databases that are amassing around the world are really ticking time bombs.
The cameras are there. They are not going away. Cameras are incredibly cheap, tiny and readily available, and legislating them out of private hands just isn't going to happen.
So we'll have to deal with them somehow, and I'd prefer that the government not have a monopoly on the data -- frankly, I think that the data that the government collects in public should be made public, rather immediately, so that we can see what is being collected.
I don't have a huge problem with individuals running license plate readers, since that is necessarily limited in scope. I meant that it's a bit of a dystopic view to assume that the government should be allowed to have their license plate readers and use them to accumulate massive databases that track the position of every car on every road.
Given that a lot of the license plate capture right now is private companies (that insist that everybody can do so) such restrictions would achieve at least some the goal. Now if that's worth it is a different question...
But there are other things to be mindful of...when publicizing how easy it is to be surveilled/attacked, how easy is it to for a mischievous person to make use of that information versus how long would it take to fix? I'd have mixed feelings about anyone publishing a user-friendly one-button-SWATter, even if it would most certainly spur some kind of movement to strengthen our emergency response systems (eventually).
But something that is basically an object detector plus OCR? No doubt that if many people run this software, and then feed into a system that makes it as easy (and ubiquitous) as Google to look up any license plate and see instantly all locations where it has been photographed, we would have a situation that would make most people a bit unhappy...but without those network effects, the personal use of this software would seem to be relatively benign, while at the same time educating people how easy it is to be tracked.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openbook_(website)