[corresation]

But we should not so readily give up the very freedoms that terrorists seek to destroy.

The freedom to not have your license plate OCR'd? Is that what it's all about? Putting that in there is jingoistic and appealing to the same emotions that the other side abuses.

Pervasive, often incidental monitoring (e.g. the growing proliferation of electronic toll roads) is absolutely inevitable. Cameras are everywhere. Recording costs close to nothing. Capacity is endless. Processing and OCR is achieved with negligible power on tiny, low-cost devices. Imagine what tomorrow will be like?

Reactions that involve essentially trying to pretend that technology doesn't exist or can be suppressed will never and have never worked.

[jerf]

The "real" solution is to retrain society from top to bottom to break the conflation between what a law is and the outcome a law is intended to produce. As that phrasing implies, I don't think this is going to be an easy process.

The purpose of a speed limit is not to make people not go more than 55 miles per hour. The purpose of a speed limit is to make driving safe, and particularly to make driving safe for society, even moreso than for the individual. If everybody is driving at 65 in the 55 zone, but everybody is safe, the higher purpose of the law is being met, and citations for speeding are just punitive for no gain. When conditions make 55 unsafe, people need to slow down enough to be safe, regardless of what the local speed limit is.

Because we've never been able to rigidly enforce laws, it was very easy to conflate the two concepts. Now we are starting to develop some tech that does let us rigidly enforce laws. The solution is, don't do that. The laws we have on the books today were not designed for rigid enforcement. They were designed to be tools for creating public safety that could be used by the legal system, they are not themselves the specification of public safety. No such specification can really be created, and people are going to have to learn that.

Hopefully we learn that before we really box ourselves in with even better tech. Either way we do seem very determined to learn this the hard way.

This idea has applications to all sorts of modern day issues popular on HN; copyright law isn't really to prevent you from sharing a copy of a song with a friend, it's to prevent massive pirating enterprises that impact the market. Patent law isn't intended to provide mechanisms to sue end-user consumers of scanners that violate patents, it's intended to protect innovators from having their ideas taken without compensation by large engineering firms. Regulations in general are intended to produce certain results, usually some sort of social safety, they are not intended to becomes gods in and of themselves. But the actions of pretty much everybody in the system from top to bottom proves this idea is poorly understood.

[tomkarlo]

The solution isn't "lossy" enforcement, at least in the case of speed limits. It's to revise the speed limit to a higher, more realistic figure and then enforce that limit as rigorously as practical. This is what the UK and other countries are doing with average speed cameras.

It's been shown that in some cases US speed limits make roads less safe and are lower than the speed limits recommended by the engineers who designed the roadway.

"The design speed for the project was 110 km/h (68 mph). The design speed is like a warranty: nothing in the road design requires a driver to go slower than 68 mph, not even on a wet road at night (the design conditions).

The average speed is not far from the design speed. The 85th percentile speed, which is supposed to be used for setting speed limits, is around 75 mph. A little over by my measurement, which found 1% compliance with the speed limit."

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/09/be-...

Having speed limits where a large percentage of drivers regularly violate them teaches people to break the law casually. (Similarly, COPPA basically teaches kids to lie about their age online.)

[jerf]

"Having speed limits where a large percentage of drivers regularly violate them teaches people to break the law casually. (Similarly, COPPA basically teaches kids to lie about their age online.)"

I'd suggest that there's also a widespread lack of understanding that there's a difference between having a law, enforcing a law, and potentially even having the capability of enforcing the law. It's part of the reason why "law" isn't the answer to every societal problem.

[krichman]

> It's part of the reason why "law" isn't the answer to every societal problem.

I sure wish more people like you had stronger control over the legislative process.

[Vivtek]

You appear to be suffering from the notion that there is a single defined value at which the speed limit will be optimum at all times.

But I entirely agree with your larger point that violation of arbitrary speed limits because of obvious engineering considerations does train people to break the law casually.

[tomkarlo]

The quote I posted explicitly points out that the speed limit is based on worst-case road conditions. Obviously a single-value speed limit can't be optimal in all conditions, for all drivers, in all vehicles. It has to be based on what's safe for most vehicles in most conditions, but there is a single optimal value for those constraints on a particular road.

I'd have no problem with variable speed limits on roads - I think it would make a lot of sense to have speed limit displays that change based on time of day, weather conditions, etc. But until that's practical, speed limits will be set based on worst-case, with a proviso that drivers ALSO have to exercise discretion and further reduce speed in exceptional conditions like fog or snow.

[kvb]

I don't think the data on optimal speeds is that clear cut. See another Marginal Revolution post for a summary of a study indicating that raising the limits generally would have costs outweighing the benefits: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/12/sho....

[AnthonyMouse]

The conclusions are based on the idea that higher speeds create external costs to third parties which aren't required to be internalized by the driver, making the driver more likely to choose a higher speed than would otherwise be optimal.

Which means the conclusion is wrong. The solution is not to have a lower speed limit, it's to require the internalization of externalized costs: Impose a fuel tax that accounts for the full cost of the pollution created to society. Require drivers whose speed has caused a collision to pay higher insurance premiums. Then drivers will have to weigh the cost to others in their decisions and the identified problem goes away.

[tptacek]

Did you read the actual paper, or just Tyler Cowen's blurb? The paper is based on actual data, not just suppositions. It too might be wrong, but the arguments it makes are more compelling than anything in your comment.

[AnthonyMouse]

The "actual data" is just as problematic, because they took it from the speed limit increases in 1987 and 1996. Fast forward two or three decades and we have much safer cars, which will completely change the injury data. Meanwhile modern cars are significantly more efficient and have far better pollution control systems. On page 4 of the paper Benthem writes, "Perhaps surprisingly, the costs from pollution-induced adverse health impacts are about as large as the costs from traffic fatalities." (Which is astounding considering the number of traffic fatalities.) But now we have gasoline powered cars that produce exhaust which is cleaner than the ambient air taken into the engine in certain cities. We have fully electric cars. If your concern is pollution then you would do better with legislative efforts to get older cars off the road and eliminating their pollution entirely rather than only reducing it, which would also save you from unnecessarily slowing down newer vehicles that cause little to no impact on air quality.

[UVB-76]

Average speed cameras are actually quite scary. In the UK they have only been used (as far as I'm aware) to enforce temporary speed limit reductions, most typically during roadworks, then removed once the speed limit is returned to normal.

In theory they could be deployed across the motorway network with ease, and overnight force people to abide by the maximum speed limits (which a majority of people do not currently do) or face fines and points on their licence (ultimately leading to a ban)

[timthorn]

No, they're deployed as regular speed cameras too. The M25 cameras are linked to a variable speed limit system to dynamically manage traffic flow; not sure if that fits in your definition of temporary (the cameras are permanent but the threshold speed changes) but there are also many instances of fixed speed cameras both on the trunk road network (eg the A14 near Cambridge) and even in villages (eg in Nottinghamshire)

[igouy]

Distractions --

>>The purpose of a speed limit is to make driving safe...<<

"I hoped that the national 55-mile per-hour speed limit--already in force--would help reduce gasoline consumption"

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=8017

>>When conditions make 55 unsafe, people need to slow down enough to be safe...<<

"California has a 'Basic Speed Law.' This law means that you may never drive faster than is safe for current conditions"

http://www.dmv.ca.gov/pubs/hdbk/speed_limits.htm

[jerf]

"I hoped that the national 55-mile per-hour speed limit--already in force--would help reduce gasoline consumption"

That's clearly not the current reason.

And more than just California has a law like that. I know Michigan does, I imagine most states do. It does show that somebody at some point understood the purpose. By no means am I saying all laws or bad, or that laws are bad, or even in a way that any particular law is bad; I'm saying people all to frequently conflate the letter of the law with its purpose.

[tptacek]

Higher-speed drivers use more fuel and produce more pollution. That's not a controversial argument. Whether or not it's the "current" reason for the 60-75mph speed limits we have now doesn't seem relevant. The question is, "should we raise the speed limit". If raising it increases the speed at which people drive, then raising it will increase pollution, and thus morbidity.

[orangethirty]

You are wrong about this part:

The purpose of a speed limit is not to make people not go more than 55 miles per hour. The purpose of a speed limit is to make driving safe, and particularly to make driving safe for society, even moreso than for the individual. If everybody is driving at 65 in the 55 zone, but everybody is safe, the higher purpose of the law is being met, and citations for speeding are just punitive for no gain. When conditions make 55 unsafe, people need to slow down enough to be safe, regardless of what the local speed limit is.

The 55 MPH speed limit was enforced by congress to reduce the consumption of fuel (gasoline). It has nothing to do with safety.

[schiffern]

>The 55 MPH speed limit was enforced by congress to reduce the consumption of fuel (gasoline). It has nothing to do with safety.

The second sentence doesn't follow from the first. I guarantee there were congress-critters for whom the safety justification tipped their vote.

[tptacek]

You write that like it's crazy. But the data shows that when people drive faster on average, accidents increase.

[orangethirty]

All I'm stating is that the double dime speed limit was enforced as a measure to reduce fuel consumption. Read this: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/nixon-signs-natio...

[krichman]

What's worse are laws that are basically enacted in reaction to some specific situation but shouldn't be applied or necessary in the general case.

Sometimes it seems like the majority of the legal code is archaic if not completely corrupt. I wish there was a way for the public to revoke laws that were ridiculous. Jury nullification? If there is a way they should be teaching it in the schools.

[Lambent_Cactus]

As far as I can tell from the article, EFF is asking for transparency into how ALPR records are used in the LA law enforcement. The only policy response even mentioned - and it's not even explicitly called for - is for the legislature to set retention limits. Both of those strike me as eminently reasonable requests, and neither of which claims a general "freedom not to have your license plate OCR'd."

[njharman]

I don't agree with retention limits.

Data is awesome. Tt is history and science. In 50 or 5000 years anthropologists will be salvilating over having the data we record today.

Maybe in 5 years hobbyist, startup or evil corporation will come up with novel use that beneficial.

The problem is not in the data or in the technology. It is with how it is used. It should be available to everyone free of restriction.

[Lambent_Cactus]

Victims of domestic violence, to name the most obvious example, probably feel differently about making their location indexed and searchable for anyone to look up without restriction.

[sp332]

Intentionally building a database whose sold purpose is to track tens of millions of mostly-innocent people as they go about their business for years on end is a bad idea.

[goostavos]

Seems like a system that's destined to be rife with false positives. I can only see this data being misused by lawyers and law enforcement to support a bad assumption. Anyone with a basic familiarity with statistics knows misinterpreting is remarkably easy to do; misrepresenting it is even easier. I'd hate to have a coincidental pattern become "proof" in some kind of court case.

[AnthonyMouse]

>I'd hate to have a coincidental pattern become "proof" in some kind of court case.

Especially when the pattern is what the cops use to identify the suspect in the first place.

There is a real problem with big data in the courtroom. Take the intersection of a victim, a crime and a suspect and look at a million data points and you'll find several thousand that match. Put only those in front of a jury and you have something that looks like a mountain of evidence but is really just systematically applying confirmation bias to random noise.

[corresation]

Monitoring license plates don't track people. They track vehicles. Vehicles that are heavily regulated.

Humorously your smartphone probably is tracking you (with a much higher correlation with people, and accuracy, than vehicles), and logging it for years on end.

And honestly I don't care whether there is a database of places where my car has been (this usually causes wildfire in most forums as the natural result is to hysterically proclaim that one can only allow some monitoring if they allow any and all monitoring for anyone, which is a nonsensical dichotomy). I can rationally see that there could be a lot of uses for it, in fact, in modernizing investigations and law enforcement.

Presuming that it has appropriate checks and balances. e.g. audited access and look-ups, with every plate-holder having the right to use that same information themselves (whether the history of spots, and every look-up of the same).

[sp332]

audited access and look-ups

Driver's license photos have audited lookups, but all that tells us is that the system is routinely abused and no one is stopping it. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/02/cop-database-abuse/

Putting every car into the database will generate the maximum number of conflicts of interest possible. If a database only has interesting or suspicious plates in it, an average cop might not browse the database for funsies (risking a hit on the next audit). But if everyone the cop knows is in there, they might check up on spouses, exes, cute girls' habits, old bosses, friend's bosses... the list of reasons to risk a peek is endless.

[notahacker]

The flip side is I'd rather be found by idle browsers in a database of everyone than a database of people considered (sometimes arbitrarily) as suspicious. Ultimately the thoroughness of auditing lookups and clarity about what is and isn't acceptable enquiry is more important than who is in the database and how many months of data is accessible.

Rogue cops might be able to misuse access to the system out of sheer curiosity but similarly rogue employees in certain positions at [mobile] telephone companies can abuse their position to tracking your whereabouts and call history, and financial organizations have access to your transaction history and card numbers - both far more sensitive than a few isolated datapoints from when your car passes police vehicles with their cameras switched on. I don't see the EFF campaigning against mobile telephony or credit cards.

[steve_b]

I don't see the EFF campaigning against mobile telephony or credit cards.

The EFF is concerned about privacy matters involving mobile devices. https://ssd.eff.org/tech/mobile

[jerrya]

Presuming that it has appropriate checks and balances. e.g. audited access and look-ups, with every plate-holder having the right to use that same information themselves (whether the history of spots, and every look-up of the same).

You seem to be begging the question (in the formal sense) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question)

[betterunix]

"I can rationally see that there could be a lot of uses for it, in fact, in modernizing investigations and law enforcement."

In other words, you feel that these people do not have enough power over the public, and should be given more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:San_Bernardino_police_swa...

"Presuming that it has appropriate checks and balances"

It will almost certainly not, except under the most far-right definition of "appropriate."

"with every plate-holder having the right to use that same information themselves"

Have you ever tried to file a FOIA request? The public will have a substantially harder time accessing that information than the government will.

[DanBC]

> Monitoring license plates don't track people. They track vehicles. Vehicles that are heavily regulated.

The owner of the vehicle is identifiable through owner's documents and insurance and etc. The driver of the vehicle is identified either through a police office confirming ID, or by a camera taking a photograph of the driver, or people making sworn statements and risking jail time if they lie.

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21737627)

She lied and said she was driving, so she took his penalty. They both got prison sentences for that lie.

> And honestly I don't care whether there is a database of places where my car has been

At the moment there's probably no need to care. Would you care if you were living in a little tin-pot country where kidnap was common and corruption was rife?

As you say there are plenty of uses for this data. How about some that inconvenience you? Demographics to target billboard ads along your route? Introduction of toll roads for traffic management?

[__david__]

> Monitoring license plates don't track people. They track vehicles.

Nope, they track people, too. According to the article, "just four randomly selected geospatial datapoints (location + time)" can uniquely identify an individual person 95% of the time. When you live in a place where cars are the only practical way of getting around (like the LA area), then this is de facto person tracking.

[girvo]

I think it should be embraced... but transparent. Let me see when someone has looked up those details, let me view all my own records. Only then can the balance of power shift ever so slightly back towards regular people.

[gyardley]

Yes, pervasive monitoring might be absolutely inevitable, technology is hard to suppress, and I may not be able to keep you from OCRing my license plate.

However, the people do still have the ability to keep the government from doing this, or from accessing and utilizing the pervasive monitoring done by others. The government does not automatically get the right to do everything a private citizen can.

[jerrya]

The Court, including Scalia, has already ruled that technology can be suppressed when it comes up against Constitutional protections.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States

(And at other times, various courts have ruled:

    * citizens cannot decrypt encrypted cable tv signals passing through their homes
    * citizens cannot monitor even unencrypted cell phone transmissions) (I think)

[krichman]

This reaction isn't pretending technology doesn't exist. On the contrary, I believe they are very forward looking to oppose a seemingly innocuous thing that could become a tool of some imagined police state 50 or 100 years in the future. Legislating against this would be a good precedent for when those drones that can track X-centimeter objects from Y kilometers away become more commonplace.

So no, it's not the freedom from having your license plate OCR'd:

> And, according to recent research reported in Nature, it’s possible to identify 95% of individuals with as few as four randomly selected geospatial datapoints (location + time), making location data the ultimate biometric identifier.

It's the freedom from having the government know exactly who was exactly where at all times, which may be important for peaceful groups (if the only possible victims were violent nobody would oppose this) that are against its policies.

The question is not "how can we preserve our privacy by preventing technology from advancing" but "do we want the government or arbitrary private entities to be able to know what we are doing all day every day?"

[lgieron]

>Reactions that involve essentially trying to pretend that technology doesn't exist or can be suppressed will never and have never worked.

It's not a matter of availability of technology, but essentially of values - for example, a technology for murdering people cheaply and effectively (guns) exists and yet murder is not ubiquitous precisely because people agree that it's wrong. The privacy folks are just arguing that being under near-constant surveilance when in public space is also wrong. I'm not saying that I necessarily agree with them, but saying that if technology exists, then its use cannot be (to a large degree) prevented, is just incorrect.

[ihsw]

You're misinterpreting the author's point -- nobody anywhere is arguing that we should abandon useful technology due to blind fear, uncertainty, and doubt. The problem is the lack of oversight on how the data is managed.

[corresation]

nobody anywhere is arguing that we should abandon useful technology due to blind fear, uncertainty, and doubt

Except that the entire article was raising fear, uncertainty and doubt about the retention of that data. The "useful" part is retaining the information such that later on when someone is arrested in the commission of a rape, for instance, they could look at other historical appearances of that person's known vehicle and see if there's a correlation with other incidents (which at most would be circumstantial given that a vehicle can have many drivers, but it could instruct further investigations).

This article warns that such logged data betrays "your political and religious beliefs, your social and sexual habits, your visits to the doctor", and then says " If this data is too private to give a week’s worth to the public to help inform us how the technology is being used, then isn’t it too private to let the police amass years’ worth of data without a warrant?"

That does not mesh with your rebuttal at all.

[mikeash]

It does seem terribly hypocritical to complain about the police capturing images from a public street, while simultaneously defending people's right to record the police in public.

I wonder what people would make of it if someone released a highly popular smartphone app that did this same sort of thing, just crowdsourced rather than done by dedicated police. You could build a gigantic, publicly-accessible, searchable database that would absolutely destroy privacy in the same way that having the police do it would, except it would be available to all instead of just to the government. Somehow, I imagine that the same people fighting against this would fight for people's rights to run this app.

It's a tough problem, certainly. I'm sympathetic to the privacy argument, but on the other hand, it seems like that ship has sailed. Maintaining privacy in public just because it's too hard to correlate all of the available data is becoming as anachronistic as riding a horse into town.

Edit: it's so wonderful how people are downvoting me apparently because they disagree. Before you downvote, click the reply button to explain why you think I'm wrong, and then don't downvote. Seriously, you can't take a little bit of differing opinion? I didn't insult anyone or say anything unproductive here, I just went slightly against the hivemind. And yes, I realize that complaining about downvotes is against the rules, and I don't care.

[sambeau]

You are a private citizen. A police officer is not while in the process of carrying out their duty. This is, in part, why they wear a uniform and why the are badged and numbered.

The police have a very special and privileged place in our society. They apply the law which means that they individually (and as a group) are given special rights by society for our protection. However, they are in a unique (and uniquely easy) position to abuse those extra rights.

How can we fight corruption if the people who's job it is to fight corruption are corrupt? How can we prove that they aren't? The extra powers the police are given make it very easy for them to be corrupt and to hide the fact.

Complaints against the police force are rarely about them recording their work, it is about them recording private citizen't going about their business for no good reason. Legitimate protestors legitimately protesting.

The police complain that they shouldn't have to be recorded going about their business as no-one else puts up with that. But they are wrong. They apply the law, the final step in the chain — and that isn't recorded. Everything said in parliament is recorded, everything said in court is recorded.

Hell, even truck drivers have tacographs!

Should police cars have dash-cams in this day and age? Yes. Should police have google-glass-like recorders recording what they see and what they do? Yes probably. Should a police gun record everything it shoots? definitely.

And the same applies for prisons and prison officers.

These are exactly the people who society has a valid, just reason to record in their duty.

A good cop has nothing to fear from more cameras. Even better—automating the process should, if done correctly, mean the death of a ton of paperwork.

The other argument for the police recording themselves is the fact that recording equipment is now so prevalent on walls and in the hands of the citizenry that they would surely need their own evidence to back up what the cops say. How many jury's will continue to take the word of a cop over two conflicting video recordings? Imagine how persuasive video footage of a cop being punched in the goggles would be? Surely the cops need that?

[betterunix]

"It does seem terribly hypocritical to complain about the police capturing images from a public street, while simultaneously defending people's right to record the police in public."

The police have great power over the general public; we must keep that power in check, and one of the ways to do that in the modern world is to record police abuses and police brutality and publish those recordings on the Internet. I would rather see people who are dissatisfied with law enforcement aim cameras at the police than to have guns aimed at the police. We generally do not want our cities to become war zones.

On the other hand, when the police record the general public, the balance of power is further tipped toward the police. They already have paramilitary teams, armored vehicles, even attack helicopters, and they have vast surveillance powers; it is hard enough to prevent such an organization from become an oppressive, tyrannical force. Further expansion of police power is unnecessary and dangerous.

[belorn]

I downvoted you because you imply that government collecting and recording data about their citizens is the same as citizen collecting and recording data about their government. You don't support such implication with anything, and just states it as an fact.

It is false. Actions made by Government, and actions made by private people has different effects on society.

A transparent government is a good thing. it allows for accountability and protects the individual. Its the only defense against power abuse.

A lack of privacy for the individual is a bad thing. It destroy modern society, breaks the court system, and encourage politics to focus on conservative efforts against political threats. Suddenly, one can identify any future political leaders before they has risen to a point of power.

If a popular smarthpone allowed people to identify any movement of an other person, FSF would likely not cheer on. Such app would be used to steal identify, provide stalkers with location data, allowed thieves to know where house owners are, and so on.

[sp332]

It does seem terribly hypocritical to complain about the police capturing images from a public street, while simultaneously defending people's right to record the police in public.

Cops are only recordable on the job, because they are public servants doing a public job.

[mikeash]

I thought anyone in public could legally be recorded.

[saraid216]

It's a legal gray area because the physics of wave propagation are not good about obeying privacy laws.

IANAL, so that's the extent of the opinion I should be giving.

[krichman]

It's not gray at all. You may record someone in public. You may record someone on private property iff you have permission or you are on public property. You may not use their image in an advertisement without a signed release.

(IANAL also)

[knowaveragejoe]

I fail to understand how it's hypocritical to advocate recording of the people sanctioned by the state to use lethal force while decrying a system that is by all measures ripe for abuse.

[mikeash]

Because recording police is justified by "we're both in public, and I should be able to record public things", which justification applies equally well to police using cameras in public.

[betterunix]

That is kind of like saying, "Everyone has freedom of speech, therefore the government should be allowed to publish propaganda."

[pfortuny]

Nope: the government is not a 'person' in that sense because it has a special role in society, which has been given by society and needs to be controled by society.

The government is not 'one' in 'everyone'.

[throwaway2048]

how are the police different in this regard?

[wnight]

Sure, as people themselves. But as my employee, no. Only if it really serves me.

We pay the bills so we can make some requirements.

[jedberg]

It sounds like they aren't trying to suppress the technology, just pushing for better rules around data retention.