[danjones]

The issue isn't license plate readers, it's data retention.

They certainly have a valid point about the need for limits on data retention however I feel they're going too far in demanding "public disclosure of the actual license plate data [(a week’s worth)]" just to highlight the issue.

For reference on how this is handled in other countries take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_data_retenti...

[GhotiFish]

Gooooood point.

Releasing that data publicly could be dangerous. Which kind of goes to show that the police shouldn't have that kind of data to begin with.

I really wish they had just used that bloody system to look for hits on wanted and stolen vehicles. That's fine, everyone's ok with that. Mass collection and tracking of every single car that gets recorded? Why did they have to torpedo such a useful technology by doing something so stupid?

[notahacker]

Releasing that data publicly could be dangerous. Which kind of goes to show that the police shouldn't have that kind of data to begin with.

That's the point the EFF is trying to make, but it's also absurd. It would obviously be dangerous for them to release their donors' credit card details in public (or even store them in a non-encrypted database and non-PCI compliant manner), but that's an argument for limiting who has access to how much of the records and not an argument that credit cards and financial transactions data shouldn't exist.