[hippoman]

Any private person can collect license plate data with a computer too. Surely that's not illegal? Imagine thousands of hobbyists doing this and building a database of when and where cars are moving around the city. If this data collection is only allowed on "small scales" but when people combine or publish their records it becomes illegal for the group (but not the individual members?), that would become a pretty hairy legal gray area.

Also cars are a massive cause of death and heavily used in violent crimes so it can actually be useful to track them, unlike trying to catch near-non-existant terrorists.

[tobehonest]

Plane watches already do this. They have even outed CIA operations.

I wonder how the Government would like it if many hobbyists sat in front of the NSA car park and started writing down every license plate and put them on a searchable database.

Now this is a project I would fund. Kickstarter anyone?

[midas007]

Interesting. Got a reference to that CIA incident?

[markvdb]

There's quite a pile of information on CIA rendition flights. They seem to have used EU member states air space [1][2].

The Washington Post suggests there was at least some journalistic field work plane spotting in the US [3].

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/jan/23/usa.eu

[2] http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/news-room/content/2012...

[3] http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/ten-ye...

[midas007]

Nice. Thanks.

I'm wondering if anyone is working on an app like Metadata for CIA renditions. Basically to to track when someone just disappears, because it's not like they got a day in court before they were tortured and/or murdered.

[dispense]

There was an entertaining lecture about it this (and other stuff) at the 30C3: http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2013/30C3_-_5604_-_en_-_...

[dalke]

Google "plane watching CIA". Second hit: http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/dec/10/usa.terrorism1 : How planespotters turned into the scourge of the CIA

[Shivetya]

We already have people doing this.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/private-firms-arg...

[hippoman]

Wherever this is legal for private companies (seemingly in a state of flux now) it has to be legal for the government too.

[coldpie]

Er, no. We don't allow the government to censor speech, but Youtube sure as hell can silence me for being a dick.

This is because we give the government an exclusive license on force.

[jasomill]

YouTube sure as hell can't silence you, other than by refusing to host your content on its servers, and federal, state, and local governments can exercise similar control over content hosted on government servers.

[fluidcruft]

Congress has much more freedom/power to pass laws limiting the operation of the Executive than it has over private activities.

This is part of the reason all sorts of government surveillance is structured as private companies that curate data with the goal of providing it to the Government. Companies are much more free to generate whatever databases they like, however they want. Government use then falls under the vague category of accessing "business records" which Congress ultimately doesn't seem to regulate much (except perhaps for medical records and wiretapping).

[prof_hobart]

A couple of differences - the private individual probably does have access to records of who the car belongs to (which is far more useful information), and they also typically can't use the data to do too much damage, such as implicate you in a crime because you happened to be driving past 3 places where similar crimes happened in the past.

[aestra]

IIRC, In New York City and the northeast there is EZPASS (an RFID device that automatically deducts a toll to your prepaid account). Someone altered theirs EZPASS to track when their EZPASS was read. Basically it was read all over the city far away from toll booths.

Here's the article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/09/12/e-zpasses...

EDIT: Seems that New York Department of Transportation is doing this.

[seszett]

> Any private person can collect license plate data with a computer too. Surely that's not illegal?

Probably not in the US, but in lots of EU countries, just collecting identifying data with an automated system is illegal, or at least has to be declared.

And I think that it's a very good thing.