Some have expressed concern that such ubiquitous tracking of license plates is a violation of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution., which protects citizens against unreasonable search and seizure and outlines the necessity of warrants in searches.

However, the counter-argument is that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1967 that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections only apply when there is a “reasonable expectation of privacy”. License plates are issued by the state, and technically remain property of the state. Police are certainly permitted to read and run your plates. Supporters of the scanning technology say that this only allows them to do that faster. Beyond that, the rules of probable cause and searches still apply.

The great concern that some have now is that data from these scans is now being compiled. They fear that profiles can be built to construct a data “picture” of a person’s movements. Over time, that kind of tracking, can yield quite a profile on a person in terms of personal habits and proclivities. And, if your cameras are concentrated thickly enough in an area (Washington, DC has one reader per square mile, so far) that picture gains definition quickly. With enough info, it is almost as unbroken a stream of info as a GPS tracking device would provide.

And now, there is a new wrinkle. This data is not held by the police, but by a private company.

California-based Vigilant Video sells license plate scanners. It has competitors. But, what Vigilant does is unique. They compile a database of the scans – hundreds of millions of them – and have built the National Vehicle Location Service. The service is available to use for free by law enforcement.

What sort of result could come from identifying and tracking capability held by private companies?

Of course, we already have that, to some degree. For example, on a Facebook post I made recently about reading Stephen King’s newest book, this appeared:

We’re used to those. But, could we get to the level of Minority Report ads? Is it a matter of “if”? Or of “when”?

I’m glad you asked.

Have a look at one of Vigilant Video’s other databases. This one is called LineUp. It stores facial and full-body recognition profiles into a database. Profiles, not just of someone committing a crime, but of anyone who walked into the surveillance area.

Of course, Vigilant Video company reps are quick to point out that only authorized law enforcement agencies can use their databases. But, privacy advocates are always quick to add: “For now…”

While social media sites like Twitter and Facebook have become integral for protesters to organize events, government officials in Malaysia have taken a page out of this playbook and used it against the protesters. Wall Street Journal describes the effort:

The Royal Malaysia Police are now using their own official Facebook and Twitter pages – typically filled with traffic warnings and information on crime rates – to hopefully prevent a planned rally in support of Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim on Jan. 9, when the verdict on his two-year sodomy trial is expected.

Sharing photos and videos of past riots – including the raucous London demonstrations that shook Britain last August – the Malaysian police warned that peaceful assemblies can easily devolve into chaos, and “should be a lesson” to Malaysians.

“Should be a lesson”? Nice words of intimidation and fear-mongering. Still, the Facebook page for the Malaysian police don’t seem to be short on popularity as it has nearly 100,000 likes while their Twitter account, which was only launched last September, has nearly 10,000 followers. Of course, likes and followers does not necessarily imply support for the government’s tactics. It could just as well be an online episode of cat-and-mouse between protesters and the government: government watches the protesters, and the protesters watch the government. While both sides try to stay one step ahead of the other, the meantime result is the perception of greater online popularity. But is anybody even really surprised that the government is using social media to monitor the activity of dissident groups? Malaysia’s police aren’t alone in this act nor are they the first.

In what sounds like the most dystopian novel I’ve ever read, Wikileaks explained the extent of the surveillance operation in a release:

International surveillance companies are based in the more technologically sophisticated countries, and they sell their technology on to every country of the world. This industry is, in practice, unregulated. Intelligence agencies, military forces and police authorities are able to silently, and on mass, and secretly intercept calls and take over computers without the help or knowledge of the telecommunication providers. Users’ physical location can be tracked if they are carrying a mobile phone, even if it is only on stand by.

But the WikiLeaks Spy Files are more than just about ’good Western countries’ exporting to ’bad developing world countries’. Western companies are also selling a vast range of mass surveillance equipment to Western intelligence agencies. In traditional spy stories, intelligence agencies like MI5 bug the phone of one or two people of interest. In the last ten years systems for indiscriminate, mass surveillance have become the norm. Intelligence companies such as VASTech secretly sell equipment to permanently record the phone calls of entire nations. Others record the location of every mobile phone in a city, down to 50 meters. Systems to infect every Facebook user, or smart-phone owner of an entire population group are on the intelligence market.

The Wikileaks release also explains that citizens involved in overthrowing their respective dictators during the Arab Spring this year discovered listening rooms “where devices from Gamma corporation of the UK, Amesys of France, VASTech of South Africa and ZTE Corp of China monitored their every move online and on the phone.” Further, the Spyfiles announcement details how surveillance entities in the U.S., Italy and France have manufactured viruses to infiltrate private computers and smart phones – they’re looking at you, iPhone, Blackberry, and Gmail users – in order to essentially hijack the device and record its every movement.

Wikileaks cohort OWNI have taken the Spyfiles release and created a remarkably fascinating – and outright terrifying – interactive map to help make sense of this new information to the visually-inclined. Go ahead and play around with it and become scared.

Not included in the video above is an extended account of how intelligence surveillance isn’t only limited to certain regions of the world:

But software users in the West are not safe either. Assange and other members of the panel told reporters how Western intelligence services used electronic devices to monitor the activities of its citizens. In Britain MI5 apparently used specialized voice recognition software implanted into cell phones that could make out who was speaking to whom. Other intelligence agencies had the ability to figure out where exactly the user was located, what they were typing and what they looked like. One of the programs allowed agencies to take photos of unsuspecting victims by using cameras implanted into their phones.

One intrepid tweeter already seems to have corroborated Wikipedia’s claim:

More mysterious is that Wikileaks seems to be experiencing some accessibility issues with their website right now following the release of the Spyfiles:

Not to be crass about what has been a pretty sobering article up to this point, but does this mean that I should hurry up and pay my parking tickets now or is it really just too late to even worry about that?

On that note, let’s say that you are having a Sunday afternoon picnic with your child. The weather’s good, you’ve been running around and playing – but now it’s time for lunch. You open up the cooler, only to discover that you’ve left a couple of the sandwiches in the car. The car’s just a few yards away, so you quickly run to grab the sandwiches.

And in a split second, you look back to see that your child is gone. You catch a black sedan speeding away and you are barely able to catch the license plate. Because you caught that license plate, police are able to search a giant database of plate captures and track the movements of the kidnapper.

A classic question: What is more important, public safety or personal freedom? What are you willing to sacrifice? Let us know in the comments.

Ok, I know this whole scenario seems a little bit Without A Trace or Lifetime movie-esque, but the point is that police were able to use an ever-expanding database of data culled from license plate snapshots in order to generate real-time location information. That’s a reality, and it’s happening in our nation’s capital, among other places.

The Washington Post is reporting that police in D.C. are beefing up the area covered by license plate cameras. More than 250 cameras in D.C. and its suburbs are constantly hard at work, grabbing license plate numbers and sticking them into databases. The police aren’t exactly doing this quietly, but it’s being done with “virtually no public debate.”

The highest concentration of these plate readers in the entire nation exists in D.C. (one reader per square mile), so that means that District police are building the biggest location database based on license plates in the whole country.

Let’s take a brief look at these license plate readers.

First, these are apparently different types of cameras than the cameras cities have been affixing near stoplights and other places to catch people running red lights or speeding – the “here’s a ticket 2 weeks later in the mail” cameras.

These plate readers cost about $20,000 each and can snatch images of numbers and letters on cars traveling nearly 150 mph and across four lanes of traffic. These plate readers in D.C. take 1,800 images per minute, every one of which is stored in a database.

Basically, these plate readers have made it possible for police to track everyone’s movements as they move across the city.

These plate readers and the subsequent database of image captures has tipped the privacy concerns of some – notably the American Civil Liberties Union. One of their main concerns is naturally the privacy implications.

In the District, laws are in place that limit the amount of time that surveillance camera footage can be kept. The images must be dumped after 10 days, unless there is an actual investigatory reason to keep them. But right now, there is nothing keeping data from the plate readers from being stored for years.

The ACLU says that this database is storing the location data of innocent people. And they are right. The plate readers are casting an all-inclusive net, grabbing license plate numbers indiscriminately.

Clearly this technology is rapidly approaching the point where it could be used to reconstruct the entire movements of any individual vehicle. As we have argued in the context of GPS tracking that level of intrusion on private life is something that the police should not be able to engage in without a warrant.

Let’s think back to the slightly-stylized child abduction scene from the beginning of this article. Maybe that seems a bit far-fetched, but the reality of the situation is that the plate reader database has helped police. According to the D.C. police department, they make an arrest a day with the help of the plate readers. In a four month period this year, they also found 51 stolen cars.

And although our child abduction story above might seem unrealistic, the possibilities are there for the plate readers to help in truly significant ways. Police could track cars to and from murder scenes or use it to identify players in organized crime circles like sex trafficking – by logging which cars travel between certain locations.

But the fact that the technology is beneficial or could be beneficial in terms of law enforcement does not assuage concerns of a “surveillance society” becoming the norm in the U.S. It’s a classic argument that pits personal liberties against security and safety. Just how much of your freedom are you able to give up to feel safer? This is a crucial debate that we’ve seen play out most recently after 9/11 with the Patriot Act.

The ACLU channels Minority Report to discuss preemptive law enforcement:

Of course, if the police track all of us all the time, there is no doubt that will help to solve some crimes — just as it would no doubt help solve some crimes if they could read everybody’s e-mail and install cameras in everybody’s homes. But in a free society, we don’t let the police watch over us just because we might do something wrong. That is not the balance struck by our Constitution and is not the balance we should strike in our policymaking.

Obviously, the plate readers are a valuable tool for the police, and there are an abundance of situations where one could imagine the searchable database of plate captures to be extremely useful. But are those plate readers building up a database that’s just a little too full of innocent people’s location information for your liking?

If this kind of thing is to proliferate (both in D.C. and across the country), it is argued that it needs to see the light of day. Basically, society should have time to debate its merits and discuss their concerns. “The police should not be able to run out and buy a new technology and put it in place before anybody realizes what’s going on,” says Jay Stanley of the ACLU’s Privacy and Technology Program.

What do you think about the expansion of the plate reader technology? Do the benefits outweigh the privacy and personal freedom concerns? Or is this an example of big brother yielding too much power with the ability to catalog this data without warrants? Let us know in the comments.

From there, it’s a really simple process, as indicated by by TechCrunch (via Lifehacker). Setting up your home (or other place of value) surveillance unit is really quite simple. All you have to do is put the video camera in your location of choice with one Google+ account, start a hangout, send your other Plus account a link to hangout, and bam: instant surveillance of the area you selected:

You will need two Google+ accounts to make this work — one for the camera side and another to view the stream. But that shouldn’t be that big of an issue. Simply start a Hangout on one side and then email yourself the URL. Once you’re at work, or wherever, just open the link to look through the other side of the portal.

You could even invite others to your Google+ hangout so they could take over the security duties, provided your friends would be satisfied watching your house do nothing all day.

There is an issue of inactivity on Google Hangouts, meaning you can’t just “set it and forget it.” If you aren’t interacting, or at least moving your mouse or other input device, you’ll be kicked out for being inactive. Granted, that’s a minor obstacle if home defense is your thing. It’s not that hard to move your mouse every once and a while.

Lifehacker has an image of the setup in action:

Are you worried the babysitter swiping drinks from the liquor cabinet? Or are you having a hard time figuring out which one of you lovable dogs is destroying your shoes? Google+ has a free option to pursue, provided you have a video camera set up in the area you want to watch.

You could probably wire up your entire domicile to this system, provided you had enough cameras and enough Google+ accounts.

In the remake of Casino Royale, James Bond connects himself from Montenegro to MI6 in London so they can figure out the poison Le Chiffre’s associate added to his drink. Remote medical monitoring in the real world might become a matter of business, based on something Microsoft has been developing.

The Times Online described a patent sought by Microsoft. This technology would monitor aspects of the physical state of a computer user connected to the system.

Someone who is feeling a little stressed out by their employer would end up sending a signal to human resources. Management could provide help to the employee as they see fit.

Take a moment to indulge in a little outrage yourself. If developed and implemented in the business world, this could be the most reprehensible invasion of privacy ever proposed.

Now we’ll tie it into the Fast purchase. The Norwegians have some fascinating products in their solutions mix.

In the category of Surveillance and Enforcement, Fast offers products that assist with threat detection and criminal investigation. These relate to data, of course.

But Microsoft’s patent would turn physiological responses into data. The company has been working on ways to assess data, based on the patent. We can’t see any reason why the Fast Surveillance and Enforcement tools couldn’t be part of the assessment chain.

Frustration in the workplace may end up being interpreted as more than pressure from an upcoming deadline. Imagine a world where physical responses to stress cause someone to be accused of thought crimes.

Stay tuned. Big Brother will be watching.

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/microsoft-the-fast-buy-and-big-brother-2008-01/feed 1 http://www.webpronews.com/skype-outage-dials-up-conspiracy-theories-2007-08 http://www.webpronews.com/skype-outage-dials-up-conspiracy-theories-2007-08#comments Mon, 27 Aug 2007 16:23:28 +0000 WebProNews Staff http://www.webpronews.com/?p=40038 That 36-hour blank spot where Skype’s login and authentication systems used to be may have been down for reasons beyond the official party line…but you have to believe the *truth* is out there.

Skype Outage Dials Up Conspiracy Theories

Not everyone has been satisfied with Skype’s assertion that Microsoft’s latest patch updates caused thousands of Skype users to logout and try to log back in at the same time, crushing Skype’s login system.

Skype official types have blogged a couple of times that the long service outage was not due to an outside exploit or other malicious activity. Microsoft, for its part, has reacted with virtually a WTF to claims that for the first time ever a Windows update and restart sequence caused this kind of disruption across a peer-to-peer system that should withstand such activity.

Whenever there is controversy, people like to try and fit baffling circumstances into what they do understand. Conspiracy theories fill in the gaps where facts fear to tread, and that’s where Jabari Zakiya’s article at Free Software Magazine picks up the Skype outage thread:

“The Skype network has been a concern of government intelligence agencies since its inception because it provides a worldwide network of encrypted VoIP calls to potential

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/skype-outage-dials-up-conspiracy-theories-2007-08/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/behavioral-targeting-becoming-essential-2007-08 http://www.webpronews.com/behavioral-targeting-becoming-essential-2007-08#comments Tue, 07 Aug 2007 16:47:45 +0000 WebProNews Staff http://www.webpronews.com/?p=39611 Now is the time to do some behavioral targeting before it's regulated. (Da guvmint is froggy on both sides of this issue, wanting at the same time to limit how much digital information is stored about users and to glean all they can from it for their own surveillance purposes.) Though people tend to be creeped out by how much marketers know about them, if done right, it can be mutually beneficial.
]]> Now is the time to do some behavioral targeting before it’s regulated. (Da guvmint is froggy on both sides of this issue, wanting at the same time to limit how much digital information is stored about users and to glean all they can from it for their own surveillance purposes.) Though people tend to be creeped out by how much marketers know about them, if done right, it can be mutually beneficial.

There are some kinks to be worked out, though.

When I turned 18, I got a present from Gillette in the mail – the brand spanking new Mach 3 razor. I was too young to be concerned at the time about why Gillette knew when my birthday was, and how they knew where I lived. Did they have an arrangement with Selective Service or something? Scary.

Nonetheless, it was an effective marketing hook. I used that razor (and bought knew blades frequently) for a long time – until I said, "Hey, wait a minute! That’s creepy."

On the Web, at your online store, it’s the same concept. You know your customer, you know what he wants, and you deliver it before he can ask, or suggest something he didn’t know he wanted.

That’s the idea, anyway.

SearchEngineGuide’s Jody Nemitz cites three reasons why behavioral targeting is becoming "essential": rising acquisition costs; decreasing conversion rates; transition from mass marketing to personalized marketing.

He recommends developing profiles for users that take into account factors like referral sites and keywords, internal search patterns, noting preferred content and contact methods, purchase patterns, and demographics, among other things.

And then he gets creepy with a hypothetical examination of "Jonathan Bowers," who will know all sorts of details about, enough to let him know of discounts on Hawaiian cruises. But that’s the sort of thing you’ll need to know to effectively market to the Jonathan Bowerses of the world.

Until he gets mad at you for spying, that is. 

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/behavioral-targeting-becoming-essential-2007-08/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/youtube-cracking-down-on-crime-2006-12 http://www.webpronews.com/youtube-cracking-down-on-crime-2006-12#comments Fri, 15 Dec 2006 21:41:29 +0000 Autumn Davis http://www.webpronews.com/?p=33770 Ontario police use the popular video sharing site YouTube to help catch a killer.

Video sharing and social networking site YouTube is having a banner year. First Google acquired the company for $1.65 billion and now the site is being used to help put criminals behind bars.

Hamilton, Ontario police Staff Sgt. Jorge posted a one-minute long clip of a surveillance video on YouTube, in the hopes that the site’s 50 million viewers could aid in the identification of a killer.

The clip features “two people of interest” who are suspected in the murder of a 22 year-old man at a hip-hop concert. Viewers of the site must be eager to assist the police, as the clip was been viewed more than 2, 000 times since it was uploaded.

For Jorge, posting the video on YouTube made sense because of the fact that the age demographic of possible witnesses at the concert was congruent to YouTube’s average viewer.

“Our target demographic, the age group of people who was present at that concert, is the same age group of people who has made a habit out of watching YouTube and chatting online.”

Police realize the popularity of social networking sites, and that if criminals are using the Internet they can probably also be tracked through it.

Although social networking and video sharing sites are considered to contain largely humorous and entertaining content, criminals should not discount their ability to be taken seriously. In fact, YouTube videos were used as evidence in the case of two Los Angeles police officers using excessive force during an arrest.

Posting clips on sites such as YouTube or using a social networking site is a two way street. Police are using them to their advantage in searching for clues about the identities of suspects, and to search for criminals broadcasting their crimes.

That was the case in Philadelphia, where a fugitive was arrested after police tracked him through his MySpace account that he checked at a public library.

In another case, a man in Norway was fined after the police found a clip on YouTube of him driving his car recklessly and blatantly exceeding the speed limit.

Knowing that using social networking and video sharing sites are extremely useful in the identification and apprehension of suspects, police should consider utilizing them more often in the future. On the opposite end of the spectrum, criminals should realize that if they broadcast there whereabouts they are more likely to be found.

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl

Autmn Davis is a staff writer for WebProNews covering ebusiness and technology.

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/youtube-cracking-down-on-crime-2006-12/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/nsa-wiretaps-myspace-and-virtual-surveillance-2006-02 http://www.webpronews.com/nsa-wiretaps-myspace-and-virtual-surveillance-2006-02#comments Fri, 10 Feb 2006 14:10:08 +0000 Ken Yarmosh http://www.webpronews.com/?p=26792 Earlier this week, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales faced questioning from the Senate Judiciary Committee, in regards to legitimacy of the Bush Administration’s NSA wiretapping surveillance program.

Mr. Gonzales wrote an editorial, published Monday morning in the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Editorial entitled America Expects Surveillance.

Mr. Gonzales’ case as stated in this editorial and also before Congress is that the President had the authority to use such tactics in order to protect “both the security of the nation and the rights and liberties we cherish.” He also points to specific examples in America’s history where similar tactics were used:

History is clear that signals intelligence is, to use the language of the Supreme Court, “a fundamental incident of waging war.” President Wilson authorized the military to intercept all telegraph, telephone and cable communications into and out of the U.S. during World War I. The day after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt authorized the interception of all communications traffic into and out of the U.S.

While the title of his piece is not necessarily addressed through his argument, I find the idea behind it most interesting. Outside of the legitimacy of his claims, I found myself wondering, do Americans expect surveillance?

I can think of more than several cases where the answer is most definitely yes.

Consider the fact that in most every store today, there are video surveillance cameras. Many places of work have the same, especially in mission critical data centers or areas of confidentiality.

The Internet is no different. IP addresses are logged for nearly every website someone visits. Online activity is identifiable enough that college students can be busted for illegally downloading copyrighted material.

But what made me really start thinking is what I’ve been hearing about parents and MySpace. A Dateline special that aired near the end of January was actually entitled Why parents must mind MySpace. And many parents are now “spying” on their kids’ online activity.

I see nothing wrong with parents ensuring their kids are behaving online. For that matter, nor do I with the MPAA trying to use the proper channels to enforce copyrighted material from not being illegally downloaded or distributed. Or in search engine companies handing over non-identifiable search queries to the federal government when requested.

Digital citizens still feel empowered to disregard established law (or in the case of kids, disobey their parents), believing the Internet provides them a cloak of invincibility from repercussions. They do not believe that “virtual surveillance” really even exists because unlike the cameras in the store, they haven’t seen them – at least not until recently.

Thus, the issue in all these cases is found in the perception of surveillance. In instances where people have commonly accepted some sort of checks and balances, they do in fact “expect surveillance” and have a harder time disputing the consequences for wrongful actions.

With amendments to laws to match technical advancements, netizens will soon begin to understand that the virtual world is not all that different from the physical one. The presence of virtual surveillance will be felt. And that may help curb some of the dangers or crimes in the deep dark alleys of the Internet.

Ken Yarmosh is a consultant who helps organizations get the most out of their technology investments. He works with technology users and creators across various industries, focusing on technology education and strategy. With over 7 years IT experience, Ken has worked with small businesses, non-profits, federal agencies, and multi-million dollar companies.

His online efforts include acting as the Editor for the Corante Technology Hub and authoring the TECHNOSIGHT blog.

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/nsa-wiretaps-myspace-and-virtual-surveillance-2006-02/feed 0