Tag: Surveillance

Bizarre, Politics, Society

Garbage In, Garbage Out: San Jose Considers Installing License Plate Readers On Garbage Trucks

By Darren Smith, Weekend Contributor

garbage-truck-scaniaSan Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo and Councilmen Johnny Khamis and Raul Peralez proposed installing license plate readers on garbage trucks. If there is one thing apparently that is important to the collection of your trash and rubbish it is reading every license plate in the neighborhood it seems. The city officials believe it will make a strong dent in the number of stolen and wanted vehicles left out in the street around garbage day.

The proposal involves installation of the readers and feeding the license data to the central computer system that serves the police department’s LPRs installed on patrol cars. It promises to be a monumentally cost inefficient system despite what city officials might claim. The civil liberties implications notwithstanding.

Psst, car thieves of California: be sure to take in your stolen car when you take out the trash.

Continue reading “Garbage In, Garbage Out: San Jose Considers Installing License Plate Readers On Garbage Trucks” →

Constitutional Law, Media, Politics

License Plate Data Mining By Police Partially Curtailed By Red Tape After 80Gb Drive Got Full

By Darren Smith, Weekend Contributor

TRS-80 Model 1Those who strongly advocate for both privacy and efficient government are sure to be perplexed.

Oakland Police, which has a License Plate Recognition system that gathers thousands of its citizens’ license plate data via cameras, decided to reduce their license plate data-mining retention time after the underlying hard drive storing the data filled up, crashing the storage system. The culprit was a desktop computer running Windows XP on an 80 gigabyte hard drive.

If that wasn’t enough the replacement of this hard drive, at least, was curtailed by a firewall of red tape that seems to have prevented the city from buying a replacement drive. A one terabyte hard-drive can easily be found for fifty dollars.

Continue reading “License Plate Data Mining By Police Partially Curtailed By Red Tape After 80Gb Drive Got Full” →

Constitutional Law, Courts, Free Speech, International, Media, Politics, Society

European Commission Considering Data Retention Law Targeting Telecoms And Internet Service Providers

By Darren Smith, Weekend Contributor

european-commission-logoUnder the pre-text of combatting terrorism, the European Commission is mulling a proposed regulation that would require telecommunications companies and internet service providers to retain records of European Citizens’ communications. Courts struck down on constitutional privacy grounds a previous law.

The measure comes just after the deadly terrorist attacks stemming from the Charlie Hebdo rampage in Paris in early January. The situation does appear to a lesser degree reminiscent of the changes in government approaches to privacy in the wake of terrorist outrages in other nations such as those in the United States in 2001 and the railway attacks in Spain and the United Kingdom.

Continue reading “European Commission Considering Data Retention Law Targeting Telecoms And Internet Service Providers” →