Posted on 02/19/2014 8:14:24 AM PST by Responsibility2nd
The Department of Homeland Security wants a private company to provide a national license-plate tracking system that would give the agency access to vast amounts of information from commercial and law enforcement tag readers, according to a government proposal that does not specify what privacy safeguards would be put in place.
The national license-plate recognition database, which would draw data from readers that scan the tags of every vehicle crossing their paths, would help catch fugitive illegal immigrants, according to a DHS solicitation. But the database could easily contain more than 1 billion records and could be shared with other law enforcement agencies, raising concerns that the movements of ordinary citizens who are under no criminal suspicion could be scrutinized.
A spokeswoman for DHS’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) stressed that the database “could only be accessed in conjunction with ongoing criminal investigations or to locate wanted individuals.”
The database would enhance agents’ and officers’ ability to locate suspects who could pose a threat to public safety and would reduce the time required to conduct surveillance, ICE spokeswoman Gillian Christensen said.
“It is important to note that this database would be run by a commercial enterprise, and the data would be collected and stored by the commercial enterprise, not the government,” she said.
~snip~
Agents would be able to use a smartphone to snap pictures of license plates that could be compared against a “hot list” of plates in the database. They would have 24-hour, seven-day-a-week access, according to the solicitation, which was first noted last week by bloggers.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
They’re going to use this to find terrorists and violent criminals, right? This isn’t going to harass Tea Party members and contributors to the Republican party, right? This won’t be turned against people who oppose gay ‘marriage’ right?
Dream on.
Thanks for the ping; post. Thread BUMP!
What do you have to hide anyway? It’s your patriotic duty to allow yourself to be tracked citizen!
This is only a stopgap measure, to be sure, but if you want to gum up the works and make it harder for them to track you, get a license plate that’s hard to read.
A study by North Carolina State University entitled “Effects of License Plate Attributes on Automatic License Plate Recognition” (google it if you’re interested) found that the cameras had the easiest time reading plates whose numbers were grouped together and separately from letters; where stacked characters were not used; and where the color contrast between the numbers/letters and the background was the greatest (such as black letters on a white background).
The cameras were much less effective with plates featuring stacked characters, or ones where the numbers and letters were mixed together, or ones where the number/letter and background contrast wasn’t too great. For “improved” results, try to get characters that can easily be confused, i.e. B/8, E/3, I/1, etc.
Some states’ standard-issue plates meet some or all of these criteria; but if yours isn’t one of them, you can probably find a specialty plate that would address the contrast issue (e.g. one with white lettering on a yellow background), and maybe even the stacked-character issue; then you can get a personalized one like “B8E3I1” or something.
M4L
They have to track them down to offer them EBT cards.
Apparently the welfare ads in foreign langauges were not at successful as Obama had hoped.
Time to buy a couple of horses.
They surely already have that ability. They are just looking for authorization to use it openly against people.
I am sure it already keeps most potentially problematic Congressmen in line. Bohner and McConnell are likely intimately familiar with the NSA’s blackmail potential, and John Roberts, too.
LOL - yeah right. I suspect the little jerkoffs are going to use this to track 'political opponents' of the new Police State...
I think you're right Desert...
If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about. We are tracking you for you own safety. By tracking you, your phone calls, your medical history, your gun ownership records, school records, voting records, political actions, music preferences, pet ownership, your ‘smart’ appliances, GPS tracking locators, and these new microphones required in all light fixtures in your home YOU are helping to catch terrorists.
If you object...Well, we have ways of dealing with traitors.
The irony here will be a Chinese company will sell license plate covers to render them unreadable to cameras.
>>Who in the world is Homeland Security???<<
Global government under the control of corporate marketers and manufacturers.
They have to know where you are after all
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.