Privacy vs. personal freedom. The blurring of online and offline privacy. Concerns that we are becoming a “surveillance society.” How much of your personal freedoms are you willing to sacrifice to give the police and government the tools they can use to catch criminals? It is a very tough question because it seems the answer depends on whether the use of those tools, such as surveillance cameras or online tracking, are properly used or whether they get abused. For me, the line is crossed when companies or social sites capture my personal information and store it in databases. However, if I or a member of my family were a victim of a crime and it was caught on a surveillance camera, I would be glad if it led to the investigation and capture of the criminal.
The Washington Post is reporting that police in D.C. are beefing up their areas 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.
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. Read the full article »
