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Comment by speedyrev | Hacker News Reader

My nephew is a detective who just worked an Abduction/Murder case. The suspect was located (and later convicted) largely in part because of the license plate scanners. One thing you cannot argue, they are incredibly effective. My problem is the infinite retention of that data and the fact that many agencies use a private third party for the system. I think eliminating the scanners is a bad thing, but I would like to see some basic rules that would have to be followed.

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Yeah well knowing where EVERYONE is, ALL the time probably helps them know a lot of things, who is dating who, where you shop, where you work, etc. You okay with all that to "save the children" ?

If they were allowed to use xray scanners to scan every car on every street in a city to see who and what is inside - you okay with that escalation? Because they are doing it "near" borders (backscatter on vehicles) and who knows where they will take it next.

It's like you didn't read what he said:

My problem is the infinite retention of that data and the fact that many agencies use a private third party for the system. I think eliminating the scanners is a bad thing, but I would like to see some basic rules that would have to be followed.

As I see it, we need more explicit rules about privacy that encompass both gov't and private parties. Whether we get rid of FISA or the NSA will ultimately not matter (fat chance, of course) -- if it seems important enough, gov't will always be able to entice the private owners of data to "voluntarily" share with law enforcement.

This car location database is just the tip of the iceberg, and it happens to be absolutely unambiguously legal for gov't and corporations to do whatever they please with this data.

I am not actually paranoid. I am quite confident that the norm is for the police to have reasonable procedures in place -- the last thing a police department wants is for a police officer or former police officer to be accused of using police resources in a creepy manner to stalk/spy on an ex-spouse or similar. They want an explicit paper trial of Officer X asked about car owned by person Y for reason Z. Even if the norm is pretty good, the public should have clear expectation that can be understood.

> If they were allowed to use xray scanners to scan every car on every street in a city to see who and what is inside - you okay with that escalation?

I wouldn't, but mostly because x-ray'ing is harmful to health.

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