Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Another Reason To Ride A Bike

Because there just isn't enough surveillance in this country.

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.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

By law and practice, bicyclists have had less privacy than drivers or car passengers. Plate readers may seem to tilt the relative privacy needle back toward bicyclists, until we factor in facial, biometric, and form recognition technologies. With fixed street level surveillance systems, mobile mounted cams, and networked aerial drones, all vehicles will be tracked all the time visually, but bicyclists and peds will more likely be personally identified and be victimized by auditory recordings.

Still, bicyclists should continue to fight licensing programs which incorporate rfid or other remote recognition capabilities.

Radio Free Spokane said...

Clapper is trying to Yanukovich the airgap.

We're not particularly impressed. The Junta is obsessed with the web, and their efforts to surveil the open air are counterproductive.

Pro-democracy Americans may not have a political party yet, nor a golden braided Tymoshenko to rally around, but give us enough Amanda Jo Stephen's and we will take White House.

Failure to Identify said...

We shouldn't underestimate divisions in the elites, either. Clapper et al obviously made a bid for 9-0 in yesterday's Fourth Amendment case, but it was men against women in the Supremes, despite domestic abuse facts. Authoritarianism is not an historically appealing philosophy for even elite women or minorities.

We'll get our braided (or cornrowed) champion eventually. The NSA presents a rather white male face to the cameras. They can no longer hide behind Obama or distract with gay rights alone.

Optic Nerve said...

We need an ongoing census of public and corprate surveillance, with the creation of an independent oversight authority with subpoena power. The public should be able to map and reasonably quantify total surveillance, as well as be informed of particular methods in use at any given location. An informed public is necessary for democratic elections, and for elected officials and judges to meaningfully exert oversight of these systems. There is no legal, practical, or technological reason the public cannot have a granular, comprehensive interactive map of both fixed and mobile surveillance points, or to prevent non-suspects from complete access to their data files.

Maidanform Girl said...



Nerve, the intermediate effort we're considering is the NAACP investigative model from the 1950s, or, more parallel, the Gandhi/INC investigations of colonial abuses.

We can get along way toward a report and interactive map without subpoena or USGOV, and as a political party we can offer people an app during the campaign. We can allow voters to create an outline of their personal surveillance exposure analysis without the actual content, based simply on known systems. It's a start.

As always, we begin within a legal framework, since the law is on our side, not Clapper's. Clapper looks increasingly desperate to avoid hard time.

Anonymous said...

The consensus that we find a Thurgood Marshall -Mahatma Gandhi hybrid who is female, tech-savvy and has fantastic hair. How hard could it be?

Another historical parallel: Before Bill Clinton deregulated banks causing the Great Recession; before he signed the trade deals which destroyed the middle class and the environment; before he an Hillary took hundreds of millions in kickbacks for their foul corporatism; before they used that money to try to buy the presidency for Hillary; before ALL of that, before Monica even...

Clinton held a great show panel on the American economy, wearing his reading glasses. Utterly meaningless and deceptive, it was a great show.

Right now we are at a point in which Clapper can order Reddit to censor NSA news. No one is allowed to talk about the bank deregulation, Wall Street, PAFTA, or systematic Border Patrol rapes on the border.

Host a panel, put our Tymoshenko in reading glasses, and talk about everything Clinton-Clapper-Bush have ordered us not to mention.