"God forbid if the day came that a child is abducted from that mall," he says. "We would have that tool available to us, to look at that data and see if we can't find a possible suspect vehicle."

Thank you Anderson Cooper (http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/anderson.cooper.360/blog/200...).

> Despite these huge numbers, very few children are victims of the kinds of crimes that so-often lead local and national news reports. According to NCMEC, just 115 children are the victims of what most people think of as "stereotypical" kidnapping, which the center characterizes thusly: "These crimes involve someone the child does not know or someone of slight acquaintance, who holds the child overnight, transports the child 50 miles or more, kills the child, demands ransom, or intends to keep the child permanently."

My mom is absolutely freaked out about our wife and I living in the city, because someone might kidnap our daughter. Because a crowded apartment building where hundreds of people can hear a child cry for help is so much less safe than an out-of-the-way suburban house when it comes to a crime that never happens.

>Of these 115 incidents, 57 percent ended with the return of the child. The other 43 percent had a less happy outcome.

Think of the children.

The answer, of course, is that while losing a child is unspeakably awful, children are not infinitely valuable to us - at least if you go by what we do rather than what we say. And public policy needs to reflect that.

You have some very confused notions of numbers.

And personally I find 115 children being abducted (in the more-than-a-day-taken-60-miles sense) about 115 too many (and it's simply incredible that the other poster observes that half "return", as if anything less than death is child's play).

Did you know that only three to five children are killed by lightning each year? Yet preventative efforts to avoid children being hit by lightning are extremely widespread. We all know to fear lightning.

"Stranger danger" created an atmosphere of fear, but did little to prevent sexual abuse of children.

Yet I was replying to someone who said that children "don't ever actually get kidnapped" because 115 a year apparently don't count as "ever" (half of whom get murdered, the other half harmed in various other ways, and that's ignoring the 50,000+ who are molested in bathrooms and the like, yearly). All to refute a simple statement that logging might prove useful in such a circumstance.

I don't think that was goal. I think he was questioning whether invading the privacy of a huge amount of individuals is worth it for that cause. How critical is it to have 2 year's worth of car-location data at your fingertips for any investigation? The question is not whether kids ever get kidnapped, but whether such a gigantic dataset aids investigation in any way. A compromise would be to delete the data after a few days, similar to what happens in Minesota, according to the article.

Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children's_interests_(rhetoric...

edit: I mistakenly assumed that hvs and rayiner were the same person. There might be something to be said for your interpretation, but I would assume the best possible one.

The concept of collecting and storing all sorts of data and information on everyone just in case someone bad does something is a flawed one.

The government is collecting all phone call information, numbers, location, duration, along with SMS, email, and who knows what else on everybody in order to have that data "just in case" a terrorist attack happens, so they can (possibly) track down the perpetrators.

Now we have police collecting license plate data, along with GPS coordinates, video and still cameras mounted all over cities that can easily allow for facial recognition, combined with the tracking of your phone as mentioned above. It's not a stretch to assume that if the government (NSA/CIA/FBI) wants to know where you are at any given moment, they know.

All this "just in case" one of the infinitesimally unlikely events such as a terrorist attack or kidnapping occurs. For the children. And because terrorism.

The potential for abuse is huge and the cost/benefit is not even close to worth it—unless the stated purpose for collecting the data is not the real one.

To a certain extent, all it really does is SUGGEST you belong or don't belong in any given location. There might be a murder in an alley, but data shows you go to a comic book store blocks away every week so you probably aren't involved. Generally the data is going to clear more people than it makes guilty.

Of course I'm a huge fan of Numb3rs and Criminal Minds that show this kind of stuff being used properly by honest people... Emphasis on HONEST people.

"God forbids all those reports of people being abducted by aliens were real, we would have a tool to analyze the data from an alien abduction and like 44th President said once hundred years ago: if it saves one life, then it was worth it!"

http://dreamcafe.com/2013/06/18/people-are-stupid/

http://boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=2012

"Lincoln" was #13.

Here, let me rub your face in the stupidity: apparently almost half the United States population believes in ghosts and does not believe in evolution: http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-500160_162-994766.html

I'm in no way coming from a position of intellectual superiority, rather from observational despair.

Just because it can be done without much manual effort today vs. 50 years ago having people sit around town logging every car they see drive by doesn't mean really the privacy expectation has changed. Just because it is "scary" doesn't mean it is "illegal".

For the former, you're of course right: not much has changed! The local police could have posted someone on every street corner to record every license plate that passed -- probably multiple people to account for traffic!

That's no different than cameras, in theory. You have no less privacy with cameras! But in practice, the police didn't do that (to that scale).

So, given that my expectations of privacy are not about logical possibilities, but rather about actual realities, they certainly have changed.

Of course, the "rules" have indeed changed. It's pedantic to the point of ignorance to only consider laws and reject the context in which those laws were made (pre-wifi-enabled-streetcorner-cameras). The words on paper might not change, but a rule effectively changes when the environment changes around it. Consider also: every other legal issue that intersects with technology.

You realize that you contradict yourself in the same sentence? That's the kind of thing I tell people who ask me "Is so-and-so (technically very hard) possible?": "Most things are possible with enough time and money".

The fact is, technology makes previously impossible things possible, and previously difficult things easier. The law should absolutely account for that.

The Supreme Court's decision effectively said that having to use people to tail suspects or whoever put a brake on the government. The GPS trackers removed that restriction. They proceeded to rule GPS trackers without a warrant as unconstitutional.

See: http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/11pdf/10-1259.pdf.

ANPR is an excellent system for finding stolen cars, fugitives, etc and responding to the hits immediately. The issue is archiving the data. So don't ban ANPR, ban the retention of license plate geolocation data without suspicion.

Every day that you fail/delay to provide me those reports, you will pay me $100k in damages.

Right??

This is not a search or privacy problem per se. Most situations where exculpating evidence is withheld aren't so clear-cut as photographic evidence of the supposed perpetrator's car in a different place. It's usually something more like a statement by a witness whose exculpatory potential is ambiguous enough that a prosecutor can rationalize it as irrelevant. Indeed, I think technology ameliorates this problem. It's hard for prosecutors to withhold DNA evidence, for example, because juries know its widely used and take it so seriously. If use of photographic evidence in prosecutions becomes common, I think it will be difficult for prosecutors to withhold relevant information from the defense without compromising their ability to get convictions from juries.

In the purely theoretical sense, sure. In actual court, however, the whole purpose of alibis is to prove innocence, which is exactly the context that we are discussion. If you want to simply wax about the presumption of innocence, then the defendant need not provide any contrary evidence, as they have nothing to prove.

Apparently they want to use indirect collection or collection by private groups as somehow not falling under the 4th because of how it was assembled. I guess they could take all of a grocery stores purchase records and do the same, after all they aren't look at you directly under the guise of fixing health issues.

Eventually data, wherever it may exist, will have to land at the Supremes to declare how abstract it has to be before it is not subject to the Constitution. Based on past cases it may not bode well for us.

You're mis-characterizing the rebuttal in both cases.

1) With metadata the rebuttal is that the Constitution refers to the "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects..." There is a legitimate argument that AT&T's records about when you used their network is not your papers or effects. You didn't create the record, AT&T did. You don't usually even have access to the information, AT&T does. It's not something silly like "the phone doesn't have a 4th amendment right."

2) The rebuttal for gathering information from cameras is that the 4th amendment has never extended to what the government can observe about you in a public place.

The 4th amendment doesn't mean "I have a right to have the government not track or monitor me without a warrant." It says exactly what it means: the police can't search your person or your house, your papers or effects, without a search warrant supported by probable cause. The farther you get from that plain language, the more tenuous your argument becomes.

Vis-a-vis the Supremes, at least Sotomayor has questioned whether it might be necessary to rethink at least the third party doctrine, which is the basis for (1): http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/the_data_question.... I don't think anyone any time soon would think about revisiting the rule for plainly visible activity in public spaces, which is the basis of (2).

You caused the record to come into being by making or receiving the phone call. No human intervention was required on the carrier's part. Your action triggered an automated response by a machine. The records are about you, were generated by your actions, and exist pursuant to a service contract you hold. To say it is not "yours" is to cherry-pick a certain definition of "yours:" one based solely on who holds the property rights. But there are other reasonable definitions of "yours." Ordinary English usage illustrates this. I could talk about "your records at the phone company," and nobody would find my turn of phrase the slightest bit odd, even though you don't own those records. It should be noted that Constitutional interpretation generally looks to the ordinary meaning of words first. Indeed, in Katz, the Court held:

"The existence of a property right is but one element in determining whether expectations of privacy are legitimate."

By a narrow reading of "their persons, houses, papers, and effects," phone data might not be your papers or effects. However, one ought not read the 4th amendment narrowly. The Supreme Court said in Griswold:

"The foregoing cases suggest that specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance. See Poe v. Ullman, 367 U.S. 497, 516-522 (dissenting opinion). Various guarantees create zones of privacy...These cases bear witness that the right of privacy which presses for recognition here is a legitimate one."

The cases cited in Griswold and those which cite it lay out a doctrine of broadly interpreting privacy rights provided by the 4th and other Amendments. Words like "their" should not be construed narrowly to limit a person's privacy rights.

Instead, we have the doctrine of "reasonable expectation of privacy." That is, where a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy, 4th Amendment protections come into play. For a telephone call, one should reasonably expect the phone company to generate logs, if only for billing purposes and aggregated, anonymized data analysis. However, one would not reasonably expect the sum total of their personal call history to be available to the government.

> The rebuttal for gathering information from cameras is that the 4th amendment has never extended to what the government can observe about you in a public place.

This is not true. See, for example, US v Jones (the GPS tracking case). Jones strengthened the doctrine of "reasonable expectation of privacy," enshrining a new application in public places. I expect that we'll see a case about facial recognition, license plate tracking, or something similar where the government assembles a database of your movements in public. Alito's concurrence in Jones reads a prelude to these future cases:

"In the pre-computer age, the greatest protections of privacy were neither constitutional nor statutory, but practical. Traditional surveillance for any extended period of time was difficult and costly and therefore rarely undertaken. The surveillance at issue in this case—constant monitoring of the location of a vehicle for four weeks—would have required a large team of agents, multiple vehicles, and perhaps aerial assistance. 10 Only an investigation of unusual importance could have justified such an expenditure of law enforcement resources. Devices like the one used in the present case, however, make long-term monitoring relatively easy and cheap...But the use of longer term GPS monitoring in investigations of most offenses impinges on expectations of privacy. For such offenses, society’s expectation has been that law enforcement agents and others would not—and indeed, in the main, simply could not—secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period."

To your general point about narrow versus broad readings: I didn't say there wasn't a plausible broad reading. I was characterizing the legitimate, plausible narrow one. You claim I'm "cherry-pick[ing] a certain definition of 'yours'" but that's precisely what you do when you're characterizing one side of an argument.

As for plausibility--you cite a dissenting opinion, a concurring opinion, and one of the most handwave-y opinions in the history of the Court (Griswold)... The Supreme Court could someday find a broad privacy protection in the "penumbras" and "emanations" of the 4th amendment, and it will be equally handwave-y when they do.

Finally: U.S. v. Jones was based on meat and potatoes Constitutional law: Scalia's majority opinion focused on the physical intrusion necessary to install the GPS tracker.

I should have brought up Smith. My mistake. My opinion of Smith is basically this: It's at odds with other cases, and its logic rests on a much older picture of the technology. Unfortunately, I don't have time to write a lengthy prediction of how Smith will someday be eroded or overturned. But for now I'll say that I consider Smith to be an outlier with respect to the broader trends in 4th Amendment law I'm attempting to highlight.

> You claim I'm "cherry-pick[ing] a certain definition of 'yours'" but that's precisely what you do when you're characterizing one side of an argument.

Fair enough. My intention in cherry-picking a different definition was to offer an alternative to the one you presented, simply to show that it's not so cut-and-dry. Perhaps I should have been more explicit about my rhetorical intentions there.

> As for plausibility--you cite a dissenting opinion, a concurring opinion, and one of the most handwave-y opinions in the history of the Court (Griswold)

All of which are valid citations. If you were a SCOTUS judge, you'd have the right to take these citations with a grain of salt. But their existence still helps illuminate how the justices think about privacy.

By the way, which one was the dissent? (Not doubting you, just seeking clarification.)

> Finally: U.S. v. Jones was based on meat and potatoes Constitutional law: Scalia's majority opinion focused on the physical intrusion necessary to install the GPS tracker.

Yes it did, which is why I quoted Alito's concurrence as a roadmap for the future.

I don't believe in everything in black and whites. Perhaps you collect data and save it for a fortnight and within that fortnight presumably any crimes which may have occurred within a certain area will be known and one might start looking for cars which were within the area. After a fortnight if nothing comes to pass, then presumably you really don't need the data from that locale. And the case might even be made for up to 6 months or a year since sometimes criminal investigations do take some time. Perhaps you make the case that within a fortnight an area needs to be declared a crime scene in order for the license plate collection data to be maintain for up to a year.

But then you save the data for the foreseeable future and who knows what happens with it. Sheriff Arpaio or some gung ho type like that decides computer programmers needed to be monitored and bam, every where I've been for years on end shows up on a map? That seems a little iffy even if the scenario seems far fetched right now (really far fetched since I don't have a license much less a car at this point in my life, but asides aside).

What about a system that had no data retention but could actively scan and compare to a list of plates that had warrants, Amber Alerts or BOLO's. Surveillance is only going to get easier with tech. Rules of use is what is important.

I had responded to shivetya just to say what I believed.

Your post seems exactly in line with what I was trying to say though in a lot of ways.

Rules of use are exactly what are important and the fact is that most communities have not held votes to decide upon them despite the implementation of these scanners and the holding of the data.

We need to decide as a people whether this is a national, state, or even county by county issue as well.

It is public. You are on a public roadway. But what rights does that give to law enforcement to retain your driving records for an indefinite amount of time?

I was reminded by a colleague today of a quote attributed to Roger Needham, something along the lines of "privacy is a transient condition in between people realising there isn't an omniscient god, and government realising there was a vacancy" (quoting second hand from memory)

It says the police cars can tag the location of 7K plates during a normal shift without burdening the officers at all. Doesn't sound like too much, but multiply that by about 10,000 (Chicagoland) and two shifts and it adds up fast.

Also here in Chicago, they have an "Open Road Tolling" system that grabs your plate # on the fly at 80 mph.

Then they mail you a ticket if the plate # doesn't match with a valid iPass (wireless box in most everyone's car).

The thing is, there's no way to tell which car in a group has the iPass - so they must have to run every plate thru their database and match it up with valid iPasses.

That means the Illinois tollway is grabbing and analyzing say 20 million plates and timestamps every day.

If all that data is stored indefinitely - wow.

It seems to be a new scandal brewing. Surprises me how long it took. I recall in 2009 in Clearwater Florida when a Sherrif car had a gun-type looking devices pointing all 4 sides of the car. I asked what it was and he told me when he drives this thing picks up license plates and raises two alerts (if any): 1) if the tag is expired, OR if the owner of the car has a DL suspended/etc. If #2 then the picture of driver pops up and he visually checks if gender/look matches... if not, then he ignores the alert.

We even had a law change to specify the type of fonts you can use for licence plates.

I can understand it if they're catching uninsured drivers, or stolen vehicles. But I can't understand why they'd keep it for longer than a month. (I recognize that I'm on the lenient end when I say "a month" and that some people don't want the data to be kept at all.)

BTW: Heaven forbid if one of these license plate databases ever gets leaked! It's not like the government will re-issue everyone new plates for free.

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.

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.

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.

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