Fr. Z's Blog

Automatic license plate readers are the most widespread location tracking technology you’ve probably never heard of. Mounted on patrol cars or stationary objects like bridges, they snap photos of every passing car, recording their plate numbers, times, and locations. At first the captured plate data was used just to check against lists of cars law enforcement hoped to locate for various reasons (to act on arrest warrants, find stolen cars, etc.). But increasingly, all of this data is being fed into massive databases that contain the location information of many millions of innocent Americans stretching back for months or even years.

This is what we have found after analyzing more than 26,000 pages of documents from police departments in cities and towns across the country, obtained through freedom of information requests by ACLU affiliates in 38 states and Washington, D.C. As it becomes increasingly clear that ours is an era of mass surveillance facilitated by ever cheaper and more powerful computing technology (think about the NSA’s call logging program), it is critical we learn how this technology is being used. License plate readers are just one example of a disturbing phenomenon: the government is increasingly using new technology to collect information about all of us, all the time, and to store it forever – providing a complete record of our lives for it to access at will.

Today, we are releasing all of the documents we have received (accessible through this interactive map and this issue page) and are publishing a report, “You Are Being Tracked,” which explains what these documents say about license plate readers: what they are capable of, how they are being used, and what privacy harms they can cause if protections aren’t put in place. We’re also offering more than a dozen recommendations we think local police departments and state legislatures should follow when they pass laws about this technology.

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If only they would get their act together about religious freedom.  (And then Fr. Z woke up from his pleasant dream….)

A while ago, when writing about angels (holy and fallen) and their knowledge of your ways (for good or ill), I tapped this out:

[Angels/devils] never sleep, never tire, are never distracted, have no need to travel from point a to b, and they never miss what you are up to.

Think this through.

Imagine what sort of profile on you some government agency could put together.

Imagine that government agencies wanted to build a psychological profile of you, much as the FBI might when they use clues and evidence to hunt down an unknown serial killer.

So these government agents … just to make this fun, let’s call it The Agency (under Obama’s fourth term), teamed up with his newly minted Domestic Security Force, are profiling Catholics… because they are probably terrorists and dissidents and refuse to worship Moloch and offer sacrifices of incense to the statue of the POTUS.

The Agency and DSF start to plot your movements through your mobile phone as you move in and out of cells which they monitor to triangulate your location.  They learn something about you through your patterns of travel.  They learn about your tastes and interests through your purchasing history.  They monitor your calls, where you go on the internet, what you write and read in your email and on webpages.  They look at all your online transactions. Through your credit card records they hunt up the actual receipts and examine what you bought at every store…  including those embarrassing things.
After all, you leave amazingly information-rich and detailed trails and clues to who you are with every move and purchase.

The Agency and DSF review all your library checkouts, your magazine subscriptions, your movie going habits, your DVD choices through Netflix or digital downloads through iTunes.  They watch your channel selections through your cable or satellite. All this information can be mined.  They watch your every interaction with your friends… and strangers too, for that matter, with listening devices and cameras.  After gathering all this information, the Agency’s profiling experts build a picture of you, get into your head.   They figure out what you are about, who you are, and what you going to do next.

They are merely humans with a lot of bits of information.

How much better can fallen angels, the demons do this?

Not only this, but pretty soon, with the installation of smart grids for utility meter readings, etc., they will be able to figure out when you shower, when you turn on your dishwater, etc.

Back to the ACLU post.  Toward the end, they write:

This is not just an issue we’ll have to decide in the context of license plate readers, but the most important surveillance issue of our time. Should the NSA collect all data about everyone’s calls, just in case it’s useful to identify a terrorist? Why stop there? Why not store all of the contents of the calls we make as well? And emails? This is not just about communications or public movements. It’s also about what happens inside the home. As electric companies convert to “smart grids” that provide them data about the patterns of your electricity usage, it could well become apparent when you take a shower and whether you run your dishwasher more frequently than others in your demographic profile.

Let’s have a little poll, with some questions that pop into my head.