License plate scanners are actually just scanning everyone so there is no slippery slope involved. Right now we are all being watched. It's a pure cost issue; camera + OCR + database lookup is really cheap so just tag everyone.
How did we go from the FBI flying aircraft with video cameras to license plate scanners which scan 'everyone'?
I ask because there is no mention of license plate scanners in any of the parent comments to this, or the article.
Also while I assume by everyone you mean everyone who passes through the field of view of the scanner, and not actually everyone; phrasing things in false absolutes like that does not further your point.
It's hard to directly read a license plate from an aircraft. However that's not necessary as the plates are being recorded as part of a separate system all it takes is continuous footage of a car from aircraft and you are recording everyone. https://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology/location-trac...
Basically, aircraft follows car X, it passes by a scanner, you now know every car with timestamp that passed by the scanner and can look it up on the video. Doing this automatically is just a question of having enough video coverage and some fairly basic video analysis. They don’t even need to do this in real time as you can write the software after the fact.
In other words because they already have license plate scanners and are doing OCR + lookup they just need a video of the cars after that point.
Note: I doubt they have nearly enough footage to track everyone right now, but the cheaper it is to add one more camera and archive the footage the closer you get to that point.
PS: You can even back track cars so if you have a lot of footage of a car that then passes near a scanner you then know its path from wherever the footage starts.
You completely ignored my question to you. I asked how you got to the topic of license plate readers, I know how they work and an explanation of how they work does nothing to answer the question of how you transitioned to that topic.
I think you completely misunderstood my comment. If you have an hour of video footage of a blue car that you happen to collect from an aircraft while tracking a suspect then on it's own that says vary little. Historically you need to track a suspect to there car and then follow a car so together it's vary labor intensive to track large numbers of people.
However, if the blue car passed a license plate reader it stops being a random blue car and becomes license plate ABC-1234 registered to someone and your now "following" that specific car plus the original subjects car for that hour. Basicly, the readers enable you to track people not just where the reader physically is but wherever you have footage either leading up to that scan or after the fact. Together you can potentally follow millions of people for fairly low costs.
Granted, nothing says the person who the car is registered to is the actual driver, but you have someone who can probably tell you who was driving that car.
And how do they automatically detect the criminal wrongdoing being committed by that car or its occupants? That is the part I don't get. Yes if they decide to look for John Smith, License plate 1AMJ0HN, then they can probably automatically find his car in that footage, and they can watch that footage to see what he was up to. But watching that footage and figuring out if he did anything they can prosecute him for is not a simple task for any computer algorithm I can think of, and would require time to do manually. And with out doing it in an automated manner they can't possibly do this for 'everyone' which means they have to have reason to already suspect the people they do choose.
I see absolutely no way that bringing up the existence of license plate scanners created a situation where there was no slippery slope.
Also the recorded video collection grows to be a ridiculously large amount of data over time, even detecting all video of John Smith's car across the United States will become an expensive task to complete computationally. And for everyone? Well even more expensive.
Add on the concept that camera's will not be covering all of the United States at times, and if you are just using make, model, and color of cars to track people between license plate readers shell games where similar cars rearrange them selves in tunnels or garages will become extremely effective at defeating surveillance if license plate readers are not basically everywhere.
So in spite of you deciding to bring up license plate readers, and explain how they can be used to assist in tracking with airborne surveillance I still fail to see the relevance of how they ensure that 'everyone' will be monitored.
Did you forget about Speeding or the 1001 other traffic offences? Does anyone observe proper following distance for every second of every trip?
I suspect if you wanted to harass your ex-wife, or a dissident, then overhead footage of their car for a few hours would provide a multitude of crimes.
Sure, if you actually prosecuted everyone that's one thing, but selective enforcement plus mass surveillance is a very powerful and easy to abuse tool and you don't need anywhere near 100% coverage to make this effective.
