You see them on roadsides, bridges, toll plazas and in the hands of police.
More and more these days, when Americans take to the road in their cars, cameras are in place to photograph and record their license plates.
Police forces are widely adopting the technology.
The date, time, and location of each image is uploaded into a database and can be used for a variety of things, from enforcing traffic laws to tracking stolen cars and suspects sought for criminal activity.
Increasingly, law enforcement agencies are saving all of the photographs these license plate readers take, and not just of individuals who are wanted for a crime, but for every single person whose car passes them, and that information is being stored for increasingly long periods of time.
Plate readers are being used to create massive database us of where innocent Americans have traveled, and these databases are being kept.
There is no credit card, not even a library card, that is not indexing some database, and, as a result of that, there's a huge amount of information that's being gathered by businesses and your fellow citizens that have nothing to do with criminal activity and are completely beyond the purview of the U.S. Constitution.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/nation/july-dec13/plates_08-12.html
More and more these days, when Americans take to the road in their cars, cameras are in place to photograph and record their license plates.
Police forces are widely adopting the technology.
The date, time, and location of each image is uploaded into a database and can be used for a variety of things, from enforcing traffic laws to tracking stolen cars and suspects sought for criminal activity.
Increasingly, law enforcement agencies are saving all of the photographs these license plate readers take, and not just of individuals who are wanted for a crime, but for every single person whose car passes them, and that information is being stored for increasingly long periods of time.
Plate readers are being used to create massive database us of where innocent Americans have traveled, and these databases are being kept.
There is no credit card, not even a library card, that is not indexing some database, and, as a result of that, there's a huge amount of information that's being gathered by businesses and your fellow citizens that have nothing to do with criminal activity and are completely beyond the purview of the U.S. Constitution.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/nation/july-dec13/plates_08-12.html
