dlq04

A friend sent me a rather lengthy tape of the police in British Columbia using the ALRP computer system. They drive around with cameras on the front and sides of their cars and while at speed they can catch a photo of the cars - on the road or in parking lots - and as soon as they can pickup the license plate it is processed in their on board computer which has daily downloads of the plates for stolen cars, cars w/o ins, cars used in hold ups, etc. The way he talked these will become standard all over north america very soon.

DrCloud

This isn't surprising.

License plates photos are easy to digitize and parse for the plate number, and smart recognition programs are becoming ever more sophisticated.

What will really be spooky is when these techniques become good enough to recognize faces (even with rudimentary disguises such as facial hair changes) and put names to them (correctly). Airports will likely be one of the first (public) applications of this, but eventually city streets and just about everywhere will be surveilled this way. At least if certain folks in certain government agencies have their way. HPH

boltonblue

really makes you wonder what the framers of the consitution would say if they could see todays world.

I guess I have just a touch of a paranoid streak.
we all have stories of stolen credit cards etc.

As these autorecognition systems get "better" they will reach a state where they are trusted by those who use them. The guys with authority and guns who can just ruin your day because the system has said your the 'guy'.

I'm not sure I want to be one who has to prove I was never in east paducah montana and have an arrest warrant for not paying a parking ticket issued there.

ok that's an exageration but is it? the more the systems are trusted the harder it is to combat bad data. i'm not talking about deliberate mischief which is a seperate scary thought but just plain malfeasance.

who will be the watch dogs on the data when the image recognition software erroneously places you in a bad place. when it's a day later that they "catch you", it's an easy thing to say where you were yesterday. when it's four, six or eight moths later, you can be in for a long day.

DrCloud

^^ This is exactly the issue.

There is a lot of emphasis on eliminating false positives in these automatic recognition systems, but we're use to a legal system that goes a long, long way to give every advantage to a defendant. I doubt the false positive elimination will go that far, and that means huge hassles for false-positive victims. What that also means is that everyone needs to have identification papers that are unambiguous.

Of course, in some places (Colorado, for example) a US Passport isn't good enough any more. I'm not sure what they do accept, but they claim passports are too easy to counterfeit.

Time for a national ID system with Stalin's signature, or something like that, I guess. HPH

AGBLLET

There are so many car thefts occuring in this area that this idea has received very positive support from the community. Nevertheless, I still put more faith in LO Jack.