Government Drops Plan To Collect License Plate Data

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I'm not sure why the government even considered this plan in the first place. If they wanted this info, all they have to do is get it from the NSA. ;)

The Homeland Security Department abruptly reversed course Wednesday and dropped plans to ask a private company to give the government access to a nationwide database of license plate tracking information. Secretary Jeh Johnson directed that a contract proposal issued last week be canceled.
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Why do I have the feeling that they just found a better way to do it without involving that private company
 
We all need to use license plate covers that are optically clear but are black in IR so the laser readers can't see anything but a blank space.

Go even further with powerful IR beacons on the front and back of your car, so shit like surveillance cameras, red light cameras, toll booth cameras are all blinded as you go by.
 
Maybe they simply bought the technology (or stole it) themselves, and why worry about some 3rd party collecting all the data then blabbing to the media about how the NSA pays them for data.

That said, license plate readers are not anything new, some police have used them, they're used for automatic toll collection, they're used by repo men.
 
xX_Jack_Carver_Xx said:
We all need to use license plate covers that are optically clear but are black in IR so the laser readers can't see anything but a blank space.

Go even further with powerful IR beacons on the front and back of your car, so shit like surveillance cameras, red light cameras, toll booth cameras are all blinded as you go by.
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Do those exist?
 
Well, I know that some cities will scan every license plate that comes into city limits and if it pops up as a stolen vehicle, cops are alerted fairly quickly.
 
TechLarry said:
Exactly. Why is there a nationwide license plate program outside of law enforcement ?
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what is stopping you or I from putting a camera on our front lawns and writing a program that captures and timestamps the plate of every single car that drives by?

now imagine you have a nationwide fleet of vehicles (for some existing business purpose; say, a fleet of repair trucks). there is no law stopping you from putting a camera on the front and back of every fleet vehicle and capturing plates, timestamps and GPS coordinates of every vehicle you see.

why would you do this? who the hell knows. but there is no law saying you cant. you are in a public space, you have no expectation that others cant see your license plate. this is just a more automated, accurate and permanent way of remembering the plate numbers.

add googles facial recognition and you can now identifiy different drivers of the same car; you can tell if someone else is driving the car with a plate you previously saw in the field.

all of this is a goldmine of personal information, that is not illegal to collect.
 
Why does the private company have it in the first place?
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Who operates toll roads and such that use these scanners, I think this is a type of place to start looking if you want to identify this company. But these things are not really nationwide, they are regional, so it's also reasonable to suspect that the DHS's interest is regional or else this thing wouldn't help them much.
 
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