One of my clients does license plate reading and tracking. They have hundreds of tiny customers, and a handful of VERY LARGER customers, so I can say with 100% certainty, there are hundreds of agencies across the USA already doing this.
For fun, I tracked my rental car from Georgia to Texas after a vacation a few months back to see how often I hit one of my client's customer's cameras. It was a lot. I saw myself hit toll booths, go under over passes, and parked at a service station. About 25 hits that my account had access to (probably hundreds or thousands that I didn't have rights to see).
IIRC there's an episode of Jay Leno's Garage that features a cop with a license plate reader. He can sit on the side of the road and every car that passes is scanned and checked for warrants. The answer comes back about as quickly as the speed reading on a radar gun.
What they don't tell you is that all those plate numbers are going into a database, time- and location-stamped.
In Saskatchewan, Canada, they no longer require yearly insurance stickers on plates because the information is automatically checked by plate scanners on cop cars (to the best of my knowledge).
The officer will still require proof of registration when pulled over.
Yep, and there are agencies all over the US that share data between themselves to get access to much larger sets of data. So when a cop pulls you over in Dallas because you have a warrant in Atlanta, you now know how he figured that out.
This is the most terrifying thing I've seen that moves us toward the potential for real authoritarian societal control. The reason is we have a terrible history of being able to legally correct incorrect information in these separate local and national databases. So you can use this as another way to suppress disagreements and suppress protests against those in power. I'm an american citizen and it's my right to protect. Imagine there's a big protest and the next day the local police or fbi comes to your house to ask why you were in the neighborhood where the protest was. It can happen now. I can turn off my phone or choose not to take it, but transportation is required to get there. My bus pass is also a history of my travels.
I just contacted my us rep and senators about this. I would be surprised if we can stop this, but we should try.
Read David Brin's "Kiln People" for an interesting take, he foresaw this issue, also read "Transparency"
There are a few vendors out there who sell the data they collect, and then sell search capabilities to law enforcement agencies, repo firms, bounty hunters, etc.
These camera systems are usually installed on civilian cars and those people just drive around all day on 10 hours shifts around their territory. They aren't looking for people, only collecting the data. Some of them get rights to add cameras to signs in front of shopping centers on busy streets. Some have even illegally placed them next to red light cameras that use an open wi-fi to upload the data back to their database. Its the wild west for some of these guys, but they make almost no money once you account for the cost of the cameras, cost of staff to drive around, etc.
Call your representative and voice your opinion. Donate to eff and aclu or any other civil and digital liberties organizations, to help them protect our privacy and rights through legal means.
Privacy evasion is slippery slope and it only gets worse.
Take this as your daily or weekly reminder to do something, even if that something is donating just the price of a coffee.
I am feeling pessimistic man. We had a few decades of privacy and human rights progress post World Wars. But with Terrorism on the rise there is no way for privacy or human rights to make a comeback. We will see increasingly clever ways to water down laws we already have in place.
Terrorism in the US isn't on the rise (unless we're counting white supremacists marches, which the media doesn't) but the powers that be and their cohorts are still milking the teat and our fears from 9/11 on this stuff. People who have no reason to be scared of any of this also won't stand up to it ('I'm not a criminal so it doesn't matter...'). Also funny that when/if another attack does happen, it will be those of us in blue cities (NYC, LA, SF, etc.) sacrificing our lives even if we're against this stuff and the system as it is.
Fear is a business and some people are making bank. Osama would be proud.
The incentives are huge, and digital life makes it all the more easy. The more information someone has, the more lucrative it is collect even more.
You can find someones property address online - it used to take wuite a bit of effort in the past. Now the effort is on the property owner to protect his privacy - using land trusts or other estate structures.
What is worse is now people volunteer information on social networks. If you dont, your friends do - nullifying your effort.
I am not optimistic either, but i will do whatever i can ti protect my own privacy whenever i can. I stopped using fb, and making an effort to learn estate planning and so on.
I feel very skeptical of calling your representatives. Firstly, it matters if they are in a contentious district. Secondly, even if they do see you as a potentially credible concern, they will still corroborate that concern with a political consultancy when election time comes.
> I feel very skeptical of calling your representatives
Based on what? For contentious issues on which most voters are decided, e.g. guns or abortion, you are correct--calling in is unlikely to do anything. If you care about a big-ticket issue, join an organization and do the whole camping out at town houses and protesting local and D.C. offices and filing lawsuits schtick. It's hard, but it works.
For niche issues, however, there is a good chance nobody has bothered to think about it. Congressional offices rely on inbound information to put new issues on their radar. An SLA penning out a letter to the ICE requesting information can start meaningful debate, inside the ICE as well as in the Congress.
That is the part that is most disturbing. The more people think that way the more marginal each caller becomes. We need crowds to call, raise issues.
Part of why things got bad wrt housing, for example, only the people that had houses raised their opinion in city halls, which led to these people trying to protect their investments, which eventually lead to nimbysm.
I am not a citizen, yet, so i am going through the route of donating an amount i am comfortable with, but in 2.5 years, i will be one, and raise my voice through other channels too.
Yet another piece of evidence that the US is turning into an authoritarian state - as, to be fair, others do too (especially China!), but the US have the unique advantage of being the technologically most advanced civilization.
In earlier times, when situations got too authoritarian, there were rebellions and revolution. With the level of militarization in police and military and the abilities made possible by today's technology (the Gestapo or the Stasi would have done anything for this kind of power), it is very well possible that a revolution might simply be made impossible or crushed before it even begins, as you can simply single out and eliminate potential "leaders" based on AI analysis of what people do... and what people think, as they post it on Twitter, Facebook or their own "private" cloud space.
In addition, the future of AI is already showing its first signs - and governments around the world have not shown any interest in planning for the inevitable millions that will lose their jobs or for the social unrest caused by this. Quite to the contrary: governments and right-wing parties are "looking back in time" and promising their citizens that they will bring back the "good old times" and snatching up the votes of the Frustrated Old White Men - and are very successful at this.
one lesson can be drawn from Solzhenitsyn'a Gulag Archipelago. he talks about how the number of people to be dealt with vastly outnumbers the police state's employees.
Therefore if everyone fights back when "they" come for you, the outcome for society is positive, even if hopeless for individuals. The insane gun ownership in this country could be a benefit. Sure, you're not going to beat the army, but if every 10 people to be liquidated take out one secret police guy, then the civilian population as a whole will be safe. This assumes the army is distracted with a war somewhere, which seems likely to me.
> Therefore if everyone fights back when "they" come for you, the outcome for society is positive, even if hopeless for individuals. The insane gun ownership in this country could be a benefit. Sure, you're not going to beat the army, but if every 10 people to be liquidated take out one secret police guy, then the civilian population as a whole will be safe.
That argument only works if it were an all-out battle between the population as a whole on one side and the secret police on the other. That is not how authoritarianism works. They start by isolating minorities, and target individuals one by one. In every single 'battle' the secret police outnumbers their opponents. Any resistance is used to justify the use of more force.
Imagine what would happen if 'illegal' immigrants (which number in the millions) that are being deported by ICE (about 20,000 employees [1]) start fighting back with guns. How do you think Fox News would react? Or public opinion?
Or just look at police brutality against minorities in the US. Do you think that the use of more guns by minorities is likely to lessen police brutality, or exacerbate it?
> The insane gun ownership in this country could be a benefit.
I'm sorry, it's hard not to be a little snarky here. Yes, the guys who wrote the original rules for the country considered gun ownership so essential that they placed it second only to the freedom of expression. I don't like guns, but they represent a failsafe that we hopefully never have to use.
To quote madam secretary, "at this point, what difference does it make".
People have been more then willing to give up their data to FB, Google, Apple, etc. The only difference is this is captured by governments --who at least in theory represent the voting public.
It'll be interesting to see what the outcome is. Will the public demand the government regulate industry as well as ask it to rein in its own capabilities, or will they just get used to it and accept it?
We'll have to see. Some technologists, libertarians and interestingly an intersection of right wing and left wing ideologies will oppose this for different reasons, but in the end, I think they will be a minority in total.
The license plate cameras are actually a special case.
If you don't like most types of surveillance there are a lot of countermeasures a concerned party can use. Run your own servers, use encryption, etc.
The problem with license plates is that the equivalent thing is to obscure your license plate, which is prohibited by law. So it's not just that the government is collecting publicly available information, it's that you're prohibited by law from not making the information public. Which is a different kind of thing that deserves to be treated differently.
> The only difference is this is captured by governments --who at least in theory represent the voting public.
Actually I trust a megacorp like Google, Amazon, Twitter or Facebook more with my data than I trust the state.
The state can arrest me based on that data. The tech giants not, and they are fighting like hell that the government does not get access to that data (as that would compromise trust, and by that their business model). Given the massive amounts of money involved, I have no doubt who will win that fight.
I'm playing around with a thought experiment in my head and would like your opinions. Considering this topic in comparison to getting a warrant for a criminal's cell phone location. Here's some considerations:
1. What is the status of an illegal immigrant who might get queried? There's two categories of illegal aliens. The first is unlawful entry (people hopping the border), this is a crime. Then there's unlawful presence, or outstaying your visa, this is a civil infraction. If ICE knows enough about this person to specifically query this database for them, surely there must be a bench warrant or something? I genuinely don't know this.
2. Unlike the cell phone location warrant, it appears this will not require a warrant. This to me is THE problem. If they were required to get a separate warrant for every query, then I would likely not have much concern.
3. ICE is not creating a database itself, but purchasing the ability to query commercially available data. This distinction possibly matters legally. Does it matter ethically?
> but the US have the unique advantage of being the technologically most advanced civilization.
Yes? I would say this is a very strong statement which would be hard to put into actual numbers.
However i highly doubt that a huge country riddled with historic issues like the U.S. could beat a fast growing country like South Korea in technical advantage.
I don’t understand, Europe has national ID laws I can fill up a form and get the details including owner details for any license plate in the EU (you need cause but it’s not verified in most cases it would land you in trouble if it’s abused tho), and automated license plate tracking is pretty darn common across all EU countries yet no one here yells Stasi about this.
> and automated license plate tracking is pretty darn common across all EU countries
No it's not. It may be legal in some countries, yes, for example the Italians are doing it for speed-tracking in certain highways, but the data is not shared between the countries, aggregated to form movement profiles or stored longer than required.
With ICE one can be sure that: a) nothing ever gets deleted b) it WILL get data-mined c) it WILL be abused.
> I can fill up a form and get the details including owner details for any license plate in the EU
That's a new to me - in Germany if you want the data e.g. for a lawsuit you have to file a complaint at police and before you get the data the validity of your request will be checked. In addition, this does not allow everyone to build a movement tracking system.
There are many facets to this debate that aren't discussed in the news. One is that without immigration, the population of the US would decrease based on birth / death rates. If the population of the US decreases, social security and other social programs become insolvent. In other words, our social programs are based off the current working generation paying for the current retired generation, and has since their inception.
It's a complex issue, and benefits vary from region to region. The powers (with big microphones) that are trying to sway you one way or the other only focus on a few simple things.
Flooding the US with vast quantities of low skilled labor for four decades, is also why wages for the bottom 50% do not climb like they should. It's simple, and obvious, supply & demand.
It's bizarre that so many tech workers easily spot this concept in effect when big companies try to undercut their salaries in exactly the same manner by importing cheaper tech talent from other nations, yet they're oblivious to the exact same being done to lower income Americans.
It's also why the Koch brothers are aggressive supporters of unlimited low skill labor immigration. It's good for certain types of businesses involving traditional labor. The Kochs use it to suppress wages for their blue collar workers.
There's a reason why Canada - and most prosperous, developed nations - have strict immigration policies against flooding their nations with large amounts of low skill labor. Scandinavia flirted with it briefly, and now they've almost entirely shut down the immigration spigot. Most of Europe has turned back against the same thing, because it's harmful to the weakest working classes.
The primary argument is whether the US should match eg Canada and switch to a merit system. At a time when low skill labor is going to be automated away, it's extremely obvious which way the US will have to move. And if the US does not move that way, the cost will drown the fiscal budget and continue to hammer the poorest workers.
Taking a quick look at Vigilant Solutions has been interesting. Yet another Israeli mass surveillance company started by ex 8200 IDF 'graduates'.
The founder Adi Pinhas may ring a bell --- he also founded SuperFish!
Worth noting that the EFF have been on ALPR tech for years. Signing up for their emails has given me opportunities to contact representatives regarding ALPR legislation and decisions I would have never heard about otherwise.
Is it possible to fight back by poisoning the data? Is it legal to set up a display by the roadside that shows randomly generated license plates, filling their automated cameras with garbage data? Or is their data collection smart enough to recognize a non-car, either technologically or by filtering everything through a Turk-like equivalent?
It would be ideal if you chose the fake plate numbers from the population of actual plate numbers used by corporate plate-tracking vehicles, just in case one encounters its "namesake" -- you might trigger some highly entertaining edge condition. ("Um, wait, that's... me! WTF?")
Wasn't there a Supreme Court case a while ago that ruled it illegal for the government to put a tracking device on your car? Given this recognition technology, could someone challenge the visible license plate requirement as an illegal tracking device?
Plate scanning is against the spirit of the law; it's a workaround for not being able to place a tracking device on your car. Unfortunately, since your car is in a public place, and your plates are in the open, I don't think place scanning will be ruled unconstitutional.
Of course congress could always pass a law making it illegal, but both our major parties have authoritarian with regards to privacy.
> Unfortunately, since your car is in a public place, and your plates are in the open, I don't think place scanning will be ruled unconstitutional.
The question GP asked was a bit different:
> could someone challenge the visible license plate requirement as an illegal tracking device?
In other words, in a world where plate scanning is ubiqitous, have license plates become a tracking device? And if they are a tracking device, is requiring them unconstitutional?
The Supreme Court actually has in the past ruled that a technology that is cheap and can be applied without public knowledge is constitutionally different from direct observation. See e.g. United States v. Jones, which ruled that a GPS device placed under a valid warrant could not be used to continue tracking a person outside of the scope of the warrant.
"Deputy Solicitor General Michael Dreeben[15] began his argument for the United States by noting that information revealed to the world (i.e. movement on a public road) is not protected by the Fourth Amendment.[16] Dreeben cited United States v. Knotts as an example where police were allowed to use a device known as a "beeper" that allows the tracking of a car from a short distance away.[16] Chief Justice Roberts distinguished the current case from Knotts, saying that using a beeper still took "a lot of work" whereas a GPS device allows the police to "sit back in the station ... and push a button whenever they want to find out where the car is."[17]"
It would be nice to see voters react to these sorts of technologies (whether they're provided by private companies or not) the way people reacted to the idea of being filmed via Google Glass when they went to a bar on a Friday night.
Yeah, also love cops and firemen voting Republican - you know, tough on crime, small business - while also pulling down taxpayer OT pay and pensions. Is there any metric showing they Republican party is actually good at enacting crime-fighting policies or are they just good at funding crime fighters? Seems more like the latter.
Readit News
For fun, I tracked my rental car from Georgia to Texas after a vacation a few months back to see how often I hit one of my client's customer's cameras. It was a lot. I saw myself hit toll booths, go under over passes, and parked at a service station. About 25 hits that my account had access to (probably hundreds or thousands that I didn't have rights to see).
What they don't tell you is that all those plate numbers are going into a database, time- and location-stamped.
The officer will still require proof of registration when pulled over.
This isn't surprising. Why wouldn't it? They just need to cache that day's data, right?
I just contacted my us rep and senators about this. I would be surprised if we can stop this, but we should try.
Read David Brin's "Kiln People" for an interesting take, he foresaw this issue, also read "Transparency"
But for some weird reason civilian cars carrying these cameras (and collecting and re-selling my plate information) really infuriates me.
These camera systems are usually installed on civilian cars and those people just drive around all day on 10 hours shifts around their territory. They aren't looking for people, only collecting the data. Some of them get rights to add cameras to signs in front of shopping centers on busy streets. Some have even illegally placed them next to red light cameras that use an open wi-fi to upload the data back to their database. Its the wild west for some of these guys, but they make almost no money once you account for the cost of the cameras, cost of staff to drive around, etc.
Call your representative and voice your opinion. Donate to eff and aclu or any other civil and digital liberties organizations, to help them protect our privacy and rights through legal means.
Privacy evasion is slippery slope and it only gets worse.
Take this as your daily or weekly reminder to do something, even if that something is donating just the price of a coffee.
Terrorism in the US isn't on the rise (unless we're counting white supremacists marches, which the media doesn't) but the powers that be and their cohorts are still milking the teat and our fears from 9/11 on this stuff. People who have no reason to be scared of any of this also won't stand up to it ('I'm not a criminal so it doesn't matter...'). Also funny that when/if another attack does happen, it will be those of us in blue cities (NYC, LA, SF, etc.) sacrificing our lives even if we're against this stuff and the system as it is.
Fear is a business and some people are making bank. Osama would be proud.
You can find someones property address online - it used to take wuite a bit of effort in the past. Now the effort is on the property owner to protect his privacy - using land trusts or other estate structures.
What is worse is now people volunteer information on social networks. If you dont, your friends do - nullifying your effort.
I am not optimistic either, but i will do whatever i can ti protect my own privacy whenever i can. I stopped using fb, and making an effort to learn estate planning and so on.
Based on what? For contentious issues on which most voters are decided, e.g. guns or abortion, you are correct--calling in is unlikely to do anything. If you care about a big-ticket issue, join an organization and do the whole camping out at town houses and protesting local and D.C. offices and filing lawsuits schtick. It's hard, but it works.
For niche issues, however, there is a good chance nobody has bothered to think about it. Congressional offices rely on inbound information to put new issues on their radar. An SLA penning out a letter to the ICE requesting information can start meaningful debate, inside the ICE as well as in the Congress.
Part of why things got bad wrt housing, for example, only the people that had houses raised their opinion in city halls, which led to these people trying to protect their investments, which eventually lead to nimbysm.
I am not a citizen, yet, so i am going through the route of donating an amount i am comfortable with, but in 2.5 years, i will be one, and raise my voice through other channels too.
In earlier times, when situations got too authoritarian, there were rebellions and revolution. With the level of militarization in police and military and the abilities made possible by today's technology (the Gestapo or the Stasi would have done anything for this kind of power), it is very well possible that a revolution might simply be made impossible or crushed before it even begins, as you can simply single out and eliminate potential "leaders" based on AI analysis of what people do... and what people think, as they post it on Twitter, Facebook or their own "private" cloud space.
In addition, the future of AI is already showing its first signs - and governments around the world have not shown any interest in planning for the inevitable millions that will lose their jobs or for the social unrest caused by this. Quite to the contrary: governments and right-wing parties are "looking back in time" and promising their citizens that they will bring back the "good old times" and snatching up the votes of the Frustrated Old White Men - and are very successful at this.
Scary indeed.
Therefore if everyone fights back when "they" come for you, the outcome for society is positive, even if hopeless for individuals. The insane gun ownership in this country could be a benefit. Sure, you're not going to beat the army, but if every 10 people to be liquidated take out one secret police guy, then the civilian population as a whole will be safe. This assumes the army is distracted with a war somewhere, which seems likely to me.
That argument only works if it were an all-out battle between the population as a whole on one side and the secret police on the other. That is not how authoritarianism works. They start by isolating minorities, and target individuals one by one. In every single 'battle' the secret police outnumbers their opponents. Any resistance is used to justify the use of more force.
Imagine what would happen if 'illegal' immigrants (which number in the millions) that are being deported by ICE (about 20,000 employees [1]) start fighting back with guns. How do you think Fox News would react? Or public opinion?
Or just look at police brutality against minorities in the US. Do you think that the use of more guns by minorities is likely to lessen police brutality, or exacerbate it?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Immigration_and_Customs_E...
I'm sorry, it's hard not to be a little snarky here. Yes, the guys who wrote the original rules for the country considered gun ownership so essential that they placed it second only to the freedom of expression. I don't like guns, but they represent a failsafe that we hopefully never have to use.
People have been more then willing to give up their data to FB, Google, Apple, etc. The only difference is this is captured by governments --who at least in theory represent the voting public.
It'll be interesting to see what the outcome is. Will the public demand the government regulate industry as well as ask it to rein in its own capabilities, or will they just get used to it and accept it?
We'll have to see. Some technologists, libertarians and interestingly an intersection of right wing and left wing ideologies will oppose this for different reasons, but in the end, I think they will be a minority in total.
If you don't like most types of surveillance there are a lot of countermeasures a concerned party can use. Run your own servers, use encryption, etc.
The problem with license plates is that the equivalent thing is to obscure your license plate, which is prohibited by law. So it's not just that the government is collecting publicly available information, it's that you're prohibited by law from not making the information public. Which is a different kind of thing that deserves to be treated differently.
Actually I trust a megacorp like Google, Amazon, Twitter or Facebook more with my data than I trust the state.
The state can arrest me based on that data. The tech giants not, and they are fighting like hell that the government does not get access to that data (as that would compromise trust, and by that their business model). Given the massive amounts of money involved, I have no doubt who will win that fight.
1. What is the status of an illegal immigrant who might get queried? There's two categories of illegal aliens. The first is unlawful entry (people hopping the border), this is a crime. Then there's unlawful presence, or outstaying your visa, this is a civil infraction. If ICE knows enough about this person to specifically query this database for them, surely there must be a bench warrant or something? I genuinely don't know this.
2. Unlike the cell phone location warrant, it appears this will not require a warrant. This to me is THE problem. If they were required to get a separate warrant for every query, then I would likely not have much concern.
3. ICE is not creating a database itself, but purchasing the ability to query commercially available data. This distinction possibly matters legally. Does it matter ethically?
Yes? I would say this is a very strong statement which would be hard to put into actual numbers.
However i highly doubt that a huge country riddled with historic issues like the U.S. could beat a fast growing country like South Korea in technical advantage.
Deleted Comment
No it's not. It may be legal in some countries, yes, for example the Italians are doing it for speed-tracking in certain highways, but the data is not shared between the countries, aggregated to form movement profiles or stored longer than required.
With ICE one can be sure that: a) nothing ever gets deleted b) it WILL get data-mined c) it WILL be abused.
> I can fill up a form and get the details including owner details for any license plate in the EU
That's a new to me - in Germany if you want the data e.g. for a lawsuit you have to file a complaint at police and before you get the data the validity of your request will be checked. In addition, this does not allow everyone to build a movement tracking system.
> yet no one here yells Stasi about this.
Oh hell yes people did. In Germany they went to the Bundesverfassungsgericht (~ Supreme Court) and got the legal base for automated tracking banned: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urteil_des_Bundesverfassungsge...
A huge chunk of Europe doesn't use driving as their primary means of transportation.
Are they wrong?
Low-skilled immigration seems like the worst possible idea at a time when millions of low skilled locals are going to be out of work.
With no net immigration most western countries are slowly shrinking which would help a fair bit as well.
It's a complex issue, and benefits vary from region to region. The powers (with big microphones) that are trying to sway you one way or the other only focus on a few simple things.
It's bizarre that so many tech workers easily spot this concept in effect when big companies try to undercut their salaries in exactly the same manner by importing cheaper tech talent from other nations, yet they're oblivious to the exact same being done to lower income Americans.
It's also why the Koch brothers are aggressive supporters of unlimited low skill labor immigration. It's good for certain types of businesses involving traditional labor. The Kochs use it to suppress wages for their blue collar workers.
There's a reason why Canada - and most prosperous, developed nations - have strict immigration policies against flooding their nations with large amounts of low skill labor. Scandinavia flirted with it briefly, and now they've almost entirely shut down the immigration spigot. Most of Europe has turned back against the same thing, because it's harmful to the weakest working classes.
The primary argument is whether the US should match eg Canada and switch to a merit system. At a time when low skill labor is going to be automated away, it's extremely obvious which way the US will have to move. And if the US does not move that way, the cost will drown the fiscal budget and continue to hammer the poorest workers.
The founder Adi Pinhas may ring a bell --- he also founded SuperFish!
Worth noting that the EFF have been on ALPR tech for years. Signing up for their emails has given me opportunities to contact representatives regarding ALPR legislation and decisions I would have never heard about otherwise.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Aeff.org+ALPR
And US-CERT is a part of DHS, just like ICE.
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/cdndevs/2010/03/22/sql-inje...
Of course congress could always pass a law making it illegal, but both our major parties have authoritarian with regards to privacy.
The question GP asked was a bit different:
> could someone challenge the visible license plate requirement as an illegal tracking device?
In other words, in a world where plate scanning is ubiqitous, have license plates become a tracking device? And if they are a tracking device, is requiring them unconstitutional?
"Deputy Solicitor General Michael Dreeben[15] began his argument for the United States by noting that information revealed to the world (i.e. movement on a public road) is not protected by the Fourth Amendment.[16] Dreeben cited United States v. Knotts as an example where police were allowed to use a device known as a "beeper" that allows the tracking of a car from a short distance away.[16] Chief Justice Roberts distinguished the current case from Knotts, saying that using a beeper still took "a lot of work" whereas a GPS device allows the police to "sit back in the station ... and push a button whenever they want to find out where the car is."[17]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jones_(2012)
Deleted Comment
Is among many. Eff challenges state and local law enforcement in court for their use of automated license place readers.
If you drop a frog into boiling water, it won't jump out, it will die.