siliconwafer writes "The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is looking to acquire a vehicle license plate tracking system, to be used at the national level. According to the solicitation obtained by the Washington Post, commercial readers, supplied by a private company, would scan the plate of vehicles and store them in a "National License Plate Recognition" (NLPR) database. This is already being done at the state level, and privacy advocates are up in arms, with EFF and ACLU suing California over their automatic plate readers. Now that this has potential to become a broad and national program."
[ED Note: "Shortly after the Washington Post broke the story on the national plate reading system, it appears the DHS has shelved their plans for the tracking system, by order of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, at least in the interim."]
(Score: 2) by dry on Sunday February 23 2014, @07:35PM
The other counter argument is "do better means of catching car thieves exist?"
Around here they use bait cars (and even bait bicycles). Cars with remote kill switches, video cameras and such left in high crime areas and when a car thieve steals the car they swoop down on them and make the arrest.
No rights taken away from the honest person except maybe one less parking spot and it works very well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitari