Butt shots for cars - the German freeway camera dragnet

Oh, they do that here, too? How' d you idiots find that out, sorry, how did my fellow team members find out? grumbled TheEditor.

We stumbled on a tweet by a lawyer.

Ah, I wish I had my Random Research* team back, but let's hear. And don't joke about photos taken from the rear only.

Scanners that snap a picture of every license plate and compare it to a database for stolen cars and outstanding warrants are being used on a large scale in a number of German states. The southern state of Bavaria seems to be the most prolific gatherer of plates, while others discontinued their dragnets after a 2005 German supreme court decision that ruled continuous unwarranted dragnets unconstitutional.

An excellent article (in German, with some information about U.S. practices in English) is on netzpolitik.org, which should be any Germany watchers' goto site for all things digital.

The article describes in detail how the northern state of Brandenburg, in former East Germany, justifies their dragnet almost a decade after the high court ruling.

All searches are done for a specific investigation, and any license plates that do not match the vehicles sought at the time are immediately deleted. [our translation]


Sounds pretty reasonable.

Another article about a court case in Bavaria contains the same statement: no hit means instant deletion of the data. However, the article about the court case contains another statement we found a little odd: Frequent travel on Bavarian freeways may increase the severity of sentences for some crimes, for example drug trafficking.

Somewhere further down in the netzpolitik article, they talk about a second mode of operation of license plate scanners. This mode is aptly called "recording mode", it simply records and stores plates. This is not done as part of an active investigation, no matching against vehicles involved in a crime is performed. Since drivers are not under suspicion, there is - according to state officials - no violation of rights.

The recorded data are kept for "later use".

The Bavarian system scans about 8 million plates a month, and the official error rate is given as between 40 000 and 50 000 incorrect reads or false positives versus, as the court itself says, "very few" positive investigative benefits.

What does it feel like to be one of those 40 000?

We do not know what the Germans do, but we have one example from the U.S. involving their standard toll gate cameras.

One day, the blogster receives a letter from the LA area. Your car, <correct license plate> used the toll road from City A to City B on date and time without paying the toll of 2 dollars.
They asked for a fine and followed it up with a friendly threatening note in case the blogster did not pay.

Did someone clone my plates? I was away for over a week, did someone steal the car, travel many hundreds of miles each way to Los Angels and put back? Call to the police.
Oh, just call the agency and tell them. A call to the agency, just send a letter, we'll verify the license plate.

The letter was sent, and that was the last of it.

A simple solution to these woes: every time the government or a company reads a license plate, it has to notify the owner.

If this solution sounds too simple, just contact your congress person or whatever they call the equivalent in your non-U.S. country.

While you wait for progress in transparency, here is a quick description of Operation Paper Moon, a surveillance art project.

Cardboard cutouts that moon a camera can be fun to make and can brighten up the boring task of sifting through tens of thousands of errors.
When you prepare a paper moon, don't make it too big - you don't want to get a ticket for obstructing the rear view.
You can experiment with male moons, too, add enough hair. Let your inspiration guide you, and don't be too shy. After all, why do you think do American security guards look forward to the night shift?
Not because of the peace and quiet that allows you to finish a term paper for the college class in the morning but because of interesting things taking place on the building's back entrance.

For the less artistically inclined, you may want to get an infrared sensor (the cameras use infrared flashes like all good hunters' game cameras), record camera locations and send the information to you local misguided idealist freedomy folks. In Germany, that would be netzpolitik.org.

* The Random Research team, RR for short did research for the K-Landnews. Until they researched compensation for work, found that people get paid for that and split.