Medium:
Every day tens of thousands of high-speed optical recognition cameras silently snap digital photos of plates, capturing in milliseconds an image of each tag and sometimes the driver as well. They are difficult to see if you’re not looking for them, but the sleek devices can be found clamped to patrol cars and the vehicles of debt chasers as well as mounted along streets and highways and in parking garages and shopping centers. A single reader, once activated, works furiously without assistance, capturing thousands of plate scans per shift.
But there are bugs.
We are being spied on in ways we don’t imagine, for reasons we can’t fathom and by “authorities” with little to no oversight.
…. who hire low-wage thugs on our dime.
These kind of plate readers have been in use in the UK for a long time and result in lots of wrong stops by police. In the UK, the plate stays with the car, so if you buy a used car that was once linked to a drug dealer or used as a getaway car, you can expect to be stopped often. The network of fixed and mobile cameras in the UK is so extensive that
it can basically track any vehicle in real time across most of the
country. Regular patrol cars all have dash-mounted plate readers that link to the central database continuously and sound off an alert if the cop car is following a car that is in the database. That car will then be stopped even if they were doing nothing wrong. The car may be searched at the roadside for evidence of drugs (or whatever it was previously associated with) and when they don’t find anything they grudgingly let the driver continue on his way. It’s hard to get a wrongly flagged plate removed from the system – it’s not done from the patrol car when they find no evidence because they just think the driver has been careful this time but they’ll get him next time.
At least in the UK you don’t have to be grateful you weren’t shot.