NY Times: Activists Turn Facial Recognition Tools Against the Police

[friendly_iconoclast]

1. And then there's: "License Plate Scanners Aren't Just for Cops Anymore"

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-30/license-plate-scanners-for-police-are-becoming-cheaper-more-available

Cheap tech is turning any mobile phone or home security system into a vehicle tracker.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/ne879z/i-tracked-someone-with-license-plate-readers-drn

This Company Built a Private Surveillance Network. We Tracked Someone With It

Repo men are passively scanning and uploading the locations of every car they drive by into DRN, a surveillance database of 9 billion license plate scans accessible by private investigators.

In just a few taps and clicks, the tool showed where a car had been seen throughout the U.S. A private investigator source had access to a powerful system used by their industry, repossession agents, and insurance companies. Armed with just a car's plate number, the tool—fed by a network of private cameras spread across the country—provides users a list of all the times that car has been spotted. I gave the private investigator, who offered to demonstrate the capability, a plate of someone who consented to be tracked.

It was a match.

The results popped up: dozens of sightings, spanning years. The system could see photos of the car parked outside the owner's house; the car in another state as its driver went to visit family; and the car parked in other spots in the owner's city. Each was tagged with the time and GPS coordinates of the car. Some showed the car's location as recently as a few weeks before. In addition to photos of the vehicle itself, the tool displayed the car's accurate location on an easy to understand, Google Maps-style interface.

There's a few freely accessable parking lots near me that are just crying out for a slow cruise through them with one of these.

Little Brother, anyone?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Brother_(Doctorow_novel)