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The Electronic Frontier Foundation is warning of a new surveillance technology to look out for alongside drones, automatic license plate readers, facial recognition, IMSI catchers (like Stingray), and Rapid DNA analyzers. It's Xerox's new and improved system for Automated Vehicle Occupancy Detection, also known as Automated Vehicle Passenger Detection or Automated Vehicle Occupancy Verification:
For years, government agencies have chased technologies that would make it easier to ensure that vehicles in carpool lanes are actually carrying multiple passengers. Perhaps the only reason these systems haven't garnered much attention is that they haven't been particularly effective or accurate, as UC Berkeley researchers noted in a 2011 report.
Now, an agency in San Diego, Calif. believes it may have found the answer: the Automated Vehicle Passenger Detection system developed by Xerox.
The San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG), a government umbrella group that develops transportation and public safety initiatives across the San Diego County region, estimates that 15% of drivers in High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes aren't supposed to be there. After coming up short with earlier experimental projects, the agency is now testing a brand new technology to crack down on carpool-lane scofflaws on the I-15 freeway.
Documents obtained by CBS 8 reporter David Gotfredson show that Xerox's system uses two cameras to capture the front and side views of a car's interior. Then "video analytics" and "geometric algorithms" are used to detect whether the seats are occupied.
When the detection system's computer determines a driver is improperly traveling in the carpool lane, the cameras instantly send photos of the car's interior and its license plate to the California Highway Patrol.
In short: the technology is looking at your image, the image of the people you're with, your location, and your license plate. (SANDAG told CBS the systems will not be storing license plate data during the trial phase and the system will, at least for now, automatically redact images of drivers and passengers. Xerox's software, however, allows police the option of using a weaker form of redaction that can be reversed on request.)
(Score: 1) by Fauxlosopher on Wednesday April 29 2015, @05:25PM
Most of the stupidity or illegality (aka "overreach") involved with government persists because Americans have largely forgotten the original source for the US fedgov's founding charter is ultimately a derivative of a single human's authority, and as such, cannot legitimately exceed the authority of its source. (The same is true for State governments as well.)
HOV lanes, government involvement with marriages, and other interferences persist because such are imposed at gunpoint by agents of government, and/or because some individuals refuse to take responsibility for their own choices and turn with wailing and gnashing of teeth to government courts to seek a club of so-called law with which to strike another person with.
Thus, I counter with the claim that the best way to solve problems such as HOV implementation is to remind people in and out of government that forcing such choices on people is literally criminal. Seems to me that one approach that strikes the root of all such issues is better than trying to pick a way to solve one of a thousand "leaf" issues.