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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: 1) by Joe Desertrat on Monday February 24 2014, @03:39AM
"...ANR (automatic numberplate recognition) is ridiculously good in modern application. It consists of one or more video-ish cameras, one or more fairly serious IR illuminators (remember, license plates are retroreflective), and some computer vision code..."
And in Florida at least, and I'm sure in many other places, they are trying to introduce plates that are easier to read by such means. I imagine they are looking at RFID identification and any and all other such means as well.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday April 29 2014, @05:09AM
Montana has gone the other way... a lot of the specialty plates are hard to read when you're standing right there, so I wonder how they are for cameras. Tho color filtering might make the numbers leap out.
[I can't believe the Reply link is still active, but since I tripped over this post...]
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.