A nation of hoarders
by Tom Sullivan
Last night NPR ran a story on how police departments like Seattle’s are archiving masses of data gleaned from cities’ license plate scanners. They’ve only scratched the surface of what might be done with it:
Newell is a PhD student at the University of Washington. He studies surveillance and is experimenting with what people can find out from stored license plate data. The scanners have already proven themselves when it comes to finding stolen cars, but Newell says with a big enough data base of this information, people could do so much more.
“As we mix data between roving systems on these patrol cars and systems mounted on, say red lights, law enforcement could get a much better picture of our individual movements,” he says. “And with enough data, [police can] predict when we might leave our home and when we might be at home, for instance.”
That capability is still “rudimentary,” and the data is mostly in the hands of private companies and contractors, not the government’s. Still, the hair on the back of privacy advocates’ necks is already standing up. But this isn’t another post about government spying and privacy concerns.
NPR reports that law enforcement officials across the country are worried Congress may force them to throw away data they have already collected, as well as restrict how they may collect, store, and use automated license plate recognition (ALPR) data in the future … for purposes they haven’t thought of yet … using technology that hasn’t been invented yet.
That got me thinking. They’re not alone. ALPR is just a smaller version of what the NSA is doing on a grander scale with phone records, etc. The NSA built Bluffdale (the Utah Data Center) so it could hoard — that is the word, isn’t it? — the sum total of “all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital ‘pocket litter.’” You know, for later. Because who knows? Some odd bit of random pocket litter might prove important someday. To somebody. Somewhere. And heaven forbid we should ever be forced to throw it out.
God help us. That’s not law enforcement. That’s a psychological disorder.