Previous Politech message: http://www.politechbot.com/2006/08/01/indianapolis-police-test/ -------- Original Message -------- Subject: indianapolis police test camera-scanner that reads license plates Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2006 11:13:28 -0700 (PDT) From: Andrew Blumberg <blumberg@private> To: declan@private References: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0608021133170.5718@private> hi declan, because of the necessity of having such devices for congestion pricing, not to mention their use in automatic traffic enforcement (e.g. catching stoplight violations), it seems likely that in a decade there will be ubiquitous monitoring of license plates in most metropolitan areas. this is really bad, from the perspective of "driver privacy" --- it means that it is easy for the state to track the motion of individual drivers, which could be the basis for obvious and disturbing abuses. on the other hand, as you point out there are compelling reasons to want such ubiquitous tracking --- congestion pricing is a good thing, and there are public safety benefits. some collaborators and i wrote a few papers on how to balance these concerns --- we designed a system which allows the state to catch traffic violators, without sacrificing driver privacy. similarly, one can do congestion pricing in a similarly privacy-preserving way. the solution involves monitoring devices on every corner, reading from transponders (like EZ-pass) in each car. but by using crytographic protocols (relying heavily on digital signatures and zero-knowledge interactions), the state can catch "bad guys" without compelling law-abiding citizens to give up their privacy. if you're interested, our papers on the subject are available at http://math.stanford.edu/~blumberg/driving.pdf and http://math.stanford.edu/~blumberg/congestion.pdf. regards, andrew _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)
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