The FBI has been lobbying top internet companies like Yahoo and Google to support a proposal that would force them to provide backdoors for government surveillance, according to CNET.
Law enforcement agencies are using license plate readers to build a giant database of publicly available personal information—all obtained legally, without warrants. In 2011 the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center, which coordinates information-sharing between law enforcement agencies, signed a contract with Silicon Valley-based defense contractor Palantir to create a database capable of storing 100 million license plate records.
The right to remain silent is meaningless if not accompanied by protection for the thinking required to exercise it.
It’s the ultimate machine of what’s become our Paranoid State. Clive Irving on the Orwellian mass-surveillance data center rising in the Utah desert.
The information captured by the readers [ Automatic license plate readers] – including the license plate number, and the date, time, and location of every scan – is being collected and sometimes pooled into regional sharing systems. As a result, enormous databases of innocent motorists’ location information are growing rapidly. This information is often retained for years or even indefinitely, with few or no restrictions to protect privacy rights.