The license plate scanner: Trading freedom for security?

Police in Springdale, Ohio, have a new and amazing piece of technology - a license plate scanner which mounts to a patrol car and can read up to 900 plates an hour at highway speeds. Springdale police have read 86,000 plates since they began using the scanner in June. The primary use is to immediately identify stolen cars and also to locate people wanted on other charges. There’s a funny story here about two parolees in L. A. who were spotted by a scanner when they drove to an appointment with their parole officer in a stolen car.

As a non-car-thief, this technology sounds good to me, except for one thing: The data gathered by the scanner is kept indefinitely, perhaps forever. The reason is that, if I ever DO commit a crime and the police need to find me, they can pull up my license plate and find all the places where I was scanned and use it to deduce where I might be.

Now I’m not planning on becoming a criminal, but it creeps me out a bit to picture a scanner on every police car, and soon on every traffic light and lamp post tracking my every move for who-knows-what and who-knows-who. Check out the best sci-fi movie of the 2000s, Minority Report, to see this idea fleshed out beyond all sanity.

In the early 90s, I read an article by Charles Colson predicting that when fear strikes us, we’ll trade our freedom for security. We seem to do that a little bit more each year. This scanner seems like a step in that direction.

But in these early days of the technology, I hope they catch a lot of criminals!

(I first read about the scanner at Slashdot).

July 30, 2007 · Filed Under Culture

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