Appeals Court ruled in favor of random license plate scanning.

Judges in Kentucky have no problem with police randomly scanning the license plates of motorists who are not suspected of any crime. The state Court of Appeals last week upheld the conviction of Timothy Gentry who was stopped on October 3, 2009 because a Lexington police officer conducted what he said was a random license plate scan.

Officer Jason Newman testified he spotted a red Dodge Charger parked on Breckinridge Street in September 2009. For no reason, he decided to run the license plate number. He identified the owner as Dominick Evans, a black man with a suspended driver's license. He saw nobody near the car, so he took no action. Weeks later, Officer Newman saw Gentry, a black twenty-three-year old man, driving a red Charger. It had the same license plate. Though Gentry was driving properly, Officer Newman conducted a traffic stop.

After asking for Gentry's proof of insurance, registration and driver's license, Officer Newman quickly realized the man he thought would be behind the wheel turned out to be someone else. Gentry, however, admitted he also had a suspended driver's license. Because of this, Officer Newman issued a ticket instead of taking him into custody. A month later, however, prosecutors upgraded the charge to a felony third-offense of driving on a license suspended for drunk driving. At trial, Gentry argued there was no valid reason for the stop and that he had been racially profiled. Kentucky's constitution bans arbitrary state action.

"Absolute and arbitrary power over the lives, liberty and property of freemen exists nowhere in a republic, not even in the largest majority," Article I, Section 2 of the Kentucky constitution states.

The three-judge appellate panel found no cases in the state dealing with the expectation of privacy of drivers and their license plates. The court reviewed findings in other states before siding with the practice of random plate searches for vehicles parked on a public street.

"We do not think the citizens of this commonwealth are prepared to recognize as reasonable a person's subjective expectation of privacy in his or her license plate," Chief Judge Glenn E. Acree wrote for the court. "Therefore, we hold that there is no expectation of privacy in the license plate affixed to the exterior of one's motor vehicle that merits constitutional protection and, as a result, when a police officer checks or 'runs' a motor vehicle's license plate, randomly or otherwise, there is no search as contemplated by Fourth Amendment jurisprudence."

The court also dismissed Gentry's complaint that Officer Newman acted arbitrarily because the Lexington Police Department had no official policy guidelines to limit random information checks.

"Gentry claims Officer Newman chose to run the Charger's plates because the vehicle appeared 'glammed' out with tinted windows, oversized tires, chrome rims, and sport styling," Judge Acree wrote. "As the circuit court noted, and we readily repeat, the record is void of any evidence to support Gentry's position that the officer was improperly motivated."
http://thenewspaper.com/news/39/3927.asp

Gentry v. Kentucy ruling: http://thenewspaper.com/rlc/docs/2012/ky-platescan.pdf 

A new license plate frame claims to foil traffic-light cameras.

Jonathan Dandrow has developed noPhoto, which renders the pix snapped by those revenue-generating robo-cams useless. The technology behind noPhoto is fairly simple. At the top of the gadget, which doubles as a license plate frame, there’s an optical flash trigger that detects the flash of the traffic-light camera. That trigger sets off one or both xenon flashes in the sides of the noPhoto, so when the traffic-light camera opens its shutter, there’s too much light and the picture of your license plate is overexposed. Big Brother can’t read your plate.

He also thinks red-light cameras are a serious infringement of a drivers’ rights. As Gary Biller, the president of the National Motorists Association, recently wrote in U.S. News and World Report, traffic-light cameras violate “several key tenets of a citizen’s due process rights,” because there is “no certifiable witness to the alleged violation,” and so therefore, “the defendant loses the right to cross-examine his accuser in court.” Many cities are deactivating their cameras, but there are still plenty of them around.

“I just had a lot of reservations about the cameras,” Dandrow says. “They are trying to circumvent the constitution.”

Nothing about noPhoto is revolutionary. You can find optical flash triggers at a variety at places like Amazon and B&H Photo. What’s unique about the noPhoto trigger, though, is it works at much longer distance — about 150 feet in direct sunlight and farther in the dark.

“Distance was definitely the biggest challenge,” Dandrow says.

The noPhoto also has a clever piece of engineering to thwart those cameras that fire multiple flashes. On those cameras, Dandrow says, the first flash is a metering flash to help set the exposure. If the noPhoto reacts to the metering flash, the camera can correct the over-exposure. To win this tricky game of back-and-forth, noPhoto will incrementally up its power to ensure the pictures are washed out no matter what.

There is also, of course, the problem with false triggers where the device could react to other light sources like the sun or headlights. To compensate, Dandrow says, noPhoto has a filtering circuit that can differentiate between things like natural light and the light from a red-light camera flash.

“With that technology we were able to reduce false alerts by over 90 percent,” he says.

Originally designed two years ago in a garage, noPhoto might soon become a national product. Dandrow says he has a fully functional prototype built with help from Advantage Electronic Product Development Inc.. The company will mass-produce the item, he says, once it’s been tested and certified. At the moment he’s running an Indiegogo campaign to fund that certification process which he says can cost up to $50,000.

To allay people’s fears, Dandrow notes on his Indiegogo site that noPhoto is legal because it doesn’t obscure the license plate, and he’s shot a video to prove the noPhoto can work at the distances he promises.

If all goes smoothly with the certification process, Dandrow says he hopes to have noPhoto on the market by March. He figures it’ll cost around $350, or about the cost of a red-light ticket in many cities.
http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2012/10/new-gadget-helps-foil-irksome-red-light-cameras