Big brother is spying on you in parking lots and hotels
Newspapers like the Boston Globe, Monroe News and Mercury News reported, a nationwide network of unmarked cars armed with automated plate readers are hoovering up data from cars in parking lots. License plate tracking companies like the 'Virtual Parking Manager' assert that collecting the data is covered by the First Amendment, even when they make their data pools available to law enforcement agencies.
By Virtual Parking Managers own admission its about MONEY, here's a quote from their website "Technology and automation are the future in parking, allowing parking managers to better manage resources with less hassle, higher service and increased profits. Virtual Parking Manager also uses cloud based technology to manage payment terminals, provide tracking..."
And given the growing importance of auto credit expansion to car sales, it seems that these private plate scanners have come to play a critical role in the new economy -- and they are unlikely to simply disappear due to privacy concerns!
With the most recent push for a gas tax increase now apparently off the table, only one real alternative remains: a so-called vehicle miles traveled tax. This tax, which was floated by former Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, would track cars centrally and tax them based on the number of miles they are driven. Such a system is being tested here in Oregon as a way of ensuring that electric vehicles pay for their road use.
It's only a matter of time before every car in America is tracked by DHS in order to collect funds for highway construction and maintenance.
It appears a new reality is emerging in which simply leaving home in your car makes you a likely target of surveillance. But, as efficient and effective as license plate scanners appear to be, they carry huge costs as well. The auto industry -- which is already struggling to maintain its long-term marketing strategy of associating car ownership with that emotional touchstone personal freedom -- may find that these profound social shifts further erode its pitch that "we don't sell cars, we sell freedom." And without their appeal to freedom, automobiles will struggle to compete with more pragmatic (if nontraditional) alternatives such as car sharing and even public transportation.
Insurance companies are leading the way in normalizing surveillance in the name of financial savings -- as Progressive Insurance has done with its Snapshot program, which offers discounts in return for collecting data about driver activity and behavior -- the public may already be so inured to it as to quell any public outrage to the recent revelations. This is dangerous not only because the rise of automotive surveillance raises questions about privacy and presents opportunities for abuse, but also because it crept up on the public without an open debate about how to weigh its benefits against its costs.
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-01-29/big-brother-is-watching-you-run-errands
http://www.cbs8.com/story/24004308/license-plate-readers-creating-countywide-driver-database
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/19/how-urban-anonymity-disappears-when-all-data-is-tracked/?_r=0
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/27/stealing-hotel-towels_n_6555486.html
Police/DHS are forcing hotels to let them spy on your bank records without a warrant: The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and EPIC filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in a challenge brought by hotel owners against a Los Angeles city ordinance that allows police to access guest registers without consent, warrant, or other legal process. Supporting the hotel owners, EFF argues that people must have the right to challenge surveillance laws like these on Fourth Amendment grounds, even before police have used the law to conduct a suspicionless search. “In an era of pervasive surveillance, the ability to challenge overbroad laws that invade privacy is more important than ever,” Senior Staff Attorney and Adams Chair for Internet Rights Lee Tien said.
Central to City of Los Angeles v. Patel is a city ordinance requiring hotel operators to retain certain guest registry information, which they must make available to police officers on demand. Hotel operators aren’t allowed to challenge requests for guest information in court in advance and can be punished with a jail or fine if they refuse to comply.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found that the ordinance violates the Fourth Amendment: individuals subject to an “administrative search”—a kind of warrantless, suspicionless search that may be performed for reasons unrelated to criminal investigations—must be allowed to object in court before they can be punished for resisting the requests. However, a dissenting opinion argued that not only does the Los Angeles ordinance satisfy the Fourth Amendment, but the Constitution does not allow the hotel owners to challenge the law until the government actually uses the law to conduct a warrantless search against them.
Hotels can even track their towels & bathrobes:
Hotels are using an M&M-sized tracking device that they've have embedded in their linens which lets them know where their towels, robes and bedsheets are at all times.
The main service they use is Linen Technology Tracking, which provides the chips to some 2,000 hotels around the country, according to its executive VP William Serbin. The company's initial goal was to let hotels track which linens had made it from the hotel to the cleaners and back again, but the chips have also proven handy for keeping tabs on stolen goods that guests think have slipped out unnoticed.
"One hotel uses the chips to monitor the elevator banks," Serbin told The Huffington Post. "Any time one of their towels passes through the elevator bay, Housekeeping gets an alert."
https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-files-supreme-court-amicus-brief-over-warrantless-searches-hotel-records