Posted by (classified, top secret)
The License Plate Reader
It’s the size of a 200 page paperback book and when installed on the outside of police cars it can log thousands of license plates in an eight-hour patrol shift. It’s in use in a number of bay area cities that are part of a broader matrix that is coordinated by what is called in the trade, a Fusion Center. Fusion Centers typically run by a government contractor that oversees a mix of police employees and sub-contractors. The Fusion Center holds the computers and runs the detection software and then fees this information back to the subscribing law enforcement agencies. Intelligence like this doesn’t come cheap, typically a single subscriber agency is required to pony up around a million bucks, however, just to get it this project up and running as a showcase for other law enforcement customers this one cost the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center a mere $340,000.
The Photograph to go with the License Plate
When news of the license plate readers leaked to the media, one concerned citizen petitioned to know exactly how many times his license plate was read and his vehicles photographed along with the occupants. He was shocked to find out his two cars had been recorded on 112 occasions, including one image from 2009 that shows him and his daughters stepping out of his Toyota Prius in their driveway. Yes, a Prius…you couldn’t make this stuff up, this guy was so straight, he’s never had a parking ticket, he certainly NEVER been accused of a crime and never done anything EVER to warrant this level of surveillance, yet there it is and it could just as easily have been you, and maybe it was, been to the bay area recently?
That photograph (not the one in this article – that’s made up), made him “frightened and concerned about the magnitude of police surveillance and data collection” said the local San Leandro newspaper. According to their investigation, a single patrol car in San Leandro equipped with a plate reader had logged his car once a week on average, photographing his license plate and documenting the time and location.
At a rapid pace, and mostly hidden from the public, police agencies throughout California have been collecting millions of records on drivers and feeding them to intelligence fusion centers operated by local, state and federal law enforcement.
Enter Big Brother
Now here’s the kicker. This goes back to the Palantir folks. They are heavily connected with the CIA and other high level intelligence agencies and have been since shortly after 9/11. At the time, it was needed too, because places like FBI, CIA, DOJ, DEA, NSA and others used their own customized software and this meant it didn’t integrate, well or at all, with other computer systems. This caused blind spots, lost data and delays in evaluating terrorist threats and then Palantir arrived on the scene! They were like this Genie that cast a magical net over all the data systems in all the intelligence agencies and then with an amazing mystical power they were able to decipher every single agency’s coded information, put it in a universal language and then redirect it that info (like a router) to whatever other intel agency was in need, but with a number of need to know restrictions. Ah, but it also did much more! Exactly how much more is still top secret, but I can assure you it involved data mining and this all seeing system was by design capable of gathering information from far more than just government agency computer files.
The Ulimate Terrorist Mousetrap is also the Ultimate Crime Mousetrap
When turned loose Palantir could gather information (data mining) on your daily activities, travel, emails, banking, medical records, relatives, friends and much, much more. Use your imagination…if the data exists out here, it can find it. However, this raised some immediate concerns by our dear leaders who didn’t want it snooping around their doors. So, it was mutually agreed that it should never, ever, be used on American citizens and that’s a promise! Rather it would be used in places like Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan and wherever there were hotbeds of terrorist activities and it would sort them out, group them by threat, and keep the boots on the ground apprised of the latest developments so they could do an occasional round up for Guantanamo. This resulted in some very spectacular captures of top Al Qaeda terrorists, but nobody outside the program knew exactly how it was being done? It was just assumed that traditional methods were working better than normal and our news media didn’t see anything odd, just really dedicated anti-terrorists units doing an extra good job! The only problem for the program was a matter of restraint, not doing too good (Osama bin Laden), lest questions be asked…
“We Promise Never Ever to use it Inside the USA”
The mission is now a decade old and as it has been with other government programs, it appears we have mission creep in the Palantir program too. Now enters domestic spying as revealed by Edward Snowden. How shall I say this now? Ummm, okay, in order to sort of sidestep some of the conditions in that original agreement about domestic spying, a de-tuned version of Palantir was created for use by law enforcement. The license plate reader was one element of that de-turned version. A tiny spin-off of the mother program, but there were others and exactly how many others remains to be seen.
You may recall a few months ago the New York City Police Department got their hands spanked when they were caught using some law enforcement intel program to map out ethnic neighborhoods (presumably those were Islamic neighborhoods). Their excuse was it was just an experiment to see if their was any overlaps on their pin maps to indicate terrorist activity. However, nothing much came of it, except to be told not to do that anymore! Well guess what, Palantir can do that, and the New York City Police Dept., was allowed access to Palantir on a test basis because of their world class anti-terrorist unit. Do you really need anymore to connect the dots?
There’s no question that this powerful program can be extremely helpful to law enforcement. You need only a top secret clearance and a quickie look at all the top terrorists it’s helped to take down to see that. And you don’t need all the tools in the Palantir tool belt to do it, just one of them can make a big difference, like the license plate reader and the ability to analyse the data, which potentially could detect a drug house, ID everyone in the drug house, ID their suppliers and all their customers and all their friends and even dig into their families data and….. and the list keeps on growing…. ad infinitum until some day it reaches you!
Six degrees of separation is all that it takes to connect us to almost any one, any where. The good part here is this big brother program is the Code of Conduct strictly adhered to by those in government that promised to use it only for good, it’s basically the same code of conduct the IRS uses.
- Now tell me you are not the least little bit afraid? You should be…. because if you just read this you’re now on the watch list! (Just kidding…or am I????)
This is the kind of expense that infuriates me. Our cities are going broke, yet we always have money to spend on garbage like this. I realize that we all have preferences over where tax dollars are spent. Many think welfare is a waste of tax money, others think it is money well spent. But I have yet to meet a single person who thinks spending money on programs that spy on us is a good idea. Why do we have no say over how our money is spent?
NO ONE wants to spend money on that giant data collection center in Utah. So how did it get built?
…. because if you just read this you’re now on the watch list! (Just kidding…or am I????)
Heh. I saw/read something not too long ago where a grey-haired gentleman was reminiscing about the good old dark ages before the information age, when land lines and wire taps were the cutting edge. Hearing a distinct “click” on the line at the start of a conversation was pretty much a dead giveaway that there was a tap on the line. This gentleman recalled what fun it was upon hearing the click to shout “F@#% J. Edgar! into the phone.
Princess Kathryn Herrige, FOX News has some answers about the data center (video)
$2Billion…not including overrides…authorized through the intelligence community.
Some information can be found at website: NSA Utah Data Center
Looks like some of the money was allocated through the military budget.
The amount of money being thrown on this technology is staggering. Many, many billions. Whole startup companies are being founded on spy technology and it’s then used to spy on the people paying for it.
Jack I’m a little suspicious about the photo associated with the story out of San Leandro. The camera is on the front of the police vehicle. The photo was supposedly taken as the family exited the car but does this arrangement seem to you like something that such a camera would capture? The people appear to be looking directly into the camera as if they posed for the picture…and would parents taking their kids from the car spontaneously piggyback them and as if from the same exit door?
ALSO $340K for the fusion center seems low to me given coordinating computers and software are involved. If true this is one project that the region didn’t pay too much to acquire. Ongoing expenses for employees, etc. is another story.
I’m thrilled at the thought of law enforcement and terror fighters being able to nail the bad guys. I’m concerned mostly because I don’t have a sense that we can trust people anymore. I know I don’t trust the current administration but it goes beyond that. People in general just don’t seem to have the same moral standards we counted on in times past. I don’t think they grasp the need for honor and integrity or the severity and importance of national security.
If it wasn’t for bad news….
Tina, the $340k is just the cost to open the doors and then there are those reoccurring costs that must be paid by participating agencies, like shared costs for wages, rent, power, etc. As for my picture, that was made as a spoof on a very real happening. My theme…here’s a happy family and then big brother has them in the cross hairs! Well, I thought it was funny, but with a real message. Maybe it was only funny to me? I have a strange sense of humor.
Excellent blog I’m a huge Big Brother fan from Holland.