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NYPD License Plate Readers Will Be Able To Track Every Car Entering Manhattan
NEW YORK — The ring of steel is expanding. New York City Police Department Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly announced a “major project” at a budget hearing on Tuesday to install license plate reader cameras “in every lane of traffic on all of the bridges and tunnels that serve as entrances and exits to Manhattan.”
Soon, no one will be able to drive onto or off of the island without potentially being recorded.
Currently, Kelly said, the NYPD has “complete” coverage on the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges and the Battery and Holland Tunnels. License plate readers will be commissioned for additional bridges by this summer. The devices can quickly scan license plate numbers and submit the time and place they were captured to a database.
Kelly also said the department has mounted a high-resolution camera on an NYPD helicopter and given it “sophisticated down-link technology to provide real-time, high-quality video of incidents as they unfold.” The commissioner has expressed interest in flying unmanned drones to watch over demonstrations as well.
Kelly did not state the cost of the license plate reader program. But along with data from other major NYPD electronic surveillance initiatives — the Argus cameras mounted on streets in neighborhoods and the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative that integrates private cameras from banks and other institutions — the license plate data will be fed into a $30-40 million comprehensive dashboard produced by Microsoft called the Domain Awareness System.
While the new measures could arguably come in handy if the city ever faces another terrorist attack, privacy advocates are raising questions about what sort of safeguards the NYPD uses to protect the data it collects.
Last month, The New York Times reported that the police department had built a database of 16 million license plates.
More: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/13…mail_share
2013-03-13 17:49:53
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