How License-Plate Scanners Are Eroding Our Privacy

Police officers don't respond kindly to being videotaped, yet law enforcement agencies on every level are tracking out comings and going via cameras that ID our license plate numbers. Here, PopMech contributor and Instapundit blogger Glenn Reynolds takes on the slow erosion of our privacy.

Here's a thought experiment: imagine that activists, concerned with official misconduct, install license-plate readers on private property to track the location of every car belonging to the police department or a politician and upload the locations to a public database. The result: a map of where the police go, and where they don't—along, perhaps, with politicians' visits to motels or strip clubs.

Given that police often respond with hostility to simply being videotaped, I expect that a venture like this would prompt an outcry, and probably some efforts to shut it down. But this is precisely what officialdom is doing to citizens.


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