Big Brother Zeros in on License Plates

Photo: Flickr / Snapsi

By Dave Eyvazzade~Wired

The town council in Tiburon, a Marin County community just north of San Francisco, has unanimously voted to install license plate recording cameras in a bid to bring down crime.

So what’s the story? Does the town have an unusually high level of violent crimes? Hardly. From 2001 to 2008, this community of less than 9,000 people saw a total of 47 violent crimes, of which only one was murder. And Marin County is the richest in all of California.

To add to the metropolis suburb Shangri-La image, the town boasts a median household income of over $100,000, a median home value of almost $2 million with a list of residents –past and present– that makes the cast of Oceans Eleven look like a high school musical.

Tiburon officials voted 4-0 — one member was absent — to install six license plate recognition cameras on the only two roads that feed into the community, Tiburon Boulevard and Paradise Drive. When they go live in six months, the system will compare the plates to databases of “vehicles of interest” — those that are stolen, or used in kidnappings, etc. Should they find a match, the cops will be alerted. The system will archive the information for 30 days to help identify or rule out suspects for current crime investigations.

The program will cost $195,000, and the council vote was, predictably, met with mixed reaction. Police Chief Michael Cronin of course said it will make the city safer. But some residents, like 72-year old William Rotham, consider it an invasion of privacy and “overkill” akin to “going after a flea with a cannon.” Rotham told the San Francisco Chronicle he also worries the immediacy of the system will cause dangerous confrontations between police and criminals on the town’s two major roads.

Yami Anolik, a 64-year-old real estate investor thought otherwise and told the Chronicle, “If it lowers the crime rate even a little bit, then it’s a great idea.”

Similar programs, like the camera system in Denver, have proven valuable to law enforcement. Denver’s system scanned more than 40,000 cars in two months and found 250 needle-in-a-hay-stack vehicles of interest. We don’t debate the benefit such technology brings law enforcement, nor do we question the value of lower crime rates. But we do question the actual return on this kind of reactive technology versus a proactive system like adding to two more police officers in a town that already has a crime rate lower than that of Pleasantville.

Who can we expect to be photographed by Big Brother? The list of current and past noteworthy residents of Marin county includes tennis star Andre Agassi, Metallica vocalist and guitarist James Hetfield, rocker Sammy Hagar, director George Lucas and actors like Sean Penn and Brad Pitt. We wonder how long before Tiburon’s big-brother license plate tracking system is hacked and turned against them as a paparazzi informant ‘bot.