In-Car Stasi, by Eric Peters

Soon, cars will be able to snitch on other cars . . . and their drivers. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

In what was styled the German Democratic Republic – which was in fact Communist East Germany – the secret police, the Stasi, worked by using what felt like every East German to spy on every other East German. A man could not be sure his wife or best friend weren’t Stasi stoolies.

Fast-forward about 40 years. The car behind you – or coming at you – could be “Stasi” also, courtesy of Flock Safety.

You don’t really need to know more than that (the name) to know something not good is coming. Flock – a collection animals, such as sheep. Safety – goes without saying. Or ought to by now. Put the two together and what you have is a company that wants to use the “flock” – privately owned vehicles with dashcams – to force-multiply the Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) it builds for the American iteration of the Stasi; i.e., law enforcement.

That term, by the way, at least has the merit of straightforwardness going for it (unlike “democratic” as the greasy euphemism for Communism). The law must be enforced – because it’s the law. No room for nuance, much less difficult questions about whether a thing is right or wrong. Just inflexible, mindless obeisance.

Which brings us back to these Automated Plate Readers.

ALPRs are a species of intelligent camera system used by law enforcement to passively scan the license plates of all the vehicles that pass by the ALPR – they work very much like the bar code scanner that is used to identify groceries on the conveyor belt at a supermarket checkout – and cross-reference each with plate number with state databases that correlate license plate numbers with the owners of the vehicles the plates are affixed to.

Continue reading