According to the Boston Globe, Massachusetts wants to establish a database with the information gathered by license plate scanners installed in police cars. The scanners will scan license plates of every car the police vehicle passes and transmit that information (along with the location) to a database that will be made available to various government agencies. The data will be kept indefinitely. Civil libertarians are raising an alarm and rightly so. This makes me wonder if “1984″ was accurate other than the timing with the date. This sounds like another move towards fascism by our government. Our founding fathers could never have known that technology would proceed as far as it has come. I am sure that if they had of known what was coming they would have definitely banned it while they were defining the Ten Amendments that guarantee our civil liberties.   So many of our liberties are being tossed out the window as our new technological feats make gathering and storing data on individual citizens becomes easier and easier. I can see where they would be of great use if they were simply used to scan the thousands of vehicles a police car sees almost everyday. If they were using the plate readers to look for a specific license plate of someone who was wanted by the authorities and they were not saving all the information gathered into a huge data base where they could check your whereabouts and track your movements maybe that would be a good idea. However scanning all those plates seen by the plate reader into a database to be used by whomever managed to get into the data base is wrong. Keeping track of your movements when you have committed no crime should not be allowed. If you live in Massachusetts you need to contact your local Senator and Representative to block this legislation.

Also a note to Massachusetts politicians: Such videos will be used against you at some point. Count on it. If you don’t care about the privacy of the citizens, at least think of your self interest before voting for this.

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