THE SHORT VERSION: The next layer of vehicle surveillance may not need to begin with a license plate, a suspect, or even a name. It may begin with the recurring electronic family traveling inside the car. Welcome to another magnificent episode of the continuing human experiment in which we take every invention ever designed to make your life easier and ask the only question that really matters: How can we use this to watch you more efficiently? Because apparently the license plate wasn’t enough. That was primitive. Neanderthal surveillance. You drove past a camera, it photographed your plate, and some bureaucrat somewhere could say, “Ah-ha! There goes the blue Toyota.” But civilization has evolved. Now, the camera may not need to know your license plate. It may just need to know your phone, your watch, your earbuds, and the other little electronic breadcrumbs you’ve stuffed into your automobile like a technologically sophisticated bag of trail mix. Enter SignalTrace, stage left SignalTrace is a surveillance system designed to work alongside license-plate-reader infrastructure. It detects electronic signals from consumer devices traveling in vehicles and can identify groups of devices that routinely move together—potentially giving investigators leads even when they do not begin with a known person or vehicle. And this is what we call innovation. Your car does not merely have a license plate anymore. It has a social life. The phone goes with it. The smartwatch goes with it. The Bluetooth devices go with it. Perhaps the abandoned vibrator in the trunk goes with it. If that particular constellation of gadgets keeps appearing together, the system can potentially start recognizing the pattern. Not necessarily you, at first. Just the little electronic herd traveling around with you. Your anonymous electronic shadow can begin to look suspiciously like a biography. anonymous electronic shadow If the same fingerprint appears at your house every morning, your office every day, the gym every Tuesday, and the same bar every Friday night, nobody needed to begin with your name. The pattern can lead back to the person. That is the conceptual leap. Traditional investigation begins with something: a suspect, a vehicle, a plate, a photograph. This approach can begin with a recurring pattern of movement and proximity, then work backward toward the people attached to it. You do not have to be known to become interesting. You can become interesting because your gadgets keep showing up together. That’s the modern American dream. You don’t need a criminal record. You don’t need to be famous. You don’t need to be suspected of anything. You merely need to be sufficiently predictable—and congratulations, most of you are. Same house. Same office. Same grocery store. Same Starbucks. Same goddamned strip mall. The great mystery is no longer Who are you? It is: “Which little electronic puckfist keeps traveling with this other little electronic puckfist?” Share This is about relationships, not just cars An electronic fingerprint does not need to have your name stamped across it in twelve-point Helvetica. It can potentially amount to a repeated association: this device appears with these other devices; this combination appears in this vehicle; this vehicle appears at these places; the pattern appears again and again. And once you start asking what collections of people and devices keep moving together, you are no longer merely watching cars. You are watching relationships. Who lives with whom. Who works with whom. Who visits whom. Who travels together. Who keeps appearing in the same orbit. Relationships are information. The machine is not just following a car; it is beginning to construct a map of human behavior. Now, before everyone runs naked into the woods screaming about the electronic apocalypse: reality check. SignalTrace is not magic. It is relatively new, and security experts have questioned how reliably different devices can be identified and associated. Wireless systems do not conveniently broadcast one permanent electronic Social Security number into the heavens. Different devices, protocols, and frequencies complicate the picture, and promotional descriptions are often more terrifying than the product is useful. So: don’t panic. Yet. My work here is free because this information matters more than a paygate. The research, reporting, and analysis remain open to everyone. If you find value here and want to help keep it that way, a paid subscription is the best way to do it. Your support makes it possible to continue publishing without putting the most important material behind a paywall. Thank you for reading, subscribing, and sharing this work with others. A few benefits to upgrading: Weekly Live radio Broadcast across Los Angeles with your calls Continuing adult education Global community, including students Inside access to the conversations and ideas shaping decisions at the highest levels—from whistleblowers to think tank analysts Find us at caryharrison.com — and for the love of the Founders, tell a friend. Please Upgrade The full conversation in the video above and wherever you get podcasts. Search: The Cary Harrison Files. The surveillance circus is already in town Flock has already helped normalize automated license-plate readers throughout American communities. The company says it has roughly 120,000 cameras deployed nationwide, and its systems record vehicle characteristics and movements. It has also drawn growing criticism over privacy, misuse, and the huge accumulation of location data. And the humble license plate is only the beginning. Here is where the magnificent surveillance circus starts to smell like a toilet behind a bus station: we are building an increasingly sophisticated electronic nervous system to identify your car, your phone, your movements, and your little Bluetooth entourage—except the machines doing the identifying are not exactly infallible. In Roseville, California, an internal review found that 71% of the Flock-generated alerts examined during one period involved misread plates: 1,427 alerts. That does not mean Flock cameras are wrong 71% of the time everywhere. It means that, among those reviewed alerts in that deployment, most involved a misread plate. Flock has claimed roughly 93% accuracy. Marvelous. Until you remember that 7% of billions of scans is not a rounding error. It is an industrial mountain of potentially wrong information. The Institute for Justice has documented at least 27 cases since 2018 in which errors contributed to innocent motorists being stopped, detained at gunpoint, or jailed. Welcome to the future: the surveillance system that knows everything, except when it doesn’t know s**t. So now we have two parallel developments. One system watches the car. Another begins listening for the gadgets inside it. Somewhere in the middle sits you: the meat, the human filling, the delicious little privacy burrito, wrapped in Bluetooth. “Public safety,” naturally Every one of these systems arrives bearing the same beautiful promise: public safety. And, to be intellectually honest, there are legitimate uses. A stolen vehicle can be found. A missing child can be located. A violent suspect can be identified. A crime that might otherwise remain unsolved can produce a useful lead. Those are real benefits. That is precisely why this is politically difficult. The choice is not safety versus evil. It is useful surveillance versus how much surveillance you are willing to tolerate in exchange for that usefulness. That is a much uglier question. And ugliness is where government policy traditionally goes to breed. Because once you build the machine, somebody finds another perfectly reasonable reason to use it. Then another. Then another. Eventually, the system installed to find stolen cars becomes infrastructure capable of answering questions nobody imagined when the camera went up: Who was there? Who wasn’t? Who keeps visiting? Who travels together? Who suddenly stopped going somewhere? And who the hell is that guy whose phone keeps appearing beside her phone? That is not necessarily science fiction. It is the trajectory of the technology being built. And the funniest part? You are helping build it yourself. You bought the phone, the watch, the earbuds. You connected them, paired them, named them, gave them permissions, carried them everywhere. You made yourself electronically sexy. You have not committed a crime. You are just moving through the world. But your devices move with you, and increasingly the machines are getting very good at noticing. So the next time you see one of those innocent-looking cameras beside the road, do not assume it is merely looking at your license plate. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. The important question is no longer simply, Can they see my car? It is: Can they recognize the electronic family traveling inside it? The license plate tells them what the car is. The electronic fingerprint may begin telling them who tends to be in it. If that sounds like a small distinction, congratulations: you have discovered why the future is going to require lowering your standards considerably. Privacy may not disappear with a dramatic explosion. It may disappear quietly—one Bluetooth handshake, one Wi-Fi signal, one camera, one harmless little “public safety” upgrade at a time. Until you are driving down the highway, minding your own business, listening to music, scratching your ass at a red light—and the infrastructure does not merely know what car or e-bike passed. It has a pretty good idea whose electronic little entourage came along for the ride.The full conversation in the video above and wherever you get podcasts. Search: The Cary Harrison Files. Text or leave a voice message: 310-737-TALK This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caryharrison.subst
