// surveillance infrastructure

Source: 404 Media

A company is engineering automatic license plate readers to simultaneously capture nearby phone and wearable device identifiers—turning traffic infrastructure into dual-purpose location surveillance nodes that can track individuals independent of their vehicles. This merges two previously separate surveillance streams: vehicular movement data (already deployed in hundreds of U.S. cities) and personal device identification, which would allow authorities to follow people beyond their cars and correlate their movements across multiple locations. The expansion exploits the fact that existing ALPR deployments have little public scrutiny and less regulation than cell-site simulators, potentially enabling mass tracking infrastructure under the cover of traffic enforcement.