Germany strikes down indiscriminate use of Automated License Plate Recognition technology

[Florian Weimer]

* Peter Sommer:

> Germany strikes down indiscriminate use of Automated License Plate
> Recognition technology
>
> http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,541025,00.html
>
> Germany's high court has declared laws enabling British-style total
> surveillance of drivers illegal.

This summary is somewhat misleading.  Scanning with on-line matching
against a well-defined database (and immediate discarding of
non-matches) does not infringe upon the rights of those not stored in
the database, and is therefore allowed.

It's been spun diffirently in the media, but the general tendency of the
ruling is that scanning is permitted.  The court mainly criticized that
the legal framework created by state legislation was woefully
inadequate, and it clarified that off-line matching (with retention of
all data) is not permitted.

Unfortunately, the RAF (the terrorist organization, not the Royal Air
Force) had already broken on-line license plate matching in the 70s, by
using doubles matching car type and color.