Let's think now. Could they track or find a car that wasn't stolen? Could they track a person they have no "business" tracking? How many highways does Orwell plan these for? Is your neighborhood next to get these nifty gadgets? Can YOU think of questions? Be "tagged"? R U "licensed"? Are your "papers" and national "ID" card in order? Are your "Freedoms" still intact? What freedoms???????
Citizen "joe 6pk" Amer I CAN/ play tag

http://www.dallasnews.com/national/296390_theft_25nat.AR.html
Device spots stolen cars, but officials let them pass
Vehicles stream past workers at Mexican border

02/25/2001

New York Times News Service


SAN DIEGO – As many as 2,000 stolen vehicles pass by the border station in San Diego on their way into Mexico each year, U.S. Customs Service officials say.

How do they know? They have a machine that beeps whenever a stolen license plate goes by.

Why do customs officials not stop those cars?

"It would be great if we could do that," said Dennis Murphy, a spokesman for the Customs Service, which installed the machines – license plate readers – at 11 of its 31 Southwest border crossings during the last two years. The main reason for installing the machines, which cost $63,000 each, was to record vehicles leaving and entering the country for possible criminal investigations, but stopping stolen cars was another goal.

Because customs officers inspect only cars entering the country, "It's not like we can just throw ourselves in front of every stolen car we see and say, 'Stop,'" Mr. Murphy said.

But in the two years since customs officials set up the machines, they have not coordinated with local police agencies to stop the stolen cars, except for one pilot program in Arizona. And many of the machines, such as the one in San Diego, have been installed so close to the border that it would be difficult to stop drivers before they leave the country.

In San Diego, a California Highway Patrol spokesman, Officer Scott Parker, said his agency was aware of the machines and their potential but added: "We were never invited to participate in using them. I assume it was a funding problem."

The idea, said John McGowan, a customs enforcement officer, "was to get them installed and prove that the technology worked."

In the beginning, Mr. Murphy added, "the cameras were only going to be used to create a record of cars entering and leaving the country."

"We're now into the second and third evolution of possible uses," he said.

At the San Ysidro border crossing in San Diego, four plate readers are set up in each lane of the freeway, about 500 feet this side of Mexico. They scan cars heading south, quickly run the license number through an FBI database and set off a high-pitched alarm whenever they hit on a plate that has been reported stolen.

Inside the nearby customs office, inspectors barely look up anymore when they hear the sound. "What's the point?" said one.

The beeping plate reader, which goes off anywhere from four to eight times a day, inspectors say, has been a source of frustration since it showed up.

"We were told it was going to be part of a federal-local task force that would nab the stolen vehicles before they got into Mexico," says a retired inspector who was a supervisor at San Ysidro when the machine arrived. "Nothing ever happened."

Inspectors, he said, constantly complained about the futility of having to watch what they considered a "crime wave" of car theft – a daily parade that would add up to more than 2,000 vehicles a year heading south. With the typical stolen car worth about $13,300, according to the California Highway Patrol, that would mean an annual loss of more than $26 million.

The five U.S. cities with the highest auto theft rates – Los Angeles, Phoenix, Houston, Riverside and San Diego – are within a few hundred miles of the border. In 1998, the crime bureau says, 161,499 cars were reported stolen from those cities.

Customs officials say help may be on the way from a new financing bill that proposes enough money to send 1,754 new employees and $151 million worth of new high-tech equipment to the Southwest border.

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