The Gizmodo article misstates EFF's claim about frequency of welfare fraud:
EFF says "The use of powerful ALPR data is disproportionate to the need. As Sacramento DHA officials acknowledged in 2013: “the percentage of fraud cases is statistically low.”. So, EFF is quoting Sacramento DHA saying "statistically low". Ctrl-F on EFF does not hit on 'rare'. EFF never said fraud was rare.
Sacramento Bee did not want to attribute the 'rare' quote to Gizmodo, so they dishonestly implied that EFF said this. It wouldn't be as persuasive or inflammatory, I suppose, to quote EFF as saying "use is disproportionate to the need", which is what EFF said.
Is is so hard to simply tell the truth, as to who said what? Sacramento Bee fail.

How about "Brendan Eich still doesn't work here".

Doing the math on a slowing of 1/74,000th of a second (per year) and 1.4bn years, comes out to a rotation speed of 18.75 hours per revolution 1.4bn years ago. Amazingly close to the 18 hrs and 41 min claimed in the article. If the extrapolation is this close, why bother with the "astronomical theory, geochemical signatures, and modeling"?...just for confirmation?