License plate scanners are one of the most under-appreciated violations of personal privacy that exist today.
It's not just government use either. There are private companies that scan vast numbers of license plates (sometimes by driving around parking lots with a camera), build a database of what plate was seen where at what time, then sell access to both law enforcement and I believe private investigators.
Want to know if your spouse is having an affair? Those databases may well have the answer.
Taking a photograph of a car with its license plate is legal. As is selling a photo you've taken, whether it has a license plate or not.
Therefore taking millions of photos in public of cars, and turning their license plate numbers into a database is legal, as is selling that information. It's all data gained in public.
Obviously it's now scary that you're being tracked. But what is the solution? We certainly don't want to outlaw taking photos in public. Is it the mass aggregation of already-public data that should be made illegal? What adverse consequences might that have, e.g. journalists compiling public data to prove governmental corruption?
> Taking a photograph of a car with its license plate is legal. As is selling a photo you've taken, whether it has a license plate or not.
> Therefore taking millions of photos in public of cars, and turning their license plate numbers into a database is legal, as is selling that information. It's all data gained in public.
One absolutely does not follow the other; there are all sorts of things that are legal only if done for certain purposes, only below a certain scale, etc. The idea that we must permit both or neither is a false dichotomy.
Observing and recording is a difference in kind. Recording and processing is a difference in kind. Processing and selling is a difference in kind. And quantity has a quality all its own.
> Observing and recording is a difference in kind.
Not if you believe in a right of general-purpose computing. Your brain records everything you observe. If you can use a computer for any purpose you choose, then you can use it to record what you can see and hear.
...I mean, sure, I'll argue that copyright laws are illegitimate on this basis. And it's beyond obvious at this point that the internet doesn't abide by this "law".
> Not wanting laws to reflect a difference does not mean a difference does not exist.
The point is: the difference is a legal fiction which necessarily prohibits general-purpose computing. If I can capture photons with my eyes, but then I try to do it with a machine, and you say, "hey, you can't use a machine for that!" then you are telling me that I can't engage in general purpose computing.
> What law? Copyright? Why the punctuation? And what did you intend this to imply?
Yes, I don't think copyright laws are a legitimate role for state power in the information age. And if the argument is, "well, look copyright laws require prohibitions on collecting or copying data or any other general purpose computing process", then that only makes the case stronger, not weaker.
If a law requires the state to intrude into your personal, intimate computing process - whether the biological process in your brain or an electronic one in your computer - then that's a very strong indication that the law is not a legitimate intervention on behalf of the rights of others.
> If I can capture photons with my eyes, but then I try to do it with a machine, and you say, "hey, you can't use a machine for that!" then you are telling me that I can't engage in general purpose computing.
Observing, recording, and processing are different words with different meanings. Repeating your assertion they are the same did not make it more persuasive.
> Yes, I don't think copyright laws are a legitimate role for state power in the information age. And if the argument is, "well, look copyright laws require prohibitions on collecting or copying data or any other general purpose computing process", then that only makes the case stronger, not weaker.
Copyright laws regulated copying always.
There are arguments for copyright abolition worth considering. It is impossible to separate activities almost everyone but you can separate and separates is not.
> If I can capture photons with my eyes, but then I try to do it with a machine, and you say, "hey, you can't use a machine for that!" then you are telling me that I can't engage in general purpose computing.
You can capture photons with your eyes, and you can use an image sensor to capture photons. Seems pretty equivalent.
But your brain cannot store images or recall them in the future (even for yourself, it is a very lossy recall), or transmit them to another person, etc. That is all completely separate functionality that is not equivalent to what your brain can do.
> Not if you believe in a right of general-purpose computing
Uh, sure. If we make up a right, there is a problem.
Currently, this right doesn't exist. We make plenty of laws without presuming it exists. Plenty of people are trying and failing to pursue voters that it should exist, and I generaly commend them. But it's weird to the point of bordring on intentional distraction to try and pot this specific issue on the basis of a demand that doesn't apply to anything else.
If you can look at the world and conclude that a right to make something and use it as you see fit, in private and without harming others, does not exist, then I guess we just have a dramatically different perspective of the world in which we've arrived.
> But it's weird to the point of bordring (sic) on intentional distraction to try and pot this specific issue on the basis of a demand that doesn't apply to anything else.
You've assumed bad intentions and... I don't know what else to say. If I can see something with my eyes, save it in my brain, recall it later in a drawing, but can't do those same things with a computer, then the implications for the right of general-purpose computing (and for that matter, free thought) are just absolutely obvious.
Messaging can be co-opted. I think you're genuinely arguing for general-purpose computing. But that functionally serves to preserve Flock and the CBP's ability to illegally, in my opinion, monitor and harm Americans.
Well, there are two clear things to be teased out here:
* What Flock does is _not_ consistent with the use of a camera in a fashion that is identical to an eyeball - they are not standing and watching cars go by, or even recording them and logging it. I think it's essential to support the right of individuals to to this. But putting a camera on a fixture? That's a little different. But even if we support that - and I think I can be convinced...
* The custody of this data in secret, and the sharing of it with criminal elements in society, let alone those committing crimes under color of law like CBP, is the harmful part.
Imagine if there were a network of cameras covering all the commons across the land (ie, every street), and there were a way to view their perspective in real time. This gives every person the ability to record and follow any other.
Is this, in itself, an affront?
What if an alien on mars has such a powerful telescope that they too can follow someone in this way. Is this criminal? Do the rights of a person to police how certain photons - those which bounce off their skin - can be captured... extend to the ends of the universe?
I hope the answer is 'obviously not'.
The problem here is that CBP exists in the first place. We need to complete the incomplete struggle for abolition that fizzed in the middle of the 19th century. We need to rid the land of the power structures wherein some people can exact violence under color of law and others cannot even defend themselves, even as all the cameras in the land capture this injustice.
_That's_ the problem, not that somebody saw it happen.
We are commenting on an article where the process you describe leads to harming others, are we not? You can make it sound as robotic as you'd like, but at the end of the day we're still talking about corporations surveilling people on a massive scale and selling the data to be used against them.
It's sort of like saying "what, so I can't assemble a simple contraption of metal and explosive powder, and use it as I see fit?" to elide the fact that what you're actually talking about is shooting a gun. The details matter!
If the case is that the movements of people are plainly observable, but that observing them advances the ability of an organizing like CBP to victimize them, then it seems to me that the logical conclusion is to abolish CBP. Which I think is actually a far more logical position and also a far more popular one among Americans, though many are now afraid to say it out loud.
> It's sort of like saying "what, so I can't assemble a simple contraption of metal and explosive powder, and use it as I see fit?" to elide the fact that what you're actually talking about is shooting a gun.
Shooting? Or building? Of course you have a right to fabricate a gun in your own home. Is this in dispute (at least, in the USA)? Equally obvious, you do not have a right to discharge it in a way that endangers others.
I mean, I am not your enemy with regard to abolishing CBP. But the harms go beyond that. There are many studies that show how being surveilled can affect our behavior and negatively impact our mental health.
With regard to guns, restrictions abound on how you can use them (even in the privacy of your own home) — you need a license to carry them in public, you must lock them up around children, etc. Even though you might believe in some sort of "right to generalized mechanics", in practice most people believe your rights should actually be strictly limited.
First of all, in much of the US, you don't need a license to carry a gun in public. I'm not saying that's good or bad - I don't love it, but it's the current state of things.
But... is there a right to generalized mechanics in the same sense as general computing? General computing is the right to think - is your right to think limited to what your brain is capable of right now? Is it OK to exercise to increase your capacity? Is it OK to take supplements and drugs for this purpose? Is it OK to offload some thinking to a device you own?
Of course. These are fundamental, bedrock needs of a free information age society. You can think _anything_ you want. Thoughts, perhaps by definition, don't harm or imperil others.
But can you arbitrarily craft any machine you want? I mean, no. Like the right to your thoughts, you can craft what you like as long as it doesn't harm or imperil others. Unlike thoughts, some machines do certainly do this.
We have long had a legal and philosophical distinction between arms and ordnance for this reason. We recognize that the right to bear arms create a decentralization of the capacity for violence. But the right to bear ordnance does not. Also, in practical terms, manufacturing ordnance in secret is often difficult (and in fact, it is relieving to know how difficult it is to make nuclear weapons in secret - so much so that it seems to be _less_ possible with each passing year - in part due to the proliferation of eyes/cameras!).
So yeah, I think you can have totally philosophically and legally consistent limits on manufacturing without also having to limit thought / computation / perception.
In much of the US, you can't do the "general computing" you're describing either. Many states don't allow you to record audio without the consent of all parties, for example. You can't record or even possess child sexual abuse material. So it turns out the right you're talking about doesn't actually exist.
But that's literally the question I'm asking. Where do you draw the line in a way that stops what we consider to be abuses, but doesn't stop what we think of as legitimate uses by journalists, academics, etc.?
E.g. city employees who need to better understand traffic patterns originating from one neighborhood, to plan better public transit. Journalists who want to expose the congestion caused by Amazon delivery trucks. And so forth.
Is it database size? Commercial use? Whether license plates are hashed before storing? Hashed before selling the data to a third party? What about law enforcement with a warrant? Etc.
License plate numbers are generally considered PII in their own right. A tuple of make, model, color, and year range is getting awfully close to an equivalent on its own as well.
> But that's literally the question I'm asking. Where do you draw the line in a way that stops what we consider to be abuses, but doesn't stop what we think of as legitimate uses by journalists, academics, etc.?
I think the wrong assumption you're making, is that there is supposed to be a simple answer, like something you can describe with a thousand words. But with messy reality this basically never the case: Where do you draw the line of what is considered a taxable business? What are the limits of free speech? What procedures should be paid by health insurance?
It is important to accept this messiness and the complexity it brings instead of giving up and declaring the problem unsolvable. If you have ever asked yourself, why the GDPR is so difficult and so multifaceted in its implications, the messiness you are pointing out is the reason.
And of course, the answer to your question is: Look at the GDPR and European legislation as a precedent to where you draw the line for each instance and situation. It's not perfect of course, but given the problem, it can't be.
Generally, you do want the general principle of something like this to be explainable in a few sentences, yes.
Even if that results in a bunch of more detailed regulations, we can then understand the principles behind those regulations, even if they decide a bunch of edge cases with precise lines that seem arbitrary.
Things like the limits of free speech can be explained in a few sentences at a high level. So yes, I'm asking for what the equivalent might be here.
The idea that "it's so impossibly complicated that the general approach can't even be summarized" is not helpful. Even when regulations are complicated, they start from a few basic principles that can be clearly enumerated.
This is not how things ever work in practice in representative democracy. The world is too complex, and the many overlapping sets of political groups in a country/provice/city have different takes on what the policy should be, and more importantly, each group have different tolerances for what they will accept.
Because everyone has different principles by which they evaluate the world, most laws don't actually care about principles. They are simply arbitrary lines in the sand drawn by the legislature in a bid to satisfy (or not dissatisfy) as many groups as possible. Sometimes, some vague sounding principles are attached to the laws, but its always impossible for someone else to start with the same principles and derive the exact same law from them.
Constitutions on the other hand seem simple and often have simple sounding principles in them. The reason is that constitutions specify what the State institutions can and cannot do. The State is a relatively simple system compared to the world, so constitutions seem simple. Laws on the other hand specify what everyone else must or must not do, and they must deal with messy reality.
Emphasis on casual, IMO. It is perfectly reasonable to decide that past norms which evolved in the absence of large scale computing power, digital cameras, and interconnected everything do not translate to the right to extrapolate freedom of casual observation into computer-assisted stalking.
One big easy line to draw is personal+individual versus commercial+corporation. There should be sweeping privacy laws that individuals can use to prevent information about them (including government issued identifiers) from being recorded, processed, and stored. Then for private vs private, a de minimis exception for individuals doing it noncommercially on a small number of people.
Delivery trucks are operated by corporations so don't have privacy protection (although the individuals driving them would from things like facial recognition). Traffic patterns can be studied without the use of individual identifiers. Law enforcement is moot because the juicy commercial surveillance databases won't be generated in the first place, and without them we can have an honest societal conversation whether the government should create their own surveillance databases of everyone's movements.
These aren't insurmountable problems. GDPR gets these answers mostly right. What it requires is drawing a line in the sand and iterating to close loopholes, rather than simply assuming futility when trying to regulate the corporate surveillance industry.
This is literally what private detectives do when they tail someone. So yes, this is legal as long as it's not harassing or there's a restraining order or something. Did you think it was not?
Not OP, but yes, I think it is not. At least, not legal in the same expansive way that you are implying. AFAIK private detective work is very much regulated, most likely because it is otherwise known as stalking.
Require a warrant for law enforcement to poll these databases. And make the database operators strictly liable for breaches and mis-use.
For all we know, "suspicious" travel patterns may include visiting a place of religious worship or an abortion clinic. For a future President, it may be parking near the home of someone who tweeted support for a J6'er.
(And we haven't even touched the national security risk Flock poses [1].)
> Require a warrant for law enforcement to poll these databases.
This seems so uncontroversial I don't know why we haven't collectively decided to implement it. Though I get that the folks in power probably don't support it. We could easily decide that law enforcement data gathering warrant requirements are not so simple to circumvent. Maybe we should largely abolish third party doctrine.
Collectively decide and easily are carrying lots of weight here.
Americans (citizens that is) have held fairly consistent opinions on healthcare, guns, education, war and yet very little changes because all voices are in fact, not equal. We are not collectively deciding. There are massive thumbs on the scale, often in favor of private profit that keep things as they are now.
Some might even, surprise surprise, be owned by the companies investing in the companies that use this technology.
This is, as the OP noted, a gross invasion of privacy and not avoidable in a country that largely requires cars and their registration for day to day life.
Are you also going to require a warrant for paramilitary insurgent groups to poll these databases? Maybe you intended to propose for them to be abolished entirely.
paramilitary insurgent groups are abolished, actually. it is illegal to operate a paramilitary insurgent group. this is the main way they prevent groups from doing paramilitary insurrection.
that, and most military actions are also illegal, if you're not a member of the military following lawful orders. so there's not much paramilitary stuff one can do. and insurgency is like... outlawed
> Are you also going to require a warrant for paramilitary insurgent groups to poll these databases?
No. Because this is a straw man.
> Maybe you intended to propose for them to be abolished entirely
Banks operate with liability for losses resulting from breaches. Unless Flock et al are routinly losing their entire database, this shouldn't be exisential.
> Banks operate with liability for losses resulting from breaches.
Not enough.
> Unless Flock et al are routinly losing their entire database, this shouldn't be exisential.
The risk of misuse by future governments is too great even if Flock's security was perfect. And allowing anything less than routinely losing the entire database is unreasonably lax even if you don't believe Flock is too risky to exist.
It isn't a straw man; paramilitary insurgent groups will just look like normal customers to Flock et al., except when they're stealing their entire database, which will indeed happen routinely.
Knowingly or negligently materially supporting violent crime creates criminal liability under conspiracy statutes. Plenty of states specifically regulate domestic terrorism [1]. And as we've seen with gun violence, by default being involved in acts of violence generates civil liability [2].
Negligence is generally not sufficient for conspiracy statutes, and Flock wouldn't have to be knowing or even negligent. Indeed, there is no possible way they could prevent their services from being used by violent insurgencies except to not sell them at all.
> Flock wouldn't have to be knowing or even negligent
Neither do banks.
> there is no possible way they could prevent their services from being used by violent insurgencies except to not sell them at all
Prevent? No. Increase the cost of? Yes.
Trying to police domestic terrorism by restricting what they see is a bit silly. But if that were a concern, I said "make the database operators strictly liable for breaches and mis-use." Domestic terrorism is mis-use. But it's not precedented mis-use, which makes it a strange priority to get distracted by.
Remove the legal requirements for license plates or tinted windows.
We gimp the ability of the public to obfuscate their vehicle by forcing us to have license plates in the first place, when we already prove our license to drive with VIN and registration.
Also, remove the intellectual property protections associated with the appearance of vehicles, thus creating a market of clones that can easily fit in with each other.
Owning a baseball bat is completely legal. Swinging it in your immediate vicinity is completely legal. Standing within baseball bat range of other people is completely legal.
But you'll quickly find yourself detained if you try to practice this innocent collection of legal activities together. The whole is different from the sum of its parts. It's a very common occurrence.
Simply, the scale of observation matters. Making observations at scale is categorically different than manual observations. And yes, there is a spectrum. But the important thing is that there is a difference between the ends of that spectrum.
The solution is to recognize that ease of observation interacts with expectation of privacy and legislate what can be done at each point on the spectrum. I have no expectation that someone won't take a picture with me in the background while I'm in public, but I would find it jarring to be filmed at every public location I went, have that video indexed to my name in a database, and have all my behaviors tagged. You write the law so that the latter thing is illegal and the former thing isn't. When there's a dispute about what's illegal, you have it resolved by the courts like every other law.
>Making observations at scale is categorically different than manual observations.
No it isn't. It's evidenced by the fact that you will need to decide some exact scale at which surveillance becomes illegal and under which it is legal
>When there's a dispute about what's illegal, you have it resolved by the courts like every other law.
Okay, but what ought they resolve to? That is what we are debating.
I think we have a mass re-assessment coming for how we think about data collected in public spaces. The realities of mass surveillance and mass data correlation come to very different outcomes than they did when we established our current rules about what is allowed in public spaces.
I don't really know what a better system looks like - but I suspect it has to do with the step where the info is provided to a third party. We can all exist in public and we can all take in whatever is happening in public - but it's not clear that passing that observation on to a third party who wasn't in public is an important freedom. Obviously this cuts both ways and we need to think carefully about preserving citizens rights to observe and report on the behavior of authorities (though also you could argue that reporting on people doing their jobs in the public space is different than reporting on private citizens).
> we can all take in whatever is happening in public
People have the right to take in what is in public, but maybe cameras should not?
This could apply to everyone in public spaces. No video, audio or surveillance without obtaining permission. Better blur anything you share, or you might get busted. The least we could do is restrict corporations from possessing such data.
Similar to what Germany does with doorbell cameras, making it illegal to film anything outside of your property, like a public sidewalk or the neighbors house. It is my understanding that people there will confront someone taking pictures of them without their consent.
> People have the right to take in what is in public
You write this as if it is a fundamental human right. I disagree. I could imagine this could be treated differently in different cultures. As an example, Google Maps has heavily censored their Street View in Germany to scrub any personal info (including faces). Another common issue that is handled very differently in different cultures: How to control video recording in public places.
> Google Maps has heavily censored their Street View in Germany to scrub any personal info
I remember when this first launched in the UK, automated face-scrubbing was in place. It was about 90% accurate on scrubbing faces from pictures. One of its best screwups was showing people's faces as they were standing outside a branch of KFC but blurring out the Colonel.
Please take a moment to draw for us detailed faces of all the people you've "taken in" today while you were outside. Use a sketch artist if you need to. Now compare those results with what you'd have if you did the same with a photocamera. And for good measure, add in the amount of effort it took you to recall, and the effort it will take you to describe to every reader on HN who you saw today.
Do you really not see any difference between the human process and what a digital camera can do?
I think we're agreeing but our frequencies are mixed. I was just saying "you can't stop people from using their eyes in public".photography and recording laws are very different.
for more context, the chain started with this:
>People have the right to take in what is in public, but maybe cameras should not?
and then the direct reply disagreed with this notion. I just wanted to distinguish between "taking in" and cameras, because it appears that user made a similar mistake.
I dunno - I think there are uses of surveillance in pursuit of enforcing laws that I don't think are harmful. Like...maybe you can record the public and pass it on to the police when there's a specific request for a time and place that a crime was allegedly committed? Like - if an organization has a legitimate interest in what happened there you can pass on your recording. But you can't just sell it to some random data broker, because they don't have a specific reason to want a recording of that place at that time.
My jaded AF crystal ball called history says that these things never change until the petite-bourgeoise (I'm no Marx fan, but I think he did a good job with that part of his social class classification system) are seriously harmed by it. The rulers don't care. The poor have real problems. This sorts of crap happens or doesn't happen at the behest of the materially comfortable people in the middle. And it seems like they never learn except the hard way.
The best time to plant a tree is 20yr ago. The second best time is today.
The best time to ostracize, ridicule and marginalize the people who support the growth of the surveillance state is a generation ago. The second best time is today.
I say we ostracize the crap out of the people who peddle, justify and facilitate these activities. It worked for wife beating, worked for drunk driving, worked for overt racism.
This is not a technical problem. This is not a law problem. This is a social norms and acceptability of certain actions problem. Applications of technology and law follow norms.
This is a law problem though. This is clear violation of 4th amendment. You’re being unreasonably searched when a set of traffic observation cameras turn into surveillance of a particular individual. This is not that hard to understand, observing traffic flow != tracking YOU in particular. That should require a probable cause and proper warrant, we want to identify this individuals movements because …
The US system is VERY good at giving a minority veto power if there is legal avenue for such (see also: obamacare). We've been walking all over the 4th (and others) since the 20th century. This isn't a law problem. This is a "there is clearly broad political will for violation of rights in limited circumstances and the system is taking it and running with it as far as it can" problem.
Specific to US copyright law, there are exceptions for "public persons". Without these exceptions, it would severely restrict reporting on said persons. The most important part of that last sentence is elected officials. In any highly advanced democracy, you want to grant your media wide access to elected officials for reporting purposes.
>the simple sounding proposal has a lot of complexity hiding behind it.
Okay? We're not on a legal forum drafting the 50 page law to cover all those loopholes. I'm nor even sure if the posting limit here would faciliate that.
I trust some decent lawyers can take the high level suggestions and dig into the minutae when it comes to real policy. And I find it a bit annoying to berate the community because they aren't acting as a lawyer (and no one here claims to be one AFAIK).
>If I’m a photographer, do I have to get consent from both the divorced parents to photograph the kids? The kids themselves?
Check your state laws. The answer will vary immensely. Another reason a global forum like this isn't the best place to talk about law.
AFAIK that is not correct. They are issued by the government. Required by the government to be displayed on the car if you are driving on public roads. But the plate is not physically owned by the government. The biggest distinction seems to be that in some states it becomes part of the car, and in other states it stays with the driver when ownership of the car changes hands (or the owner of the car can choose either option when selling the car).
As an aside, these days I am guessing the latter is the truth in most states. So many specialty and personalized plate options out there that people are going to want to keep for themselves.
Obviously the government does own a small number of plates, of course, because they attach them to government owned vehicles.
Ride a bike! I half-kid, but it's interesting to consider that cycling is a right which can't be taken away in the US, while driving is a privilege that can be revoked.
How does it stop you from being observed by cameras? These cameras log more than just the plate numbers, they take note of the appearance of drivers, all sorts of things.
Practically, because bicyclists aren't licensed. It is true that in some jurisdictions cyclists have to register or license their bicycles, so potentially failure to do so could get you fined or even have your bike impounded.
If riding a bike was as common as a car it'd be regulated all the same.
You already see "certain demographics" that suspiciously always seem to feature prominently in any given decade's policy failings screeching about how e-bikes need registration because they let people they don't like have easy geographic mobility.
Naw, I just want to hear what the sociopathic tech bros who think they own the world think- they have an outweighed influence on my material reality.
I just want to know before one of them decides it is inevitable that we solve global warming by blotting out the sun or something, and makes that choice for the rest of us.
Not being such a car-dependent society that every single person is forced into a dangerous, personal machine that requires licensing and tracking, to do absolutely any activity outside the house.
I think the solution is simple - make it legal to hide your license plate, but make the hiders required to be remotely openable by an authorized law enforcement user. The plate hider should keep an audit log of the time, name, and badge number of the cop that required it to be opened. Anyone who wants to read license plates for a private purpose (not law enforcement) can either ask you nicely to open the hider, or screw off.
More likely we get RFID tags in them or something and then the cops stop caring about the letters being defaced (except as a pretest for fishing, same story as tail light out or whatever) because they just use the tag reader 99.999% of the time.
>Therefore taking millions of photos in public of cars, and turning their license plate numbers into a database is legal, as is selling that information
Very typical engineer thinking. The world doesn't work that way. Laws and social norms don't abide by formal logic.
Doing this as a private citizen is one thing. When the government does it the implications are vastly different. That is kind of the whole point of the constitution.
> Taking a photograph of a car with its license plate is legal.
And perhaps it was legal because before mass surveillance and automatic license plate readers it was difficult to impossible to abuse that.
Perhaps it shouldn’t be legal in the same way anymore.
These days they can just photograph everyone and then go back later and figure out where they were when that person is of interest. It’s pre-emptive investigation of innocent people for future use.
You ban monetization of the data. The federal government has the power to regulate interstate commerce.
States can ban this behavior as well.
Furthermore, legislators can create a right to privacy in the law, letting people sue companies who collect this data. And to top it off, states and the federal government can make corporate officers personally liable for collecting this information without consent.
With Lina Khan biding time in NYC, I do believe we are going to see this change very soon. I don't think there will be any public sympathy for tech companies in the next political cycle.
Unlike normal activities, driving is an overtly public act. You need permission to do it, and it’s entirely reasonable for the state to monitor you doing it.
Allow people to secure temporary plates that are just aliases to their normal plate so they can be swapped every x hours. Then people could use paper temp plates and change them frequently while the state still maintains the supeonable connection to the true registration.
Knowing the US dmv, this will cost $50 and only be doable twice per year, but it should be offered free of charge to be reprinted at least daily. It's not expensive to maintain a massive data lake of the records.
> I'm curious what you think the solution is?
>
> Taking a photograph of a car with its license plate is legal. As is selling a photo you've taken, whether it has a license plate or not.
>
> Therefore taking millions of photos in public of cars, and turning their license plate numbers into a database is legal, as is selling that information. It's all data gained in public.
>
Collecting and selling PII without a person's consent is certainly not legal in many places.
Eliminating license plates would be a good step. As I understand it, license plates were established as a compromise between privacy and accountability: they made it possible to track down evildoers without entirely eliminating anonymity in public. Now, due to advances in computer technology, they entirely eliminate anonymity in public. Therefore we should abolish them and invent an alternative that strikes a better balance between these concerns. Encrypted radio beacons, for example, which beep to alert the driver when they are being probed.
> Encrypted radio beacons, for example, which beep to alert the driver when they are being probed.
That thing would ping so often that everyone would just turn it off. You'd also want to require it to always be on so that, for example, someone can't do a hit and run.
The problem that needs to be addressed is the fact that the american police force has WAY too much power and funding. Particularly the DHS.
The tracking sucks, but what sucks more is the police using that tracking in pretty much any way imaginable.
You'd need to have some causal pathway from it pinging too often through people getting irritated to removing the scanners that were doing the excessive tracking.
Police forces are not the only ones who can use this information. Foreign intelligence agencies, violent insurgencies, and drug cartels can also use it.
The rub is that the information is something that regular drivers need access to.
If I get into a car accident, I need some way to know who hit me in the case they bolt from the scene.
And that's what makes this a hard problem. I don't think there's a solution that allows me to address a hit and run and would prevent the groups you mention from similarly tracking people.
As I said in another subthread, it would be surprising if the solution were not worse in some way than the status quo ante; after all, we're looking for a solution to the new problem of mass surveillance, not taking advantage of a new opportunity.
License plates were always about taxation/revenue first. Creating some level of identifiability without putting people's names on their cars was how it was sold to the general public.
Yes. It's potentially a privacy win because (1) it can't be read by random people, only law enforcement, and (2) it can't be read without notifying you.
You can’t make a transceiver and chip for this kind of deployment that can only be used by the right people. Either the secrets will leak or the implementation will have vulns or both.
Oh, I was on cypherpunks in 01992, so I know about the Clipper Chip. But in this case you don't need to keep any secrets from the owner of the vehicle; they're free to attach a debugging connector to their own transceiver and read it at any time. The idea is to make their car anonymous to other people, except for law enforcement, not to themselves.
Maybe you think there's no way that the transceiver can successfully authenticate those law-enforcement requests without containing secrets. It can; it only needs the public key of a root CA.
It's possible that you could learn to recognize every individual car from things like the pattern of scratches on their hoods, yes, but this ability has not been demonstrated and may prove more difficult than you think.
I don't know jack about the algorithms because classified and not my job, but I can tell you that however good you think it was, it was better. I don't know if it's real or just marketing BS but what we said publicly was that differences in antennas, mirrors and trim were key in re-identifying vehicles after they leave the observable area (e.g. two silver Camry's go into a garage, come back out, how do you keep track which is which).
License plates are there not to "catch evildoers". They're there because cars are heavy and kill people even when non-evildoers are operating them. The problem is not that cars can be tracked, it's that we design cities to mandate people travel in heavy metal boxes that kill people. When we made walking inconvenient, we also surrendered our rights.
In other words, cars were a fascist[0] long-con - a project of societal engineering to deliberately control Americans[1] by offering the illusion of freedom. I don't even think the panopticon of license plate readers was in the thoughts of the people who designed this nonsense, but all the major figures involved with the institutionalization of cars would have loved being able to bulldoze those pesky 4A/5A rights.
[0] Fords and Volkswagens are the original model swasticars.
[1] And, arguably, make segregation survive the Civil Rights Act - but that's a different topic for another day. Look up what Robert Moses did to highways on Long Island if you want to know more.
Bullshit. You don't need to track everyone to figure out who done it when something serious happens. You can do "good old fashioned police work" and go look at CCTV footage, ask witnesses, etc. People are happy to help when it's something serious.
ALPRs are useful so that mustache twirling evil people can a) have law enforcement more easily unilaterally do enforcement work from their desks without actually having support on the ground from the public b) burn public support doing stuff the public doesn't support without affecting their ability to investigate serious stiff. Neither of those are good.
Come on, it's not that hard to think of a solution.
Pass a law making it illegal to do a combination of collecting and storing personally identifying information, such as a license plate number, in a timestamped database with location data. Extra penalty if it's done for the purpose of selling the data.
Not saying I agree with OP, but for the law you described: any photo you take of a license plate on your smartphone would fit that description (unless you’ve explicitly disabled the automatic location and time stamping default).
So you’d need to further distinguish to preserve that freedom.
There’s a difference in intent, and you’re aware of that. Aggregating photos of license plates for the express purpose of building a database of license plates with location and other metadata to make profit from granting access to that database is clearly different to most other cases of taking, storing, and even selling photographs. There is no overlap here at all.
Its not hard to distugush individual pictures that contain trackable attributes like a license plate number from building a large scale database of them for sale. Or making such a database not legal to sell access to without removing that information, etc. It doesn't need to center on the contents of a single photo.
Then OCR'ing the camera roll on your phone would be illegal. Every photo is stamped with time and location, and your camera roll is a database.
That's why it actually is hard.
Plus, what about legitimate purposes of tracking? E.g. journalists tracking the movements of politicians to show they are meeting in secret to plan corrupt activities. Or tracking Ubers to show that the city is allowing way more then the number of permits granted. Or a journalist wanting to better understand traffic patterns.
The line between illegitimate usage and legitimate usage seems really blurry. Hence my question.
Thing is, I am not /really/ worried about private citizens with access to this. There are just limits to what a private citizen or even massive corporation can do. What concerns me is when governments get involved and aggregate these private databases. The government is the one that can violate your 4A rights. It exists to protect us FROM the government. Not from private citizens and that exposure is very different. A private citizen can't for example, prosecute me, etc.
> There are just limits to what a private citizen or even massive corporation can do.
You’re just not being creative enough. Car insurers could increase your premiums if you often travel through dangerous intersections, employers could decide to pass you over for promotion if you’re often at a bar, etc.
Even better, make the law flexible enough to encompass all data brokers.
Car insurance can't wait to know everything about you. They will be crafting insurance policies that are specific for you and that will make unregulated insurance a very lucrative business proposition. Not sure if you can even call it insurance at that point.
If not for the government forcing us to buy their product they can't play games with premiums. It all comes back to government force at the end of the day.
How am I not? He proposes no company may store in a. Database a (PIi, Time, Location) triple. I am responding to exactly the claim he made and do not take kindly to your backseat moderating.
The context was surveillance without consent. Not service with consent. It is not certain they meant their proposal in this context. But it is plausible.
Users reminding other users of the guidelines is common here. I will stop if a moderator says to stop. Your complaint is your problem otherwise.
It's the same question we're asking with scraping. It's legal to read the data off one website. What's in question is mass scraping the entire Internet and bringing hundreds of sites to a halt.
Change the scope of the data, and you change your approach to the problem. I see no reason why law should be any different.
I think the data itself has to come under attack in a variety of ways. Thinking off the top of my head: Possession of the data could be made illegal. The data could be treated as a public record. Defendants could be guaranteed access to all data about them in the government's possession.
It is a matter of law that no digital database of firearms data can be made. The friction is a feature. I'd propose something surrounding license plates, phone info, SIM's and VIN's may be needed. Of course, LE and tax authorities would scream bloody murder, but if we didn't see such flagrant abuse of sensitive identifiers, then maybe they could be trusted with nice things.
IDK that I even have a problem with such a database existing (just like I don't really care about a firearms db existing). What I care about is access to the data. It should absolutely require a warrant before it can be accessed. That means the agency that wants to access it needs to prove to a judge that the person they are trying to track has done something wrong or worth invading their privacy over.
As it stands, we allow joe bob to access that database so he can harass brown people working on my roof.
>just like I don't really care about a firearms db existing)
You might not care, but even before computers were a big thing, and people thought "Computer" and IBM mainframes were synonymous, it was put forth in law that no central digital registry of firearms was to be made available to the Federal Government.
In short, NFA, GCA, and FOPA basically synergize to outlaw centralized registries of firearms owners in the U.S. due to the recognition of the particular temptation and value in organizing activities resulting in disarming the populace.
It is absolutely the case other identifiers and activity can be restricted to prevent foreseeable abuse, and to be honest, that this type of abuse wasn't foreseen is frankly testament to either our forebearers being comfortable with a surveillance dystopia or just being so disconnected from technical possibilities that they didn't understand the fire we were working with.
Any notion of an armed populace doing anything useful to protect freedom has been thoroughly debunked with the current administration.
If we can send people to concentration camps without a single armed conflict I can't for the life of me see why anyone would presume guns to have any effect on limiting tyranny.
That's why I just can't care about a firearm database being potentially used nefariously. Gun rights have done nothing positive for America.
It's not about the "populace" doing anything at scale.
It's about making abusing people under color of law come with a fairly significant chance that there will eventually be a body that was formerly on government payroll that needs to be explained away thereby making such activity much less lucrative.
>Gun rights have done nothing positive for America.
Despite being 13% of the population black men have been rounded up 0% of the time. There's two ethnic groups that can't say that, well, three depending on how you count.
> They tossed a bunch of Japanese in camps and right now they're going after immigrants real hard.
I think if you look at the entire history of the US, you'll find they've been going after Black people real hard the entire time, and that the root of mass incarceration was as a direct replacement for chattel slavery while the ink on the abolition of that institution was still wet, focussed on Black people, who have been vastly disproportionately its target ever since.
The law didn't stop them. The feds made one anyway and used tortured logic to pretend like they didn't. Many states have their own little ones because "hurr durr it's a tax not a registration"
> Therefore taking millions of photos in public of cars, and turning their license plate numbers into a database is legal, as is selling that information. It's all data gained in public.
In the US. GDPR forbids sharing or processing it without consent. Maybe the Californian privacy act does too?
Hacker solution: open/crowd source a pirate camera network. People submit feeds of traffic from whatever camera they have. We build tiny/concealable cameras to plant all over state capitals. Client-side software detects plates and reports only those on the target list. That list: every elected leader. The next time they hold a privacy-related hearing, we read out the committee chairperson's daily movements for the last month.
Other idea: AI-enabled dashcam detects and automatically reports "emergency vehicles" to google maps hands free. Goodbye speed traps.
You don't even need something so complicated. Those Flock cameras are so vulnerable you can easily make a botnet from them and make them serve your own malicious purpose.
It should be illegal for the government to do so, further make it illegal for businesses to do so AND for city, county, state, federal governments to utilize third party databases.
> You do not want local govt each building their own “secure” system
I really do. A centralised, insecure [1] database could lead to America losing a war.
A distributed system of low-reliability nodes is more robust than a centralised system that's very reliable. "ARPANET," after all "was built to explore technologies related to building a military command-and-control network that could survive a nuclear attack." (That's not what it wound up becoming.)
The solution is simple. If there's a judge that signed off on a warrant to track a particular vehicle or person, cameras should be permitted to track its movements.
Otherwise, cameras should only be allowed to track people actively breaking the law - such as sending tickets to people running red lights. They should not record or retain any information about drivers that are following the rules.
Fishing expeditions are illegal and immoral. Mass tracking of innocent people is immoral.
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Judicial warrants exist as a counterbalance between two public needs (The need to not be harassed by the police for no good reason, and the need for the police to be able to conduct active, targeted investigations of a particular crime.)
Police could switch to using VIN for tracking of warrants and such, which can be obtained after a car is pulled over.
Modern technology allows for every citizen to be tracked more comprehensively than the most wanted mob bosses or suspected soviet spies just a few decades ago.
Or simply outlaw the mass collection and sale or sharing of the data. We already outlaw sharing copies of music or movies, so I don't want to hear any complaints about enforcement- sure there'd still be some data floating around from random photos with a car in the background, but you wouldn't have repo tow truck drivers scanning 20,000 license plates a night or cameras in parking lots and such.
The solution is to wake up and start treating this like it is which is mass stalking. Sousveillance against the people who profit from these disgusting antisocial behaviours should be common place.
If an individual was to do this to a single person they'd considered a creep and the cops would rustle them out of a the bushes and seize all their cameras as evidence of their stalking behaviour.
The act of incorporating and doing the same thing en masse doesn't make it legal.
How to easily identify a car in a myriad of scenarios then that may or may absolutely not involve digital devices, like quickly remembering someone fleeing from an accident?
It would be surprising if the solution were not worse in some way than the status quo ante; after all, we're looking for a solution to the new problem of mass surveillance, not taking advantage of a new opportunity.
Flock has a series of bizarre, obviously LLM-generated blog posts trying to convince the public that they are working "toward a future where compliance and community trust walk hand in hand"....
If they are going to be used by the government and law enforcement, they are clearly government-collected data about you - and thus, are subject to (the state equivalent of) a FOIA request.
This puts an onerous compliance requirement on Flock and the ciites that allow it to operate.
Hopefully, WA's state legislature will decline to give them any exemptions, which will kill that company's operations in the state.
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Among other things, these cameras have been illegally used to spy on people who were getting an abortion in WA. Flock's executives (and the engineers who implemented that feature) belong in prison.
That would frankly be a narrow, reasonable application.
The problem is the database building. Law enforcement queries should all be forced to be
1. Require a warrant or an active emergency and
2. Be strictly real-time, for a set duration, and store no information about cars that are not subject to the warrant.
If either of those is not hardcoses into the technology, I don't want my local police department to be allowed to use license plate scanners whatsoever.
I mean frankly if the police had to put in the work to make parallel constructions for all the evidence they're gaining by abusing this system that would be a pretty solid start.
Do you think that corporate erosion of (or outright hostility to) privacy is somehow a compelling reason to deny rights to those of us who make different choices in an attempt to protect them? Just because some people decided to buy a smartphone on wheels, do I have to suffer and have my freedom of movement narrowed and protection from arbitrary inspection by government agents denied?
They do, but it is relatively easy to nuke the onboard modem to permanently disconnect your car. Unfortunately, most people don't know or don't care that their cars are actively spying on them.
My guess would be that your car would develop some covert or overt fault if you did that. You might even lose warranty as the manufacturer could claim that the issue they fixed via a software update couldn't be installed on your car - or couldn't monitor some diagnostics which are a prerequisite for in-warranty repair.
Most telco execs would sell their own mothers before offering reasonable data plans - that your car comes with one for free should be very telling
> My guess would be that your car would develop some covert or overt fault if you did that.
I used a bypass harness to avoid losing a speaker and the car hasn't developed any fault. I wouldn't buy a car without knowing in advance that this mod is possible. There are plenty of tutorials on how to do this for popular makes/models. It may be as simple as removing a fuse, or you might need to disassemble part of the dash to physically unplug the modem.
Here's a vid describing DRN & Resolvion supplying car location data to repo companies. I didn't realize they'll strap a camera pack on your car and pay you a commission on the license plate data you collect.
https://youtu.be/xE5NnZm9OpU?si=oEkSvUjNmBhQD-xI&t=138
Yeah, I was just watching a How Money Works video and how these same services are used for car repos. Worse yet, there is a gig economy around paying people to collect photos taken from private cars and giving them a kickback for any that lead to repos.
Don't use Google Location Service (GLS) on your phone. It's built into Google Play Services, aka the enormous rootkit from Google and does...stuff...with high accuracy location data because lawyers think they can argue in court that that data is "anonymized".
> revolves around being able to do illegal things.
The problem is, what is legal today might not be tomorrow. Especially depending on the regime in power at the time.
Mass surveillance can implicate someone in a crime if later on some regime decides that what they did or where they went is now a crime when it wasn't before.
Remember the push back against Apple's proposed client side scanning of photos to look for CSAM? What happens when the hash database starts including things like political memes, or other types of photos. What used to be legal is now not, and you get screwed because of the surveillance state.
Absolutely no data should be available without a warrant and subpoena, full stop. Warrants issued by a court, not a secret national security letter with a gag order either. Warrants only issued with true probable cause, not "acting suspicious."
Absolutely all your data is available for sale by data brokers. Need to get rid of those first. Then the government would need warrants where they don’t need warrants to just buy your data.
If you've worked in government, you'd know that that bar for getting a subpoena or warrant is far lower and less strenuous than getting a purchase order.
Which is also a problem that needs fixed. A search warrant should be extremely difficult to get. "The person is suspicious and we think we will find xyz illegal item" is not enough. An arrest alone shouldn't be enough either. Police/detectives should have to prove, beyond all reasonable doubt, that what they are looking for is actually there to get the warrant.
No, I had my wording mixed up. I meant to say probable cause, not beyond reasonable doubt.
The problem is the standard for probable cause is becoming too low. The courts often just rubber stamp warrants. We need systems in place to make sure warrants are only issued when the facts presented are so compelling that there is no possible doubt that probable cause doesn't exist rather than just the bare minimum to get rubber stamped by a judge.
Insufficient corroboration is already basis to refuse a warrant, but in practice that doesn't always happen. You are at the mercy of the police and court system and if you don't have the resources (money) to appeal and get your conviction overturned, you get screwed.
The standard for a warrant is probable cause, which is more stringent than reasonable belief.
Reasonable belief is what allows for police to take warrantless actions. Cop sees someone in a neighborhood walking around looking inside car windows and trying door handles. He now has reasonable belief enough to temporarily detain that person and ask what he's doing. No arrest or search may be conducted.
vs.
A court issued warrant requires probable cause. Cop let the suspect go in the first example (as he should with no probable cause for an arrest), and the next day someone in the neighborhood reports that their car was broken into and their laptop stolen. Cop checks local pawn shops and finds the laptop, the person that sold it to the pawn shop is the same person the cop stopped last night.
NOW the cop has enough probable cause to seek a search warrant to look for other stolen items.
Point being, reasonable belief or reasonable suspicion isn't and shouldn't be enough to search or detain. You need probable cause, and that probable cause needs to be affirmed by a judge and a warrant issued.
Generally, laws can't be applied retroactively. If you're in a regime that ignores that, then there really isn't a sense of law anymore to worry about.
A binary view is incorrect. Governments not having records of Jews would not have stopped the Holocaust. But this killed some people who could have escaped.
And the problem is not limited to retroactive laws. Phone scanning was another example in their comment. A regime could use this to restrict future communication even if they did not punish past communication.
The idea that US citizens actually give a fuck about defending anything is laughable. All of this is performative virtue signaling.
US literally has ownership of guns codified into constitution, specifically to allow citizens to defend themselves from oppressive regimes that fit CBP to the letter (i.e violence against US citizens), however a CBP officer is yet to be shot in a confrontation.
Its to the point where Trump can literally start confiscating guns, and the amount of armed resistance will be negligible, and most of it originating from organized gangs. When it comes to all the "dont tread on me" people, when armed forces are surrounding their house, and the chance of losing the easy comfortable life they have lived for the past 3 decades is very real, all of them are going to bend over and lube up so fast that they will get whiplash, without a doubt.
The most important reason for privacy is that without it, social norms calcify.
If a norm is outdated, oppressive, or maladaptive in some way and needs to be changed, it becomes very difficult to change the norm if you cannot build a critical mass of people practicing the replacement norm.
It is even harder if you cannot even talk about building a critical mass of people practicing the replacement norm.
For many norms, like the taboo on homosexuality which was strong in the US and Europe until recently and is still strong in many places today, the taboo and threat of ostracism are strong enough that people need privacy to build critical mass to change the norm even when the taboo is not enshrined in law, or the law is not usually enforced. This was the mechanism of "coming out of the closet": build critical mass for changing the norm in private, and then take the risk of being in public violation once enough critical mass had been organized that it was plausible to replace the old oppressive/maladaptive norm with a new one.
But yes, obsolete/maladaptive/oppressive norms are often enshrined in law too.
For good reason. Being "investigated" for illegal things is a key way to violate personal liberties. If you believe in freedom, you have to accept that some people who are not nice people benefit from those human rights. You may find yourself an "enemy of the people" for a variety of reasons.
In most cases, cell tower data is sold in the open market in aggregate. A commercial real estate developer can buy datasets that provide the average household income of passers by by hour of the day and month of the year, for example. The police can request tower ping data, generally by warrant. There are exceptions, especially in the federal space.
The Feds have a massive surveillance network. Every journey on the interstates between Miami and the border crossings near Buffalo, Watertown, Plattsburgh, Vermont and Maine all the way down to Miami is logged and tracked by a DEA program, which has likely expanded. You can get breadcrumbs of LPR hits and passenger photographs throughout the journey.
Flock is a cancer, as it is deployed by individual jurisdictions (often with Federal grants) and makes each node part of a larger network. They help solve and will likely eliminate some categories of crime. But the laws governing use are at best weak and at worse an abomination. Local cops abuse it by doing the usual dumb cop stuff -- stalking girlfriends, checking up on acquaintances. The Federal government is able to tap in to make it a node in their panopticon. Unlike government systems, stuff like user ids aren't really governed well and the abuses are mostly unauditable.
The private camera networks are a problem for commercial abuse and Federal abuse. They aren't as risky for local PDs because they generally require a paper trail to use. Corrupt/abusive cops don't like accountability.
>The police can request tower ping data, generally by warrant.
Or Trump can just put legal pressure on cell providers and they will bend the knee like everyone else, and CPB can easily have that data without problems.
Lets not pretend that that is the line they won't cross.
Those companies have been selling the data to the government without warrant for quite some time actually. No pressure necessary. Cops have money and Verizon wants it.
I want you to tell me in exact words that you firmly believe that when the current regime starts requesting records without any legal oversight, cell companies won't comply, because users trust is worth to them more than shareholder value.
Counterpoint: when you're sharing a public road, the license of your car to share that road isn't private information.
... But I echo the concern with how the collection and aggregation of the data can be abused. I just don't have a great solution. "Don't use shared public resources to do secret things; they're incompatible with privacy" might be the rubric here.
As much hate as it gets, the GDPR has pretty clear guidelines for situations like these. Essentially, the purpose of the data collection matters. Your license plates may be public information as in they are visible in the public, but that doesn’t mean collecting the information is, or providing others access to it - without your consent.
I mean... the whole point of a license plate is that it's a public identifier. It should not be that controversial that's publicly registered information. In the same way that flights are tracked.
Multiple Supreme Courts have also made it clear several times that they believe you do not have a right to privacy in public spaces. So all the traffic camera databases do is automate and make easier something that is currently definitively legal.
The more pertinent issue in this case is that driving patterns should not be grounds for detainment without a warrant. Especially if you have no evidence to link the driver to the car. But unfortunately, the recent Supreme Court decision made suspicion of being an illegal immigrant grounds for detainment.
> Multiple Supreme Courts have also made it clear several times that they believe you do not have a right to privacy in public spaces. So all the traffic camera databases do is automate and make easier something that is currently definitively legal.
I propose we streamline things and augment your cars license plate with a placard stating:
First and Last Name
Address and Phone Number
Drivers license number
Age and net worth
Prior convictions
Maybe there's a few more factoids we could add on there? I'd really like to know who is parked next to me. I mean, you're in public and have no expectation of privacy afterall.
This line of argument enables all kinds of criminals to do stuff you absolutely do not want them to. From stalkers figuring out the best time to rape their victim to organised crime planning cash truck robbery routes.
It's been fascinating watching the party of "small government" turn into one that supports ever expanding powers of a three letter agency whose job is supposed to be patrolling the border. It's like a new 9/11 Patriot act moment, except it's only one side supporting it this time.
It's the same as the Republican slogans of being the party of "fiscal responsibility" despite under-performing the Democratic party in nearly all financial metrics and constantly blowing up the deficit or being the party of "family values" while having leaders and 'respected' voices who are the complete opposite.
The party of small government is a slogan. It’s the same party that expanded domestic FBI surveillance, expanded intelligence agencies and lots of other things. It’s also the party that is intimately interested in what private citizens do in their bedroom (sodomy and condom laws) and what medical decisions doctors and patients can undertake.
To be fair, the current Republican Party bears almost no resemblance to the "classic" Republican Party of....10 years ago.
The Newt and the Tea Party started the slide, normalizing hatred and bombast and FU-politics, and MAGA perfected it.
Whether you love it, hate it, or are indifferent, what you are dealing with now are not really Republicans. They are MAGA-folks. They should really rename themselves the Solipism Party. Nothing matters but the current state of your own head.
And yes, I know parties change and evolve with the times, but I would argue this time is very different.
The "old" GOP also loved 3 letter agencies, unitary executive theory, and mass surveillance. They did the Patriot Act. And Scalia hated the 5th Amendment, was weird on the 4th, and dramatically increased police powers.
> To be fair, the current Republican Party bears almost no resemblance to the "classic" Republican Party of....10 years ago.
In other aspects, perhaps. But the "small government" or "pro-economy" branding of the Republican Party has been an absurdity for more like 75 years. Democratic administrations have performed better on virtually any conceivable economic metric with very few minor exceptions.
It's not like those Tea Party folk appeared out of the blue. They grew, but the core constituency has been pandered to by mainstream Republican leadership since at least Nixon.
The current Republican Party is the exact same as 10 years ago, just further along.
10 years ago was basically Trump 1. And 10 years before that was GWB starting the endless wars with an admin outright denying reality. Which Reagan also did. And of course Nixon literally broke into the opposition party’s.
The Tea Party, MAGA (and the on the other side of the isle the Bernie bros and whatever their replacement will be) represent pent up demand from the masses to get the current status quo to F-off. So far the status quo has co-opted all these movements.
.. 10 years ago. Yes it fucking does, it's just become more brazen. Those are the motherfuckers that passed the patriot act and then reupped it over and over.
Yes votes were 144 D and 213 R in the house with unanimous yes (only one no) in the Senate. Right after 9/11 people were fine giving up with their rights pretty much across the spectrum. Granted Republicans more than Democrats. I think since then it has just been the status quo for every president since Bush. I hate it but it has been engrained at this point IMO.
This all reminds me of Makeshift Patriot by Sage Francis.
Every US administration at least as far back as Woodrow has done nothing but expand the surveillance state. Like you can make the argument that occasional weirdos like Ike, Clinton and Hoover didn't really do anything to expand on that front and just kept the status quo and let them run themselves but there has never been any substantial rollback in at least 100yr. And as bad as the executive is the legislature is no better.
That's why all of these efforts to corrode civil liberties needs to be fought and contested by both sides. Otherwise the ratcheting effect makes if impossible to reclaim these liberties.
None of this is new. The article states that CBP got authorization to track license plates in 2017 and concerns about law enforcement use of ALPR date back to at least 2010. The ACLU sued the LAPD in 2013 on ALPR.
Is it? or is the new part that it's being reported? This "news" just looks like an investigation AP conducted on its own. Could they have conducted it years ago, and what would they have found then?
No it is not. The DEA has been doing that since at least the 2nd Bush admin and probably would've been under Clinton or Bush 1 had the tech existed at the time.
I've been seeing a slow splinter as of late between "establshment"-style Democrats focused on decorum, and the progressive-style democrats focused on overhauling the status quo. There definitely seems to be a slow shift towards people who want to take real actions an not stay stifled in years talking about actions.
Of course, the former won't let the latter perform without a fight. The campaign with Mamdami was one of many clashes on this, and there will be many more to come next year.
Either way, a focus of not falling to fascism is the bare minimum agreement between all democrats. I just hope we don't all think the job is done once we get the bar back from being underground. It being on the floor still isn't a great look.
They talk about increasing minimum salaries for exempt workers, paid sick and family leave, infrastructure funding, expanding access to healthcare, etc. How is that lower case conservative, or pro status quo?
Here’s some American context: a ~3 minute video. Bush and Reagan, during the primaries, trying to win over Republicans, answering a question about immigration.
Or even look at George @ Bush's calls for comprehensive immigration reform, and his repeated emphasis on treating all immigrants, legal or not, with dignity and courtesy: https://www.bushcenter.org/topics/immigration
Infrastructure funding is a pro-business position. At this point, most of the infrastructure that the Democrats are seeking funding for is maintenance, the definition of "status quo".
So is minimum wage, despite all of the screaming. Minimum wages ensure the existence of a working class. When the minimum wage drops below subsistence, there are civil disruptions that are bas for business.
When the Democrats expanded health care, they did so using a plan devised by the Heritage Foundation. It works on free-market principles, of consumers purchasing insurance from private enterprise. It is also very pro-business, creating a larger class of potential employees who can be hired without employer-sponsored benefits.
Many democrats would indeed like a government-run universal health care plan. But it's not a majority of the party, which is indeed (as the OP said) dominated by the center-right.
When have there ever been "civil disruptions" due to a low minimum wage in the US? Federal minimum wage has been underwater all of my life. If the minimum wage law had any teeth (requiring Congress to stop fellating business owners), it would at least be tied to the inflation rate (as Social Security tends to be).
If the Federal minimum wage had kept up with inflation since it's peak value in 1968, it would be close to $26/hour.
None of that is conservative or liberal or leftist its common sense that both parties should be able to agree on. There are policies that are logically the right thing to do.
If implemented with a modicum of competence (which is admittedly not a foregone conclusion) and over a sufficiently long period (probably at least longer than one or two 4-year terms), all of those things would almost certainly have positive effects on the economy.
They notably do not talk about modifying the systems of governance that have prevented us from accomplishing those goals, which they have been "talking about" nearly the entire 40 years I've been alive. If I were to ignore their talk and judge purely based on action, it certainly seems like Democrats effect less change than Republicans.
(to be clear about where I stand, when given a choice between a conservative party and a regressive party, I have always begrudgingly chosen the conservatives)
They directly increased access to healthcare and infrastructure funding in the last 15 years, and both were very obvious, big bills. Perhaps it would behoove you to actually pay attention, instead of memeing online about things you don't actually know anything about?
Do you know any progressives? Do you follow any politics outside the US? I'm going to guess not, because your frame of reference for what a genuinely progressive win would look like is woefully miscalibrated. I suggest you rectify that before accusing anyone else of ignorance.
Yes, they have had some incremental policy wins and done tremendous good for millions of people (while also making, e.g. healthcare more expensive/profitable). No, the occasional incremental policy win does not a progressive party make.
Since Clinton Democrats have been neoliberal (conservative). The mechanism they've chosen for all of their programs has been public private partnerships. Infrastructure funding, for example, has been "they created a slush fund for private companies to bid on". Healthcare was "They created a slush fund to pay for private insurance".
And I'll point out, that they also made healthcare more expensive with this slush fund approach. Medicare Part C was created by the Clinton administration which, you guessed it, created a giant slush fund for private insurance that ends up being more expensive than Medicare Part A/B.
I agree, democrats did expand access to healthcare, but they did it in the most expensive and easily corruptible way possible. The approach was literally a carbon copy of the Heritage foundation plan that Romney implemented in Mass.
You'll notice that, except for paid sick leave, all these things are simply "keep the lights on" policies. That is conservatism.
You might be confusing conservatism with libertarianism. Up until about Reagan, all these policies were considered conservative.
Progressive policies aren't just about tweaking existing policy, it's about building new social structures. We've not seen anything really close to that in the US since roughly LBJ.
"Woke" is more of a political weapon created by the right than any actual real concept.
There's no consistent or fixed definition of woke. It's a blanket term applied to anything that MAGA dislikes at any given moment. Woke's only purpose is to manufacture outrage, and it didn't exist as a concept until MAGA made it one.
One can just look at what they did whilst in power. During Biden's tenure, they severely weakened Title IX protections for women and girls, in deference to trans activist demands. They changed federal prison policy so that men who call themselves women could be incarcerated in women's prisons, and prison staff would be forced to pretend these male prisoners are women. Their "first-ever female four-star admiral" appointed to lead the public health corps, which they falsely touted as a historic win for women, was actually a male transvestite.
This is absurd and harmful policy. Of course the opposition are going to call it out.
For one, the party either was in favor or did not take a clear stance on issues such as trans people in women's sports, DEI practices and other similar "woke" issues. That was enough to turn off a huge number of voters. Democrats of the Clinton era would have easily defeated Trump.
What a weird stance. A minimum wage guarantees all citizens can live a life in basic dignity. A worker is, even if part of a union, still a citizen of a state. A state is the sum of its constituents. There is, beyond the bipartisan war, room for compromise and mutual understanding for the benefit of all.
Unions are by far a net positive, but the way they fight against universal healthcare and minimum wage for people not fortunate enough to have the option of being in a union makes me question this belief.
The far left always portrays the democrats as being too far left, even though both parties have moved to the left.
In 2000, no country in the world accepted gay marriage, up until 2013 gay marriage was banned in California because the Californians elected to do so (it was overruled federally against the wishes of the Californians).
In 2025, even a majority of Republicans (by some polls) support gay marriage. The far left always moves the goal posts. Once they legalized gay marriage, they considered it the norm instead of a wild idea that Republicans should fight to remove.
That's why you see the rise of Christian nationalism. Many consider the average Republican to be too far left (similar to how leftists consider Democrats to be too far right).
Personally, I'm for the Matrix opinion. In the Matrix, the future humans live in a simulated 1999 because it was considered the peak of human civilization. Socially, it was.
The goal of the far left has always been equality. It's the same goal that legalized interracial marriage.
> That's why you see the rise of Christian nationalism
We've always had an issue with Christian Nationalism in the US, and they use any excuse they can to push their agenda. If it's not gay marriage it's immigration, or trans rights, or whatever other wedge issue they can create a moral panic over.
It's vital to remember that nationalist goals are absolute, but they will lie about it. They say they just want to protect women's sports to get their foot in the door, and then they're banning gender affirming care and looking to re-criminalize gay marriage. There's no reason to compromise with nationalists.
They are anti-gun "progressive" nuts, how can they be "conservative". Their "normal" was destruction, so people voted trump in just to stop this idiocy (by starting a new one)
Small C conservative would be what these days? Iraq invading weed dealer arresting homosexual hating mid-00s "we call ourselves neoliberals bur are nothing of the sort"? Or their counterparts on the other side of the isle who are happy to build up the police state thinking it can do no wrong or happy to regulate the shit out of everything uncritically deluding themselves into thinking it won't become a handout for moneyed interests at the expense of upstarts?
As bad as shit is now I think that might actually be worse.
While people haven't yet suffered enough to agree to compromise and just wind the whole mistake down, there is a huge consensus on both sides of the isle these days that we have too much government swinging it's weight around in pursuit of things that are bad.
At this point, what would that party even be? Their only genuine appeal is to Christian fundamentalists who prioritize banning abortion and LGBTQ rights. There hasn't been a coherent domestic or foreign policy from them in decades.
Just to be clear, you really would prefer to live in crumbling infrastructure, with plenty of violence, martial law, and constant worry of whether you are going to get shot or not trying to get basic supplies?
Because boiler exploding isn't romantic or cool like you think it is. Imagine the worst possible riot, except country wide.
And they were right. The American revolution had more to do with the fact that the wealthy landowners in the colonies wanted to claim even more land to the west. The British crown was getting tired of sending soldiers to clean up the messes the colonists were getting into by picking fights with the natives.
Most of that rhetoric about tyranny and freedom was simply propaganda to get the poors to fight on their behalf.
And it worked! They successfully conned the other colonists into laying down their lives to make the founders even richer.
Somehow it doesn't feel all that different from America today. Something something history, doomed to repeat it.
If the ship is gonna sink there's an argument to be made for letting it go down with those who doomed it aboard rather some unspecified future generation.
The Reds very nearly lost the civil war to the Whites, not because of any battlefield victory, or even a concerted propaganda effort. Instead, it was because for a lot of people, they'd take going back to the old rotten monarchist system that got them into this mess, if meant they could just stop starving to death while party operatives came and took all their food away.
That's have likely been forced to go with a limited monarchy with a legislature and limited democratic characteristics (like most of the rest of europe at the time) in order to consolidate the support, or at least buy the compliance of the factions that opposed them.
That might've saved a whole bunch of lives. And looking at it now 100yr later, Russia didn't exactly turn out great.
The leadership of the Whites were not the moderate monarchists who just wanted Nicholas to abdicate to literally any functioning adult. They were the “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality or death!” types. Their explicit goal was a restoration of pre-Revolution autocracy, whose brutal dysfunction was the explicit reason for the February revolution in the first place. The Whites were not good people, and it’s a mistake to characterize them as simple, noble anti-communist fighters. Most of the White leadership that survived into WWII went beyond just collaborating with the Nazis on invading Russia, but were onboard for all of the Nazi program save for “Ukraine belongs to Germany now”.
Don’t misunderstand me, Stalinism was worse for Russia than the Czars, but there’s really no White-victory scenario where it’s all sunshine and roses and limited democracy. That option went out the window with the October revolution.
All I’m saying is that there is no better illustration of how bad War Communism got than the fact that people looked at the literal pogroms and said “maybe that’s not so bad”.
> for a lot of people, they'd take going back to the old rotten monarchist system that got them into this mess, if meant they could just stop starving to death while party operatives came and took all their food away.
That describes Russia under Putin. Putin considers his regime to be a continuation of Imperial Russia. He's brought back the Imperial Eagle, the Russian Orthodox Church as an arm of the state, considers himself to be the next Peter the Great, and says that his goal is to extend Russia to its traditional boundaries, out to at least the edge of Poland and the Baltics.
Communism was a historical accident which has now been corrected.
People fantasize about revolution, but the reality would mostly be huge amounts of suffering and death.
And there's near-zero chance that the outcome would be the 'high-tech fully-automated luxury communism' that people dream of. There's many much-more-likely outcome that are worse than what exists now.
Accelerationism never works. There's a long, long list of complete and utter disasters and tremendous suffering inflicted by this moronic logic. Things get better by being made better, not by being made worse.
It has never been about small government. You can just look at the Republican record on deficit spending or military funding to dismiss that. “Small government” was just an acceptable way to say you were for reducing benefits to people deemed undeserving.
There are people who called themselves Republican who started to believe their own propaganda, but it’s never been an empirical fact in the modern era that Republicans acted to reduce government spending in toto.
There's no need to partisanize this. Why would you immediately turn off half of your possible audience when speaking about an issue that affects everyone equally? San Francisco is covered in Flock cameras just like the ones pictured top-right in the article, and you won't find a more-Democrat-leaning place. One cannot analyze and act on data that does not exist: https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/sf-takes-historic-step-to-s...
Flock is sort of a new kind of animal in the LPR space. Before that there were a lot of LPR companies out there but none of them were providing data in such a way that law enforcement could do what it's doing. LPR has been in use for tolling and for parking enforcement for decades now. It's the same kind of shell game Ring has been running by putting surveillance cameras on everyone's house and then selling access to law enforcement.
On the contrary, the only way to drive change in a democracy is via partisanship. Demanding we all adhere to an artificial both-sides framing is manufacturing consensus for the status quo. Politicians only change their positions if they think they'll lose votes because of it.
Also, obviously, because the analysis in this case is clearly wrong. This is a 100% partisan issue. Period. There are good guys and bad guys in the story, and if you won't point out who they are you're just running cover for the bad guys.
> Politicians only change their positions if they think they'll lose votes because of it.
And you won't convince any of that party's voters to care about location privacy enough to make it a vote-changing issue if you open your argument by criticizing their party (which, yes, almost universally sucks) instead of talking about the actual issue, which is location privacy.
This is HN, no one here is ignorant of the issue. Even granting your framing, you're addressing the wrong audience. This is the choir here, not the laity.
Look, no, that's just wrong. Immigration enforcement overreach (and law enforcement overreach more generally) is an almost purely republican issue. Period. Trying to silence criticism, especially in this forum, is simply trying to deflect blame.
How so? You don't want us discussing the fact that republican policymaking is behind the CBP overreach in the linked article. You... literally said so.
There is nothing small Govt anymore. Both parties are the same when it comes to extending Govt's power (just for different reasons). It is just a talking point now.
The problem is that the "both sides are bad" people just uniformly vote Republican. Its the cope of understanding that your side is batshit insane, so you have to pretend that the current state of affairs doesn't actually matter, and the problem goes deeper in the goal of normalizing your party.
The truth is, the only reason not to trust the intel community is because of some fringe bullshit you heard on Joe Rogan.
I've been voting third party for a long time. When both sides are bad (in different ways) it is the only choice left. (The third party isn't all that great either, but they are better and hopefully they send a message that people care)
No because the statistics are counted. People in the "smoke filled backrooms" pay attention to what third party messages are getting attention and in turn use that to inform how they change. Long term it isn't a bad strategy, but it does mean you have to accept whoever wins (though in rare cases a third party has won) for today. If one candidate isn't too bad I will vote for them.
In my case I've decided on criteria is has not held this office for more than one term (that is I give you two terms no matter what office you are running for) because no matter how much I agree with you I don't want anyone to spend too long in government.
I consider third parties running in Presidential elections to be joke candidacies but what you’re saying is just the whining of whoever lost the election that was influenced by third party voters. Would have been the same result if the third party voters didn’t vote btw.
People in the "smoke filled backrooms" pay attention to what third party messages are getting attention and in turn use that to inform how they change.
Kinda like how the Libertarians got ~3% of the vote 2016, and over the following years the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire was taken over by groypers and the national LP endorsed Trump in 2024? I mean, in an ideal polity you'd be right, major parties would pay attention to where they're losing votes at the margin to inform their policy decisions. But we live in a far-from-ideal polity where the two major parties systematically undermine minor party candidates at anything above the county level.
When faced with reality over the past decades, and the historically good record that Democrats have had, versus historically bad record that Republicans have had, versus the unproven record that any 3d party had,
and considering what was at stake in the 2024 election,
you either voted for sanity (especially given that Kamala was the most milquetoast unoffensive candidate ever which would have been MILES better than what we have now), or you voted for insanity, because lack of vote for Dems means you were giving Trump a chance to win.
This is your cope to justify your side's righteousness. Many people recognize how awful both parties are and do not vote republican. Every socialist/leftist/communist falls into this category.
Wait, are you saying mass surveillance is a good thing?
Seriously. Where were all these people when the Democrats overreached into every aspect of our lives?
Apparently the only criticism is an accusation of hypocrisy for calling themselves the party of small government. Nothing wrong with the actions themselves apparently! Lol.
Plenty of people complained and wanted all government overreach to stop - this is an even more dire situation, propped up by people who directly lied and said they were not interested in this (which they obviously are, and they are liars.)
Why are you complaining about people's concerns instead of the actual problems created by those in power?
Because it feels like theater for party politics instead of genuine concern. I expect these people to go quiet when Democrats come into power and start doing the same things.
The same things? You mean effectively making money laundering legal, crashing the government and starving the poor, ending health care benefits, stealing directly from the coffers, pardoning sex pests and criminals as they continue to commit crimes, ramp up terrorist action against american cities, drop bombs on boats with no justification, roll back our environmental protections to invest in dead end energy projects, double down on crony capitalism, make it so corporations either bend the knee by directly giving money to the president or have their business ended with tariffs, and generally do everything they can to rob us blind and you say "oh it's all the same!"
The president is sending the troop into cities on made up offenses, he's posting to social media shitting on american citizens, he's doing death threats on sitting politicians, this is not the same you absolute twat.
Yeah the emerging 'The Bullwark' wing of the democrat party. Never trumper republicans trying as hard as they can to move the right flank of the democrat party into the bush era republican gradient so that they can pretend that they didn't lose their own party.
If you're interested in some reflection on that, What's the Matter with Kansas? (2004) by Thomas Frank explores some of this, but centered around Kansas. Pretty interesting (and frustrating) stuff.
While you're not wrong, not sure it applies here. This is an all-party thing:
Started about a decade ago to fight illegal border-related activities and the trafficking of both drugs and people, it has expanded over the past five years.
Some of the lawsuits (cited in article) to fight this, and illegal pull overs, go back years.
Really? It shows how this tech can be used in ways you don't like, when your party is no longer in power. How whatever laws you pass, surveillance you enact, powers you give, aren't just for you.
Well at least post 9/11 unconstitutional escalation required legislation and the creation of agencies like the DHS and TSA. Now, a political culture that is willing to break norms and abuse technicalities is silently expanding powers to the max, and that’s far more insidious. But maybe it’ll result in a strengthened democracy in the long term if new laws or amendments are passed to contain this problem.
Meh. I think political parties in the states are really there just to make money. Why else would the dems keep pelting you with adds for $5? I think both parties are saying whatever they need to say to convince people to give them cash. The number of people who care about privacy seems smaller than the number of people who want to be entertained by politicians, so it's unlikely to change anytime soon.
"turn into" is referring to the mask off nature of it all. Before, they might be a little embarrassed or pretend they still stand for those principles. But all I've seen are conservatives explaining why it might be technically allowed or straight up cheering it on.
The logical conclusion of all this oppression is that everyone will just stay home, and go out no more than necessary, and spend no money that isn't absolutely necessary.
You can't even call the GOP the party of capitalism either.
The party that took a 10% stake in Intel to at least partially nationalize it. The party of tariffs, the party of special interest tax loopholes giving taxpayer subsidies to fossil fuels, real estate, and agriculture, the $400 million equity stake in MP materials.
Sure sounds like they are picking winners and losers, the antithesis of free market capitalism.
They've been at these programs for decades; if they were effective we wouldn't be in a drug epidemic At some point you have to cut your losses and accept that the only benefits were the politicians Flock donated to.
I'm not saying you have to abolish CBP. I'm saying they should be protecting the border and this ain't it.
Millions of illegal aliens have entered the US under Biden. They're not all hanging at the border. Of course CBP needs to go everywhere in the US to remove all of them.
Before terrorists it was drugs, before that it was communists, before that it was communists with less weed and shorter hair.
Eventually you realize your enemy isn't the system. The system is like a misbehaving toddler that's never been disciplined. It acts as badly as it can get away with. Your enemy is your fellow countryman, you coworkers, your own family. And from that realization comes nothing actionable nor good conclusions, only despair...
ICE has very little legal authority and is yet the current president’s ground troops to lock up everyone who looks foreign. I’d say they have all the power they need.
ICE can walk into your house / pull you out of the car with masks on and kidnap you without showing you any papers. That's more power than a lot of other agencies
Trump wasn't in office at that time. He urged Republicans to not pass it for various reasons which I will not enumerate here, and CBP was funded weeks later.
The reasons you don’t want to enumerate here are “he wanted only Republicans to look good on the border by ensuring that nothing could get passed while a Democrat is president”. He doesn’t care about the border, he cares about authoritarianism and party politics.
Translated to "Even though I know that most republicans said they didn't want to go against someone who had a very good chance winning in 2024 for the fear that they would get their political career destroyed, because that is what Trump explicitly said to them, I will vaguely allude to some fringe statements about things that haven never been proven true in regards to other aspects of the bill as the reason Republicans didn't vote for it, because in no way shape or form will I ever admit that I was wrong.
I don't get why people on your side still think that saying shit like this makes you sound smart. That ship has long sailed.
There were a lot of things not to like about the bill, such as being tied to Israel/Ukraine aid, setting an emergency trigger that normalized flooding the border, and it being a token measure for Biden to use in the election.
The only thing fascinating is that anyone believed any of that crap.
Everything that Trumpists are doing was peddled in the 1990s by such distinguished figures as Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani. Usually with a nauseating appeal to "rule of law". The "surprise", and "this behavior may be the path to authoritarianism" stuff in the NY Times makes it hard to read without an eyeroll.
> except it's only one side supporting it this time.
I wish.
Very early on in this Trump admin there was a bipartisan bill passed which greatly expanded the capabilities of ICE to deport [1]. Democrats have been well aligned with the republicans when it comes to immigration policy. You'll find few that will actually criticize the actions of ICE/DHS.
46 voted yes. And just a few months prior democrats tried to pass this [1] [2]. Which only failed because Trump didn't want Biden to be able to show a "tough on the border" stance.
Again, you'll find few democrats that have a stance on the border that contradicts the Republican stance. There are a few, but most are just staying silent. The only reason they vote against these sorts of bills is because of pure partisanship, not out of some ideology alignment.
We've had a generation of leaders allowing in tens of millions of people to flood into the country, the American people have voted against it every time they are given the chance and still nothing is ever done about it. The right wing voting base doesn't care about small government, we care about stopping the flood and undoing the damage that decades of these policies have caused. Look at polling data, especially among young people, border enforcement and deportations are what we want.
Look at the recent actions in Charlotte: ICE raids started and 25% of the school kids didn't show up to school. Which indicates that likely 25% of the population is illegal. It is a massive problem.
> ICE raids started and 25% of the school kids didn't show up to school. Which indicates that likely 25% of the population is illegal.
you're downvoted but this is a very real thing, especially at the elementary school level. My kids had regular classes in first/second grade taught in Spanish because they were the one single English speaking student in the room (this was fixed when my wife and I found out). The level of illegal immigrants in schools goes down over time as they drop out. My son is now 16 and a sophomore in HS, SEM Magnet, and in a class of about 100-125 he knows maybe 10 that have told him they're here illegally.
> border enforcement and deportations are what we want.
this is not what “we want” - this is what ruling party wants you to think and obsess over while they pillage and make your life otherwise miserable.
the same young votes voted for Biden in 2020 knowing very well what the immigration policy would be (and they were as bad as it gets the first two years)
The “party of small government” has always seen protection of sovereignty and borders as exactly one of the few things a government should actually do.
Your comment feels unsubstantiated. What do you mean by that? Or do you just mean the current government has Republicans at the top.
Can you share data on how people of one party are supporting ALPR and the other are against it? I was looking for a public poll on this question and couldn't find one.
Polling this year consistently shows that Republicans support all the actions being taken with respect to immigration under this admin. Sorry I don't have any links handy at the moment, but you can see it in this thread: "too many people crossed under Biden, look what you made us do!"
I don't see anything in the article that says anything about immigration. From the info provided, this is about suspicious behavior ID'ed via ALPR, and they don't specify suspicious of what. That seems very broad and something a reasonable person would expect many people of all parties to be wary of, not just people of one party.
Hard to blame this squarely on the Republicans. Access to private license plate readers was granted under the Biden admin, and no doubt each of the last four administrations played some part.
To me, the CPB and ICE are looking more and more like an American Gestapo.
Small government without control of who comes in is borderline anarchy, and they never claimed to be for anarchy. Small government internally requires border controls, and if the border controls failed in the past do you expect them to just shrug? I can see disagreeing with them, easily, I just don’t see obvious hypocrisy like you are suggesting.
We're literally discussing a mass surveillance dragnet throughout the country (not just at the border) here; the kind of stuff that is normally reserved for dystopias in fiction.
To argue that it is somehow okay because it enables "small government" to exist is very much in the spirit of "war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength". When thugs in uniform stop and interrogate Americans on the roads because their movement patterns are "suspicious", there's nothing small about it.
I’m not saying it’s okay, but I am not a small government person. Illogical arguments just bother me. I think small government is impossible for other reasons.
The republicans have been the party of massive military since forever. I don’t really see how this is different.
Small government without [big thing I happen to like] is [bad thing] therefore it's okay to make the government big in [the aspects I like] and I don't see any hipocrisy in that.
65% of the US population, 200 million Americans, live within the 100-Mile "Constitution-Free Zone".
Supreme Court has established that some established constitutional provisions do not apply at the U.S. border, and protections against governmental privacy incursions are significantly reduced.
The border search exception applies within 100 miles (160 km) of the border of the United States, including borders with Mexico and Canada but also coastlines.
This is mostly a canard, kept alive by fundraising pages at ACLU, but contradicted directly by current pages on the ACLU's site. It feels useful on a message board to call out things like this, but it actually hurts people in the US, who deserve to know that they do not surrender their 4th Amendment rights simply by dint of living within 100 miles of Lake Erie.
> (really good Penn State law review article on that thread)
Yes, and what it says is this:
>The Supreme Court has decided that there is a reduced expectation of privacy at the border, holding that the government’s interest in monitoring and controlling entrants
outweighs the privacy interest of the individual. Thus, routine searches
without a warrant, probable cause, or reasonable suspicion are considered
inherently reasonable and automatically justified in that particular
context.32 Fourth Amendment rights are therefore significantly
circumscribed at the border, and CBP is given an expansive authority to
randomly—and without suspicion—search, seize, and detain individuals
and property at border crossings that law enforcement officers would not
have in other circumstances.
The constitution free, means that constitutional rights are reduced within the area.
I reread that old thread, and then skimmed the Penn State article (a bit quickly, I admit). I gotta say: I think you're overstating your case here. Certainly, the author of that article is skeptical about the 100-mile zone and makes plenty of good (and, IMO, obvious) points about why it is constitutionally suspect. But, to read your comments, you'd think that some important court somewhere has actually placed meaningful limits on immigration enforcement within that zone (outside the context of an actual border crossing). If so, I don't see where you're getting that. If that's actually in the article, could you tell us where?
To be fair, though, I think it is also true that the ACLU is too eager to talk about the "Constitution-Free Zone" as though it is fact. I also agree that people should not simply accept that the Constitution-Free Zone exists. It is definitely not that simple and what would otherwise be 4th Amendment violations should absolutely still be challenged even if they occur within the zone. There is still every opportunity for more good law on this.
Without wanting to recapitulate this argument for the Nx1000th time if we don't have to I'll just say that the points I'm making are points ACLU itself now makes.
Since the ACLU is largely the origin of this meme, I think that's pretty dispositive.
Importantly: I am (for the Nx1000th time) not saying that federal law enforcement officers won't make abusive claims, or directly abuse the law; they certainly will. As I said in the previous thread, they managed to detain Senator Patrick Leahy more than 100 miles from a border, which, when you think about the implications of the 100-mile-zone, is kind of a feat!
>The federal government defines a “reasonable distance” as 100 air miles from any external boundary of the U.S. So, combining this federal regulation and the federal law regarding warrantless vehicle searches, CBP claims authority to board a bus or train without a warrant anywhere within this 100-mile zone. Nearly two-thirds of the U.S. population, over 213 million people, reside within the region that CBP considers falling within the 100-mile border zone, according to the 2020 census. Most of the 10 largest cities in the U.S., such as New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago, fall in this region. Some states, like Florida, lie entirely within this border band so their entire populations are impacted.
Which, upon re-reading both of your comments in this thread makes me actually think there is no argument at all and everyone here and the ACLU agree: there is a no consitution zone, it has practical consequences, and it does extend out 100 miles from internal foreign borders.
The executive branch asserts that there is such a zone. But the truth is likely that many, if not all, 4th Amendment rights still apply in many situations within that zone. It's situation dependent, so it's difficult to make a sweeping generalization. But some of the executive branch's most aggressive claims and tactics, at least, may well not hold up in court.
I think one thing that happens in these discussions is that people lose sight of how big a deal an actual border search is. An actual border search (I've had the pleasure! And mine was on the mild end of things.) is much worse than a search incident to arrest.
What I feel like people do here is map everyday abusive law enforcement behavior onto that border search exemption without realizing that what they're actually suggesting is that people should expect (and thus roll with) a "tear everything apart, search under clothes, maximally invasive" border search, which is what the Constitution authorizes at an actual border crossing.
Drive a white Altima across I20 from Abilene to Shreveport. Be a good boy and drive within the speed limit. You'll get pulled over for suspicion of being a drug mule. Of course you're innocent, but if you decline to allow them to search your car, they'll call in a drug dog that's trained to alert whenever its handler wants. So they toss your car and all your belongings. Strip out all the door panels, everything. If they want, they can plant evidence and jail you. If they decide to be nice, they just leave you on the side of the road trying to figure out how to put your car back together.
> The executive branch asserts that there is such a zone. But the truth is likely that many, if not all, 4th Amendment rights still apply in many situations within that zone.
Technically, the entire fourth amendment applies. BUT All the fourth amendment requires is probable cause for warrants, and that searches and seizures be reasonable. It doesn't require warrants for searches or seizures (although courts have found that that is usually necessary for reasonableness), and it doesn't require probable cause for searches or seizures without a warrant (though courts have found that that also is usually necessary for reasonableness.)
What the courts have allowed is the use of the border zone to justify exceptions to a lot of the things that are usually required for reasonableness. This isn't, technically, an exception to the Fourth Amendment, because searches still need to be "reasonable". Its just proximity to the border makes searches "reasonable" that wouldn't be anywhere else.
I'm doing ["border search" "miles" site:uscourts.gov], getting cases --- recent cases, including some with cites to Ameida-Sanchez, which of course makes my point --- and not seeing much to suggest that CBP can randomly search random cars in Green Bay WI under the border search exemption.
2. The US Border Patrol has lost court cases for things they have done within those 100 miles, essentially saying they shouldn't have done those things.
An informal interpretation of this is that the US Federal Government and BP generally view the powers of the BP as more expansive than the judicial branch, possibly including the legislative.
In the end people are being swept upt under what seems to be an obviously unconstitutional thing and yet the courts continue to shrug.
I agree with the Penn State Law Review analysis in your link. Sadly that's not the reality of the world we live in. You're burying your head in the sand pointing to a document that suggest how things should be compared to what has actually been happening. In the end, people are being stopped and nothing is being done about it. Some paper put out by a law review isn't ending the persucation that is happening no matter how hard you ignore it.
Words on some paper mean nothing compared to the actual actions of man.
Border Patrol is doing an operation in Charlotte, NC right now. That is well over 100 miles from any border or coast. So 100 miles itself is fiction, they can just do whatever they want. Who’s gonna stop them?
>While the U.S. Border Patrol primarily operates within 100 miles of the border, it is legally allowed “to operate anywhere in the United States,” the agency added.
The Border Patrol probably is allowed to operate anywhere within the United States, but being in the Border Patrol doesn't (at least statutorily) give them any magic powers; in particular, you don't get "border search authority" by being a part of CBP, but rather by being any law enforcement officer confronting someone who you reasonably believe crossed the border recently.
It is not an exception to the Constitution, it's a decision about what “unreasonable” in the Fourth Amendment means.
Note that the default (but not universal) equirement to get a warrant for a search or seizure (and the imputation that for many warrantless instances of either, probable cause is still required) is also such an interpretation; the text of the Amendment doesn’t say either of those things, but they have been inferred by the Supreme Court to be generally the case from the juxtaposition of the reasonableness requirement for searches and seizures and the probable cause requirement for warrants.
While the Bill of Rights (and protections in later amendments) is sometimes treated like a bit of divine revelation, much of it is intentionally (to kick the can down the road on resolving disputes at the time) imprecisely worded, heavily compromised, legislative enactment by imperfect legislators, with sentences that are disjoint and where any meaningful application requires reading connections into the the text that aren’t explicit, as well as devising concrete operationalizations for vague terms like “unreasonable” or “due process”.
The 1946 statute gave CBP the authority to stop and search all vehicles within a “reasonable distance”. CBP defined the reasonable to be 100 miles and it stuck. It's just federal regulation interpreting the law and courts have blessed it.
After graduating high school, our daughter became a "member" working for Disney World. We made several driving trips back and forth to visit or bring her stuff she wanted or just for the heck of it. Then after a while we flew out, rented a van and brought all her things and her back home. Was that suspicious?
The same daughter and our son-in-law lived in Huntsville Alabama while he finished his post grad degree. I can't tell you how many trips we made then to visit, tour and eat at restaurants around town. Was that suspicious?
In 2023, we drove a round-about way to Phoenix to purchase a puppy. We visited Carlsbad New Mexico and several national parks after driving through the panhandle of Texas, in some of the remotest highways I've ever been on. (And beautiful too!) On the way home, we took a different route to see more of the states. Was that suspicious?
If I would have been pulled over and asked what I was doing, I would have said it was none of their damn business, I'd broken no laws. (Yes, I would have said we are on a trip to buy a dog and are heading home, but to be grilled, hell no!) How is this legal? I'm a white guy in his late sixties, is it fair they wouldn't suspect me because of that? Does the rule of law crumbling bother anyone anymore?
> law enforcement is required to have a reasonable, articulable suspicion of a crime in order to detain people.
In theory, yes.
In practice, yes, with many caveats.
LE doesn't have to articulate that reasonable suspicion at the time of the detention. They can come up with that suspicion years later when it comes to deciding in court whether the evidence from that traffic stop can be suppressed. This is assuming that the warrantless search even found anything, the suspect didn't accept a plea deal in lieu of going to trial, and the charges weren't dropped just before trial.
A working system for this sort of thing would be more like:
* The officer needs to record that reasonable suspicion at the time of the detention.
* All of these reasonable suspicion detentions are recorded, along with outcomes. This becomes evidence for reasonability presented in court. An officer with a low hit rate suggests that the suspicion in generally unreasonable, and they are just fishing.
* A 20 minute timer is started at the start of a traffic stop. If the officer can't articulate the reasonable suspicion at the 20 minute mark, detention is considered plainly illegal, and qualified immunity does not apply. This prevents keeping people on the roadside for a hour waiting for the dog to show up.
* Similarly, the hit rate of the police dogs needs to be recorded, and low hit rate should make any evidence from them inadmissible.
For any of this to happen, we would need to start giving standing to supposedly "unharmed" suspects that just had their vehicle torn apart and hours of their lives wasted without charge. Currently, the courts seem to think that a little wait at a traffic stop and an fruitless illegal search that is never seen in the courtroom is no damage at all.
The traffic stop is for breaking some kind of traffic law, usually.
I suppose you could have a reasonable suspicion stop, but it would have to be something like "a hit and run just happened nearby, no vehicle description", and you witness a car with a smashed grill and leaking radiator fluid, but not breaking any traffic laws.
Reasonable suspicion might develop over the course of the stop, e.g. driver is super nervous, the back seat is full of overstuffed black duffel bags, there is a powerful chemical air freshener odor, and the vehicle has just crossed the Mexico border.
I commute to a different state for work and when one of them legalized weed I once got pulled over and dog-searched for "driving exactly the speed limit." When they want to go fishing there is absolutely nothing that will stop them.
I had an acquaintance who was a county constable. He once told me, "Let me watch you drive down the road, any road, for 30 seconds and I will be able to find a valid reason to pull you over." He implied that some part of their training was focused on exactly that.
One data point, and a highly regional one at that, I know.
The law is not on the citizens' side and never has been. Driving over the limit (even the smallest increment) is technically illegal. Driving under can be considered suspicious and warrant further surveillance (or more likely incite road rage from other drivers) in which you will likely make a mistake. Nobody follows every traffic law perfectly and in all likelyhood cannot. Every cop I have ever known has admitted to this fact and there are even more examples of former(or current) law enforcement officers going on record saying the same thing.
"Y.T.’s mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes. Later, when Marietta does her end-of-day statistical roundup, sitting in her private office at 9:00pm, she will see the name of each employee and next to it, the amount of time spent reading this memo, and her reaction, based on the time spent, will go something like this:
Less than 10 min.: Time for an employee conference and possible attitude counseling.
10-14 min.: Keep an eye on this employee; may be developing slipshod attitude.
14-15.61 min.: Employee is an efficient worker, may sometimes miss important details.
16-18 min.: Employee is a methodical worker, may sometimes get hung up on minor details.
More than 18 min.: Check the security videotape, see just what this employee was up to (e.g., possible unauthorized restroom break).
Y.T.’s mom decides to spend between fourteen and fifteen minutes reading the memo. It’s better for younger workers to spend too long, to show that they’re careful, not cocky. It’s better for older workers to go a little fast, to show good management potential. She’s pushing forty. She scans through the memo, hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular intervals, occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section. The computer is going to notice all this. It approves of rereading. It’s a small thing, but over a decade or so this stuff really shows up on your work-habits summary."
There was a recent case in Illinois where the district attorneys' office decided to create their own private police force that wasn't covered by any of the laws normally reserved for law enforcement, so it could do whatever the fuck it wanted.
I remember one guy they hired to sit and pull people over all day on the highway who said the same thing "I can find something wrong with every single vehicle that passes by. I can literally pull anybody over that I want." IIRC he had things like a corner of a mudflap being broken off, or some trivial insanity like that. The big one in Illinois was having any air freshener hanging from your mirror.
Law enforcement has enormous discretion for probable cause and can give straight up contradictory reasons for different cases, it is what officers are taught to do (i.e. something like driving too fast, driving too slow, driving too rigidly at the speed limit). This allows individual bias to overwhelm any attempt at equal enforcement. It's pretty well documented in both The New Jim Crow and Usual Cruelty, the Supreme Court has made it difficult to gather data in the last couple decades.
Any given american citizen is certainly breaking, at minimum, dozens of laws even while asleep in their own bed. If they want to pick you up and they are diligent enough they certainly can. They might be laughed out of court, but they also might not be.
But once in court, you would probably get that thrown out. The key problem is that we haven't instituted consequences for that sort of police behavior.
They did not ticket me so there is no day in court. Chatting you up, seeing everything visible through the windows, leaning in to smell your car, running your license for warrants are all "free" interactions with no oversight.
The fun doesnt stop there, check out 'civil asset forfeiture' when you have a chance.
Also, if you read TFA, it seemed like the owner of a truck and trailer had to spend $20k getting his stuff out of impound when his employee was wrongly arrested. Seems like an innocent judgement isnt everything we think it is.
> Some states don't enforce it, but you are breaking federal law when you smoke it.
No states enforce federal law, nor should they. To legalize weed, those state removed or deactivated state laws also on the books about marijuana production, distribution and consumption.
The problem with lots of laws, often poorly thought out or framed, is that anyone can be breaking them any time, allowing law enforcement to target people or groups they don’t like with impunity. Drug laws are an obvious one, but so are traffic laws (with ever more rules about distracted driving etc, “drunk” driving ), things like loitering, all the stupid anti-free speech laws in places like the uk.
People get whipped up to support laws but don’t see that more is just worse, especially the petty ones, even if they notionally correct for some bad behaviour, because they allow selective enforcement.
How? I've never been arrested in my life because I follow laws, so I'm unfamiliar how you can just accidentally break a law. Is this an American thing?
If you live in a jurisdiction where there is a speed limit enforced by law, you likely have driven above it at some point. By definition, this is a violation of the law. Yet you have observed that you have never been arrested (perhaps never even ticketed?) as a result of this. Is this a logical contradiction? Obviously not. The law isn't always enforced, and not every violation of the law is punished.
I can't speak for where you live, but in America, there are many, many traffic laws. They differ greatly by jurisdiction. Most of them are not enforced. Sometimes explicitly -- for example, in my city, they recently announced they would no longer detain people for specific minor traffic violations -- but usually, it's implicit which go unpunished. It's also selective. By creating an unseen web of violations, the detaining officer is given all the necessary tools to make each stop as painful or as peaceful as they'd like.
Where are you from? In the US, there are well over a thousand laws on the books. Might be more like 10000 with respect to criminal law alone. And that's at the federal level. Factor in all the various states and criminal codes for those states and the surface area becomes enormous.
In my state alone, it is illegal to do things like:
* Hold stud poker games by charitable groups more than twice a year
* Keep an elk in a sandbox in your back yard
* Serve both beer and pretzels at a bar or restaurant simultaneously
* Swim naked in the Red River from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m
* Wear a hat while dancing or at any event where a dance is happening
* Lie down and fall asleep with your shoes on
Yes, these are actual crimes in the state I'm in. If you think those are absurd, you should see some other states criminal codes; for example, in Alaska, it is illegal to appear drunk in a bar. No, really, I'm serious. So you literally can't live your life without breaking the law somehow. I'm pretty sure Legal Eagle has an entire video (or more than one) dedicated to downright stupid laws like these.
In a just world, these laws wouldn't exist, but, well...
Edit: just wanted to add that I can't seem to find actual legal citations for some of these but they may be county or city ordinances. Regardless, they are still stupid and still crimes from what I know.
Those wacky law lists never have any proper sources, and I can only assume were scavenged from early internet chain letters or "1001 Weird Facts" type books.
In my area I can get pulled over for exceeding the speed limit, or the more nebulous "impeding the flow of traffic" aka driving too slow. On average, most drivers speed on the highways here, so it ends up being illegal to go with the flow and illegal to not go with the flow.
Which is fine, EXCEPT that it wasn't the *posted* speed limit, it was the *gazetted* speed limit (that is, the signs were incorrect and driving to them was illegal
While suspicious behavior is not a crime, it is certainly going to be used as probable cause. How would you think it to be any other way? See something, say something is nothing but using suspicious behavior
Not true. Section 215 of Patriot Act expanded surveillance powers, information-sharing, and intelligence authorities, allowing the FBI to obtain “business records” relevant to counterterrorism, no probable cause required. This does not specifically authorize detention, but show me the "business records" of any enterprise that would not raise questions requiring 48-hour hold.
Police that I’ve spoken to will readily confirm this. They consider profiling, not necessarily racial, an important part of patrolling. If they decide you look the part, they will find a way within several minutes/miles of watching.
Assuming they do the questioning in good faith. When they are ordered to "find something", you are already at a disadvantage as a regular person. I mostly have good interactions when stopped but had my share of bad faith actors and it will be a really bad day if you happen to come across those especially in current climate.
Yes, but suspicious behavior (of a crime) is indeed often reasonable, articulable suspicion of a crime. Suspicious behavior is almost always one of the main, if not the only, thing establishing RAS for a Terry stop.
Unfortunately, law enforcement often isn't subject to US law in practice, only in theory. And even on those few occasions where they are held to account for crimes against the public, the settlement is paid out with the public's own money rather than the officer's.
Devil's advocate: If the officer is acting within the policy/training they are given by their employer (and that includes not being told to not do something) then it's the employer's fault, and we (the taxpayer/ultimate employer) are liable for that.
Officers are licensed professionals. Doctors carry insurance. Engineers carry insurance. Teachers carry legal insurance, too. Sometimes the employer is also financially liable for damages, but not solely. Yet the police tend to let a city or county pay the bill instead of the officer, the department, or the union even when the officer is well outside of training and policy.
First of all - I said something different to what you are claiming I should produce citations for
I said, and I will quote "If the officer is acting within the policy/training they are given by their employer (and that includes not being told to not do something) then it's the employer's fault, and we (the taxpayer/ultimate employer) are liable for that."
Citation:
https://lawrencekstimes.com/2023/03/01/tran-case-settles/
Tran’s criminal case was prosecuted under former DA Branson’s administration; however, it has impacted the policies of District Attorney Suzanne Valdez, who took office in January 2021.
The DA’s office did not have a formal, written Brady-Giglio policy until Valdez implemented hers in January 2022.
Valdez’s Brady-Giglio policy asks law enforcement agencies to share information about “allegations” of misconduct made against their officers — not just “findings” of misconduct.
I wanted a citation of "even when the officer is well outside training and policy"
Because I cannot find any such occurrence
As to your demand for me to cite things that I never spoke of
> In November 2023, a settlement was reached between protester Eli Durand-McDonnell and two police officers who arrested him during a demonstration outside the summer home of Leonard Leo, a leader of the Federalist Society.
Police arrested Durand-McDonnell in July 2022 on a disorderly conduct charge amid protests over Leo’s role in efforts to overturn Roe v. Wade. The Hancock County district attorney later dismissed the charge, citing the need for caution when political speech is involved. Durand-McDonnell subsequently filed a federal lawsuit against Officer Kevin Edgecomb and Officer Nathan Formby, alleging false arrest and violation of his free speech rights. Details of the settlement were not publicly available as of early November 2023.
> The family of Fanta Bility, an eight-year-old girl who was fatally shot by police outside a high school football game in 2021, reached an $11 million settlement with the Borough of Sharon Hill, Pennsylvania, as well as its police chief and three former officers involved.
Police opened fire after a verbal altercation between teens escalated into a gunfight. Police gunfire inadvertently struck Bility and injured three others, including her twelve-year-old sister. Officers Brian Devaney, Sean Dolan, and Devon Smith were fired and later sentenced to probation, pleading guilty to reckless endangerment. As part of the settlement, Sharon Hill agreed to implement enhanced officer training, particularly concerning the use of deadly force. The Bility family, who established the Fanta Bility Foundation to honor her legacy and advocate for police reform, emphasized that no settlement could erase the tragedy but expressed hope for healing and change.
[Not a payout]
> In April 2023, as part of a settlement in a class action lawsuit over the treatment of demonstrators in 2020, former Minneapolis, Minnesota, police union head Lieutenant Bob Kroll agreed he would not work as a police officer or law enforcement leader in Hennepin, Ramsey, or Anoka counties during the next decade.
The lawsuit alleged that Kroll’s actions as a de facto policymaker led police to use excessive force against demonstrators in the protests that followed the May 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis Police Department officer. Under the terms of the settlement, Kroll also agreed that he would not serve on the Minnesota Board of Peace Officer Standards and Training, and that he would testify in any trials related to the suit.
And, because people are saying "insurance will pay it"
> In February 2023, the insurance carrier of the City of Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, agreed to pay $2 million to Clinton Jones Sr., whose son was fatally shot by an undercover police officer.
In 2015, then-Officer Nouman Raja shot and killed Corey Jones after his car broke down on an Interstate 95 off-ramp. Jones was on the phone with roadside assistance at the time of the shooting, and the recorded call revealed that Raja never identified himself as a police officer. Raja was found guilty of manslaughter and attempted murder in a separate criminal case in 2019 and received a twenty-five-year prison sentence.
You are bound to obey the legal orders/directions of your employer.
If you deem them to be illegal - the onus is on you to prove that, in a court of law, whilst you are unemployed because the employer sacked you for disobeying their instructions/orders
It's all cool to be on the internet saying things like that, but when it comes to reality, I DOUBT you would do anything other than acquiesce.
It's the oldest trick in the fascist book. You can't be a tyrant when the people are used to the idea that citizens have inalienable rights, so you slowly chip away at who counts as a "citizen."
The legal system has been chipping away at the rights themselves (and otherwise expanding governmental power) for hundreds of years, predating fascism (and communism, too). This is just the tactic of the moment.
Drove a new Hyundai with dealer plates from AZ to Minnesota and got pulled over by Bethany, MO city police on I-35 in northern MO with no probable cause other than window tint being too dark. They tore the car apart certain that I was muling drugs (removed seats, body panels, etc). Took 6 hours. Never found anything and left me with "we know you have committed a crime, we just cannot find it, but you will get caught". I had to put the car back together myself in the dark.
Retired age men driving dealer plate cars eastbound onto I-80 in Nebraska out of Colorado from I-76 get stopped ALL THE TIME as potential drug mules.
I'm confused. Are you saying they disassembled your car right there where you were pulled over? They had the tools on hand to do this? They didn't tow your car to a shop to have it searched? I've seen many many a car stop get searched by hand and/or with canine. Not once have I ever seen removal of seats/paneling/etc on the side of the road. So this is a bit much to take on first read without further questions
Yes that is what I am saying. Most cops carry a multi tool at the minimum (with Phillips screwdriver). They also had a standard 10mm socket (carried by MANY cops and all that is required to dismantle much of any Hyundai).
Using their multi tool, they removed the fender liners (wheel well liners) from all 4 wheels, the trunk side trim (luggage compartment side trim) from both sides - all of which just has plastic push-pin scrivets (retainer clips). They broke 5 of them.
They folded down my back seats (after removing all my personal items out to the shoulder in the rain), then unbolted and removed the back seat.
I do a LOT of interstate driving, and it is not at all uncommon to see this happen.
This is not the only time I have been in situations where authority has been exceeded. My attitude is to generally be cooperative (without giving consent) as my experience has taught me that is the most painless way to go.
Just adding some perspective from someone who has been inside the trunk of a lot of cop cars over the years[1]:
A good many cops (maybe not >50%, but a very significant percentage) carry a pretty decent ad-hoc toolkit in their vehicles. There's often a toolbox with screwdrivers, socketry, pliers, some wrenches, maybe a hammer and/or other basic handtools.
It's pretty common for folks who know how to use tools to keep some on-hand, and cops are not an exception.
[1]: Yeah, so... I should probably explain that part. Some of my work involves 2-way radios, and some of that 2-way radio business has lead to me putting radios and stuff into things like cop cars. I've emptied out hundreds of cop cars to get access to what I need, and have certainly climbed into the trunk of dozens of them to be where I need to be. (Someone has to do it, and sometimes that person is me.)
Did you ever ask for a supervisor/sergeant to be called? If they are in on it to then you're no worse off, but if they can come out and rein in an out of control patrol then so much the better.
One of them WAS a sergeant. My hope was that a State Trooper would stop and reign things in a bit. Just lots of semis thundering by. Otherwise, it can get pretty quiet on rural interstates at night.
I was hassled once for driving without my head lights on at night - when they were in fact on - in NYC and one of the cops was a white shirt lieutenant. They were rude, insulting and were obviously trying to get a rise out of me. I kept cool along with my passenger and after some simple questioning and running my ID they let me go. It was obviously a fishing expedition but for what I can only guess.
They don't need a lot of tools to do such a deep 'search' of your car, they're not under any requirement or mandate to make it easy or even possible to repair.
In my 40+ years of driving, I've seen such disassembled cars along the road a hand full of times.
The more this flyover-state mentality policing continues (obvious civil asset forfeiture fishing - dealers might be carrying cash from a previous sale, etc), the less people are going to drive through them, further depriving these states of a revenue source. Of course, this mentality could be voted out by the residents of these states, but I'm not optimistic.
I hope mightily that you are correct and it is restricted to the flyover states. I fear that the reality is probably that in populated states the police are so preoccupied dealing with real crime they have little opportunity to take "preventative action". Being as empathic as I can, I would say that the cops in flyover states deal with a LOT of transport-related drug crimes (that's why they are called "flyover"), so I get their focus. I have just learned to exist below the radar as much as possible. I no longer drive dealer plated cars and have no vehicles registered in my name (so I never come up in ALPR systems). I try to be compliant in every way possible. But then again that's what real criminals do too.
I've always wanted to ask people who lived in East Germany: what similarities and differences do you see with the modern American surveillance infrastructure?
Yes, I’m Polish American and was traveling from West Germany to Poland. It wasn’t so bad once we bribed them. It turned-out the guards just wanted Marlboros, Johnny Walker, and US dollars. We still had to reassemble the Mercedes.
Drove a DeLorean from Chicago to LA and back. Got pulled over 4 times on the way there and 7 times on the way back. All for made up infractions just so they could get photos.
Every rental car I've rented in California seems to have Florida plates and every U-haul I've rented in the country has Arizona plates. I don't know that the issuing state matters. The Article content suggests the main issue is taking multiple short trips to the boarder not driving across a state.
They register the vehicles in states where it's cheaper. It used to be that a lot of people with trailers in New England registered them in Maine because you were(are?) not required to insure the trailer OR live in the same state to register.
The idea of a federal agent stopping you for a traffic infraction is insane on its face. That'd be very rare, if not unheard of, in normal times no? How would they charge you? Are there federal laws on the books for speeding or not wearing a seatbelt?
Look into "dual sworn" officers. Although I've seen a few investigations which show that the federal officers will just send a text message, on a private phone, to uniformed officers when they want them to "check something out."
The US Park Police can and do enforce basic traffic regulations in national parks - which includes some roads, like the Blue Ridge Parkway, that are “linear parks”. In respect of the fact that these roads are often used by local traffic, they will generally permit things that would be legal under the law of the state you are in (e.g., concealed firearm carry, so long as it’s in the car and not brought into a ranger station or other building on the federal property).
Even worse feds will use local cops as fodder to pull over actual murderous criminals on traffic infractions, not knowing what they are dealing with. They then let the local cops take the risk and come by with their meal team 6 squad afterwards.
When i was building a house next to the border, I drove from the border north every week, but was astonishingly never flagged at the internal checkpoints (ive been brutalized by cbp at the actual border before under false drug smuggling accusations). I also have a lot of foreign, brown 'illegal' looking family (us citizens) whom I'd drive up/down the border regularly through CBP checkpoints as they helped us build.
The fact i was never stopped makes me even more terrified of a panopticon. Is their surveillance that bad -- or that good?
"Suddenly, drivers find themselves pulled over — often for reasons cited such as speeding, failure to signal, the wrong window tint or even a dangling air freshener blocking the view. They are then aggressively questioned and searched, with no inkling that the roads they drove put them on law enforcement’s radar."
Wow, this is incredibly concerning. So they can pull me over, lie about why and then try to manufacture something ?
It should be illegal for law enforcement not currently participating in a proper sting operation to lie to the person they wish to investigate. But it's not.
It is in some jurisdictions. In Illinois and Oregon, laws have been passed that prohibit law enforcement officers from using deception when dealing with suspects under the age of 18. Other states, such as Washington, Connecticut, Delaware, and New York, are considering similar legislation that may extend these prohibitions to all individuals being interrogated.
> Wow, this is incredibly concerning. So they can pull me over, lie about why and then try to manufacture something?
Parallel construction is a law enforcement process of building a parallel, or
separate, evidentiary basis for a criminal investigation in order to limit
disclosure as to the origins of an investigation.
In the US, a particular form is evidence laundering, where one police officer
obtains evidence via means that are in violation of the Fourth Amendment's
protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, and then passes it on
to another officer, who builds on it and gets it accepted by the court under
the good-faith exception as applied to the second officer.
Well, maybe now you understand that when people were saying Trump is an actual fascist, it wasn't just memes.
Its only gonna get worse. At some point, CBP is gonna shoot someone, nothing is gonna happen, and that will be the turning point of when they can just arbitrarily start shooting citizens with no repercussion.
If you don't have a plan to GTFO the country by now, you are behind.
Yes, it's very important to let them lie about it or else they will have to reveal the actual giant surveillance state and all the technology behind it and that would cause us to lose WWII.
One of the most striking things about this article were the photos of the disguised cameras, especially the ones dressed up as traffic cones and electrical boxes.
How is that striking? We've had nanny cams with cameras hidden in teddy bears and other items for a really long time now. That's like saying you're shocked cops go undercover and do not ID themselves as cops.
Have most Americans never considered undercover operations? If you are investigating someone, you don't want them to know about it. Otherwise, you wouldn't be bothering with the undercover aspect. Now that the department has cool hidden cameras, of course they will be used for other purposes.
It's not like I'm out there hunting down police abuses, but having hidden cameras is just something I would absolutely expect them to have. I did not know they specifically had cameras hidden as traffic cones, but I'm also not shocked they do. That's the shocking part to me is the shock of others instead of others also going "of course they do"
What bugs me the most about all this surveillance is that crime clearance rates dont seem to be improving, I guess it just makes law enforcents job easier, they just click click click instead of actual shoe leathering.
Murder clearance rates in the 50s was in the high ninety percent.
There are some good reasons it is lower now, like defense lawyers and Miranda rights. Obviously it'd be good if we had both good civil rights AND high murder clearance, but they seem in obvious tension with each other.
It feels like the past 25 years has been a continuous slowly constricting circle just chipping away at privacy and freedom and it almost never goes in the other direction or even just reverts a policy back to baseline. People largely don't seem to care though and I don't think there are any politicians seriously fighting against it and prioritizing as a primary policy.
I don't get why you have to obfuscate like this. You aren't against limitations for questioning. You wont find any sensible person that is against immigration enforcement completely.
What you want is the ability for your side to carry out its will unobstructed by any legal process, because you fundamentally believe what they are doing is right, and the other side is evil.
Just say that instead of pretending that its about the law.
I will always find it weird that people who think the fact their consciousness randomly popped into existence through pure luck in a privileged country means that they deserve it more than someone who popped into existence somewhere else.
Even that aside, how does that give them the right to infringe on the rights and privacy of citizens?
Not sure about the "ever recorded" part - how far back are we talking? There were some pretty massive waves of illegal aliens flooding the East Coast back in the 1600s.
Does anyone know if ALPRs are being combined with Bluetooth/TPMS scanning to associate devices across vehicles or if TPMS is getting associated to vehicles (like if a stolen plate is put on another vehicle because the TPMS doesn't match)?
TPMS scanning is particularly nasty. I've been meaning to read up more about all of the potential ways it can violate our privacy. Sorry that I don't have any further info about it in this case.
Your rights are limited in interactions with CBP, or to state the inverse: CBP have claimed more powers than traditional law enforcement. This has been true for quite a while; they have at various times been more and less careful about your rights while exercising those powers. They are being less careful now.
Imagine a drone swarm that follows you wherever you go. Tracking and photographing every step you take in public. When you go into a building, a ground drone follows you in, notes where you've gone, and when you leave, hands you off to the flying swarm. Creating a trail of all your activities. Legally there may not be anything you can do to stop it.
The expectation that you have no privacy in public is what fuels this.
Modern cars log their GPS coordinates about every 60 seconds and maintain weeks of records at minimum. Police regularly obtain search warrants to view weeks of GPS logs from your infotainment system.
Ah, the freedom of a car. Well, in any case, this is easy to circumvent—use public transport or ride a bike. Wait, what country are we talking about here? Oh... right.
Remember the movie Minority Report? Where a central plot point was the main character being tracked (by their retina in that case), and how to defeat the tracking? Vibes.
Originally it would cost too much to have someone follow you around and keep track of where you're going. This was a kind of check against that system. Now you're an SQL query away from being on some list you don't know exists.
> often for reasons cited such as speeding, failure to signal, the wrong window tint or even a dangling air freshener
Police shouldn't be able to pull someone over for an air freshener or tinted windows. They can send a fix-it ticket without wasting the time and resources, and without causing the inconvenience or diversions in traffic. And, as a private citizen, I strongly prefer the police have the minimal necessary powers to detain me.
Anyone can be targeted, anyone can be pulled over, anyone can be detained, anyone can be labelled a terrorist, anyone can be deported to a black hole in el salvador. These are dark times.
The border patrol should only be able to do this within the 100 mile no constitution zone that extends from all foreign borders (including internal borders like the great lakes). If they do this in Minneapolis, Minnesota or Denver, Colorado it would be unconstitutional.
No. They shouldn't be able to do this within 100 miles of a border either, since that's not a reasonable distance for the border exception to apply by any sane reasoning. The rights of roughly 2/3 of the US population don't evaporate because of some absurd assertion of distance that is clearly off by two orders of magnitude. We must uproot this particular crop of dystopian bullshit and salt the earth in its place.
"Suddenly, drivers find themselves pulled over — often for reasons cited such as speeding, failure to signal, the wrong window tint or even a dangling air freshener blocking the view. They are then aggressively questioned and searched, with no inkling that the roads they drove put them on law enforcement’s radar."
So, standard driving while black (or brown, or Muslim, or whatever is demonized in $CURRENT_YEAR), but extended to new categories? I guess now that it's impinging on the comfortable it's news.
It's germane to point out the War on Drugs™ is a war on the people and has never been about "keeping people safe". I know that a lot of people say that cannabis is ok but hard drugs should not be legal to keep people safe. Look at how well that's worked out, as well as how the people involved with those drugs are treated (users are treated like dangerous criminals rather than with substance abuse issues).
This war along with the War on Terror™ give pretense to all of these abuses of power and need to be undone. The problems they profess to address can be addressed in much simpler, cheaper, and humane ways.
good? why is this "news-worthy"? "Law-enforcement personnel are paying attention to people behaving 'suspiciously'" seems like: "people are doing their jobs". Gasp! The audacity!
just saw this [1] today where the police chief was using license plate readers to stalk and harass "multiple victims". This is why you don't collect the information in the first place. I am sure the lawyers are one step ahead, but I think Flock should pay these victims directly (in addition to the PD) for failing to stop the misuse of their technology.
If there's a reason for having them, why don't we require them for people? Let's make everyone walk with their id at the front and back. We're for public safety here, right?
But the criminals and illegals and the worst of the worst and the drugs. Think of the children that are being fed illegal drugs thru tubes put in by the trans-national trans gangs.
No, the license plates are not the problem. It's the scanning/recording of them that is.
License plates provide basically the same info as the title to the car or your house. They only supply addition information, such as location when they are recorded somewhere. With things like facial recognition, you don't need the plates to track movement (although it is easier).
The real problem is public surveillance identifying/tracking individuals.
The idea of having titles for cars seems fundamentally weird too. We manage fine in most of the rest of the world without any special government paperwork establishing the owner of a vehicle.
Given technology's march forward, it seems that higher resolution cameras would enable tracking systems to determine unique car identities by the pattern of imperfections in the vehicle, much like biologists sort leopards by their spots.
IOW, I think removing license plates just buys some time.
It does seem easier, but very low vlaue. If we let the recoding continue we will still have facial recognition, gait recognition, OnStar tracking, etc.
People may not understand how deep this goes. With municipalities eagerly allowing companies like Flock to hoover up license plates and centrally aggregate this data there is a very strong argument this is true and amounts to 4A violations when considered in total.
Add that many states have laws that are /more/ punishing if you intentionally obscure your plate than simply not having one, what other conclusion can be drawn? The state’s arguments are thin. “Oh we need it to find criminals / vehicles of interest” oh sure, so you get to suck up all our data to protect a few toll roads and track a few supposed criminals. The balance of benefit to society is dubious at best IMO.
Steve Jobs famously used to get a new car every 6 months, because in California, you don't have to put plates on it for that amount of time. So he could essentially permanently drive around without an attached license plate.
Paper plates are still required. The number on it may not be as large as the actual plate, but there is definitely a unique number on it that is absolutely registered to owner of the car.
This sounds a lot like urban legend / internet lore
California did not require numbered paper plates when Jobs did this. Car dealers would put paper plates advertising themselves on the car, but you could remove them. Your temporary registration was taped on the inside of the front windshield.
I personally saw his SL500 with dealer plates a couple of times while visiting the Apple campus as a vendor. He'd park in the handicap spot too.
Part of the problem is that you're simply not allowed to sue the people who are misusing the technology to violate the level of privacy everyone actually does expect in public.
I want to hear out your point more, but by that logic, neither is walking around without a mask, or using a transit pass, or paying for things with a credit card.
Yeah and if you have your cell phone with you, license plates readers are irrelevant.
Fun fact, the Austin bomber was caught because publically available user data used for advertising, as gathered by a bunch of 3d party apps, allowed a cross reference of cellphones in vicinity within certain time ranges, which narrowed the suspect pool to very few people from which they were able to start their investigation.
>In February, Lorenzo Gutierrez Lugo, a driver for a small trucking company that specializes in transporting furniture, clothing and other belongings to families in Mexico, was driving south to the border city of Brownsville, Texas, carrying packages from immigrant communities in South Carolina’s low country.
If you think 'this is just a normal citizen doing good work' at first and you are breaking privacy here, keep reading.
>They unearthed no contraband. But Beltran arrested Gutierrez Lugo on suspicion of money laundering and engaging in organized criminal activity because he was carrying thousands of dollars in cash — money his supervisor said came directly from customers in local Latino communities, who are accustomed to paying in cash.
carrying thousands of dollars in cash over the US Mexico border is so suspicious that there is likely a lot more happening. The trucking company spent 20,000$ to get him out of it.
The more I think of better call Saul and breaking bad, the more I wonder whether this is one of those situations where the reality is actually much worse than television fiction.
90% of the drugs that enter US come from the south border. At 120 tons of drugs being 'seized' not the ones being distributed, I am assuming the scale of this thing is massive. [1]
Carrying cash isn't a crime. The fact that no charges were brought says that they couldn't prove a crime was committed either. And please read the fifth amendment.
> No criminal charges were ultimately brought against Gutierrez Lugo
No but carrying over $10,000 into the US requires you to declare it and maybe pay taxes if you can't prove its source or risk being sized (which is fine if it's drug money).
License plate scanners are one of the most under-appreciated violations of personal privacy that exist today.
It's not just government use either. There are private companies that scan vast numbers of license plates (sometimes by driving around parking lots with a camera), build a database of what plate was seen where at what time, then sell access to both law enforcement and I believe private investigators.
Want to know if your spouse is having an affair? Those databases may well have the answer.
Here is a Wired story from 2014 about Vigilant Solutions, founded in 2009: https://www.wired.com/2014/05/license-plate-tracking/
I believe Vigilant only provide access to law enforcement, but Digital Recognition Network sell access to others as well: https://drndata.com/about/
Good Vice story about that: https://www.vice.com/en/article/i-tracked-someone-with-licen...
I'm curious what you think the solution is?
Taking a photograph of a car with its license plate is legal. As is selling a photo you've taken, whether it has a license plate or not.
Therefore taking millions of photos in public of cars, and turning their license plate numbers into a database is legal, as is selling that information. It's all data gained in public.
Obviously it's now scary that you're being tracked. But what is the solution? We certainly don't want to outlaw taking photos in public. Is it the mass aggregation of already-public data that should be made illegal? What adverse consequences might that have, e.g. journalists compiling public data to prove governmental corruption?
Counties with effective privacy laws focus on the control and processing of the data.
Regulating data processing like this is common and should not be controversial.
> Taking a photograph of a car with its license plate is legal. As is selling a photo you've taken, whether it has a license plate or not.
> Therefore taking millions of photos in public of cars, and turning their license plate numbers into a database is legal, as is selling that information. It's all data gained in public.
One absolutely does not follow the other; there are all sorts of things that are legal only if done for certain purposes, only below a certain scale, etc. The idea that we must permit both or neither is a false dichotomy.
E.g. I have the personal liberty to host card game for money at my house. But if I require a house take, now I'm running a gambling business.
That's not a difference in scope; it's a difference in kind.
And even the latter is fraught with hazards to liberty.
Observing and recording is a difference in kind. Recording and processing is a difference in kind. Processing and selling is a difference in kind. And quantity has a quality all its own.
> Observing and recording is a difference in kind.
Not if you believe in a right of general-purpose computing. Your brain records everything you observe. If you can use a computer for any purpose you choose, then you can use it to record what you can see and hear.
Human memory is not recording in common or legal language. And laws now reflect the difference. Copyright for example.
...I mean, sure, I'll argue that copyright laws are illegitimate on this basis. And it's beyond obvious at this point that the internet doesn't abide by this "law".
Not wanting laws to reflect a difference does not mean a difference does not exist.
> And it's beyond obvious at this point that the internet doesn't abide by this "law".
What law? Copyright? Why the punctuation? And what did you intend this to imply?
> Not wanting laws to reflect a difference does not mean a difference does not exist.
The point is: the difference is a legal fiction which necessarily prohibits general-purpose computing. If I can capture photons with my eyes, but then I try to do it with a machine, and you say, "hey, you can't use a machine for that!" then you are telling me that I can't engage in general purpose computing.
> What law? Copyright? Why the punctuation? And what did you intend this to imply?
Yes, I don't think copyright laws are a legitimate role for state power in the information age. And if the argument is, "well, look copyright laws require prohibitions on collecting or copying data or any other general purpose computing process", then that only makes the case stronger, not weaker.
If a law requires the state to intrude into your personal, intimate computing process - whether the biological process in your brain or an electronic one in your computer - then that's a very strong indication that the law is not a legitimate intervention on behalf of the rights of others.
> The point is: the difference is a legal fiction
The point was it was not.
> If I can capture photons with my eyes, but then I try to do it with a machine, and you say, "hey, you can't use a machine for that!" then you are telling me that I can't engage in general purpose computing.
Observing, recording, and processing are different words with different meanings. Repeating your assertion they are the same did not make it more persuasive.
> Yes, I don't think copyright laws are a legitimate role for state power in the information age. And if the argument is, "well, look copyright laws require prohibitions on collecting or copying data or any other general purpose computing process", then that only makes the case stronger, not weaker.
Copyright laws regulated copying always.
There are arguments for copyright abolition worth considering. It is impossible to separate activities almost everyone but you can separate and separates is not.
> If I can capture photons with my eyes, but then I try to do it with a machine, and you say, "hey, you can't use a machine for that!" then you are telling me that I can't engage in general purpose computing.
You can capture photons with your eyes, and you can use an image sensor to capture photons. Seems pretty equivalent.
But your brain cannot store images or recall them in the future (even for yourself, it is a very lossy recall), or transmit them to another person, etc. That is all completely separate functionality that is not equivalent to what your brain can do.
> Not if you believe in a right of general-purpose computing
Uh, sure. If we make up a right, there is a problem.
Currently, this right doesn't exist. We make plenty of laws without presuming it exists. Plenty of people are trying and failing to pursue voters that it should exist, and I generaly commend them. But it's weird to the point of bordring on intentional distraction to try and pot this specific issue on the basis of a demand that doesn't apply to anything else.
If you can look at the world and conclude that a right to make something and use it as you see fit, in private and without harming others, does not exist, then I guess we just have a dramatically different perspective of the world in which we've arrived.
> But it's weird to the point of bordring (sic) on intentional distraction to try and pot this specific issue on the basis of a demand that doesn't apply to anything else.
You've assumed bad intentions and... I don't know what else to say. If I can see something with my eyes, save it in my brain, recall it later in a drawing, but can't do those same things with a computer, then the implications for the right of general-purpose computing (and for that matter, free thought) are just absolutely obvious.
> You've assumed bad intentions
Sorry if it came across that way. I don't.
Messaging can be co-opted. I think you're genuinely arguing for general-purpose computing. But that functionally serves to preserve Flock and the CBP's ability to illegally, in my opinion, monitor and harm Americans.
Well, there are two clear things to be teased out here:
* What Flock does is _not_ consistent with the use of a camera in a fashion that is identical to an eyeball - they are not standing and watching cars go by, or even recording them and logging it. I think it's essential to support the right of individuals to to this. But putting a camera on a fixture? That's a little different. But even if we support that - and I think I can be convinced...
* The custody of this data in secret, and the sharing of it with criminal elements in society, let alone those committing crimes under color of law like CBP, is the harmful part.
Imagine if there were a network of cameras covering all the commons across the land (ie, every street), and there were a way to view their perspective in real time. This gives every person the ability to record and follow any other.
Is this, in itself, an affront?
What if an alien on mars has such a powerful telescope that they too can follow someone in this way. Is this criminal? Do the rights of a person to police how certain photons - those which bounce off their skin - can be captured... extend to the ends of the universe?
I hope the answer is 'obviously not'.
The problem here is that CBP exists in the first place. We need to complete the incomplete struggle for abolition that fizzed in the middle of the 19th century. We need to rid the land of the power structures wherein some people can exact violence under color of law and others cannot even defend themselves, even as all the cameras in the land capture this injustice.
_That's_ the problem, not that somebody saw it happen.
We are commenting on an article where the process you describe leads to harming others, are we not? You can make it sound as robotic as you'd like, but at the end of the day we're still talking about corporations surveilling people on a massive scale and selling the data to be used against them.
It's sort of like saying "what, so I can't assemble a simple contraption of metal and explosive powder, and use it as I see fit?" to elide the fact that what you're actually talking about is shooting a gun. The details matter!
Well, the question is: where is the actual harm?
If the case is that the movements of people are plainly observable, but that observing them advances the ability of an organizing like CBP to victimize them, then it seems to me that the logical conclusion is to abolish CBP. Which I think is actually a far more logical position and also a far more popular one among Americans, though many are now afraid to say it out loud.
> It's sort of like saying "what, so I can't assemble a simple contraption of metal and explosive powder, and use it as I see fit?" to elide the fact that what you're actually talking about is shooting a gun.
Shooting? Or building? Of course you have a right to fabricate a gun in your own home. Is this in dispute (at least, in the USA)? Equally obvious, you do not have a right to discharge it in a way that endangers others.
I mean, I am not your enemy with regard to abolishing CBP. But the harms go beyond that. There are many studies that show how being surveilled can affect our behavior and negatively impact our mental health.
With regard to guns, restrictions abound on how you can use them (even in the privacy of your own home) — you need a license to carry them in public, you must lock them up around children, etc. Even though you might believe in some sort of "right to generalized mechanics", in practice most people believe your rights should actually be strictly limited.
First of all, in much of the US, you don't need a license to carry a gun in public. I'm not saying that's good or bad - I don't love it, but it's the current state of things.
But... is there a right to generalized mechanics in the same sense as general computing? General computing is the right to think - is your right to think limited to what your brain is capable of right now? Is it OK to exercise to increase your capacity? Is it OK to take supplements and drugs for this purpose? Is it OK to offload some thinking to a device you own?
Of course. These are fundamental, bedrock needs of a free information age society. You can think _anything_ you want. Thoughts, perhaps by definition, don't harm or imperil others.
But can you arbitrarily craft any machine you want? I mean, no. Like the right to your thoughts, you can craft what you like as long as it doesn't harm or imperil others. Unlike thoughts, some machines do certainly do this.
We have long had a legal and philosophical distinction between arms and ordnance for this reason. We recognize that the right to bear arms create a decentralization of the capacity for violence. But the right to bear ordnance does not. Also, in practical terms, manufacturing ordnance in secret is often difficult (and in fact, it is relieving to know how difficult it is to make nuclear weapons in secret - so much so that it seems to be _less_ possible with each passing year - in part due to the proliferation of eyes/cameras!).
So yeah, I think you can have totally philosophically and legally consistent limits on manufacturing without also having to limit thought / computation / perception.
In much of the US, you can't do the "general computing" you're describing either. Many states don't allow you to record audio without the consent of all parties, for example. You can't record or even possess child sexual abuse material. So it turns out the right you're talking about doesn't actually exist.
> That's not a difference in scope; it's a difference in kind
At a certain point, difference in scale becomes difference in kind. This is fundamental to the universe to the point of thermodynamics.
(To the example, how do you think it would go if you regularly hosted hundres of card games in respect of which you didn't take a cut?)
But that's literally the question I'm asking. Where do you draw the line in a way that stops what we consider to be abuses, but doesn't stop what we think of as legitimate uses by journalists, academics, etc.?
E.g. city employees who need to better understand traffic patterns originating from one neighborhood, to plan better public transit. Journalists who want to expose the congestion caused by Amazon delivery trucks. And so forth.
Is it database size? Commercial use? Whether license plates are hashed before storing? Hashed before selling the data to a third party? What about law enforcement with a warrant? Etc.
It’s where you decouple the vehicle information (make, model, plate) from the PII (registered owner information)
License plate numbers are generally considered PII in their own right. A tuple of make, model, color, and year range is getting awfully close to an equivalent on its own as well.
> But that's literally the question I'm asking. Where do you draw the line in a way that stops what we consider to be abuses, but doesn't stop what we think of as legitimate uses by journalists, academics, etc.?
I think the wrong assumption you're making, is that there is supposed to be a simple answer, like something you can describe with a thousand words. But with messy reality this basically never the case: Where do you draw the line of what is considered a taxable business? What are the limits of free speech? What procedures should be paid by health insurance?
It is important to accept this messiness and the complexity it brings instead of giving up and declaring the problem unsolvable. If you have ever asked yourself, why the GDPR is so difficult and so multifaceted in its implications, the messiness you are pointing out is the reason.
And of course, the answer to your question is: Look at the GDPR and European legislation as a precedent to where you draw the line for each instance and situation. It's not perfect of course, but given the problem, it can't be.
Generally, you do want the general principle of something like this to be explainable in a few sentences, yes.
Even if that results in a bunch of more detailed regulations, we can then understand the principles behind those regulations, even if they decide a bunch of edge cases with precise lines that seem arbitrary.
Things like the limits of free speech can be explained in a few sentences at a high level. So yes, I'm asking for what the equivalent might be here.
The idea that "it's so impossibly complicated that the general approach can't even be summarized" is not helpful. Even when regulations are complicated, they start from a few basic principles that can be clearly enumerated.
This is not how things ever work in practice in representative democracy. The world is too complex, and the many overlapping sets of political groups in a country/provice/city have different takes on what the policy should be, and more importantly, each group have different tolerances for what they will accept.
Because everyone has different principles by which they evaluate the world, most laws don't actually care about principles. They are simply arbitrary lines in the sand drawn by the legislature in a bid to satisfy (or not dissatisfy) as many groups as possible. Sometimes, some vague sounding principles are attached to the laws, but its always impossible for someone else to start with the same principles and derive the exact same law from them.
Constitutions on the other hand seem simple and often have simple sounding principles in them. The reason is that constitutions specify what the State institutions can and cannot do. The State is a relatively simple system compared to the world, so constitutions seem simple. Laws on the other hand specify what everyone else must or must not do, and they must deal with messy reality.
The principle is that you should be able to casually document what you see in public, but you should not be able to intrude on the privacy of others.
Emphasis on casual, IMO. It is perfectly reasonable to decide that past norms which evolved in the absence of large scale computing power, digital cameras, and interconnected everything do not translate to the right to extrapolate freedom of casual observation into computer-assisted stalking.
One big easy line to draw is personal+individual versus commercial+corporation. There should be sweeping privacy laws that individuals can use to prevent information about them (including government issued identifiers) from being recorded, processed, and stored. Then for private vs private, a de minimis exception for individuals doing it noncommercially on a small number of people.
Delivery trucks are operated by corporations so don't have privacy protection (although the individuals driving them would from things like facial recognition). Traffic patterns can be studied without the use of individual identifiers. Law enforcement is moot because the juicy commercial surveillance databases won't be generated in the first place, and without them we can have an honest societal conversation whether the government should create their own surveillance databases of everyone's movements.
These aren't insurmountable problems. GDPR gets these answers mostly right. What it requires is drawing a line in the sand and iterating to close loopholes, rather than simply assuming futility when trying to regulate the corporate surveillance industry.
I see so I can follow you around and continuously 24x7 video tape and document your actions as long as it’s in public this should be fine.
This is literally what private detectives do when they tail someone. So yes, this is legal as long as it's not harassing or there's a restraining order or something. Did you think it was not?
> Did you think it was not?
Not OP, but yes, I think it is not. At least, not legal in the same expansive way that you are implying. AFAIK private detective work is very much regulated, most likely because it is otherwise known as stalking.
> curious what you think the solution is?
Require a warrant for law enforcement to poll these databases. And make the database operators strictly liable for breaches and mis-use.
For all we know, "suspicious" travel patterns may include visiting a place of religious worship or an abortion clinic. For a future President, it may be parking near the home of someone who tweeted support for a J6'er.
(And we haven't even touched the national security risk Flock poses [1].)
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/03/lawmakers-say-stolen-polic...
> Require a warrant for law enforcement to poll these databases.
This seems so uncontroversial I don't know why we haven't collectively decided to implement it. Though I get that the folks in power probably don't support it. We could easily decide that law enforcement data gathering warrant requirements are not so simple to circumvent. Maybe we should largely abolish third party doctrine.
Collectively decide and easily are carrying lots of weight here.
Americans (citizens that is) have held fairly consistent opinions on healthcare, guns, education, war and yet very little changes because all voices are in fact, not equal. We are not collectively deciding. There are massive thumbs on the scale, often in favor of private profit that keep things as they are now.
Some might even, surprise surprise, be owned by the companies investing in the companies that use this technology.
This is, as the OP noted, a gross invasion of privacy and not avoidable in a country that largely requires cars and their registration for day to day life.
Are you also going to require a warrant for paramilitary insurgent groups to poll these databases? Maybe you intended to propose for them to be abolished entirely.
paramilitary insurgent groups are abolished, actually. it is illegal to operate a paramilitary insurgent group. this is the main way they prevent groups from doing paramilitary insurrection.
that, and most military actions are also illegal, if you're not a member of the military following lawful orders. so there's not much paramilitary stuff one can do. and insurgency is like... outlawed
> Are you also going to require a warrant for paramilitary insurgent groups to poll these databases?
No. Because this is a straw man.
> Maybe you intended to propose for them to be abolished entirely
Banks operate with liability for losses resulting from breaches. Unless Flock et al are routinly losing their entire database, this shouldn't be exisential.
> Banks operate with liability for losses resulting from breaches.
Not enough.
> Unless Flock et al are routinly losing their entire database, this shouldn't be exisential.
The risk of misuse by future governments is too great even if Flock's security was perfect. And allowing anything less than routinely losing the entire database is unreasonably lax even if you don't believe Flock is too risky to exist.
It isn't a straw man; paramilitary insurgent groups will just look like normal customers to Flock et al., except when they're stealing their entire database, which will indeed happen routinely.
> paramilitary insurgent groups will just look like normal customers to Flock et al.
Existing liability law works just fine for terrorism. (Guns notwithstanding.)
In what sense? Terrorism, if successful, overturns the court system.
> In what sense?
Knowingly or negligently materially supporting violent crime creates criminal liability under conspiracy statutes. Plenty of states specifically regulate domestic terrorism [1]. And as we've seen with gun violence, by default being involved in acts of violence generates civil liability [2].
[1] https://www.icnl.org/resources/terrorism-laws-in-the-united-...
[2] https://www.yalejreg.com/wp-content/uploads/Laura-Hallas-Mas...
Negligence is generally not sufficient for conspiracy statutes, and Flock wouldn't have to be knowing or even negligent. Indeed, there is no possible way they could prevent their services from being used by violent insurgencies except to not sell them at all.
> Flock wouldn't have to be knowing or even negligent
Neither do banks.
> there is no possible way they could prevent their services from being used by violent insurgencies except to not sell them at all
Prevent? No. Increase the cost of? Yes.
Trying to police domestic terrorism by restricting what they see is a bit silly. But if that were a concern, I said "make the database operators strictly liable for breaches and mis-use." Domestic terrorism is mis-use. But it's not precedented mis-use, which makes it a strange priority to get distracted by.
Remove the legal requirements for license plates or tinted windows.
We gimp the ability of the public to obfuscate their vehicle by forcing us to have license plates in the first place, when we already prove our license to drive with VIN and registration.
Also, remove the intellectual property protections associated with the appearance of vehicles, thus creating a market of clones that can easily fit in with each other.
That’s kind of the point of license plates though.
They are there firstly so that when a driver damages something or hurts someone, they can be held responsible. What’s so bad about that?
Owning a baseball bat is completely legal. Swinging it in your immediate vicinity is completely legal. Standing within baseball bat range of other people is completely legal.
But you'll quickly find yourself detained if you try to practice this innocent collection of legal activities together. The whole is different from the sum of its parts. It's a very common occurrence.
Okay, but in this instance it is a matter of scale.
Simply, the scale of observation matters. Making observations at scale is categorically different than manual observations. And yes, there is a spectrum. But the important thing is that there is a difference between the ends of that spectrum.
The solution is to recognize that ease of observation interacts with expectation of privacy and legislate what can be done at each point on the spectrum. I have no expectation that someone won't take a picture with me in the background while I'm in public, but I would find it jarring to be filmed at every public location I went, have that video indexed to my name in a database, and have all my behaviors tagged. You write the law so that the latter thing is illegal and the former thing isn't. When there's a dispute about what's illegal, you have it resolved by the courts like every other law.
>Making observations at scale is categorically different than manual observations.
No it isn't. It's evidenced by the fact that you will need to decide some exact scale at which surveillance becomes illegal and under which it is legal
>When there's a dispute about what's illegal, you have it resolved by the courts like every other law.
Okay, but what ought they resolve to? That is what we are debating.
I think we have a mass re-assessment coming for how we think about data collected in public spaces. The realities of mass surveillance and mass data correlation come to very different outcomes than they did when we established our current rules about what is allowed in public spaces.
I don't really know what a better system looks like - but I suspect it has to do with the step where the info is provided to a third party. We can all exist in public and we can all take in whatever is happening in public - but it's not clear that passing that observation on to a third party who wasn't in public is an important freedom. Obviously this cuts both ways and we need to think carefully about preserving citizens rights to observe and report on the behavior of authorities (though also you could argue that reporting on people doing their jobs in the public space is different than reporting on private citizens).
> we can all take in whatever is happening in public
People have the right to take in what is in public, but maybe cameras should not?
This could apply to everyone in public spaces. No video, audio or surveillance without obtaining permission. Better blur anything you share, or you might get busted. The least we could do is restrict corporations from possessing such data.
Similar to what Germany does with doorbell cameras, making it illegal to film anything outside of your property, like a public sidewalk or the neighbors house. It is my understanding that people there will confront someone taking pictures of them without their consent.
> Google Maps has heavily censored their Street View in Germany to scrub any personal info
I remember when this first launched in the UK, automated face-scrubbing was in place. It was about 90% accurate on scrubbing faces from pictures. One of its best screwups was showing people's faces as they were standing outside a branch of KFC but blurring out the Colonel.
>You write this as if it is a fundamental human right. I disagree.
It's more common sense than any real sense of law. If something is a public space, how do you stop people from "taking it in"?
Recording is a different matter, but people existing is what comprises the "public".
> how do you stop people from "taking it in"
Please take a moment to draw for us detailed faces of all the people you've "taken in" today while you were outside. Use a sketch artist if you need to. Now compare those results with what you'd have if you did the same with a photocamera. And for good measure, add in the amount of effort it took you to recall, and the effort it will take you to describe to every reader on HN who you saw today.
Do you really not see any difference between the human process and what a digital camera can do?
I think we're agreeing but our frequencies are mixed. I was just saying "you can't stop people from using their eyes in public".photography and recording laws are very different.
for more context, the chain started with this:
>People have the right to take in what is in public, but maybe cameras should not?
and then the direct reply disagreed with this notion. I just wanted to distinguish between "taking in" and cameras, because it appears that user made a similar mistake.
I dunno - I think there are uses of surveillance in pursuit of enforcing laws that I don't think are harmful. Like...maybe you can record the public and pass it on to the police when there's a specific request for a time and place that a crime was allegedly committed? Like - if an organization has a legitimate interest in what happened there you can pass on your recording. But you can't just sell it to some random data broker, because they don't have a specific reason to want a recording of that place at that time.
> [I]t's not clear that passing that observation on to a third party who wasn't in public is an important freedom.
It's not hard to imagine a restriction on reporting one's observations failing any number of First Amendment challenges.
My jaded AF crystal ball called history says that these things never change until the petite-bourgeoise (I'm no Marx fan, but I think he did a good job with that part of his social class classification system) are seriously harmed by it. The rulers don't care. The poor have real problems. This sorts of crap happens or doesn't happen at the behest of the materially comfortable people in the middle. And it seems like they never learn except the hard way.
>But what is the solution?
The best time to plant a tree is 20yr ago. The second best time is today.
The best time to ostracize, ridicule and marginalize the people who support the growth of the surveillance state is a generation ago. The second best time is today.
I say we ostracize the crap out of the people who peddle, justify and facilitate these activities. It worked for wife beating, worked for drunk driving, worked for overt racism.
This is not a technical problem. This is not a law problem. This is a social norms and acceptability of certain actions problem. Applications of technology and law follow norms.
There are no social norms problems. Social norms are always a response to technology and not the other way around.
This is a law problem though. This is clear violation of 4th amendment. You’re being unreasonably searched when a set of traffic observation cameras turn into surveillance of a particular individual. This is not that hard to understand, observing traffic flow != tracking YOU in particular. That should require a probable cause and proper warrant, we want to identify this individuals movements because …
The US system is VERY good at giving a minority veto power if there is legal avenue for such (see also: obamacare). We've been walking all over the 4th (and others) since the 20th century. This isn't a law problem. This is a "there is clearly broad political will for violation of rights in limited circumstances and the system is taking it and running with it as far as it can" problem.
Require commercially used photos to not contain identifying information (face license plate) without consent of the owner (of the license plate/face).
This already happens a lot on Google street view.
> Require commercially used photos to not contain identifying information…
So CNN can't put Trump's photo up unless he consents?
Just like copyright you'd have an exclusion for news reporting. A lot of these apparent 'gotchas' will be well known to lawyers and law drafters.
Specific to US copyright law, there are exceptions for "public persons". Without these exceptions, it would severely restrict reporting on said persons. The most important part of that last sentence is elected officials. In any highly advanced democracy, you want to grant your media wide access to elected officials for reporting purposes.
Lots of countries already have nuanced laws around public figures vs private citizens.
There have always been different standards for a person of public interest compared to the general public. So what is your point?
The point is the simple sounding proposal has a lot of complexity hiding behind it.
If I’m a photographer, do I have to get consent from both the divorced parents to photograph the kids? The kids themselves?
>the simple sounding proposal has a lot of complexity hiding behind it.
Okay? We're not on a legal forum drafting the 50 page law to cover all those loopholes. I'm nor even sure if the posting limit here would faciliate that.
I trust some decent lawyers can take the high level suggestions and dig into the minutae when it comes to real policy. And I find it a bit annoying to berate the community because they aren't acting as a lawyer (and no one here claims to be one AFAIK).
>If I’m a photographer, do I have to get consent from both the divorced parents to photograph the kids? The kids themselves?
Check your state laws. The answer will vary immensely. Another reason a global forum like this isn't the best place to talk about law.
> If I’m a photographer, do I have to get consent from both the divorced parents to photograph the kids?
Does a doctor have to get consent from both divorced parents to give a child routine care?
Sometimes, yes.
The point was similar situations exist now. For photographers even. Parents may disagree if a photographer may publish their child's photographs.
License plates are owned by the government.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.[1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
AFAIK that is not correct. They are issued by the government. Required by the government to be displayed on the car if you are driving on public roads. But the plate is not physically owned by the government. The biggest distinction seems to be that in some states it becomes part of the car, and in other states it stays with the driver when ownership of the car changes hands (or the owner of the car can choose either option when selling the car).
As an aside, these days I am guessing the latter is the truth in most states. So many specialty and personalized plate options out there that people are going to want to keep for themselves.
Obviously the government does own a small number of plates, of course, because they attach them to government owned vehicles.
But not where it is in real-time or its location history.
So what?
Ride a bike! I half-kid, but it's interesting to consider that cycling is a right which can't be taken away in the US, while driving is a privilege that can be revoked.
How does it stop you from being observed by cameras? These cameras log more than just the plate numbers, they take note of the appearance of drivers, all sorts of things.
> a right which can't be taken away
It's not licensed until it is. Cars and airplanes were once unlicensed.
> cycling is a right which can't be taken away in the US
Why not ?
Practically, because bicyclists aren't licensed. It is true that in some jurisdictions cyclists have to register or license their bicycles, so potentially failure to do so could get you fined or even have your bike impounded.
If riding a bike was as common as a car it'd be regulated all the same.
You already see "certain demographics" that suspiciously always seem to feature prominently in any given decade's policy failings screeching about how e-bikes need registration because they let people they don't like have easy geographic mobility.
When I tell folks that I come to HN to see a particular kind of take, this is what I'm talking about.
Here is a premise: you can decompose any illegal action into legal actions, therefore according to your logic laws cannot not exist.
> When I tell folks that I come to HN to see a particular kind of take, this is what I'm talking about.
Is this a form of masochism?
Naw, I just want to hear what the sociopathic tech bros who think they own the world think- they have an outweighed influence on my material reality.
I just want to know before one of them decides it is inevitable that we solve global warming by blotting out the sun or something, and makes that choice for the rest of us.
Outlaw collecting more than 1,000 photos of license plates in a given city.
Not being such a car-dependent society that every single person is forced into a dangerous, personal machine that requires licensing and tracking, to do absolutely any activity outside the house.
I think the solution is simple - make it legal to hide your license plate, but make the hiders required to be remotely openable by an authorized law enforcement user. The plate hider should keep an audit log of the time, name, and badge number of the cop that required it to be opened. Anyone who wants to read license plates for a private purpose (not law enforcement) can either ask you nicely to open the hider, or screw off.
Then we just get rid of license plates and have them implemented with digital telemetry. Which is probably gonna happen regardless.
More likely we get RFID tags in them or something and then the cops stop caring about the letters being defaced (except as a pretest for fishing, same story as tail light out or whatever) because they just use the tag reader 99.999% of the time.
>Therefore taking millions of photos in public of cars, and turning their license plate numbers into a database is legal, as is selling that information
Very typical engineer thinking. The world doesn't work that way. Laws and social norms don't abide by formal logic.
Dynamic led plate that are totp. Where you can determine who is who on which date only with central access.
Doing this as a private citizen is one thing. When the government does it the implications are vastly different. That is kind of the whole point of the constitution.
> Taking a photograph of a car with its license plate is legal.
And perhaps it was legal because before mass surveillance and automatic license plate readers it was difficult to impossible to abuse that.
Perhaps it shouldn’t be legal in the same way anymore.
These days they can just photograph everyone and then go back later and figure out where they were when that person is of interest. It’s pre-emptive investigation of innocent people for future use.
You ban monetization of the data. The federal government has the power to regulate interstate commerce.
States can ban this behavior as well.
Furthermore, legislators can create a right to privacy in the law, letting people sue companies who collect this data. And to top it off, states and the federal government can make corporate officers personally liable for collecting this information without consent.
With Lina Khan biding time in NYC, I do believe we are going to see this change very soon. I don't think there will be any public sympathy for tech companies in the next political cycle.
Unlike normal activities, driving is an overtly public act. You need permission to do it, and it’s entirely reasonable for the state to monitor you doing it.
That really complicates things.
Tracking someone everywhere they go is stalking, but tracking everyone is just good business strategy
Allow people to secure temporary plates that are just aliases to their normal plate so they can be swapped every x hours. Then people could use paper temp plates and change them frequently while the state still maintains the supeonable connection to the true registration.
Knowing the US dmv, this will cost $50 and only be doable twice per year, but it should be offered free of charge to be reprinted at least daily. It's not expensive to maintain a massive data lake of the records.
There is a huge overlap between legal and immoral
> I'm curious what you think the solution is? > > Taking a photograph of a car with its license plate is legal. As is selling a photo you've taken, whether it has a license plate or not. > > Therefore taking millions of photos in public of cars, and turning their license plate numbers into a database is legal, as is selling that information. It's all data gained in public. > Collecting and selling PII without a person's consent is certainly not legal in many places.
Eliminating license plates would be a good step. As I understand it, license plates were established as a compromise between privacy and accountability: they made it possible to track down evildoers without entirely eliminating anonymity in public. Now, due to advances in computer technology, they entirely eliminate anonymity in public. Therefore we should abolish them and invent an alternative that strikes a better balance between these concerns. Encrypted radio beacons, for example, which beep to alert the driver when they are being probed.
> Encrypted radio beacons, for example, which beep to alert the driver when they are being probed.
That thing would ping so often that everyone would just turn it off. You'd also want to require it to always be on so that, for example, someone can't do a hit and run.
The problem that needs to be addressed is the fact that the american police force has WAY too much power and funding. Particularly the DHS.
The tracking sucks, but what sucks more is the police using that tracking in pretty much any way imaginable.
You'd need to have some causal pathway from it pinging too often through people getting irritated to removing the scanners that were doing the excessive tracking.
Police forces are not the only ones who can use this information. Foreign intelligence agencies, violent insurgencies, and drug cartels can also use it.
The rub is that the information is something that regular drivers need access to.
If I get into a car accident, I need some way to know who hit me in the case they bolt from the scene.
And that's what makes this a hard problem. I don't think there's a solution that allows me to address a hit and run and would prevent the groups you mention from similarly tracking people.
As I said in another subthread, it would be surprising if the solution were not worse in some way than the status quo ante; after all, we're looking for a solution to the new problem of mass surveillance, not taking advantage of a new opportunity.
License plates were always about taxation/revenue first. Creating some level of identifiability without putting people's names on their cars was how it was sold to the general public.
Do you happen to have any references?
Instead of pieces of metal physically on the car, you want all cars to have a radio transceiver attached to a computer with crypto?
That doesn't seem like a privacy win.
Yes. It's potentially a privacy win because (1) it can't be read by random people, only law enforcement, and (2) it can't be read without notifying you.
You may want to read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
You can’t make a transceiver and chip for this kind of deployment that can only be used by the right people. Either the secrets will leak or the implementation will have vulns or both.
Oh, I was on cypherpunks in 01992, so I know about the Clipper Chip. But in this case you don't need to keep any secrets from the owner of the vehicle; they're free to attach a debugging connector to their own transceiver and read it at any time. The idea is to make their car anonymous to other people, except for law enforcement, not to themselves.
Maybe you think there's no way that the transceiver can successfully authenticate those law-enforcement requests without containing secrets. It can; it only needs the public key of a root CA.
> Either the secrets will leak or the implementation will have vulns or both.
Implementations do not have to have vulnerabilities, no.
With network of cameras large enough you can trivially profile and identify all cars without license plates.
It's possible that you could learn to recognize every individual car from things like the pattern of scratches on their hoods, yes, but this ability has not been demonstrated and may prove more difficult than you think.
What you're talking about was being done a decade ago in the skies over Iraq.
https://www.northropgrumman.com/what-we-do/mission-solutions...
I don't know jack about the algorithms because classified and not my job, but I can tell you that however good you think it was, it was better. I don't know if it's real or just marketing BS but what we said publicly was that differences in antennas, mirrors and trim were key in re-identifying vehicles after they leave the observable area (e.g. two silver Camry's go into a garage, come back out, how do you keep track which is which).
Interesting, thanks! That page doesn't say anything that even suggests that.
Well it's also been a decade. I'm surprised they still have a web page for it.
I was able to find some more old info online.
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA500620.pdf
License plates are there not to "catch evildoers". They're there because cars are heavy and kill people even when non-evildoers are operating them. The problem is not that cars can be tracked, it's that we design cities to mandate people travel in heavy metal boxes that kill people. When we made walking inconvenient, we also surrendered our rights.
In other words, cars were a fascist[0] long-con - a project of societal engineering to deliberately control Americans[1] by offering the illusion of freedom. I don't even think the panopticon of license plate readers was in the thoughts of the people who designed this nonsense, but all the major figures involved with the institutionalization of cars would have loved being able to bulldoze those pesky 4A/5A rights.
[0] Fords and Volkswagens are the original model swasticars.
[1] And, arguably, make segregation survive the Civil Rights Act - but that's a different topic for another day. Look up what Robert Moses did to highways on Long Island if you want to know more.
If non-evildoers kill people with their cars, they will make extreme efforts to make amends, not flee the scene.
Bullshit. You don't need to track everyone to figure out who done it when something serious happens. You can do "good old fashioned police work" and go look at CCTV footage, ask witnesses, etc. People are happy to help when it's something serious.
ALPRs are useful so that mustache twirling evil people can a) have law enforcement more easily unilaterally do enforcement work from their desks without actually having support on the ground from the public b) burn public support doing stuff the public doesn't support without affecting their ability to investigate serious stiff. Neither of those are good.
Come on, it's not that hard to think of a solution.
Pass a law making it illegal to do a combination of collecting and storing personally identifying information, such as a license plate number, in a timestamped database with location data. Extra penalty if it's done for the purpose of selling the data.
Not saying I agree with OP, but for the law you described: any photo you take of a license plate on your smartphone would fit that description (unless you’ve explicitly disabled the automatic location and time stamping default).
So you’d need to further distinguish to preserve that freedom.
There’s a difference in intent, and you’re aware of that. Aggregating photos of license plates for the express purpose of building a database of license plates with location and other metadata to make profit from granting access to that database is clearly different to most other cases of taking, storing, and even selling photographs. There is no overlap here at all.
Its not hard to distugush individual pictures that contain trackable attributes like a license plate number from building a large scale database of them for sale. Or making such a database not legal to sell access to without removing that information, etc. It doesn't need to center on the contents of a single photo.
> any photo you take of a license plate on your smartphone would fit that description
I don't normally do that, unless I'm involved in an accident.
> So you’d need to further distinguish to preserve that freedom.
And you think it's very hard to do that, legally speaking?
Then make the act of selling it or storing it in a database with the intent to track people illegal?
Then OCR'ing the camera roll on your phone would be illegal. Every photo is stamped with time and location, and your camera roll is a database.
That's why it actually is hard.
Plus, what about legitimate purposes of tracking? E.g. journalists tracking the movements of politicians to show they are meeting in secret to plan corrupt activities. Or tracking Ubers to show that the city is allowing way more then the number of permits granted. Or a journalist wanting to better understand traffic patterns.
The line between illegitimate usage and legitimate usage seems really blurry. Hence my question.
They suggested commercial use as a factor. You ignored it.
No, they said "extra penalty". I didn't ignore anything, because they said it's illegal for non-commercial use.
They proposed collecting specific data should be illegal and selling it should be extra illegal.
Thing is, I am not /really/ worried about private citizens with access to this. There are just limits to what a private citizen or even massive corporation can do. What concerns me is when governments get involved and aggregate these private databases. The government is the one that can violate your 4A rights. It exists to protect us FROM the government. Not from private citizens and that exposure is very different. A private citizen can't for example, prosecute me, etc.
> There are just limits to what a private citizen or even massive corporation can do.
You’re just not being creative enough. Car insurers could increase your premiums if you often travel through dangerous intersections, employers could decide to pass you over for promotion if you’re often at a bar, etc.
Even better, make the law flexible enough to encompass all data brokers.
Car insurance can't wait to know everything about you. They will be crafting insurance policies that are specific for you and that will make unregulated insurance a very lucrative business proposition. Not sure if you can even call it insurance at that point.
If not for the government forcing us to buy their product they can't play games with premiums. It all comes back to government force at the end of the day.
But yeah, that's a pretty obvious one.
Glad to see I'm not the only one that thinks its obvious
In your universe, how do I make a hotel reservation?
That requires at least my name, a date, and a location.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.[1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
How am I not? He proposes no company may store in a. Database a (PIi, Time, Location) triple. I am responding to exactly the claim he made and do not take kindly to your backseat moderating.
The context was surveillance without consent. Not service with consent. It is not certain they meant their proposal in this context. But it is plausible.
Users reminding other users of the guidelines is common here. I will stop if a moderator says to stop. Your complaint is your problem otherwise.
Point out where the GP says a single word about consent.
You didn't understand what context, not certain, or plausible meant?
What do you think “must not” means? That doesn’t allow wiggle room.
Does MUST NOT in RFCs mean must not ever? Or in the context of the RFCs?
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html reply
Cheeky. But not relevant. And not an answer.
Why do you expect engagement when you continually respond with bad faith and personal attacks?
Let's call it GDPR. :-)
It's the same question we're asking with scraping. It's legal to read the data off one website. What's in question is mass scraping the entire Internet and bringing hundreds of sites to a halt.
Change the scope of the data, and you change your approach to the problem. I see no reason why law should be any different.
I think the data itself has to come under attack in a variety of ways. Thinking off the top of my head: Possession of the data could be made illegal. The data could be treated as a public record. Defendants could be guaranteed access to all data about them in the government's possession.
Just like every other discussion about private data violation - the issue is aggregation not one data point.
> But what is the solution?
Don't allow the commoditization of public imagery, ie being a tourist is legal and being a business is not.
License plate holders that obscure the license plate on private property.
It is a matter of law that no digital database of firearms data can be made. The friction is a feature. I'd propose something surrounding license plates, phone info, SIM's and VIN's may be needed. Of course, LE and tax authorities would scream bloody murder, but if we didn't see such flagrant abuse of sensitive identifiers, then maybe they could be trusted with nice things.
IDK that I even have a problem with such a database existing (just like I don't really care about a firearms db existing). What I care about is access to the data. It should absolutely require a warrant before it can be accessed. That means the agency that wants to access it needs to prove to a judge that the person they are trying to track has done something wrong or worth invading their privacy over.
As it stands, we allow joe bob to access that database so he can harass brown people working on my roof.
If it exists then people will use it legally and illegally. Sometimes you find out about the illegal activities years later, sometimes you don't.
No, no, no.
>just like I don't really care about a firearms db existing)
You might not care, but even before computers were a big thing, and people thought "Computer" and IBM mainframes were synonymous, it was put forth in law that no central digital registry of firearms was to be made available to the Federal Government.
View regulations under
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12057
In short, NFA, GCA, and FOPA basically synergize to outlaw centralized registries of firearms owners in the U.S. due to the recognition of the particular temptation and value in organizing activities resulting in disarming the populace.
It is absolutely the case other identifiers and activity can be restricted to prevent foreseeable abuse, and to be honest, that this type of abuse wasn't foreseen is frankly testament to either our forebearers being comfortable with a surveillance dystopia or just being so disconnected from technical possibilities that they didn't understand the fire we were working with.
Any notion of an armed populace doing anything useful to protect freedom has been thoroughly debunked with the current administration.
If we can send people to concentration camps without a single armed conflict I can't for the life of me see why anyone would presume guns to have any effect on limiting tyranny.
That's why I just can't care about a firearm database being potentially used nefariously. Gun rights have done nothing positive for America.
It's not about the "populace" doing anything at scale.
It's about making abusing people under color of law come with a fairly significant chance that there will eventually be a body that was formerly on government payroll that needs to be explained away thereby making such activity much less lucrative.
>Gun rights have done nothing positive for America.
Despite being 13% of the population black men have been rounded up 0% of the time. There's two ethnic groups that can't say that, well, three depending on how you count.
> Despite being 13% of the population black men have been rounded up 0% of the time.
I'm not familiar with any definition of "rounded up" for which this even remotely approximates reality.
They tossed a bunch of Japanese in camps and right now they're going after immigrants real hard.
I think if either group had a less docile reputation they'd be gone after far more surgically and in far lower volume.
> They tossed a bunch of Japanese in camps and right now they're going after immigrants real hard.
I think if you look at the entire history of the US, you'll find they've been going after Black people real hard the entire time, and that the root of mass incarceration was as a direct replacement for chattel slavery while the ink on the abolition of that institution was still wet, focussed on Black people, who have been vastly disproportionately its target ever since.
The law didn't stop them. The feds made one anyway and used tortured logic to pretend like they didn't. Many states have their own little ones because "hurr durr it's a tax not a registration"
Isn't the law that the federal government can't create a digital database of firearm ownership?
Presumably many FFLs hold records digitally tracking their sales/transfers, as do manufacturers. And several states require firearm registration.
Correct, but FOPA prohibits those records from entering the custody of BATFE/DoJ, and even if handed off, no funding can be provided to digitize them.
> Therefore taking millions of photos in public of cars, and turning their license plate numbers into a database is legal, as is selling that information. It's all data gained in public.
In the US. GDPR forbids sharing or processing it without consent. Maybe the Californian privacy act does too?
Hacker solution: open/crowd source a pirate camera network. People submit feeds of traffic from whatever camera they have. We build tiny/concealable cameras to plant all over state capitals. Client-side software detects plates and reports only those on the target list. That list: every elected leader. The next time they hold a privacy-related hearing, we read out the committee chairperson's daily movements for the last month.
Other idea: AI-enabled dashcam detects and automatically reports "emergency vehicles" to google maps hands free. Goodbye speed traps.
They just might write a law that makes the act of publicly disseminating travel data for future and past official's illegal.
You don't even need something so complicated. Those Flock cameras are so vulnerable you can easily make a botnet from them and make them serve your own malicious purpose.
The solution is to make it illegal to record individuals in public for the purpose of tracking.
Come on man, does this actually stump you? You can't come up with a single possible solution to this problem?
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2261A
It should be illegal for the government to do so, further make it illegal for businesses to do so AND for city, county, state, federal governments to utilize third party databases.
> make it illegal for businesses to do so AND for city, county, state, federal governments to utilize third party databases
Local control and storage should be a requirement.
You do not want local govt each building their own “secure” system.
> You do not want local govt each building their own “secure” system
I really do. A centralised, insecure [1] database could lead to America losing a war.
A distributed system of low-reliability nodes is more robust than a centralised system that's very reliable. "ARPANET," after all "was built to explore technologies related to building a military command-and-control network that could survive a nuclear attack." (That's not what it wound up becoming.)
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/03/lawmakers-say-stolen-polic...
Restrictions and oversight should increase proportionally to the power an entity has.
This is a very under-appreciated concept.
> I'm curious what you think the solution is?
The solution is simple. If there's a judge that signed off on a warrant to track a particular vehicle or person, cameras should be permitted to track its movements.
Otherwise, cameras should only be allowed to track people actively breaking the law - such as sending tickets to people running red lights. They should not record or retain any information about drivers that are following the rules.
Fishing expeditions are illegal and immoral. Mass tracking of innocent people is immoral.
---
Judicial warrants exist as a counterbalance between two public needs (The need to not be harassed by the police for no good reason, and the need for the police to be able to conduct active, targeted investigations of a particular crime.)
Make everybody secure, happy and sane enough that using such powers for ill becomes uninteresting.
Not great news for people who want to have affairs. Or (a better example) escape from an abusive relationship.
Maybe it's time to do away with license plates.
Police could switch to using VIN for tracking of warrants and such, which can be obtained after a car is pulled over.
Modern technology allows for every citizen to be tracked more comprehensively than the most wanted mob bosses or suspected soviet spies just a few decades ago.
Or simply outlaw the mass collection and sale or sharing of the data. We already outlaw sharing copies of music or movies, so I don't want to hear any complaints about enforcement- sure there'd still be some data floating around from random photos with a car in the background, but you wouldn't have repo tow truck drivers scanning 20,000 license plates a night or cameras in parking lots and such.
The solution is to wake up and start treating this like it is which is mass stalking. Sousveillance against the people who profit from these disgusting antisocial behaviours should be common place.
If an individual was to do this to a single person they'd considered a creep and the cops would rustle them out of a the bushes and seize all their cameras as evidence of their stalking behaviour.
The act of incorporating and doing the same thing en masse doesn't make it legal.
Get rid of license plates.
How to easily identify a car in a myriad of scenarios then that may or may absolutely not involve digital devices, like quickly remembering someone fleeing from an accident?
It would be surprising if the solution were not worse in some way than the status quo ante; after all, we're looking for a solution to the new problem of mass surveillance, not taking advantage of a new opportunity.
How to easily identify a person in even more myriad of scenarios? If we have license plates for cars, we need to have them for people.
Ironically, you'll have more privacy in a Waymo than your own car.
No, you have to have a Google or Apple account tracking you under their terms.
Right, Google would certainly know, but the rest of the world would not.
But that data is not shared anywhere, where companies like Flock sell it to a number of third parties.
Your phone IMEI is being tracked everywhere.
Yes. Should we even worry about license plates specifically?
Flock is extremely egregious.
https://deflock.me
Relevant federal payola
https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary...
https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/lobbyis...
Flock has a series of bizarre, obviously LLM-generated blog posts trying to convince the public that they are working "toward a future where compliance and community trust walk hand in hand"....
[1] https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/policy-pulse-compliance-doe...
[2] https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/policy-pulse-the-work-alrea...
[3] https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/policy-pulse-transparency-c...
WA state has figured out a solution to the Flock problem.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/washington-court-rules...
If they are going to be used by the government and law enforcement, they are clearly government-collected data about you - and thus, are subject to (the state equivalent of) a FOIA request.
This puts an onerous compliance requirement on Flock and the ciites that allow it to operate.
Hopefully, WA's state legislature will decline to give them any exemptions, which will kill that company's operations in the state.
---
Among other things, these cameras have been illegally used to spy on people who were getting an abortion in WA. Flock's executives (and the engineers who implemented that feature) belong in prison.
See also the latest Benn Jordan video on youtube [1]
1 - https://youtu.be/uB0gr7Fh6lY?si=lu_nCW8A94ziP9YW
CAIR-CA is suing San Jose over it — https://ca.cair.com/press-release/cair-ca-joins-lawsuit-chal...
Toyota was working on a feature for its cars that would report license plates from amber alerts to authorities. https://x.com/SteveMoser/status/1493990907661766664?s=20
That would frankly be a narrow, reasonable application.
The problem is the database building. Law enforcement queries should all be forced to be 1. Require a warrant or an active emergency and 2. Be strictly real-time, for a set duration, and store no information about cars that are not subject to the warrant.
If either of those is not hardcoses into the technology, I don't want my local police department to be allowed to use license plate scanners whatsoever.
Okay now, how do you show that it's not being abused? FOIA? Good luck.
Exactly. Witness how Texas has failed to provide emails between Musk and the governor... Well, they released them, but they were redacted 99.99%.
immediate public disclosure of all tracking requests
That's even harder than FOIA.
practically it's simpler, and more obvious when violated.
and i figure as long as we're legislating we'd better shoot for the moon
I mean frankly if the police had to put in the work to make parallel constructions for all the evidence they're gaining by abusing this system that would be a pretty solid start.
Don't new cars just directly record your location as you drive them?
Do you think that corporate erosion of (or outright hostility to) privacy is somehow a compelling reason to deny rights to those of us who make different choices in an attempt to protect them? Just because some people decided to buy a smartphone on wheels, do I have to suffer and have my freedom of movement narrowed and protection from arbitrary inspection by government agents denied?
They do, but it is relatively easy to nuke the onboard modem to permanently disconnect your car. Unfortunately, most people don't know or don't care that their cars are actively spying on them.
My guess would be that your car would develop some covert or overt fault if you did that. You might even lose warranty as the manufacturer could claim that the issue they fixed via a software update couldn't be installed on your car - or couldn't monitor some diagnostics which are a prerequisite for in-warranty repair.
Most telco execs would sell their own mothers before offering reasonable data plans - that your car comes with one for free should be very telling
> My guess would be that your car would develop some covert or overt fault if you did that.
I used a bypass harness to avoid losing a speaker and the car hasn't developed any fault. I wouldn't buy a car without knowing in advance that this mod is possible. There are plenty of tutorials on how to do this for popular makes/models. It may be as simple as removing a fuse, or you might need to disassemble part of the dash to physically unplug the modem.
So does your phone. And the government just buys the data from data brokers.
One wonders if any given tesla is harvesting the plates the other cars it see in traffic as well.
Here's a vid describing DRN & Resolvion supplying car location data to repo companies. I didn't realize they'll strap a camera pack on your car and pay you a commission on the license plate data you collect. https://youtu.be/xE5NnZm9OpU?si=oEkSvUjNmBhQD-xI&t=138
Yeah, I was just watching a How Money Works video and how these same services are used for car repos. Worse yet, there is a gig economy around paying people to collect photos taken from private cars and giving them a kickback for any that lead to repos.
I'm sure that's only the tip of the iceberg.
Don't use Google Location Service (GLS) on your phone. It's built into Google Play Services, aka the enormous rootkit from Google and does...stuff...with high accuracy location data because lawyers think they can argue in court that that data is "anonymized".
I'd be for it if there was direct control over the data. Like it shouldn't be hard to not let ICE into your police data when looking for stolen cars.
- yeah it also has solved 3 murders near house so is it really a net negative?
Car repossession companies also use this data.
> License plate scanners are one of the most under-appreciated violations of personal privacy that exist today.
Worse than cell phone tracking? Cell phone tracking is higher fidelity, continuous, and works everywhere.
People talk about cell phone tracking all the time. I rarely see people talk about license plate scanning, hence "under-appreciated".
The difference is you can opt out by leaving it at home.
This is just the classic infosec nerd missing the point.
The problem isn't the license plate monitoring. The problem is the detention without cause.
It's the jackbooted thugs kicking in your door which are the issue, not that address books exist.
I mean, its possible to subpoena cellphone records and geographically track your movement based on which cell towers you connect to.
But regardless, I always find it funny that most of the rhetoric for personal liberties revolves around being able to do illegal things.
> revolves around being able to do illegal things.
The problem is, what is legal today might not be tomorrow. Especially depending on the regime in power at the time.
Mass surveillance can implicate someone in a crime if later on some regime decides that what they did or where they went is now a crime when it wasn't before.
Remember the push back against Apple's proposed client side scanning of photos to look for CSAM? What happens when the hash database starts including things like political memes, or other types of photos. What used to be legal is now not, and you get screwed because of the surveillance state.
Absolutely no data should be available without a warrant and subpoena, full stop. Warrants issued by a court, not a secret national security letter with a gag order either. Warrants only issued with true probable cause, not "acting suspicious."
Absolutely all your data is available for sale by data brokers. Need to get rid of those first. Then the government would need warrants where they don’t need warrants to just buy your data.
If you've worked in government, you'd know that that bar for getting a subpoena or warrant is far lower and less strenuous than getting a purchase order.
Which is also a problem that needs fixed. A search warrant should be extremely difficult to get. "The person is suspicious and we think we will find xyz illegal item" is not enough. An arrest alone shouldn't be enough either. Police/detectives should have to prove, beyond all reasonable doubt, that what they are looking for is actually there to get the warrant.
You think the standards for a warrant and conviction should be the same?
No, I had my wording mixed up. I meant to say probable cause, not beyond reasonable doubt.
The problem is the standard for probable cause is becoming too low. The courts often just rubber stamp warrants. We need systems in place to make sure warrants are only issued when the facts presented are so compelling that there is no possible doubt that probable cause doesn't exist rather than just the bare minimum to get rubber stamped by a judge.
Insufficient corroboration is already basis to refuse a warrant, but in practice that doesn't always happen. You are at the mercy of the police and court system and if you don't have the resources (money) to appeal and get your conviction overturned, you get screwed.
That’s not the standard for a warrant. That standard is “reasonable belief”.
The standard for a warrant is probable cause, which is more stringent than reasonable belief.
Reasonable belief is what allows for police to take warrantless actions. Cop sees someone in a neighborhood walking around looking inside car windows and trying door handles. He now has reasonable belief enough to temporarily detain that person and ask what he's doing. No arrest or search may be conducted.
vs.
A court issued warrant requires probable cause. Cop let the suspect go in the first example (as he should with no probable cause for an arrest), and the next day someone in the neighborhood reports that their car was broken into and their laptop stolen. Cop checks local pawn shops and finds the laptop, the person that sold it to the pawn shop is the same person the cop stopped last night. NOW the cop has enough probable cause to seek a search warrant to look for other stolen items.
Point being, reasonable belief or reasonable suspicion isn't and shouldn't be enough to search or detain. You need probable cause, and that probable cause needs to be affirmed by a judge and a warrant issued.
Police are not filling out purchase orders to query an API they already have a contract with.
The purchase order was already taken care of a long time ago, because police loved being able to get around warrants and love dragnet surveillance.
Ouch
Generally, laws can't be applied retroactively. If you're in a regime that ignores that, then there really isn't a sense of law anymore to worry about.
A binary view is incorrect. Governments not having records of Jews would not have stopped the Holocaust. But this killed some people who could have escaped.
And the problem is not limited to retroactive laws. Phone scanning was another example in their comment. A regime could use this to restrict future communication even if they did not punish past communication.
The idea that US citizens actually give a fuck about defending anything is laughable. All of this is performative virtue signaling.
US literally has ownership of guns codified into constitution, specifically to allow citizens to defend themselves from oppressive regimes that fit CBP to the letter (i.e violence against US citizens), however a CBP officer is yet to be shot in a confrontation.
Its to the point where Trump can literally start confiscating guns, and the amount of armed resistance will be negligible, and most of it originating from organized gangs. When it comes to all the "dont tread on me" people, when armed forces are surrounding their house, and the chance of losing the easy comfortable life they have lived for the past 3 decades is very real, all of them are going to bend over and lube up so fast that they will get whiplash, without a doubt.
The most important reason for privacy is that without it, social norms calcify.
If a norm is outdated, oppressive, or maladaptive in some way and needs to be changed, it becomes very difficult to change the norm if you cannot build a critical mass of people practicing the replacement norm.
It is even harder if you cannot even talk about building a critical mass of people practicing the replacement norm.
For many norms, like the taboo on homosexuality which was strong in the US and Europe until recently and is still strong in many places today, the taboo and threat of ostracism are strong enough that people need privacy to build critical mass to change the norm even when the taboo is not enshrined in law, or the law is not usually enforced. This was the mechanism of "coming out of the closet": build critical mass for changing the norm in private, and then take the risk of being in public violation once enough critical mass had been organized that it was plausible to replace the old oppressive/maladaptive norm with a new one.
But yes, obsolete/maladaptive/oppressive norms are often enshrined in law too.
For good reason. Being "investigated" for illegal things is a key way to violate personal liberties. If you believe in freedom, you have to accept that some people who are not nice people benefit from those human rights. You may find yourself an "enemy of the people" for a variety of reasons.
In most cases, cell tower data is sold in the open market in aggregate. A commercial real estate developer can buy datasets that provide the average household income of passers by by hour of the day and month of the year, for example. The police can request tower ping data, generally by warrant. There are exceptions, especially in the federal space.
The Feds have a massive surveillance network. Every journey on the interstates between Miami and the border crossings near Buffalo, Watertown, Plattsburgh, Vermont and Maine all the way down to Miami is logged and tracked by a DEA program, which has likely expanded. You can get breadcrumbs of LPR hits and passenger photographs throughout the journey.
Flock is a cancer, as it is deployed by individual jurisdictions (often with Federal grants) and makes each node part of a larger network. They help solve and will likely eliminate some categories of crime. But the laws governing use are at best weak and at worse an abomination. Local cops abuse it by doing the usual dumb cop stuff -- stalking girlfriends, checking up on acquaintances. The Federal government is able to tap in to make it a node in their panopticon. Unlike government systems, stuff like user ids aren't really governed well and the abuses are mostly unauditable.
The private camera networks are a problem for commercial abuse and Federal abuse. They aren't as risky for local PDs because they generally require a paper trail to use. Corrupt/abusive cops don't like accountability.
>The police can request tower ping data, generally by warrant.
Or Trump can just put legal pressure on cell providers and they will bend the knee like everyone else, and CPB can easily have that data without problems.
Lets not pretend that that is the line they won't cross.
Those companies have been selling the data to the government without warrant for quite some time actually. No pressure necessary. Cops have money and Verizon wants it.
Where do the cops get that money? Oh, right, us.
That is exactly my point: no subpoena or warrant is required for access to license plate scan databases.
I want you to tell me in exact words that you firmly believe that when the current regime starts requesting records without any legal oversight, cell companies won't comply, because users trust is worth to them more than shareholder value.
What's the point you are trying to make here?
That things like subpoena matter very little to actual fascists.
Only a review of your dossier by the House Un-American Activities Committee† can verify you have not demonstrated any subversive behavior, citizen.
† https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_Un-American_Activities_C...
> [M]ost of the rhetoric for personal liberties revolves around being able to do illegal things.
What are you basing that on? Conjecture?
No, simple logic and how society is evolving.
Counterpoint: when you're sharing a public road, the license of your car to share that road isn't private information.
... But I echo the concern with how the collection and aggregation of the data can be abused. I just don't have a great solution. "Don't use shared public resources to do secret things; they're incompatible with privacy" might be the rubric here.
As much hate as it gets, the GDPR has pretty clear guidelines for situations like these. Essentially, the purpose of the data collection matters. Your license plates may be public information as in they are visible in the public, but that doesn’t mean collecting the information is, or providing others access to it - without your consent.
> It's not just government use either. There are private companies that scan vast numbers of license plates
Welcome to capitalism. It is very hard, in EU and US, to tell where the government ends and the private companies begin.
especially when private companies can buy politicians. At this point there is no line and the two have become one.
I mean... the whole point of a license plate is that it's a public identifier. It should not be that controversial that's publicly registered information. In the same way that flights are tracked.
Multiple Supreme Courts have also made it clear several times that they believe you do not have a right to privacy in public spaces. So all the traffic camera databases do is automate and make easier something that is currently definitively legal.
The more pertinent issue in this case is that driving patterns should not be grounds for detainment without a warrant. Especially if you have no evidence to link the driver to the car. But unfortunately, the recent Supreme Court decision made suspicion of being an illegal immigrant grounds for detainment.
> Multiple Supreme Courts have also made it clear several times that they believe you do not have a right to privacy in public spaces. So all the traffic camera databases do is automate and make easier something that is currently definitively legal.
I propose we streamline things and augment your cars license plate with a placard stating:
First and Last Name
Address and Phone Number
Drivers license number
Age and net worth
Prior convictions
Maybe there's a few more factoids we could add on there? I'd really like to know who is parked next to me. I mean, you're in public and have no expectation of privacy afterall.
This line of argument enables all kinds of criminals to do stuff you absolutely do not want them to. From stalkers figuring out the best time to rape their victim to organised crime planning cash truck robbery routes.
It's been fascinating watching the party of "small government" turn into one that supports ever expanding powers of a three letter agency whose job is supposed to be patrolling the border. It's like a new 9/11 Patriot act moment, except it's only one side supporting it this time.
It's the same as the Republican slogans of being the party of "fiscal responsibility" despite under-performing the Democratic party in nearly all financial metrics and constantly blowing up the deficit or being the party of "family values" while having leaders and 'respected' voices who are the complete opposite.
Don't forget "states' rights"
The party of small government is a slogan. It’s the same party that expanded domestic FBI surveillance, expanded intelligence agencies and lots of other things. It’s also the party that is intimately interested in what private citizens do in their bedroom (sodomy and condom laws) and what medical decisions doctors and patients can undertake.
To be fair, the current Republican Party bears almost no resemblance to the "classic" Republican Party of....10 years ago.
The Newt and the Tea Party started the slide, normalizing hatred and bombast and FU-politics, and MAGA perfected it.
Whether you love it, hate it, or are indifferent, what you are dealing with now are not really Republicans. They are MAGA-folks. They should really rename themselves the Solipism Party. Nothing matters but the current state of your own head.
And yes, I know parties change and evolve with the times, but I would argue this time is very different.
The "old" GOP also loved 3 letter agencies, unitary executive theory, and mass surveillance. They did the Patriot Act. And Scalia hated the 5th Amendment, was weird on the 4th, and dramatically increased police powers.
> To be fair, the current Republican Party bears almost no resemblance to the "classic" Republican Party of....10 years ago.
In other aspects, perhaps. But the "small government" or "pro-economy" branding of the Republican Party has been an absurdity for more like 75 years. Democratic administrations have performed better on virtually any conceivable economic metric with very few minor exceptions.
It's not like those Tea Party folk appeared out of the blue. They grew, but the core constituency has been pandered to by mainstream Republican leadership since at least Nixon.
The current Republican Party is the exact same as 10 years ago, just further along.
10 years ago was basically Trump 1. And 10 years before that was GWB starting the endless wars with an admin outright denying reality. Which Reagan also did. And of course Nixon literally broke into the opposition party’s.
The Tea Party, MAGA (and the on the other side of the isle the Bernie bros and whatever their replacement will be) represent pent up demand from the masses to get the current status quo to F-off. So far the status quo has co-opted all these movements.
.. 10 years ago. Yes it fucking does, it's just become more brazen. Those are the motherfuckers that passed the patriot act and then reupped it over and over.
Yes votes were 144 D and 213 R in the house with unanimous yes (only one no) in the Senate. Right after 9/11 people were fine giving up with their rights pretty much across the spectrum. Granted Republicans more than Democrats. I think since then it has just been the status quo for every president since Bush. I hate it but it has been engrained at this point IMO.
This all reminds me of Makeshift Patriot by Sage Francis.
Obama and the Democrats were surprisingly heavy on surveillance and curtailing rights during Obama’s Presidency.
So you can include them in the “reupped it over and over”.
Every US administration at least as far back as Woodrow has done nothing but expand the surveillance state. Like you can make the argument that occasional weirdos like Ike, Clinton and Hoover didn't really do anything to expand on that front and just kept the status quo and let them run themselves but there has never been any substantial rollback in at least 100yr. And as bad as the executive is the legislature is no better.
That's why all of these efforts to corrode civil liberties needs to be fought and contested by both sides. Otherwise the ratcheting effect makes if impossible to reclaim these liberties.
None of this is new. The article states that CBP got authorization to track license plates in 2017 and concerns about law enforcement use of ALPR date back to at least 2010. The ACLU sued the LAPD in 2013 on ALPR.
The part that's new is people being detained for "suspicious" traffic patterns.
Is it? or is the new part that it's being reported? This "news" just looks like an investigation AP conducted on its own. Could they have conducted it years ago, and what would they have found then?
This. TFA barely glanced at it but they mentioned "collaboration with the DEA".
The DEA has been jerking off about how they've been doing this stuff on the east coast corridor for over a decade.
The current CBP situation is basically a Ctrl+C Ctrl+V Ctrl+V Ctrl+V Ctrl+V of what DEA was doing under Bush and Obama.
Historically CBP isn't patrolling the entire country, so yeah, at least the scale and reach is definitely new.
The particular manner in which it is being used can be different even if the fact that is being used by CBP is not.
>CBP got authorization to track license plates in 2017
who was president in 2017?
I mean, the last 20 years is only ~8% of the history of the U.S., so all things considered those changes are pretty "new".
Sure, but the OP was specifically referring to party politics and this is a bipartisan issue.
"detaining those with suspicious travel patterns" is new
No it is not. The DEA has been doing that since at least the 2nd Bush admin and probably would've been under Clinton or Bush 1 had the tech existed at the time.
> this is a bipartisan issue
Where the instance upthread and your instance both occurred under the same president? lol
I really wish we had a (lower case) republican or conservative party in the US.
I hope we survive this fear driven over-stimulated era of politics.
We have a lower case conservative, pro-status-quo party. The Democrats.
Even now all they can talk about is returning to normal (where normal describes the conditions that led to the current state).
I've been seeing a slow splinter as of late between "establshment"-style Democrats focused on decorum, and the progressive-style democrats focused on overhauling the status quo. There definitely seems to be a slow shift towards people who want to take real actions an not stay stifled in years talking about actions.
Of course, the former won't let the latter perform without a fight. The campaign with Mamdami was one of many clashes on this, and there will be many more to come next year.
Either way, a focus of not falling to fascism is the bare minimum agreement between all democrats. I just hope we don't all think the job is done once we get the bar back from being underground. It being on the floor still isn't a great look.
They talk about increasing minimum salaries for exempt workers, paid sick and family leave, infrastructure funding, expanding access to healthcare, etc. How is that lower case conservative, or pro status quo?
Those are pretty standard policies of center-right / conservative parties in Europe.
(Plus the fact that Dems talk about some of these doesn't mean they think they're going to happen.)
That's definitely left wing in the United States.
There's a big difference between "actually left wing" and "leftwards of 50% of a particular population".
The US has very little actual big-L Left (ahem) left in it.
left and right are directions, not locations
The leftmost member of the Reichstag in 1942 was probably not fairly described as “left wing”.
Can you name an example?
Sure; the UK's Tories, or Germany's CDU, or Australia's Liberal (lol) Party.
Hell, the right-wing ran on giving more money to the National Health Service as one of their Brexit arguments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_Leave_bus (Including Farage, at times! https://www.the-independent.com/news/uk/politics/brexit-eu-r...)
But that ended up being a lie. It almost feels like a pattern...
Seems irrelevant to a discussion comparing US parties.
>Plus the fact that Dems talk about some of these doesn't mean they think they're going to happen
They literally got ACA passed by a hair, and were just shy of 2 Senate votes needed to enact all those policies I discussed in Biden's original BBB.
We're talking about a need for a party that no longer exists in the US. Why would we not look to similar examples out there in actual practice?
this thread comes from a provocative quip that the democrats are conservative, with no mention whatsoever of any context other than america
Here’s some American context: a ~3 minute video. Bush and Reagan, during the primaries, trying to win over Republicans, answering a question about immigration.
https://youtu.be/YsmgPp_nlok
That’s what American conservatism used to look like. Modern Dems talk a lot like that.
Or even look at George @ Bush's calls for comprehensive immigration reform, and his repeated emphasis on treating all immigrants, legal or not, with dignity and courtesy: https://www.bushcenter.org/topics/immigration
Infrastructure funding is a pro-business position. At this point, most of the infrastructure that the Democrats are seeking funding for is maintenance, the definition of "status quo".
So is minimum wage, despite all of the screaming. Minimum wages ensure the existence of a working class. When the minimum wage drops below subsistence, there are civil disruptions that are bas for business.
When the Democrats expanded health care, they did so using a plan devised by the Heritage Foundation. It works on free-market principles, of consumers purchasing insurance from private enterprise. It is also very pro-business, creating a larger class of potential employees who can be hired without employer-sponsored benefits.
Many democrats would indeed like a government-run universal health care plan. But it's not a majority of the party, which is indeed (as the OP said) dominated by the center-right.
When have there ever been "civil disruptions" due to a low minimum wage in the US? Federal minimum wage has been underwater all of my life. If the minimum wage law had any teeth (requiring Congress to stop fellating business owners), it would at least be tied to the inflation rate (as Social Security tends to be).
If the Federal minimum wage had kept up with inflation since it's peak value in 1968, it would be close to $26/hour.
None of that is conservative or liberal or leftist its common sense that both parties should be able to agree on. There are policies that are logically the right thing to do.
If implemented with a modicum of competence (which is admittedly not a foregone conclusion) and over a sufficiently long period (probably at least longer than one or two 4-year terms), all of those things would almost certainly have positive effects on the economy.
They notably do not talk about modifying the systems of governance that have prevented us from accomplishing those goals, which they have been "talking about" nearly the entire 40 years I've been alive. If I were to ignore their talk and judge purely based on action, it certainly seems like Democrats effect less change than Republicans.
(to be clear about where I stand, when given a choice between a conservative party and a regressive party, I have always begrudgingly chosen the conservatives)
>They notably do not talk about modifying the systems of governance that have prevented us from accomplishing those goals,
All the Democrat led states have passed a law to change presidential votes to popular vote:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...
And there isn't much Dems can do about the disproportionate power of a few states due to the Senate, except for start a Civil War.
They directly increased access to healthcare and infrastructure funding in the last 15 years, and both were very obvious, big bills. Perhaps it would behoove you to actually pay attention, instead of memeing online about things you don't actually know anything about?
Do you know any progressives? Do you follow any politics outside the US? I'm going to guess not, because your frame of reference for what a genuinely progressive win would look like is woefully miscalibrated. I suggest you rectify that before accusing anyone else of ignorance.
Yes, they have had some incremental policy wins and done tremendous good for millions of people (while also making, e.g. healthcare more expensive/profitable). No, the occasional incremental policy win does not a progressive party make.
The how matters.
Since Clinton Democrats have been neoliberal (conservative). The mechanism they've chosen for all of their programs has been public private partnerships. Infrastructure funding, for example, has been "they created a slush fund for private companies to bid on". Healthcare was "They created a slush fund to pay for private insurance".
And I'll point out, that they also made healthcare more expensive with this slush fund approach. Medicare Part C was created by the Clinton administration which, you guessed it, created a giant slush fund for private insurance that ends up being more expensive than Medicare Part A/B.
I agree, democrats did expand access to healthcare, but they did it in the most expensive and easily corruptible way possible. The approach was literally a carbon copy of the Heritage foundation plan that Romney implemented in Mass.
You'll notice that, except for paid sick leave, all these things are simply "keep the lights on" policies. That is conservatism.
You might be confusing conservatism with libertarianism. Up until about Reagan, all these policies were considered conservative.
Progressive policies aren't just about tweaking existing policy, it's about building new social structures. We've not seen anything really close to that in the US since roughly LBJ.
Bernie does, does anyone else? They were just in power and didn't do any of it.
You should maybe read about all the things that died in the pocket filibuster.
And then there is all the woke stuff, that is unfortunately what the Democrats have been associated with lately.
"Woke" is more of a political weapon created by the right than any actual real concept.
There's no consistent or fixed definition of woke. It's a blanket term applied to anything that MAGA dislikes at any given moment. Woke's only purpose is to manufacture outrage, and it didn't exist as a concept until MAGA made it one.
Case in point: Dems in 2024 did not run on trans issues, almost at all, and yet Republicans spent millions to give the impression that they did.
One can just look at what they did whilst in power. During Biden's tenure, they severely weakened Title IX protections for women and girls, in deference to trans activist demands. They changed federal prison policy so that men who call themselves women could be incarcerated in women's prisons, and prison staff would be forced to pretend these male prisoners are women. Their "first-ever female four-star admiral" appointed to lead the public health corps, which they falsely touted as a historic win for women, was actually a male transvestite.
This is absurd and harmful policy. Of course the opposition are going to call it out.
For one, the party either was in favor or did not take a clear stance on issues such as trans people in women's sports, DEI practices and other similar "woke" issues. That was enough to turn off a huge number of voters. Democrats of the Clinton era would have easily defeated Trump.
Let's hope grown adults using the word "woke" unironically dies with 2025.
The concept of a "Minimum wage" in itself is anti-worker. The state is not a workers friend. The union is.
What a weird stance. A minimum wage guarantees all citizens can live a life in basic dignity. A worker is, even if part of a union, still a citizen of a state. A state is the sum of its constituents. There is, beyond the bipartisan war, room for compromise and mutual understanding for the benefit of all.
A minimum wage only guarantees that all citizens can race towards a collective bottom determined by some easily bribable elites.
Companies do not have to do a conscious effort to determine the lowest amount they can go. "Everyone else pays that rate too"
> Companies do not have to do a conscious effort to determine the lowest amount they can go.
But absent the rule, they would - and did - reliably go lower.
Unions are by far a net positive, but the way they fight against universal healthcare and minimum wage for people not fortunate enough to have the option of being in a union makes me question this belief.
The far left always portrays the democrats as being too far left, even though both parties have moved to the left.
In 2000, no country in the world accepted gay marriage, up until 2013 gay marriage was banned in California because the Californians elected to do so (it was overruled federally against the wishes of the Californians).
In 2025, even a majority of Republicans (by some polls) support gay marriage. The far left always moves the goal posts. Once they legalized gay marriage, they considered it the norm instead of a wild idea that Republicans should fight to remove.
That's why you see the rise of Christian nationalism. Many consider the average Republican to be too far left (similar to how leftists consider Democrats to be too far right).
Personally, I'm for the Matrix opinion. In the Matrix, the future humans live in a simulated 1999 because it was considered the peak of human civilization. Socially, it was.
> The far left always moves the goal posts
The goal of the far left has always been equality. It's the same goal that legalized interracial marriage.
> That's why you see the rise of Christian nationalism
We've always had an issue with Christian Nationalism in the US, and they use any excuse they can to push their agenda. If it's not gay marriage it's immigration, or trans rights, or whatever other wedge issue they can create a moral panic over.
It's vital to remember that nationalist goals are absolute, but they will lie about it. They say they just want to protect women's sports to get their foot in the door, and then they're banning gender affirming care and looking to re-criminalize gay marriage. There's no reason to compromise with nationalists.
They are anti-gun "progressive" nuts, how can they be "conservative". Their "normal" was destruction, so people voted trump in just to stop this idiocy (by starting a new one)
Small C conservative would be what these days? Iraq invading weed dealer arresting homosexual hating mid-00s "we call ourselves neoliberals bur are nothing of the sort"? Or their counterparts on the other side of the isle who are happy to build up the police state thinking it can do no wrong or happy to regulate the shit out of everything uncritically deluding themselves into thinking it won't become a handout for moneyed interests at the expense of upstarts?
As bad as shit is now I think that might actually be worse.
While people haven't yet suffered enough to agree to compromise and just wind the whole mistake down, there is a huge consensus on both sides of the isle these days that we have too much government swinging it's weight around in pursuit of things that are bad.
At this point, what would that party even be? Their only genuine appeal is to Christian fundamentalists who prioritize banning abortion and LGBTQ rights. There hasn't been a coherent domestic or foreign policy from them in decades.
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>I would rather prefer the boiler to explode
Just to be clear, you really would prefer to live in crumbling infrastructure, with plenty of violence, martial law, and constant worry of whether you are going to get shot or not trying to get basic supplies?
Because boiler exploding isn't romantic or cool like you think it is. Imagine the worst possible riot, except country wide.
I'm sure people made the same argument against the founders of this Republic.
And they were right. The American revolution had more to do with the fact that the wealthy landowners in the colonies wanted to claim even more land to the west. The British crown was getting tired of sending soldiers to clean up the messes the colonists were getting into by picking fights with the natives.
Most of that rhetoric about tyranny and freedom was simply propaganda to get the poors to fight on their behalf.
And it worked! They successfully conned the other colonists into laying down their lives to make the founders even richer.
Somehow it doesn't feel all that different from America today. Something something history, doomed to repeat it.
If the ship is gonna sink there's an argument to be made for letting it go down with those who doomed it aboard rather some unspecified future generation.
That sounds like a recipe for chaos and famine akin to Russia in the early-mid 90's
Or worse still, Russia in the early-mid 1920s.
The Reds very nearly lost the civil war to the Whites, not because of any battlefield victory, or even a concerted propaganda effort. Instead, it was because for a lot of people, they'd take going back to the old rotten monarchist system that got them into this mess, if meant they could just stop starving to death while party operatives came and took all their food away.
Would that have been a bad thing?
That's have likely been forced to go with a limited monarchy with a legislature and limited democratic characteristics (like most of the rest of europe at the time) in order to consolidate the support, or at least buy the compliance of the factions that opposed them.
That might've saved a whole bunch of lives. And looking at it now 100yr later, Russia didn't exactly turn out great.
The leadership of the Whites were not the moderate monarchists who just wanted Nicholas to abdicate to literally any functioning adult. They were the “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality or death!” types. Their explicit goal was a restoration of pre-Revolution autocracy, whose brutal dysfunction was the explicit reason for the February revolution in the first place. The Whites were not good people, and it’s a mistake to characterize them as simple, noble anti-communist fighters. Most of the White leadership that survived into WWII went beyond just collaborating with the Nazis on invading Russia, but were onboard for all of the Nazi program save for “Ukraine belongs to Germany now”.
Don’t misunderstand me, Stalinism was worse for Russia than the Czars, but there’s really no White-victory scenario where it’s all sunshine and roses and limited democracy. That option went out the window with the October revolution.
All I’m saying is that there is no better illustration of how bad War Communism got than the fact that people looked at the literal pogroms and said “maybe that’s not so bad”.
> for a lot of people, they'd take going back to the old rotten monarchist system that got them into this mess, if meant they could just stop starving to death while party operatives came and took all their food away.
That describes Russia under Putin. Putin considers his regime to be a continuation of Imperial Russia. He's brought back the Imperial Eagle, the Russian Orthodox Church as an arm of the state, considers himself to be the next Peter the Great, and says that his goal is to extend Russia to its traditional boundaries, out to at least the edge of Poland and the Baltics. Communism was a historical accident which has now been corrected.
What do you know about Russia in 90's?
People fantasize about revolution, but the reality would mostly be huge amounts of suffering and death.
And there's near-zero chance that the outcome would be the 'high-tech fully-automated luxury communism' that people dream of. There's many much-more-likely outcome that are worse than what exists now.
> the reality would mostly be huge amounts of suffering and death.
I think many of the people fantasizing about revolution are aware.
I think the movie 'Civil War' by Alex Garland was too absurd to be understood by a lot of people - to me it was yelling "IT CAN HAPPEN HERE TOO"
>People fantasize about revolution, but the reality would mostly be huge amounts of suffering and death.
There is suffering either way. Which has more area under the curve, fighting about it now, or boiling the frog 100yr and fighting later?
That's easy to say when you aren't the one under pressure.
Or one of the 200M people in the blast radius.
Accelerationism never works. There's a long, long list of complete and utter disasters and tremendous suffering inflicted by this moronic logic. Things get better by being made better, not by being made worse.
> Accelerationism
In the AI sense, or in the Israel/Third Temple/apocalypse sense?
It has never been about small government. You can just look at the Republican record on deficit spending or military funding to dismiss that. “Small government” was just an acceptable way to say you were for reducing benefits to people deemed undeserving.
There are people who called themselves Republican who started to believe their own propaganda, but it’s never been an empirical fact in the modern era that Republicans acted to reduce government spending in toto.
There's no need to partisanize this. Why would you immediately turn off half of your possible audience when speaking about an issue that affects everyone equally? San Francisco is covered in Flock cameras just like the ones pictured top-right in the article, and you won't find a more-Democrat-leaning place. One cannot analyze and act on data that does not exist: https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/sf-takes-historic-step-to-s...
Flock is sort of a new kind of animal in the LPR space. Before that there were a lot of LPR companies out there but none of them were providing data in such a way that law enforcement could do what it's doing. LPR has been in use for tolling and for parking enforcement for decades now. It's the same kind of shell game Ring has been running by putting surveillance cameras on everyone's house and then selling access to law enforcement.
> There's no need to partisanize this.
On the contrary, the only way to drive change in a democracy is via partisanship. Demanding we all adhere to an artificial both-sides framing is manufacturing consensus for the status quo. Politicians only change their positions if they think they'll lose votes because of it.
Also, obviously, because the analysis in this case is clearly wrong. This is a 100% partisan issue. Period. There are good guys and bad guys in the story, and if you won't point out who they are you're just running cover for the bad guys.
> Politicians only change their positions if they think they'll lose votes because of it.
And you won't convince any of that party's voters to care about location privacy enough to make it a vote-changing issue if you open your argument by criticizing their party (which, yes, almost universally sucks) instead of talking about the actual issue, which is location privacy.
Most voters are independent.
This is HN, no one here is ignorant of the issue. Even granting your framing, you're addressing the wrong audience. This is the choir here, not the laity.
Look, no, that's just wrong. Immigration enforcement overreach (and law enforcement overreach more generally) is an almost purely republican issue. Period. Trying to silence criticism, especially in this forum, is simply trying to deflect blame.
> Trying to silence criticism, especially in this forum, is simply trying to deflect blame.
You are misinterpreting me in bad faith here.
How so? You don't want us discussing the fact that republican policymaking is behind the CBP overreach in the linked article. You... literally said so.
An interesting fact is that "the border" technically extends 100 miles from any actual border.
Guess how many major metros are in that area.
https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/your-rights-bord...
There is nothing small Govt anymore. Both parties are the same when it comes to extending Govt's power (just for different reasons). It is just a talking point now.
State's Rights (to own slaves) vs No State Rights (to shelter slaves) is probably the most infamous example, and it's from a while ago.
The same party that gave us the Patriot Act?
They've not been "small government" since forever.
While 62 house Democrats voted against it, Patriot Act had bipartisan support, which is why Obama never repealed it.
They have been the party of small government when the democrats are in power since forever. When they have power though...
Very similar feeling to watching the liberal/progressive party fangirl the FBI and the intel community
edit: in reality the times have changed and so has the country and the parties. All of these pre-2008 stereotypes are stupid and not useful anymore.
The problem is that the "both sides are bad" people just uniformly vote Republican. Its the cope of understanding that your side is batshit insane, so you have to pretend that the current state of affairs doesn't actually matter, and the problem goes deeper in the goal of normalizing your party.
The truth is, the only reason not to trust the intel community is because of some fringe bullshit you heard on Joe Rogan.
I've been voting third party for a long time. When both sides are bad (in different ways) it is the only choice left. (The third party isn't all that great either, but they are better and hopefully they send a message that people care)
Isn’t that basically just throwing away your vote though with it being a winner-takes-all system?
No because the statistics are counted. People in the "smoke filled backrooms" pay attention to what third party messages are getting attention and in turn use that to inform how they change. Long term it isn't a bad strategy, but it does mean you have to accept whoever wins (though in rare cases a third party has won) for today. If one candidate isn't too bad I will vote for them.
In my case I've decided on criteria is has not held this office for more than one term (that is I give you two terms no matter what office you are running for) because no matter how much I agree with you I don't want anyone to spend too long in government.
To quote Marlow Stanfield, "You want it to be one way. But it's the other way."
In the US electoral system, voting third party doesn't send a signal. It throws away your vote. Let's take a look at what voting third party has done.
1. Voting for Nader led to Bush Jr. winning the presidency in 2000. 2. Voting for Jill Stein led to the first Trump presidency in 2016.
So you got that going for you.
I consider third parties running in Presidential elections to be joke candidacies but what you’re saying is just the whining of whoever lost the election that was influenced by third party voters. Would have been the same result if the third party voters didn’t vote btw.
People in the "smoke filled backrooms" pay attention to what third party messages are getting attention and in turn use that to inform how they change.
Kinda like how the Libertarians got ~3% of the vote 2016, and over the following years the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire was taken over by groypers and the national LP endorsed Trump in 2024? I mean, in an ideal polity you'd be right, major parties would pay attention to where they're losing votes at the margin to inform their policy decisions. But we live in a far-from-ideal polity where the two major parties systematically undermine minor party candidates at anything above the county level.
When faced with reality over the past decades, and the historically good record that Democrats have had, versus historically bad record that Republicans have had, versus the unproven record that any 3d party had,
and considering what was at stake in the 2024 election,
you either voted for sanity (especially given that Kamala was the most milquetoast unoffensive candidate ever which would have been MILES better than what we have now), or you voted for insanity, because lack of vote for Dems means you were giving Trump a chance to win.
Sorry, but that is how it is.
Bad reading comprehension. This isn't a "both sides are bad" thing. Both sides are different than they were from 1980 - 2008.
This is your cope to justify your side's righteousness. Many people recognize how awful both parties are and do not vote republican. Every socialist/leftist/communist falls into this category.
Wait, are you saying mass surveillance is a good thing?
Seriously. Where were all these people when the Democrats overreached into every aspect of our lives?
Apparently the only criticism is an accusation of hypocrisy for calling themselves the party of small government. Nothing wrong with the actions themselves apparently! Lol.
Plenty of people complained and wanted all government overreach to stop - this is an even more dire situation, propped up by people who directly lied and said they were not interested in this (which they obviously are, and they are liars.)
Why are you complaining about people's concerns instead of the actual problems created by those in power?
Because it feels like theater for party politics instead of genuine concern. I expect these people to go quiet when Democrats come into power and start doing the same things.
The same things? You mean effectively making money laundering legal, crashing the government and starving the poor, ending health care benefits, stealing directly from the coffers, pardoning sex pests and criminals as they continue to commit crimes, ramp up terrorist action against american cities, drop bombs on boats with no justification, roll back our environmental protections to invest in dead end energy projects, double down on crony capitalism, make it so corporations either bend the knee by directly giving money to the president or have their business ended with tariffs, and generally do everything they can to rob us blind and you say "oh it's all the same!"
The president is sending the troop into cities on made up offenses, he's posting to social media shitting on american citizens, he's doing death threats on sitting politicians, this is not the same you absolute twat.
It's a silly claim made by unserious folks.
Yeah the emerging 'The Bullwark' wing of the democrat party. Never trumper republicans trying as hard as they can to move the right flank of the democrat party into the bush era republican gradient so that they can pretend that they didn't lose their own party.
If you're interested in some reflection on that, What's the Matter with Kansas? (2004) by Thomas Frank explores some of this, but centered around Kansas. Pretty interesting (and frustrating) stuff.
They were never for small government, they just want it crippled enough that it can't regulate them but can still be used against other people.
While you're not wrong, not sure it applies here. This is an all-party thing:
Started about a decade ago to fight illegal border-related activities and the trafficking of both drugs and people, it has expanded over the past five years.
Some of the lawsuits (cited in article) to fight this, and illegal pull overs, go back years.
Really? It shows how this tech can be used in ways you don't like, when your party is no longer in power. How whatever laws you pass, surveillance you enact, powers you give, aren't just for you.
But also your political adversary.
Started 25yr ago when some dudes with poor aviation skills caused the checkbook to open up and the war on drugs was still going strong.
And even then it was smoldering for a long time before that. A good "start" point is probably the creation of the FBI.
The party of small government thing hasn't been true for a long time, if it ever was.
Well at least post 9/11 unconstitutional escalation required legislation and the creation of agencies like the DHS and TSA. Now, a political culture that is willing to break norms and abuse technicalities is silently expanding powers to the max, and that’s far more insidious. But maybe it’ll result in a strengthened democracy in the long term if new laws or amendments are passed to contain this problem.
Pepperidge farms remembers when it took a constitutional amendment to ban booze.
Meh. I think political parties in the states are really there just to make money. Why else would the dems keep pelting you with adds for $5? I think both parties are saying whatever they need to say to convince people to give them cash. The number of people who care about privacy seems smaller than the number of people who want to be entertained by politicians, so it's unlikely to change anytime soon.
I've talked to some of these people at the local level and they really believe what they're saying. So I don't really buy your explanation.
I don't know what you mean by "turn into" it's always been that way
"turn into" is referring to the mask off nature of it all. Before, they might be a little embarrassed or pretend they still stand for those principles. But all I've seen are conservatives explaining why it might be technically allowed or straight up cheering it on.
No, they still insist, while building a stasi, that they are the party of small government.
The people who voted for them and are still cheering them on are insisting that they voted for and are getting small government!
They are divorced from what words mean
The logical conclusion of all this oppression is that everyone will just stay home, and go out no more than necessary, and spend no money that isn't absolutely necessary.
Is that a win for the oligarchs?
It is for the ones that do deliveries. I never looked up the numbers, but my gut feeling is that Amazon did well during the pandemic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Wilhoit_(composer)
To the GOP, lying (in stated intentions "small gov", et al) aligns with their core values:
GOP is the party of capitalism (free-market, laissez-faire). Capitalism is the pursuit of self-interest and the profit motive.
And when the opportunity permits, this creates an ethical incentive structure for lying to be deployed for tactical gain.
You can't even call the GOP the party of capitalism either.
The party that took a 10% stake in Intel to at least partially nationalize it. The party of tariffs, the party of special interest tax loopholes giving taxpayer subsidies to fossil fuels, real estate, and agriculture, the $400 million equity stake in MP materials.
Sure sounds like they are picking winners and losers, the antithesis of free market capitalism.
Pretty sure Republicans always supported defending the border from drug trafficking and illegal immigration.
Gary, Indiana does not have a border with a foreign country so why do CBP need to monitor drivers there?
Airplanes exist
It’s a logistics chokepoint for drugs coming across the southwest border into the Chicago area.
> It’s a logistics chokepoint for drugs coming across the southwest border into the Chicago area
The ?
You mean to say you're supporting a checkpoint in Indiana to catch drugs that came from Mexico?
Fix the checkpoint in Texas then if it's leaking drugs to Indiana ...
I guess we could build a wall or something.
It's not a checkpoint, it's surveillance.
Presumably CBP is not stupid and that surveillance is providing value they can not otherwise get only in Texas.
They've been at these programs for decades; if they were effective we wouldn't be in a drug epidemic At some point you have to cut your losses and accept that the only benefits were the politicians Flock donated to.
I'm not saying you have to abolish CBP. I'm saying they should be protecting the border and this ain't it.
Millions of illegal aliens have entered the US under Biden. They're not all hanging at the border. Of course CBP needs to go everywhere in the US to remove all of them.
Ah yes, illegal immigration is like the new "terrorism"... everything must be done to stop it which includes giving CBP and ICE unchecked power.
why not legally migrate, millions have done it in the past.
Before terrorists it was drugs, before that it was communists, before that it was communists with less weed and shorter hair.
Eventually you realize your enemy isn't the system. The system is like a misbehaving toddler that's never been disciplined. It acts as badly as it can get away with. Your enemy is your fellow countryman, you coworkers, your own family. And from that realization comes nothing actionable nor good conclusions, only despair...
In reality, CBP and ICE have very little power.
ICE has very little legal authority and is yet the current president’s ground troops to lock up everyone who looks foreign. I’d say they have all the power they need.
ICE can walk into your house / pull you out of the car with masks on and kidnap you without showing you any papers. That's more power than a lot of other agencies
Is that why Trump killed the CBP funding bill in the beginning of 2024?
Trump wasn't in office at that time. He urged Republicans to not pass it for various reasons which I will not enumerate here, and CBP was funded weeks later.
The reasons you don’t want to enumerate here are “he wanted only Republicans to look good on the border by ensuring that nothing could get passed while a Democrat is president”. He doesn’t care about the border, he cares about authoritarianism and party politics.
>which I will not enumerate here
Translated to "Even though I know that most republicans said they didn't want to go against someone who had a very good chance winning in 2024 for the fear that they would get their political career destroyed, because that is what Trump explicitly said to them, I will vaguely allude to some fringe statements about things that haven never been proven true in regards to other aspects of the bill as the reason Republicans didn't vote for it, because in no way shape or form will I ever admit that I was wrong.
I don't get why people on your side still think that saying shit like this makes you sound smart. That ship has long sailed.
There were a lot of things not to like about the bill, such as being tied to Israel/Ukraine aid, setting an emergency trigger that normalized flooding the border, and it being a token measure for Biden to use in the election.
lol
It's funny until you personally are affected.
funnier to believe that republicans always supported defending the border from drug trafficking and illegal immigration. - much funnier :)
Everyone supports that?
The only thing fascinating is that anyone believed any of that crap.
Everything that Trumpists are doing was peddled in the 1990s by such distinguished figures as Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani. Usually with a nauseating appeal to "rule of law". The "surprise", and "this behavior may be the path to authoritarianism" stuff in the NY Times makes it hard to read without an eyeroll.
This shit comes in waves. Before it was peddled in the 90s it was peddled in the 70s. In the 50s you had the same stuff as well.
> except it's only one side supporting it this time.
I wish.
Very early on in this Trump admin there was a bipartisan bill passed which greatly expanded the capabilities of ICE to deport [1]. Democrats have been well aligned with the republicans when it comes to immigration policy. You'll find few that will actually criticize the actions of ICE/DHS.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laken_Riley_Act
156 Democratic congressmen voted no on that bill.
46 voted yes. And just a few months prior democrats tried to pass this [1] [2]. Which only failed because Trump didn't want Biden to be able to show a "tough on the border" stance.
Again, you'll find few democrats that have a stance on the border that contradicts the Republican stance. There are a few, but most are just staying silent. The only reason they vote against these sorts of bills is because of pure partisanship, not out of some ideology alignment.
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/436...
[2] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/senate-hold-election-year-sh...
That's less than 1/4, so your argument fails.
We've had a generation of leaders allowing in tens of millions of people to flood into the country, the American people have voted against it every time they are given the chance and still nothing is ever done about it. The right wing voting base doesn't care about small government, we care about stopping the flood and undoing the damage that decades of these policies have caused. Look at polling data, especially among young people, border enforcement and deportations are what we want.
Look at the recent actions in Charlotte: ICE raids started and 25% of the school kids didn't show up to school. Which indicates that likely 25% of the population is illegal. It is a massive problem.
> ICE raids started and 25% of the school kids didn't show up to school. Which indicates that likely 25% of the population is illegal.
you're downvoted but this is a very real thing, especially at the elementary school level. My kids had regular classes in first/second grade taught in Spanish because they were the one single English speaking student in the room (this was fixed when my wife and I found out). The level of illegal immigrants in schools goes down over time as they drop out. My son is now 16 and a sophomore in HS, SEM Magnet, and in a class of about 100-125 he knows maybe 10 that have told him they're here illegally.
/Dallas public schools
> border enforcement and deportations are what we want.
this is not what “we want” - this is what ruling party wants you to think and obsess over while they pillage and make your life otherwise miserable.
the same young votes voted for Biden in 2020 knowing very well what the immigration policy would be (and they were as bad as it gets the first two years)
one that we can solve without turning the US into a single-party police state
The “party of small government” has always seen protection of sovereignty and borders as exactly one of the few things a government should actually do.
Your comment feels unsubstantiated. What do you mean by that? Or do you just mean the current government has Republicans at the top.
Can you share data on how people of one party are supporting ALPR and the other are against it? I was looking for a public poll on this question and couldn't find one.
edit: Why am I being downvoted?
Polling this year consistently shows that Republicans support all the actions being taken with respect to immigration under this admin. Sorry I don't have any links handy at the moment, but you can see it in this thread: "too many people crossed under Biden, look what you made us do!"
I don't see anything in the article that says anything about immigration. From the info provided, this is about suspicious behavior ID'ed via ALPR, and they don't specify suspicious of what. That seems very broad and something a reasonable person would expect many people of all parties to be wary of, not just people of one party.
> I don't see anything in the article that says anything about immigration
Article starts with: "The U.S. Border Patrol is monitoring millions of American drivers nationwide"
Hard to blame this squarely on the Republicans. Access to private license plate readers was granted under the Biden admin, and no doubt each of the last four administrations played some part.
To me, the CPB and ICE are looking more and more like an American Gestapo.
> Access to private license plate readers was granted under the Biden admin
Apropos of anything else, this access was granted in 2017, and Biden might be surprised to learn he was President then, not Trump.
> Access to private license plate readers was granted under the Biden admin,
Nope.
Nice try tho. The "both sides bad" argument used to work, not anymore.
Small government without control of who comes in is borderline anarchy, and they never claimed to be for anarchy. Small government internally requires border controls, and if the border controls failed in the past do you expect them to just shrug? I can see disagreeing with them, easily, I just don’t see obvious hypocrisy like you are suggesting.
We're literally discussing a mass surveillance dragnet throughout the country (not just at the border) here; the kind of stuff that is normally reserved for dystopias in fiction.
To argue that it is somehow okay because it enables "small government" to exist is very much in the spirit of "war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength". When thugs in uniform stop and interrogate Americans on the roads because their movement patterns are "suspicious", there's nothing small about it.
I’m not saying it’s okay, but I am not a small government person. Illogical arguments just bother me. I think small government is impossible for other reasons.
The republicans have been the party of massive military since forever. I don’t really see how this is different.
Small government without [big thing I happen to like] is [bad thing] therefore it's okay to make the government big in [the aspects I like] and I don't see any hipocrisy in that.
65% of the US population, 200 million Americans, live within the 100-Mile "Constitution-Free Zone".
Supreme Court has established that some established constitutional provisions do not apply at the U.S. border, and protections against governmental privacy incursions are significantly reduced.
The border search exception applies within 100 miles (160 km) of the border of the United States, including borders with Mexico and Canada but also coastlines.
This is mostly a canard, kept alive by fundraising pages at ACLU, but contradicted directly by current pages on the ACLU's site. It feels useful on a message board to call out things like this, but it actually hurts people in the US, who deserve to know that they do not surrender their 4th Amendment rights simply by dint of living within 100 miles of Lake Erie.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45041697
(There's a really good Penn State law review article on that thread).
> (really good Penn State law review article on that thread)
Yes, and what it says is this:
>The Supreme Court has decided that there is a reduced expectation of privacy at the border, holding that the government’s interest in monitoring and controlling entrants outweighs the privacy interest of the individual. Thus, routine searches without a warrant, probable cause, or reasonable suspicion are considered inherently reasonable and automatically justified in that particular context.32 Fourth Amendment rights are therefore significantly circumscribed at the border, and CBP is given an expansive authority to randomly—and without suspicion—search, seize, and detain individuals and property at border crossings that law enforcement officers would not have in other circumstances.
The constitution free, means that constitutional rights are reduced within the area.
The whole article is about what at the border actually means.
I reread that old thread, and then skimmed the Penn State article (a bit quickly, I admit). I gotta say: I think you're overstating your case here. Certainly, the author of that article is skeptical about the 100-mile zone and makes plenty of good (and, IMO, obvious) points about why it is constitutionally suspect. But, to read your comments, you'd think that some important court somewhere has actually placed meaningful limits on immigration enforcement within that zone (outside the context of an actual border crossing). If so, I don't see where you're getting that. If that's actually in the article, could you tell us where?
To be fair, though, I think it is also true that the ACLU is too eager to talk about the "Constitution-Free Zone" as though it is fact. I also agree that people should not simply accept that the Constitution-Free Zone exists. It is definitely not that simple and what would otherwise be 4th Amendment violations should absolutely still be challenged even if they occur within the zone. There is still every opportunity for more good law on this.
Without wanting to recapitulate this argument for the Nx1000th time if we don't have to I'll just say that the points I'm making are points ACLU itself now makes.
https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone
Since the ACLU is largely the origin of this meme, I think that's pretty dispositive.
Importantly: I am (for the Nx1000th time) not saying that federal law enforcement officers won't make abusive claims, or directly abuse the law; they certainly will. As I said in the previous thread, they managed to detain Senator Patrick Leahy more than 100 miles from a border, which, when you think about the implications of the 100-mile-zone, is kind of a feat!
Okay, so you linked to https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone which contains this text:
>The federal government defines a “reasonable distance” as 100 air miles from any external boundary of the U.S. So, combining this federal regulation and the federal law regarding warrantless vehicle searches, CBP claims authority to board a bus or train without a warrant anywhere within this 100-mile zone. Nearly two-thirds of the U.S. population, over 213 million people, reside within the region that CBP considers falling within the 100-mile border zone, according to the 2020 census. Most of the 10 largest cities in the U.S., such as New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago, fall in this region. Some states, like Florida, lie entirely within this border band so their entire populations are impacted.
Which, upon re-reading both of your comments in this thread makes me actually think there is no argument at all and everyone here and the ACLU agree: there is a no consitution zone, it has practical consequences, and it does extend out 100 miles from internal foreign borders.
The executive branch asserts that there is such a zone. But the truth is likely that many, if not all, 4th Amendment rights still apply in many situations within that zone. It's situation dependent, so it's difficult to make a sweeping generalization. But some of the executive branch's most aggressive claims and tactics, at least, may well not hold up in court.
I think one thing that happens in these discussions is that people lose sight of how big a deal an actual border search is. An actual border search (I've had the pleasure! And mine was on the mild end of things.) is much worse than a search incident to arrest.
What I feel like people do here is map everyday abusive law enforcement behavior onto that border search exemption without realizing that what they're actually suggesting is that people should expect (and thus roll with) a "tear everything apart, search under clothes, maximally invasive" border search, which is what the Constitution authorizes at an actual border crossing.
Drive a white Altima across I20 from Abilene to Shreveport. Be a good boy and drive within the speed limit. You'll get pulled over for suspicion of being a drug mule. Of course you're innocent, but if you decline to allow them to search your car, they'll call in a drug dog that's trained to alert whenever its handler wants. So they toss your car and all your belongings. Strip out all the door panels, everything. If they want, they can plant evidence and jail you. If they decide to be nice, they just leave you on the side of the road trying to figure out how to put your car back together.
> The executive branch asserts that there is such a zone. But the truth is likely that many, if not all, 4th Amendment rights still apply in many situations within that zone.
Technically, the entire fourth amendment applies. BUT All the fourth amendment requires is probable cause for warrants, and that searches and seizures be reasonable. It doesn't require warrants for searches or seizures (although courts have found that that is usually necessary for reasonableness), and it doesn't require probable cause for searches or seizures without a warrant (though courts have found that that also is usually necessary for reasonableness.)
What the courts have allowed is the use of the border zone to justify exceptions to a lot of the things that are usually required for reasonableness. This isn't, technically, an exception to the Fourth Amendment, because searches still need to be "reasonable". Its just proximity to the border makes searches "reasonable" that wouldn't be anywhere else.
Got a case cite on this?
I'm doing ["border search" "miles" site:uscourts.gov], getting cases --- recent cases, including some with cites to Ameida-Sanchez, which of course makes my point --- and not seeing much to suggest that CBP can randomly search random cars in Green Bay WI under the border search exemption.
Folks may be talking past each other on the "100 mile" issue.
The dissonance arises from these contradictions:
1. Federal regulations specifically state "100 air miles" with respect to the US Border patrol: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-8/part-287/section-287.1#...
2. The US Border Patrol has lost court cases for things they have done within those 100 miles, essentially saying they shouldn't have done those things.
An informal interpretation of this is that the US Federal Government and BP generally view the powers of the BP as more expansive than the judicial branch, possibly including the legislative.
In the end people are being swept upt under what seems to be an obviously unconstitutional thing and yet the courts continue to shrug.
I agree with the Penn State Law Review analysis in your link. Sadly that's not the reality of the world we live in. You're burying your head in the sand pointing to a document that suggest how things should be compared to what has actually been happening. In the end, people are being stopped and nothing is being done about it. Some paper put out by a law review isn't ending the persucation that is happening no matter how hard you ignore it.
Words on some paper mean nothing compared to the actual actions of man.
Border Patrol is doing an operation in Charlotte, NC right now. That is well over 100 miles from any border or coast. So 100 miles itself is fiction, they can just do whatever they want. Who’s gonna stop them?
International airports count.
>While the U.S. Border Patrol primarily operates within 100 miles of the border, it is legally allowed “to operate anywhere in the United States,” the agency added.
The Border Patrol probably is allowed to operate anywhere within the United States, but being in the Border Patrol doesn't (at least statutorily) give them any magic powers; in particular, you don't get "border search authority" by being a part of CBP, but rather by being any law enforcement officer confronting someone who you reasonably believe crossed the border recently.
…and including international airports (and thus all major cities) if I'm informed correctly.
We need all these exceptions to the constitution to get a hard reset. SCOTUS has failed to uphold the constitution.
It is not an exception to the Constitution, it's a decision about what “unreasonable” in the Fourth Amendment means.
Note that the default (but not universal) equirement to get a warrant for a search or seizure (and the imputation that for many warrantless instances of either, probable cause is still required) is also such an interpretation; the text of the Amendment doesn’t say either of those things, but they have been inferred by the Supreme Court to be generally the case from the juxtaposition of the reasonableness requirement for searches and seizures and the probable cause requirement for warrants.
While the Bill of Rights (and protections in later amendments) is sometimes treated like a bit of divine revelation, much of it is intentionally (to kick the can down the road on resolving disputes at the time) imprecisely worded, heavily compromised, legislative enactment by imperfect legislators, with sentences that are disjoint and where any meaningful application requires reading connections into the the text that aren’t explicit, as well as devising concrete operationalizations for vague terms like “unreasonable” or “due process”.
What is the rationale for 100 miles? Curious if anyone knows, or if its an arbitrary number a lawmaker decided?
The 1946 statute gave CBP the authority to stop and search all vehicles within a “reasonable distance”. CBP defined the reasonable to be 100 miles and it stuck. It's just federal regulation interpreting the law and courts have blessed it.
Supreme Court rulings it seems. This is the law: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1357#
But it only says "any reasonable distance". SCOTUS appears to have come up with the 100 mile limit in various cases over time.
“Constitution-Free Zone”
Now there’s a trumped-up charge.
After graduating high school, our daughter became a "member" working for Disney World. We made several driving trips back and forth to visit or bring her stuff she wanted or just for the heck of it. Then after a while we flew out, rented a van and brought all her things and her back home. Was that suspicious?
The same daughter and our son-in-law lived in Huntsville Alabama while he finished his post grad degree. I can't tell you how many trips we made then to visit, tour and eat at restaurants around town. Was that suspicious?
In 2023, we drove a round-about way to Phoenix to purchase a puppy. We visited Carlsbad New Mexico and several national parks after driving through the panhandle of Texas, in some of the remotest highways I've ever been on. (And beautiful too!) On the way home, we took a different route to see more of the states. Was that suspicious?
If I would have been pulled over and asked what I was doing, I would have said it was none of their damn business, I'd broken no laws. (Yes, I would have said we are on a trip to buy a dog and are heading home, but to be grilled, hell no!) How is this legal? I'm a white guy in his late sixties, is it fair they wouldn't suspect me because of that? Does the rule of law crumbling bother anyone anymore?
Suspicious behavior is not a crime, and law enforcement is required to have a reasonable, articulable suspicion of a crime in order to detain people.
> law enforcement is required to have a reasonable, articulable suspicion of a crime in order to detain people.
In theory, yes.
In practice, yes, with many caveats.
LE doesn't have to articulate that reasonable suspicion at the time of the detention. They can come up with that suspicion years later when it comes to deciding in court whether the evidence from that traffic stop can be suppressed. This is assuming that the warrantless search even found anything, the suspect didn't accept a plea deal in lieu of going to trial, and the charges weren't dropped just before trial.
A working system for this sort of thing would be more like:
* The officer needs to record that reasonable suspicion at the time of the detention.
* All of these reasonable suspicion detentions are recorded, along with outcomes. This becomes evidence for reasonability presented in court. An officer with a low hit rate suggests that the suspicion in generally unreasonable, and they are just fishing.
* A 20 minute timer is started at the start of a traffic stop. If the officer can't articulate the reasonable suspicion at the 20 minute mark, detention is considered plainly illegal, and qualified immunity does not apply. This prevents keeping people on the roadside for a hour waiting for the dog to show up.
* Similarly, the hit rate of the police dogs needs to be recorded, and low hit rate should make any evidence from them inadmissible.
For any of this to happen, we would need to start giving standing to supposedly "unharmed" suspects that just had their vehicle torn apart and hours of their lives wasted without charge. Currently, the courts seem to think that a little wait at a traffic stop and an fruitless illegal search that is never seen in the courtroom is no damage at all.
> If the officer can't articulate the reasonable suspicion at the 20 minute mark
Wouldn't the suspicion -- the observed fact and presumed implication -- need to be recorded before the traffic stop?
The traffic stop is for breaking some kind of traffic law, usually.
I suppose you could have a reasonable suspicion stop, but it would have to be something like "a hit and run just happened nearby, no vehicle description", and you witness a car with a smashed grill and leaking radiator fluid, but not breaking any traffic laws.
Reasonable suspicion might develop over the course of the stop, e.g. driver is super nervous, the back seat is full of overstuffed black duffel bags, there is a powerful chemical air freshener odor, and the vehicle has just crossed the Mexico border.
I commute to a different state for work and when one of them legalized weed I once got pulled over and dog-searched for "driving exactly the speed limit." When they want to go fishing there is absolutely nothing that will stop them.
I had an acquaintance who was a county constable. He once told me, "Let me watch you drive down the road, any road, for 30 seconds and I will be able to find a valid reason to pull you over." He implied that some part of their training was focused on exactly that.
One data point, and a highly regional one at that, I know.
The law is not on the citizens' side and never has been. Driving over the limit (even the smallest increment) is technically illegal. Driving under can be considered suspicious and warrant further surveillance (or more likely incite road rage from other drivers) in which you will likely make a mistake. Nobody follows every traffic law perfectly and in all likelyhood cannot. Every cop I have ever known has admitted to this fact and there are even more examples of former(or current) law enforcement officers going on record saying the same thing.
"Y.T.’s mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes. Later, when Marietta does her end-of-day statistical roundup, sitting in her private office at 9:00pm, she will see the name of each employee and next to it, the amount of time spent reading this memo, and her reaction, based on the time spent, will go something like this: Less than 10 min.: Time for an employee conference and possible attitude counseling.
10-14 min.: Keep an eye on this employee; may be developing slipshod attitude.
14-15.61 min.: Employee is an efficient worker, may sometimes miss important details.
Exactly 15.62 min.: Smartass. Needs attitude counseling.
15.63-16 min.: Asswipe. Not to be trusted.
16-18 min.: Employee is a methodical worker, may sometimes get hung up on minor details.
More than 18 min.: Check the security videotape, see just what this employee was up to (e.g., possible unauthorized restroom break).
Y.T.’s mom decides to spend between fourteen and fifteen minutes reading the memo. It’s better for younger workers to spend too long, to show that they’re careful, not cocky. It’s better for older workers to go a little fast, to show good management potential. She’s pushing forty. She scans through the memo, hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular intervals, occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section. The computer is going to notice all this. It approves of rereading. It’s a small thing, but over a decade or so this stuff really shows up on your work-habits summary."
--Neal Stephenson, _Snow Crash_
There was a recent case in Illinois where the district attorneys' office decided to create their own private police force that wasn't covered by any of the laws normally reserved for law enforcement, so it could do whatever the fuck it wanted.
I remember one guy they hired to sit and pull people over all day on the highway who said the same thing "I can find something wrong with every single vehicle that passes by. I can literally pull anybody over that I want." IIRC he had things like a corner of a mudflap being broken off, or some trivial insanity like that. The big one in Illinois was having any air freshener hanging from your mirror.
Law enforcement has enormous discretion for probable cause and can give straight up contradictory reasons for different cases, it is what officers are taught to do (i.e. something like driving too fast, driving too slow, driving too rigidly at the speed limit). This allows individual bias to overwhelm any attempt at equal enforcement. It's pretty well documented in both The New Jim Crow and Usual Cruelty, the Supreme Court has made it difficult to gather data in the last couple decades.
> driving too rigidly at the speed limit
In a time when adaptive cruise control is ubiquitous, this is so egregious.
If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
- Cardinal Richelieu
Outdated information. With the new 2.0 update, anyone with a car can pull you over for whatever reason.
Any given american citizen is certainly breaking, at minimum, dozens of laws even while asleep in their own bed. If they want to pick you up and they are diligent enough they certainly can. They might be laughed out of court, but they also might not be.
But once in court, you would probably get that thrown out. The key problem is that we haven't instituted consequences for that sort of police behavior.
They did not ticket me so there is no day in court. Chatting you up, seeing everything visible through the windows, leaning in to smell your car, running your license for warrants are all "free" interactions with no oversight.
The fun doesnt stop there, check out 'civil asset forfeiture' when you have a chance.
Also, if you read TFA, it seemed like the owner of a truck and trailer had to spend $20k getting his stuff out of impound when his employee was wrongly arrested. Seems like an innocent judgement isnt everything we think it is.
> Seems like an innocent judgement isnt everything we think it is.
The State of Florida will charge you $75/day for your incarceration, even if charges are dropped, dismissed or you are found not guilty.
Not paying these fees is a Class C Felony in Florida, punishable by up to 10y in prison and/or a $10,000 fine.
If you go to court, pay a lawyer for the hours for it, instead of pleading down. In many cases you have already lost just based on the accusation.
That’s if you get to go to court. ICE makes mistakes and I doubt any of their detainees get due process.
> and when one of them legalized weed
There is no US state in which weed is legal. Some states don't enforce it, but you are breaking federal law when you smoke it.
> Some states don't enforce it, but you are breaking federal law when you smoke it.
No states enforce federal law, nor should they. To legalize weed, those state removed or deactivated state laws also on the books about marijuana production, distribution and consumption.
The problem with lots of laws, often poorly thought out or framed, is that anyone can be breaking them any time, allowing law enforcement to target people or groups they don’t like with impunity. Drug laws are an obvious one, but so are traffic laws (with ever more rules about distracted driving etc, “drunk” driving ), things like loitering, all the stupid anti-free speech laws in places like the uk.
People get whipped up to support laws but don’t see that more is just worse, especially the petty ones, even if they notionally correct for some bad behaviour, because they allow selective enforcement.
It's borderline impossible to drive from one location to another and not break a law. Some argue that this is by design.
How? I've never been arrested in my life because I follow laws, so I'm unfamiliar how you can just accidentally break a law. Is this an American thing?
If you live in a jurisdiction where there is a speed limit enforced by law, you likely have driven above it at some point. By definition, this is a violation of the law. Yet you have observed that you have never been arrested (perhaps never even ticketed?) as a result of this. Is this a logical contradiction? Obviously not. The law isn't always enforced, and not every violation of the law is punished.
I can't speak for where you live, but in America, there are many, many traffic laws. They differ greatly by jurisdiction. Most of them are not enforced. Sometimes explicitly -- for example, in my city, they recently announced they would no longer detain people for specific minor traffic violations -- but usually, it's implicit which go unpunished. It's also selective. By creating an unseen web of violations, the detaining officer is given all the necessary tools to make each stop as painful or as peaceful as they'd like.
Where are you from? In the US, there are well over a thousand laws on the books. Might be more like 10000 with respect to criminal law alone. And that's at the federal level. Factor in all the various states and criminal codes for those states and the surface area becomes enormous.
In my state alone, it is illegal to do things like:
* Hold stud poker games by charitable groups more than twice a year
* Keep an elk in a sandbox in your back yard
* Serve both beer and pretzels at a bar or restaurant simultaneously
* Swim naked in the Red River from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m
* Wear a hat while dancing or at any event where a dance is happening
* Lie down and fall asleep with your shoes on
Yes, these are actual crimes in the state I'm in. If you think those are absurd, you should see some other states criminal codes; for example, in Alaska, it is illegal to appear drunk in a bar. No, really, I'm serious. So you literally can't live your life without breaking the law somehow. I'm pretty sure Legal Eagle has an entire video (or more than one) dedicated to downright stupid laws like these.
In a just world, these laws wouldn't exist, but, well...
Edit: just wanted to add that I can't seem to find actual legal citations for some of these but they may be county or city ordinances. Regardless, they are still stupid and still crimes from what I know.
Those wacky law lists never have any proper sources, and I can only assume were scavenged from early internet chain letters or "1001 Weird Facts" type books.
Are they "whacky laws" or cover for something worse? Falling asleep with shoes on sounds like a sundown law for the homeless.
Never ever broken the speed limit?
Idled your vehicle? (Illegal in the UK no idea about the US)
In my area I can get pulled over for exceeding the speed limit, or the more nebulous "impeding the flow of traffic" aka driving too slow. On average, most drivers speed on the highways here, so it ends up being illegal to go with the flow and illegal to not go with the flow.
My favourite has been "exceeding the speed limit"
Which is fine, EXCEPT that it wasn't the *posted* speed limit, it was the *gazetted* speed limit (that is, the signs were incorrect and driving to them was illegal
While suspicious behavior is not a crime, it is certainly going to be used as probable cause. How would you think it to be any other way? See something, say something is nothing but using suspicious behavior
Not true. Section 215 of Patriot Act expanded surveillance powers, information-sharing, and intelligence authorities, allowing the FBI to obtain “business records” relevant to counterterrorism, no probable cause required. This does not specifically authorize detention, but show me the "business records" of any enterprise that would not raise questions requiring 48-hour hold.
From the sound of the article, they flag the person for local police that then can almost always find a reason to pull someone over as a pretext.
Police that I’ve spoken to will readily confirm this. They consider profiling, not necessarily racial, an important part of patrolling. If they decide you look the part, they will find a way within several minutes/miles of watching.
Assuming they do the questioning in good faith. When they are ordered to "find something", you are already at a disadvantage as a regular person. I mostly have good interactions when stopped but had my share of bad faith actors and it will be a really bad day if you happen to come across those especially in current climate.
Yes, but suspicious behavior (of a crime) is indeed often reasonable, articulable suspicion of a crime. Suspicious behavior is almost always one of the main, if not the only, thing establishing RAS for a Terry stop.
"Computer said you did something wrong, explain yourself."
Guilty until proven innocent.
If you've nothing to hide you've nothing to fear
(/s incase it isn't obvious)
Please watch "Don't Talk to the Police" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36371237)
> incase it isn’t obvious
You’re right that it should be. And in a sane world it would be. Yet here we are anyway.
Unfortunately, law enforcement often isn't subject to US law in practice, only in theory. And even on those few occasions where they are held to account for crimes against the public, the settlement is paid out with the public's own money rather than the officer's.
Devil's advocate: If the officer is acting within the policy/training they are given by their employer (and that includes not being told to not do something) then it's the employer's fault, and we (the taxpayer/ultimate employer) are liable for that.
Officers are licensed professionals. Doctors carry insurance. Engineers carry insurance. Teachers carry legal insurance, too. Sometimes the employer is also financially liable for damages, but not solely. Yet the police tend to let a city or county pay the bill instead of the officer, the department, or the union even when the officer is well outside of training and policy.
"Sometimes"
"Tend to"
Do you have any citeable evidence of this being an actual thing, or is it just vibes?
Almost every small business carries insurance.
>Do you have any citeable evidence of this being an actual thing, or is it just vibes?
Are you really unaware of city settlements for police misconduct?
Let me turn the question around- can you name a single example of a police department, union, or office paying out a settlement? Has it ever happened?
First of all - I said something different to what you are claiming I should produce citations for
I said, and I will quote "If the officer is acting within the policy/training they are given by their employer (and that includes not being told to not do something) then it's the employer's fault, and we (the taxpayer/ultimate employer) are liable for that."
Citation: https://lawrencekstimes.com/2023/03/01/tran-case-settles/ Tran’s criminal case was prosecuted under former DA Branson’s administration; however, it has impacted the policies of District Attorney Suzanne Valdez, who took office in January 2021.
The DA’s office did not have a formal, written Brady-Giglio policy until Valdez implemented hers in January 2022.
Valdez’s Brady-Giglio policy asks law enforcement agencies to share information about “allegations” of misconduct made against their officers — not just “findings” of misconduct.
I wanted a citation of "even when the officer is well outside training and policy"
Because I cannot find any such occurrence
As to your demand for me to cite things that I never spoke of
there are the following cases (the ones I have highlighted indicate that not just the city were liable, meaning that officers/unions/insurance also paid out) https://policefundingdatabase.org/explore-the-database/settl...
> In November 2023, a settlement was reached between protester Eli Durand-McDonnell and two police officers who arrested him during a demonstration outside the summer home of Leonard Leo, a leader of the Federalist Society.
Police arrested Durand-McDonnell in July 2022 on a disorderly conduct charge amid protests over Leo’s role in efforts to overturn Roe v. Wade. The Hancock County district attorney later dismissed the charge, citing the need for caution when political speech is involved. Durand-McDonnell subsequently filed a federal lawsuit against Officer Kevin Edgecomb and Officer Nathan Formby, alleging false arrest and violation of his free speech rights. Details of the settlement were not publicly available as of early November 2023.
> The family of Fanta Bility, an eight-year-old girl who was fatally shot by police outside a high school football game in 2021, reached an $11 million settlement with the Borough of Sharon Hill, Pennsylvania, as well as its police chief and three former officers involved.
Police opened fire after a verbal altercation between teens escalated into a gunfight. Police gunfire inadvertently struck Bility and injured three others, including her twelve-year-old sister. Officers Brian Devaney, Sean Dolan, and Devon Smith were fired and later sentenced to probation, pleading guilty to reckless endangerment. As part of the settlement, Sharon Hill agreed to implement enhanced officer training, particularly concerning the use of deadly force. The Bility family, who established the Fanta Bility Foundation to honor her legacy and advocate for police reform, emphasized that no settlement could erase the tragedy but expressed hope for healing and change.
[Not a payout] > In April 2023, as part of a settlement in a class action lawsuit over the treatment of demonstrators in 2020, former Minneapolis, Minnesota, police union head Lieutenant Bob Kroll agreed he would not work as a police officer or law enforcement leader in Hennepin, Ramsey, or Anoka counties during the next decade.
The lawsuit alleged that Kroll’s actions as a de facto policymaker led police to use excessive force against demonstrators in the protests that followed the May 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis Police Department officer. Under the terms of the settlement, Kroll also agreed that he would not serve on the Minnesota Board of Peace Officer Standards and Training, and that he would testify in any trials related to the suit.
And, because people are saying "insurance will pay it"
> In February 2023, the insurance carrier of the City of Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, agreed to pay $2 million to Clinton Jones Sr., whose son was fatally shot by an undercover police officer.
In 2015, then-Officer Nouman Raja shot and killed Corey Jones after his car broke down on an Interstate 95 off-ramp. Jones was on the phone with roadside assistance at the time of the shooting, and the recorded call revealed that Raja never identified himself as a police officer. Raja was found guilty of manslaughter and attempted murder in a separate criminal case in 2019 and received a twenty-five-year prison sentence.
"I was just following orders"
You are bound to obey the legal orders/directions of your employer.
If you deem them to be illegal - the onus is on you to prove that, in a court of law, whilst you are unemployed because the employer sacked you for disobeying their instructions/orders
It's all cool to be on the internet saying things like that, but when it comes to reality, I DOUBT you would do anything other than acquiesce.
For anyone that thinks otherwise - the POTUS is currently in a dispute with Senators about this
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/11/20/punishable-by-deat...
The devil doesn't need an advocate.
And you are misrepresenting the situation of what is paid out.
Nope.
As proved by the fact that you have no evidence.
>and law enforcement is required to have a reasonable, articulable suspicion of a crime in order to detain people.
They can just say you're not a citizen.
It's the oldest trick in the fascist book. You can't be a tyrant when the people are used to the idea that citizens have inalienable rights, so you slowly chip away at who counts as a "citizen."
The legal system has been chipping away at the rights themselves (and otherwise expanding governmental power) for hundreds of years, predating fascism (and communism, too). This is just the tactic of the moment.
Drive a rental car with California plates through Arizona on eastward and you're likely to find this out first hand.
They'll of course pretend that they just saw you commit a minor infraction and that's why you were pulled over.
Drove a new Hyundai with dealer plates from AZ to Minnesota and got pulled over by Bethany, MO city police on I-35 in northern MO with no probable cause other than window tint being too dark. They tore the car apart certain that I was muling drugs (removed seats, body panels, etc). Took 6 hours. Never found anything and left me with "we know you have committed a crime, we just cannot find it, but you will get caught". I had to put the car back together myself in the dark.
Retired age men driving dealer plate cars eastbound onto I-80 in Nebraska out of Colorado from I-76 get stopped ALL THE TIME as potential drug mules.
I'm confused. Are you saying they disassembled your car right there where you were pulled over? They had the tools on hand to do this? They didn't tow your car to a shop to have it searched? I've seen many many a car stop get searched by hand and/or with canine. Not once have I ever seen removal of seats/paneling/etc on the side of the road. So this is a bit much to take on first read without further questions
Yes that is what I am saying. Most cops carry a multi tool at the minimum (with Phillips screwdriver). They also had a standard 10mm socket (carried by MANY cops and all that is required to dismantle much of any Hyundai).
Using their multi tool, they removed the fender liners (wheel well liners) from all 4 wheels, the trunk side trim (luggage compartment side trim) from both sides - all of which just has plastic push-pin scrivets (retainer clips). They broke 5 of them.
They folded down my back seats (after removing all my personal items out to the shoulder in the rain), then unbolted and removed the back seat.
I do a LOT of interstate driving, and it is not at all uncommon to see this happen.
This is not the only time I have been in situations where authority has been exceeded. My attitude is to generally be cooperative (without giving consent) as my experience has taught me that is the most painless way to go.
Just adding some perspective from someone who has been inside the trunk of a lot of cop cars over the years[1]:
A good many cops (maybe not >50%, but a very significant percentage) carry a pretty decent ad-hoc toolkit in their vehicles. There's often a toolbox with screwdrivers, socketry, pliers, some wrenches, maybe a hammer and/or other basic handtools.
It's pretty common for folks who know how to use tools to keep some on-hand, and cops are not an exception.
[1]: Yeah, so... I should probably explain that part. Some of my work involves 2-way radios, and some of that 2-way radio business has lead to me putting radios and stuff into things like cop cars. I've emptied out hundreds of cop cars to get access to what I need, and have certainly climbed into the trunk of dozens of them to be where I need to be. (Someone has to do it, and sometimes that person is me.)
> Just adding some perspective from someone who has been inside the trunk of a lot of cop cars over the years
this gave me a bit of a laugh as my initial read had me imagining you being shoved into the trunk vs having dug around to see the contents.
Until it's happened to you, it sounds unbelievable
Sorry about all the broken plastic on the trim -- That's also very familiar...
Did you ever ask for a supervisor/sergeant to be called? If they are in on it to then you're no worse off, but if they can come out and rein in an out of control patrol then so much the better.
One of them WAS a sergeant. My hope was that a State Trooper would stop and reign things in a bit. Just lots of semis thundering by. Otherwise, it can get pretty quiet on rural interstates at night.
I was hassled once for driving without my head lights on at night - when they were in fact on - in NYC and one of the cops was a white shirt lieutenant. They were rude, insulting and were obviously trying to get a rise out of me. I kept cool along with my passenger and after some simple questioning and running my ID they let me go. It was obviously a fishing expedition but for what I can only guess.
Driving on I-70 or I-80/81 through Ohio definitely gets you noticed. There's a lot of meth in Ohio...
They don't need a lot of tools to do such a deep 'search' of your car, they're not under any requirement or mandate to make it easy or even possible to repair.
In my 40+ years of driving, I've seen such disassembled cars along the road a hand full of times.
This is regular, typical behavior for some departments.
The more this flyover-state mentality policing continues (obvious civil asset forfeiture fishing - dealers might be carrying cash from a previous sale, etc), the less people are going to drive through them, further depriving these states of a revenue source. Of course, this mentality could be voted out by the residents of these states, but I'm not optimistic.
I hope mightily that you are correct and it is restricted to the flyover states. I fear that the reality is probably that in populated states the police are so preoccupied dealing with real crime they have little opportunity to take "preventative action". Being as empathic as I can, I would say that the cops in flyover states deal with a LOT of transport-related drug crimes (that's why they are called "flyover"), so I get their focus. I have just learned to exist below the radar as much as possible. I no longer drive dealer plated cars and have no vehicles registered in my name (so I never come up in ALPR systems). I try to be compliant in every way possible. But then again that's what real criminals do too.
This happened to me, in East Germany. I'm sorry it happens now in the Land of the Free.
I've always wanted to ask people who lived in East Germany: what similarities and differences do you see with the modern American surveillance infrastructure?
Parent commenter probably didn’t live in East Germany, it’s the visitors’ cars that were searched.
Yes, I’m Polish American and was traveling from West Germany to Poland. It wasn’t so bad once we bribed them. It turned-out the guards just wanted Marlboros, Johnny Walker, and US dollars. We still had to reassemble the Mercedes.
The cruelty is the point
Drove a DeLorean from Chicago to LA and back. Got pulled over 4 times on the way there and 7 times on the way back. All for made up infractions just so they could get photos.
Every rental car I've rented in California seems to have Florida plates and every U-haul I've rented in the country has Arizona plates. I don't know that the issuing state matters. The Article content suggests the main issue is taking multiple short trips to the boarder not driving across a state.
They register the vehicles in states where it's cheaper. It used to be that a lot of people with trailers in New England registered them in Maine because you were(are?) not required to insure the trailer OR live in the same state to register.
And in California you can drive with no plates at all and seemingly never have any issues.
The idea of a federal agent stopping you for a traffic infraction is insane on its face. That'd be very rare, if not unheard of, in normal times no? How would they charge you? Are there federal laws on the books for speeding or not wearing a seatbelt?
Look into "dual sworn" officers. Although I've seen a few investigations which show that the federal officers will just send a text message, on a private phone, to uniformed officers when they want them to "check something out."
The US Park Police can and do enforce basic traffic regulations in national parks - which includes some roads, like the Blue Ridge Parkway, that are “linear parks”. In respect of the fact that these roads are often used by local traffic, they will generally permit things that would be legal under the law of the state you are in (e.g., concealed firearm carry, so long as it’s in the car and not brought into a ranger station or other building on the federal property).
Even worse feds will use local cops as fodder to pull over actual murderous criminals on traffic infractions, not knowing what they are dealing with. They then let the local cops take the risk and come by with their meal team 6 squad afterwards.
https://youtu.be/rH6bsr61vrw
When i was building a house next to the border, I drove from the border north every week, but was astonishingly never flagged at the internal checkpoints (ive been brutalized by cbp at the actual border before under false drug smuggling accusations). I also have a lot of foreign, brown 'illegal' looking family (us citizens) whom I'd drive up/down the border regularly through CBP checkpoints as they helped us build.
The fact i was never stopped makes me even more terrified of a panopticon. Is their surveillance that bad -- or that good?
>the fact i was never stopped makes me even more terrified of a panopticon. Is their surveillance that bad -- or that good?
"I'm terrified that this panopticon so bad that it doesn't see anything"
If it’s so good that it sees everything, and they just haven’t seen anything of interest enough to stop you yet isn’t that scary?
what
This makes me want to do this just to jam up the system
This dragnet style data monitoring is illegal when it comes to phones, it probably should be illegal when it comes to cameras too.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45945960
So how do we do that? Is some organization working on it with a plausible theory of change?
The phone rulings came from court cases. So sadly it has to reach a case, an in the meantime other folks are hurt with no recourse.
We already know they're doing it with phones too, laws don't apply to them.
Nonsense, I have it on good authority that Privacy Is A Human Right or somesuch.
...to be charitable, I think OP is being facetious.
"Suddenly, drivers find themselves pulled over — often for reasons cited such as speeding, failure to signal, the wrong window tint or even a dangling air freshener blocking the view. They are then aggressively questioned and searched, with no inkling that the roads they drove put them on law enforcement’s radar."
Wow, this is incredibly concerning. So they can pull me over, lie about why and then try to manufacture something ?
It should be illegal for law enforcement not currently participating in a proper sting operation to lie to the person they wish to investigate. But it's not.
It is in some jurisdictions. In Illinois and Oregon, laws have been passed that prohibit law enforcement officers from using deception when dealing with suspects under the age of 18. Other states, such as Washington, Connecticut, Delaware, and New York, are considering similar legislation that may extend these prohibitions to all individuals being interrogated.
https://www.timesleaderonline.com/uncategorized/2022/11/poli...
Wait until you hear about parallel construction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2014/feb/03/dea-paral...
> Wow, this is incredibly concerning. So they can pull me over, lie about why and then try to manufacture something?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction>Wow, this is incredibly concerning.
Well, maybe now you understand that when people were saying Trump is an actual fascist, it wasn't just memes.
Its only gonna get worse. At some point, CBP is gonna shoot someone, nothing is gonna happen, and that will be the turning point of when they can just arbitrarily start shooting citizens with no repercussion.
If you don't have a plan to GTFO the country by now, you are behind.
Not CBP but see Carlos Jimenez for an example of what's currently happening.
Yes, it's very important to let them lie about it or else they will have to reveal the actual giant surveillance state and all the technology behind it and that would cause us to lose WWII.
Oh wait, I think we just did, given what the Coast Guard has been up to today. https://www.juneauindependent.com/post/coast-guard-says-swas...
One of the most striking things about this article were the photos of the disguised cameras, especially the ones dressed up as traffic cones and electrical boxes.
How is that striking? We've had nanny cams with cameras hidden in teddy bears and other items for a really long time now. That's like saying you're shocked cops go undercover and do not ID themselves as cops.
I think most Americans would be struck by the revelation that the government has hidden cameras in traffic cones
Have most Americans never considered undercover operations? If you are investigating someone, you don't want them to know about it. Otherwise, you wouldn't be bothering with the undercover aspect. Now that the department has cool hidden cameras, of course they will be used for other purposes.
It's not like I'm out there hunting down police abuses, but having hidden cameras is just something I would absolutely expect them to have. I did not know they specifically had cameras hidden as traffic cones, but I'm also not shocked they do. That's the shocking part to me is the shock of others instead of others also going "of course they do"
What bugs me the most about all this surveillance is that crime clearance rates dont seem to be improving, I guess it just makes law enforcents job easier, they just click click click instead of actual shoe leathering.
Murder clearance rates in the 50s was in the high ninety percent.
There are some good reasons it is lower now, like defense lawyers and Miranda rights. Obviously it'd be good if we had both good civil rights AND high murder clearance, but they seem in obvious tension with each other.
It feels like the past 25 years has been a continuous slowly constricting circle just chipping away at privacy and freedom and it almost never goes in the other direction or even just reverts a policy back to baseline. People largely don't seem to care though and I don't think there are any politicians seriously fighting against it and prioritizing as a primary policy.
This is what the world's most perfect democracy looks like. Peak Freedom.
To be fair, we are also free to own guns and defend ourselves against illegal acts. Too bad people just want freedom when its easy, not when its hard
Guns can't help protect you against illegal acts like these.
They can, but few people are willing to use them to perform that task.
The people with the guns and the militias are the ones in support of the tyrant, unfortunately.
According to Pew Research, more foreigners make up the US population today than ever recorded. People here are allowed to question who is coming.
>People here are allowed to question
I don't get why you have to obfuscate like this. You aren't against limitations for questioning. You wont find any sensible person that is against immigration enforcement completely.
What you want is the ability for your side to carry out its will unobstructed by any legal process, because you fundamentally believe what they are doing is right, and the other side is evil.
Just say that instead of pretending that its about the law.
I will always find it weird that people who think the fact their consciousness randomly popped into existence through pure luck in a privileged country means that they deserve it more than someone who popped into existence somewhere else.
Even that aside, how does that give them the right to infringe on the rights and privacy of citizens?
Not sure about the "ever recorded" part - how far back are we talking? There were some pretty massive waves of illegal aliens flooding the East Coast back in the 1600s.
The United States didn't exist in the 1600s.
What even is a foreigner in a place like the USA?
Benn Jordan's recent video on Flock Security cameras is a must-watch IMO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lY
Does anyone know if ALPRs are being combined with Bluetooth/TPMS scanning to associate devices across vehicles or if TPMS is getting associated to vehicles (like if a stolen plate is put on another vehicle because the TPMS doesn't match)?
TPMS scanning is particularly nasty. I've been meaning to read up more about all of the potential ways it can violate our privacy. Sorry that I don't have any further info about it in this case.
100 Mile Border Zone - https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone
Your rights are limited in interactions with CBP, or to state the inverse: CBP have claimed more powers than traditional law enforcement. This has been true for quite a while; they have at various times been more and less careful about your rights while exercising those powers. They are being less careful now.
Wouldn’t it be trivial for serious criminals - like cartels etc - to just use different vehicles?
Sure, but policies that just generally terrorize people aren't primarily about actually catching criminals.
Technology is going to change a lot of things...
Imagine a drone swarm that follows you wherever you go. Tracking and photographing every step you take in public. When you go into a building, a ground drone follows you in, notes where you've gone, and when you leave, hands you off to the flying swarm. Creating a trail of all your activities. Legally there may not be anything you can do to stop it.
The expectation that you have no privacy in public is what fuels this.
Modern cars log their GPS coordinates about every 60 seconds and maintain weeks of records at minimum. Police regularly obtain search warrants to view weeks of GPS logs from your infotainment system.
Ah, the freedom of a car. Well, in any case, this is easy to circumvent—use public transport or ride a bike. Wait, what country are we talking about here? Oh... right.
It is so tragic to see where the US is going in real time from an outside observer. So much for "freedom".
> Once limited to policing the nation’s boundaries, the Border Patrol has built a surveillance system stretching into the country’s interior
Well, that's what happens when you blur the line called the border.
Remember the movie Minority Report? Where a central plot point was the main character being tracked (by their retina in that case), and how to defeat the tracking? Vibes.
The US is turning into China, which has perfected the surveillance state.
"They'll never use it for evil!"
It was about cost, not desire.
Originally it would cost too much to have someone follow you around and keep track of where you're going. This was a kind of check against that system. Now you're an SQL query away from being on some list you don't know exists.
> "detaining those with suspicious travel patterns"
Detaining those they _deem_, without oversight to have such.
> often for reasons cited such as speeding, failure to signal, the wrong window tint or even a dangling air freshener
Police shouldn't be able to pull someone over for an air freshener or tinted windows. They can send a fix-it ticket without wasting the time and resources, and without causing the inconvenience or diversions in traffic. And, as a private citizen, I strongly prefer the police have the minimal necessary powers to detain me.
In the last admin I used to think that "abolish ICE" was hysterical.
I now believe we need to not only abolish ICE, but puts the politicians and officers on trial. CBP needs to be purged and rebuilt from the ground up.
You can sue the government for violating your 4th amendment rights.
Terrifying and unconstitutional
Land of the free.....
Anyone can be targeted, anyone can be pulled over, anyone can be detained, anyone can be labelled a terrorist, anyone can be deported to a black hole in el salvador. These are dark times.
The border patrol should only be able to do this within the 100 mile no constitution zone that extends from all foreign borders (including internal borders like the great lakes). If they do this in Minneapolis, Minnesota or Denver, Colorado it would be unconstitutional.
No. They shouldn't be able to do this within 100 miles of a border either, since that's not a reasonable distance for the border exception to apply by any sane reasoning. The rights of roughly 2/3 of the US population don't evaporate because of some absurd assertion of distance that is clearly off by two orders of magnitude. We must uproot this particular crop of dystopian bullshit and salt the earth in its place.
"Suddenly, drivers find themselves pulled over — often for reasons cited such as speeding, failure to signal, the wrong window tint or even a dangling air freshener blocking the view. They are then aggressively questioned and searched, with no inkling that the roads they drove put them on law enforcement’s radar."
So, standard driving while black (or brown, or Muslim, or whatever is demonized in $CURRENT_YEAR), but extended to new categories? I guess now that it's impinging on the comfortable it's news.
Intentionally driving suspiciously to get illegally detained sounds like an easy lawsuit.
Beware of "you can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride." Some people don't survive that ride. Sometimes that ride lasts many years.
If only the application of the law was as binary as code.
It's germane to point out the War on Drugs™ is a war on the people and has never been about "keeping people safe". I know that a lot of people say that cannabis is ok but hard drugs should not be legal to keep people safe. Look at how well that's worked out, as well as how the people involved with those drugs are treated (users are treated like dangerous criminals rather than with substance abuse issues).
This war along with the War on Terror™ give pretense to all of these abuses of power and need to be undone. The problems they profess to address can be addressed in much simpler, cheaper, and humane ways.
good? why is this "news-worthy"? "Law-enforcement personnel are paying attention to people behaving 'suspiciously'" seems like: "people are doing their jobs". Gasp! The audacity!
just saw this [1] today where the police chief was using license plate readers to stalk and harass "multiple victims". This is why you don't collect the information in the first place. I am sure the lawyers are one step ahead, but I think Flock should pay these victims directly (in addition to the PD) for failing to stop the misuse of their technology.
https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/braselton-police-chief-arre...
Remind me, why do we need license plates?
If there's a reason for having them, why don't we require them for people? Let's make everyone walk with their id at the front and back. We're for public safety here, right?
Canada has been authoritarian for awhile, while trying to claim to be 'nice'. The protestors during Covid got de-banked, fired, and arrested.
Democracies with Liberal leaders can quite literally get away with murder.
> Democracies with Liberal leaders can quite literally get away with murder.
I mean, so can Saudi Arabia and Israel. It's less about being a democratic liberal, and more about having the right connections.
In Saudi Arabia Uber reports all trips to the kingdom [1].
[1] https://blog.careem.com/posts/local-regulatory-data-sharing-...
That's good to know and I wouldn't use the service in that country after learning this.
It's always good to know how different countries try to violate us in different ways.
But the criminals and illegals and the worst of the worst and the drugs. Think of the children that are being fed illegal drugs thru tubes put in by the trans-national trans gangs.
/s
I drive back-country roads all the time to go hiking and camping. I guess that makes me an outlaw now. Great. /s
License plates aren't compatible with the 4th amendment, and this only becomes more obvious with time.
No, the license plates are not the problem. It's the scanning/recording of them that is.
License plates provide basically the same info as the title to the car or your house. They only supply addition information, such as location when they are recorded somewhere. With things like facial recognition, you don't need the plates to track movement (although it is easier).
The real problem is public surveillance identifying/tracking individuals.
The idea of having titles for cars seems fundamentally weird too. We manage fine in most of the rest of the world without any special government paperwork establishing the owner of a vehicle.
It's mostly redundant as the registration schemes in most other countries do the same thing.
it seems more feasible to get rid of the license plates than to control public or private imaging and analytics of the license plates.
Given technology's march forward, it seems that higher resolution cameras would enable tracking systems to determine unique car identities by the pattern of imperfections in the vehicle, much like biologists sort leopards by their spots.
IOW, I think removing license plates just buys some time.
It does seem easier, but very low vlaue. If we let the recoding continue we will still have facial recognition, gait recognition, OnStar tracking, etc.
sure, but those are much less effective as programs and much less difficult to counteract at an individual level.
i think taking the easy win here could be very effective and provide a path towards solving the rest.
People may not understand how deep this goes. With municipalities eagerly allowing companies like Flock to hoover up license plates and centrally aggregate this data there is a very strong argument this is true and amounts to 4A violations when considered in total.
Add that many states have laws that are /more/ punishing if you intentionally obscure your plate than simply not having one, what other conclusion can be drawn? The state’s arguments are thin. “Oh we need it to find criminals / vehicles of interest” oh sure, so you get to suck up all our data to protect a few toll roads and track a few supposed criminals. The balance of benefit to society is dubious at best IMO.
Steve Jobs famously used to get a new car every 6 months, because in California, you don't have to put plates on it for that amount of time. So he could essentially permanently drive around without an attached license plate.
I think about this from time to time.
Paper plates are still required. The number on it may not be as large as the actual plate, but there is definitely a unique number on it that is absolutely registered to owner of the car.
This sounds a lot like urban legend / internet lore
California did not require numbered paper plates when Jobs did this. Car dealers would put paper plates advertising themselves on the car, but you could remove them. Your temporary registration was taped on the inside of the front windshield.
I personally saw his SL500 with dealer plates a couple of times while visiting the Apple campus as a vendor. He'd park in the handicap spot too.
Yep, and just paid all the fines if / when he got them.
Well that's just based.
That's illegal now, not that it affects him any more.
Part of the problem is that you're simply not allowed to sue the people who are misusing the technology to violate the level of privacy everyone actually does expect in public.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/01/you-should-have-right-...
I want to hear out your point more, but by that logic, neither is walking around without a mask, or using a transit pass, or paying for things with a credit card.
LP are compelled search of your papers by police without RAS nor PC.
A license plate seems as much of a "paper" as the house numbers on my mailbox.
Even if you accept equivalence on face, I don't have a house number anywhere, nor a mailbox, nor is there any state law requiring so.
You don't own a license plate. It's the state's property.
Not in my state.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45991257
This is good news. Punish the wrongdoers so we can live in a peaceful safe society.
Use AI to keep your driving pattern non suspicious ...
How, exactly, do you propose to do that?
Palantir might have a solution for you.
Ask the AI. It will tell you. :)
Yeah and if you have your cell phone with you, license plates readers are irrelevant.
Fun fact, the Austin bomber was caught because publically available user data used for advertising, as gathered by a bunch of 3d party apps, allowed a cross reference of cellphones in vicinity within certain time ranges, which narrowed the suspect pool to very few people from which they were able to start their investigation.
>In February, Lorenzo Gutierrez Lugo, a driver for a small trucking company that specializes in transporting furniture, clothing and other belongings to families in Mexico, was driving south to the border city of Brownsville, Texas, carrying packages from immigrant communities in South Carolina’s low country.
If you think 'this is just a normal citizen doing good work' at first and you are breaking privacy here, keep reading.
>They unearthed no contraband. But Beltran arrested Gutierrez Lugo on suspicion of money laundering and engaging in organized criminal activity because he was carrying thousands of dollars in cash — money his supervisor said came directly from customers in local Latino communities, who are accustomed to paying in cash.
carrying thousands of dollars in cash over the US Mexico border is so suspicious that there is likely a lot more happening. The trucking company spent 20,000$ to get him out of it.
The more I think of better call Saul and breaking bad, the more I wonder whether this is one of those situations where the reality is actually much worse than television fiction.
90% of the drugs that enter US come from the south border. At 120 tons of drugs being 'seized' not the ones being distributed, I am assuming the scale of this thing is massive. [1]
[1] https://forumtogether.org/article/illicit-fentanyl-and-drug-...
> driving south to the border city of Brownsville, Texas
> from immigrant communities in South Carolina
Not sure where you got that he crossed the border. If they had a case he'd have been arrested, you're making some pretty shady assumptions here.
Carrying cash isn't a crime. The fact that no charges were brought says that they couldn't prove a crime was committed either. And please read the fifth amendment.
> No criminal charges were ultimately brought against Gutierrez Lugo
>Carrying cash isn't a crime.
No but carrying over $10,000 into the US requires you to declare it and maybe pay taxes if you can't prove its source or risk being sized (which is fine if it's drug money).