This has been going on for at least 15 years. But it is a wider scale than just the Border patrol. Police agencies monitoring cameras and working with other agencies to notify in advance of people coming through. Flagged plates are pulled over. IIRC, "Desert snow" was part of this. [1] I suppose the new thing now is the bandwidth and tech to watch more cars. Local police forces and cities are purchasing more readers and installing them on cars and around town in certain bottlenecks. In my town there has been a bit of an uproar...but about 25 years too late (my area started this after 9/11).
Certain highways have always been worse than others though. Back in 2013 I was working with Trinitylabs in Portland developing 3d printers (For those of you in Ruby on rails this was Ezmobius' company). After working for a week doing 15hr days getting 3d printers assembled I was driving home along the Columbia river gorge but I was on the highway on the Washington side. I was pulled over in the middle of nowhere at ~10pm for going 8mph over the limit. After a bit of talking and letting him know what I was doing..including a 20min conversation about 3d printing on the side of the highway in literally the middle of nowhere [2] the officer tells me "I only pulled you over because you are on a known drug running highway...and you are driving an Audi which is a known drug runner car."
At least he was honest :)
[1] https://www.engadget.com/2014-09-09-police-seizure-black-asp...
[2] We were so far out that he his radio wouldn't work to contact his dispatch...he had to use a cellphone :)
If you’re on the interstate in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, and hope off of it to take some back road, you’ll throw a flag.
They sent someone out to intercept me at 3 am. Just drug traffic monitoring. Once I was cleared by having “just as surprised to see you as you are to see me” conversation, I was on my way. Two things about being near the border at night: 1) don’t ride dirty, 2) you will get pulled over just speed anyway.
>you will get pulled over just speed anyway
If this is in Texas, absolutely. Doing 75 in an 80 is suspicious AF.
A few decades ago I did contracting work on Texas military bases; I would always smoke a pre-rolled blunt between the border bases and inland-checkpoints. To the chagrin of drug dogs just looking for people to harass (surprisingly: rarely me).
>don’t ride dirty
We were always taught to only break one law at a time.
States like Texas, Louisiana, and Florida are those kind of states where an unwashed car stands out pretty much anywhere and is another way to increase chances of getting pulled over. Deep cultural expectation to "take care of your stuff."
Absolutely — a car wash before any road trip South.
>If this is in Texas, absolutely. Doing 75 in an 80 is suspicious AF.
Oh, please. Half the damn signage in Texas hasn't been updated from 75, and if you weren't a Texas resident to read when the State updated the daytime speed limit to 80 in the newspapers, you wouldn't know that signs notwithstanding, 80 is the speed you should be going in the day. If you're just passing through the state, speed limit signs on parts of the interstate that haven't been updated still tell you 75. If anything it was a masterful move by Texas LE to engineer probable cause to do a traffic stop on anyone who wasn't a local, which would tend to select for non-resident traffickers.
I say this as someone who was a resident in the state when that change happened and is disgusted every time I go through and see unupdated signs. It is disingenuous, yet effective, profiling of the worst sort that seems to be ignored by most in favor of thinking like quoted poster's.
I seem to be of a minority that believe that a State has an obligation to clearly and consistently communicate the actual state of their traffic management regime to drivers from in and out of state via signage. Not play games to manufacture justification to surveil subpopulations that aren't likely to be represented/incapable of voting.
[dead]
My 78-year-old step-mother was pulled over for having a frame around her license plate but it was probably really for something else because it seems like it shouldn't take 2 highway patrol cars and 4 police-people for that...
I bet someone here reading this is very proud of their work on such a large scale system.
Government has a massive network of cameras, drones and facial recognition devices. You basically can't walk anywhere in Michigan without getting your face scanned. https://www.atlasofsurveillance.org/atlas
A network of cameras scans and records vehicle license plate information, and an algorithm flags vehicles deemed suspicious based on where they came from, where they were going and which route they took.
Given the sheer number of cameras and data sensors mounted everywhere, I guess I kinda assumed this was happening already. I think most of us are well aware that when we are in public, the government can pretty much take our picture our license plate anything. Unfortunately, I don't think there's much we can do about that which has grown under every administration and congress since 9/11.
The solvable crime is the pulling someone over without probable cause, which has been used in ridiculous civil forfeiture cases to flat out rob people on the side of the highway.
In another federal court document filed in California, a Border Patrol agent acknowledged “conducting targeted analysis on vehicles exhibiting suspicious travel patterns” as the reason he singled out a Nissan Altima traveling near San Diego.
This smacks in the face of the free right to movement across state lines. We are letting the computers tell us what's probable cause, and that must stop.
There is always something we can do about it. Fight. The question is whether enough people have the will to do so, or whether they have accepted their fate as cattle.
[dead]