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?
> 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.
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
> [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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
License plates are owned by the government.
But not where it is in real-time or its location history.
So what?
> 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.
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?
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
There is a huge overlap between legal and immoral
License plate holders that obscure the license plate on private property.
The solution is to make it illegal to record individuals in public for the purpose of tracking.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Let's call it GDPR. :-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.)
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.
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?
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.
Flock is extremely egregious.
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.
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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.
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".
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
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%.
Car repossession companies also use this data.
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
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.
> 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.
The difference is you can opt out by leaving it at home.
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.
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.
That’s not the standard for a warrant. That standard is “reasonable belief”.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
The GOP has been this same contemptible thing at least since Reagan.
The ideology and philosophy is all identical, the only thing new (which is substantial and dangerous) is the complete shamelessness of it today.
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.
.. 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.
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”.
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?
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
> this is a bipartisan issue
Where the instance upthread and your instance both occurred under the same president? lol
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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"
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
> 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"
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?
That's easy to say when you aren't the one under pressure.
Or one of the 200M people in the blast radius.
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'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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 party of small government thing hasn't been true for a long time, if it ever was.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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)
> 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
> 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.
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...
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,
Nope.
Nice try tho. The "both sides bad" argument used to work, not anymore.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
"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?
"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.
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.
Terrifying and unconstitutional
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.
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.
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.
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?
The cruelty is the point
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?
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).
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."
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?
>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
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.
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"
This dragnet style data monitoring is illegal when it comes to phones, it probably should be illegal when it comes to cameras too.
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_constructionParallel 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.>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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
> more foreigners make up the US population today than ever recorded
This is a dog whistle for "non-whites"
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.
> 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.
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.
It is so tragic to see where the US is going in real time from an outside observer. So much for "freedom".
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.
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.
> "detaining those with suspicious travel patterns"
Detaining those they _deem_, without oversight to have such.
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.
You can sue the government for violating your 4th amendment rights.
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.
This is good news. Punish the wrongdoers so we can live in a peaceful safe society.
> 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.
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.
"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.
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.
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?
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...
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
Over the past decade we've seen large numbers of Trump and MAGA supporters on HN.
Has their life improved because of ICE and CBP crackdowns? Are they happier now that all those undocumented immigrants have had their lives ruined? Are they proud of the destruction of our democratic norms and the attack on our civil liberties? Do they enjoy watching the rights of American citizens being trampled on a daily basis by a wannabe dictator?
They've been very vocal and aggressive here in the past, where are they now? Will they continue to spout misinformation, disinformation and whataboutism with unprecedented presidential power grabs, the economy faltering and the Constitution being ignored?
I wonder how they feel now that literally every fear that progressives warned about are coming true? Are they willing to accept that they are and always have been completely wrong?
Please feel free to reply and show your full throated support for this administration. I'd like to see how many HNers are so stubborn as to ignore reality.
Not sure the phrasing of "undocumented immigrants have had their lives ruined" is the angle you want.
The angle should be that CBP is causing a lot of unjustified problems for legal residents and citizens. People having to spend 20k to get back property that the government never should've taken is not good for deterring undocumented immigrants. When CBP agents need to spend 20 days of the month rounding up people on farms and home depot to meet quota those are 20 days _not_ spent searching for drug dealers.
[delayed]
Let's talk about those unfortunate migrants who are having their lives ruined. In West Oakland, much ado was just made about ICE attempting to pick someone up near an elementary school [0]. Some locals swarmed the cops to try to protect the poor man from being "kidnapped."
Turns out ICE conducted a targeted immigration enforcement operation to arrest Gonzalo Ramirez Martez, whose rap sheet includes multiple arrests for DUI, domestic violence, driving on a suspended license, etc. I don't know of a developed nation that wouldn't deport a habitual drunk driver who beats women.
In my county, every local ICE apprehension has been the result of targeted operations against criminals with substantial records, to include domestic violence, rape, aggravated assault, and meth trafficking for the cartels among others. No exceptions have been found by the local press, and it's not for lack of trying.
Is my life better because these criminals are being deported? Yes. So long as one "side" pretends it's all innocents being kidnapped, the rest of us will ignore you, because it's obviously and demonstrably not the case. I don't want woman-beating violent felons in my immediate location, and if an American were doing the same thing in another country they would absolutely deserve to be sent home in handcuffs.
Do I have trepidation about the methods being used? Sure, it's why I'm in this thread. But let's not pretend there's no benefit to what's going on, because it seems pretty clear to this observer that removing repeat offenders is a good thing.
[0] https://www.sfchronicle.com/eastbay/article/ice-hoover-eleme...
The Gestapo, too, got the occasional actual criminal. It still wasn't a good organization.
Iryna Zarutska's life was ruined. When liberals downplay events like these, it pushes people to the other side, even if the other side has issues. It's not hateful to want less crime.
>When liberals downplay events like these
For casual observers, this is where the fallacy is.
Sure, and Charlie Kirk was murdered by a US citizen. It's okay for us to correlate a rising trend in political violence with something other than immigration.
It's not as pleasant or vindictive as saying "the nonwhites did it" but it certainly seems to hold true when the political pot boils over. It's rarely the immigrants taking potshots at the president or storming the capitol, but instead deluded ideologues who are naturalized Americans.
Are you sure it's liberals downplaying these events? Or is it conservatives amplifying these events because they're politically useful?
I'm pretty sure everybody has condemned Zarutska's death.
Remember that Joe Biden had a border bill that Donald Trump told republicans to kill because Trump wanted to keep the border as a election issue.
I don't support any politicians. Trump may be more blatant about things, but nothing has fundamentally changed. Civil liberty was aspirational at the start of the USA, was once almost real, and then immediately began reversing.
A person in the USA has approximately zero of the rights guaranteed in the Bill of the Rights. The average person is relatively free, but the government can change that at will and the target of government power has little recourse.
Nihilism is self defeating. Saying it's just how it goes let that be the case.
Of course we support this, but it hasn't gone far enough yet. Housing costs, crime rates, healthcare costs, insurance rates, and in general political outcomes will be improved by deporting million of illegal aliens. Competition for resources, territory, and political power are zero sum. Why would we support a mass importation of millions of foreigners? Trump ran on "mass deportations". He hasn't really gotten close to that yet, but he's a massive improvement over the previous admin who increased illegal immigration by millions.
The interests of foreigners mean nothing in comparison with the interests of the nation and it's own citizens. You live in an ahistorical fantasy world where the entire globe can just coexist in one place without conflict and consequence and citizens and their political leaders should serve these people at the expense of their own. It's insane, and it's not good for the country or Americans.
Aren't your healthcare costs going to rapidly increase soon? Also with an approval rating so low, most Americans seem not to agree.
You mean aren't there already massive problems with high healthcare costs here? Yes. And housing costs. And car insurance costs. And property tax costs.
Having millions of foreigners here who are net-costs to taxpayers doesn't make it better it makes it worse. Cost of living goes down massively if we were to deport 30 million illegal aliens.
Then there's the H1B and other visas fiasco. Wages go up for Americans if this program is scrapped. Part of the discontent with Trump is he is not acting aggressively enough on any of this. So he has approval problems from all sides. And whether people agree with those like me that identify cost of living pressures as caused in large part by immigration, those same people and everyone else are going to have general "disapproval" and unhappiness with the effects.
When you have an average of 2.4 million new people pouring in for 4 years, the collateral damage is bad and eveyone is feeling it now.
Which funny definition of illegal alien are you using that adds up to 30 million?
I did some idle googling and neither “no legal status” nor “no lawful presence” amount to that many.
Probably remove status to people who had a legal status. Which they did already quite a bit in that administration.
If legal people are suddenly illegal, that sure helps their rhetoric.
Yes, that occurred to me, but the full number of foreign-born residents is in the 50-60mill range. I assumed if that was the goal they would have gone with the larger number cause it looks scarier, but no. There must be some weird middle ground where they only want to denaturalize some people, and I kinda want to know where they draw that line.
Hey, if it isn't "blood and soil" rhetoric. Very early 20th century. Back in vogue, I suppose.
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.
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.
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.
You don't own a license plate. It's the state's property.
Not in my state.
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.
Use AI to keep your driving pattern non suspicious ...
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.
How, exactly, do you propose to do that?
Ask the AI. It will tell you. :)