Agree it's never going to happen. The last time people hit the streets for police accountability the political backlash got us a convict in the white house. Democrats are now fully cowed on the topic and Republicans cheer any police overreach.

For the powerful in both government and business there is no rule of law anymore. The "law and order" slogan only means a boot stamping on little people's face forever, the powerful can break the law with impunity.

When it comes to encryption, it helps save actual lives. If you mandate getting rid of encryption, bad actors will still break the law and use encryption to carry on business as normal. Regular citizens lose, oppressive governments & criminals win.

Something that seems inherently different between GP's comment and encryption is that encryption is an algorithm / tool, not a dataset. Not creating literal tools because they might have bad use cases is clearly a bad idea (e.g., fire, knives, hammers, etc.).

I'd say that one thing inherently different about datasets is that they are continually used badly, including by well-meaning actors. Data is frequently misinterpreted, with good intent, to draw bad conclusions.

You might hit your thumb with a hammer. That hurts! People would be a lot more careful if misinterpreting data had such clear, immediate effects on them.

Also, there are many different groups with different passionate opinions in any community as large as this one.

>advocate against encryption

This is a good point. If people are willing to push back against giving law enforcement everybody’s data why would they also oppose giving law enforcement everybody’s data? It is inconsistent because if you think about it “giving law enforcement everybody’s data” and “not giving law enforcement everybody’s data” are basically the same th

Encryption is this same exact topic, and the prevailing technical viewpoint is the direct application of the principle of minimizing collected datasets.

What can I say, it's hard to give up data. So I guess the situation must escalate until the bad outcome was undeniable.

And I don't want to make a point here about current political affairs. My point is that data collection has serious dangers, independent how good you think the current collectors are, how good the intentions of the data collection are, and how good the benefits of the data collection are. We should not pretend that at least some data collection has benefits. But we should also not pretend that any given data collection doesn't have the risk of misuse.

It's up to politics (in the end, us), to make sure that these risks are valued correctly, for example by making sure that data collectors take over some of the risk in a serious way. "The data was protected according to industry standards" is not enough.

A lot of that is because of the advent of computer systems built by IBM to maintain records.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

I think the whole timeline of WWII is broadly misunderstood in the US. I imagine it’s related to the fact the US entered quite late, and that much of what’s taught in school is fairly US centric.

It’d be very interesting to survey people and see how people’s mental models reflect reality. I imagine very few Americans would identify what was going on in 1933 at all, never mind that Hitler’s first attempt at a coup took place nearly 20 years before the US entered the war.

I think the hard counterpoint is - some ways that American government function are patently insane compared to other industrialized countries. Having moved from US to Nl just having one single source of truth about where I live and who I am for all sources of government is much less of a headache in day-to-day life. Mail forwarding, authentication for municipal governments, health insurance, etc, just takes 0% of my life (compared to the pain of authenticating myself separately to every part of the government, sometimes by answering questions about my life trawled from _private_ data aggregation companies - the lack of a central civil register does not seem to be particularly effective right now in stopping the Us government from terrorizing its citizens. Gathering this data for everyone is certainly more tedious but i think avoiding the dragnet completely for the average member of society is functionally impossible.

What can we even change? It's likely HN will also go to the grave demanding deregulation amidst a maelstrom of consumer protection malfunctions. We're already there in many respects; the DOJ's case against Google and Apple both seem to have stalled-out while the EU, Japan and South Korea all push forward with their investigations.

In many respects, the attitude of "we'll fix this one day" is exactly why we don't think deeply about these issues. Client-side scanning was proposed only a short while ago, and you can still read the insane amount of apologists on this site who think that unmitigated data collection can be a good thing if you trust the good Samaritan doing it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068741

It will take an utter catastrophe before the deregulation bloc sees what's at stake. This is far from over, despite the unanimous desire to put security in the rearview mirror.

The Nazis didn't actually need the pre-occupation data from the civil registry to easily find Jewish people.

In January of 1941, the Nazis ordered all Jews in the Netherlands to register themselves and virtually all of them, some 160,000, provided their name, address and information on any Jewish grandparents to the government.

If the lesson one learns from the Holocaust is that one shouldn't collect data just in case some genocidal group comes to power, then I fear one has learned the wrong lesson.

Who was this guy?

The simple counterpoint is that lack of data didn't stop the nazis a single fucking bit, and ICE has no problem breaking down random doors and harassing legal establishments.

This absurd idea that all we have to do is "defang" the government and we can safely ignore it, as if the problems that these data sets are built to work towards fixing would magically go away, or magically mean that people who experience those problems wouldn't still try to get something done about them, except now outside of a legal framework of any sort.

Do you actually think people with broken governments are more free in their world of arbitrary penalties and non-existent solutions?

A blinded government isn't less dangerous when it gets hostile. It just makes it more random and less well targeted. But that won't STOP it.

The holocaust would have happened just the same even if we never made counting machines. The main difference with IBM helping the Nazis is that we have good data about who died in the camps and good documentation. Funny that doesn't seem to matter to morons who think it's a hoax though.

Or do you honestly believe Jews faced no oppression and extermination in the areas without good data on them?

The actual answer is, as always, the hard one: Suck it up and pay attention to your government, participate in democracy, advocate for good politicians, understand how our system is somewhat broken and non-representative, and vote for people who will make it more representative.

There's no option to disregard politics and stay safe. If enough people in your country want you dead, no government can protect you of that if you stay disengaged. Ask the native americans how safe they ended up without a comprehensive database of their existence. We nearly exterminated the buffalo to solve that "problem". Because it was popular. No IBM needed.

They are a political force, not a force of nature. It is certainly reasonable to get angry at a political force even if their politics are predictable.

Yes, this is why the slogan was "Abolish the Police". The replacement "Defund the Police" was entirely astroturfed by Democratic politicians who thought it was better optics (it wasn't).

At this point it sounds like you have given up believing in checks and balances in politics.

ETA: It’s complicated, but having you give up actually weakens the rule of law even more.

Politics change, scorpions don't. Throw your hands up in and air and give up if you want, but don't pretend some poor analogy absolves you.

Local governments are under no obligation to help the federal government enforce federal laws.

Those officers are employees of the City, County or State, not the United States.

There are plenty of things Federal law can't do under the Tenth Amendment.

As an example, the Feds can round up marijuana users in California, if they like. They can't require California's law enforcement to help.

> This was tried. It generated a generational backlash against the left as petty crime and visible homelessness rose.

Crime has been on a downward trend for a generation, outside of a few areas. In San Francisco specifically, crime also increased due to police officers quietly going on strike against policies they disagreed with. Now that police officers are actually doing their jobs again, shockingly, crime is rapidly falling.

What has actually increased is sensationalist coverage in the media, which you're right, has created a significant political backlash.

In Los Angeles, crime on the Metro public transportation system has fallen by almost 70% in the three months since the LAPD was booted off the job and replaced by...security guards.

This is pretty good evidence that high crime rates in cities with large police forces are directly related to the police force not actually doing the job it's already being paid to do.

(LA Metro was forced to use LAPD for security a few decades ago, at which point crime rates went from very low to skyrocketing. LAPD serviced the Metro contract exclusively with officers that were in overtime hours (1.5x pay) so at best could only provide 2/3rd of the contracted manpower. That changed earlier this year; the contract was terminated for cause and LAPD was replaced with contract security guards. The contract security guards make substantially less than LAPD officers, so Metro is currently able to field a security presence about 5x the size as the LAPD force. Metro reported this that crime has fallen dramatically in just 2 months.)

"Defund the police" was never actually tried. (This is not a defense of defunding -- I agree it would have similarly bad outcomes! But you can't just point at changes that weren't defunding the police and say it was tried.)

SF did not reduce police funding. They quiet quit anyway.

Where was it tried? My understanding is that even Minneapolis didn't follow through with it.

Crime did not rose, crime has been in a downward trajectory for decades, this is likely one of the reasons the crackdown on illegal immigrants is so bad, prison owners are noticing they might lose their cash cow and needs a new population to imprison.

It was not tried, and saying that it was is a fundamentally false claim that is actively pushing public opposition to the idea supported by lies. It’s as reasonable as saying don’t vote for democrats because they have a pedophile office under a pizza store. Are there a bunch of people who were convinced by this lie? Yes. Does that make it anything other than a manipulative lie to say? No.

> It generated a generational backlash against the left as petty crime and visible homelessness rose

With "the left" you mean the SF DA?

Don't speak bullshit. There was more media outrage hullabaloo around the idea of reducing cop funding than there was any actual reduction. Especially because the cops went on strike to ensure that no cuts would happen.

Police forces across the US have never seen higher funding rates.

I guess this depends on how one defines the public interest. Shielding data from federal authorities surely has both upsides and downsides.

They aren't even required to protect you according to the supreme court. The only point of cops is to protect private property, not people, and to harass people that conservatives don't like.

> If you defund police, what do you think will be cut first?

That's why you don't just go to the cops and say "find $1B in your budget to cut". You give specifics.

So you are saying that the police force is a extra-governmental organization that has full control over how they allocate funds?

All the more reason to reduce their funding!

I worked for Flock. I was sold during the recruiting process on high ethics and morals and an idealistic vision.

The reality was a surveillance state, and questionable policies on data sharing between agencies, and private installations (HOA, etc.), and a CEO with a weirdly literal belief on how Flock should "eliminate all crime". Not "visionary", but far more literal. Way too Minority Report for my liking.

They have a public "disclosure" site that supposedly shows the agencies using Flock that is absolutely inaccurate (there are three agencies in my County alone using it that are not listed there).

> Are they just sitting on their asses and getting a check, petrified of public discourse?

All while patting themselves on the back and calling themselves heros.

Yeah, this is for kids who can't go to prison :P

This is evidenced in Oakland, where the recall campaign for Pamela Price began before she took office.

Yes. So yet another pretty law with no consequences for transgressions.

I’m Swedish. We have plenty of toothless laws that no one follows. Plenty.

The use was audited and is now being investigated. The claims were for various local and federal investigations. ICE also contains HSI, the second largest federal law enforcement agency, which prior to their recent mandate has been tasked to solve sex trafficking, import fraud etc. SF has multiple large inter-agency task forces that run multi-year long investigations into all types of crimes. HSI is part of those investigations. Querying flock to establish a suspect’s presence during the commission of a crime seems like it’s within the bounds of reasonable use.

> In sharing the license plate data, how was the OPD enforcing the law?

... the immigration laws? Folks should read the immigration laws. They're actually quite draconian against not only illegal immigration, but anyone who aids and abets illegal immigration. We've just had decades of non-enforcement.

If you think that's bad, you should dig into state agency violations of PRWORA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Responsibility_and_Wo.... Lot's of illegal conduct going on in blue states.

> For example, a cop cannot just steal a 3rd party's database to get the evidence they are after.

Except we're talking about the state's own license plate data, not stealing someone else's data. Since it is California's data, California can complain that Oakland police shared it impermissibly. (Good luck with that!) But that doesn't create a constitutional issue.

It's practically impossible to build a system that "can't be abused". If you set the bar there, then you can block any policy forever by simply enumerating increasingly unlikely ways for it to be abused. It's like a child's version of politics.

I could go into my car right now and plow through a bunch of people. I'm still allowed to own a car. We've made the actual harmful act illegal, not the thing that theoretically made it possible.

There is zero "solid plan" you can produce that prevents a popular thing in a democratic country from happening. Like, sure, there are supposed to be some amount of base rules to prevent you from gulaging people as soon as you get a 51% vote share, but if you have enough popularity for long enough, as designed, you can change those rules and eventually do whatever you want.

You can bet the shit the Nazis did wasn't "allowed" by the Weimar Republic's constitution, but that didn't matter one bit as soon as the brownshirts murdered enough people. Hitler wasn't even that popular at any point. The holocaust didn't happen because Germany didn't have enough "don't do holocausts" rules, it happened because millions of Germans just let it, because they didn't want to die under a brownshirt's boot.

Meanwhile we've had tens of examples of full blown genocides that did not use any database at all. It has never seemed to actually stop a genocide.

The answer, as always, is that it takes hard work to defend your rights, and you can never ignore your government, and you should stop trying to ignore your government. You cannot "defang" a government. If enough people are working to build an authoritarian shithole state, they will get it, and no paper will stop them, because "having enough people who want something" is literally what a government is.

We have thousands and thousands of years of history showing that if you want rights you have to fight for them.

>If someone points out that the system you're building can be abused

Any system of authority can be abused. No paper can fix that. The only thing that can fix that is a popular, credible threat to the people trying to abuse it.

This isn’t even misuse. Sharing with other agencies is an intended feature.

Edit for clarity this is not a misuse of Flock.

The same people? Really? Who?

And some of them have actual, non state-sanctioned gangs in their midst.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LASD_deputy_gangs

https://knock-la.com/tradition-of-violence-lasd-gang-history...

Surely you don't think all 25k porch thefts are performed by 25k individual people?

was posted on HN within the last week

https://www.openice.org/

was posted on HN within the last week https://www.openice.org/

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The numbers would be much higher if the city had any foot traffic [1]. It's dead, small businesses are dead, it's just not safe to walk around too much, everyone keeps it to a minimum and drives between parking lots in 5000lb tanks.

[1]: https://www.unacast.com/foot-traffic-data/oakland

"and I hate hate hate that we're enabling masked, unnamed government"

Sidenote: As per the article, this is already illegal and was a mis-step on the part of SFPD and CHP searching OPD's database (OPD didn't give ICE anything). It sounds like whoever did it will be prosecuted.

Drawing this line gets tough.

If I build a sidewalk curb, there's a perfectly legitimate use case for it. It can also be used to curb-stomp someone to death.

Can't we build the curb and forbid curb-stomping at the same time? Shouldn't that be our right?

> If you're gonna be angry at someone be angry at the people among us were in favor of the creation of this data set

You're right, they're not shifting blame, they're straight up telling you who is to blame. And apparently, it is not the people who came up with this idea, nor the people carrying out the actions, nor the people supporting them.

That’s not my point. My point is we have no leverage.

A populace with deep and wide skills can be a collective action threat.

A bunch of dead eyed screen addicts are just Wall-E background characters.

We’ll end up manual workers for the rich through state violence (happening right now to Latinos to free up jobs). Because we can’t threaten to walk away and undermine wall streets grip on agency.

ICE deports US citizens. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/ice-deported-3-childre...

They're like the gestapo because they act in secret and hide their identities. They arrest dissidents because they say things the administration doesn't like. See Mahmoud Khalil. They're like the gestapo because hateful people get to just make people "illegal" at their own discretion. Half a million Haitians fleeing violence were here under temporary protected status, the executive branch is choosing to make them "illegal" and lying that Haiti is safe now. Half a million people were legal. Now they're "illegal". https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/27/haiti-temporar...

They do not follow due process which is guaranteed by the constitution to all persons in the US (not just citizens).

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2025/jul/13/rosie-odonne... Trump wants to make Rosie O'Donnell "illegal". What are your thoughts on this?

> ICE is deporting illegals. How is that equivalent to the Gestapo?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Laws

"The two laws were the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, which forbade marriages and extramarital intercourse between Jews and Germans and the employment of German females under 45 in Jewish households; and the Reich Citizenship Law, which declared that only those of German or related blood were eligible to be Reich citizens."

The Holocaust was, broadly speaking, legal under German law at the time. The Gestapo were frequently enforcing laws with their actions. Eventually, Jews were deported to concentration camps; they were made "illegal".

"Legal" and "moral" are sometimes related, but not always. The Gestapo didn't start with the killings.

Anyone, citizen or non-citizen, illegaly here or legally here, can now be kidnapped off the street, stuffed in an unmarked van by masked men not identifying themselves as police, and sent to a foreign prison, without any due process. This is a little bit beyond merely “deporting illegals.”

"illegal" is not a noun and the use of it as such dehumanizes people for terrible reasons.

"They only brought a meal once a day and it had maggots. They never take off the lights for 24 hours. The mosquitoes are as big as elephants," La Figura said.

"They're not respecting our human rights," one man said during the same call. "We're human beings; we're not dogs. We're like rats in an experiment."

"I'm on the edge of losing my mind. I've gone three days without taking my medicine," he said. "It's impossible to sleep with this white light that's on all day."

He also claimed his Bible was confiscated.

"They took the Bible I had and they said here there is no right to religion. And my Bible is the one thing that keeps my faith, and now I'm losing my faith," he said.

https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/alligator-alcatraz-detain...

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Another example for the whiteboard of "why 'invest in founders not ideas' doesn't work" I suppose.

The more I look back on it, working for a YC-funded company will forever remain the black eye of my resume. I don't feel even a lick of pride "solving" the "problems" that YC perceives to be important. The greatest minds of my generation are looking at China and envying the confidence of their state.

That's way too broad to support the previous comment's claim, and seems to be looking for examples of ingenuity. Modifying your dishwasher to use less water would fit that prompt.

Because VCs are psychopaths by most measures? I mean just look at Andreesen, or Thiel, or any of the ghouls creating a fascist state.

Are you suggesting that YC applications contain trick questions? Or that the questions are intentionally drafted in a confusing and/or misleading way? That seems kind of weird.

That’s not what is happening here. They shared the records with state agencies legally. And the other agencies may have shared permissible results legally too

The pendulum always swings. Always. History is littered with the corpses of seemingly unstoppable movements that were invincible until they suddenly were not.

Eh, sorta.

South Dakota v. Dole held that things like the drinking age can only be tied to related items. Road maintenance in exchange for road rules passes muster, and interstate highways is about as "interstate commerce" as you can probably get.

I'm not prepared to consider the Tenth extinct just yet. That is, among other things, a "you nuke us we nuke you" scenario between the two parties. Things like drinking age work because the two parties largely agree on it.

In that case putting a light on that "State rights" was just talk.

> California has their own goon squad

The only way that could be a purer distillation of abstract whataboutism would be to remove the last lingering traces of specificity, yielding: "[They] do [it] too!"

Even if we accept that that other-bad-thing exists, how does it justify the first-bad-thing we were talking about?

> Money laundering through tech startups or crypto shell companies, luxury real estate purchases by Chinese or Russian oligarchs for capital flight…

You could be describing parts of Texas, Florida real estate.... I'm not sure why California gets all the blame. I suspect because it is the wealthiest.

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California's SB 34.

The article in question even links to it. https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_201520160sb...

California's AG:

https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/2023-dle-06.pdf

> Importantly, the definition of “public agency” is limited to state or local agencies, including law enforcement agencies, and does not include out-of-state or federal law enforcement agencies. (See Civ. Information Bulletin 2023-DLE-06 Code, § 1798.90.5, subd. (f).) Accordingly, SB 34 does not permit California LEAs to share ALPR information with private entities or out-of-state or federal agencies, including out-of-state and federal law enforcement agencies. This prohibition applies to ALPR database(s) that LEAs access through private or public vendors who maintain ALPR information collected from multiple databases and/or public agencies.

> I’ve had my comments removed in the past for saying this, but HN has become toxic the past few years.

We don't remove anyone's comments for reasons like that. In fact, we go out of our way not to, which is one reason that there is so much complaining about HN on HN.

Thats not how the balance of power between the State and Federal level work. The anti-commandeering doctrine prevents the federal government from directly compelling states to implement or enforce federal law. It has been ruled on time and time again, from 1842 when Justice Joseph Story affirmed it [1] to Justice Samuel Alito in 2018 [2]. Having to get voluntary buy-in from States for Federally passed laws is a key check on Federal power.

[1] “The clause relating to fugitive slaves is found in the national Constitution, and not in that of any State. It might well be deemed an unconstitutional exercise of the power of interpretation to insist that the States are bound to provide means to carry into effect the duties of the National Government nowhere delegated or entrusted to them by the Constitution.” Prigg v. Pennsylvania https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/41/539/

[2] “Congress may not simply ‘commandeer the legislative process of the States by directly compelling them to enact and enforce a federal regulatory program.” Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association https://www.oyez.org/cases/2017/16-476

You're conflating incomparable things here. The reason why local law enforcement enforces state laws is because municipalities don't have any political sovereignty of their own - they are granted their authority by the state government, and as such, it can come with arbitrary strings attached and can be changed and revoked entirely at any moment.

This is not the case when you consider the relationship between the states and the federal government, though. While the states obviously aren't fully sovereign, the federated structure of our country explicitly grants them limited sovereignty that is innate and not in any way derived or subject to the federal authority. Thus the ability of the federal government to commandeer state governments to its own ends is rather limited and needs to be explicitly spelled out (e.g. National Guard can be federalized, but State Defense Forces cannot). And last I checked, there are no clauses in the Constitution that give the feds the power to commandeer state law enforcement to enforce federal laws; nor did the courts find such power implicit in other clauses.

> Local law enforcement should not just enforce the law of the specific city they are in. They should enforce all applicable laws: city, county, state, country, etc.

Not only shouldn't they do it, they _can't_. You don't want some local sheriff deciding you're guilty of, I dunno, securities fraud, and you don't want the FBI writing parking tickets.

Some people like to use drugs. It's their body, and should be their right. If you have a problem with specific behavior that you associate with drugs - and that behavior negatively affects other people and is not protected - the regulate that behavior.

Been doing that since the 80s, how's it going?

> How about tracking the vehicles of people who are subject to retribution for political reasons?

You mean like insurrectionist rebels carrying the battle flag of a long defeated enemy of the US?

There. FTFY.

What a persecution complex you have. Those people should have been locked up for a lot longer than they ended up, along with the "leadership" which caused it.

> Also a large proportion of illegal aliens crossed the border illegally. Which therefore makes them criminals, since improper entry is a federal crime.

that must be proven on a case-by-case basis and is impossible to determine by visual observation alone.

"The two laws were the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, which forbade marriages and extramarital intercourse between Jews and Germans and the employment of German females under 45 in Jewish households; and the Reich Citizenship Law, which declared that only those of German or related blood were eligible to be Reich citizens."

The Gestapo was only enforcing the law! Intermarriages were illegal. Which therefore made the Jews criminals, since violating race laws was a federal crime.

Because that's not what it's happening. It's a dragnet of paramilitary forces using skin color to determine who to abduct, and they're kidnapping loads of legal residents and even citizens, because skin color and spoken language are not legitimate proxies for legal residency status.

> if i were to visit any country, and then just randomly stay and try to get a job, I expect that it won't last long. why is this not the case for people that come here?

If you have ever gone backpacking for any length of time, you will have met large numbers of people all over the developing world from Europe, Australia and America who are living there and working illegally. In general the result of being caught is being asked to leave and come back with a new visa, and not being violently arrested and thrown into a concentration camp indefinitely.

Do you expect that a properly granted visa will be revoked without any notice and then be quickly hurried off to a for-profit prison without any trial or representation for months?

Billionaires have funded a coup, supported climate change, mass surveillance, and a genocide in Gaza. Why are they not held to account for their wrongdoing but immigrants are being sent to concentration camps without due process for the crime of crossing border for work? The reason is that billionaires are powerful and hard to unseat, while immigrants are a convenient scapegoat for society’s ills.

With a wave of a billionaire’s hand, officials are elected, the constitution undone, a dictator installed, a new political party formed. This political structure is oligarchy not democracy.

Due process, on the other hand, is a fundamental right of democratic systems. Yet this feature too is being curtailed - in favor of concentrations camps.

Billionaires have made scapegoats out of a racial minority. Basic humans rights are violated. Our democracy is in shambles thanks to this group - through their subversion of democratic processes and the undermining of democratic rights. What we are witnessing is not democracy - quite the opposite.

> One clear example is segregation which was on the books in some states decades after the civil rights movement.

Some states took over a decade after Brown v Board to actually integrate school systems. So again, another instance of state laws seeming to trump federal laws.

If the idea is just not enforcing the supremacy of federal laws is enough, then not enforcing the federal law over the state law which bar sharing info with federal agencies is also in place here so far

It's not OK to attack others on HN like this, no matter how right you are or feel you are.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

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> Adam Schwartz, privacy litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, confirmed that Senate Bill 34 of 2015 prohibits California police from sharing data from automated license plate readers with out-of-state and federal agencies, regardless of what they plan to do with the data or whether they’re working on a joint task force.

> “Just because Oakland has collected ALPR data for purposes of dealing with local crime doesn’t mean this is a ‘come one, come all’ buffet,” Schwartz said.

> The law only prohibits the sharing of data if it's being used for immigration law enforcement.

Citation? The law does not appear to be this narrow.

Per the article: "Under a decade-old state law, California police are prohibited from sharing data from automated license plate readers with out-of-state and federal agencies. Attorney General Rob Bonta affirmed that fact in a 2023 notice to police."

It's not a key phrase. It's alleged that this particular violation was for that purpose.

The law itself - https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_201520160sb... - doesn't specify immigration purposes.

https://www.404media.co/ice-taps-into-nationwide-ai-enabled-... also indicates a number of specific requests had "immigration" as the given reason.