> 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.

> 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...

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).

Simply, the scale of observation matters. Making observations at scale is categorically different than manual observations. And yes, there is a spectrum. But the important thing is that there is a difference between the ends of that spectrum.

The solution is to recognize that ease of observation interacts with expectation of privacy and legislate what can be done at each point on the spectrum. I have no expectation that someone won't take a picture with me in the background while I'm in public, but I would find it jarring to be filmed at every public location I went, have that video indexed to my name in a database, and have all my behaviors tagged. You write the law so that the latter thing is illegal and the former thing isn't. When there's a dispute about what's illegal, you have it resolved by the courts like every other law.

>But what is the solution?

The best time to plant a tree is 20yr ago. The second best time is today.

The best time to ostracize, ridicule and marginalize the people who support the growth of the surveillance state is a generation ago. The second best time is today.

I say we ostracize the crap out of the people who peddle, justify and facilitate these activities. It worked for wife beating, worked for drunk driving, worked for overt racism.

This is not a technical problem. This is not a law problem. This is a social norms and acceptability of certain actions problem. Applications of technology and law follow norms.

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.

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.

When I tell folks that I come to HN to see a particular kind of take, this is what I'm talking about.

Here is a premise: you can decompose any illegal action into legal actions, therefore according to your logic laws cannot not exist.

Hacker solution: open/crowd source a pirate camera network. People submit feeds of traffic from whatever camera they have. We build tiny/concealable cameras to plant all over state capitals. Client-side software detects plates and reports only those on the target list. That list: every elected leader. The next time they hold a privacy-related hearing, we read out the committee chairperson's daily movements for the last month.

Other idea: AI-enabled dashcam detects and automatically reports "emergency vehicles" to google maps hands free. Goodbye speed traps.

You ban monetization of the data. The federal government has the power to regulate interstate commerce.

States can ban this behavior as well.

Furthermore, legislators can create a right to privacy in the law, letting people sue companies who collect this data. And to top it off, states and the federal government can make corporate officers personally liable for collecting this information without consent.

With Lina Khan biding time in NYC, I do believe we are going to see this change very soon. I don't think there will be any public sympathy for tech companies in the next political cycle.

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.

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.

>Therefore taking millions of photos in public of cars, and turning their license plate numbers into a database is legal, as is selling that information

Very typical engineer thinking. The world doesn't work that way. Laws and social norms don't abide by formal logic.

Doing this as a private citizen is one thing. When the government does it the implications are vastly different. That is kind of the whole point of the constitution.

> Taking a photograph of a car with its license plate is legal. As is selling a photo you've taken, whether it has a license plate or not.

Because when those laws were enacted the technology to do so at scale wasn't there or wasn't cost-efficient. So it made sense to make it legal because nobody could realistically abuse it.

Nowadays this is no longer the case, so maybe the law should be amended. Of course, with the lawmakers being the ones benefiting from such abuses it's unlikely.

> We certainly don't want to outlaw taking photos in public.

Some countries (Germany I believe) actually do outlaw it; I believe taking a picture is ok but publishing it requires consent of everyone in that picture.

> journalists compiling public data to prove governmental corruption?

You could allow free public disclosure, but disallow selling of that data. Meaning journalists can still conduct mass-surveillance for the public interest since the results of that would be published free-of-charge, while destroying the business model of those surveillance-as-a-service companies.

> 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.

> 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.

Does it have to be?

What if selling more than 1,000 license plates with location and time in any calendar year starts down a path of increasingly severe penalties proportional to the gross income gained? What are the negative ramifications that I'm missing which would be hard to solve by following how other laws work?

Example: If you exclude location but effectively have an agreement with someone else that sells corresponding location data, then you can both be found guilty with a penalty multiplier for attempting to evade the law.

We write laws against stalking individuals, and we can write laws against similar behavior towards groups.

> I'm curious what you think the solution is?

The solution is simple. If there's a judge that signed off on a warrant to track a particular vehicle or person, cameras should be permitted to track its movements.

Otherwise, cameras should only be allowed to track people actively breaking the law - such as sending tickets to people running red lights. They should not record or retain any information about drivers that are following the rules.

Fishing expeditions are illegal and immoral. Mass tracking of innocent people is immoral.

---

Judicial warrants exist as a counterbalance between two public needs (The need to not be harassed by the police for no good reason, and the need for the police to be able to conduct active, targeted investigations of a particular crime.)

There is a huge overlap between legal and immoral

The solution, from a personal privacy standpoint, could be to obscure your license plate to prevent a proper photograph from being taken. I have read of invisible film and transparent sprays that purport to do just this.

There are also very affordable "license plate flippers" which, at the push of a button, rotate both your front and rear plates to different plates.

Both of these methods are likely illegal for driving, but may be legal when parked on private property.

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.

> 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.

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.

In Germany it's legal to take car pictures, but if you publish, you need to black out the licence plate...

It's the same question we're asking with scraping. It's legal to read the data off one website. What's in question is mass scraping the entire Internet and bringing hundreds of sites to a halt.

Change the scope of the data, and you change your approach to the problem. I see no reason why law should be any different.

Dynamic led plate that are totp. Where you can determine who is who on which date only with central access.

Just like every other discussion about private data violation - the issue is aggregation not one data point.

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.

Tracking someone everywhere they go is stalking, but tracking everyone is just good business strategy

> I'm curious what you think the solution is?

I believe cars don't have to have license plates readable when parked. Depends on the jurisdiction of course, but I would definitely use a license plate hiding device and hide my license plate when parked.

Not being such a car-dependent society that every single person is forced into a dangerous, personal machine that requires licensing and tracking, to do absolutely any activity outside the house.

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.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2261A

It should be illegal for the government to do so, further make it illegal for businesses to do so AND for city, county, state, federal governments to utilize third party databases.

Counties with effective privacy laws focus on the control and processing of the data.

Regulating data processing like this is common and should not be controversial.

Allow people to secure temporary plates that are just aliases to their normal plate so they can be swapped every x hours. Then people could use paper temp plates and change them frequently while the state still maintains the supeonable connection to the true registration.

Knowing the US dmv, this will cost $50 and only be doable twice per year, but it should be offered free of charge to be reprinted at least daily. It's not expensive to maintain a massive data lake of the records.

> 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.

Remove the legal requirements for license plates or tinted windows.

We gimp the ability of the public to obfuscate their vehicle by forcing us to have license plates in the first place, when we already prove our license to drive with VIN and registration.

Also, remove the intellectual property protections associated with the appearance of vehicles, thus creating a market of clones that can easily fit in with each other.

You don't have to work this out from first principles, the EU have already done this in the form of GDPR. Building a database mapping people's location and selling it to third parties without their consent would be squarely illegal under GDPR, and result in massive fines given the entire business model is a breach rather than this being an oversight.

License plate holders that obscure the license plate on private property.

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.

Make everybody secure, happy and sane enough that using such powers for ill becomes uninteresting.

The solution is to make it illegal to record individuals in public for the purpose of tracking.

> Therefore taking millions of photos in public of cars, and turning their license plate numbers into a database is legal, as is selling that information. It's all data gained in public.

In the US. GDPR forbids sharing or processing it without consent. Maybe the Californian privacy act does too?

Outlaw collecting more than 1,000 photos of license plates in a given city.

There is no solution. A large part of the population wants a borderline fascist dictatorship that hunts down brown people.

Come on man, does this actually stump you? You can't come up with a single possible solution to this problem?

Get rid of license plates.

Ironically, you'll have more privacy in a Waymo than your own car.

WA state has figured out a solution to the Flock problem.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/washington-court-rules...

If they are going to be used by the government and law enforcement, they are clearly government-collected data about you - and thus, are subject to (the state equivalent of) a FOIA request.

This puts an onerous compliance requirement on Flock and the ciites that allow it to operate.

Hopefully, WA's state legislature will decline to give them any exemptions, which will kill that company's operations in the state.

---

Among other things, these cameras have been illegally used to spy on people who were getting an abortion in WA. Flock's executives (and the engineers who implemented that feature) belong in prison.

Relevant federal payola

https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary...

https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/lobbyis...

Flock has a series of bizarre, obviously LLM-generated blog posts trying to convince the public that they are working "toward a future where compliance and community trust walk hand in hand"....

[1] https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/policy-pulse-compliance-doe...

[2] https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/policy-pulse-the-work-alrea...

[3] https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/policy-pulse-transparency-c...

See also the latest Benn Jordan video on youtube [1]

1 - https://youtu.be/uB0gr7Fh6lY?si=lu_nCW8A94ziP9YW

This is just nationalism in practice. Them bad, us good. No nuances, no thinking.

You see similar levels of hypocrisy leveled at the capacity for Chinese EVs to surveil consumers, but not at Tesla, when we know that Tesla employees had access to sex tapes of their customers in their cars. As long as it’s western capital or western police doing the surveillance, it must be permissible, right? /s

We should be clamping down on all surveillance, and this is not a problem that has a technological solution. Quite the reverse, actually.

[dead]

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.

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.

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.

What are the odds they wouldn't have solved those murders anyway?

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.

People talk about cell phone tracking all the time. I rarely see people talk about license plate scanning, hence "under-appreciated".

The difference is you can opt out by leaving it at home.

Maybe both are bad.

If the data troth hadn't been created, the jackboots wouldn't know what door to kick in.

I'm sure they don't think exposing adultery is inherently bad, but rather that the method employed feels like an excessive violation of privacy.

If you'd like a different example, imagine a man is angry that his ex wife is with someone else now, and uses such a service to figure out where he can find the pair.

Heres a better example: want to escape an abusive relationship? Your license plate may help your abuser track you down again.

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.

> 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."

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.

That is exactly my point: no subpoena or warrant is required for access to license plate scan databases.

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?

Because people are human beings and not property? They're your spouse, not your possession, and still possess free agency.

Which is one of the reasons why (simplifying) we don't legislate morality, and it's not illegal to be an asshole.

What about divorce? The logical conclusion of your scenario is that divorce should be illegal too, as you made a huge commitment to your partner, and now you want to break it?

Nobody is out here arguing that privacy is important because they want to make it easier to get away with things that are immoral or criminal. The importance of privacy is in retaining as much control over what information you share with others as possible, especially with the public at large, corporations, and the government. The information you wish to control is typically the kind that is sensitive in nature: PII; browser history, authentication secrets; what banking institution(s) you use; what accounts you have and their identifiers; financial information (what assets do you have, what are they, and how much are they worth, likewise with debts); spending patterns (where you shop, how often, how much do you spend); political affiliation and activities; religious beliefs and activities; how often do you travel, where do you go, and how do you get there; what is your daily routine/schedule, and how frequently do you deviate from it, etc. The list goes on and on.

Some of that information you might be totally fine with anyone knowing, such as your political leanings or religious beliefs. Others might be deeply uncomfortable with that being shared with just anyone. I assume you'd agree with me that at least some of the information I listed above is unambiguously of the variety that deserves privacy, i.e. you control who has access to it, and when.

Some things that should be generally private (e.g. financial activity), might need to be conditionally shared with certain parties (e.g. the government) - you might be fine with the IRS knowing details about your financial activity for purposes of taxation, but be understandably pissed if you found out that they were then making that information freely available to anyone that asked - because they have taken away your control over that information. I'm not saying that is actually the case, it is just an example.

Lastly, the more information about yourself that is effectively public information (either because you don't keep it private, or someone else has made it public without your consent), the easier it is to uncover other things that you do consider private. If someone can monitor everywhere you go, they can build a picture of you as an individual. Maybe you don't share your religious beliefs with others unless asked, but if someone knows that, e.g., you go to a specific church every Wednesday and Sunday, they now know your specific denomination and that you are more involved than the sort of person that only shows up on Sunday mornings, or only once a month, or only on holidays, etc. That information can be used to target you, either for innocuous purposes like advertising products to you that sell predominantly to that demographic - or for more malicious purposes, like running a scam against you that appeals to your specific beliefs, or in some cases, violence. That may seem unlikely to you, but you may also benefit from not being a minority that is prone to being targeted in such a way - the right to privacy ensures that we retain control over the information that can be used to target or hurt us according to our own risk tolerance.

especially when private companies can buy politicians. At this point there is no line and the two have become one.

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.

> 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.

Don't forget "states' rights"

> 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 "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.

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.

The Tea Party, MAGA (and the on the other side of the isle the Bernie bros and whatever their replacement will be) represent pent up demand from the masses to get the current status quo to F-off. So far the status quo has co-opted all these movements.

[flagged]

The part that's new is people being detained for "suspicious" traffic patterns.

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".

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).

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.

Small C conservative would be what these days? Iraq invading weed dealer arresting homosexual hating mid-00s "we call ourselves neoliberals bur are nothing of the sort"? Or their counterparts on the other side of the isle who are happy to build up the police state thinking it can do no wrong or happy to regulate the shit out of everything uncritically deluding themselves into thinking it won't become a handout for moneyed interests at the expense of upstarts?

As bad as shit is now I think that might actually be worse.

While people haven't yet suffered enough to agree to compromise and just wind the whole mistake down, there is a huge consensus on both sides of the isle these days that we have too much government swinging it's weight around in pursuit of things that are bad.

-

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.

Pepperidge farms remembers when it took a constitutional amendment to ban booze.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

"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.

Started 25yr ago when some dudes with poor aviation skills caused the checkbook to open up and the war on drugs was still going strong.

And even then it was smoldering for a long time before that. A good "start" point is probably the creation of the FBI.

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.

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.

This shit comes in waves. Before it was peddled in the 90s it was peddled in the 70s. In the 50s you had the same stuff as well.

> If you create a problem like this by essentially opening the border and failing to enforce the law, the necessary corrective action is going to have to be a lot heavier than if you’d just patrolled the border in the first place

Deportations are lower than under Obama, despite ICE having Saudi Arabia's military budget. The resources are very clearly being spent on something other than immigration enforcement. Whether that's an authoritarian agenda or simply corruption is still, in my book, to be seen.

I’m totally sure you’d apply the same for unchecked corporate law breaking, right? Enforce the Hatch Act, go after wage theft which dwarfs any kind of retail or private theft, etc. If you think it’s about political power, you’d question prisons and detention centers being put in red states where they count political appropriation from the inmates and guards.

Well-stated. Our prior solutions to internal enforcement of previous Border misses no longer work given that the scale of border "misses" exploded after deliberate non-enforcement.* Now larger-scale internal enforcement is needed. Sucks for all of us.

*Worse than non-enforcement, the feds actively blocked/destroyed Texas border protections.

This notion of 'opening the border' is a political myth conservatives have been using to justify their increasingly extreme positions for years, much like their inflammatory use of the word 'invasion'.

"essentially opening the border and failing to enforce the law" this did not happen is the issue with your statement

> ICE raids started and 25% of the school kids didn't show up to school. Which indicates that likely 25% of the population is illegal.

you're downvoted but this is a very real thing, especially at the elementary school level. My kids had regular classes in first/second grade taught in Spanish because they were the one single English speaking student in the room (this was fixed when my wife and I found out). The level of illegal immigrants in schools goes down over time as they drop out. My son is now 16 and a sophomore in HS, SEM Magnet, and in a class of about 100-125 he knows maybe 10 that have told him they're here illegally.

/Dallas public schools

> border enforcement and deportations are what we want.

this is not what “we want” - this is what ruling party wants you to think and obsess over while they pillage and make your life otherwise miserable.

the same young votes voted for Biden in 2020 knowing very well what the immigration policy would be (and they were as bad as it gets the first two years)

one that we can solve without turning the US into a single-party police state

156 Democratic congressmen voted no on that bill.

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.

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!"

> Access to private license plate readers was granted under the Biden admin

Apropos of anything else, this access was granted in 2017, and Biden might be surprised to learn he was President then, not Trump.

> Access to private license plate readers was granted under the Biden admin,

Nope.

Nice try tho. The "both sides bad" argument used to work, not anymore.

Gary, Indiana does not have a border with a foreign country so why do CBP need to monitor drivers there?

Ah yes, illegal immigration is like the new "terrorism"... everything must be done to stop it which includes giving CBP and ICE unchecked power.

Is that why Trump killed the CBP funding bill in the beginning of 2024?

lol

Everyone supports that?

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.

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.

Its been proven many times over that the majority of "illegal" immigrants, whether they come US and either overstay their allowance, or manage to skirt by on refugee status, are all predominately doing it for financial reasons, willing to work jobs for lower pay that Americans will never do, which is a huge benefit for economy.

This idea that border control somehow failed is a lie sold to you by republicans. Also Trump killed the CBP funding bill in early 2024 that would have addressed a lot of issues.

> (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.

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.

This whole discussion feels very cute when Kavanaugh-stops are going on right now. Like we're discussing the fine points of white-tie dress while sitting around in sweatpants. ICE is snatching citizens off the streets. The constitution is not self-enforcing.

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.

International airports count.

The Border Patrol probably is allowed to operate anywhere within the United States, but being in the Border Patrol doesn't (at least statutorily) give them any magic powers; in particular, you don't get "border search authority" by being a part of CBP, but rather by being any law enforcement officer confronting someone who you reasonably believe crossed the border recently.

It is not an exception to the Constitution, it's a decision about what “unreasonable” in the Fourth Amendment means.

Note that the default (but not universal) equirement to get a warrant for a search or seizure (and the imputation that for many warrantless instances of either, probable cause is still required) is also such an interpretation; the text of the Amendment doesn’t say either of those things, but they have been inferred by the Supreme Court to be generally the case from the juxtaposition of the reasonableness requirement for searches and seizures and the probable cause requirement for warrants.

While the Bill of Rights (and protections in later amendments) is sometimes treated like a bit of divine revelation, much of it is intentionally (to kick the can down the road on resolving disputes at the time) imprecisely worded, heavily compromised, legislative enactment by imperfect legislators, with sentences that are disjoint and where any meaningful application requires reading connections into the the text that aren’t explicit, as well as devising concrete operationalizations for vague terms like “unreasonable” or “due process”.

The 1946 statute gave CBP the authority to stop and search all vehicles within a “reasonable distance”. CBP defined the reasonable to be 100 miles and it stuck. It's just federal regulation interpreting the law and courts have blessed it.

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.

> 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 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.

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.

> and when one of them legalized weed

There is no US state in which weed is legal. Some states don't enforce it, but you are breaking federal law when you smoke it.

It's a feature, not a bug because it's a weapon of authoritarians wearing badges on up the government punishment pipeline.

Furthermore, in the areas of business owner and employee it's even worse because of the vague, contradictory, and expansive commercial code plus the rest of applicable city, county, state, and federal laws that apply too that sometimes criminalize trivial transgressions with occasionally excessive penalties. There's a whole book about it: Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent

I'm not one for no regulations or "all gubberment bad", far from it; the core problem is the almost complete lack of effective guardrails on malicious enforcement and prosecution.

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?

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.

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.

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."

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.

Guilty until proven innocent.

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

This happened to me, in East Germany. I'm sorry it happens now in the Land of the Free.

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.

The cruelty is the point

>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"

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.

Even worse feds will use local cops as fodder to pull over actual murderous criminals on traffic infractions, not knowing what they are dealing with. They then let the local cops take the risk and come by with their meal team 6 squad afterwards.

https://youtu.be/rH6bsr61vrw

Look into "dual sworn" officers. Although I've seen a few investigations which show that the federal officers will just send a text message, on a private phone, to uniformed officers when they want them to "check something out."

The US Park Police can and do enforce basic traffic regulations in national parks - which includes some roads, like the Blue Ridge Parkway, that are “linear parks”. In respect of the fact that these roads are often used by local traffic, they will generally permit things that would be legal under the law of the state you are in (e.g., concealed firearm carry, so long as it’s in the car and not brought into a ranger station or other building on the federal property).

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...

Not CBP but see Carlos Jimenez for an example of what's currently happening.

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.

Nonsense, I have it on good authority that Privacy Is A Human Right or somesuch.

I think most Americans would be struck by the revelation that the government has hidden cameras in traffic cones

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.

>People here are allowed to question

I don't get why you have to obfuscate like this. You aren't against limitations for questioning. You wont find any sensible person that is against immigration enforcement completely.

What you want is the ability for your side to carry out its will unobstructed by any legal process, because you fundamentally believe what they are doing is right, and the other side is evil.

Just say that instead of pretending that its about the law.

I will always find it weird that people who think the fact their consciousness randomly popped into existence through pure luck in a privileged country means that they deserve it more than someone who popped into existence somewhere else.

Even that aside, how does that give them the right to infringe on the rights and privacy of citizens?

Not sure about the "ever recorded" part - how far back are we talking? There were some pretty massive waves of illegal aliens flooding the East Coast back in the 1600s.

What even is a foreigner in a place like the USA?

The US is a country of immigrants. It was made by people coming from overseas. Never forget that.

[flagged]

I was extrapolating a lower cost version of Gorgon Stare. I remember when Rivet Joint first came on line and it was possible to track Warsaw Pact units as they traveled, and you could extrapolate their C3 units as well as their POL supplies. Never thought it would become part of modern police surveillance, but I was a young naive person back then.

I'm not looking for a political angle, I'm straight up asking: Has the 70,000 people put in concentration camps and then deported made their lives demonstrably better and happier?

The Gestapo, too, got the occasional actual criminal. It still wasn't a good organization.

What are you talking about? For all intents and purposes it is all innocents, and you know it. Arguing otherwise is just that - an argument, said just to try to "win" for your "side".

You're advocating that we assume everyone is a violent criminal so that we can jail that 1 in 9,000 that actually is dangerous. Guilty until proven innocent. You can't get more un-American than that, really.

For context, I am replying to a 3 karma account. We are being fucked with.

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.

>When liberals downplay events like these

For casual observers, this is where the fallacy is. I have to wonder what your media diet is, that of all the things to complain about, a false statement about the murder of a woman to justify watching the destruction of the country is the one a person lands on.

Our justice system is being ripped apart. Allies don't trust us militarily or economically. The president is pardoning people openly for money. His family is taking in hundreds of millions of dollars in cryptocurrency from anonymous sources. He shrugged off the murder of a Washington Post journalist while standing next to his murderer and called a journalist "insubordinate" for asking the question.

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.

Nihilism is self defeating. Saying it's just how it goes let that be the case.

Aren't your healthcare costs going to rapidly increase soon? Also with an approval rating so low, most Americans seem not to agree.

Housing costs? Nothing to do with immigrants.

Crime rates? Nothing to do with immigrants. They commit less crimes than Americans.

Healthcare costs? Nothing to do with immigrants. Don't believe lies about unauthorized immigrants getting Medicaid, it doesn't happen.

Insurance rates? Nothing to do with immigrants.

Why would we support people wanting to emigrate to the U.S.? We are a nation of immigrants. Full stop. It is our greatest strength. Name an American with Mayflower ancestry who has done anything of any note in the past 100 years. It's all immigrants and their first generation children.

I'm sure you're totally fine with Elon and Melania, you just don't like brown immigrants.

And again, besides pleasing your political hatred, how does deporting anyone make you happy?

Hey, if it isn't "blood and soil" rhetoric. Very early 20th century. Back in vogue, I suppose.

You are wrong on almost every metric, and I hope someday you'll see how much so.

Housing is the fault of NIMBYs and real estate speculation. Healthcare costs are not high because of illegal immigrants (mainly), it is due to a broken private health insurance system your party defends. At the cost of scaring the rest of the world away from ever wanting to be in this country, legally or not, while we disintegrate our political and economic power in the world. A Russian patriot as president of the United States could not do more damage to our country than your supported policies are doing to us, for years to come, today.

Do we need fewer migrants coming in? Yes. Do we need to target violent criminals of any kind thoroughly? Yes. Is this skin-color-based mass manhunt being done by the dregs of wannabe law enforcement (combined with every other idiotic, anti-American policy this president has pursued) worth it? No.

[dead]

72 hours in a cell while I rifle through their entire life for anything I can use to extend their stay at the Graybar Hotel should be enough to cool their heels.

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 seems more feasible to get rid of the license plates than to control public or private imaging and analytics of the license plates.

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.

LP are compelled search of your papers by police without RAS nor PC.

Palantir might have a solution for you.

Ask the AI. It will tell you. :)