> For civil liberties groups, the implications go far beyond immigration. “There are people circulating in our society who are undocumented,” says senior policy analyst Jay Stanley, who studies license plate readers with the ACLU. “Are we as a society, out of our desire to find those people, willing to let our government create an infrastructure that will track all of us?”
It seems we are hurtling towards a scary state of affairs faster than I would have ever guessed. I remember hearing an outcry about police cars using these type of scanners a few years ago, but I guess by now the outcry has died down.
Incredible huh, it's also due to the acceleration of technology. If you wanted to do this in, say the 1970's, you'd have to hire someone to follow each car. With video cameras with good enough resolution you can start recording things, but someone would still have to watch them, or review the recordings manually. Now, computers can read licence plates and recognizes individuals from their faces, they can have eyes (cameras) everywhere and they don't need sleep. And Petabytes of storage are affordable.
Was it DHS that had drones constantly recording Cleveland from the air, and if something happens they can just rewind the footage to see who, where they came from, etc? (Also being used in warzones, IIRC)
Well, the local police and sheriff's department have been "practicing"and writing tickets with this for about four years. This is just another layer of law enforcement that will be collecting information on your whereabouts.
This is insane. Face tracking, body scanners, license plate tracking, TSA, cameras on every city street corner, militarization of the police, citizens united, allowing police to force blood tests on DUI suspects, search warrants via text messages, police confiscation of property with no guilty verdict...
In just my short 35 years in America the bill of rights are being steadily eroded.
It feels like it would be super easy to get an truly authoritarian president in office who is able to lift term limits and assert control over the press and the America we know and love is no more.
If you truly want to fund one organization the ACLU is the biggest one in my opinion. Without a free America everything else falls like dominoes
"Face tracking, body scanners, license plate tracking, TSA, cameras on every city street corner, militarization of the police, citizens united, allowing police to force blood tests on DUI suspects, search warrants via text messages, police confiscation of property with no guilty verdict..."
... all of which were in widespread practice well before the current administration.
The ACLU did, to their credit, blog about these issues throughout the Obama administration[0], although they got far less attention in the mainstream media or HN back then.
ICE is becoming a really disconcerting force in America. They are largely exempt from warrant requirements, and can demand papers from anyone they arbitrarily detain. Now they're tracking all of us who drive.
Not to put too fine a point in it, but ICE are perfectly positioned to be the shock troops in a fascist takeover of America.
Actually they do have warrant requirements, and those are more limited than for criminal warrants. Also, in California employers (of any size) are required by law to turn away ICE agents unless they have an appropriate warrant, and to provide notice to employees, subject to criminal penalties for non-compliance.
This has nothing to do with the license plate issue, but I wanted to clarify that ICE agents are not quite as legally powerful as they like to present themselves. You might be mixing them with the very broad search powers of Customs and Border Patrol, which is a separate agency and the one that can supposedly conduct searches within 100 miles of any border. Not that being a separate agency makes that better.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 28.4 ms ] threadIt seems we are hurtling towards a scary state of affairs faster than I would have ever guessed. I remember hearing an outcry about police cars using these type of scanners a few years ago, but I guess by now the outcry has died down.
Was it DHS that had drones constantly recording Cleveland from the air, and if something happens they can just rewind the footage to see who, where they came from, etc? (Also being used in warzones, IIRC)
In just my short 35 years in America the bill of rights are being steadily eroded.
It feels like it would be super easy to get an truly authoritarian president in office who is able to lift term limits and assert control over the press and the America we know and love is no more.
If you truly want to fund one organization the ACLU is the biggest one in my opinion. Without a free America everything else falls like dominoes
... all of which were in widespread practice well before the current administration.
The ACLU did, to their credit, blog about these issues throughout the Obama administration[0], although they got far less attention in the mainstream media or HN back then.
[0] https://www.aclu.org/search/%22license%20plate%22?page=2&f%5...
Not any particular administration...
It's just a steady decline in civil rights.
The ACLU blogs about a ton of amazing issues all the time. Their blog should deff be a periodic read.
My current favorite is the scary election commission Trump tried to establish that kept all of its meetings secret..
Not to put too fine a point in it, but ICE are perfectly positioned to be the shock troops in a fascist takeover of America.
https://www.fletc.gov/audio/ice-administrative-removal-warra...
http://hrwatchdog.calchamber.com/2018/01/ice-raids-californi...
This has nothing to do with the license plate issue, but I wanted to clarify that ICE agents are not quite as legally powerful as they like to present themselves. You might be mixing them with the very broad search powers of Customs and Border Patrol, which is a separate agency and the one that can supposedly conduct searches within 100 miles of any border. Not that being a separate agency makes that better.