https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/01/you-should-have-right-...
License plates provide basically the same info as the title to the car or your house. They only supply addition information, such as location when they are recorded somewhere. With things like facial recognition, you don't need the plates to track movement (although it is easier).
The real problem is public surveillance identifying/tracking individuals.
The authorities disagree.
https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/vehicles/registration/...
i think taking the easy win here could be very effective and provide a path towards solving the rest.
IOW, I think removing license plates just buys some time.
Add that many states have laws that are /more/ punishing if you intentionally obscure your plate than simply not having one, what other conclusion can be drawn? The state’s arguments are thin. “Oh we need it to find criminals / vehicles of interest” oh sure, so you get to suck up all our data to protect a few toll roads and track a few supposed criminals. The balance of benefit to society is dubious at best IMO.
I think about this from time to time.
This sounds a lot like urban legend / internet lore
I personally saw his SL500 with dealer plates a couple of times while visiting the Apple campus as a vendor. He'd park in the handicap spot too.
They can just say you're not a citizen.
And you are misrepresenting the situation of what is paid out.
As proved by the fact that you have no evidence.
There’s no value in treating you with respect. You don’t warrant it.
You’re the worthless product of two awful people who never should have met.
If you deem them to be illegal - the onus is on you to prove that, in a court of law, whilst you are unemployed because the employer sacked you for disobeying their instructions/orders
It's all cool to be on the internet saying things like that, but when it comes to reality, I DOUBT you would do anything other than acquiesce.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/11/20/punishable-by-deat...
"Tend to"
Do you have any citeable evidence of this being an actual thing, or is it just vibes?
Are you really unaware of city settlements for police misconduct?
Let me turn the question around- can you name a single example of a police department, union, or office paying out a settlement? Has it ever happened?
I said, and I will quote "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."
Citation: https://lawrencekstimes.com/2023/03/01/tran-case-settles/ Tran’s criminal case was prosecuted under former DA Branson’s administration; however, it has impacted the policies of District Attorney Suzanne Valdez, who took office in January 2021.
The DA’s office did not have a formal, written Brady-Giglio policy until Valdez implemented hers in January 2022.
Valdez’s Brady-Giglio policy asks law enforcement agencies to share information about “allegations” of misconduct made against their officers — not just “findings” of misconduct.
I wanted a citation of "even when the officer is well outside training and policy"
Because I cannot find any such occurrence
As to your demand for me to cite things that I never spoke of
there are the following cases (the ones I have highlighted indicate that not just the city were liable, meaning that officers/unions/insurance also paid out) https://policefundingdatabase.org/explore-the-database/settl...
> In November 2023, a settlement was reached between protester Eli Durand-McDonnell and two police officers who arrested him during a demonstration outside the summer home of Leonard Leo, a leader of the Federalist Society.
Police arrested Durand-McDonnell in July 2022 on a disorderly conduct charge amid protests over Leo’s role in efforts to overturn Roe v. Wade. The Hancock County district attorney later dismissed the charge, citing the need for caution when political speech is involved. Durand-McDonnell subsequently filed a federal lawsuit against Officer Kevin Edgecomb and Officer Nathan Formby, alleging false arrest and violation of his free speech rights. Details of the settlement were not publicly available as of early November 2023.
> The family of Fanta Bility, an eight-year-old girl who was fatally shot by police outside a high school football game in 2021, reached an $11 million settlement with the Borough of Sharon Hill, Pennsylvania, as well as its police chief and three former officers involved.
Police opened fire after a verbal altercation between teens escalated into a gunfight. Police gunfire inadvertently struck Bility and injured three others, including her twelve-year-old sister. Officers Brian Devaney, Sean Dolan, and Devon Smith were fired and later sentenced to probation, pleading guilty to reckless endangerment. As part of the settlement, Sharon Hill agreed to implement enhanced officer training, particularly concerning the use of deadly force. The Bility family, who established the Fanta Bility Foundation to honor her legacy and advocate for police reform, emphasized that no settlement could erase the tragedy but expressed hope for healing and change.
[Not a payout] > In April 2023, as part of a settlement in a class action lawsuit over the treatment of demonstrators in 2020, former Minneapolis, Minnesota, police union head Lieutenant Bob Kroll agreed he would not work as a police officer or law enforcement leader in Hennepin, Ramsey, or Anoka counties during the next decade.
The lawsuit alleged that Kroll’s actions as a de facto policymaker led police to use excessive force against demonstrators in the protests that followed the May 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis Police Department officer. Under the terms of the settlement, Kroll also agreed that he would not serve on the Minnesota Board of Peace Officer Standards and Training, and that he would testify in any trials related to the suit.
And, because people are saying "insurance will pay it"
> In February 2023, the insurance carrier of the City of Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, agreed to pay $2 million to Clinton Jones Sr., whose son was fatally shot by an undercover police officer.
In 2015, then-Officer Nouman Raja shot and killed Corey Jones after his car broke down on an Interstate 95 off-ramp. Jones was on the phone with roadside assistance at the time of the shooting, and the recorded call revealed that Raja never identified himself as a police officer. Raja was found guilty of manslaughter and attempted murder in a separate criminal case in 2019 and received a twenty-five-year prison sentence.
Are you saying the handful of settlements that include officers form the majority of funds paid to victims of bad policing?
I was asked for citations, and I delivered (Which you haven't by the way).
Would you at least acknowledge that US taxpayers are on the hook orders of magnitude more often then the offending officers themselves, and that there's a clear conflict of interest presented by this de-facto outcome? Yes, there are exceptions, as you've diligently pointed out, but those are noteworthy because they are the exceptions that prove the general rule of thumb.
Do you know of any US taxpayer who would explicitly, voluntarily, and freely offer to pay for the settlements resulting from the abusive, corrupt, or criminal conduct of police officers in their town, if that were an optional choice that every US taxpayer made distinctly from the implicit, collective choice to comply with public taxation to fund public services writ large?
If every city in the US had a ballot measure in the next election that allowed citizens to vote on whether they would voluntarily accept personal financial responsibility for the misconduct of their police department, OR, mandate that all future settlements come out of the police union / pension fund / guilty officers' personal finances, how do you think those votes would tend to go, across the country?
That's on you.
I showed that there are examples of those things actually happening.
> When lobf posed the question "can you name a single example of a police department, union, or office paying out a settlement? Has it ever happened?", I read that as a rhetorical question that was meant to point out that an overwhelming majority of such cases are paid out by taxpayers, not a serious assertion that police officers themselves have never been held personally financially accountable a single time.
Wut?
Do you mean, like I said previously that we the taxpayers are on the hook because we're the ultimate employers??
Or do you not read anything?
> Do you know of any US taxpayer who would explicitly, voluntarily, and freely offer to pay for the settlements resulting from the abusive, corrupt, or criminal conduct of police officers in their town, if that were an optional choice that every US taxpayer made distinctly from the implicit, collective choice to comply with public taxation to fund public services writ large?
Already covered.
You explicitly abdicated that responsibility to the council/governing organisation to do it on your behalf.
You explicitly expect that organisation to work within the laws of your area.
You explicitly expect victims of bad policing to be paid out monetary compensation
If you don't want any of that to happen, then vote for someone else who will do what you claim you want
> If every city in the US had a ballot measure in the next election that allowed citizens to vote on whether they would voluntarily accept personal financial responsibility for the misconduct of their police department, OR, mandate that all future settlements come out of the police union / pension fund / guilty officers' personal finances, how do you think those votes would tend to go, across the country?
You do vote, every time there is an election.
If you don't know what you are voting for, or you don't like what's on offer, that's on you.
I did not, and never would if given the choice. I had no choice in my citizenship, and would renounce it if given the option, which I am not. Any effort to abdicate the responsibilities involuntary imposed on me is ultimately met with a team of professionally trained gunmen sent by the state to kill me. You're making unsubstantiated and unsubstantiable assertions of fact regarding decisions I've never made.
>You explicitly expect that organisation to work within the laws of your area.
I explicitly do not recognize the legitimacy of the federal government. You are again asserting a provably false narrative about my life that you have no way of knowing.
>You explicitly expect victims of bad policing to be paid out monetary compensation
I do not. You don't seem to understand the meaning of the word explicitly. You appear to be confusing implicit with explicit. Even then, I don't agree with this even implicitly - I don't fundamentally recognize the legitimacy of the state, nor the right of the state to exercise violent force against people who never freely consented to the rules of the state in the first place. Again, you are hallucinating details about my preferences that simply do not exist.
>If you don't want any of that to happen, then vote for someone else who will do what you claim you want
I never agreed to be bound to the laws established by representatives selected through Democratic elections, and I would refuse if given the choice. I do not recognize the legitimacy of the state, nor of the people around me to establish an entity with a monopoly on legal violence, period, let alone to decide who gets to pick what forms of violence are or are not acceptable.
> If every city in the US had a ballot measure in the next election that allowed citizens to vote on whether they would voluntarily accept personal financial responsibility for the misconduct of their police department, OR, mandate that all future settlements come out of the police union / pension fund / guilty officers' personal finances, how do you think those votes would tend to go, across the country?
>You do vote, every time there is an election.
I don't vote and never have, as I do not fundamentally recognize anyone's rights to coerce others by means of democratic election, including myself, nor of the existence of the state itself. You are again making unsupported assumptions about me that appear rooted only in your own imagination.
>If you don't know what you are voting for, or you don't like what's on offer, that's on you.
I have no option to express my political desire to fundamentally be left alone in the current system, the best I can do is leave others alone and accept that, even if against my will, I exist within a system that believes it has the right to exercise force against me, up to and including lethal force, for any or no reason, at the sole discretion of murderers who've been granted permission to murder by other people.
Every act of social interaction I personally undertake is dictated by the ethical terms of the NAP.
Every act of civic interaction I personally undertake with the state is dictated by the terms of the team of professionally trained gunmen who will ultimately be sent to murder me for noncompliance. I pay taxes for the same reason I'd hand a mugger my wallet if he pointed a gun at my face and demanded it - nothing more.
You have the choice. Every time you choose to vote, every time you choose not to engage with your local representatives.
That's not even talking about the most obvious choice - jump on a plane and go somewhere else.
What you really mean is "Waaaahhh waaahhh I have never done anything resembling looking at the issues beyond accusing other people of doing what i don't know anything about"
Honestly, you genuinely sound like one of those libertarians that don't want to pay for water, then run out and start stealing from neighbours.
Or an incel that blames women for all the bad choices HE made.
I'm done with your childishness.
We, the taxpayers, are the ultimate employers, we, the taxpayers, are liable for the things that we the taxpayers ask to be done on our behalf (policing)
We, the voters asked for laws that protect civil rights
We, the taxpayers asked police to enforce those laws
We, the voters demanded that people whose civil rights are violated be compensated fairly
We, the taxpayers/voters chose people that didn't do the job properly (including training)
It's not magic, the governments (at all levels) are there because we put them there, and we told them what we wanted to do (and we voted for the ones that do/do not do what we asked of them, including setting up the systems that do the things)
Your complaint is that the systems YOU vote for are ... doing their job
(/s 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.
Idled your vehicle? (Illegal in the UK no idea about the US)
Which is fine, EXCEPT that it wasn't the *posted* speed limit, it was the *gazetted* speed limit (that is, the signs were incorrect and driving to them was illegal
In my state alone, it is illegal to do things like:
* Hold stud poker games by charitable groups more than twice a year
* Keep an elk in a sandbox in your back yard
* Serve both beer and pretzels at a bar or restaurant simultaneously
* Swim naked in the Red River from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m
* Wear a hat while dancing or at any event where a dance is happening
* Lie down and fall asleep with your shoes on
Yes, these are actual crimes in the state I'm in. If you think those are absurd, you should see some other states criminal codes; for example, in Alaska, it is illegal to appear drunk in a bar. No, really, I'm serious. So you literally can't live your life without breaking the law somehow. I'm pretty sure Legal Eagle has an entire video (or more than one) dedicated to downright stupid laws like these.
In a just world, these laws wouldn't exist, but, well...
Edit: just wanted to add that I can't seem to find actual legal citations for some of these but they may be county or city ordinances. Regardless, they are still stupid and still crimes from what I know.
I can't speak for where you live, but in America, there are many, many traffic laws. They differ greatly by jurisdiction. Most of them are not enforced. Sometimes explicitly -- for example, in my city, they recently announced they would no longer detain people for specific minor traffic violations -- but usually, it's implicit which go unpunished. It's also selective. By creating an unseen web of violations, the detaining officer is given all the necessary tools to make each stop as painful or as peaceful as they'd like.
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.
The fun doesnt stop there, check out 'civil asset forfeiture' when you have a chance.
Also, if you read TFA, it seemed like the owner of a truck and trailer had to spend $20k getting his stuff out of impound when his employee was wrongly arrested. Seems like an innocent judgement isnt everything we think it is.
The State of Florida will charge you $75/day for your incarceration, even if charges are dropped, dismissed or you are found not guilty.
Not paying these fees is a Class C Felony in Florida, punishable by up to 10y in prison and/or a $10,000 fine.
One data point, and a highly regional one at that, I know.
10-14 min.: Keep an eye on this employee; may be developing slipshod attitude.
14-15.61 min.: Employee is an efficient worker, may sometimes miss important details.
Exactly 15.62 min.: Smartass. Needs attitude counseling.
15.63-16 min.: Asswipe. Not to be trusted.
16-18 min.: Employee is a methodical worker, may sometimes get hung up on minor details.
More than 18 min.: Check the security videotape, see just what this employee was up to (e.g., possible unauthorized restroom break).
Y.T.’s mom decides to spend between fourteen and fifteen minutes reading the memo. It’s better for younger workers to spend too long, to show that they’re careful, not cocky. It’s better for older workers to go a little fast, to show good management potential. She’s pushing forty. She scans through the memo, hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular intervals, occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section. The computer is going to notice all this. It approves of rereading. It’s a small thing, but over a decade or so this stuff really shows up on your work-habits summary."
--Neal Stephenson, _Snow Crash_
In a time when adaptive cruise control is ubiquitous, this is so egregious.
- Cardinal Richelieu
I remember one guy they hired to sit and pull people over all day on the highway who said the same thing "I can find something wrong with every single vehicle that passes by. I can literally pull anybody over that I want." IIRC he had things like a corner of a mudflap being broken off, or some trivial insanity like that. The big one in Illinois was having any air freshener hanging from your mirror.
> Give me six lines written by the most honest man, and I will find something there to hang him.
-- Richelieu
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.
No states enforce federal law, nor should they. To legalize weed, those state removed or deactivated state laws also on the books about marijuana production, distribution and consumption.
In theory, yes.
In practice, yes, with many caveats.
LE doesn't have to articulate that reasonable suspicion at the time of the detention. They can come up with that suspicion years later when it comes to deciding in court whether the evidence from that traffic stop can be suppressed. This is assuming that the warrantless search even found anything, the suspect didn't accept a plea deal in lieu of going to trial, and the charges weren't dropped just before trial.
A working system for this sort of thing would be more like:
* The officer needs to record that reasonable suspicion at the time of the detention.
* All of these reasonable suspicion detentions are recorded, along with outcomes. This becomes evidence for reasonability presented in court. An officer with a low hit rate suggests that the suspicion in generally unreasonable, and they are just fishing.
* A 20 minute timer is started at the start of a traffic stop. If the officer can't articulate the reasonable suspicion at the 20 minute mark, detention is considered plainly illegal, and qualified immunity does not apply. This prevents keeping people on the roadside for a hour waiting for the dog to show up.
* Similarly, the hit rate of the police dogs needs to be recorded, and low hit rate should make any evidence from them inadmissible.
For any of this to happen, we would need to start giving standing to supposedly "unharmed" suspects that just had their vehicle torn apart and hours of their lives wasted without charge. Currently, the courts seem to think that a little wait at a traffic stop and an fruitless illegal search that is never seen in the courtroom is no damage at all.
Wouldn't the suspicion -- the observed fact and presumed implication -- need to be recorded before the traffic stop?
I suppose you could have a reasonable suspicion stop, but it would have to be something like "a hit and run just happened nearby, no vehicle description", and you witness a car with a smashed grill and leaking radiator fluid, but not breaking any traffic laws.
Reasonable suspicion might develop over the course of the stop, e.g. driver is super nervous, the back seat is full of overstuffed black duffel bags, there is a powerful chemical air freshener odor, and the vehicle has just crossed the Mexico border.
People get whipped up to support laws but don’t see that more is just worse, especially the petty ones, even if they notionally correct for some bad behaviour, because they allow selective enforcement.
Fun fact, the Austin bomber was caught because publically available user data used for advertising, as gathered by a bunch of 3d party apps, allowed a cross reference of cellphones in vicinity within certain time ranges, which narrowed the suspect pool to very few people from which they were able to start their investigation.
/s
Supreme Court has established that some established constitutional provisions do not apply at the U.S. border, and protections against governmental privacy incursions are significantly reduced.
The border search exception applies within 100 miles (160 km) of the border of the United States, including borders with Mexico and Canada but also coastlines.
But it only says "any reasonable distance". SCOTUS appears to have come up with the 100 mile limit in various cases over time.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45041697
(There's a 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.
To be fair, though, I think it is also true that the ACLU is too eager to talk about the "Constitution-Free Zone" as though it is fact. I also agree that people should not simply accept that the Constitution-Free Zone exists. It is definitely not that simple and what would otherwise be 4th Amendment violations should absolutely still be challenged even if they occur within the zone. There is still every opportunity for more good law on this.
https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone
Since the ACLU is largely the origin of this meme, I think that's pretty dispositive.
Importantly: I am (for the Nx1000th time) not saying that federal law enforcement officers won't make abusive claims, or directly abuse the law; they certainly will. As I said in the previous thread, they managed to detain Senator Patrick Leahy more than 100 miles from a border, which, when you think about the implications of the 100-mile-zone, is kind of a feat!
>The federal government defines a “reasonable distance” as 100 air miles from any external boundary of the U.S. So, combining this federal regulation and the federal law regarding warrantless vehicle searches, CBP claims authority to board a bus or train without a warrant anywhere within this 100-mile zone. Nearly two-thirds of the U.S. population, over 213 million people, reside within the region that CBP considers falling within the 100-mile border zone, according to the 2020 census. Most of the 10 largest cities in the U.S., such as New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago, fall in this region. Some states, like Florida, lie entirely within this border band so their entire populations are impacted.
Which, upon re-reading both of your comments in this thread makes me actually think there is no argument at all and everyone here and the ACLU agree: there is a no consitution zone, it has practical consequences, and it does extend out 100 miles from internal foreign borders.
What I feel like people do here is map everyday abusive law enforcement behavior onto that border search exemption without realizing that what they're actually suggesting is that people should expect (and thus roll with) a "tear everything apart, search under clothes, maximally invasive" border search, which is what the Constitution authorizes at an actual border crossing.
Technically, the entire fourth amendment applies. BUT All the fourth amendment requires is probable cause for warrants, and that searches and seizures be reasonable. It doesn't require warrants for searches or seizures (although courts have found that that is usually necessary for reasonableness), and it doesn't require probable cause for searches or seizures without a warrant (though courts have found that that also is usually necessary for reasonableness.)
What the courts have allowed is the use of the border zone to justify exceptions to a lot of the things that are usually required for reasonableness. This isn't, technically, an exception to the Fourth Amendment, because searches still need to be "reasonable". Its just proximity to the border makes searches "reasonable" that wouldn't be anywhere else.
I'm doing ["border search" "miles" site:uscourts.gov], getting cases --- recent cases, including some with cites to Ameida-Sanchez, which of course makes my point --- and not seeing much to suggest that CBP can randomly search random cars in Green Bay WI under the border search exemption.
And now here we are with most of the population of the USA without rights and the president able to declare anyone left a terrorist and use the military against them.
(1*: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Abdulrahman_al-Awla... )
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.
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.
Now there’s a trumped-up charge.
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”.
[1] https://blog.careem.com/posts/local-regulatory-data-sharing-...
It's always good to know how different countries try to violate us in different ways.
It's not like I'm out there hunting down police abuses, but having hidden cameras is just something I would absolutely expect them to have. I did not know they specifically had cameras hidden as traffic cones, but I'm also not shocked they do. That's the shocking part to me is the shock of others instead of others also going "of course they do"
The people who voted for them and are still cheering them on are insisting that they voted for and are getting small government!
They are divorced from what words mean
Where the instance upthread and your instance both occurred under the same president? lol
who was president in 2017?
The DEA has been jerking off about how they've been doing this stuff on the east coast corridor for over a decade.
The current CBP situation is basically a Ctrl+C Ctrl+V Ctrl+V Ctrl+V Ctrl+V of what DEA was doing under Bush and Obama.
I hope we survive this fear driven over-stimulated era of politics.
The Reds very nearly lost the civil war to the Whites, not because of any battlefield victory, or even a concerted propaganda effort. Instead, it was because for a lot of people, they'd take going back to the old rotten monarchist system that got them into this mess, if meant they could just stop starving to death while party operatives came and took all their food away.
That describes Russia under Putin. Putin considers his regime to be a continuation of Imperial Russia. He's brought back the Imperial Eagle, the Russian Orthodox Church as an arm of the state, considers himself to be the next Peter the Great, and says that his goal is to extend Russia to its traditional boundaries, out to at least the edge of Poland and the Baltics. Communism was a historical accident which has now been corrected.
That's have likely been forced to go with a limited monarchy with a legislature and limited democratic characteristics (like most of the rest of europe at the time) in order to consolidate the support, or at least buy the compliance of the factions that opposed them.
That might've saved a whole bunch of lives. And looking at it now 100yr later, Russia didn't exactly turn out great.
Don’t misunderstand me, Stalinism was worse for Russia than the Czars, but there’s really no White-victory scenario where it’s all sunshine and roses and limited democracy. That option went out the window with the October revolution.
All I’m saying is that there is no better illustration of how bad War Communism got than the fact that people looked at the literal pogroms and said “maybe that’s not so bad”.
The Taliban can hate the west all they want, it's not politically tenable for them to engage in any serious effort to sponsor terrorism abroad. Likewise going full jackboot during reconstruction after the US civil war wasn't politically possible.
I’m sure it was. You’ll see after whoever wins the next one.
That's just not true. The Black Hundred responsible for pogroms were in decline already before revolution having lost state support as bureaucrats felt it was getting out of control. They played zero role after the revolution. Monarchists were a minority among Whites, it is just that the most competent military leaders were (i. e. Kolchak Denikin, Kappel) - but even them were not too loud loud about it as not to lose support. The Reds nearly lost simply because they had zero approval rating to begin with, what got them any support at all was the promise to exit WWI - and the support fell considerably when it turned out that exiting the war meant Brest peace accord.
In the AI sense, or in the Israel/Third Temple/apocalypse sense?
And there's near-zero chance that the outcome would be the 'high-tech fully-automated luxury communism' that people dream of. There's many much-more-likely outcome that are worse than what exists now.
I think many of the people fantasizing about revolution are aware.
There is suffering either way. Which has more area under the curve, fighting about it now, or boiling the frog 100yr and fighting later?
Just to be clear, you really would prefer to live in crumbling infrastructure, with plenty of violence, martial law, and constant worry of whether you are going to get shot or not trying to get basic supplies?
Because boiler exploding isn't romantic or cool like you think it is. Imagine the worst possible riot, except country wide.
Most of that rhetoric about tyranny and freedom was simply propaganda to get the poors to fight on their behalf.
And it worked! They successfully conned the other colonists into laying down their lives to make the founders even richer.
Somehow it doesn't feel all that different from America today. Something something history, doomed to repeat it.
You are a wealthy plantation owner in 1770. Do you a) grumble about taxes and the British and pay anyway because you like free-ish trade that makes you money hand over fist b) instigate a war that will drag armies all across the countryside of your nation with all the disruption to commerce that entails. If you have a brain, it's not even a choice.
They didn't to it because they lacked principals and would do anything for a buck. They did it because they were such ideological zealots who would rather forgo years of commerce, and risk the total destruction of their nation and subjugation of their countryman than bend over and take what they saw as violations of their rights as British subjects.
The founders didn't even get substantially richer out of it, many of them got poorer. You can go read about what they did after the war and it wasn't "make money hand over fist". It was mostly figure out how to run a nation, be stressed out and die young.
Trading the protection of the dominant and very benevolent for the time world power for freedom you mostly already had in practice is not a trade that pays off in anyone's lifetime. It's a miracle that it worked out at all. Plenty of other countries kicked out the British with not much to show for it.
Even now all they can talk about is returning to normal (where normal describes the conditions that led to the current state).
(Plus the fact that Dems talk about some of these doesn't mean they think they're going to happen.)
>Plus the fact that Dems talk about some of these doesn't mean they think they're going to happen
They literally got ACA passed by a hair, and were just shy of 2 Senate votes needed to enact all those policies I discussed in Biden's original BBB.
That’s what American conservatism used to look like. Modern Dems talk a lot like that.
Hell, the right-wing ran on giving more money to the National Health Service as one of their Brexit arguments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_Leave_bus (Including Farage, at times! https://www.the-independent.com/news/uk/politics/brexit-eu-r...)
The US has very little actual big-L Left (ahem) left in it.
Normal earnings increased just 55% in that time and tracking inflation would have meant increasing 49.5%
(to be clear about where I stand, when given a choice between a conservative party and a regressive party, I have always begrudgingly chosen the conservatives)
Since Clinton Democrats have been neoliberal (conservative). The mechanism they've chosen for all of their programs has been public private partnerships. Infrastructure funding, for example, has been "they created a slush fund for private companies to bid on". Healthcare was "They created a slush fund to pay for private insurance".
And I'll point out, that they also made healthcare more expensive with this slush fund approach. Medicare Part C was created by the Clinton administration which, you guessed it, created a giant slush fund for private insurance that ends up being more expensive than Medicare Part A/B.
I agree, democrats did expand access to healthcare, but they did it in the most expensive and easily corruptible way possible. The approach was literally a carbon copy of the Heritage foundation plan that Romney implemented in Mass.
Yes, they have had some incremental policy wins and done tremendous good for millions of people (while also making, e.g. healthcare more expensive/profitable). No, the occasional incremental policy win does not a progressive party make.
Healthcare, for instance, is not more expensive for the average low-income person because of the ACA. You’re utterly incorrect, completely misinformed, and repeating bullshit. “Progressives”. Lol.
All the Democrat led states have passed a law to change presidential votes to popular vote:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...
And there isn't much Dems can do about the disproportionate power of a few states due to the Senate, except for start a Civil War.
You might be confusing conservatism with libertarianism. Up until about Reagan, all these policies were considered conservative.
Progressive policies aren't just about tweaking existing policy, it's about building new social structures. We've not seen anything really close to that in the US since roughly LBJ.
So is minimum wage, despite all of the screaming. Minimum wages ensure the existence of a working class. When the minimum wage drops below subsistence, there are civil disruptions that are bas for business.
When the Democrats expanded health care, they did so using a plan devised by the Heritage Foundation. It works on free-market principles, of consumers purchasing insurance from private enterprise. It is also very pro-business, creating a larger class of potential employees who can be hired without employer-sponsored benefits.
Many democrats would indeed like a government-run universal health care plan. But it's not a majority of the party, which is indeed (as the OP said) dominated by the center-right.
If the Federal minimum wage had kept up with inflation since it's peak value in 1968, it would be close to $26/hour.
There's no consistent or fixed definition of woke. It's a blanket term applied to anything that MAGA dislikes at any given moment. Woke's only purpose is to manufacture outrage, and it didn't exist as a concept until MAGA made it one.
Companies do not have to do a conscious effort to determine the lowest amount they can go. "Everyone else pays that rate too"
But absent the rule, they would - and did - reliably go lower.
In 2000, no country in the world accepted gay marriage, up until 2013 gay marriage was banned in California because the Californians elected to do so (it was overruled federally against the wishes of the Californians).
In 2025, even a majority of Republicans (by some polls) support gay marriage. The far left always moves the goal posts. Once they legalized gay marriage, they considered it the norm instead of a wild idea that Republicans should fight to remove.
That's why you see the rise of Christian nationalism. Many consider the average Republican to be too far left (similar to how leftists consider Democrats to be too far right).
Personally, I'm for the Matrix opinion. In the Matrix, the future humans live in a simulated 1999 because it was considered the peak of human civilization. Socially, it was.
The goal of the far left has always been equality. It's the same goal that legalized interracial marriage.
> That's why you see the rise of Christian nationalism
We've always had an issue with Christian Nationalism in the US, and they use any excuse they can to push their agenda. If it's not gay marriage it's immigration, or trans rights, or whatever other wedge issue they can create a moral panic over.
It's vital to remember that nationalist goals are absolute, but they will lie about it. They say they just want to protect women's sports to get their foot in the door, and then they're banning gender affirming care and looking to re-criminalize gay marriage. There's no reason to compromise with nationalists.
Of course, the former won't let the latter perform without a fight. The campaign with Mamdami was one of many clashes on this, and there will be many more to come next year.
Either way, a focus of not falling to fascism is the bare minimum agreement between all democrats. I just hope we don't all think the job is done once we get the bar back from being underground. It being on the floor still isn't a great look.
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.
edit: in reality the times have changed and so has the country and the parties. All of these pre-2008 stereotypes are stupid and not useful anymore.
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.
Why are you complaining about people's concerns instead of the actual problems created by those in power?
The president is sending the troop into cities on made up offenses, he's posting to social media shitting on american citizens, he's doing death threats on sitting politicians, this is not the same you absolute twat.
It's a silly claim made by unserious folks.
The truth is, the only reason not to trust the intel community is because of some fringe bullshit you heard on Joe Rogan.
Wait, are you saying mass surveillance is a good thing?
In my case I've decided on criteria is has not held this office for more than one term (that is I give you two terms no matter what office you are running for) because no matter how much I agree with you I don't want anyone to spend too long in government.
In the US electoral system, voting third party doesn't send a signal. It throws away your vote. Let's take a look at what voting third party has done.
1. Voting for Nader led to Bush Jr. winning the presidency in 2000. 2. Voting for Jill Stein led to the first Trump presidency in 2016.
So you got that going for you.
Kinda like how the Libertarians got ~3% of the vote 2016, and over the following years the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire was taken over by groypers and the national LP endorsed Trump in 2024? I mean, in an ideal polity you'd be right, major parties would pay attention to where they're losing votes at the margin to inform their policy decisions. But we live in a far-from-ideal polity where the two major parties systematically undermine minor party candidates at anything above the county level.
and considering what was at stake in the 2024 election,
you either voted for sanity (especially given that Kamala was the most milquetoast unoffensive candidate ever which would have been MILES better than what we have now), or you voted for insanity, because lack of vote for Dems means you were giving Trump a chance to win.
Sorry, but that is how it is.
The ?
You mean to say you're supporting a checkpoint in Indiana to catch drugs that came from Mexico?
Fix the checkpoint in Texas then if it's leaking drugs to Indiana ...
Presumably CBP is not stupid and that surveillance is providing value they can not otherwise get only in Texas.
I'm not saying you have to abolish CBP. I'm saying they should be protecting the border and this ain't it.
Translated to "Even though I know that most republicans said they didn't want to go against someone who had a very good chance winning in 2024 for the fear that they would get their political career destroyed, because that is what Trump explicitly said to them, I will vaguely allude to some fringe statements about things that haven never been proven true in regards to other aspects of the bill as the reason Republicans didn't vote for it, because in no way shape or form will I ever admit that I was wrong.
I don't get why people on your side still think that saying shit like this makes you sound smart. That ship has long sailed.
Eventually you realize your enemy isn't the system. The system is like a misbehaving toddler that's never been disciplined. It acts as badly as it can get away with. Your enemy is your fellow countryman, you coworkers, your own family. And from that realization comes nothing actionable nor good conclusions, only despair...
Started about a decade ago to fight illegal border-related activities and the trafficking of both drugs and people, it has expanded over the past five years.
Some of the lawsuits (cited in article) to fight this, and illegal pull overs, go back years.
Really? It shows how this tech can be used in ways you don't like, when your party is no longer in power. How whatever laws you pass, surveillance you enact, powers you give, aren't just for you.
But also your political adversary.
And even then it was smoldering for a long time before that. A good "start" point is probably the creation of the FBI.
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.
Pushing wages down for low-skilled work is possibly good for the economy, but it's very bad for low-skilled American workers.
> This idea that border control somehow failed is a lie sold to you by republicans.
There are millions of illegal aliens in the US. From 2021 to 2024, several millions more entered the US.
> Also Trump killed the CBP funding bill in early 2024 that would have addressed a lot of issues.
Conjecture. Trump was not in office in 2024. That bill may or may not have addressed some issues, while also creating new issues or making things worse.
Thats why minimum wage laws specifically exist. Everybody wins.
>There are millions of illegal aliens in the US. From 2021 to 2024, several millions more entered the US.
The border bill that Trump killed would have increased funding to CBP to speed up the process of determining who is fit to stay and who isn't because so many people were entering that there wasn't enough staff to process cases quicker.
>Conjecture.
Nice try lol. I know yall LOVE to rewrite history, but that doesn't fly anymore. Everything is on record on why Republicans voted against it.
Yes that is one of the things that bill would have done, along with hundreds of other things which may or may not have been beneficial or detrimental.
And again, Trump didn't kill anything. He was not in office. There were many criticisms of that bill on its merits. The criticisms are on record as you said https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf4EzoWR944
> In this video, several Republican Senators express their blunt dismissal of the so-called "bipartisan" border security bill, highlighting their reasons for opposition and their dissatisfaction with the negotiation process and their leadership.
Hopefully, once US economy tanks, and you lose years of your life due to stress and a good portion of your retirement funds, you will understand this because its impossible for you to learn this any other way.
"Why?" he asked. "A simple reason: Donald Trump. Because Donald Trump thinks it's bad for him politically."
Mr Biden said the former president had spent the past 24 hours lobbying Republicans in the House and Senate in an effort to torpedo the proposal.
He said Mr Trump had tried to intimidate Republican lawmakers, "and it looks like they're caving".
Mr Biden urged the lawmakers to "show some spine".
The Trump campaign blasted the Biden speech, calling it "an embarrassment to our Nation and a slap in the face to the American people".
Spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt called Mr Biden's criticism of Mr Trump "a brazen, pathetic lie and the American people know the truth".
Her statement also said Mr Trump's policies had "created the most secure border in American history, and it was Joe Biden who reversed them".
On Monday, Mr Trump posted on social media that "only a fool, or a radical left Democrat" would vote for the bill. ”
That Biden is trying to blame Trump for the border disaster that he caused?
Give me a break.
Here are some Republican Senators talking about their criticisms of the bill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf4EzoWR944
It sure doesn't sound like a "really good bill" that only failed because Trump said so. That is a Democrat-spun narrative.
WTF? So your arguments is that stealing American jobs and not paying taxes “it’s good for the economy”?
Even if that were true, slavery is also “good for the economy”, but that doesn’t make it a good thing
Undocumented Tyson Chicken employees handed over paperwork _from Tyson_ that was given to over 900 of them where the company told them how to fill out government/tax/payroll forms when undocumented so as to stay under the radar... and CBP said that wasn't part of the scope of their investigation into Tyson, and did precisely nothing about that.
Hormel, much the same.
The bitching and moaning about "the economy" by Republicans is so amazingly selective - it's funny how they focus on that, while ignoring how _awfully convenient_ it is to farm, livestock, food production and other employers and businesses it is to have access to that same labor pool.
Do keep in mind that 50 years ago all these jobs were done by “Americans”.
Either way, prices will increase - that's just the immediate corollary of having a higher production cost due to higher salaries. Hopefully the Maga distortion field still acknolwges that basic fact. Guess what happens when prices increase. People won't buy more out of patriotic feelings.
The problem you (and others) raise with this point is that Americans don’t want to do those jobs. But if they paid a lot more, they would want to. Okay now the problem on your end shifts. Ohhh but the prices would go up. Okay, and? Yes, the prices go up, and we can discuss whether that is a problem, but it isn’t your original problem, you have performed a squirm maneuver (probably unknowingly since you are probably just repeating essentially a propaganda script you have unknowingly ingested).
You take it as a foregone conclusion that the price increases would be prohibitive. You have provided no basis for this assumption, and nobody ever does because it isn’t obviously true. It depends on a) what percent of the consumer price can be attributed to the artificially low wages and b) the second and third etc order effects of increasing wages on affordability across society, including the domestic workers in these areas. When you dig into it (a) isn’t generally above a few years worth of target inflation, on very specific product categories, and you simultaneously increase wages for low skill domestic workers, which sounds like a win for the left but somehow it isn’t? Pay slightly higher prices to support American workers is a pretty easy slogan.
So the proposal is basically that we knowingly abandon the rule of law in the area of immigration in exchange for 6% cheaper vegetables. Uh, no thank you, I’ll pass on that one.
The comparison to slavery is quite funny, because you're actually right. But probably not in the way you think - or even, the way most American politics talks about. For example, whenever a state gets a bug up their butt about illegal immigration and tries to actually enforce eVerify[0], the local agricultural sector collapses. Because American agriculture has always been addicted to slave labor, and always will be absent specific interventions to give agricultural workers negotiating power.
Of course, that's not the kind of intervention you're going to see out of Congress anytime soon. The arguments had in Congress, and with Trump, boil down to "how many indentured servants do we bring in, and for how long do they have to work before they get their rights back?" Illegal immigration is solely understood as a fault of the immigrant, not the companies who rely on them. Even the mass deportations are being carried out with the understanding that the slaves are the problem - not their masters.
And to be clear, the slave-like nature of immigration (illegal or otherwise) comes down to the fact that immigrants don't use the same job market Americans use. If I want to poach an H1-B, I have to go through hoops and pay an exorbitant sum to sponsor them. This means they can't demand equivalent salaries - even though the condition of their visa was that they'd be getting paid the same or better. It just doesn't pencil unless the immigrant works for peanuts and you're a huge organization that can swallow the compliance costs.
You can't get rid of slavery by whipping the slave harder. If you want to actually get rid of immigration-as-slavery, you need to hand out visas like candy, green cards to anyone who tells on their employer / trafficker / etc. for violating labor laws, and amnesty to people who have been here for a long time without a rap sheet.
[0] This is the US government service that actually tells you if you're hiring someone who has a legal right to work in the country or not.
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.
The republicans have been the party of massive military since forever. I don’t really see how this is different.
Can you share data on how people of one party are supporting ALPR and the other are against it? I was looking for a public poll on this question and couldn't find one.
edit: Why am I being downvoted?
Article starts with: "The U.S. Border Patrol is monitoring millions of American drivers nationwide"
Within illegal entry you have:
Terror watchlist
Recycling deportees (commuting to/from construction job sites in Phoenix or coming from Tijuana to do sex work in US)
Ultralight pilots dropping meth in fields
Smuggled minors (custody disputes)
Chinese nationals on the run from China
Mexican wildlife/hunting violators
Archaeological and horticultural looters stealing from Sonora Desert
Dryback US citizens pretending to be aliens to get a free ride on ICE flights to Houston
US citizen gotawaysThey've not been "small government" since forever.
To me, the CPB and ICE are looking more and more like an American Gestapo.
Nope.
Nice try tho. The "both sides bad" argument used to work, not anymore.
Apropos of anything else, this access was granted in 2017, and Biden might be surprised to learn he was President then, not Trump.
Is that a win for the oligarchs?
I wish.
Very early on in this Trump admin there was a bipartisan bill passed which greatly expanded the capabilities of ICE to deport [1]. Democrats have been well aligned with the republicans when it comes to immigration policy. You'll find few that will actually criticize the actions of ICE/DHS.
Again, you'll find few democrats that have a stance on the border that contradicts the Republican stance. There are a few, but most are just staying silent. The only reason they vote against these sorts of bills is because of pure partisanship, not out of some ideology alignment.
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/436...
[2] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/senate-hold-election-year-sh...
The Newt and the Tea Party started the slide, normalizing hatred and bombast and FU-politics, and MAGA perfected it.
Whether you love it, hate it, or are indifferent, what you are dealing with now are not really Republicans. They are MAGA-folks. They should really rename themselves the Solipism Party. Nothing matters but the current state of your own head.
And yes, I know parties change and evolve with the times, but I would argue this time is very different.
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.
So you can include them in the “reupped it over and over”.
This all reminds me of Makeshift Patriot by Sage Francis.
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.
Guess how many major metros are in that area.
https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/your-rights-bord...
GOP is the party of capitalism (free-market, laissez-faire). Capitalism is the pursuit of self-interest and the profit motive.
And when the opportunity permits, this creates an ethical incentive structure for lying to be deployed for tactical gain.
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.
It's going to be one party, or the other, in my opinion .. a party that is more overtly favoring the business- / owner-class. And today it happens to be GOP.
The fascinating / interesting part to me is how Lying, a socially-unfavorable trait, is overtly deployed more and more often by a specific political party.
And so it reinforces, in my mind, the "Post-Truth Era" labeling by some political scientists, for today. Where society itself is complicit in accepting the GOP, I assume because it feels good to "win", while the GOP gratuitously lies.
Their leader, Trump, is re-explained by his supporters, "what he meant when he called for the execution of other Government leaders was ..." and similar such intentional misdirection / lying.
As a tactic, it's remarkable to me how Lying is successful. I expect to see more of it, from popular and even unpopular business leaders, going forward, perhaps enabled by increasingly capable automated information generation technology like AI & (mis)info-spreaders like social-networks.
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.
And you won't convince any of that party's voters to care about location privacy enough to make it a vote-changing issue if you open your argument by criticizing their party (which, yes, almost universally sucks) instead of talking about the actual issue, which is location privacy.
Look, no, that's just wrong. Immigration enforcement overreach (and law enforcement overreach more generally) is an almost purely republican issue. Period. Trying to silence criticism, especially in this forum, is simply trying to deflect blame.
You are misinterpreting me in bad faith here.
Everything that Trumpists are doing was peddled in the 1990s by such distinguished figures as Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani. Usually with a nauseating appeal to "rule of law". The "surprise", and "this behavior may be the path to authoritarianism" stuff in the NY Times makes it hard to read without an eyeroll.
There are people who called themselves Republican who started to believe their own propaganda, but it’s never been an empirical fact in the modern era that Republicans acted to reduce government spending in toto.
There is an interesting philosophical issue around these accusations of "distributed hypocrisy". It would be one thing if you were pointing to a particular individual who took an inconsistent position. But if two loosely affiliated individuals disagree, that's not necessarily hypocritical. Even a single individual may change their mind on an issue over time.
They are patrolling the border. The border between desired and undesired citizens.
Nobody lifted a finger when “the privacy violations are only used against the bad guys”. Now it looks like it’s your turn to be declared the bad guy.
Your rights are limited in interactions with CBP, or to state the inverse: CBP have claimed more powers than traditional law enforcement. This has been true for quite a while; they have at various times been more and less careful about your rights while exercising those powers. They are being less careful now.
Wow, this is incredibly concerning. So they can pull me over, lie about why and then try to manufacture something ?
Oh wait, I think we just did, given what the Coast Guard has been up to today. https://www.juneauindependent.com/post/coast-guard-says-swas...
https://www.timesleaderonline.com/uncategorized/2022/11/poli...
Parallel construction is a law enforcement process of building a parallel, or
separate, evidentiary basis for a criminal investigation in order to limit
disclosure as to the origins of an investigation.
In the US, a particular form is evidence laundering, where one police officer
obtains evidence via means that are in violation of the Fourth Amendment's
protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, and then passes it on
to another officer, who builds on it and gets it accepted by the court under
the good-faith exception as applied to the second officer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2014/feb/03/dea-paral...
Well, maybe now you understand that when people were saying Trump is an actual fascist, it wasn't just memes.
Its only gonna get worse. At some point, CBP is gonna shoot someone, nothing is gonna happen, and that will be the turning point of when they can just arbitrarily start shooting citizens with no repercussion.
If you don't have a plan to GTFO the country by now, you are behind.
Police shouldn't be able to pull someone over for an air freshener or tinted windows. They can send a fix-it ticket without wasting the time and resources, and without causing the inconvenience or diversions in traffic. And, as a private citizen, I strongly prefer the police have the minimal necessary powers to detain me.
It's not just government use either. There are private companies that scan vast numbers of license plates (sometimes by driving around parking lots with a camera), build a database of what plate was seen where at what time, then sell access to both law enforcement and I believe private investigators.
Want to know if your spouse is having an affair? Those databases may well have the answer.
Here is a Wired story from 2014 about Vigilant Solutions, founded in 2009: https://www.wired.com/2014/05/license-plate-tracking/
I believe Vigilant only provide access to law enforcement, but Digital Recognition Network sell access to others as well: https://drndata.com/about/
Good Vice story about that: https://www.vice.com/en/article/i-tracked-someone-with-licen...
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.
[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...
> Langley offers a prediction: In less than 10 years, Flock’s cameras, airborne and fixed, will eradicate almost all crime in the U.S. (He acknowledges that programs to boost youth employment and cut recidivism will help.) It sounds like a pipe dream from another AI-can-solve-everything tech bro, but Langley, in the face of a wave of opposition from privacy advocates and Flock’s archrival, the $2.1 billion (2024 revenue) police tech giant Axon Enterprise, is a true believer. He’s convinced that America can and should be a place where everyone feels safe. And once it’s draped in a vast net of U.S.-made Flock surveillance tech, it will be.
This guy literally wants to replicate China's social credit score and ubiquitous surveillance in the US - and instead of shunning him, the company and everyone on their board, payroll and investors like an effort of that scale deserves, police, law-and-order freaks and many municipalities flock to it.
Where the fuck is the "don't tread on me" crowd?
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2025/09/03/ai-st...
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.
and i figure as long as we're legislating we'd better shoot for the moon
Basically, target demand as much as supply.
Please realize that defense counsel is fighting an uphill battle while their client is stuck in pretrial limbo. The issue of parallel construction, with some exception, will not really come up. As many lawyers have told me -- what matters to them is getting their client out of jail/pretrial. And because that's the concern over all else, the publicly available information about these abuses simply don't come up in the public eye. So these problems go and go and go.
Really, a lot of what you hope happens in court just... really fucking doesn't. All that'll happen is people will be in jail longer because so many people were arrested under 4a-violating arrests and the defense attorneys get more work load.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2290703-chicago-pd-f...
But regardless, I always find it funny that most of the rhetoric for personal liberties revolves around being able to do illegal things.
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.
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."
Reasonable belief is what allows for police to take warrantless actions. Cop sees someone in a neighborhood walking around looking inside car windows and trying door handles. He now has reasonable belief enough to temporarily detain that person and ask what he's doing. No arrest or search may be conducted.
vs.
A court issued warrant requires probable cause. Cop let the suspect go in the first example (as he should with no probable cause for an arrest), and the next day someone in the neighborhood reports that their car was broken into and their laptop stolen. Cop checks local pawn shops and finds the laptop, the person that sold it to the pawn shop is the same person the cop stopped last night. NOW the cop has enough probable cause to seek a search warrant to look for other stolen items.
Point being, reasonable belief or reasonable suspicion isn't and shouldn't be enough to search or detain. You need probable cause, and that probable cause needs to be affirmed by a judge and a warrant issued.
The problem is the standard for probable cause is becoming too low. The courts often just rubber stamp warrants. We need systems in place to make sure warrants are only issued when the facts presented are so compelling that there is no possible doubt that probable cause doesn't exist rather than just the bare minimum to get rubber stamped by a judge.
Insufficient corroboration is already basis to refuse a warrant, but in practice that doesn't always happen. You are at the mercy of the police and court system and if you don't have the resources (money) to appeal and get your conviction overturned, you get screwed.
The purchase order was already taken care of a long time ago, because police loved being able to get around warrants and love dragnet surveillance.
US literally has ownership of guns codified into constitution, specifically to allow citizens to defend themselves from oppressive regimes that fit CBP to the letter (i.e violence against US citizens), however a CBP officer is yet to be shot in a confrontation.
Its to the point where Trump can literally start confiscating guns, and the amount of armed resistance will be negligible, and most of it originating from organized gangs. When it comes to all the "dont tread on me" people, when armed forces are surrounding their house, and the chance of losing the easy comfortable life they have lived for the past 3 decades is very real, all of them are going to bend over and lube up so fast that they will get whiplash, without a doubt.
And the problem is not limited to retroactive laws. Phone scanning was another example in their comment. A regime could use this to restrict future communication even if they did not punish past communication.
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.
Or Trump can just put legal pressure on cell providers and they will bend the knee like everyone else, and CPB can easily have that data without problems.
Lets not pretend that that is the line they won't cross.
† https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_Un-American_Activities_C...
What are you basing that on? Conjecture?
Most telco execs would sell their own mothers before offering reasonable data plans - that your car comes with one for free should be very telling
I used a bypass harness to avoid losing a speaker and the car hasn't developed any fault. I wouldn't buy a car without knowing in advance that this mod is possible. There are plenty of tutorials on how to do this for popular makes/models. It may be as simple as removing a fuse, or you might need to disassemble part of the dash to physically unplug the modem.
For example if you look at where Tesla and co. are going, they are looking to reduce the amount and tickness of wiring harnesses - and they did so by creating a proprietary fieldbus that communicates between proprietary controllers that handle multiple functions, so they can multiplex everything under the sun into a single bus.
Welcome to capitalism. It is very hard, in EU and US, to tell where the government ends and the private companies begin.
... But I echo the concern with how the collection and aggregation of the data can be abused. I just don't have a great solution. "Don't use shared public resources to do secret things; they're incompatible with privacy" might be the rubric here.
Taking a photograph of a car with its license plate is legal. As is selling a photo you've taken, whether it has a license plate or not.
Therefore taking millions of photos in public of cars, and turning their license plate numbers into a database is legal, as is selling that information. It's all data gained in public.
Obviously it's now scary that you're being tracked. But what is the solution? We certainly don't want to outlaw taking photos in public. Is it the mass aggregation of already-public data that should be made illegal? What adverse consequences might that have, e.g. journalists compiling public data to prove governmental corruption?
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.
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.)
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.
So you’d need to further distinguish to preserve that freedom.
“Intent to track” could be an approach, but the toll bridges near me use license plate scanners for payment, so I could see it not being that clear cut. There are likely other valid use cases, like statistical surveys, congestion pricing laws, etc.
I don't normally do that, unless I'm involved in an accident.
> So you’d need to further distinguish to preserve that freedom.
And you think it's very hard to do that, legally speaking?
I think regulation is critically needed in this area, but acting like it’s easy to do well is a recipe for laws like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that have massive unexpected consequences.
That requires at least my name, a date, and a location.
Users reminding other users of the guidelines is common here. I will stop if a moderator says to stop. Your complaint is your problem otherwise.
Most people do not reply when reminded of the comment guidelines. And the question was rhetorical. But you will engage as long as I do seemingly.
You’re just not being creative enough. Car insurers could increase your premiums if you often travel through dangerous intersections, employers could decide to pass you over for promotion if you’re often at a bar, etc.
Even better, make the law flexible enough to encompass all data brokers.
But yeah, that's a pretty obvious one.
That's why it actually is hard.
Plus, what about legitimate purposes of tracking? E.g. journalists tracking the movements of politicians to show they are meeting in secret to plan corrupt activities. Or tracking Ubers to show that the city is allowing way more then the number of permits granted. Or a journalist wanting to better understand traffic patterns.
The line between illegitimate usage and legitimate usage seems really blurry. Hence my question.
>That's why it actually is hard.
Actually, it's not. It's the same idea as having a journalist (or a private investigator or a law "enforcement" agent) surveil a location and take photos of those who come and go on public streets to/from a particular location.
It's not the same thing if you put up automated cameras to identify everyone who goes anywhere for no reason, then create a database that allows folks (especially the government, but folks like Flock as well) to track anyone for any (or no) reason wherever they go.
That's a difference in kind not one of degree.
This already happens a lot on Google street view.
As an aside, these days I am guessing the latter is the truth in most states. So many specialty and personalized plate options out there that people are going to want to keep for themselves.
Obviously the government does own a small number of plates, of course, because they attach them to government owned vehicles.
So CNN can't put Trump's photo up unless he consents?
If I’m a photographer, do I have to get consent from both the divorced parents to photograph the kids? The kids themselves?
Okay? We're not on a legal forum drafting the 50 page law to cover all those loopholes. I'm nor even sure if the posting limit here would faciliate that.
I trust some decent lawyers can take the high level suggestions and dig into the minutae when it comes to real policy. And I find it a bit annoying to berate the community because they aren't acting as a lawyer (and no one here claims to be one AFAIK).
>If I’m a photographer, do I have to get consent from both the divorced parents to photograph the kids? The kids themselves?
Check your state laws. The answer will vary immensely. Another reason a global forum like this isn't the best place to talk about law.
Does a doctor have to get consent from both divorced parents to give a child routine care?
In public? Street photography style, you don't have to get any consent, generally.
Why is "both" the issue? You don't have to get the consent of both parents to photograph their kid whether together, married, separated or divorced.
The parent poster proposes changing that.
This is a very under-appreciated concept.
Local control and storage should be a requirement.
I really do. A centralised, insecure [1] database could lead to America losing a war.
A distributed system of low-reliability nodes is more robust than a centralised system that's very reliable. "ARPANET," after all "was built to explore technologies related to building a military command-and-control network that could survive a nuclear attack." (That's not what it wound up becoming.)
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/03/lawmakers-say-stolen-polic...
> 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.
And even the latter is fraught with hazards to liberty.
Not if you believe in a right of general-purpose computing. Your brain records everything you observe. If you can use a computer for any purpose you choose, then you can use it to record what you can see and hear.
> And it's beyond obvious at this point that the internet doesn't abide by this "law".
What law? Copyright? Why the punctuation? And what did you intend this to imply?
The point is: the difference is a legal fiction which necessarily prohibits general-purpose computing. If I can capture photons with my eyes, but then I try to do it with a machine, and you say, "hey, you can't use a machine for that!" then you are telling me that I can't engage in general purpose computing.
> What law? Copyright? Why the punctuation? And what did you intend this to imply?
Yes, I don't think copyright laws are a legitimate role for state power in the information age. And if the argument is, "well, look copyright laws require prohibitions on collecting or copying data or any other general purpose computing process", then that only makes the case stronger, not weaker.
If a law requires the state to intrude into your personal, intimate computing process - whether the biological process in your brain or an electronic one in your computer - then that's a very strong indication that the law is not a legitimate intervention on behalf of the rights of others.
The point was it was not.
> If I can capture photons with my eyes, but then I try to do it with a machine, and you say, "hey, you can't use a machine for that!" then you are telling me that I can't engage in general purpose computing.
Observing, recording, and processing are different words with different meanings. Repeating your assertion they are the same did not make it more persuasive.
> Yes, I don't think copyright laws are a legitimate role for state power in the information age. And if the argument is, "well, look copyright laws require prohibitions on collecting or copying data or any other general purpose computing process", then that only makes the case stronger, not weaker.
Copyright laws regulated copying always.
There are arguments for copyright abolition worth considering. It is impossible to separate activities almost everyone but you can separate and separates is not.
You can capture photons with your eyes, and you can use an image sensor to capture photons. Seems pretty equivalent.
But your brain cannot store images or recall them in the future (even for yourself, it is a very lossy recall), or transmit them to another person, etc. That is all completely separate functionality that is not equivalent to what your brain can do.
And what of the martian who uses a very powerful telescope to record public activities of earthlings - do our laws extend to her? Do we own the photons that bounce off of our skin unto the ends of reality? Obviously, totally not. That's not how any of this works.
You're allowed to capture photons. You are built with devices that do just say. And you're allowed to build other devices to do that.
Martians don't exist, so yeah, of course that's not how anything works!
Given that you chose to get the implant, I'd say the answer is yes. What you have done is no different than walking around with a camera and taking pictures of everything your eyes point at. So it can be regulated the same way.
> And what of the martian
If she sets foot in our jurisdiction, then she's toast.
Exactly! So what is the distinction between capturing photons with your retinas vs. with a camera sensor that, in your mind, suddenly gives the state authority to intervene?
> If she sets foot in our jurisdiction, then she's toast.
I don't know what "our" jurisdiction means on the internet. If she sets up a streaming server and makes it available to all earthlings, then what?
Uh, sure. If we make up a right, there is a problem.
Currently, this right doesn't exist. We make plenty of laws without presuming it exists. Plenty of people are trying and failing to pursue voters that it should exist, and I generaly commend them. But it's weird to the point of bordring on intentional distraction to try and pot this specific issue on the basis of a demand that doesn't apply to anything else.
> But it's weird to the point of bordring (sic) on intentional distraction to try and pot this specific issue on the basis of a demand that doesn't apply to anything else.
You've assumed bad intentions and... I don't know what else to say. If I can see something with my eyes, save it in my brain, recall it later in a drawing, but can't do those same things with a computer, then the implications for the right of general-purpose computing (and for that matter, free thought) are just absolutely obvious.
It's sort of like saying "what, so I can't assemble a simple contraption of metal and explosive powder, and use it as I see fit?" to elide the fact that what you're actually talking about is shooting a gun. The details matter!
If the case is that the movements of people are plainly observable, but that observing them advances the ability of an organizing like CBP to victimize them, then it seems to me that the logical conclusion is to abolish CBP. Which I think is actually a far more logical position and also a far more popular one among Americans, though many are now afraid to say it out loud.
> It's sort of like saying "what, so I can't assemble a simple contraption of metal and explosive powder, and use it as I see fit?" to elide the fact that what you're actually talking about is shooting a gun.
Shooting? Or building? Of course you have a right to fabricate a gun in your own home. Is this in dispute (at least, in the USA)? Equally obvious, you do not have a right to discharge it in a way that endangers others.
With regard to guns, restrictions abound on how you can use them (even in the privacy of your own home) — you need a license to carry them in public, you must lock them up around children, etc. Even though you might believe in some sort of "right to generalized mechanics", in practice most people believe your rights should actually be strictly limited.
But... is there a right to generalized mechanics in the same sense as general computing? General computing is the right to think - is your right to think limited to what your brain is capable of right now? Is it OK to exercise to increase your capacity? Is it OK to take supplements and drugs for this purpose? Is it OK to offload some thinking to a device you own?
Of course. These are fundamental, bedrock needs of a free information age society. You can think _anything_ you want. Thoughts, perhaps by definition, don't harm or imperil others.
But can you arbitrarily craft any machine you want? I mean, no. Like the right to your thoughts, you can craft what you like as long as it doesn't harm or imperil others. Unlike thoughts, some machines do certainly do this.
We have long had a legal and philosophical distinction between arms and ordnance for this reason. We recognize that the right to bear arms create a decentralization of the capacity for violence. But the right to bear ordnance does not. Also, in practical terms, manufacturing ordnance in secret is often difficult (and in fact, it is relieving to know how difficult it is to make nuclear weapons in secret - so much so that it seems to be _less_ possible with each passing year - in part due to the proliferation of eyes/cameras!).
So yeah, I think you can have totally philosophically and legally consistent limits on manufacturing without also having to limit thought / computation / perception.
I think your attention is better spent on other commenters.
A person's existence does not entitle them to control and authority over every particle that interacts with them.
I'm allowed to see you. If you are in a place where I can see (ie, in public), then I can see you without even telling you I can see you. If I can see you - regardless of whether the technology I use is the result of biological evolution or electronic innovation - and you never even realize you've been seen, then by definition I have not harmed you with that act.
So, let's identify the _actual_ acts of harm. Trying to limit what CBP is allowed to see - when we can't even verify what they've seen - is not a path to relief from their tyranny.
I don't think that's hand-wavy. I think it's consistent. And unafraid to speak truth to power.
If you think you can summarize what I'm missing, I'd love to hear it.
Sorry if it came across that way. I don't.
Messaging can be co-opted. I think you're genuinely arguing for general-purpose computing. But that functionally serves to preserve Flock and the CBP's ability to illegally, in my opinion, monitor and harm Americans.
* What Flock does is _not_ consistent with the use of a camera in a fashion that is identical to an eyeball - they are not standing and watching cars go by, or even recording them and logging it. I think it's essential to support the right of individuals to to this. But putting a camera on a fixture? That's a little different. But even if we support that - and I think I can be convinced...
* The custody of this data in secret, and the sharing of it with criminal elements in society, let alone those committing crimes under color of law like CBP, is the harmful part.
Imagine if there were a network of cameras covering all the commons across the land (ie, every street), and there were a way to view their perspective in real time. This gives every person the ability to record and follow any other.
Is this, in itself, an affront?
What if an alien on mars has such a powerful telescope that they too can follow someone in this way. Is this criminal? Do the rights of a person to police how certain photons - those which bounce off their skin - can be captured... extend to the ends of the universe?
I hope the answer is 'obviously not'.
The problem here is that CBP exists in the first place. We need to complete the incomplete struggle for abolition that fizzed in the middle of the 19th century. We need to rid the land of the power structures wherein some people can exact violence under color of law and others cannot even defend themselves, even as all the cameras in the land capture this injustice.
_That's_ the problem, not that somebody saw it happen.
At a certain point, difference in scale becomes difference in kind. This is fundamental to the universe to the point of thermodynamics.
(To the example, how do you think it would go if you regularly hosted hundres of card games in respect of which you didn't take a cut?)
E.g. city employees who need to better understand traffic patterns originating from one neighborhood, to plan better public transit. Journalists who want to expose the congestion caused by Amazon delivery trucks. And so forth.
Is it database size? Commercial use? Whether license plates are hashed before storing? Hashed before selling the data to a third party? What about law enforcement with a warrant? Etc.
I think the wrong assumption you're making, is that there is supposed to be a simple answer, like something you can describe with a thousand words. But with messy reality this basically never the case: Where do you draw the line of what is considered a taxable business? What are the limits of free speech? What procedures should be paid by health insurance?
It is important to accept this messiness and the complexity it brings instead of giving up and declaring the problem unsolvable. If you have ever asked yourself, why the GDPR is so difficult and so multifaceted in its implications, the messiness you are pointing out is the reason.
And of course, the answer to your question is: Look at the GDPR and European legislation as a precedent to where you draw the line for each instance and situation. It's not perfect of course, but given the problem, it can't be.
Even if that results in a bunch of more detailed regulations, we can then understand the principles behind those regulations, even if they decide a bunch of edge cases with precise lines that seem arbitrary.
Things like the limits of free speech can be explained in a few sentences at a high level. So yes, I'm asking for what the equivalent might be here.
The idea that "it's so impossibly complicated that the general approach can't even be summarized" is not helpful. Even when regulations are complicated, they start from a few basic principles that can be clearly enumerated.
Because everyone has different principles by which they evaluate the world, most laws don't actually care about principles. They are simply arbitrary lines in the sand drawn by the legislature in a bid to satisfy (or not dissatisfy) as many groups as possible. Sometimes, some vague sounding principles are attached to the laws, but its always impossible for someone else to start with the same principles and derive the exact same law from them.
Constitutions on the other hand seem simple and often have simple sounding principles in them. The reason is that constitutions specify what the State institutions can and cannot do. The State is a relatively simple system compared to the world, so constitutions seem simple. Laws on the other hand specify what everyone else must or must not do, and they must deal with messy reality.
Courts follow the law, but they also make determinations all the time based on the underlying principles when the law itself is not clear.
Law school itself is largely about learning all the relevant principles at work. (Along with lots of memorization of cases demonstrating which principle won where.)
I understand you're trying to take a realist or pragmatic approach, but you seem to have gone way too far in that direction.
Delivery trucks are operated by corporations so don't have privacy protection (although the individuals driving them would from things like facial recognition). Traffic patterns can be studied without the use of individual identifiers. Law enforcement is moot because the juicy commercial surveillance databases won't be generated in the first place, and without them we can have an honest societal conversation whether the government should create their own surveillance databases of everyone's movements.
These aren't insurmountable problems. GDPR gets these answers mostly right. What it requires is drawing a line in the sand and iterating to close loopholes, rather than simply assuming futility when trying to regulate the corporate surveillance industry.
anyone can in theory be driving a car. is it my wife, or me, or my kid taking the station wagon out this weekend?
it's also why red light cameras and speed camera send tickets to the registered owner, not necessarily who is driving. my sister in law borrows the car and I get the ticket
In the broader context PII is a looser concept, and can be thought of like browser fingerprinting. The legal system hasn't formalized it nearly to the same degree, but does have the concept of how enough otherwise public information sufficiently correlated can break into the realm of privacy violations. I. The browser fingerprinting world that's thought of pretty explicitly in terms of contributions of bits of entropy, but the legal system has pushed back on massive public surveillance when it steps into the realm of stalking or a firm of investigation that should require a warrant.
Not OP, but yes, I think it is not. At least, not legal in the same expansive way that you are implying. AFAIK private detective work is very much regulated, most likely because it is otherwise known as stalking.
Private detectives have an obligation to ensure that the intentions of their clients are legal if they want to continue to be private detectives.
it is illegal because it means the stalker will attack / rape / otherwise damage or harass the victim.
however watching or tracking someone in public is plenty legal, and actual PIs have ethical and legal obligation to weed out stalkers and dubious behavior
Other idea: AI-enabled dashcam detects and automatically reports "emergency vehicles" to google maps hands free. Goodbye speed traps.
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...
No. Because this is a straw man.
> Maybe you intended to propose for them to be abolished entirely
Banks operate with liability for losses resulting from breaches. Unless Flock et al are routinly losing their entire database, this shouldn't be exisential.
Existing liability law works just fine for terrorism. (Guns notwithstanding.)
Knowingly or negligently materially supporting violent crime creates criminal liability under conspiracy statutes. Plenty of states specifically regulate domestic terrorism [1]. And as we've seen with gun violence, by default being involved in acts of violence generates civil liability [2].
[1] https://www.icnl.org/resources/terrorism-laws-in-the-united-...
[2] https://www.yalejreg.com/wp-content/uploads/Laura-Hallas-Mas...
Neither do banks.
> there is no possible way they could prevent their services from being used by violent insurgencies except to not sell them at all
Prevent? No. Increase the cost of? Yes.
Trying to police domestic terrorism by restricting what they see is a bit silly. But if that were a concern, I said "make the database operators strictly liable for breaches and mis-use." Domestic terrorism is mis-use. But it's not precedented mis-use, which makes it a strange priority to get distracted by.
Not enough.
> Unless Flock et al are routinly losing their entire database, this shouldn't be exisential.
The risk of misuse by future governments is too great even if Flock's security was perfect. And allowing anything less than routinely losing the entire database is unreasonably lax even if you don't believe Flock is too risky to exist.
that, and most military actions are also illegal, if you're not a member of the military following lawful orders. so there's not much paramilitary stuff one can do. and insurgency is like... outlawed
This seems so uncontroversial I don't know why we haven't collectively decided to implement it. Though I get that the folks in power probably don't support it. We could easily decide that law enforcement data gathering warrant requirements are not so simple to circumvent. Maybe we should largely abolish third party doctrine.
Americans (citizens that is) have held fairly consistent opinions on healthcare, guns, education, war and yet very little changes because all voices are in fact, not equal. We are not collectively deciding. There are massive thumbs on the scale, often in favor of private profit that keep things as they are now.
Some might even, surprise surprise, be owned by the companies investing in the companies that use this technology.
This is, as the OP noted, a gross invasion of privacy and not avoidable in a country that largely requires cars and their registration for day to day life.
I agree. The problem is that we do not decide collectively on issues, we decide on representatives. And while a supermajority might agree, for example, that single payer healthcare is good, they may not all prioritize it the same way amongst a number of issues they are concerned about. And in the end, they get a very limited number of candidates to choose from, none of whom are likely to 100% match their priorities and choices.
So the politicians focus on the few issues that really will get people to pull the lever for them. Abortion being an obvious one. Health care doesn't have a strong enough consensus and priority combo to make it happen.
We have? That’s news to me on all three topics.
The bubble of Americans an individual commonly associates with might have fairly aligned opinions, but Americans as a set don’t hold a consistent/aligned opinion in these areas IME.
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.
As it stands, we allow joe bob to access that database so he can harass brown people working on my roof.
>just like I don't really care about a firearms db existing)
You might not care, but even before computers were a big thing, and people thought "Computer" and IBM mainframes were synonymous, it was put forth in law that no central digital registry of firearms was to be made available to the Federal Government.
View regulations under
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12057
In short, NFA, GCA, and FOPA basically synergize to outlaw centralized registries of firearms owners in the U.S. due to the recognition of the particular temptation and value in organizing activities resulting in disarming the populace.
It is absolutely the case other identifiers and activity can be restricted to prevent foreseeable abuse, and to be honest, that this type of abuse wasn't foreseen is frankly testament to either our forebearers being comfortable with a surveillance dystopia or just being so disconnected from technical possibilities that they didn't understand the fire we were working with.
If we can send people to concentration camps without a single armed conflict I can't for the life of me see why anyone would presume guns to have any effect on limiting tyranny.
That's why I just can't care about a firearm database being potentially used nefariously. Gun rights have done nothing positive for America.
It's about making abusing people under color of law come with a fairly significant chance that there will eventually be a body that was formerly on government payroll that needs to be explained away thereby making such activity much less lucrative.
>Gun rights have done nothing positive for America.
Despite being 13% of the population black men have been rounded up 0% of the time. There's two ethnic groups that can't say that, well, three depending on how you count.
I'm not familiar with any definition of "rounded up" for which this even remotely approximates reality.
I think if either group had a less docile reputation they'd be gone after far more surgically and in far lower volume.
I think if you look at the entire history of the US, you'll find they've been going after Black people real hard the entire time, and that the root of mass incarceration was as a direct replacement for chattel slavery while the ink on the abolition of that institution was still wet, focussed on Black people, who have been vastly disproportionately its target ever since.
Presumably many FFLs hold records digitally tracking their sales/transfers, as do manufacturers. And several states require firearm registration.
That thing would ping so often that everyone would just turn it off. You'd also want to require it to always be on so that, for example, someone can't do a hit and run.
The problem that needs to be addressed is the fact that the american police force has WAY too much power and funding. Particularly the DHS.
The tracking sucks, but what sucks more is the police using that tracking in pretty much any way imaginable.
Police forces are not the only ones who can use this information. Foreign intelligence agencies, violent insurgencies, and drug cartels can also use it.
If I get into a car accident, I need some way to know who hit me in the case they bolt from the scene.
And that's what makes this a hard problem. I don't think there's a solution that allows me to address a hit and run and would prevent the groups you mention from similarly tracking people.
https://www.northropgrumman.com/what-we-do/mission-solutions...
I don't know jack about the algorithms because classified and not my job, but I can tell you that however good you think it was, it was better. I don't know if it's real or just marketing BS but what we said publicly was that differences in antennas, mirrors and trim were key in re-identifying vehicles after they leave the observable area (e.g. two silver Camry's go into a garage, come back out, how do you keep track which is which).
I was able to find some more old info online.
That doesn't seem like a privacy win.
You can’t make a transceiver and chip for this kind of deployment that can only be used by the right people. Either the secrets will leak or the implementation will have vulns or both.
Maybe you think there's no way that the transceiver can successfully authenticate those law-enforcement requests without containing secrets. It can; it only needs the public key of a root CA.
In other words, cars were a fascist[0] long-con - a project of societal engineering to deliberately control Americans[1] by offering the illusion of freedom. I don't even think the panopticon of license plate readers was in the thoughts of the people who designed this nonsense, but all the major figures involved with the institutionalization of cars would have loved being able to bulldoze those pesky 4A/5A rights.
[0] Fords and Volkswagens are the original model swasticars.
[1] And, arguably, make segregation survive the Civil Rights Act - but that's a different topic for another day. Look up what Robert Moses did to highways on Long Island if you want to know more.
ALPRs are useful so that mustache twirling evil people can a) have law enforcement more easily unilaterally do enforcement work from their desks without actually having support on the ground from the public b) burn public support doing stuff the public doesn't support without affecting their ability to investigate serious stiff. Neither of those are good.
And when "encrypted radio beacons" are placed everywhere that Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR) exist, that changes things exactly how -- instead of identifying cars (and, by extension, their owners) by their license plates, you do so with these hypothetical "beacons."
How is that any different than what folks are doing today and why would that be less invasive for governments and corporations to collect en masse to track folks wherever they go?
Why not ?
why do you think bicyclists are exempt from this abusive behaviour ?
You already see "certain demographics" that suspiciously always seem to feature prominently in any given decade's policy failings screeching about how e-bikes need registration because they let people they don't like have easy geographic mobility.
Regulation of cars , like anything, is expensive. It’s worthwhile for cars for safety reasons, but bikes are cheaper, and also way less dangerous in general, so need a lighter hand.
The current cutoff in EU is probably right, above a certain power level, e bikes are l, broadly, treated an motorcycles (licensing, type approval, insurance etc) , below that and with non-e bikes, is really just about the basics, eg are the wheels firmly attached and do the brakes and lights work?
It's not licensed until it is. Cars and airplanes were once unlicensed.
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).
People have the right to take in what is in public, but maybe cameras should not?
This could apply to everyone in public spaces. No video, audio or surveillance without obtaining permission. Better blur anything you share, or you might get busted. The least we could do is restrict corporations from possessing such data.
Similar to what Germany does with doorbell cameras, making it illegal to film anything outside of your property, like a public sidewalk or the neighbors house. It is my understanding that people there will confront someone taking pictures of them without their consent.
> People have the right to take in what is in public
It's more common sense than any real sense of law. If something is a public space, how do you stop people from "taking it in"?
Recording is a different matter, but people existing is what comprises the "public".
Please take a moment to draw for us detailed faces of all the people you've "taken in" today while you were outside. Use a sketch artist if you need to. Now compare those results with what you'd have if you did the same with a photocamera. And for good measure, add in the amount of effort it took you to recall, and the effort it will take you to describe to every reader on HN who you saw today.
Do you really not see any difference between the human process and what a digital camera can do?
for more context, the chain started with this:
>People have the right to take in what is in public, but maybe cameras should not?
and then the direct reply disagreed with this notion. I just wanted to distinguish between "taking in" and cameras, because it appears that user made a similar mistake.
I remember when this first launched in the UK, automated face-scrubbing was in place. It was about 90% accurate on scrubbing faces from pictures. One of its best screwups was showing people's faces as they were standing outside a branch of KFC but blurring out the Colonel.
It's not hard to imagine a restriction on reporting one's observations failing any number of First Amendment challenges.
Don't allow the commoditization of public imagery, ie being a tourist is legal and being a business is not.
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.
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.
Change the scope of the data, and you change your approach to the problem. I see no reason why law should be any different.
In the US. GDPR forbids sharing or processing it without consent. Maybe the Californian privacy act does too?
Here is a premise: you can decompose any illegal action into legal actions, therefore according to your logic laws cannot not exist.
Is this a form of masochism?
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.
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.
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.
That really complicates things.
Very typical engineer thinking. The world doesn't work that way. Laws and social norms don't abide by formal logic.
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.
No it isn't. It's evidenced by the fact that you will need to decide some exact scale at which surveillance becomes illegal and under which it is legal
>When there's a dispute about what's illegal, you have it resolved by the courts like every other law.
Okay, but what ought they resolve to? That is what we are debating.
Surveillance of specified individuals should be allowed, but just random surveillance of the public should be declared illegal except for very particular events and purposes (e.g. searching people for entry to a music gig). If there is public surveillance in an area, it should be made clear with signs etc unless it's for the express purpose of locating specified individuals (e.g. tracking a criminal's movements on public transport).
I suspect in the future a word will evolve for the stupidity of believing if a person can walk 3 miles in an hour then that scales to walking 500 miles in a week.
I encounter this form of stupidity all the time.
Make an app where you can install a camera near your house and the users are legally contractors: they get paid ~0.1c for each car that drives by.
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.
They are there firstly so that when a driver damages something or hurts someone, they can be held responsible. What’s so bad about that?
Let's say I'm partnering with flock to track anyone who drives to say, a political convention I disagree with, and basically make your life hell.
Maybe you don't want your employer to know everywhere you go. What's so bad about that?
Or maybe you offended me in public, as long as I record your plate number I can find out your place of residence and employment through the FlockYou app for only $5. After all, people deserve to be held accountable for their actions.
Aggregation of data like Flock does is a different matter and can be handled separately. Like I mentioned in my other comment, other countries tend not to have things like Flock, since they understand unregulated data processing such as that is problematic for all sorts of reasons; the US is a big , big outlier in this area.
Regulating data processing like this is common and should not be controversial.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Worse than cell phone tracking? Cell phone tracking is higher fidelity, continuous, and works everywhere.
Multiple Supreme Courts have also made it clear several times that they believe you do not have a right to privacy in public spaces. So all the traffic camera databases do is automate and make easier something that is currently definitively legal.
The more pertinent issue in this case is that driving patterns should not be grounds for detainment without a warrant. Especially if you have no evidence to link the driver to the car. But unfortunately, the recent Supreme Court decision made suspicion of being an illegal immigrant grounds for detainment.
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.
I'm sure that's only the tip of the iceberg.
The problem isn't the license plate monitoring. The problem is the detention without cause.
It's the jackbooted thugs kicking in your door which are the issue, not that address books exist.
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.
"As long as its being used by police professionally..." is an insane stance to keep on this.
In the West we regularly point to China's surveillance state, as some horrific human rights abuse. Yet when it happens at home we don't use that same level of vitriol. Which is it? China uses authoritarian surveillance? Because then we have government-corporate cooperation here for the same authoritarian surveillance.
If it's okay for officer Opie to have access to enough data to stalk and harass any woman that refuses him, then we're no better. No amount of "right hands" can make this level of surveillance okay.
We should be clamping down on all surveillance, and this is not a problem that has a technological solution. Quite the reverse, actually.
The point of nationalism is to separate pride from accomplishments. Without something to back your pride, its hollow, violent, and hateful.
Even that aside, how does that give them the right to infringe on the rights and privacy of citizens?
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 now believe we need to not only abolish ICE, but puts the politicians and officers on trial. CBP needs to be purged and rebuilt from the ground up.
https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/braselton-police-chief-arre...
This war along with the War on Terror™ give pretense to all of these abuses of power and need to be undone. The problems they profess to address can be addressed in much simpler, cheaper, and humane ways.
Democracies with Liberal leaders can quite literally get away with murder.
I mean, so can Saudi Arabia and Israel. It's less about being a democratic liberal, and more about having the right connections.
If there's a reason for having them, why don't we require them for people? Let's make everyone walk with their id at the front and back. We're for public safety here, right?
Detaining those they _deem_, without oversight to have such.
Murder clearance rates in the 50s was in the high ninety percent.
So, standard driving while black (or brown, or Muslim, or whatever is demonized in $CURRENT_YEAR), but extended to new categories? I guess now that it's impinging on the comfortable it's news.
Well, that's what happens when you blur the line called the border.
Imagine a drone swarm that follows you wherever you go. Tracking and photographing every step you take in public. When you go into a building, a ground drone follows you in, notes where you've gone, and when you leave, hands you off to the flying swarm. Creating a trail of all your activities. Legally there may not be anything you can do to stop it.
The expectation that you have no privacy in public is what fuels this.
The same daughter and our son-in-law lived in Huntsville Alabama while he finished his post grad degree. I can't tell you how many trips we made then to visit, tour and eat at restaurants around town. Was that suspicious?
In 2023, we drove a round-about way to Phoenix to purchase a puppy. We visited Carlsbad New Mexico and several national parks after driving through the panhandle of Texas, in some of the remotest highways I've ever been on. (And beautiful too!) On the way home, we took a different route to see more of the states. Was that suspicious?
If I would have been pulled over and asked what I was doing, I would have said it was none of their damn business, I'd broken no laws. (Yes, I would have said we are on a trip to buy a dog and are heading home, but to be grilled, hell no!) How is this legal? I'm a white guy in his late sixties, is it fair they wouldn't suspect me because of that? Does the rule of law crumbling bother anyone anymore?
If you think 'this is just a normal citizen doing good work' at first and you are breaking privacy here, keep reading.
>They unearthed no contraband. But Beltran arrested Gutierrez Lugo on suspicion of money laundering and engaging in organized criminal activity because he was carrying thousands of dollars in cash — money his supervisor said came directly from customers in local Latino communities, who are accustomed to paying in cash.
carrying thousands of dollars in cash over the US Mexico border is so suspicious that there is likely a lot more happening. The trucking company spent 20,000$ to get him out of it.
The more I think of better call Saul and breaking bad, the more I wonder whether this is one of those situations where the reality is actually much worse than television fiction.
90% of the drugs that enter US come from the south border. At 120 tons of drugs being 'seized' not the ones being distributed, I am assuming the scale of this thing is massive. [1]
[1] https://forumtogether.org/article/illicit-fentanyl-and-drug-...
> No criminal charges were ultimately brought against Gutierrez Lugo
No but carrying over $10,000 into the US requires you to declare it and maybe pay taxes if you can't prove its source or risk being sized (which is fine if it's drug money).
> from immigrant communities in South Carolina
Not sure where you got that he crossed the border. If they had a case he'd have been arrested, you're making some pretty shady assumptions here.
It was about cost, not desire.
Originally it would cost too much to have someone follow you around and keep track of where you're going. This was a kind of check against that system. Now you're an SQL query away from being on some list you don't know exists.
themafia•2mo ago
They'll of course pretend that they just saw you commit a minor infraction and that's why you were pulled over.
mothballed•2mo ago
The fact i was never stopped makes me even more terrified of a panopticon. Is their surveillance that bad -- or that good?
ahmeneeroe-v2•2mo ago
"I'm terrified that this panopticon so bad that it doesn't see anything"
cestith•2mo ago
ahmeneeroe-v2•2mo ago
stevenjgarner•2mo ago
Retired age men driving dealer plate cars eastbound onto I-80 in Nebraska out of Colorado from I-76 get stopped ALL THE TIME as potential drug mules.
dylan604•2mo ago
stevenjgarner•2mo ago
Using their multi tool, they removed the fender liners (wheel well liners) from all 4 wheels, the trunk side trim (luggage compartment side trim) from both sides - all of which just has plastic push-pin scrivets (retainer clips). They broke 5 of them.
They folded down my back seats (after removing all my personal items out to the shoulder in the rain), then unbolted and removed the back seat.
I do a LOT of interstate driving, and it is not at all uncommon to see this happen.
This is not the only time I have been in situations where authority has been exceeded. My attitude is to generally be cooperative (without giving consent) as my experience has taught me that is the most painless way to go.
dylan604•2mo ago
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MisterTea•2mo ago
FuriouslyAdrift•2mo ago
ssl-3•2mo ago
A good many cops (maybe not >50%, but a very significant percentage) carry a pretty decent ad-hoc toolkit in their vehicles. There's often a toolbox with screwdrivers, socketry, pliers, some wrenches, maybe a hammer and/or other basic handtools.
It's pretty common for folks who know how to use tools to keep some on-hand, and cops are not an exception.
[1]: Yeah, so... I should probably explain that part. Some of my work involves 2-way radios, and some of that 2-way radio business has lead to me putting radios and stuff into things like cop cars. I've emptied out hundreds of cop cars to get access to what I need, and have certainly climbed into the trunk of dozens of them to be where I need to be. (Someone has to do it, and sometimes that person is me.)
dylan604•2mo ago
this gave me a bit of a laugh as my initial read had me imagining you being shoved into the trunk vs having dug around to see the contents.
0_____0•2mo ago
I rear ended someone with a tow hitch, busted the rad an AC condenser and the shop wanted $300 to fix it (tells you how old I am).
I replaced them myself and I still remember the list of tools I needed - slot screwdriver, cross screwdriver, pliers, 10mm socket on an extension on a ratchet.That's it.
philipbjorge•2mo ago
Sorry about all the broken plastic on the trim -- That's also very familiar...
cestith•2mo ago
Diederich•2mo ago
In my 40+ years of driving, I've seen such disassembled cars along the road a hand full of times.
LocalH•2mo ago
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mothballed•2mo ago
https://youtu.be/rH6bsr61vrw
devilbunny•2mo ago
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