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.
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.
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.
"Tend to"
Do you have any citeable evidence of this being an actual thing, or is it just vibes?
(/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.
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.
One data point, and a highly regional one at that, I know.
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.
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.
/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.
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.
[1] https://blog.careem.com/posts/local-regulatory-data-sharing-...
Where the instance upthread and your instance both occurred under the same president? lol
who was president in 2017?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hell, Farage's far-right Reform party ran on giving more money to the National Health Service as one of their Brexit arguments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_Leave_bus
The US has very little actual big-L Left (ahem) left in it.
(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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
They'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.
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...
Look at the recent actions in Charlotte: ICE raids started and 25% of the school kids didn't show up to school. Which indicates that likely 25% of the population is illegal. It is a massive problem.
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.
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.
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.
The tools of oppression that all of you AI sycophants have been helping to perfect!
Sorry.
I should have said, "AI cucks".
It is much more applicable, since you all are empowering these AI megacorps to fuck everyone else while idling sitting there watching it happen.
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.
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."
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 days can be abused. I just didn'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?
Even that aside, how does that give them the right to infringe on the rights and privacy of citizens?
Has their life improved because of ICE and CBP crackdowns? Are they happier now that all those undocumented immigrants have had their lives ruined? Are they proud of the destruction of our democratic norms and the attack on our civil liberties? Do they enjoy watching the rights of American citizens being trampled on a daily basis by a wannabe dictator?
They've been very vocal and aggressive here in the past, where are they now? Will they continue to spout misinformation, disinformation and whataboutism with unprecedented presidential power grabs, the economy faltering and the Constitution being ignored?
I wonder how they feel now that literally every fear that progressives warned about are coming true? Are they willing to accept that they are and always have been completely wrong?
Please feel free to reply and show your full throated support for this administration. I'd like to see how many HNers are so stubborn as to ignore reality.
The angle should be that CBP is causing a lot of unjustified problems for legal residents and citizens. People having to spend 20k to get back property that the government never should've taken is not good for deterring undocumented immigrants. When CBP agents need to spend 20 days of the month rounding up people on farms and home depot to meet quota those are 20 days _not_ spent searching for drug dealers.
It's not as pleasant or vindictive as saying "the nonwhites did it" but it certainly seems to hold true when the political pot boils over. It's rarely the immigrants taking potshots at the president or storming the capitol, but instead deluded ideologues who are naturalized Americans.
A person in the USA has approximately zero of the rights guaranteed in the Bill of the Rights. The average person is relatively free, but the government can change that at will and the target of government power has little recourse.
The interests of foreigners mean nothing in comparison with the interests of the nation and it's own citizens. You live in an ahistorical fantasy world where the entire globe can just coexist in one place without conflict and consequence and citizens and their political leaders should serve these people at the expense of their own. It's insane, and it's not good for the country or Americans.
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.
themafia•1h ago
They'll of course pretend that they just saw you commit a minor infraction and that's why you were pulled over.
mothballed•1h 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•1h ago
"I'm terrified that this panopticon so bad that it doesn't see anything"
cestith•39m ago
ahmeneeroe-v2•20m ago
stevenjgarner•1h 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•1h ago
stevenjgarner•43m 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•38m ago
stevenjgarner•33m ago
FuriouslyAdrift•28m ago
ssl-3•17m 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.)
cestith•42m ago
LocalH•1h ago
mzs•26m ago
kylehotchkiss•17m ago
stevenjgarner•3m ago
pureagave•1h ago
MisterTea•3m ago
hypeatei•1h ago
themafia•1h ago
mothballed•58m ago
https://youtu.be/rH6bsr61vrw
outside1234•25m ago