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ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US

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Re: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US

#151

Post by leereeves »

pg314 wrote: post #135
leereeves wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those guys were not handed down the word of god from heaven. No, they wrote down rules to prevent the forms of oppression and protect the means of opposition that they knew from experience. Has society changed so much in 200 years that armed opposition to the government has become impossible? The US govs failure to control Afghanistan would argue: no.

> Has society changed so much in 200 years that armed opposition to the government has become impossible? The US govs failure to control Afghanistan would argue: no. As your Afghanistan example illustrates, you don't need a right to bear arms enshrined in the constitution, nor 101 guns per 100 inhabitants as in the US. Afghanistan has an estimated 4.6 guns per 100 inhabitants. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Es…

> you don't need a right to bear arms enshrined in the constitution, nor 101 guns per 100 inhabitants as in the US

You need armed people, however you get them.

Re: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US

#152

Post by Broken_Hippo »

mratzloff wrote: post #142
nol13 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which would result in getting instantly pulled over then?

On what grounds?

Concealing your license plate or it not being easily visible. The same reason the darkened plate covers are often illegal and why putting it on the inside of your window is generally frowned upon.

It doesn't really matter if it is legal or not for them to do, I'm pretty sure they'll do it nevertheless. I had a cop pull me over for the light over my plate being out. The cop said he couldn't see my plates when he was right behind me... at night with his headlights turned off (He turned them off while driving behind me, turning them back on right before the lights started).

Re: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US

#153

Post by Clubber »

leereeves wrote: post #127
Clubber wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plate scanning is against the spirit of the law; it's a workaround for not being able to place a tracking device on your car. Unfortunately, since your car is in a public place, and your plates are in the open, I don't think place scanning will be ruled unconstitutional. Of course congress could always pass a law making it illegal, but both our major parties have authoritarian with regards to privacy.

> Unfortunately, since your car is in a public place, and your plates are in the open, I don't think place scanning will be ruled unconstitutional. The question GP asked was a bit different: > could someone challenge the visible license plate requirement as an illegal tracking device? In other words, in a world where plate scanning is ubiqitous, have license plates become a tracking device? And if they are a tracking…

Oh, that makes it more interesting. A workaround to that (thought not as effective) would be face scanning. It wouldn't be as effective because I would imagine it would be more difficult to get a consistent scan of an object inside a car.

Re: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US

#154

Post by mschuster91 »

lend000 wrote: post #118
mschuster91 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The correct solution would be in trying to vote in less authoritarian politicians. That requires a system where people actually have a meaningful vote... e.g. it's impossible in China, and for what its worth Chinese ethics are way, way different than typical Western-sourced ethics. In the US, the ability of people to have a meaningful vote has been largely dismantled by a number of bad factors: 1) gerrymandering le…

Numbers 1, 2, and 3 can all be fixed, and fixing those fix number 4. For gerrymandering, there are plenty of proposals around requiring districts conform to some set of geometric rules. The electoral college issue gets a lot of attention, but the more fundamental problem is first-past-the-post voting. What we really need is approval-based voting (i.e. I approve of candidates A and B; whoever has the most approvals wi…

> Numbers 1, 2, and 3 can all be fixed, and fixing those fix number 4.

How? There is no incentive for the entrenched party to change the rules.

Re: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US

#155

Post by jermaustin1 »

mehrdadn wrote: post #80
ams6110 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC there's an episode of Jay Leno's Garage that features a cop with a license plate reader. He can sit on the side of the road and every car that passes is scanned and checked for warrants. The answer comes back about as quickly as the speed reading on a radar gun. What they don't tell you is that all those plate numbers are going into a database, time- and location-stamped.

> The answer comes back about as quickly as the speed reading on a radar gun. This isn't surprising. Why wouldn't it? They just need to cache that day's data, right?

Depends on the vendor and the product, but that is pretty accurate.

Some vendors send the plate over the network to check, some download the latest data to the cop-puter daily. Some hourly, and some get pushed updates as they happen.

Re: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US

#156

Post by jermaustin1 »

Andrenid wrote: post #132
jermaustin1 wrote: post #37

One of my clients does license plate reading and tracking. They have hundreds of tiny customers, and a handful of VERY LARGER customers, so I can say with 100% certainty, there are hundreds of agencies across the USA already doing this. For fun, I tracked my rental car from Georgia to Texas after a vacation a few months back to see how often I hit one of my client's customer's cameras. It was a lot. I saw myself hit…

What do they do with the data? Is it just for law enforcement to find people, or is there value in the data?

There are a few vendors out there who sell the data they collect, and then sell search capabilities to law enforcement agencies, repo firms, bounty hunters, etc.

These camera systems are usually installed on civilian cars and those people just drive around all day on 10 hours shifts around their territory. They aren't looking for people, only collecting the data. Some of them get rights to add cameras to signs in front of shopping centers on busy streets. Some have even illegally placed them next to red light cameras that use an open wi-fi to upload the data back to their database. Its the wild west for some of these guys, but they make almost no money once you account for the cost of the cameras, cost of staff to drive around, etc.

Re: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US

#157

Post by jermaustin1 »

code_duck wrote: post #131
oculusthrift wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

then why does it take so long to find kidnapped kids when we know the car the perp is in?

They’re probably busy using the data to find drug money or something else that they’re actually interested in.

You are getting down voted, but you are accurate. The agencies have to pay for them some how, and money busts (not drugs, though related to drugs) are the best way.

It doesn't mean they prioritize those crimes over kidnappings, but it means the department that gets access to the system first until it's are paid off is the narcotics division.

Re: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US

#158

Post by rayiner »

syrrim wrote: post #133
doikor wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've had this since 1997 for car tax stickers in Finland when they decided it was easier to just install a computer in every cop car that has the db. Same db also has info on insurance and inspections and also the check has been recently made automatic on the camera when previously the officer had to manually enter the plate. I wouldn't be surprised if the data about the scans goes the other way too. Proof of regist…

>Driving a car isn't a right but a privilege so I'm ok with this That's an interesting perspective. I get it in the sense of safe driving - if you are swerving all about the road, you shouldn't be on the road - but it doesn't work so well for registration and tracking. Bare minimum, people should have a right to get around. So much of what people want to do in their life is beyond walking distance, that some method o…

The difference is that the roads are built by the government and are government property. The government can quite reasonably control what happens in its property without implicating peoples’ rights in the same way as when its regulating what happens on private property.

As to rural areas—people who live there make a choice to live somewhere that requires them to travel on government property to get anywhere.

Re: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US

#159

Post by chickenfries »

arca_vorago wrote: post #141
dragonwriter wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, the guys who wrote the original rules for the country considered gun ownership so essential that they placed it second only to the freedom of expression. The Articles of Confederation were the original rules of the country. The base Constitution which replaced them as the rules for the country also didn't include anything about that. The package of 12 amendments to the Constitution formally proposed after the…

And what you are entirely missing in the philosphical basis for the constitution is the principle that we have natural rights that are independent of any government and that government is established in order to protect those rights, and that government cannot and does not grant those rights, which was the original argument about what we call the bill of rights. That by listing what rights the government was specific…

Where were they “shitting” on the constitution? The original post was trying to make the point that the right to bear arms was important to many of the founders because it was the second ammendment to the constitution. They are the ones that made the case that the ordinal number of the ammendment was important. The commenters responding are just taking issue with their reasoning. Really, your issue should be with the person that agrees with you but uses the fact that it’s the second ammendment (as opposed to the third or the forth) as evidence for the point you agree with.

Re: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US

#160

Post by btown »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #140
threatofrain wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel very skeptical of calling your representatives. Firstly, it matters if they are in a contentious district. Secondly, even if they do see you as a potentially credible concern, they will still corroborate that concern with a political consultancy when election time comes.

> I feel very skeptical of calling your representatives Based on what? For contentious issues on which most voters are decided, e.g. guns or abortion, you are correct--calling in is unlikely to do anything. If you care about a big-ticket issue, join an organization and do the whole camping out at town houses and protesting local and D.C. offices and filing lawsuits schtick. It's hard, but it works. For niche issues,…

SLA?
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