CBP is monitoring US drivers and detaining those with suspicious travel patterns
apnews.com537 points by jjwiseman 4 hours ago
537 points by jjwiseman 4 hours ago
License plate scanners are one of the most under-appreciated violations of personal privacy that exist today.
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...
I'm curious what you think the solution is?
Taking a photograph of a car with its license plate is legal. As is selling a photo you've taken, whether it has a license plate or not.
Therefore taking millions of photos in public of cars, and turning their license plate numbers into a database is legal, as is selling that information. It's all data gained in public.
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?
> Taking a photograph of a car with its license plate is legal. As is selling a photo you've taken, whether it has a license plate or not.
> Therefore taking millions of photos in public of cars, and turning their license plate numbers into a database is legal, as is selling that information. It's all data gained in public.
One absolutely does not follow the other; there are all sorts of things that are legal only if done for certain purposes, only below a certain scale, etc. The idea that we must permit both or neither is a false dichotomy.
E.g. I have the personal liberty to host card game for money at my house. But if I require a house take, now I'm running a gambling business.
That's not a difference in scope; it's a difference in kind.
And even the latter is fraught with hazards to liberty.
Observing and recording is a difference in kind. Recording and processing is a difference in kind. Processing and selling is a difference in kind. And quantity has a quality all its own.
> Observing and recording is a difference in kind.
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.
I see so I can follow you around and continuously 24x7 video tape and document your actions as long as it’s in public this should be fine.
But that's literally the question I'm asking. Where do you draw the line in a way that stops what we consider to be abuses, but doesn't stop what we think of as legitimate uses by journalists, academics, etc.?
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.
> But that's literally the question I'm asking. Where do you draw the line in a way that stops what we consider to be abuses, but doesn't stop what we think of as legitimate uses by journalists, academics, 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.
> curious what you think the solution is?
Require a warrant for law enforcement to poll these databases. And make the database operators strictly liable for breaches and mis-use.
For all we know, "suspicious" travel patterns may include visiting a place of religious worship or an abortion clinic. For a future President, it may be parking near the home of someone who tweeted support for a J6'er.
(And we haven't even touched the national security risk Flock poses [1].)
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/03/lawmakers-say-stolen-polic...
Are you also going to require a warrant for paramilitary insurgent groups to poll these databases? Maybe you intended to propose for them to be abolished entirely.
> Are you also going to require a warrant for paramilitary insurgent groups to poll these databases?
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.
It isn't a straw man; paramilitary insurgent groups will just look like normal customers to Flock et al., except when they're stealing their entire database, which will indeed happen routinely.
> paramilitary insurgent groups will just look like normal customers to Flock et al.
Existing liability law works just fine for terrorism. (Guns notwithstanding.)
Owning a baseball bat is completely legal. Swinging it in your immediate vicinity is completely legal. Standing within baseball bat range of other people is completely legal.
But you'll quickly find yourself detained if you try to practice this innocent collection of legal activities together. The whole is different from the sum of its parts. It's a very common occurrence.
Require commercially used photos to not contain identifying information (face license plate) without consent of the owner (of the license plate/face).
This already happens a lot on Google street view.
License plates are owned by the government.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.[1]
> Require commercially used photos to not contain identifying information…
So CNN can't put Trump's photo up unless he consents?
Specific to US copyright law, there are exceptions for "public persons". Without these exceptions, it would severely restrict reporting on said persons. The most important part of that last sentence is elected officials. In any highly advanced democracy, you want to grant your media wide access to elected officials for reporting purposes.
Just like copyright you'd have an exclusion for news reporting. A lot of these apparent 'gotchas' will be well known to lawyers and law drafters.
Lots of countries already have nuanced laws around public figures vs private citizens.
There have always been different standards for a person of public interest compared to the general public. So what is your point?
The point is the simple sounding proposal has a lot of complexity hiding behind it.
If I’m a photographer, do I have to get consent from both the divorced parents to photograph the kids? The kids themselves?
>the simple sounding proposal has a lot of complexity hiding behind it.
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.
> If I’m a photographer, do I have to get consent from both the divorced parents to photograph the kids?
Does a doctor have to get consent from both divorced parents to give a child routine care?
Ride a bike! I half-kid, but it's interesting to consider that cycling is a right which can't be taken away in the US, while driving is a privilege that can be revoked.
If riding a bike was as common as a car it'd be regulated all the same.
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.
> cycling is a right which can't be taken away in the US
Why not ?
Practically, because bicyclists aren't licensed. It is true that in some jurisdictions cyclists have to register or license their bicycles, so potentially failure to do so could get you fined or even have your bike impounded.
I think we have a mass re-assessment coming for how we think about data collected in public spaces. The realities of mass surveillance and mass data correlation come to very different outcomes than they did when we established our current rules about what is allowed in public spaces.
I don't really know what a better system looks like - but I suspect it has to do with the step where the info is provided to a third party. We can all exist in public and we can all take in whatever is happening in public - but it's not clear that passing that observation on to a third party who wasn't in public is an important freedom. Obviously this cuts both ways and we need to think carefully about preserving citizens rights to observe and report on the behavior of authorities (though also you could argue that reporting on people doing their jobs in the public space is different than reporting on private citizens).
> we can all take in whatever is happening in public
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.
I dunno - I think there are uses of surveillance in pursuit of enforcing laws that I don't think are harmful. Like...maybe you can record the public and pass it on to the police when there's a specific request for a time and place that a crime was allegedly committed? Like - if an organization has a legitimate interest in what happened there you can pass on your recording. But you can't just sell it to some random data broker, because they don't have a specific reason to want a recording of that place at that time.
> People have the right to take in what is in public
>You write this as if it is a fundamental human right. I disagree.
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".
> [I]t's not clear that passing that observation on to a third party who wasn't in public is an important freedom.
It's not hard to imagine a restriction on reporting one's observations failing any number of First Amendment challenges.
My jaded AF crystal ball called history says that these things never change until the petite-bourgeoise (I'm no Marx fan, but I think he did a good job with that part of his social class classification system) are seriously harmed by it. The rulers don't care. The poor have real problems. This sorts of crap happens or doesn't happen at the behest of the materially comfortable people in the middle. And it seems like they never learn except the hard way.
I think the solution is simple - make it legal to hide your license plate, but make the hiders required to be remotely openable by an authorized law enforcement user. The plate hider should keep an audit log of the time, name, and badge number of the cop that required it to be opened. Anyone who wants to read license plates for a private purpose (not law enforcement) can either ask you nicely to open the hider, or screw off.
Then we just get rid of license plates and have them implemented with digital telemetry. Which is probably gonna happen regardless.
More likely we get RFID tags in them or something and then the cops stop caring about the letters being defaced (except as a pretest for fishing, same story as tail light out or whatever) because they just use the tag reader 99.999% of the time.
It's the same question we're asking with scraping. It's legal to read the data off one website. What's in question is mass scraping the entire Internet and bringing hundreds of sites to a halt.
Change the scope of the data, and you change your approach to the problem. I see no reason why law should be any different.
> I'm curious what you think the solution is? > > Taking a photograph of a car with its license plate is legal. As is selling a photo you've taken, whether it has a license plate or not. > > Therefore taking millions of photos in public of cars, and turning their license plate numbers into a database is legal, as is selling that information. It's all data gained in public. > Collecting and selling PII without a person's consent is certainly not legal in many places.
> Taking a photograph of a car with its license plate is legal.
And perhaps it was legal because before mass surveillance and automatic license plate readers it was difficult to impossible to abuse that.
Perhaps it shouldn’t be legal in the same way anymore.
These days they can just photograph everyone and then go back later and figure out where they were when that person is of interest. It’s pre-emptive investigation of innocent people for future use.
Eliminating license plates would be a good step. As I understand it, license plates were established as a compromise between privacy and accountability: they made it possible to track down evildoers without entirely eliminating anonymity in public. Now, due to advances in computer technology, they entirely eliminate anonymity in public. Therefore we should abolish them and invent an alternative that strikes a better balance between these concerns. Encrypted radio beacons, for example, which beep to alert the driver when they are being probed.
License plates were always about taxation/revenue first. Creating some level of identifiability without putting people's names on their cars was how it was sold to the general public.
> Encrypted radio beacons, for example, which beep to alert the driver when they are being probed.
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.
You'd need to have some causal pathway from it pinging too often through people getting irritated to removing the scanners that were doing the excessive tracking.
Police forces are not the only ones who can use this information. Foreign intelligence agencies, violent insurgencies, and drug cartels can also use it.
The rub is that the information is something that regular drivers need access to.
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.
As I said in another subthread, it would be surprising if the solution were not worse in some way than the status quo ante; after all, we're looking for a solution to the new problem of mass surveillance, not taking advantage of a new opportunity.
Instead of pieces of metal physically on the car, you want all cars to have a radio transceiver attached to a computer with crypto?
That doesn't seem like a privacy win.
Yes. It's potentially a privacy win because (1) it can't be read by random people, only law enforcement, and (2) it can't be read without notifying you.
You may want to read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
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.
Oh, I was on cypherpunks in 01992, so I know about the Clipper Chip. But in this case you don't need to keep any secrets from the owner of the vehicle; they're free to attach a debugging connector to their own transceiver and read it at any time. The idea is to make their car anonymous to other people, except for law enforcement, not to themselves.
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.
> Either the secrets will leak or the implementation will have vulns or both.
With network of cameras large enough you can trivially profile and identify all cars without license plates.
It's possible that you could learn to recognize every individual car from things like the pattern of scratches on their hoods, yes, but this ability has not been demonstrated and may prove more difficult than you think.
What you're talking about was being done a decade ago in the skies over Iraq.
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).
Interesting, thanks! That page doesn't say anything that even suggests that.
License plates are there not to "catch evildoers". They're there because cars are heavy and kill people even when non-evildoers are operating them. The problem is not that cars can be tracked, it's that we design cities to mandate people travel in heavy metal boxes that kill people. When we made walking inconvenient, we also surrendered our rights.
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.
If non-evildoers kill people with their cars, they will make extreme efforts to make amends, not flee the scene.
Bullshit. You don't need to track everyone to figure out who done it when something serious happens. You can do "good old fashioned police work" and go look at CCTV footage, ask witnesses, etc. People are happy to help when it's something serious.
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.
I think the data itself has to come under attack in a variety of ways. Thinking off the top of my head: Possession of the data could be made illegal. The data could be treated as a public record. Defendants could be guaranteed access to all data about them in the government's possession.
Doing this as a private citizen is one thing. When the government does it the implications are vastly different. That is kind of the whole point of the constitution.
> But what is the solution?
Don't allow the commoditization of public imagery, ie being a tourist is legal and being a business is not.
> Therefore taking millions of photos in public of cars, and turning their license plate numbers into a database is legal, as is selling that information. It's all data gained in public.
In the US. GDPR forbids sharing or processing it without consent. Maybe the Californian privacy act does too?
Come on, it's not that hard to think of a solution.
Pass a law making it illegal to do a combination of collecting and storing personally identifying information, such as a license plate number, in a timestamped database with location data. Extra penalty if it's done for the purpose of selling the data.
Then OCR'ing the camera roll on your phone would be illegal. Every photo is stamped with time and location, and your camera roll is a database.
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.
Thing is, I am not /really/ worried about private citizens with access to this. There are just limits to what a private citizen or even massive corporation can do. What concerns me is when governments get involved and aggregate these private databases. The government is the one that can violate your 4A rights. It exists to protect us FROM the government. Not from private citizens and that exposure is very different. A private citizen can't for example, prosecute me, etc.
> There are just limits to what a private citizen or even massive corporation can do.
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.
Car insurance can't wait to know everything about you. They will be crafting insurance policies that are specific for you and that will make unregulated insurance a very lucrative business proposition. Not sure if you can even call it insurance at that point.
If not for the government forcing us to buy their product they can't play games with premiums. It all comes back to government force at the end of the day.
But yeah, that's a pretty obvious one.
Not saying I agree with OP, but for the law you described: any photo you take of a license plate on your smartphone would fit that description (unless you’ve explicitly disabled the automatic location and time stamping default).
So you’d need to further distinguish to preserve that freedom.
There’s a difference in intent, and you’re aware of that. Aggregating photos of license plates for the express purpose of building a database of license plates with location and other metadata to make profit from granting access to that database is clearly different to most other cases of taking, storing, and even selling photographs. There is no overlap here at all.
Its not hard to distugush individual pictures that contain trackable attributes like a license plate number from building a large scale database of them for sale. Or making such a database not legal to sell access to without removing that information, etc. It doesn't need to center on the contents of a single photo.
> any photo you take of a license plate on your smartphone would fit that description
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?
Then make the act of selling it or storing it in a database with the intent to track people illegal?
In your universe, how do I make a hotel reservation?
That requires at least my name, a date, and a location.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.[1]
It is a matter of law that no digital database of firearms data can be made. The friction is a feature. I'd propose something surrounding license plates, phone info, SIM's and VIN's may be needed. Of course, LE and tax authorities would scream bloody murder, but if we didn't see such flagrant abuse of sensitive identifiers, then maybe they could be trusted with nice things.
IDK that I even have a problem with such a database existing (just like I don't really care about a firearms db existing). What I care about is access to the data. It should absolutely require a warrant before it can be accessed. That means the agency that wants to access it needs to prove to a judge that the person they are trying to track has done something wrong or worth invading their privacy over.
As it stands, we allow joe bob to access that database so he can harass brown people working on my roof.
If it exists then people will use it legally and illegally. Sometimes you find out about the illegal activities years later, sometimes you don't.
No, no, no.
>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.
Any notion of an armed populace doing anything useful to protect freedom has been thoroughly debunked with the current administration.
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 not about the "populace" doing anything at scale.
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.
> Despite being 13% of the population black men have been rounded up 0% of the time.
I'm not familiar with any definition of "rounded up" for which this even remotely approximates reality.
The law didn't stop them. The feds made one anyway and used tortured logic to pretend like they didn't. Many states have their own little ones because "hurr durr it's a tax not a registration"
Isn't the law that the federal government can't create a digital database of firearm ownership?
Presumably many FFLs hold records digitally tracking their sales/transfers, as do manufacturers. And several states require firearm registration.
Correct, but FOPA prohibits those records from entering the custody of BATFE/DoJ, and even if handed off, no funding can be provided to digitize them.
Hacker solution: open/crowd source a pirate camera network. People submit feeds of traffic from whatever camera they have. We build tiny/concealable cameras to plant all over state capitals. Client-side software detects plates and reports only those on the target list. That list: every elected leader. The next time they hold a privacy-related hearing, we read out the committee chairperson's daily movements for the last month.
Other idea: AI-enabled dashcam detects and automatically reports "emergency vehicles" to google maps hands free. Goodbye speed traps.
They just might write a law that makes the act of publicly disseminating travel data for future and past official's illegal.
You don't even need something so complicated. Those Flock cameras are so vulnerable you can easily make a botnet from them and make them serve your own malicious purpose.
The solution is to make it illegal to record individuals in public for the purpose of tracking.
It should be illegal for the government to do so, further make it illegal for businesses to do so AND for city, county, state, federal governments to utilize third party databases.
> make it illegal for businesses to do so AND for city, county, state, federal governments to utilize third party databases
Local control and storage should be a requirement.
You do not want local govt each building their own “secure” system.
> You do not want local govt each building their own “secure” system
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...
Restrictions and oversight should increase proportionally to the power an entity has.
This is a very under-appreciated concept.
> I'm curious what you think the solution is?
The solution is simple. If there's a judge that signed off on a warrant to track a particular vehicle or person, cameras should be permitted to track its movements.
Otherwise, cameras should only be allowed to track people actively breaking the law - such as sending tickets to people running red lights. They should not record or retain any information about drivers that are following the rules.
Fishing expeditions are illegal and immoral. Mass tracking of innocent people is immoral.
---
Judicial warrants exist as a counterbalance between two public needs (The need to not be harassed by the police for no good reason, and the need for the police to be able to conduct active, targeted investigations of a particular crime.)
Make everybody secure, happy and sane enough that using such powers for ill becomes uninteresting.
Not great news for people who want to have affairs. Or (a better example) escape from an abusive relationship.
Maybe it's time to do away with license plates.
Police could switch to using VIN for tracking of warrants and such, which can be obtained after a car is pulled over.
Modern technology allows for every citizen to be tracked more comprehensively than the most wanted mob bosses or suspected soviet spies just a few decades ago.
Or simply outlaw the mass collection and sale or sharing of the data. We already outlaw sharing copies of music or movies, so I don't want to hear any complaints about enforcement- sure there'd still be some data floating around from random photos with a car in the background, but you wouldn't have repo tow truck drivers scanning 20,000 license plates a night or cameras in parking lots and such.
The solution is to wake up and start treating this like it is which is mass stalking. Sousveillance against the people who profit from these disgusting antisocial behaviours should be common place.
If an individual was to do this to a single person they'd considered a creep and the cops would rustle them out of a the bushes and seize all their cameras as evidence of their stalking behaviour.
The act of incorporating and doing the same thing en masse doesn't make it legal.
Get rid of license plates.
How to easily identify a car in a myriad of scenarios then that may or may absolutely not involve digital devices, like quickly remembering someone fleeing from an accident?
It would be surprising if the solution were not worse in some way than the status quo ante; after all, we're looking for a solution to the new problem of mass surveillance, not taking advantage of a new opportunity.
How to easily identify a person in even more myriad of scenarios? If we have license plates for cars, we need to have them for people.
Ironically, you'll have more privacy in a Waymo than your own car.
No, you have to have a Google or Apple account tracking you under their terms.
But that data is not shared anywhere, where companies like Flock sell it to a number of third parties.
Flock is extremely egregious.
Flock has a series of bizarre, obviously LLM-generated blog posts trying to convince the public that they are working "toward a future where compliance and community trust walk hand in hand"....
[1] https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/policy-pulse-compliance-doe...
[2] https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/policy-pulse-the-work-alrea...
[3] https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/policy-pulse-transparency-c...
WA state has figured out a solution to the Flock problem.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/washington-court-rules...
If they are going to be used by the government and law enforcement, they are clearly government-collected data about you - and thus, are subject to (the state equivalent of) a FOIA request.
This puts an onerous compliance requirement on Flock and the ciites that allow it to operate.
Hopefully, WA's state legislature will decline to give them any exemptions, which will kill that company's operations in the state.
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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.
Toyota was working on a feature for its cars that would report license plates from amber alerts to authorities. https://x.com/SteveMoser/status/1493990907661766664?s=20
That would frankly be a narrow, reasonable application.
The problem is the database building. Law enforcement queries should all be forced to be 1. Require a warrant or an active emergency and 2. Be strictly real-time, for a set duration, and store no information about cars that are not subject to the warrant.
If either of those is not hardcoses into the technology, I don't want my local police department to be allowed to use license plate scanners whatsoever.
Okay now, how do you show that it's not being abused? FOIA? Good luck.
Exactly. Witness how Texas has failed to provide emails between Musk and the governor... Well, they released them, but they were redacted 99.99%.
Yeah, I was just watching a How Money Works video and how these same services are used for car repos. Worse yet, there is a gig economy around paying people to collect photos taken from private cars and giving them a kickback for any that lead to repos.
I'm sure that's only the tip of the iceberg.
Don't new cars just directly record your location as you drive them?
Do you think that corporate erosion of (or outright hostility to) privacy is somehow a compelling reason to deny rights to those of us who make different choices in an attempt to protect them? Just because some people decided to buy a smartphone on wheels, do I have to suffer and have my freedom of movement narrowed and protection from arbitrary inspection by government agents denied?
They do, but it is relatively easy to nuke the onboard modem to permanently disconnect your car. Unfortunately, most people don't know or don't care that their cars are actively spying on them.
My guess would be that your car would develop some covert or overt fault if you did that. You might even lose warranty as the manufacturer could claim that the issue they fixed via a software update couldn't be installed on your car - or couldn't monitor some diagnostics which are a prerequisite for in-warranty repair.
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
One wonders if any given tesla is harvesting the plates the other cars it see in traffic as well.
Here's a vid describing DRN & Resolvion supplying car location data to repo companies. I didn't realize they'll strap a camera pack on your car and pay you a commission on the license plate data you collect. https://youtu.be/xE5NnZm9OpU?si=oEkSvUjNmBhQD-xI&t=138
Don't use Google Location Service (GLS) on your phone. It's built into Google Play Services, aka the enormous rootkit from Google and does...stuff...with high accuracy location data because lawyers think they can argue in court that that data is "anonymized".
- yeah it also has solved 3 murders near house so is it really a net negative?
> License plate scanners are one of the most under-appreciated violations of personal privacy that exist today.
Worse than cell phone tracking? Cell phone tracking is higher fidelity, continuous, and works everywhere.
I mean... the whole point of a license plate is that it's a public identifier. It should not be that controversial that's publicly registered information. In the same way that flights are tracked.
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.
> Multiple Supreme Courts have also made it clear several times that they believe you do not have a right to privacy in public spaces. So all the traffic camera databases do is automate and make easier something that is currently definitively legal.
I propose we streamline things and augment your cars license plate with a placard stating:
First and Last Name
Address and Phone Number
Drivers license number
Age and net worth
Prior convictions
Maybe there's a few more factoids we could add on there? I'd really like to know who is parked next to me. I mean, you're in public and have no expectation of privacy afterall.
This line of argument enables all kinds of criminals to do stuff you absolutely do not want them to. From stalkers figuring out the best time to rape their victim to organised crime planning cash truck robbery routes.
I mean, its possible to subpoena cellphone records and geographically track your movement based on which cell towers you connect to.
But regardless, I always find it funny that most of the rhetoric for personal liberties revolves around being able to do illegal things.
> revolves around being able to do illegal things.
The problem is, what is legal today might not be tomorrow. Especially depending on the regime in power at the time.
Mass surveillance can implicate someone in a crime if later on some regime decides that what they did or where they went is now a crime when it wasn't before.
Remember the push back against Apple's proposed client side scanning of photos to look for CSAM? What happens when the hash database starts including things like political memes, or other types of photos. What used to be legal is now not, and you get screwed because of the surveillance state.
Absolutely no data should be available without a warrant and subpoena, full stop. Warrants issued by a court, not a secret national security letter with a gag order either. Warrants only issued with true probable cause, not "acting suspicious."
Generally, laws can't be applied retroactively. If you're in a regime that ignores that, then there really isn't a sense of law anymore to worry about.
Absolutely all your data is available for sale by data brokers. Need to get rid of those first. Then the government would need warrants where they don’t need warrants to just buy your data.
If you've worked in government, you'd know that that bar for getting a subpoena or warrant is far lower and less strenuous than getting a purchase order.
Which is also a problem that needs fixed. A search warrant should be extremely difficult to get. "The person is suspicious and we think we will find xyz illegal item" is not enough. An arrest alone shouldn't be enough either. Police/detectives should have to prove, beyond all reasonable doubt, that what they are looking for is actually there to get the warrant.
You think the standard for a warrant and conviction should be the same?
That’s not the standard for a warrant. That standard is “reasonable belief”.
The standard for a warrant is probable cause, which is more stringent than reasonable belief.
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.
Police are not filling out purchase orders to query an API they already have a contract with.
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.
The idea that US citizens actually give a fuck about defending anything is laughable. All of this is performative virtue signaling.
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.
The most important reason for privacy is that without it, social norms calcify.
If a norm is outdated, oppressive, or maladaptive in some way and needs to be changed, it becomes very difficult to change the norm if you cannot build a critical mass of people practicing the replacement norm.
It is even harder if you cannot even talk about building a critical mass of people practicing the replacement norm.
For many norms, like the taboo on homosexuality which was strong in the US and Europe until recently and is still strong in many places today, the taboo and threat of ostracism are strong enough that people need privacy to build critical mass to change the norm even when the taboo is not enshrined in law, or the law is not usually enforced. This was the mechanism of "coming out of the closet": build critical mass for changing the norm in private, and then take the risk of being in public violation once enough critical mass had been organized that it was plausible to replace the old oppressive/maladaptive norm with a new one.
But yes, obsolete/maladaptive/oppressive norms are often enshrined in law too.
For good reason. Being "investigated" for illegal things is a key way to violate personal liberties. If you believe in freedom, you have to accept that some people who are not nice people benefit from those human rights. You may find yourself an "enemy of the people" for a variety of reasons.
In most cases, cell tower data is sold in the open market in aggregate. A commercial real estate developer can buy datasets that provide the average household income of passers by by hour of the day and month of the year, for example. The police can request tower ping data, generally by warrant. There are exceptions, especially in the federal space.
The Feds have a massive surveillance network. Every journey on the interstates between Miami and the border crossings near Buffalo, Watertown, Plattsburgh, Vermont and Maine all the way down to Miami is logged and tracked by a DEA program, which has likely expanded. You can get breadcrumbs of LPR hits and passenger photographs throughout the journey.
Flock is a cancer, as it is deployed by individual jurisdictions (often with Federal grants) and makes each node part of a larger network. They help solve and will likely eliminate some categories of crime. But the laws governing use are at best weak and at worse an abomination. Local cops abuse it by doing the usual dumb cop stuff -- stalking girlfriends, checking up on acquaintances. The Federal government is able to tap in to make it a node in their panopticon. Unlike government systems, stuff like user ids aren't really governed well and the abuses are mostly unauditable.
The private camera networks are a problem for commercial abuse and Federal abuse. They aren't as risky for local PDs because they generally require a paper trail to use. Corrupt/abusive cops don't like accountability.
>The police can request tower ping data, generally by warrant.
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.
Those companies have been selling the data to the government without warrant for quite some time actually. No pressure necessary. Cops have money and Verizon wants it.
That is exactly my point: no subpoena or warrant is required for access to license plate scan databases.
I want you to tell me in exact words that you firmly believe that when the current regime starts requesting records without any legal oversight, cell companies won't comply, because users trust is worth to them more than shareholder value.
Only a review of your dossier by the House Un-American Activities Committee† can verify you have not demonstrated any subversive behavior, citizen.
† https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_Un-American_Activities_C...
> [M]ost of the rhetoric for personal liberties revolves around being able to do illegal things.
What are you basing that on? Conjecture?
Counterpoint: when you're sharing a public road, the license of your car to share that road isn't private information.
... 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.
As much hate as it gets, the GDPR has pretty clear guidelines for situations like these. Essentially, the purpose of the data collection matters. Your license plates may be public information as in they are visible in the public, but that doesn’t mean collecting the information is, or providing others access to it - without your consent.
> It's not just government use either. There are private companies that scan vast numbers of license plates
Welcome to capitalism. It is very hard, in EU and US, to tell where the government ends and the private companies begin.
especially when private companies can buy politicians. At this point there is no line and the two have become one.
It's been fascinating watching the party of "small government" turn into one that supports ever expanding powers of a three letter agency whose job is supposed to be patrolling the border. It's like a new 9/11 Patriot act moment, except it's only one side supporting it this time.
It's the same as the Republican slogans of being the party of "fiscal responsibility" despite under-performing the Democratic party in nearly all financial metrics and constantly blowing up the deficit or being the party of "family values" while having leaders and 'respected' voices who are the complete opposite.
The party of small government is a slogan. It’s the same party that expanded domestic FBI surveillance, expanded intelligence agencies and lots of other things. It’s also the party that is intimately interested in what private citizens do in their bedroom (sodomy and condom laws) and what medical decisions doctors and patients can undertake.
To be fair, the current Republican Party bears almost no resemblance to the "classic" Republican Party of....10 years ago.
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.
The "old" GOP also loved 3 letter agencies, unitary executive theory, and mass surveillance. They did the Patriot Act. And Scalia hated the 5th Amendment, was weird on the 4th, and dramatically increased police powers.
> To be fair, the current Republican Party bears almost no resemblance to the "classic" Republican Party of....10 years ago.
In other aspects, perhaps. But the "small government" or "pro-economy" branding of the Republican Party has been an absurdity for more like 75 years. Democratic administrations have performed better on virtually any conceivable economic metric with very few minor exceptions.
The GOP has been this same contemptible thing at least since Reagan.
The ideology and philosophy is all identical, the only thing new (which is substantial and dangerous) is the complete shamelessness of it today.
It's not like those Tea Party folk appeared out of the blue. They grew, but the core constituency has been pandered to by mainstream Republican leadership since at least Nixon.
The current Republican Party is the exact same as 10 years ago, just further along.
10 years ago was basically Trump 1. And 10 years before that was GWB starting the endless wars with an admin outright denying reality. Which Reagan also did. And of course Nixon literally broke into the opposition party’s.
.. 10 years ago. Yes it fucking does, it's just become more brazen. Those are the motherfuckers that passed the patriot act and then reupped it over and over.
Obama and the Democrats were surprisingly heavy on surveillance and curtailing rights during Obama’s Presidency.
So you can include them in the “reupped it over and over”.
That's why all of these efforts to corrode civil liberties needs to be fought and contested by both sides. Otherwise the ratcheting effect makes if impossible to reclaim these liberties.
None of this is new. The article states that CBP got authorization to track license plates in 2017 and concerns about law enforcement use of ALPR date back to at least 2010. The ACLU sued the LAPD in 2013 on ALPR.
The part that's new is people being detained for "suspicious" traffic patterns.
Is it? or is the new part that it's being reported? This "news" just looks like an investigation AP conducted on its own. Could they have conducted it years ago, and what would they have found then?
Historically CBP isn't patrolling the entire country, so yeah, at least the scale and reach is definitely new.
The particular manner in which it is being used can be different even if the fact that is being used by CBP is not.
>CBP got authorization to track license plates in 2017
who was president in 2017?
I mean, the last 20 years is only ~8% of the history of the U.S., so all things considered those changes are pretty "new".
Sure, but the OP was specifically referring to party politics and this is a bipartisan issue.
> this is a bipartisan issue
Where the instance upthread and your instance both occurred under the same president? lol
It has never been about small government. You can just look at the Republican record on deficit spending or military funding to dismiss that. “Small government” was just an acceptable way to say you were for reducing benefits to people deemed undeserving.
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.
I really wish we had a (lower case) republican or conservative party in the US.
I hope we survive this fear driven over-stimulated era of politics.
We have a lower case conservative, pro-status-quo party. The Democrats.
Even now all they can talk about is returning to normal (where normal describes the conditions that led to the current state).
I've been seeing a slow splinter as of late between "establshment"-style Democrats focused on decorum, and the progressive-style democrats focused on overhauling the status quo. There definitely seems to be a slow shift towards people who want to take real actions an not stay stifled in years talking about actions.
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.
They talk about increasing minimum salaries for exempt workers, paid sick and family leave, infrastructure funding, expanding access to healthcare, etc. How is that lower case conservative, or pro status quo?
Those are pretty standard policies of center-right / conservative parties in Europe.
(Plus the fact that Dems talk about some of these doesn't mean they think they're going to happen.)
That's definitely left wing in the United States.
There's a big difference between "actually left wing" and "leftwards of 50% of a particular population".
The US has very little actual big-L Left (ahem) left in it.
left and right are directions, not locations
The leftmost member of the Reichstag in 1942 was probably not fairly described as “left wing”.
Can you name an example?
Sure; the UK's Tories, or Germany's CDU, or Australia's Liberal (lol) Party.
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...)
Seems irrelevant to a discussion comparing US parties.
>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.
We're talking about a need for a party that no longer exists in the US. Why would we not look to similar examples out there in actual practice?
this thread comes from a provocative quip that the democrats are conservative, with no mention whatsoever of any context other than america
Infrastructure funding is a pro-business position. At this point, most of the infrastructure that the Democrats are seeking funding for is maintenance, the definition of "status quo".
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.
When have there ever been "civil disruptions" due to a low minimum wage in the US? Federal minimum wage has been underwater all of my life. If the minimum wage law had any teeth (requiring Congress to stop fellating business owners), it would at least be tied to the inflation rate (as Social Security tends to be).
If the Federal minimum wage had kept up with inflation since it's peak value in 1968, it would be close to $26/hour.
None of that is conservative or liberal or leftist its common sense that both parties should be able to agree on. There are policies that are logically the right thing to do.
If implemented with a modicum of competence (which is admittedly not a foregone conclusion) and over a sufficiently long period (probably at least longer than one or two 4-year terms), all of those things would almost certainly have positive effects on the economy.
The concept of a "Minimum wage" in itself is anti-worker. The state is not a workers friend. The union is.
What a weird stance. A minimum wage guarantees all citizens can live a life in basic dignity. A worker is, even if part of a union, still a citizen of a state. A state is the sum of its constituents. There is, beyond the bipartisan war, room for compromise and mutual understanding for the benefit of all.
A minimum wage only guarantees that all citizens can race towards a collective bottom determined by some easily bribable elites.
Companies do not have to do a conscious effort to determine the lowest amount they can go. "Everyone else pays that rate too"
They notably do not talk about modifying the systems of governance that have prevented us from accomplishing those goals, which they have been "talking about" nearly the entire 40 years I've been alive. If I were to ignore their talk and judge purely based on action, it certainly seems like Democrats effect less change than Republicans.
(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)
They directly increased access to healthcare and infrastructure funding in the last 15 years, and both were very obvious, big bills. Perhaps it would behoove you to actually pay attention, instead of memeing online about things you don't actually know anything about?
Do you know any progressives? Do you follow any politics outside the US? I'm going to guess not, because your frame of reference for what a genuinely progressive win would look like is woefully miscalibrated. I suggest you rectify that before accusing anyone else of ignorance.
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.
The how matters.
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'll notice that, except for paid sick leave, all these things are simply "keep the lights on" policies. That is conservatism.
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.
Bernie does, does anyone else? They were just in power and didn't do any of it.
You should maybe read about all the things that died in the pocket filibuster.
And then there is all the woke stuff, that is unfortunately what the Democrats have been associated with lately.
"Woke" is more of a political weapon created by the right than any actual real concept.
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.
The far left always portrays the democrats as being too far left, even though both parties have moved to the left.
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 far left always moves the goal posts
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.
They are anti-gun "progressive" nuts, how can they be "conservative". Their "normal" was destruction, so people voted trump in just to stop this idiocy (by starting a new one)
At this point, what would that party even be? Their only genuine appeal is to Christian fundamentalists who prioritize banning abortion and LGBTQ rights. There hasn't been a coherent domestic or foreign policy from them in decades.
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>I would rather prefer the boiler to explode
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.
That sounds like a recipe for chaos and famine akin to Russia in the early-mid 90's
Or worse still, Russia in the early-mid 1920s.
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.
> 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.
People fantasize about revolution, but the reality would mostly be huge amounts of suffering and death.
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.
> the reality would mostly be huge amounts of suffering and death.
I think many of the people fantasizing about revolution are aware.
I think the movie 'Civil War' by Alex Garland was too absurd to be understood by a lot of people - to me it was yelling "IT CAN HAPPEN HERE TOO"
Accelerationism never works. There's a long, long list of complete and utter disasters and tremendous suffering inflicted by this moronic logic. Things get better by being made better, not by being made worse.
> Accelerationism
In the AI sense, or in the Israel/Third Temple/apocalypse sense?
An interesting fact is that "the border" technically extends 100 miles from any actual border.
Guess how many major metros are in that area.
https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/your-rights-bord...
There's no need to partisanize this. Why would you immediately turn off half of your possible audience when speaking about an issue that affects everyone equally? San Francisco is covered in Flock cameras just like the ones pictured top-right in the article, and you won't find a more-Democrat-leaning place. One cannot analyze and act on data that does not exist: https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/sf-takes-historic-step-to-s...
Flock is sort of a new kind of animal in the LPR space. Before that there were a lot of LPR companies out there but none of them were providing data in such a way that law enforcement could do what it's doing. LPR has been in use for tolling and for parking enforcement for decades now. It's the same kind of shell game Ring has been running by putting surveillance cameras on everyone's house and then selling access to law enforcement.
> There's no need to partisanize this.
On the contrary, the only way to drive change in a democracy is via partisanship. Demanding we all adhere to an artificial both-sides framing is manufacturing consensus for the status quo. Politicians only change their positions if they think they'll lose votes because of it.
Also, obviously, because the analysis in this case is clearly wrong. This is a 100% partisan issue. Period. There are good guys and bad guys in the story, and if you won't point out who they are you're just running cover for the bad guys.
> Politicians only change their positions if they think they'll lose votes because of it.
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.
This is HN, no one here is ignorant of the issue. Even granting your framing, you're addressing the wrong audience. This is the choir here, not the laity.
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.
> Trying to silence criticism, especially in this forum, is simply trying to deflect blame.
You are misinterpreting me in bad faith here.
How so? You don't want us discussing the fact that republican policymaking is behind the CBP overreach in the linked article. You... literally said so.
The same party that gave us the Patriot Act?
They've not been "small government" since forever.
While 62 house Democrats voted against it, Patriot Act had bipartisan support, which is why Obama never repealed it.
They have been the party of small government when the democrats are in power since forever. When they have power though...
There is nothing small Govt anymore. Both parties are the same when it comes to extending Govt's power (just for different reasons). It is just a talking point now.
State's Rights (to own slaves) vs No State Rights (to shelter slaves) is probably the most infamous example, and it's from a while ago.
They were never for small government, they just want it crippled enough that it can't regulate them but can still be used against other people.
If you're interested in some reflection on that, What's the Matter with Kansas? (2004) by Thomas Frank explores some of this, but centered around Kansas. Pretty interesting (and frustrating) stuff.
While you're not wrong, not sure it applies here. This is an all-party thing:
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.
Meh. I think political parties in the states are really there just to make money. Why else would the dems keep pelting you with adds for $5? I think both parties are saying whatever they need to say to convince people to give them cash. The number of people who care about privacy seems smaller than the number of people who want to be entertained by politicians, so it's unlikely to change anytime soon.
I've talked to some of these people at the local level and they really believe what they're saying. So I don't really buy your explanation.
Well at least post 9/11 unconstitutional escalation required legislation and the creation of agencies like the DHS and TSA. Now, a political culture that is willing to break norms and abuse technicalities is silently expanding powers to the max, and that’s far more insidious. But maybe it’ll result in a strengthened democracy in the long term if new laws or amendments are passed to contain this problem.
I don't know what you mean by "turn into" it's always been that way
"turn into" is referring to the mask off nature of it all. Before, they might be a little embarrassed or pretend they still stand for those principles. But all I've seen are conservatives explaining why it might be technically allowed or straight up cheering it on.
No, they still insist, while building a stasi, that they are the party of small government.
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
The party of small government thing hasn't been true for a long time, if it ever was.
The logical conclusion of all this oppression is that everyone will just stay home, and go out no more than necessary, and spend no money that isn't absolutely necessary.
Is that a win for the oligarchs?
It is for the ones that do deliveries. I never looked up the numbers, but my gut feeling is that Amazon did well during the pandemic.
To the GOP, lying (in stated intentions "small gov", et al) aligns with their core values:
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.
You can't even call the GOP the party of capitalism either.
The party that took a 10% stake in Intel to at least partially nationalize it. The party of tariffs, the party of special interest tax loopholes giving taxpayer subsidies to fossil fuels, real estate, and agriculture, the $400 million equity stake in MP materials.
Sure sounds like they are picking winners and losers, the antithesis of free market capitalism.
The only thing fascinating is that anyone believed any of that crap.
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.
Pretty sure Republicans always supported defending the border from drug trafficking and illegal immigration.
Gary, Indiana does not have a border with a foreign country so why do CBP need to monitor drivers there?
Millions of illegal aliens have entered the US under Biden. They're not all hanging at the border. Of course CBP needs to go everywhere in the US to remove all of them.
It’s a logistics chokepoint for drugs coming across the southwest border into the Chicago area.
> It’s a logistics chokepoint for drugs coming across the southwest border into the Chicago area
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 ...
It's not a checkpoint, it's surveillance.
Presumably CBP is not stupid and that surveillance is providing value they can not otherwise get only in Texas.
They've been at these programs for decades; if they were effective we wouldn't be in a drug epidemic At some point you have to cut your losses and accept that the only benefits were the politicians Flock donated to.
I'm not saying you have to abolish CBP. I'm saying they should be protecting the border and this ain't it.
Ah yes, illegal immigration is like the new "terrorism"... everything must be done to stop it which includes giving CBP and ICE unchecked power.
In reality, CBP and ICE have very little power.
ICE has very little legal authority and is yet the current president’s ground troops to lock up everyone who looks foreign. I’d say they have all the power they need.
ICE can walk into your house / pull you out of the car with masks on and kidnap you without showing you any papers. That's more power than a lot of other agencies
Is that why Trump killed the CBP funding bill in the beginning of 2024?
Trump wasn't in office at that time. He urged Republicans to not pass it for various reasons which I will not enumerate here, and CBP was funded weeks later.
The reasons you don’t want to enumerate here are “he wanted only Republicans to look good on the border by ensuring that nothing could get passed while a Democrat is president”. He doesn’t care about the border, he cares about authoritarianism and party politics.
>which I will not enumerate here
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.
lol
It's funny until you personally are affected.
funnier to believe that republicans always supported defending the border from drug trafficking and illegal immigration. - much funnier :)
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> If you create a problem like this by essentially opening the border and failing to enforce the law, the necessary corrective action is going to have to be a lot heavier than if you’d just patrolled the border in the first place
Deportations are lower than under Obama, despite ICE having Saudi Arabia's military budget. The resources are very clearly being spent on something other than immigration enforcement. Whether that's an authoritarian agenda or simply corruption is still, in my book, to be seen.
> Whether that's an authoritarian agenda or simply corruption
Its both a floor wax and a dessert topping.
"Deportations" is an ambiguous term, which may or may not include people turned away at the border and actual categories like Removals, Returns, and Expulsions.
> "Deportations" is an ambiguous term
It is. Which means the numbers are generally able to be fluffed. The fact that ICE isn't even bothering to do that communicates that they're not focussing on nor being held to it.
> which may or may not include people turned away at the border
You don't need to blow the military budget of most of the world's militaries [1] to do this, nor build "a surveillance system stretching into the country’s interior."
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/immigration-ice-bill-trump-2093456
Agreed. I think it's important to remember the lack of real "mass deportations now" when you see two things:
1) low Trump approval rating. Likely due to lack of following through on these promises (rather than disapproval of the promises themselves)
2) protests against deportations. Why do dems simultaneously crow about their superior deportation numbers while condemning current efforts as heavy handed and cruel?
I think the answer to 2) is that the Obama administration scrupulously followed the law, actually targeted those with criminal records rather than grabbing people just based on their ethnicity, and didn't engage in practices like sending people to prisons in third countries such as El Salvador. I suspect you already know this, given your choice to draw a contrast between numbers and methods.
It's the untrained masked men with guns dragging people away because the computer said to, that's the new heavy-handed method that America has not seen before except in WW2 Germany and the Soviet Union.
Everything about this is stupid and wrong or irrelevant
>It's the untrained
You made this up
>masked men
oh no masks!
>with guns dragging people away
so just normal law enforcement arresting people
>because the computer said to
you made this up
>except in WW2 Germany and the Soviet Union
Oh no everyone its WWII Germany oh no I mean it's my political opponents governing
Here's a job posting for CBP: https://www.usajobs.gov/job/849185400 I'm having trouble finding the ICE requirements, my understanding is even less than CBP. The ones without firearms training won't have guns, fortunately.
Compare to state police officers, who go through half a year of academy. FBI needs a college education or two years work experience, and then they do another 1000 hours of training.
If you've ever watched real cops working, the difference in training / professionalism is obvious. They will identify themselves, and be familiar with the case history before dragging anyone away.
Here's one of the apps used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Fortify . ICE agents aren't psychic. There's a database of people who's legal status has expired, the database is not perfect. An ICE official decides who is guilty and issues a civil arrest warrant. The supervisor sends agents to where the computer has tracked them, and the agents arrests if the computer says so. There's no judge issuing the warrant before, or trying the case afterward.
These are a real changes in America, we have a right to speak about it, and it's reasonable to guard against these tools being turned on Trump's "enemies within" next.
> You made this up
Correct. "Once hired, ICE agents receive training before beginning fieldwork" [1].
That said, "unlike many law enforcement roles, no previous experience in law enforcement is required, and candidates do not need to take a pre-employment exam." And the training is minimal, as evidenced by the dismal deportation figures.
> so just normal law enforcement arresting people
Normal law enforcement is bound by laws and identifies itself. We do that to prevent abuses of power and to ensure that unidentifiable agents shoving Americans into unmarked cars is something that raises alarm, because there is zero assurance it's ICE versus e.g. foreign operatives or gangs.
> Oh no everyone its WWII Germany oh no I mean it's my political opponents governing
These processes are being kept under wraps because they're a massive expansion of state power. The kind conservatives and libertartians oppose. The narrow branch of MAGA that's distrating federal law enforcement isn't representative of any governing coalition.
Understanding why process matters is difficult for everyone when your guy is in charge. A good method is to imagine a left-wing President having these extralegal authorities and resources.
[1] https://ktla.com/news/local-news/what-it-takes-to-become-an-...
> Likely due to lack of following through on these promises (rather than disapproval of the promises themselves)
No. Most of it has to do with the fact that masked, unidentified ICE agents are abducting and disappearing people with no due process.
American citizens are being taken away. People who are here legally are being abducted and sent to countries they aren't from.
Of the deportations, Trump said they would be targeted toward violent criminals. Over 90% of those who have been rounded up have no criminal history.
Masked men with weapons who refuse to identify themselves are shooting people and lying about it, directly refuted by video others took of the event.
This isn't some case where "Americans are upset Trump isn't doing what he said!". This is a case where Americans are finally seeing the reality of what he is doing and are sickened by it.
I’m totally sure you’d apply the same for unchecked corporate law breaking, right? Enforce the Hatch Act, go after wage theft which dwarfs any kind of retail or private theft, etc. If you think it’s about political power, you’d question prisons and detention centers being put in red states where they count political appropriation from the inmates and guards.
Well-stated. Our prior solutions to internal enforcement of previous Border misses no longer work given that the scale of border "misses" exploded after deliberate non-enforcement.* Now larger-scale internal enforcement is needed. Sucks for all of us.
*Worse than non-enforcement, the feds actively blocked/destroyed Texas border protections.
This notion of 'opening the border' is a political myth conservatives have been using to justify their increasingly extreme positions for years, much like their inflammatory use of the word 'invasion'.
The border was de facto open since there was no serious enforcement. Because there was no space to detain millions of people, the majority were processed and then simply let go into the U.S. with a "Notice to Appear" set for 2030. Basically a free pass to stay for years.
On top of that, they had parole loopholes (like the CBP One app and CHNV) to legally admit millions more people.
"essentially opening the border and failing to enforce the law" this did not happen is the issue with your statement
It wasn't 100% open, but it was open enough to let in several millions of people who should not have been allowed in.
> except it's only one side supporting it this time.
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.
156 Democratic congressmen voted no on that bill.
46 voted yes. And just a few months prior democrats tried to pass this [1] [2]. Which only failed because Trump didn't want Biden to be able to show a "tough on the border" stance.
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...
We've had a generation of leaders allowing in tens of millions of people to flood into the country, the American people have voted against it every time they are given the chance and still nothing is ever done about it. The right wing voting base doesn't care about small government, we care about stopping the flood and undoing the damage that decades of these policies have caused. Look at polling data, especially among young people, border enforcement and deportations are what we want.
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.
one that we can solve without turning the US into a single-party police state
> border enforcement and deportations are what we want.
this is not what “we want” - this is what ruling party wants you to think and obsess over while they pillage and make your life otherwise miserable.
the same young votes voted for Biden in 2020 knowing very well what the immigration policy would be (and they were as bad as it gets the first two years)
> ICE raids started and 25% of the school kids didn't show up to school. Which indicates that likely 25% of the population is illegal.
you're downvoted but this is a very real thing, especially at the elementary school level. My kids had regular classes in first/second grade taught in Spanish because they were the one single English speaking student in the room (this was fixed when my wife and I found out). The level of illegal immigrants in schools goes down over time as they drop out. My son is now 16 and a sophomore in HS, SEM Magnet, and in a class of about 100-125 he knows maybe 10 that have told him they're here illegally.
/Dallas public schools
Your comment feels unsubstantiated. What do you mean by that? Or do you just mean the current government has Republicans at the top.
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?
Polling this year consistently shows that Republicans support all the actions being taken with respect to immigration under this admin. Sorry I don't have any links handy at the moment, but you can see it in this thread: "too many people crossed under Biden, look what you made us do!"
I don't see anything in the article that says anything about immigration. From the info provided, this is about suspicious behavior ID'ed via ALPR, and they don't specify suspicious of what. That seems very broad and something a reasonable person would expect many people of all parties to be wary of, not just people of one party.
> I don't see anything in the article that says anything about immigration
Article starts with: "The U.S. Border Patrol is monitoring millions of American drivers nationwide"
Hard to blame this squarely on the Republicans. Access to private license plate readers was granted under the Biden admin, and no doubt each of the last four administrations played some part.
To me, the CPB and ICE are looking more and more like an American Gestapo.
> Access to private license plate readers was granted under the Biden admin
Apropos of anything else, this access was granted in 2017, and Biden might be surprised to learn he was President then, not Trump.
> Access to private license plate readers was granted under the Biden admin,
Nope.
Nice try tho. The "both sides bad" argument used to work, not anymore.
Very similar feeling to watching the liberal/progressive party fangirl the FBI and the intel community
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.
Seriously. Where were all these people when the Democrats overreached into every aspect of our lives?
Apparently the only criticism is an accusation of hypocrisy for calling themselves the party of small government. Nothing wrong with the actions themselves apparently! Lol.
Plenty of people complained and wanted all government overreach to stop - this is an even more dire situation, propped up by people who directly lied and said they were not interested in this (which they obviously are, and they are liars.)
Why are you complaining about people's concerns instead of the actual problems created by those in power?
The problem is that the "both sides are bad" people just uniformly vote Republican. Its the cope of understanding that your side is batshit insane, so you have to pretend that the current state of affairs doesn't actually matter, and the problem goes deeper in the goal of normalizing your party.
The truth is, the only reason not to trust the intel community is because of some fringe bullshit you heard on Joe Rogan.
I've been voting third party for a long time. When both sides are bad (in different ways) it is the only choice left. (The third party isn't all that great either, but they are better and hopefully they send a message that people care)
Isn’t that basically just throwing away your vote though with it being a winner-takes-all system?
No because the statistics are counted. People in the "smoke filled backrooms" pay attention to what third party messages are getting attention and in turn use that to inform how they change. Long term it isn't a bad strategy, but it does mean you have to accept whoever wins (though in rare cases a third party has won) for today. If one candidate isn't too bad I will vote for them.
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.
To quote Marlow Stanfield, "You want it to be one way. But it's the other way."
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.
When faced with reality over the past decades, and the historically good record that Democrats have had, versus historically bad record that Republicans have had, versus the unproven record that any 3d party had,
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.
Bad reading comprehension. This isn't a "both sides are bad" thing. Both sides are different than they were from 1980 - 2008.
This is your cope to justify your side's righteousness. Many people recognize how awful both parties are and do not vote republican. Every socialist/leftist/communist falls into this category.
Wait, are you saying mass surveillance is a good thing?
Yeah the emerging 'The Bullwark' wing of the democrat party. Never trumper republicans trying as hard as they can to move the right flank of the democrat party into the bush era republican gradient so that they can pretend that they didn't lose their own party.
Small government without control of who comes in is borderline anarchy, and they never claimed to be for anarchy. Small government internally requires border controls, and if the border controls failed in the past do you expect them to just shrug? I can see disagreeing with them, easily, I just don’t see obvious hypocrisy like you are suggesting.
We're literally discussing a mass surveillance dragnet throughout the country (not just at the border) here; the kind of stuff that is normally reserved for dystopias in fiction.
To argue that it is somehow okay because it enables "small government" to exist is very much in the spirit of "war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength". When thugs in uniform stop and interrogate Americans on the roads because their movement patterns are "suspicious", there's nothing small about it.
I’m not saying it’s okay, but I am not a small government person. Illogical arguments just bother me. I think small government is impossible for other reasons.
The republicans have been the party of massive military since forever. I don’t really see how this is different.
Small government without [big thing I happen to like] is [bad thing] therefore it's okay to make the government big in [the aspects I like] and I don't see any hipocrisy in that.
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> willing to work jobs for lower pay that Americans will never do
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
If Americans don't want to do the job for the pay, is it still stealing?
The pay would increase if nobody takes the job for the low pay. This is basic market dynamics.
Oh my bad, I forgot that republicans have reading comprehension of 8th graders. Let me explain it in simpler terms.
You have a restaurant. Bathrooms need to be cleaned. You can't hire any American to clean them, because you can only afford $12 an hour, and high school kids who grew up in middle class neighborhoods where your restaurant is sure as shit not going to do that when they can make chatgpt write them prompts for viral videos. So your restaurant has smelly bathrooms and nobody comes in, therefore you don't get business and restaurant has to close.
Or you hire an immigrant, who is very well willing to do the job because in his home country, he would only get paid equivalent $6 an hour. Bathroom stays clean, you get customers, restaurant functions. Immigrant takes the money, and buys food and other things from local sources, thus putting that money back into the economy, with profit being made every step of the way, thus improving everyone financial situation.
Understand now?
Also, undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022
If you can’t afford to pay enough, you don’t have a viable business. This is a standard argument for minimum wage, which is reasonable, and it applies here as well, no?
The point is that there isn't a large amount of Americans that are willing to work for minimum wage, because we got used to a standard of living. You aren't going to force people to go to work for minimum wage in positions that are usually taken up by immigrants, because those people already have higher paying jobs - the unemployment (at least pre 2025) was like at an all time low.
For economy to be healthy, money has to exchange hands. The more you do this, the better the economy gets. This is why US was so far ahead of other countries because we had way less restrictions on this.
And being welcoming to people at all income levels is necessarily a part of this, because at the end of the day, even the fanciest car requires low skilled labor to builds roads for.
Immigrants do pay taxes, legal or not, because sales tax exists. Income tax doesn't really apply until you're richer.
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.
And yet, while a visa overstay is a misdemeanor, assisting someone to stay or work while unauthorized is a felony, that does more damage to the economy, but this administration seems "remarkably" unwilling to prosecute that.
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.
> willing to work jobs for lower pay that Americans will never do, which is a huge benefit for economy.
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.
>Pushing wages down for low-skilled work is possibly good for the economy, but it's very bad for low-skilled American workers.
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.
Illegal aliens operate outside of minimum wage laws obviously.
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.
65% of the US population, 200 million Americans, live within the 100-Mile "Constitution-Free Zone".
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.
This is mostly a canard, kept alive by fundraising pages at ACLU, but contradicted directly by current pages on the ACLU's site. It feels useful on a message board to call out things like this, but it actually hurts people in the US, who deserve to know that they do not surrender their 4th Amendment rights simply by dint of living within 100 miles of Lake Erie.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45041697
(There's a really good Penn State law review article on that thread).
> (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.
The whole article is about what at the border actually means.
I reread that old thread, and then skimmed the Penn State article (a bit quickly, I admit). I gotta say: I think you're overstating your case here. Certainly, the author of that article is skeptical about the 100-mile zone and makes plenty of good (and, IMO, obvious) points about why it is constitutionally suspect. But, to read your comments, you'd think that some important court somewhere has actually placed meaningful limits on immigration enforcement within that zone (outside the context of an actual border crossing). If so, I don't see where you're getting that. If that's actually in the article, could you tell us where?
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.
Without wanting to recapitulate this argument for the Nx1000th time if we don't have to I'll just say that the points I'm making are points ACLU itself now makes.
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!
Okay, so you linked to https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone which contains this text:
>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.
The executive branch asserts that there is such a zone. But the truth is likely that many, if not all, 4th Amendment rights still apply in many situations within that zone. It's situation dependent, so it's difficult to make a sweeping generalization. But some of the executive branch's most aggressive claims and tactics, at least, may well not hold up in court.
> The executive branch asserts that there is such a zone. But the truth is likely that many, if not all, 4th Amendment rights still apply in many situations within that zone.
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.