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ACLU Protests Police Scanning License Plates
dustman81 writes "The ACLU is objecting to the practice of police in Springdale, Ohio using an automated license-plate scanner on patrol cars to locate stolen vehicles or those whose owners are wanted on felony warrants. The scanner can read 900 license plates an hour traveling at highway speeds. So far, the scanner has located 95 stolen cars and helped locate 111 wanted felons. The locations of the license plates scanned are tagged with GPS data. All matches are stored (with no expiration date given) and can be brought up later and cross-referenced on a map. If the plate is wanted, the times and locations of where it was scanned can be referenced. The Springdale police department hopes to begin using the system soon to locate misdemeanor suspects. This system is also in use in British Columbia."
It's a state-issued plate, and it's designed to be publicly viewable and even photographable in many areas (where photo blocking equipment is illegal). This is really not much different than officers looking at plats normally, just more efficient. Next up? GPS tagging plates.
I'm sorry, but this is one of the instances where I disagree with the ACLU.
You're out on the open road. You have no reasonable expectation of privacy. No civil right is being violated, IMO.
Is this another example of us basically having less and less privacy when we leave our homes? Yes? Are our movements being recorded more and more and is it getting annoying? Yes? But claim that the police recording license plates on the open highway is unconstitutional? Can't side with you.
Start a happiness pandemic
Because the police have no right to track me when I have committed no crime and am not wanted in connection with a criminal investigation.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
It does not say if _all_ or just the ones that one on the "hit" list plates are "tagged" and recorded. I would object to this system IF it recored _all_ plates and locations. Recording just the ones that came back with warrants or stolen I have no problem with. And would disagree with the ACLU on this one.
So police looking at license plates is unreasonable search? I don't think so, it is a publicly viewable item. They are not taking extraorindary steps to view the license plate. It isn't hidden behind your closed drapes in your house, it is in full view on the road. I see nothing wrong with this as long as only license plates matching stolen vehicles or cars registered to felons with warrants for their arrest are logged and cataloged. I see absolutely no problem with that at all.
I figure from the article that it looks for certain plates (stolen cars etc) and only the matches are being stored, not every plate scanned. At least, that would make sense, article doesn't really make it clear. If so, how is this different than a cop seeing a "wanted" licence plate on a car and recording the time and place where it was seen? He has to look at a lot of plates but he disregards those that don't match. If every single plate scanned is stored with GPS data then obviously its a different story
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Last year my car was stolen. It happened a few days after some scumbag killed a cop and went on the lam, so the police had zero time for me (and I can't really blame them). If we'd had these gizmos then, they might have caught the piece of shit cunt that boosted my wheels.
If I was a cop on the hot auto squad, I'd cross-correlate owners reporting stolen vehicles with ACLU members - and I'd shitcan their cases.
I say let the police do all the automated tracking they want, but encrypt the data and set the system up so that it can only be decrypted by court order. Then the police can use the data when they have reason to, but they can't go on fishing expeditions or use the data for personal vendettas.
If you are of no interest to the police, then your records will just be sitting on a disk somewhere.
Oh, of course! If I have nothing to hide, then I have nothing to worry about, right?
What if I become a person of interest to my spouse during divorce proceedings? Then the database potentially becomes a tool to punish me, not for something illegal I may have done, but for something immoral. Great, so giving right of review of our morality to the police is good why?
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
Apparently you didn't Read The Fucking Article.
*Every* license plate that is scanned gets saved and downloaded onto PCs at Police HQ. Then when a warrant is issued on you later on, they can go back into the database and pull up *everywhere your car has been* before you did anything wrong. The article clearly states this.
This is not just storing the location and plates of criminals, because the cross-checking isn't done in real time, it is done when the data is downloaded later. The article clearly states this.
This is not targeted surveillance of criminals with the 'innocent plates' discarded in real time (which I would agree would be perfectly fine). This is creating a massive database of where every car in that part of Ohio is, with no time limit on when the data expires, and no limit on who can access the data.
Papers, please, comrade citizen!
And since this has always been publicly available... it is just information demanding to be released from it's bonds.
At least in my state, driving an automobile is not a RIGHT, but a privilege granted by the department of revenue
You actually believe that? That getting from point A to point B in the way society has designed it (i.e. by driving) is a PRIVILEGE? Welcome to the police state, I guess, where doing anything except breathing requires governmental permission.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
Mod parent up: "+1 unintentionally insightful" for accidentally proving the ACLU's point...
The issue isn't the reading of license plates. If they were to do that, scan for the tags of interest (stolen, wanted, etc.) and then immediateley and automatically discard all of the non-matches, then I would have no problem with it. Assuming all of those steps could be independently verified at any time of course.
The issue is the systematic reading and databasing of *all* license plates with a timestamp and geotag and storing that data indefinitely. It may not be illegal. But it should be - as part of the often claimed, but non-existent right to privacy. The state has no business tracking the whereabouts of law abiding citizens - it's rife for abuse at many levels.
Like the wiretapping, the real issue is the lose of privacy and damage to our rights. In particular, the storage of plates numbers with locations is bothersome. I do not like the idea that the police can recall where any car was at. But if the system tries to locate a positive and then discards all else, well, it sounds useful to me.
As to the fast scan of all cars that the vehicle passes, personally, I am trying to figure out why the ACLU is fighting that. For the life of me, I would think that it makes things safer since it allows police to drive and observe other issues rather than pay heavy attention to cars.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/conductunbecoming/
Yes, a cop on the street can follow you around and record where you go and when. But you would be able to see him doing that. You would know.
More importantly, the cop would have to skip other crimes to pursue you.
And the Gatling gun wasn't anything new compared to the musket. Yet it certainly changed land warfare.
Sometimes increasing the speed of an action does change the situation. And automating data collection on people NOT accused of a crime does change the situation.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Exactly.
o matic_licen.html
As usual, Bruce Schneier has already been all over it - http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/10/aut
It boils down to:
1. Automated scanning has great utility to PDs and violates no rights.
2. PDs have no need to retain data on innocent people - do not store non matches and allow the accused to challenge the accuracy of the data.
...and you've eaten your pen. simply stunning.
This is one of those "boiling frog" issues that isn't very sexy or photogenic, one of the issues that many people will ignore but that sets a very very dangerous precedent. Yes the plates are state issued and yes they are intended to be viewable but the practice of indefinitely logging the plates of innocent people, just because, is wrong and must be stopped now. If allowed to run the precedent will be set for tracking credit card purchase federally, tagging and logging your presence in all public places and more.
Yes they caught 111 felons but that could be done without logging the innocent people.
I see this as another instance of IT vendors riding over the rights of citizens in their endless goal to make a buck.
A system like this sounds really useful for locating stolen cars and finding wanted criminals. It's a great idea in theory, and apparently it's effective. And if stealing a car becomes synonymous with getting caught, so much the better. But the lawsuit is also a good idea. There's no reason to build a database of "innocent" license plates. The government shouldn't be snooping on its citizens, and it's easy to imagine this information being abused. Maybe you trust this administration, but can you trust the next one, and the one after that?
Well what's the big deal? So what if a government goon knows who my friends are, how often we hang out, which political meetings I attend, whether I attend narcotics anonymous meetings or see a psichiatrist, how often I buy liquor or go to sex shops, etc. I'm nobody important, just a working stiff like everyone else. And this is all small-potatoes stuff anyhow.
But it's precisely because I'm nobody important that it isn't a big deal to me. I don't have to worry about retribution after I leak an important story about wrongdoing at my company or government agency to the media. I'm not a journalist trying to protect the confidentiality of my sources. I'm not a candidate running for office and having all my movements for the past thirty years scrutinized by the establishment party. I'm not an undercover officer or overzealous district attorney worried about being outed or targetted by the mob. These people do important work, and it's important to protect them.
The best way to prevent the database from being abused is not to build it. You can still find criminals and stolen cars, and use the system to fight crime. But citizens who haven't done anything wrong shouldn't be tracked everywhere they go, since it might be used against them for political reasons.
If they just put an expiration date on data collected from non-stolen vehicles belonging to non-felons, I have absolutely no opposition to this measure. As has been mentioned before, this is just very efficient data collection of already public data done by a tool that is being directly operated by a human (the patrol car has a cop behind its wheel). This means it's not a weird passive voyeurism like we get with cameras, and is certainly much more limited as far as its observational scope goes. And if it makes finding a stolen car that much more efficient, I'm all for it.
I'm surprised by the way this system works.
I implemented a system that does basically this, as custom development for a police department in a small American city. It's worked fantastically well, but they had a lot of specific restrictions.
Examples:
They didn't want fully automated scanning, because apparently it causes all sorts of legal troubles if you run some plates (undercovers, celebrities, people who are later stalked/attacked).
Also, they didn't want to geotag the searches (even though all of the data was available) because they specifically didn't want to build a database of people's locations outside their duties.
And lastly, they didn't want permanent data storage of *anything*. They wanted two years, to comply with various regulations and to allow time for investigation into abuses, but no more. After that, they wanted it gone forever.
As such, I find it very surprising that a police department would even have interest in building a tool that is so incredibly ripe for abuse, when it is likely to open them to all sorts of litigation, as evidenced by the ACLU lawsuit.
And as to the tools who claim the ACLU is just interested in freeing criminals, I'd remind you that the ACLU simply cares about rights, even though sometimes that's unpopular. They're willing to fight to let you quote the Bible in your yearbook, to prevent 13 year olds from being arrested for writing on their desks and as this article notes, they are also against recorded surveillance of innocent drivers.
It's telling that nearly all of the right-wingers in this thread have distorted the ACLU's actual complaint (that surveillance databases are being built against innocent drivers) and have replaced it with a claim that somehow the ACLU is against running plates altogether or direct claims that the ACLU is pro-criminal.
According to this announcement, license plate data in BC is purged every three months. Yes, in Canada we do have privacy laws. It may not be perfect privacy, but at least it's a consideration when they roll out these programs. The Springdale cops should at the very least do the same.
Exactly. That's why we should have checkpoints at major crossings into and out of cities or across state lines. You want the privelege of driving? Well give us a cheek swab for DNA and a rapid drug/alcohol test while were at it. We'll catch a lot more felons that way.
Also, why the hell don't they have x-ray scanners like they use to find drugs in trucks in Afghanistan. I mean, it's not really a search if they don't open your trunk, and besides driving is a privilege to begin with. I'm sure they'd find illegal weapons down south a lot of illegal aliens that way.
Face it, a police state is the only way for lawful people to be safe from the scumbags. So call your Congressmen and demand road checkpoints with DNA matching, instant drug/alcohol testing, and x-ray scanning. Because driving is a privilege and not a right.
Driving is a Right, not a privilege.
"Personal liberty, or the Right to enjoyment of life and liberty, is one of the fundamental or natural Rights, which has been protected by its inclusion as a guarantee in the various constitutions, which is not derived from, or dependent on, the U.S. Constitution, which may not be submitted to a vote and may not depend on the outcome of an election. It is one of the most sacred and valuable Rights, as sacred as the Right to private property...and is regarded as inalienable." 16 C.J.S., Constitutional Law, Sect.202, p.987.
"Personal liberty largely consists of the Right of locomotion -- to go where and when one pleases -- only so far restrained as the Rights of others may make it necessary for the welfare of all other citizens. The Right of the Citizen to travel upon the public highways and to transport his property thereon, by horse drawn carriage, wagon, or automobile, is not a mere privilege which may be permitted or prohibited at will, but the common Right which he has under his Right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Under this Constitutional guarantee one may, therefore, under normal conditions, travel at his inclination along the public highways or in public places, and while conducting himself in an orderly and decent manner, neither interfering with nor disturbing another's Rights, he will be protected, not only in his person, but in his safe conduct." II Am.Jur. (1st) Constitutional Law, Sect.329, p.1135.
http://teamliberty.net/id18.html
People who claim that driving isn't a right are usually parents or Divers Ed teachers trying to control teenagers. Sorry, those of use who understand what freedom means don't buy your sorry argument.
"It's because they're stupid, that's why. That's why everybody does everything." -Homer Simpson
While PERHAPS this could be used to hinder said right, the REALITY is it does not. Until it does, you have no real reason to complain other than being overly paranoid.
That may be the fucking stupidest thing ever said.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
If the idea is "innocent until guilty", then the innocent ought to be given the *rights* of an innocent man, not just have lip-service paid to it. One of those rights is not to be constantly under surveillance by police ...
... in that respect it's very similar to having to produce "papers" at checkpoints ...
... and having the checkpoint-cop record your movement for later use. The 4th amendment may be what they're thinking is being infringed ...
..."
... is it reasonable for the cops to be constantly checking your details, or should there be some level of expected result before they are allowed to do so ?
No one is under surveilance since the are not being followed nor is their private space being violated. Random encounters in public is not surveillance.
No, it is very different. You are not stopped or otherwise interfered with.
The 4th is about search and seizure, neither of which is occuring here , the 4th says nothing about the right not to be noticed in public:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures
I understand your sentiment and it is a creepy thing for the police to do, but your misrepresentations and exaggeration are hurting your otherwise legitimate question.
As for the scanning of license plates...
The Supreme Court is clear in that this kind of observation by law enforcement doesn't constitute a search under the 4th Amendment. So you can't debate whether it is a reasonable or an unreasonable search as it never was a search to begin with.
1) Is the person in a public place? Simple yes or no. 2) Does the person have an expectation of privacy? For instance, a closed telephone booth is in a public place, but grants a person an expectation of privacy and law enforcement thus needs a warrant to record a conversation therein.
If 1 is yes and 2 is no, then it falls under the plain sight (or plain view) doctrine. It is an exception to the warrant requirement, requires no probable cause or reasonable suspicion, and is not considered a search (of any kind) under the 4th Amendment.
As for tracking/storing this data for long periods of time...
If the police can legally obtain information, there is nothing stopping them from amassing it in a database under the 4th Amendment. Something that wasn't a search to begin with doesn't magically become a search because it is entered it in to a database. A ruling stating otherwise would be groundbreaking.
However, the Court has ruled that you have a "right to privacy" under the 9th Amendment and some other numbers they pulled out of the butt of their number-gnome (since the Constitution doesn't explicitly say anything about privacy). So perhaps the Court will rule that the privacy of citizens outweighs the benefit to law enforcement in rearguards to warehousing this information.
If I had to bet, I'd say the ACLU is going to lose. But nothing stops the people of Springdale, Ohio from expecting a higher level of privacy than the minimums set by the US Constitution. I've not been to Ohio, but I'm pretty sure they have local elections there too.
"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."
ah, so I have the right to obfuscate my license plate if no human police officer is looking at it at the moment? ...
... or my appearance to any surveillance camera so long as I'm not committing a crime?
No, your department of motor vehicle regulations probably prohibit obscuring your license plate at any time. Also driving itself is not a right, it is a privelage. Your car would be an "effect" in the 4th ammendment context so searching the interior of your car would involve a right.
Most likely. However wearing a mask in certain contexts may create probable cause that would justify a search, and people and merchants would certainly be within their rights to refuse service in many contexts. So the mask may be counterproductive.
Suppose I suspect my wife is having an affair, and I sue her for divorce. I can subpoena that license plate database to see where she's been, and who she's been visiting.
Hey, wait -- she can do the same to me!
My sister owns a circa 75 Nova. The body is not in the best condition, but it runs. Every time I go to Utah to visit her and drive that car, the police pull me over and give me a ticket for something ridiculous. Here's a couple of cases in point:
Just after dark, going out for some food with my baby in my wife's lap. Illegal, I know. (A pox on insurance companies.) Dangerous? Maybe, but then cars are dangerous machines. If they're going to make laws against putting children in cars with restraints, they might as well start making up rules about how many minutes a day you can allow a child to be in a car. And when are they going to go after the repeat offender drunk driver without whom the risk of accident would drop like a rock?
(Don't tell me the one about the poor woman in south Florida rush hour traffic crying when she finally gets to the checkpoint because a sudden brake at low speeds put her baby's head against the windshield, and the cop's sob story about having to charge her with negligent homicide. I've heard it before, I draw a different lesson from it.)
Well, the cop pulls us over, uses language along the lines of calling me and my wife wetbacks, asks for me driver's license. I hand him an international permit. It's from Japan. He's never seen an international permit before, apparently. What is a white guy doing with an international permit from Japan? (Now that he's up close he can see that I'm noticeably white. He hasn't yet noticed that my wife is Japanese, which might not be surprising. She looks rather hispanic.)
I explain that I've been in Japan with my wife and kid for several years and my Utah permit has expired. He asks for it anyway, and why didn't I get it renewed? I apologize for not carrying it with me or getting it renewed when I'm only expecting to be in the States for a bit over a week.
Things go downhill from there, because, like many officers, this guy can't admit he's wrong.
He goes back to his car, radios in and we wait at least a half an hour while he discusses things with whomever. (No exaggeration. My kid is really getting hungry, and my parents and my sister are wondering where we are by the time we get back.)
In the end, the only thing he can get me on is the child carrier.
So I'm out $65, which is a week's worth of food back in Japan for my family at the wages I'm earning.
Several years later, my brother and I are in the same car making a late night run to Home Depot, first, to trade a fitting for a pipe so my sister has plumbing that works now that she is out of the hospital, and second, to pick up some medicine she needs within a few hours. We are calculating that Home Depot closes before the place with the pharmacy. It's Saturday night just after Christmas, snowing, the streets are not yet slick but will be a bit slippery in an hour or so.
Coming out of Home Depot, I stop at a traffic light. Full stop, like the law says.
Right turn on red is legal in Utah, but, of course, you must come to a full stop and signal.
Full stop. I signal. I turn. I need to get over to the left as soon as possible for a left turn, so I signal and change lanes. I get pulled over.
The ticket? Not waiting long enough between lane changes. $65 that I could not afford.
We missed the pharmacy.
Fortunately, there was another store that could do the pharmacy thing until midnight, but we had to call from her home to find it. Also, we were really lucky that she didn't end up needing the medicine before I could get back with it.
Can you charge a cop with (negligent?) homicide because he's busy profiling you when you are trying to get necessary medicine back to your sister?
No extenuating circumstances, no arguing the ticket. I'm sure my black, knee length fur coat and bright aquamarine silk trousers didn't help settle that poor cop's nerves when I got out of the car to explain that my sister's life really was in danger.
I can understand some of the ambiguities here. You have to understand, my
Of course this resolves down to a case of the public being monitored vs. an agency serving the public being monitored, so they're not directly comparable. But you made the comparison, I didn't. I think a pretty good argument could be made that the police should be monitored in this way while the general public shouldn't.
It has already been used abused in Arlington, Virginia and in several Connecticut cities. Sure finding stolen cars sounds great, and that's just what it takes to get the lemmings to give the thumbs up to this technology. But let's be real about the true purpose: to make money. Arlington will tow away your car for overdue library books. In Connecticut, the off-duty marshals -- who get paid a bounty for each car towed away -- trawled the WalMart parking lots to find people with a few overdue parking tickets. A woman in Bridgeport had her car towed out of her driveway while she was home over $85 in parking tickets. Is that the kind of world you want to live in? References: Connecticut Arlington
Well OK that was unprofessional of me to snap at Someone. Who. Writes. This. Way.
The relevant question as far as the Fourth Amendment is concerned, is whether the increased surveillance constitutes a search. Because your Fourth Amendment rights aren't forfeited when you leave your house. Ordinarily a policeman can conduct ordinary surveillance of plates on a public road- within human ability- which is one of the parameters under which the legislature and the courts defined the limits of police surveillance. It has still always been possible, if you behaved yourself, to travel on a public road anonymously, and to get where you were going without anyone knowing.
But not anymore, if the police can conduct this ordinary surveillance with superhuman ability. Many people here are looking at the legality of each atomic operation in isolation, and ignoring the fact that thousands of them can soon be carried out each second- a sudden, vast increase in surveillance efficiency. There may be no way soon to avoid traveling by car without having the government record where you are. We will suddenly find out a lot of stuff about a lot of people. This is a vast new development in the power of law enforcement, and the legislature and judiciary should both be expected to react in some way. The law often fails to prohibit things before they become humanly possible to do- it has to be maintained occasionally.
The right to privacy was originally a right derived from Common Law. We all have heard the expression "An Englishman's home is his Castle." This was the rough summary of the right to privacy enjoyed by freemen in England. Of course, it was an ideal, and was not perfectly executed in practice, but the same could be said of much that goes on in this country.
In the US, much of our law is based on a combination of British Common Law, Statutory, and Constitutional law. And, once a statute is written that enumerates what was previously common law, the statutory meaning takes precedence. The right to privacy was one of those unspoken, but widely accepted theories of British Common Law. But with the publication and ratification of the US Constitution, many areas of Common Law became statutory.
Nowadays, the right to privacy is a statutory one, carved out of the intersection of individual rights derived from the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, and 14th Amendments. For instance, the 5th Amendment gives you the right not to self-incriminate, the 4th gives you protection from unreasonable searches and seizures, and the 14th and 6th amendments insure that you have due process rights and can't be sent to a prison in Cuba. In the middle of the 20th century, the USSC began to interpret the nexus of these rights as creating an area of individual activity that should be free from government interference. Some of the more famous cases, Griswold v. Connecticut and progeny, Roe v. Wade and progeny, found that while the right to privacy was not enumerated, it was implied, in the same way that if you say "I consult with my attorney Monday through Sunday," you have implied that you also talk to your attorney Tuesday, Wednesday, etc.
While it may be true that you can't travel on public roads with an expectation of privacy, it was always implied that you can travel in public without an expectation of having your travel being monitored. Especially not with God-like powers. Nobody even envisioned such a thing. And let's be realistic here. The only conceivable purpose of a monitoring system designed to track motorists in their daily movements is to effectively conduct surveillance on all citizens in the most effective way possible. It's clearly beyond the pale.
The biggest problem here is that cops are quite often worse than the criminals they hunt. That and the crime ring the have going with the lower court judges and prosecutors. I am FAR less concerned with my car being stolen than I am about being targeted by the police AGAIN. They will make your life hell and if you stand up to them they will stomp on you.
They say a conservative is a liberal that hasn't been mugged yet and that a liberal is a conservative that hasn't been beaten up by the police yet. However, the sad reality is that most of us harmless people are constantly juggling which criminal is more dangerous. Well, check your pain and suffering count sometime and I think you'll find that government criminals have your average thief and mugger beat by a long shot.
If the police were generally a bunch of guys who really lived to protect and serve and defend the rights of the community, it'd be great. They're not though. A few are, but they're the exception to the bullies or even the average types that have felt the taint of authority and let it go to their heads.
I don't think the ACLU is some bastion of greatness--their stand on gun rights is asinine--but just because something makes it easier to "catch criminals" doesn't mean it's a "good thing" and it doesn't even mean it's going to protect anyone.
Oh yeah, one more thing:
"Let's roll back though. These are license plates. Plates that are government issue, on highways that are government funded (yes by the taxes of the people, but government funded) and a device that is government controlled. So where's the problem?"
I'd say the government issued plates are the first problem. And yeah, the roads are government funded, but who owns the government? They're PUBLIC roads, NOT government roads. They're MY roads as a tenant in common. Why in the hell do I have to ask my SERVANT pretty please to use MY roads and get a plate from them? And roads get paid for if you use them. For the time being gas taxes do a good job of being a fair user fee. The more you use, the more you pay.
I might not have the same expectation of privacy on road as I do in my house, just as there's a big difference between a PUBLIC room like a living room and my bedroom. However, I don't want a camera on every street corner and all my movements tracked just because it might catch a few car thieves. It's just not worth it. Especially given the direction it WILL go and HAS historically gone. Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. It will ALWAYS be used by whoever is in power to suppress opposition.
It's called the right to travel. It moves with the common, majority travel means of each age from when it was recognized.
.court system, it didn't get extended properly to cars, mass transit and airplanes. Which is part of the reason we are in the pickle we are in.
.gov on a daily basis.
So first it was horses. Then railways. However, due to the myopia of the
You are arrogantly in error and actually part of the problem. You, like so many others, don't understand that in a country based on freedom, having a Bill of Rights that encodes the Ninth and Tenth and now 14th amendments, that virtually all your activities are mostly rights and are violated by
The sooner we return to a more absolutist view of individual rights the sooner we will get out from under this fascism-lite that is being foisted on us.
There's a reason that many crimes in the US elicit such a harsh punishment, and that everything from bouncing a check to picking your nose in public is now a felony (ignoring the corporate-prison industry and other such arguments for the moment); the long prison sentences and exorbitant fines are thought to be a deterrent to other nare-do-wells who would now think twice before committing the same crime and getting the same sentence.
But part of the deterrence theory of punishment is premised on the fact that law enforcement can't catch all the criminals. To make up for the fact that there will always be Joe Robber or Tina Car-Thief who gets away with something, the hope is that they will be deterred from breaking the law in fear of receiving the harsh punishment.
The whole punishment-as-deterrent system will become quite warped however, when cops across the nation can cruise around scanning hundreds of license plates and arrest X number more felons than before. As law enforcement is armed with new technology, do the punishments ever decrease despite law enforcement being more effective in catching the bad guys?
To take this thought to the extreme: if police suddenly developed new drug-detecting technology that could scan people's surrounding air-mass as they walked out in public and determine with certainty whether they were carrying illegal drugs, should we still retain the harsh sentences that many states do for simple drug possession?
The ACLU will protect criminals at all costs, they don't care that the cars are on public roads, and that police calling them in is no different. For quite some time the ACLU has moved away from protecting the rights of people to being a liberal shill.
Are you saying it is only liberals that care about the U.S. Constitution with its "thing" against warrantless search and seizures? The ACLU will try to make the government follow the constitution at all costs!
Would you rather some of those rights be amended?
So what they are doing is creating a database of where all cars have been, whether they belong to the guilty or the innocent. When I read the summary I thought, "Wow, the ACLU has crossed the line here"; which made me suspicious, usually when folks want to vilify the ACLU they leave out key facts like this one. Read the article, this tidbit is buried in the second to last paragraph and is likely key to the ACLU's concerns.
While technically its not doing anything that crosses a line, noting plates and locations of cars in the public, technology is enabling some very concerning capabilities that need to be addressed. Distrust of the government isn't just a liberal thing, its an American thing.
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
Uhhh, no.
If you had any idea of how many laws are on the books you would realize it isn't possible to do ANYTHING without breaking some law. Also you KNOW that you have cut little corners each day and probably more serious corners when you were younger. Maybe you step out of the marked crosswalk before reaching the curb. (jaywalking $75) Possibly you dropped your receipt when you were trying to put it in your pocket. (littering $1000) Did you ever do something like egging a car when you were a kid? (we used snowballs)
Technology exists and is coming that will let every waking moment be scrutinized in a fashion that the laws never intended. (facial recognition, object recognition, biometric identification...) If you don't think the government will try to do it you haven't been paying attention. Automated enforcement isn't about safety. It is about generating revenue.
The big example: "But what about speed cameras?" you say. You have been brainwashed. Everyone runs around saying that going faster is dangerous. Do you have any proof. "Speed Kills", but at what speed do I suddenly die? In the 80's the NHTSA commissioned a study to show how many lives 10 years of the 55mph limit had saved. The release of the report was delayed 18 months.
Why?
Because they kept getting the 'wrong' results. After playing with the numbers for an additional 18 months the best they could spin the numbers were that if they completely ignored better safety technology, better tires, etc... and assumed that ALL reductions in fatalities were only because of reduced speed the grand total was:
For every 150 man/years of time lost on the freeways they could come up with 1 life saved.
Now we all know that improved tires and improved car safety had to improve things more then that paltry sum so why didn't we get a better result? Because we had bred a generation of drivers that were so untalented (brain dead) that they were unsafe at 55. If you raised the tire pressure of all the tires on the road by less then 2 psi you would come up with a larger savings of lives!
So when you actually analyze the data in the report you find that the safest speed to drive on the freeway is 10 to 15 mph faster then the general flow of traffic. This won't improve revenue generation so they aren't going to advertise this. If they really wanted to improve safety they would become hardcore about little right-of-way violations or lack of attention, but they are too hard to enforce. Remember... Your government thinks you are their source of income. You are giving Them money instead of Them spending Your money. If as a group we don't stop them we will be living in a fascist state beyond anything that Orwell could have imagined.
Why? Because it will be economically possible for your government to do it.
Oh, and you still won't be safe. Safe is an illusion. Grow up. You are mortal and you are going to die. (God didn't screw up there.) Get over it. A 'safe' life isn't worth living. A lot of the experiences that people treasure over their lives are special BECAUSE they weren't 'safe'.
Hardly. The ACLU is in fact protecting the law abiding, hard working, common citizen and their civil liberties. The very same civil liberties that the founding fathers fought so hard to establish. There's no excuse for the government to keep a list of law abiding citizens whereabouts indefinitely.
Totalitarian states often have less crime and are "safer" for those who follow the rules. Perhaps you would be more interested in that sort of government.
...you rarely hear people screeching about the video records and databases kept by private toll operations.
Are they somehow inherently more trustworthy? Do people think they don't share that information with government when demanded?
This isn't terribly different, imho.
Just because you have the freedom of movement, doesn't mean it has to be in a car. No one's stopping you from walking.
The way I read that is: "all liberals are criminals"
Yeah, it's hard to believe that an organization called the "American Civil Liberties Union" would have a liberal bias.
BTW, look up the word liberalism, and you will see that "Liberal" does not mean "Democrat". It is the idea that the individual is the most important part of society. That what is good for you and I, is more important than what is good of the nation. This is in contrast to totalitarianism, communism, and fascism; which all espouse the importance of society over the importance of the individual.
Obviously, a liberal society is going to have more trouble catching criminals. But that is the price we pay for our freedom.
My problem with the ACLU is that they aren't liberal enough. Sure they defend my right to surf the web (or drive) anonymously. But where are they when I decide I want to open a bar (my own private property) and put a sign on the door that says "This is not a health club, if you don't like cigarette smoke, I suggest you go somewhere else."
I just can't wait till I get pulled over on my way to work, and hauled off to jail because of one of these cameras, because someone reported me for smoking within 20ft of the the door to a bar.
LOL. I have a good example of my feelings:
:-)
My last theft experience:
Robber:
Stole 2 wheels and hubcaps from my car.
Total cost $800
Police:
Towed my car for being on a jack without wheels (left by the robbers like that):
$30 ticket
$70 towing fee
$270 damage to the car by towing.
Police cost: $370.
So in my instance. The police was only around half as bad as the robbers.
------ Warning! You are too close!
2) Does the person have an expectation of privacy? For instance, a closed telephone booth is in a public place, but grants a person an expectation of privacy and law enforcement thus needs a warrant to record a conversation therein.
The expectation of privacy is why it's illegal in Michigan (not sure if it's local or national) to use directional microphones to pick up conversations, even in public places, when there is no obvious listener within normal hearing range.
DO ordinary citizens have an expectation that the whereabouts of their car is private when there is no cop watching? Do they have an expectation that, even if a cop IS watching, after a month or so he won't remember every license plate that went by without something special to make it "stick in his mind" or end up on a report (like a car involved in an infraction or a plate on a "be on the lookout" list)?
If they do, the case could go for the ACLU on the same grounds. Maybe so far that the recording of the data would be prohibited without a warrant or a B.O.L.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way