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DEA Wants To Install License Plate Scanners and Retain Data for Two Years
An anonymous reader writes with news that might make privacy advocates a bit uneasy. From the article: "Everyone driving on Interstate 15 in southwest Utah may soon have their license plate scanned by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. The DEA and two sheriffs are asking permission to install stationary license plate scanners on the freeway in Beaver and Washington counties. The primary purpose would be to catch or build cases against drug traffickers, but at a Utah Legislature committee meeting Wednesday, the sheriffs and a DEA representative described how the scanners also could be used to catch kidnappers and violent criminals. That, however, wasn't the concern of skeptical legislators on the Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Interim Committee. They were worried about the DEA storing the data for two years and who would be able to access it."
First they store it for 2 years.. which is terrifying enough.. but we all know that will become 3 years.. then 4.. and before we know it, they'll be storying license plate scans for centuries.
At least future historians will have detailed records on who drove over Interstate 15 in southwest Utah in the 21's century. Of course they'll probably assume the plates represent our names or something..
"...and it is on government property."
You meant PUBLIC property. Right?
RIGHT?
The thing you aren't seeing and that isn't explained in the article is why. They want to cross-reference vehicles that come through the area multiple times and don't live in the area. They will then use this in a probable cause warrant.
Think about that and what it means.
The obvious implications bother me. When I was driving from northwest Arizona to western Colorado on a regular basis, I regularly drove I-15. Interstate highways are supposed to make interstate movement easier, right? So driving interstate now makes me a suspected drug smuggler? Just fucking lovely. How many thousands of vehicles drive I-15? Of those thousands, how many are drug smugglers? And how many of those drug smugglers are smart enough to change vehicles between runs?
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
How will this turn out? Let's see.
Eenie meenie, chili beanie...
1) DEA installs license plate scanners.
2) Police stop vehicles which fit the profile of drug smuggling.
3) Years pass. Many, many innocent people's rights are violated
4) Police find drugs in some stopped car, arrests are made.
5) Plaintiffs complain that police had no right to stop car based on profile
6) ACLU gets involved. Appeal goes to federal court.
7) Federal court overturns conviction on grounds that there was no probable cause (or not - this is Utah, after all)
8) Case is presented to supreme court. Supreme court upholds 4th amendment, license scanning is not probable cause.
End result: Many innocent people have their rights violated, some arrests are made. About a million dollars are spent on one case to bring it to the supreme court, ten years of some person's life is lost fighting it, and eventually the DEA is told to stop. During this time, drug smuggling is reduced by less than one part in a million. Millions of dollars spent on the system are wasted when the system is dismantled.
For once, can we please just cut to the chase? Just stop these idiots from the beginning and a whole lot of people will save a whole lot of effort, money, time, and grief.
Ahh yes, the ardent American Citizen, sitting there able to do nothing while the value of his shitty little Dollar drops year after year, his bankers and his own Government are blatantly and openly lying and stealing from him and doing and end run around his precious Constitutional Rights with Wars on Ideas -- and he clings to his gun saying "I can at least defend myself from them if it gets to that" -- ignoring the fact that his Government has enough weaponry to quickly turn any Popular Revolt with their tiny pea shooters into a grease stain in short order -- and even then, every Congressional session has new talk of attempts to enact laws to outlaw or further restrict ownership of peashooters -- just be on the safe side, it is after all best not to take risks.
What will it take for the Ardent American to use his precious armaments? Government Cameras up his ass? Face it -- you are a slave. Go to school, pass your exams, indenture yourself to a College, get a job, be useful, be productive, consume and create more consumers to replace you.
Your rights, your guns, your "freedom" -- are little more than a novelty meant to humor you.
More wars on American Citizens have been enacted in the last 30 years than wars against enemy nations.
Time to get rid of the DEA. They just keep thinking up new ways to pry into our lives with the intent of ensuring the purity of our bodily fluids.
Billions of taxpayers' dollars are spent on these yahoos every year and what do we get out of it. Money spent so they can set quotas on the production of medicines and now we have shortages of common medications for the treatment of pain, cancer, and mental disorders.
This has become very personal for me. Because of an injury from military service I get my pain medications from the VA clinic in town. Since it is a controlled substance the physician can only write a prescription for 30 days. The VA clinic has a nice system where I just go into the office and fill out a form so the physician can rubber stamp the prescription for the next month. I have it pretty good, relatively. I feel sorry for those that don't have their meds handed out by the government.
I can only imagine what someone else, someone that has to get the same meds by a private entity. Would they have to schedule a face to face examination with their physician every month? How much would that cost them? Would any insurance company cover the cost of providing a monthly supply of narcotics for a condition that existed prior to signing up for their plan?
I've heard all kinds of horror stories of people that happened to be caught with a pill bottle, or just a single pill, that a friend or relative had forgotten and was left in the person's car, bag, or apartment. Being in the possession of a controlled substance is a felony unless prescribed by a physician. Do we want people to get sent to prison for five years because they tried to return the medicine that grandma left behind when she went to see her grandkids?
FTFA:
"I'll be quite frank with you," Oda told Newcomb. "A lot of us in Utah don't trust the federal government."
I don't either. They claim they won't use this database for the purpose of enforcing misdemeanors and traffic violations. What keeps them from breaking this promise?
I can see this already, someone will get the great idea of placing two of these along a well traveled route. The computers controlling these two stations will be connected together to compute the average speed of anyone that crosses these two points. Automatic speeding tickets will get mailed to the registered owner of the vehicle.
I'd bet dollars to donuts that would happen if these license plate scanners get installed.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Defund the DEA. People are going to get high. The only real questions are:
1. How much will it cost to treat the health problems that causes?
2. Who is going to get the money from selling the drugs?
With DEA in place, the answer to question (2) is that the DEA splits it with cartels and some small fish while raping the taxpayers. The health costs are born by everybody else. Tax the drugs, and the money will go to the government. Drugs (in the absence of health problems) become a profit center for the people instead of a cost center. Of course some drugs will cause health problems. The rational answer to that is to figure out how much it costs to treat them, and tax the drugs enough to pay for them. There might be some cases where the tax isn't enough to cover the health costs without re-creating the black market. I really don't know. Does the tax on alcohol, a perfectly legal substance, come anywhere near paying for the health problems it causes? What about the health problems it helps (yep, it's good in moderation). Some drugs will bring in more money than they cost in health problems (pot). Others will probably not bring in much money, but will cause serious health problems (meth). It ought to be possible to balance the cash cows against the losers. First things first though:
Defund the DEA, reduce the national debt, quit wasting time, money, and lives.
I'm a resident of Utah. The DEA has been talking about stuff like this literally since the technology came about. I'm not surprised they are trying to get the Legislature to authorize it, they just had to get a county to buy in on it. But I am surprised it took them this long to find a county willing. Frankly the counties do a LOT of seizures and probably make a tidy profit on it but these cameras are going to make the DEA more interested in letting people pass so they can track them later so that's probably why it took this long to get a county to buy in on the plan.
I-15 through Utah carries something like 60% of the drugs coming out of LA destined for the rest of the country. You might not be familiar with the geography but unless you are willing to drive on 300+ miles of dirt roads I-15 and I-10 are the only reasonable transit corridors out of LA to the rest of the country (unless you wanna drive from LA to Sacramento and come out on I-80). There just aren't that many roads across the Sierra's and as a result I-15 before it reaches I-70 becomes an ideal candidate for scanning and data collection. All you'd need is another camera in Arizona before it reaches Phoenix and you could cover almost 100% of the drug traffic out of southern California.
As I said, there's been articles every few months in the local papers talking about it for the last couple decades with a big focus on tracking repeat users of the highway the last few years. As soon as I saw the report it wasn't hard to put it together.
America is controlled by Morons. There, I fixed it for you.