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Minneapolis Police Catalog License Plates and Location Data
tripleevenfall writes "The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports that Minneapolis police used automated scanning technology to log location data for over 800,000 license plates in June alone, with 4.9 million scans having taken place this year. The data includes the date, time, and location where the plate was seen. Worse, it appears this data is compiled and stored for up to a year and is disclosed to anyone who asks for it."
And nothing will come of it. The police will continue to do things exactly as they are now, and we'll continue to lose more of our privacy and civil rights every day. Oh, perhaps they'll throw us a bone by making it harder (although not impossible) to obtain their stored data, but the data will still be there. They won't give up that "valuable tool in the War Against Crime" and the courts will side with them, as they always have when this sort of thing comes up.
Start voting for politicians who will protect your rights and stop voting for just whichever idiot happens to be a member of your party.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
> Start voting for politicians who will protect your rights
I'd love to. Show me one
-------
1. Enjoy your job
2. Make lots of money
3. Work within the law
Choose any two.
Step 1 : Request data on every member of the City Council (or whatever the local government equivalent is).
Step 2 : Find out who's "daily routine" includes frequent trips to a local strip club, and who is spending the night at locations not their home.
Step 3 : Publish anonymously in wikileaks.
Step 4 : Watch this policy change amazingly fast.
Most people don't care about privacy as much as they care about wedge issues. Sad but true.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Oh, perhaps they'll throw us a bone by making it harder (although not impossible) to obtain their stored data
We need to go the other way. If the police gather public data, then it needs to be made totally public, searchable by anyone. That way, (a) everyone's aware of exactly what data is being collected, and (b) everyone is equally subject to surveillance, whether they're police, politicians, etc.
Except for the fact that the masses aren't sick of this crap though. And they system makes it impossible for any third-party candidate to win.
Ask the average Joe why they are voting for Romney/Obama chances are it is because Obama is worse than Romney or vice versa. No one really -likes- Obama, no one really -likes- Romney. About the only politicians that people actually like are the "long shot" candidates like Ron Paul, Gary Johnson and Jill Stein. Naturally, they have no shot in winning because A) The US election system is based on having a medium sized state government and a tiny federal government, a far cry from the large state governments and colossal federal government we have today B) The American people simply don't care about any real changes they just care about ZOMG ROMNEY DOESN'T SUPPORT GAY MARRAGE! MUST VOTE OBAMA!!!! And ZOMG OBAMA SUPPORTS ABORTION MUST VOTE ROMNEY!!! Rather than any intelligent debate on the real issues.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Can I put a camera on my front yard that records license plates, and then feed that into a computer system that creates similar logs?.
Can I put a camera on the roof of my business to do this?
Can Starbucks or McDonalds put a camera on top of every store location and track vehicles nationwide?
Someone should log the Minneapolis police; somehow I think they'd object.
Actually, in Minnesota, you can be charged with a felony for giving people any warning of an upcoming speed trap. You can also be charged with one for providing information about the police' whereabouts. The first thing authority does whenever it violates your privacy is exempt itself from similar treatment. This is how you periodically hear about an off-duty police officer in plain clothes getting into a fight with someone -- even if they were the aggressor, and even if they fail to identify themselves as a police officer, the other person still goes to jail for many years for striking an officer. Or that case of how a man accidentally bumped into the President in a crowd, while waiting to shake his hand, and was then carried away by the Secret Service and held without a trial for several months because he "made a physical threat against the President."
Government agents can abuse whomever they want, whenever they want, for as long as they want. And you will take it, Citizen, or things will get even worse for you... as well as your family and friends.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
The system is based on an ideal America which was shattered following the civil war. The idea is that most laws affecting you and me would be passed in local and state elections where there is more impact and more ability for the common man to influence change, along with more ability to vote with your feet. The federal government would be in charge of doing "big picture things" such as tariff rates, wars and foreign affairs. Their impact on the individual would be normally very low. There was competition built in, the states would choose the senate and the masses the house, meaning that laws that threatened state sovereignty would more than likely be blocked by the senate. When it came to the laws people wanted, it could easily be decided by a state by state basis where one industry or product dominated their economy. Also, political parties were minor.
Today we don't have that, senators are directly elected by the masses, the federal government affects people a lot more than the state government does, no state has a single industry anymore, sure, there are a lot of farms in Kansas but there are also huge technology firms (Garmin and Sprint for example).
There are several improvements that the US could do, such as proportional representation by party (like what much of Europe does) to let everyone's voice be heard, especially since a lot of ideas aren't geographically based. And while I'm not sure what the political benefits would be, I would like to see something like Prime Minister's questions done with the US.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
This "ideal America". It actually existed? Despite the Indian wars, slavery, The Aliens and Sedition act, whiskey (and various others) rebellion, etc.? Might be a good idea to reread your history there. It wasn't exactly peaches and cream between the states and the feds then either. All things considered, I feel better off in the here and now. Either way, the "system" cannot prevent us from electing who we wish into office, not until somebody puts a gun to our heads and tells us who to vote for.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”