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ICE License-Plate Tracking Plan Withdrawn Amid Outcry About Privacy
An anonymous reader writes "Homeland security officials on Wednesday abruptly shelved a proposal to build a national database of license-plate scans after criticism from privacy advocates. The proposal, which had been posted online last week by the office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, sought a contractor who could establish a searchable database of license plates, with the times and locations where they were spotted by traffic cameras and other sources. But in a statement late Wednesday, the department announced a reversal. 'The solicitation, which was posted without the awareness of ICE leadership, has been canceled,' said spokeswoman Gillian Christensen. 'While we continue to support a range of technologies to help meet our law enforcement mission, this solicitation will be reviewed to ensure the path forward appropriately meets our operational needs.'"
Yeah right, withdrawn. To be resubmitted covertly as something else, hopefully covered by "national security". Go on, celebrate your "victory".
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Driving may be a priveledge. Privacy is a right.
The former can be used to infringe upon the latter.
Actually, driving is neither a privelege nor a priveledge. It's a privilege.
Is walking a privilege too? If you were walking somewhere and cameras were tracking you throughout, I think you'd be very uncomfortable. Don't see that being inside a car should change anything.
It is a right to be able to move freely from point A to point B without being tracked. It is a privilege to be able to drive between those points instead of having to walk or ride horseback. The privilege of driving does not negate the right to privacy because of the mode of transportation.
If one thing the Edward Snowden releases have shown, is if the authorities are telling you they plan to do something, they are probably already doing it.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
I am so fucking tired of this mantra.
Being able to practicably exercise your mobility rights is a privilege? Being able to practicably exercise your right to live, work and be a contributing member of society is a privilege? Until we have completely ubiquitous transportation, either by public transit or autonomous cars, driving needs to be a right.
What good are your other rights if they are subject to revokable privileges?
(p.s. on a tangential note, driving also ought to be ingrained as a more responsible endeavor than most people believe it to be, not just that annoying thing they have to do between A and B. Our driver training standards in North America are laughably pathetic... you may die of shock when you learn about the years of continual training required in countries where they take driving seriously)
Like anyone would truly believe an underling could solicit such a bid without direction from the ICE leadership.
The bastards are out of control.
-- kjh
It doesn't bother you because you're only aware of it in an abstract sense. I've got a proposal. Let the government track people all they want, as long as they periodically send people the government's records of where they've been. You'd soon see outrage of historic proportions.
We've been getting along fine for a long time now without a national database of license-plate scans.
Have we? Have we really? You think Iraqi and Afghani terrorists flying commercial jetliners into skyscrapers and federal buildings is "fine"? You think jihadis smuggling weapons of mass destruction onto airplanes in their shoes and their underwear is "fine"?
You, citizen, are the reason this great nation is crumbling before the henchmen of Allah! Why do you hate America so much?
[Disclaimer: It's satire. Save yourself the whoosh.]
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
I could criticize you for posting something like that, but I'm sure you're only following orders.
What they really shelved was the public acknowledgement of the desire for the program, I doubt they shelved the plans.
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The false equivalence between tracking someone's location while they are in public and illegal search and seizure makes your comment hardly worth replying to.
It's not false equivalence, it's perfectly in line with the SCOTUS ruling that "tracking someone's location" constitutes a search.
Are you suggesting that when you are in a public park, being filmed by security cameras is a violation of your 4th amendment rights?
Now, you want to talk about false equivalence...
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
The governement does not own the highway, the public owns the highway in common. The government is nothing more than a steward of the public's property and if the public decides to change that they certainly may. As a matter of fact the public doesn't need the governments consent to change how our highways are managed either; the public can vote and make it happen.
load "$",8,1
I don't know where this "driving is a privilege" nonsense comes from. If "driving is a privilege", why not walking or breathing? They are all activities people engage in while on public lands. Unless there is a compelling public interest, government has no authority to restrict what we do on public lands; there simply is no constitutional basis for it. The restrictions we impose on driving needed to be justified by safety and environmental concerns.
But you're right: you have no expectation of privacy on public roadways. That means any private party can, if they so choose, collect your license plate information and follow you around. But the government is not a private party; it is more restricted in what it can and should be allowed to do. Police can't just follow you around without cause, and they shouldn't be allowed to collect license plate information without cause either.
So just what element is private about a plate openly displayed in public
What's private is the history of where that plate has been - tracking a person's car without a warrant is illegal, per the SCOTUS.
Shit, man, in these days of parallel construction it amazes me I have to respond to questions like this...
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Why do you hate freedom to that degree? Your arguments have been debunked time and time again.
So, if you don't like having your licensed plate tracked by government, DON'T FUCKING DRIVE. You have no right to drive in the first place.
You have no right to fly on a plane, so rejoice as the TSA thugs molest you.
If the government can violate your rights simply because you choose to participate in some activity that's not strictly necessary and/or is a privilege, you have no rights; you have tyranny.
Thank you Dave Raggett
The very purpose of a license plate is to make public the identity of a specific vehicle. Trying to say that govenrment or anyone else can not keep records of where a plate is noticed is absurd.
Bullshit, once again. You government drones need to think for yourselves. It is not absurd to say that while it is possible for people to see you in public places, the government shouldn't be installing surveillance equipment everywhere. The latter is what people want to be free from.
It does not track the owner at all. The tag identifies the car and not the driver.
But it tracks the car, which is bad enough. In my case, it would be more than enough to track me.
Worse yet one doesn't even need a plate unless one uses the vehicle on a public road.
Which nearly everyone does. A moot point.
So just what element is private about a plate openly displayed in public.
The part where we step up and demand that the government not install surveillance equipment in public places, which is a far cry from someone merely seeing you.
If I notice a suspicious vehicle can i write down the plate number just in case something happens?
Can your worthless little mind not comprehend the difference between surveillance equipment that belongs to a single source recording everything automatically and someone writing something down? Really? And you're on Slashdot? Vanish!
The privacy nuts get way over the edge these days.
No, you government drones go way over the edge. You are literally making this country worse. We have people like you to thank for the TSA, the NSA spying, stop-and-frisk, free speech zones, constitution-free zones, DUI checkpoints, and the hundreds of other small ways the government is violating our rights. Get rid of your trust for the government. Get rid of your desire to justify everything the government does.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Yes, license plates are for identifying cars. The 4th Amendment, however, was preserved due to the sheer volume of cars out there. A government official (police, FBI, etc.) had to "manually" focus on a single car at a time when there was a reason to pay attention to it. The extra work required to track too many people at once protected the 4th amendment.
Today's tech, however, can now passively track everyone with no effort - which blows away that illusory wall between the 4th amendment and license plate tracking. The moment some government official decides that they're a "person of interest" (whatever that means to that official at that time), they have a practically infinite amount of data to use against them already.
Why am I a "privacy nut" for seeing this problem and talking about it?
More importantly, why are you not concerned with this overreach?
Privacy nuts are usually branded as paranoid against the government, but I submit that people who call us "privacy nuts" have their own deep seated and subtle paranoia of their neighbors. If one really thinks about it, why else would one allow the government to track everyone everywhere in their cars if they weren't worried about some "what if" scenario where the guy next door could be "evil" and could hurt them?
They can use that to investigate crimes (who was in area X) (if you said your alibi was Y, why were you driving the other way?). If your goal is to prevent crime and to make investigation in the aftermath of an attack easier, you want this.
It does, obviously, come at a privacy cost. But realistically, we're already living with it, and they're not going to stop unless a court orders them to--which is somewhat unlikely.
Sure, and it would be easier to solve crimes if every citizen had a chip implanted that would track all their movements and record everything they do. To some people, freedom is a lot more important than solving every crime or "feeling safe" from terrorists. Unfortunately, the American people as a whole do not feel that way. They welcome more government survellience, take a look at polls conducted after the Snowden revelations - the majority doesn't see a problem with it because they think the NSA is making them safe from terrorism. One's chances of being injured or killed in a terrorist attack are very low but we spend billions and billions of dollars to fight this near non-existent threat. For the price we are paying for DHS we could do things that would actually make people safer instead of just making them feel safer.
Enigma
They are easy to spot for goodness sake, no need for tracking license plates.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Translation: "We'll put this aside for now because you caught us out and pitched a fit about it like the little criminals we believe you all to be, and we'll wait until you inevitably forget about it, then we'll re-word it, hide it in some other, completely unassociated legislation, where it'll be voted on in the middle of the night and passed, then signed into law quietly without so much as a whisper from the media."
Precisely: that's the common trope. Was I the only one struck by the fact that Snowden's revelations seemed to be the exact goals of the Total Information Awareness program? You know, the program that was so publicly canceled after the massive outcry?
"Maybe what they were really protesting was the name of the program! Let's just call it something else!"
It's shit like this that makes me unhappy to live in a representative democracy. At least in a dictatorship the rulers don't pretend that they are following the will of the populace. As we have all seen demonstrated repeatedly, in both of these "polar opposite forms" of government, the government does what it pleases no matter what the citizenry wants.
I have no expectation of privacy on public roadways. If someone wants to hang out behind a cactus with a 400mm lens and take pictures of me as I drive by then that's his right, so long as he is somewhere he is legally allowed to be and I'm in public.
The question is whether or not the government should be doing it. The government doesn't get to do anything it has a legal right to do; the government does whatever we tell it to do and not a thing more. Is it unconstitutional for the cops to take pictures of motorists' cars? No. Should we let them do it? No.
No, it a very well thought out document that very much defines the social contract and legal framework in the United States of America. To ignore it is to say that the law is whatever anyone says it is. For you liberals that like things as hey are now, wait a few years and "anyone" might be extremely ruthless and dislike liberals very much. If the constitution is simply "a stupid piece of paper" and means nothing, then said ruthless person could actually kill all liberals with no consequences until someone even more ruthless steps up.
What a moronic statement.