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L.A. Police: All Cars In L.A. Are Under Investigation
An anonymous reader writes with a link to an article by the EFF's Jennifer Lynch, carried by Gizmodo, which reports that the L.A. Police Department and L.A. Sheriff's Department "took a novel approach in the briefs they filed in EFF and the ACLU of Southern California's California Public Records Act lawsuit seeking a week's worth of Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) data. They have argued that 'All [license plate] data is investigatory.' The fact that it may never be associated with a specific crime doesn't matter. This argument is completely counter to our criminal justice system, in which we assume law enforcement will not conduct an investigation unless there are some indicia of criminal activity. In fact, the Fourth Amendment was added to the U.S. Constitution exactly to prevent law enforcement from conducting mass, suspicionless investigations under "general warrants" that targeted no specific person or place and never expired.
ALPR systems operate in just this way. The cameras are not triggered by any suspicion of criminal wrongdoing; instead, they automatically and indiscriminately photograph all license plates (and cars) that come into view. ... Taken to an extreme, the agencies' arguments would allow law enforcement to conduct around-the-clock surveillance on every aspect of our lives and store those records indefinitely on the off-chance they may aid in solving a crime at some previously undetermined date in the future. If the court accepts their arguments, the agencies would then be able to hide all this data from the public."
ALPR systems operate in just this way. The cameras are not triggered by any suspicion of criminal wrongdoing; instead, they automatically and indiscriminately photograph all license plates (and cars) that come into view. ... Taken to an extreme, the agencies' arguments would allow law enforcement to conduct around-the-clock surveillance on every aspect of our lives and store those records indefinitely on the off-chance they may aid in solving a crime at some previously undetermined date in the future. If the court accepts their arguments, the agencies would then be able to hide all this data from the public."
I'm going to take a wild guess that claim is going to get bounced out of court. Sounds more like a stalling tactic than a real defense. Unless the L.A. PD is going to try and make the case that everyone in L.A. is suspicious, in which case they might have a point.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
is dying of thirst
You can have my SIG when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
Minority Report Anyone?
Keep voting more tax increases and bigger government.
Enjoy the repression you begged for!
LA's cops department is notoriously incompetent -- need I quote chapter and verse? -- and, perhaps the civic leaders see this as a substitute for real police work.
If so, perhaps the courts, in their infinite wisdom, will rein these devices in. If not, well, who cares? They can track my movements through my iPad or mobile phone anyway.
Where do I sign up for the tour of the Gulag?
...until we decide to charge you with something.
This is a police force where the Chief of Police in the 1990's, Daryl F. Gates, said that casual drug users "ought to be taken out and shot," which prescription being specifically aimed at those "who blast some pot on a casual basis."
Mr. Gates is no long with us, but not because of any repudiation by the LAPD.
and everything else will be fine!"
Or at least that seems to the position of the powers-that-be. But they never seem to want the wisdom of God.
*beat*
Maybe I should have read the article.
Every time "the state" does something to violate personal freedoms, ask yourself, do you question enough everything they do? They start small but it all leads to things like this or worse. To keep your "questioning muscle" read some extreme libertarian blogs regularly, like Christopher Cantwell's (google it).
The 4th Amendment's warrant requirement only applies when there is an expectation of privacy. There is no expectation of privacy when you are out in public, nor in anything that can be investigated with plain human senses (plain view, plain smell, etc).
When operating a motor vehicle on a public roadway, there is no expectation of privacy attached to your license plate number, or your location. A police officer can follow you around all day without a warrant, and run as many checks on your plate number as he desires, and make a note of everywhere you go.
An officer does not need a warrant to listen to a conversation you have with someone at a park, nor does he need a warrant to take a sniff of whatever it is you're smoking outside your office.
You guys need to get over yourselves.
Apparently, all they need to do is tell the Court that they've signed an NDA with the manufacturer of these ANPR cameras. Seems to be working pretty well for police departments all across the US who are sucking up thousands? millions? of completely innocent parties' cellphone connections via "StingRay" devices.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
That's the new reality. The laws just haven't been changed yet. Yet. And yes, the terrorists have won, by making the government and law enforcement do the terrorism for them.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Reasonable suspicion or probable cause first?
Nothing is reasonable about scanning every single license plate you see. If the camera could scan the color/make/year etc of the vehicle, the compare that against known stolen vehicles or vehicles used in other crimes FIRST, then I could see them scanning the plate and doing further investigation, but just blindly scanning plates and recording their location is very disturbing.
Taxes: something used AGAINST you.
Remember that next time you vote.
Of course, the alternative is that they release all of the data they collect, thereby publishing the public movements of everyone in LA to anyone with nefarious purposes.
Not storing the data is of course out of the question.
--why?
...to get/make an IR License Plate frame.
The tag on a car is in public view. Therefore anyone has the right to view the tag and even note the when and where of such a tag. Think about it a little bit. When a man or woman hires a private detective to follow a wayward spouse and report back on where they visit that has never been considered illegal and ordinary people were free to do such things and not just cops. This all really points to records at the county courthouse debates. Once electronic postings of those records became common people complained becasue it was now too easy for people to search public records. The idea that one must go to the courthouse in person to see the exact same records is absurd. Now the real complaint is that it is now too easy for the cops to have records of where every car is at all times. Here is the real problem. Criminals sometimes plan crimes. If a man wants to pull a stick up and he is short and skinny with black hair he may leave his car near the crime scene and have a person who is taller, blond and heavy set pick up his car later. But if the cops use computer power they can look back and see all the cars parked fairly near an armed robberies over time and get a very solid lead on who is doing the crimes. Changing who picks the car up will no longer work as a tactic for such crimes. We do not want to throw out tools that help catch criminals.
This is an age old tactic by ALL authoritarian States. Instead of playing to the Law, you play to the ignorance of the sheeple, like one of those TV shows where the prosecutors always win by bending written laws to serve their new agenda. The sheeple think 'law' is all about clever people doing 'TRICKSY' things- and that the written law is designed to be so ambiguous, no-one knows what it actually means- hence the need for lawyers. This FALLACY is actively promoted in the mainstream media whenever possible.
Every alpha knows the US Supreme Court will shoot down this particular abuse of Law in a microsecond, but every alpha knows those abusing the law ALSO know this. So why the charade? Because such abuses are NOT designed to be lawful, but effective for a period, and also influential in changing the perception of the sheeple as to their rights, so in the not so distant future the written law can actually be changed to match the current abuse.
All major US police forces are instructed to IGNORE constitutional law. They are told that their political masters will protect those involved against any possible legal or civil penalty. They are told that the ONLY limiting factor as to the level of their abusive behaviour should be what the general public will 'safely' tolerate.
Recently, you see these ideas in play with the near universal harassment of those citizens who attempt to record the actions of police people. Despite the 100% clear ruling of the Supreme Court on the issue, most States give their uniformed thugs carte-blanche to arrest citizens who film the police. Notice I said ARREST. Of course, vanishingly few victims of these police-state abuses are successfully prosecuted in court, but that isn't the point. The arrest itself and threat of legal action acts as a massive disincentive to the average citizen to record footage of abusive behaviour by uniformed 'officers', and THAT is the point.
One can now watch video footage taken by the police themselves, showing absolute, inexcusable executions of American citizens, but not one video has led to the conviction of any police 'officer' in the USA. In the USA, the 'badge' itself gives the uniformed thug the absolute right to murder whomsoever they wish, PROVIDING the victim is chosen from a group already identified as a largely powerless 'underclass'.
The actions of the LA police department proves they now define all ordinary sheeple living there as the 'underclass'.
What else do you people expect in Soviet USA?
Russia, USA and North Korea are the same regimes.
It sounds like they have too much time on their hands. Perhaps they are overstaffed and in need of some headcount reductions in order to regain focus.
You are a criminal and we live in a police state.
The 2nd amendment has never been more relevant.
...Join them.
I believe another strategy on this would be to setup a crowdsource movement to create Android based ALPR devices and scatter them all over LA County and have these devices harvest data for uploading to the web for EVERYONE to view, especially with the ability to get real-time tracking on any California (E) plated (governmental) vehicle.
By doing this, it would encourage the lawmakers to make it a requirement to have a specific warrant before this data collected by anyone. This assumes that the new law would be designed to raise barriers to "amateurs" entering the ALPR business and use them indiscriminately.
Best results if that can also be done in the District of Columbia and Sacramento, CA so we can keep tabs on our lawmakers actions.
The Roman Rule: The one who says it cannot be done shall not interrupt the one who is doing it.
I am not saying, "So we should let LAPD scan license plates". What I am saying is whatever argument you use against LAPD is valid an order of magnitude more for private companies too. And any solution, change we propose should also prohibit such private companies from consolidating such data into some kind of national data base queriable by private detective agencies, repossession companies, divorce lawyers, etc.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I for one welcome our new overlords, the Illuminati.
The LAPD would only need to state that the images were captured with the intent of validating registration tags. Police have the right to look at a plate's registration tag when the vehicle is on a public road, and even stop you and ticket you if it is out of date. This could be automated and a ticket sent in the mail.
...to some of you but police officers are also there to protect you from those who might want to take your money or otherwise commit a crime against you. I'm aware of the potential for abuse from these systems, but if we decide they can't watch us in public, where can they watch us? What deters a robber that knows for a fact there will never be a cop around to catch him in the act?
This argument is completely counter to our criminal justice system
Law enforcement personnel don't think about these things the same way the rest of us do.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I fail to see how this is any worse than ARGUS, which _HAS_ been deployed over US cities as well as foreign conflict zones. The limiting factor is currently the storage space, but its not hard to imagine one of these things flying over every US city in the next decade storing a couple months of video.
Really, this has been going on for years with spy Satellites too, and no one really seems to care because the exact capabilities are still classified, but i'm betting ARGUS is just complementary to what we already have.
Random, link...
https://www.aclu.org/blog/tech...
"The cameras are not triggered by any suspicion of criminal wrongdoing; instead, they automatically and indiscriminately photograph all license plates (and cars) that come into view."
I can argue that a police officer does the exact same thing, just not as effectively. They "view" licence plates and check them against there internal "hot list" which might be oh say... 2 items, and if one of them matches then they act on it. So what difference does it make if a machine does it. You are in a public space, you are driving around something that can identify you. It just too bad that technology has just increased that officers memory to millions of licence plates.
If the EFF really wants to take a bite of Orwellian ass, they should campaign relentlessly to have the phrase "identity theft" replaced by the phrase "credential theft".
FFS, no-one can steal my gosh-darned identity until they can call up any of my nearest and dearest family members and convince them that it is really me over the course of an hour-long phone conversation.
I'd count that as actual identity theft.
All we get for this careless throwing around of the phrase "identity theft" is taking the spotlight off how poorly designed and implemented many of these credential mechanisms really are. The big institutions ought to wear their own failures, rather than making their customers take the heat, in particular, the insane persistence of black marks even after one has conclusively demonstrated that the black mark was a bungle to begin with.
How this isn't covered under "slander" is scandalous.
i'm getting tired of this, is anyone else?
they want not just license plate cameras, but to track all of your movements. disable your vehicle if they want. UAVs with cameras now and guns later. wiretapping everything. they want complete tracking of what we buy, who we know, where we go, who we fuck, our entire genome.
all this personal private data in the grimy hands of people that we don't know, and dont trust, collected with our supposed consent because a few people signed a 'protect us from everything at whatever cost' bills after some terrorist fear mongering.
'public view is up for grabs' is a terrifying concept. there's a big difference between someone taking a picture of you on the street, and a cop taking pictures of everyone on the street all the time, so it can be harvested electrically for suspicious activities.
i won't live in a police state, and i wont move either.
we are the nerds. we are the ones that made this shit up! they're misusing our technology here
that also means we are the ones with the capability to destroy these electronic monitoring devices in the least damaging way possible
we also seem to form one of the communities with a very high percentage of people that have a gut feeling that this kind of thing is terribly wrong, and that realise how much it's going to get worse.
we dont need activists or guerilla armies to get ourselves out of this mess, the future is now. we need nerds to fight, not guns.
at what point do we save the power hungry morons and the whining fearful masses that keep signing off on all this stuff from screwing ordinary innocent people over?
at what point will it be necessary to destroy these implements of monitoring with technological means?
i hope this gets me on a terrorism list. this kind of stuff comes to my neck of the woods, i'm going to try my best to fuck it up.
I don't think they have thought this policy through all the way
what if a criminal has an associate tape a fake license plate that matches the criminals license plate, and drives infront of several license plate reading cameras?
license plate cameras have helped that criminal establish alibi!!!!!
what if a guy with some petty grudge (maybe against some office coworker or neighbor) tapes a fake license plate to a car that is same make and model of his target, and then drives wildly through intersection or does something else illegal
easy to hoax this system!!!!!
If every car can be automatically worth investigating, then so can people. After all, cars don't do anything without people at the controls (at least for now anyway), so if a car is interesting, then the driver must be absolutely fascinating.
And it won't matter if the driver is walking down the street or driving, they might drive soon. Heck, if you buy alcohol in LA, they should go ahead and book you for DUI because, you know, you might drive. Or beat your wife or kids in a drunken rage, set the house on fire and go on a stabbing rampage in a hair salon. You might do these things. Might as well assume you will. Stand still while we book you for murder in that hair salon. Wouldn't want to accidentally have you fight with arresting officers.
Sig for hire.
The "investigation" part may be BS to justify creating a database of driver's behaviors. They know who belongs to what license plate. They know vehicle make and model which gives them an idea of your income. And they know where you are at any given time of day. What's to keep them from selling this information to data brokers?
Equal surveillance for all. It's more fair that way right?
hey NSA, can i get a couple bucks for pointing this terrorist out to you? Or at least a video of the FBI breaking down his door?
Rodney King deserved it.
How can anybody get enjoyment out of controlling another is beyond my comprehension.. It breaks my heart that computers are used for mostly controlling the less $$$ endowed people - instead of making life easier for us all.
To turn the tables on Open Surveillance, Using a "Burner" phone to take pictures of license Plates and forward those pics to an open web site. The location of the phone can be determined by the internal GPS. The pictures can be taken by the internal camera. The pictures can be cropped by the internal computer software. The pictures and GPS data can be sent to the web site by the internal WiFi or GSM internet connection. The Open License Plate Data would be available to everyone every where. With enough camera phones installed with this software, a public system can be developed. How many Android programmers would it take to develop the software to make this work ? How many people live on busy streets and can mount a device nearby and keep it running ?
Not having an automobile for the last ten years has been a blessing.
I no longer worry about auto thief.
I no longer worry about auto vandalism.
I no longer pay thousands of dollars per year to local, state and Federal Entities for the glorious possession os a "sex machine" aka the automobile.
Doing just as well on the sex line of things.
But I fear there will be payback from the local, state and Federal Entities given that I am not funneling thousands of dollars to their nefarious schemes.
Like Obama Care, in the near future people like me will need to be burdened with taxation in order to recover the moneys not payed to engross the automobile culture.
Ah Ha. Auto Care.
In the upcoming 12 months local, state and Federal Entities will begin rolling out Auto Care, a program for people like myself who do not own an automobile, but for the "good of the country" will be required to fork over thousands of dollars a year to remain a "good citizen".
Jolly that.
Let' s hope that Air Force One will go down in the Atlantic taking with a one Mr. President Barak Hussein Obama as the N'or Easter rages on Monday.
Toodles
Cops uses ALPR's for looking for stolen cars. Tow companies use ALPR's for looking for repo cars. It's no different than driving down a street and looking at house numbers.
Laws are for the commoners, not the elite. You should know that by now
Now you know why Steve Jobs' cars had no license plate ?
http://www.thewire.com/technol...
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Summary says:
Taken to an extreme, the agencies' arguments would allow law enforcement to conduct around-the-clock surveillance on every aspect of our lives and store those records indefinitely
I thought it was already the case. Why did the NSA built a new datacenter in Utah?
We can simplify this for them - Why go to the trouble of actually reading numberplate data - We can generate it.
Then they can simply have it.
AAA001, AAA002, AAA003, AAA004, AAA005, AAA006, AAA007, AAA008, AAA009, AAA010 .....
AAA011, AAA012, AAA013, AAA014, AAA015, AAA016, AAA017, AAA018, AAA019, AAA020
ZZZ991, ZZZ992, ZZZ993, ZZZ994, ZZZ995, ZZZ996, ZZZ997, ZZZ998, ZZZ999.
PHARQ, FARQ, 800813S, HOT,
We need to get creative to get the rest of the list.....
If those cameras get suspended drivers off the road, I'm totally for it. They're suspended for a reason.
Unless they make walking or cycling illegal as well, of course.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
My apologies to the innocents...
This behavior needs to be squashed by the DOJ faster than LAPD can order donuts. This is absolutely sick!
No, that is not what "police state" means.
Try actually reading the definition rather than making stuff up.
America isn't even close to being a police state, not matter what you and your tinfoil hat brethren want to think. (Which is not to say there isn't serious problems of course.)
Which word ? "Soviet" ?
In my youth we learned Russian in schools, and if I do not know what that word means, I might as well be blind.
The current situation in America is such that the councils are filled with people such as Feinstein / Obama who want to change the United States into a Police State.
And we have nothing else to fall back on...
Used to be that the congress / the court system and the White House are the three prongs of our government, and each of one is used to check the other two.
No more.
Nowadays the courts are being populated by judges who think we ought to give up our liberty in exchange for "security".
Congress ? That place is filled with dead woods who do nothing but looking for ways to create even more pork barrel projects.
White House ? You kiddin' ???
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
with the police http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
... I moved out.
Currently I stay outside of America, only go back for business reasons (and for voting).
Oh yes, I, an American citizen, couldn't stand the way my country which is turning into a police state.
And the most disgusting thing that I see is, *MOST* of my fellow Americans still think it's good to trade in their liberties so that the BIG BROTHER get to "protect" them.
What can I do ? I have thought very long and hard at it, and still, I can't come up with a solution.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Slashdot conversations and stories are becoming more and more like Reddit.
Where is the old Slashdot?
Down you will seemore and more of this sort of thing. Theu dont even know they are in panic mode yet.
Even if everyone got it and understood it, it would still be too late to stop.
It will be and E ticket ride.
In a civil society privacy is expected even when we are walking down the street.
Not necessarily. Pre-industrial revolution most people lived in small enough communities that they would be recognised by many of the people they would meet in the street. The difference was that you would recognize the observers so it was a symmetric loss of privacy. With modern surveillance it is a one-way privacy loss: you have no idea who is doing the observing and yet they can look up all your details and track your every move which is a bit different from having the village gossip noticing your comings and goings.
Pretty easy violation of the fourth amendment. The logging of the data itself may not constitute a fourth amendment violation. However, the use of the data itself as a tool creates the violation of the fourth amendment. So, as soon as they use the tool to do any kind of data mining to find some needle in a haystack and bring a case against that person, it becomes the violation. It has already been proven that other divisions of law enforcement (DEA, IRS) have abused their powers by taking illegally obtained wiretap intelligence and using it specifically to open cases against otherwise innocent citizens and then purposely lie and mislead the courts and prosectutors and judges about the source of the information that started the case. Because of this reason, the government cannot be trusted to have such a database. Because of this reason, the database itself must be destroyed.
I used to drive to work, and now enjoy yhe reading time I get using public transpott, ie like right now.
Here in Sydney patrol cars have automatic license plate readers and they can scan six plates a second. Here we must have plates on the front and rear of the car. This means an oncoming police car can scan an enormous number of plates very quickly. My registration expired on a friday and I intended to renew in on monday at lunchtime, the rta is in the local shops. On the way to work I got pulled over by a patrol car which had alerted the driver that my registration had expired. $700 later plus having to have the car towed ($120) I got to work and registered the car.
This is a "nice little earner" for the police here. Best of luck guys.
To play the devils advocate a bit on this, I ask how this would be any different than a network intrusion/attack detection system that runs on an ISP on links that carry peering traffic on it?
The analog would be the police being the ISP that monitor their jurisdiction for metadata and store it for their algorithms to analyse, which would be similar to a network IDS that keeps a state table of sorts on traffic flowing in its networks borders like all ISP's do.
In such an analogy, I kinda agree that what they are doing is within their mandate. It's not like they are using something akin to deep packet inspection by scanning all passing traffic with xray's to also store the contents (ie: packet logging), they are merely sampling the metadata of passing packets, err cars, as they pass through their monitoring stations.
Another analog would be a phone company that doesn't record your phone calls, but still logs the fact that a particular phone connected through or to its network to another phone number. They are just keeping track of the state, not the call itself.
If this type of monitoring is a little creepy and offends you, then perhaps we should force every single other industries on the planet with a similar situation, to stop logging their data for the purpose of defending against attacks as well?
Monitoring that oceanic buoy for useful information? Nope sorry, you can't now because you could prove that I drove by it in my boat last night at 8pm and are able to plot a rough course that I traveled. Got radar? Guess you can't log that anymore because it picked up a faint radar profile of my RC helicopter that I would flying last week and could be used to deduce some pattern of when my son and I visit the area to fly it....etc.
Long story short, get over it. It's just a license plate. Heck, everyone on the planet is already traceable by cell phone.
Just call it a taxing system based on the need for highway maintenance. Everything is cool again.
I just watched a special on the Boston Marathon bombing. They had 120 analysts going over thousands of videos and tens of thousands of pictures. While the perpetrators left on foot and it doesn't directly apply, imagine scenarios like the smoking van in NYC a few years ago that was a failed bombing attempt.
How much time and money was spent on tracking that vans path down? Imagine if a computer could simply look up in a database the cars known locations.
It would save time and money and potentially lives.
I'm all for this technology, just make sure there are checks and balances in place.
Say goodbye to "Innocent until proven guilty" and say hi to "Suspicious until proven... not suspicious in this one instance but still suspicious for future instances."
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Since it's a public place, nobody has an expectation of privacy, nor they should be granted a right to privacy. Just like anyone can take a photo of your license place and publish it on Flickr or DeviantArt, the police should be able to do so as well. It's their job to catch the criminals, and in order to do so they must keep the whole society under investigation all the time. It's not an invasion of privacy to record and publish everything you do in public.
you are innocent until proven guilty. suspicious isn't in there... Everyone is a person of interest, which is apparently okay?
Maybe you are suspicious because of some crazy curfew law, or 1 mph over the speed limit, line deviation, (which isn't a crime, but could be an indicator of one, or of tired driving), or checking for people talking on cell phones while driving.
I know if you drive through the tolls of Illinois, the I-pass overhead deals will take your picture and send you a ticket with your pic if you are on the phone, not sure if they take a snap shot of everyone or not.
. These guys are thieves and or cheating the system. We have laws that people can not wear masks in public, which we except at Halloween, why should we have masked cars.
This would catch guys with 50 parking tags unpaid - towed to pound, and I can go on.
Should we allow meta-tracking? I think they should store meta tagged data and ask a judge if they can inspect the meta-data for a location and time period to follow that car, without any ID at that time?
This would be useful in hit and runs, robberies, car thefts. All it will do is give a partial set of data that shows what pints the car had passed for the time mentioned, after the judge has said OK, no data voyeurs allowed to follow their girlfriends etc.
They passed laws that violate the constitution.
Line em up, give them their blindfolds and cigarettes, it's time for justice.
So Police are now Cortupted in California? Lol what's next under The New Regime From You Morons in This Country today It's the Donkies who are ruining Anerica today Unfortunately Wake up!
So, that rule applies to anyone who can swap out leased vehicles in CA every six months. Granted, that's probably not something most individuals would be able to convince the leasing company to do.
Just another day in Paradise
If the statements of the LA sheriff is an indication of the perceptions of a significant majority of the countries law enforcement the tree of liberty has already been ground into wood chips and used for livestock bedding.
"I do not know whether it is to yourself or Mr. Adams I am to give my thanks for the copy of the new constitution. I beg leave through you to place them where due. It will be yet three weeks before I shall receive them from America. There are very good articles in it: and very bad. I do not know which preponderate. What we have lately read in the history of Holland, in the chapter on the Stadtholder, would have sufficed to set me against a Chief magistrate eligible for a long duration, if I had ever been disposed towards one: and what we have always read of the elections of Polish kings should have forever excluded the idea of one continuable for life. Wonderful is the effect of impudent and persevering lying. The British ministry have so long hired their gazetteers to repeat and model into every form lies about our being in anarchy, that the world has at length believed them, the English nation has believed them, the ministers themselves have come to believe them, and what is more wonderful, we have believed them ourselves. Yet where does this anarchy exist? Where did it ever exist, except in the single instance of Massachusetts? And can history produce an instance of a rebellion so honorably conducted? I say nothing of its motives. They were founded in ignorance, not wickedness. God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. We have had 13. States independent 11 years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half for each state. What country ever existed a century and a half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure. Our Convention has been too much impressed by the insurrection of Massachusetts: and in the spur of the moment they are setting up a kite to keep the hen yard in order. I hope in god this article will be rectified before the new constitution is accepted." - Thomas Jefferson to William Stephens Smith, Paris, 13 Nov. 1787
Its pretty deep in a pool of piss by now.
This guy nailed it.
Do really think either party cares about you? Wake up man. The hippies wanted to get stoned, and have sex. It wasn't about making changes for the better, and look at where many of them are today. Glad to be a part of the establishment making big money. I can't think of a bigger bunch of hypocrites. Both parties are the pigs and you happen to be one of the lowely horses slogging away doing his duty.
Police cars, redlight cameras, etc do lookups on numberplates to see if the registration is current, to check if the primary drivers license is current, or has things outstanding on it. That's why we don't have car renewal stickers as well anymore. The next step, yes, will be to keep the data, regardless if you're 'clean' or not.
Guess McNeally was right.
Unless the L.A. PD is going to try and make the case that everyone in L.A. is suspicious....
....And they would be right. ZING!
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
If you look at history, most 'empires' lasted about 200 to 400 years before they imploded, became irrelevant, or were burned to ashes by the neighboring states. The US is a bit over 200 years old, so we are probably shortly due a revolution or invasion, statistically speaking.
The sad thing is, is when it happens, the mouth breathing anti-government radicals will insist that 'they knew it was bound to happen, because gay black heathens have taken over the gubbermint, and baby Jeebuz wanted to see them burn.'
(Of course they are technically right, because Baby Jeebuz was a 8 foot long monitor lizard with pyrokinesis.)
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
United Soviet States of America. Just like the old USSR but with better technology