Slashdot Mirror
Feds Convinced Police To Use License Plate-Scanning Tech At Gun Shows (foxnews.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike quotes the Wall Street Journal:
Federal agents have persuaded police officers to scan license plates to gather information about gun-show customers, government emails show, raising questions about how officials monitor constitutionally protected activity. Emails reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show agents with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency crafted a plan in 2010 to use license-plate readers -- devices that record the plate numbers of all passing cars -- at gun shows in Southern California, including one in Del Mar, not far from the Mexican border. Agents then compared that information to cars that crossed the border, hoping to find gun smugglers, according to the documents and interviews with law-enforcement officials with knowledge of the operation...
[T]he officials didn't rule out that such surveillance may have happened elsewhere. The agency has no written policy on its use of license-plate readers and could engage in similar surveillance in the future, they said. Jay Stanley, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the gun-show surveillance "highlights the problem with mass collection of data." He said law enforcement can take two entirely legal activities, like buying guns and crossing the border, "and because those two activities in concert fit somebody's idea of a crime, a person becomes inherently suspicious."
[T]he officials didn't rule out that such surveillance may have happened elsewhere. The agency has no written policy on its use of license-plate readers and could engage in similar surveillance in the future, they said. Jay Stanley, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the gun-show surveillance "highlights the problem with mass collection of data." He said law enforcement can take two entirely legal activities, like buying guns and crossing the border, "and because those two activities in concert fit somebody's idea of a crime, a person becomes inherently suspicious."
Even then, gun trade shows aren't constitutionally protected. The purchase and sale of firearms are not protected. What is, is the right to have firearms. How you get them is up for debate...technically speaking...
Why are US law enforcement personnel concerned about gun smuggling at all? Gun smuggling is Mexico's concern -- because Mexico doesn't respect the basic human right of self defense in the same way the US has historically respected it.
US law enforcement should work for US interests.
... of all the "constitutionally protected" activities which may be subject to surevillance, many people outside the USA would consider that there might just be an argument for paying some passing attention to the collection of lethal weapons by people so obsessed by them that they go to shows to drool over them and defend their right to own them on the basis that they might need them to overthrow the government at some point.
Wouldn't it be easier and better to just require some form of ID and check at gunshows? My understanding is that if you buy in a shop you have to have ID, and depending on state a cooling off period or background check or whatever. Well, surely it can't be that hard just do that stuff online at the show these days, and then they can correlate the names with those collected at the border check.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Everything Fox News says is a lie. Even true things, once said on Fox News, become lies.
Furries make the internet go.
The Road Warrior cover consists of a PDLC membrane. When power is applied, the PDLC membrane switches to a completely transparent state and remains so until the current is suspended.
Even if technically true — the best kind of correct — the same folks, who usually denounce any and all "unwarranted surveillance", are surprisingly silent about this one. Silent or even approving, thus exposing themselves as hypocrites.
But I doubt, this is even technically true — though this monitoring does not, as you say, directly violate the Second Amendment, that's not the accusation. All other objectionable surveillance and recording is usually denounced on the Fourth Amendment grounds — like NSA's snooping of your e-mails or phone-records, it, likely, constitutes an unreasonable search.
Moreover, the very "crime", that this effort was supposed to catch/prevent — transport of the legally purchased guns across the state-lines into areas, where they are illegal — should not be a crime to begin with (unlike the terrorism NSA is after). Any State-laws banning certain kinds of weapons are themselves in violation of the Bill of Rights and ought to be protested and denounced at any opportunity far more noisily than the marijuana prohibition or "gay marriage" inequality.
Distinction without difference. You can not have a weapon without buying it first. 3D-printed guns my tail — many States ban even swords and brass-knuckles, hand-made or purchased! Were we to apply this standard to the First Amendment, for example, we'd say, you have the right to speak (to yourself in the shower), but not giving a speech, nor to sell or buy a book or a magazine.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I think I'd be okay with the feds requesting local police ANPR data (from looking for stolen cars etc), but asking them to go scan a specific area sounds a little too much.
We need to give this government more power.
Pay more in taxes!
Remember, it will only be used against us!
... of all the "constitutionally protected" activities which may be subject to surevillance, many people outside the USA would consider that there might just be an argument for paying some passing attention to the collection of lethal weapons by people so obsessed by them that they go to shows to drool over them and defend their right to own them on the basis that they might need them to overthrow the government at some point.
That's an argument from fear, you're basically saying that we should take peoples' rights away because something *might* happen.
It's prudent to look ahead in time to try to predict dangers and other bad situations, but you also need to keep track of the probabilities.
Your argument conflates the *possibility* of future problems with their *likelihood*.
That's fine, it's a valid argument to make, but we have limited resources and a variety of future dangers. There are many, many more likely dangers to which we could give more than "passing" attention, which would improve the American quality of life and general lifespan.
Shouldn't we attend to the big dangers first?
While the Feds are linking things to look for people up to no good how about a query where you monitor Secretaries of State and donations by foreign government. Anyone who dies both of those activities at the same time should be more closely monitored.
monitoring the internet can agree on
That's an argument from fear, you're basically saying that we should take peoples' rights away because something *might* happen.
What right is being taken away here? To not be observed in public is NOT a right. There is no right to not be under surveillance in public that I can find in any Constitution. Do you wish to initiate that right?
The right to assemble anonymously.
Look it up, Supreme court has recorded opinions on this, and Google is your friend.
to set up License Plate-Scanning Tech in front of marijuana shops in states where it is legal?
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear."
So, tell me, right wing gun nutz: how do you like having that bullshit shibboleth applied to YOU?
I'm on the left, so I've been under surveillance forever, from COINTELPRO through Bush's illegal wide-field telecom sweeps, and up to whatever the NSA et alia are up to now: I'm used to it.
But for you right-wing fuckers who love it when such intrusion is applied to us on the left, I bet it rubs you the wrong way BIG TIME.
Enjoy!!!
PS captcha is DICTATOR
Gun shows are often exempt from requirements to conduct background checks on people who buy a gun. All that's needed is that you buy from a private individual (not a dealer).
So if I had a history of being mentally unstable or had a criminal conviction and wanted to buy a gun anyway (for my next visit to movies perhaps) I couldn't go to a normal gun shop, right? Couldn't risk having a background check run on me. But visiting a gun show with a wad of cash in my pocket would be a neat way to sidestep that pesky background check thing, right?.
If it's OK for the FBI to keep track of people who exercise their First Amendment rights to make radical undemocratic leftist noises, come out in favour of violence to protect animal rights, or to profess support for radical Islam (all cases in which I would consider surveillance reasonable), then why shouldn't it be OK for the FBI to keep track of people who may well be trying to avoid the normal background check when buying a gun?
I know people are a bit touchy about their second amendment rights, but defending loopholes that let you avoid background checks is ridiculous,
Aside from the ATF agents officially working the show, at least 35% of the attendees will be law enforcement of some type. Cops carry a gun (and often another backup gun) 24/7 and are required to have regular training, so they tend to be interested in the topic.
I used go own a gun forum for a certain brand of firearm. I'd say about 35%-40% of members were LEO. Wherever gun people gather at the range, the gun shop, the forum, a gun show, a training class - many of the people there are cops.
The Feds have been doing this for years, and this has surfaced in the news many times over those years. Here is one from Slashdot https://yro.slashdot.org/story/15/02/01/2117208/dea-planned-to-monitor-cars-parked-at-gun-shows-using-license-plate-readers
The excuses regularly change whenever a story breaks the news. But no matter what excuse is used, it makes it so much easier to grab peoples guns when you already have a list of people to check first before the house-to-house sweeps start.
do I read the comments. And WTF am I responding....like the rest of the peon class.
Even if technically true — the best kind of correct — the same folks, who usually denounce any and all "unwarranted surveillance", are surprisingly silent about this one. Silent or even approving, thus exposing themselves as hypocrites.
Whatever.
Here's the fact: our right to bear arms is just a token right the ruling class has allowed us. They don't want us armed because as we are seeing with the rise in populism, they are getting worried.
You may have the right to own a gun, but you are being tracked, cataloged and the right can be taken away at anytime.
And it is used as a distraction issue by the ruling class - along with abortion - to keep us noticing our declining standard of living and the fact that they aren't doing anything to cushion the blow from the rapid globalization, the third world catching up with us and giving us competition and eroding our standard of living, automation and how there aren't enough opportunities to make up for the job losses, our aging population that is putting more demands on Social Security and Medicare, our ever increasing medical costs and the fact that our ruling class doesn't give a rat's ass except their power.
This is why i ride my bike
Is this how the fast and furious program of Obama selling illegal guns to ruthless drug cartel members was caught ? The purpose was to prove that gun dealers were the problem, but proved the Democrats were the problem, and they have no problem dealing with the most evil killers if it will help to push their, "guns and the NRA are the problem" narrative. Boy it smells bad in here.
If you're upset that plate scanners are being used for mass surveillance, that's fine. If you're upset that plate scanners are being used for mass surveillance of a legal activity you really care about, you're part of the problem.
Don't make me quote Martin Neimoller at ya.
Conspiring to commit a crime isn't a crime ... if the feds do it. If they're deleting the data after they correlate with border crossings, fine. However, the odds are much higher that they're keeping the data in order to violate the second amendment.
Any State-laws banning certain kinds of weapons are themselves in violation of the Bill of Rights
State-laws banning certain kinds of weapons can be perfectly Constitutional, but if they try to ban other kinds of weapons they're arguably not.
First of all, the Bill of Rights was *designed* to prevent the federal government from intruding on the power of the states. It was not designed to prevent individual states from passing their own laws. The battles at Lexington and Concord were fought when the Redcoats moved to seize gunpowder stored by *the militia*, after all. The idea was some federal government sitting in Pennsylvania shouldn't be able to dictate to a random village in Massachusetts that it can't have guns. That doesn't mean that a local militia can't decide all the guns need to be stored in a central location in town, for example, or that crazy uncle Bob can't have his own cannon.
It has only been expanded to apply to the states (and protect you from things like unauthorized search and seizure) by Supreme Courts that had to decide over decades that "due process" meant respecting a series of rights that happened to mostly line up with ones mentioned in the Bill of Rights. They had to do that because state after state abused its power. You can argue it has gone too far, although truthfully it remains one of the most thoughtful, deliberative, and cautious part of the entire federal government.
But it's more than that. Assume the second amendment applies. It's still undefined. It's like you write a function that can take inputs in the range 1 through 9. Now somebody invents 10 (the handgun). Now they invent 100 (the machine gun). Now they invent 1000 (the tank). Now they invent 1,000,000 (the nuclear bomb). Now they invent 10,000,000 (the hydrogen bomb). Now they invent infinity (a genetics lab). They violate the assertions that were preconditions of running the program and calling BillofRights(). In this context, absolute claims that the Bill of Rights requires these things be treated the same way as numbers one through ten are absurd.
Real lawyers write in C++
vote trump or lose your guns with just 911 to hopefully make it in time to save you
It is about time you people stop using the tired old rhetoric that some jackbooted individual is just going to turn up one day and take your guns away out of the blue due to no fault of your own. It ain't going to happen. There are enough of us progressive / liberal types that are gun owners (I own multiple) that believe in our 2nd amendment to keep our party in check.
In 1960 I noticed a KKK meeting going on in a field. I parked my car and went to watch the clown show. Men in trench coats were writing down car plate numbers as well as taking pictures of the cars and plates. Oddly for the FBI to be seen doing that is more discouraging to free speech and free association than doing it on the sly. Local folks might have chased the clowns out of the field if they were not frightened to park and get their plates recorded or maybe photos of their faces taken. Watching an event never implies that one approves of an event.
...crickets...
Trump is a rapist
drug gangs via straw purchasers on record was (ding, ding, ding) Eric Holder!
That's right, kiddies, President Obama's first Atty General via the "Fast & Furious" gun running program whose documents are STILL mostly being hidden from congress and the courts via President Obama's assertion of "executive privilege" (the Nixon "no you cannot listen to my tapes" assertion) was running the largest known smuggling ring funneling "assault weapons" directly to Mexican drug gangs without the customary notifications to the destination country and with no mechanism in place to track the weapons (therefore either totally incompetent, or just a willful supply of fresh weapons to gangs rather than a tracking operation). This will not be done winding its way through the courts for years, so we will likely not know the true reasons until after the next president retires.
When looking for gun smugglers: image license plates at gun shops and shows (publicly-visible stuff) - fine
When looking for drug dealers: image license plates at drug shops (publicly-visible stuff) - fine
AS LONG AS:
When looking for terrorists you: image license plates at mosques (publicly-visible stuff) - instead of going all-in on political correctness and wearing blinders
When investigating Wall Street bankers and politicians like Hillary Clinton you: track their locations and activities and e-mails and servers (instead of protecting the globalist elites)
AND:
After any investigation is complete, you delete all the gathered info on people you have no other reason for suspecting of a crime.
One of the big problems with all this data capture is that we have made thousands of laws, most of which the public does not even know, and we have agencies keeping everything they have which enables selective prosecution whenever a politician has the need to "get somebody". Hillary Clinton's Benghazi issue is a prime example: She loses an ambassador and several others on the actual anniversary of 9-11 and while telling her daughter and the Egyptian government that it was a terror attack, she tells the public and surviving family members that an obscure YouTube video is to blame and she will see to it that the video maker goes to jail .... then magically a nobody out in LA is picked up by the local sheriffs for violating his probation by logging onto the internet to upload the video, and he goes to prison for a year. How did they so rapidly find and arrest and jail that guy??? How did they know they'd be able to jail him before they even knew who he was??? The answers no progressive journalists have asked (because they prefer Hillary over and Republican) are astounding and this sort of thing can go very badly for ANYBODY depending on the political winds of the day if we allow these sorts of "big brother" policies to go forward unchecked and without honest bi-partisan skepticism.
Do not be giving out legal advice online that could get people punished!
In most states, it is illegal to take any action to obscure a license plate. People have been prosecuted for using those silly plastic diffusers/polarizers over their plates that are sold as gadgets that keep the police from imaging your plates (oh, and they don't actually work anyway). Some states allow you to operate a vehicle with a plate missing from the front or back as long as the other is present, but most require both plates to be installed and visible and often to have a current registration sticker. The fact that people do not usually get ticketed/prosecuted for minor violations like these does not make them non-violations. If the govt is imaging all the plates at a venue and they find vehicles with missing/obscured plates, they are likely to focus MORE on them and the odds the owner will end up as a suspect or getting a ticket will go up.
Roll the dice if you want, but be aware: California has prosecuted a person for making a facsimile of a plate and using it (with the correct info on it) after he lost the actual plate. He thought he was doing the right thing, supposing that all that mattered was the info, but he lost in the legal casino where the legal professionals tend to get prickly about the actual text of the laws.
Already happened
Secretary Clinton thinks the Heller case was decided incorrectly and implied she would appoint justices to correct that mistake. The only question decided in Heller was whether the 2nd amendment protected the right to keep an operational handgun in the home for purposes of self-defense.
First of all: this is a story about surveillance, not about the 2nd amendment. Go whine about sidearm ownership somewhere else.
Second: Once again, somehow the concept of "arms" gets limited to rifles and pistols. Why do you all forget to bitch about not being allowed open-carry crossbows, or about not being allowed to set up a battery of TOW or FOG-M missile launchers in your back yard? Do you really think even your 37 semi-automatics (with the hack installed to make them fully automatic) are a match for one round from an M-1 tank?
"Defense against the government military" indeed.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
The globalists' war on cash tolerates these modern highwaymen.
Wait, I'm confused. Didn't Obama take all our guns away already? I mean, that was what I understood was going to happen if he was elected in the first place, and then super-duper going to happen if he was re-elected.
At this point, a Con-con is likely to produce Com-com. No, thanks.