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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."
... 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.
Everything Fox News says is a lie. Even true things, once said on Fox News, become lies.
Furries make the internet go.
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.
And yet, when conducting the same level of automated surveillance in an aerial fashion over an urban area with an insane, war zone-like crime rate, self-styled privacy advocates shit the bed (just read the comments on the Slashdot story a few down from this one). Sadly, what's an acceptable level of surveillance seems to depend on who is being surveilled and upon which side of the fence you sit politically.
False.
Gun shows are not exempt, nor are FFLs conducting business there (who are given an occasional OK to do business in a location other than their normal spot).
Private citizens who are not otherwise prohibited from buying/selling/owning a firearm are free to buy/sell in most locations. Parking lots, living rooms, gun shows. (Granted there may be state requirements as to the requirement of a background check for private transactions, and many transactions are prohibited when both persons are not in their state of residence (without a bg check)).
Which again, is nothing unique to a gun show.
Most reports of mental health issues are not enough to get added to a DB which a NICS check will pick up on and prevent the purchase.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
It also wasn't designed NOT to have big government and taxes.
This is what you get for turning the Founding Fathers into religious figures and the Constitution into religious text. We should have had at least half a dozen constitutional conventions since 1789.
You are welcome on my lawn.
This is why I donate to the ACLU and not the NRA - even as a firearm aficionado with a large collection.
But when it comes to defend the rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, the ACLU counts 1, 3, 4, 5,....
Which is why I'll never give them a fucking dime.
The plate scanners are hunting for the strawman purchasers, free types and as a general list of who is armed. A gun owner in 2016 is most likely a gun owner up until they die. A few years of scanning plates will give them a pretty detailed gun registry they've been drooling over for decades.
This country was founded after a revolutionary war that was started over aerious rights violations. Those rights violations, which are well documented, look minor in comparison to the ones going on today.
Unlike the colonists, we do have a method of changing that short of violence. We have not done so and our government seems hell bemt on making sure we don't. That is not going to end well.