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."

Comments

Re:To be fair...

[ScentCone]

There's also the fact that the mere concept of the 2nd Amendment being an individual right is a recent invention basically paid for by the weapons industry

No. The Second Amendment was proposed, talked about, debated, and eventually ratified by people who EXACTLY considered it to be about protecting (not creating - you don understand how the Constitution works, don't you?) the individual right to keep and bear arms. There are mountains of letters, transcripts, and explicit explanations from those who created the Bill of Rights to help you understand their thinking about this, as well as other familiar ones (like the freedom to speak, assemble, etc).

The colonists had just lived through the Crown's tyranny in many forms - not least of which was the stationing of soldiers in people's homes and the confiscation of their personal weapons. The official British line was, "We have a well ordered military presence in the colonies, and they are all that's needed to maintain peace and your safety..." and that was the excuse for going farm-to-farm, house-to-house, and confiscating weapons. Of course people who didn't respect British law might still hide them, and of course criminals were thrilled that the population was disarmed, since they personally were not.

The founders considered that entire scenario unacceptable for many reasons. So much so that they went out of their way to explicitly prevent their new government from ever infringing on that personal liberty again (just like they also said that the government could not infringe on freedom of expression or assembly). Much to many of the founders' annoyance, they recognized that there would be a need for a standing military of some sort - at the very least, at the local "militia" level. The Second Amendment doesn't establish a military, or speak to one's qualifications to be in it, or have anything to say about how it is funded or armed ... what it does say, since you obviously can't parse the period language, is essentially this: "Since it looks like we're going to have to have a military at some level, the fact that there will be armed, professionally trained people IN that military does not give anyone in the government the excuse to infringe on the personal right to keep and bear arms."

That was the entire point of the amendment! They didn't want the local rich guy who was funding the county's militia to say, "Hey, I've got twenty guys with some training and muskets, so I think it's best if everyone else in the county is stripped of their weapons - why would they need them?" But just like today, you can't have armed people from the government everywhere you go and in your house to defend you at every moment. Law enforcement comes AFTER you have a need for self defense. The founders didn't have to be geniuses on this topic, just simple rational thinkers.

All of this was and has been obvious since the country was chartered. For a couple hundred years, it went without saying that this was the premise and the reality of the Second Amendment. But more recently, of course, totalitarian-minded nanny-state types have been anxious to make people ever more dependent on the government, since that dependency buys them more power and a guaranteed career in being indispensable and in charge of everyone else. Routinely indicating that things like private gun ownership are horrible, and only more government, more intrusively involved in every day life could possibly be the rational replacement for things like the capability for self defense - that's just part of the larger lefty world view and movement towards a larger, sprawling, ever more powerful government.

Yes, the founders did ALSO talk about the people's right (indeed, obligation) to overthrow a government that has chosen to trash the constitution. But we've never been in that situation to the degree that the pendulum couldn't be pushed the other way through the ballot box. Millions of people who don't like the candidate they'r

Re:Monitoring =/= Rights Infringement

[harvey the nerd]

Conceptually, our government was never designed to have so many government agents or taxes doing these activities on or against the citizens. Our congress, presidents, and courts have greatly perverted the original intent of the Constitution, often under the guise of emergencies and the public good. Now we are near the Skynet moment of total overthrow by a police state.