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The US Government Is Using Road Signs Showing Drivers How Fast They're Going To Capture License Plate Data (qz.com)
Zorro shares a report from Quartz: According to recently released U.S. federal contracting data, the Drug Enforcement Administration will be expanding the footprint of its nationwide surveillance network with the purchase of "multiple" trailer-mounted speed displays "to be retrofitted as mobile LPR [License Plate Reader] platforms." The DEA is buying them from RU2 Systems Inc., a private Mesa, Arizona company. How much it's spending on the signs has been redacted. Two other, apparently related contracts, show that the DEA has hired a small machine shop in California, and another in Virginia, to conceal the readers within the signs. An RU2 representative said the company providing the LPR devices themselves is a Canadian firm called Genetec.
Which state is the DEA a part of?
They are also collecting photos of me making an obscene gesture at every one of these signs I pass.
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How the hell is it the DEA's responsibility to monitor driving speeds? If someone's driving 2 miles per hour over the posted limit do they take this as evidence the driver is hopped up on methamphetamines and they have the right to pull them over? Or if they're driving 3 miles per hour UNDER the posted limit, they claim the driver is stoned and shoot the tires out?
I'm giving up on roads. From now own, I will drive everywhere cross country. It will annoy my neighbors, but what the heck, I do that now.
Now flies "o'er the land of the surveilled, and the home of the afraid."
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
The point of these things is not to measure speed, itâ(TM)s to disguise tracking cameras as something else you normally encounter on a road and do not think of recording anything. They are trying to get a sense of where people are using cars that may be evading known traffic cameras.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Government also has people in cars with guns who can stop you and arrest on those roads, you know. You already have to REGISTER your car to drive it on a "public" (i.e. government) road. That means the government keeps track of what cars you own and such. Why should operating heavy machinery on a piece of land made by the government not come with no expectation of privacy? You wouldn't expect that you could operate a train and stay private about it. Just because cars are more versatile, doesn't mean the same principle doesn't apply. The only reason people care is that tracking cars used to be outside of the realm of what was possible. But the expectation of privacy that came with the fact no one cared to look was not the same a guaranteed privacy.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
I suspect they will have issues with bullet holes in the cameras in the western states.
That's all. We should start a national campaign of vandalizing this bullshit good-driver tax.
It's very well known that all the speed controlling devices are located in the areas where people are most likely to speed and people are most likely to speed in the areas where it is the SAFEST to speed.
The parkway with a healthy forest devider three lane on each side that has typically 50 mph limit in California is getting a 35 mph speed trap for no reason but to rob the drivers.
Vandalize them. Destroy them. A la guerre comme a la guerre.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Not sure about other states, but Michigan doesn't require a front license plate. They must be mounting these on the rear and recording after you have gone by.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
How much it's spending on the signs has been redacted.
That right there. That disgusts me. How dare a government hide such information from the voting public that's paying for it all.
I would say this SCOTUS ruling does not support that statement:
United States v. Jones - Wikipedia
" using the device to monitor the vehicle's movements constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment."
No. Federal government can't contract their way around the law. The 10th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution which is a COMPACT (Far above the power of a contract) specifically states that any power not granted to the federal government by the Constitution is reserved to the states and to the people.
Not only is this yet another example of DRUG ENFORCEMENT trying to usurp power in violation of Title 42 and title 18 of the U.S. Code, but there are plans now currently in action that will take control back away from federal government and put it back in the hands of the states where it belongs.
You do realize when driving first started it was a right. Somehow the courts ruled away your rights.
That somehow is because we let them. You only have rights as long as you protect them from the govt. usurping them
Keep in mind the constitution strictly defines the limits of the federal govt and the 10th amendment declares this quite clearly.
Hint... everything not prohibited by law is a right ;) We let them pass laws removing our rights
So you dont have to google it... the 10th
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
they are put in places folks are speeding or where they have been accidents. The data shows folks slow down when they know how fast they're driving, but it's easy to ignore your gauge and just go with the flow, which usually puts you 10-15 over.
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So, that specific ruling was about attaching a device directly to someone's car, and being told they need a warrant which they didn't bother to get. As a result, that specific case got tossed, because the police essentially trespassed without a warrant and without having demonstrated probable cause to a judge ... ie, an Unconstitutional Search.
This bit of evil is to surveil everybody, and just claim a blanket exemption of "in the public view".
Basically, if they monitor everyone, they don't need to have to worry about warrants for specific people. This is the legal equivalent of "collecting the metadata" on telecomms, which the courts have already upheld.
The DEA has now decided that they will just hoover up all information they can get, and figure it out later. Which could have the effect of making investigations retroactive because they've already collected all of the information about you and can sift through it at their leisure ... no doubt by also demanding your information from cell carriers, ad companies, and everyone else who is tracking what you do.
Welcome to the surveillance state, it's only going to get worse from here. Expect every agency to start this kind of bulk collection of everybody, everywhere they possibly can, and can all be cross referenced and collated.
Honestly, the old Soviet countries would be proud of just how much the US has become a surveillance society. And they'd be laughing at just how many Americans are OK with this. Honestly, 9/11 did more to unwind freedoms than several decades of the Cold War ever did, and this shit keeps getting more normalized.
Papers please, comrade. Keep cowering as we keep sending those amber alerts to keep everyone in a state of panic.
Not so Free these days, and definitely not so Brave.
The loophole is, there's nothing in the constitution that says the federal government can't tax citizens directly, then use those funds to bribe/cajole state governments into delegating powers implicitly reserved for states TO federal agencies as a condition of receiving those funds. That's part of the reason why the constitution originally didn't allow the federal government to tax citizens directly. Previously, Congress determined how much each state owed & states had to pay it, but states viewed the funds they paid to the federal gov't. as "their" money to begin with & bitterly resented strings placed on funds "given" back to them (or spent elsewhere). Direct taxation flipped the equation & power balance in favor of the federal government, and more or less directly enabled the federal government's scope to grow to its present size.
That's not to say it's entirely a bad thing. Expanded federal scope is a major reason why an American can move to pretty much any state without having to worry about having his life thrown into relative chaos. If states imposed the equivalent of waiting periods on new residents for what are now federally-funded benefit programs, it would be economically impossible for poorer Americans to relocate -- even if in the long term, they'd be better off. Long-term improvement means little for people like a poor single parent or disabled adult if the short-term consequences would be homelessness, hunger, and/or lack of medical care. Even for more average Americans, the "paperwork cost" of moving to another state would be a significant barrier to moving... even something as trivial as moving 2 miles to get a new apartment that's on the "wrong" side of a state line.
Federal funding is also why we have roads like I-94 across North Dakota. ND probably doesn't get enough direct benefit from it to have spent its own money building a freeway to Montana, but the net long-term benefits to other states (like having a good route between Minneapolis & Seattle) make it worthwhile. For a vivid illustration of what things USED to be like, notice the routes of I-80 & I-76 at the Ohio-PA state line. They're the original Ohio & Pensylvania Turnpikes. Neither state could agree where they should meet, so they both just picked their own routes & dumped into old roads at the state line... approx 10 miles apart. That used to be the norm... good roads within some states, but poor long-distance continuity ACROSS them. Every state line was a detour & traffic jam... and most state governments were ok with that (because getting two states to cooperate on ANYTHING is hard unless you have the feds waving cash under their noses to MOTIVATE them to cooperate).
also the makes the work zones at 45 will all kinds of walls a big joke as well. Now if there hard real limits and did not have as many 24/7 45 work zones then more people would slow down in them.
Sadly, the courts have allowed the Federal government for decades to do things outside its scope and power. The limitation of the Federal Government's power listed in the constitution no longer has any relationship to what the government does, and our judges do not care.
What you mean to say is that the Federal courts, including the Federal Supreme Court, have allowed the Federal government free reign. Since the Feds get to decide the limits of their own power is it any surprise that they generally side with themselves and not the states? Doubly so after FDR successfully bullied the Commerce Clause to be applied to literally anything.