The Newt and the Tea Party started the slide, normalizing hatred and bombast and FU-politics, and MAGA perfected it.
Whether you love it, hate it, or are indifferent, what you are dealing with now are not really Republicans. They are MAGA-folks. They should really rename themselves the Solipism Party. Nothing matters but the current state of your own head.
And yes, I know parties change and evolve with the times, but I would argue this time is very different.
In other aspects, perhaps. But the "small government" or "pro-economy" branding of the Republican Party has been an absurdity for more like 75 years. Democratic administrations have performed better on virtually any conceivable economic metric with very few minor exceptions.
10 years ago was basically Trump 1. And 10 years before that was GWB starting the endless wars with an admin outright denying reality. Which Reagan also did. And of course Nixon literally broke into the opposition party’s.
who was president in 2017?
I hope we survive this fear driven over-stimulated era of politics.
Even now all they can talk about is returning to normal (where normal describes the conditions that led to the current state).
There are people who called themselves Republican who started to believe their own propaganda, but it’s never been an empirical fact in the modern era that Republicans acted to reduce government spending in toto.
Guess how many major metros are in that area.
https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/your-rights-bord...
edit: in reality the times have changed and so has the country and the parties. All of these pre-2008 stereotypes are stupid and not useful anymore.
Apparently the only criticism is an accusation of hypocrisy for calling themselves the party of small government. Nothing wrong with the actions themselves apparently! Lol.
The truth is, the only reason not to trust the intel community is because of some fringe bullshit you heard on Joe Rogan.
There is an interesting philosophical issue around these accusations of "distributed hypocrisy". It would be one thing if you were pointing to a particular individual who took an inconsistent position. But if two loosely affiliated individuals disagree, that's not necessarily hypocritical. Even a single individual may change their mind on an issue over time.
They've not been "small government" since forever.
They are patrolling the border. The border between desired and undesired citizens.
Nobody lifted a finger when “the privacy violations are only used against the bad guys”. Now it looks like it’s your turn to be declared the bad guy.
Started about a decade ago to fight illegal border-related activities and the trafficking of both drugs and people, it has expanded over the past five years.
Some of the lawsuits (cited in article) to fight this, and illegal pull overs, go back years.
Really? It shows how this tech can be used in ways you don't like, when your party is no longer in power. How whatever laws you pass, surveillance you enact, powers you give, aren't just for you.
But also your political adversary.
Is that a win for the oligarchs?
Everything that Trumpists are doing was peddled in the 1990s by such distinguished figures as Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani. Usually with a nauseating appeal to "rule of law". The "surprise", and "this behavior may be the path to authoritarianism" stuff in the NY Times makes it hard to read without an eyeroll.
I wish.
Very early on in this Trump admin there was a bipartisan bill passed which greatly expanded the capabilities of ICE to deport [1]. Democrats have been well aligned with the republicans when it comes to immigration policy. You'll find few that will actually criticize the actions of ICE/DHS.
GOP is the party of capitalism (free-market, laissez-faire). Capitalism is the pursuit of self-interest and the profit motive.
And when the opportunity permits, this creates an ethical incentive structure for lying to be deployed for tactical gain.
The party that took a 10% stake in Intel to at least partially nationalize it. The party of tariffs, the party of special interest tax loopholes giving taxpayer subsidies to fossil fuels, real estate, and agriculture, the $400 million equity stake in MP materials.
Sure sounds like they are picking winners and losers, the antithesis of free market capitalism.
Can you share data on how people of one party are supporting ALPR and the other are against it? I was looking for a public poll on this question and couldn't find one.
edit: Why am I being downvoted?
To me, the CPB and ICE are looking more and more like an American Gestapo.
Apropos of anything else, this access was granted in 2017, and Biden might be surprised to learn he was President then, not Trump.
Nope.
Nice try tho. The "both sides bad" argument used to work, not anymore.
To argue that it is somehow okay because it enables "small government" to exist is very much in the spirit of "war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength". When thugs in uniform stop and interrogate Americans on the roads because their movement patterns are "suspicious", there's nothing small about it.
This idea that border control somehow failed is a lie sold to you by republicans. Also Trump killed the CBP funding bill in early 2024 that would have addressed a lot of issues.
It's not just government use either. There are private companies that scan vast numbers of license plates (sometimes by driving around parking lots with a camera), build a database of what plate was seen where at what time, then sell access to both law enforcement and I believe private investigators.
Want to know if your spouse is having an affair? Those databases may well have the answer.
Here is a Wired story from 2014 about Vigilant Solutions, founded in 2009: https://www.wired.com/2014/05/license-plate-tracking/
I believe Vigilant only provide access to law enforcement, but Digital Recognition Network sell access to others as well: https://drndata.com/about/
Good Vice story about that: https://www.vice.com/en/article/i-tracked-someone-with-licen...
Taking a photograph of a car with its license plate is legal. As is selling a photo you've taken, whether it has a license plate or not.
Therefore taking millions of photos in public of cars, and turning their license plate numbers into a database is legal, as is selling that information. It's all data gained in public.
Obviously it's now scary that you're being tracked. But what is the solution? We certainly don't want to outlaw taking photos in public. Is it the mass aggregation of already-public data that should be made illegal? What adverse consequences might that have, e.g. journalists compiling public data to prove governmental corruption?
> Therefore taking millions of photos in public of cars, and turning their license plate numbers into a database is legal, as is selling that information. It's all data gained in public.
One absolutely does not follow the other; there are all sorts of things that are legal only if done for certain purposes, only below a certain scale, etc. The idea that we must permit both or neither is a false dichotomy.
Require a warrant for law enforcement to poll these databases. And make the database operators strictly liable for breaches and mis-use.
For all we know, "suspicious" travel patterns may include visiting a place of religious worship or an abortion clinic. For a future President, it may be parking near the home of someone who tweeted support for a J6'er.
(And we haven't even touched the national security risk Flock poses [1].)
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/03/lawmakers-say-stolen-polic...
This already happens a lot on Google street view.
Other idea: AI-enabled dashcam detects and automatically reports "emergency vehicles" to google maps hands free. Goodbye speed traps.
The solution is simple. If there's a judge that signed off on a warrant to track a particular vehicle or person, cameras should be permitted to track its movements.
Otherwise, cameras should only be allowed to track people actively breaking the law - such as sending tickets to people running red lights. They should not record or retain any information about drivers that are following the rules.
Fishing expeditions are illegal and immoral. Mass tracking of innocent people is immoral.
---
Judicial warrants exist as a counterbalance between two public needs (The need to not be harassed by the police for no good reason, and the need for the police to be able to conduct active, targeted investigations of a particular crime.)
Pass a law making it illegal to do a combination of collecting and storing personally identifying information, such as a license plate number, in a timestamped database with location data. Extra penalty if it's done for the purpose of selling the data.
Police could switch to using VIN for tracking of warrants and such, which can be obtained after a car is pulled over.
Modern technology allows for every citizen to be tracked more comprehensively than the most wanted mob bosses or suspected soviet spies just a few decades ago.
Or simply outlaw the mass collection and sale or sharing of the data. We already outlaw sharing copies of music or movies, so I don't want to hear any complaints about enforcement- sure there'd still be some data floating around from random photos with a car in the background, but you wouldn't have repo tow truck drivers scanning 20,000 license plates a night or cameras in parking lots and such.
If an individual was to do this to a single person they'd considered a creep and the cops would rustle them out of a the bushes and seize all their cameras as evidence of their stalking behaviour.
The act of incorporating and doing the same thing en masse doesn't make it legal.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/washington-court-rules...
If they are going to be used by the government and law enforcement, they are clearly government-collected data about you - and thus, are subject to (the state equivalent of) a FOIA request.
This puts an onerous compliance requirement on Flock and the ciites that allow it to operate.
Hopefully, WA's state legislature will decline to give them any exemptions, which will kill that company's operations in the state.
---
Among other things, these cameras have been illegally used to spy on people who were getting an abortion in WA. Flock's executives (and the engineers who implemented that feature) belong in prison.
"As long as its being used by police professionally..." is an insane stance to keep on this.
In the West we regularly point to China's surveillance state, as some horrific human rights abuse. Yet when it happens at home we don't use that same level of vitriol. Which is it? China uses authoritarian surveillance? Because then we have government-corporate cooperation here for the same authoritarian surveillance.
If it's okay for officer Opie to have access to enough data to stalk and harass any woman that refuses him, then we're no better. No amount of "right hands" can make this level of surveillance okay.
The problem is the database building. Law enforcement queries should all be forced to be 1. Require a warrant or an active emergency and 2. Be strictly real-time, for a set duration, and store no information about cars that are not subject to the warrant.
If either of those is not hardcoses into the technology, I don't want my local police department to be allowed to use license plate scanners whatsoever.
I'm sure that's only the tip of the iceberg.
... But I echo the concern with how the collection and aggregation of the data can be abused. I just don't have a great solution. "Don't use shared public resources to do secret things; they're incompatible with privacy" might be the rubric here.
Worse than cell phone tracking? Cell phone tracking is higher fidelity, continuous, and works everywhere.
The problem isn't the license plate monitoring. The problem is the detention without cause.
It's the jackbooted thugs kicking in your door which are the issue, not that address books exist.
But regardless, I always find it funny that most of the rhetoric for personal liberties revolves around being able to do illegal things.
If a norm is outdated, oppressive, or maladaptive in some way and needs to be changed, it becomes very difficult to change the norm if you cannot build a critical mass of people practicing the replacement norm.
It is even harder if you cannot even talk about building a critical mass of people practicing the replacement norm.
For many norms, like the taboo on homosexuality which was strong in the US and Europe until recently and is still strong in many places today, the taboo and threat of ostracism are strong enough that people need privacy to build critical mass to change the norm even when the taboo is not enshrined in law, or the law is not usually enforced. This was the mechanism of "coming out of the closet": build critical mass for changing the norm in private, and then take the risk of being in public violation once enough critical mass had been organized that it was plausible to replace the old oppressive/maladaptive norm with a new one.
But yes, obsolete/maladaptive/oppressive norms are often enshrined in law too.
The problem is, what is legal today might not be tomorrow. Especially depending on the regime in power at the time.
Mass surveillance can implicate someone in a crime if later on some regime decides that what they did or where they went is now a crime when it wasn't before.
Remember the push back against Apple's proposed client side scanning of photos to look for CSAM? What happens when the hash database starts including things like political memes, or other types of photos. What used to be legal is now not, and you get screwed because of the surveillance state.
Absolutely no data should be available without a warrant and subpoena, full stop. Warrants issued by a court, not a secret national security letter with a gag order either. Warrants only issued with true probable cause, not "acting suspicious."
In most cases, cell tower data is sold in the open market in aggregate. A commercial real estate developer can buy datasets that provide the average household income of passers by by hour of the day and month of the year, for example. The police can request tower ping data, generally by warrant. There are exceptions, especially in the federal space.
The Feds have a massive surveillance network. Every journey on the interstates between Miami and the border crossings near Buffalo, Watertown, Plattsburgh, Vermont and Maine all the way down to Miami is logged and tracked by a DEA program, which has likely expanded. You can get breadcrumbs of LPR hits and passenger photographs throughout the journey.
Flock is a cancer, as it is deployed by individual jurisdictions (often with Federal grants) and makes each node part of a larger network. They help solve and will likely eliminate some categories of crime. But the laws governing use are at best weak and at worse an abomination. Local cops abuse it by doing the usual dumb cop stuff -- stalking girlfriends, checking up on acquaintances. The Federal government is able to tap in to make it a node in their panopticon. Unlike government systems, stuff like user ids aren't really governed well and the abuses are mostly unauditable.
The private camera networks are a problem for commercial abuse and Federal abuse. They aren't as risky for local PDs because they generally require a paper trail to use. Corrupt/abusive cops don't like accountability.
† https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_Un-American_Activities_C...
Welcome to capitalism. It is very hard, in EU and US, to tell where the government ends and the private companies begin.
Multiple Supreme Courts have also made it clear several times that they believe you do not have a right to privacy in public spaces. So all the traffic camera databases do is automate and make easier something that is currently definitively legal.
The more pertinent issue in this case is that driving patterns should not be grounds for detainment without a warrant. Especially if you have no evidence to link the driver to the car. But unfortunately, the recent Supreme Court decision made suspicion of being an illegal immigrant grounds for detainment.
In theory, yes.
In practice, yes, with many caveats.
LE doesn't have to articulate that reasonable suspicion at the time of the detention. They can come up with that suspicion years later when it comes to deciding in court whether the evidence from that traffic stop can be suppressed. This is assuming that the warrantless search even found anything, the suspect didn't accept a plea deal in lieu of going to trial, and the charges weren't dropped just before trial.
A working system for this sort of thing would be more like:
* The officer needs to record that reasonable suspicion at the time of the detention.
* All of these reasonable suspicion detentions are recorded, along with outcomes. This becomes evidence for reasonability presented in court. An officer with a low hit rate suggests that the suspicion in generally unreasonable, and they are just fishing.
* A 20 minute timer is started at the start of a traffic stop. If the officer can't articulate the reasonable suspicion at the 20 minute mark, detention is considered plainly illegal, and qualified immunity does not apply. This prevents keeping people on the roadside for a hour waiting for the dog to show up.
* Similarly, the hit rate of the police dogs needs to be recorded, and low hit rate should make any evidence from them inadmissible.
For any of this to happen, we would need to start giving standing to supposedly "unharmed" suspects that just had their vehicle torn apart and hours of their lives wasted without charge. Currently, the courts seem to think that a little wait at a traffic stop and an fruitless illegal search that is never seen in the courtroom is no damage at all.
One data point, and a highly regional one at that, I know.
People get whipped up to support laws but don’t see that more is just worse, especially the petty ones, even if they notionally correct for some bad behaviour, because they allow selective enforcement.
They can just say you're not a citizen.
(/s incase it isn't obvious)
You’re right that it should be. And in a sane world it would be. Yet here we are anyway.
Supreme Court has established that some established constitutional provisions do not apply at the U.S. border, and protections against governmental privacy incursions are significantly reduced.
The border search exception applies within 100 miles (160 km) of the border of the United States, including borders with Mexico and Canada but also coastlines.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45041697
(There's a really good Penn State law review article on that thread).
Yes, and what it says is this:
>The Supreme Court has decided that there is a reduced expectation of privacy at the border, holding that the government’s interest in monitoring and controlling entrants outweighs the privacy interest of the individual. Thus, routine searches without a warrant, probable cause, or reasonable suspicion are considered inherently reasonable and automatically justified in that particular context.32 Fourth Amendment rights are therefore significantly circumscribed at the border, and CBP is given an expansive authority to randomly—and without suspicion—search, seize, and detain individuals and property at border crossings that law enforcement officers would not have in other circumstances.
The constitution free, means that constitutional rights are reduced within the area.
The dissonance arises from these contradictions:
1. Federal regulations specifically state "100 air miles" with respect to the US Border patrol: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-8/part-287/section-287.1#...
2. The US Border Patrol has lost court cases for things they have done within those 100 miles, essentially saying they shouldn't have done those things.
An informal interpretation of this is that the US Federal Government and BP generally view the powers of the BP as more expansive than the judicial branch, possibly including the legislative.
I agree with the Penn State Law Review analysis in your link. Sadly that's not the reality of the world we live in. You're burying your head in the sand pointing to a document that suggest how things should be compared to what has actually been happening. In the end, people are being stopped and nothing is being done about it. Some paper put out by a law review isn't ending the persucation that is happening no matter how hard you ignore it.
Words on some paper mean nothing compared to the actual actions of man.
But it only says "any reasonable distance". SCOTUS appears to have come up with the 100 mile limit in various cases over time.
Now there’s a trumped-up charge.
They'll of course pretend that they just saw you commit a minor infraction and that's why you were pulled over.
Retired age men driving dealer plate cars eastbound onto I-80 in Nebraska out of Colorado from I-76 get stopped ALL THE TIME as potential drug mules.
The fact i was never stopped makes me even more terrified of a panopticon. Is their surveillance that bad -- or that good?
"I'm terrified that this panopticon so bad that it doesn't see anything"
License plates provide basically the same info as the title to the car or your house. They only supply addition information, such as location when they are recorded somewhere. With things like facial recognition, you don't need the plates to track movement (although it is easier).
The real problem is public surveillance identifying/tracking individuals.
Add that many states have laws that are /more/ punishing if you intentionally obscure your plate than simply not having one, what other conclusion can be drawn? The state’s arguments are thin. “Oh we need it to find criminals / vehicles of interest” oh sure, so you get to suck up all our data to protect a few toll roads and track a few supposed criminals. The balance of benefit to society is dubious at best IMO.
I think about this from time to time.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/01/you-should-have-right-...
I don't get why you have to obfuscate like this. You aren't against limitations for questioning. You wont find any sensible person that is against immigration enforcement completely.
What you want is the ability for your side to carry out its will unobstructed by any legal process, because you fundamentally believe what they are doing is right, and the other side is evil.
Just say that instead of pretending that its about the law.
Even that aside, how does that give them the right to infringe on the rights and privacy of citizens?
Wow, this is incredibly concerning. So they can pull me over, lie about why and then try to manufacture something ?
https://www.timesleaderonline.com/uncategorized/2022/11/poli...
Parallel construction is a law enforcement process of building a parallel, or
separate, evidentiary basis for a criminal investigation in order to limit
disclosure as to the origins of an investigation.
In the US, a particular form is evidence laundering, where one police officer
obtains evidence via means that are in violation of the Fourth Amendment's
protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, and then passes it on
to another officer, who builds on it and gets it accepted by the court under
the good-faith exception as applied to the second officer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2014/feb/03/dea-paral...
Well, maybe now you understand that when people were saying Trump is an actual fascist, it wasn't just memes.
Its only gonna get worse. At some point, CBP is gonna shoot someone, nothing is gonna happen, and that will be the turning point of when they can just arbitrarily start shooting citizens with no repercussion.
If you don't have a plan to GTFO the country by now, you are behind.
Oh wait, I think we just did, given what the Coast Guard has been up to today. https://www.juneauindependent.com/post/coast-guard-says-swas...
Fun fact, the Austin bomber was caught because publically available user data used for advertising, as gathered by a bunch of 3d party apps, allowed a cross reference of cellphones in vicinity within certain time ranges, which narrowed the suspect pool to very few people from which they were able to start their investigation.
If you think 'this is just a normal citizen doing good work' at first and you are breaking privacy here, keep reading.
>They unearthed no contraband. But Beltran arrested Gutierrez Lugo on suspicion of money laundering and engaging in organized criminal activity because he was carrying thousands of dollars in cash — money his supervisor said came directly from customers in local Latino communities, who are accustomed to paying in cash.
carrying thousands of dollars in cash over the US Mexico border is so suspicious that there is likely a lot more happening. The trucking company spent 20,000$ to get him out of it.
The more I think of better call Saul and breaking bad, the more I wonder whether this is one of those situations where the reality is actually much worse than television fiction.
90% of the drugs that enter US come from the south border. At 120 tons of drugs being 'seized' not the ones being distributed, I am assuming the scale of this thing is massive. [1]
[1] https://forumtogether.org/article/illicit-fentanyl-and-drug-...
> from immigrant communities in South Carolina
Not sure where you got that he crossed the border. If they had a case he'd have been arrested, you're making some pretty shady assumptions here.
> No criminal charges were ultimately brought against Gutierrez Lugo
Murder clearance rates in the 50s was in the high ninety percent.
Imagine a drone swarm that follows you wherever you go. Tracking and photographing every step you take in public. When you go into a building, a ground drone follows you in, notes where you've gone, and when you leave, hands you off to the flying swarm. Creating a trail of all your activities. Legally there may not be anything you can do to stop it.
The expectation that you have no privacy in public is what fuels this.
Democracies with Liberal leaders can quite literally get away with murder.
I mean, so can Saudi Arabia and Israel. It's less about being a democratic liberal, and more about having the right connections.
[1] https://blog.careem.com/posts/local-regulatory-data-sharing-...
It's always good to know how different countries try to violate us in different ways.
The same daughter and our son-in-law lived in Huntsville Alabama while he finished his post grad degree. I can't tell you how many trips we made then to visit, tour and eat at restaurants around town. Was that suspicious?
In 2023, we drove a round-about way to Phoenix to purchase a puppy. We visited Carlsbad New Mexico and several national parks after driving through the panhandle of Texas, in some of the remotest highways I've ever been on. (And beautiful too!) On the way home, we took a different route to see more of the states. Was that suspicious?
If I would have been pulled over and asked what I was doing, I would have said it was none of their damn business, I'd broken no laws. (Yes, I would have said we are on a trip to buy a dog and are heading home, but to be grilled, hell no!) How is this legal? I'm a white guy in his late sixties, is it fair they wouldn't suspect me because of that? Does the rule of law crumbling bother anyone anymore?
Police shouldn't be able to pull someone over for an air freshener or tinted windows. They can send a fix-it ticket without wasting the time and resources, and without causing the inconvenience or diversions in traffic. And, as a private citizen, I strongly prefer the police have the minimal necessary powers to detain me.
Your rights are limited in interactions with CBP, or to state the inverse: CBP have claimed more powers than traditional law enforcement. This has been true for quite a while; they have at various times been more and less careful about your rights while exercising those powers. They are being less careful now.
It was about cost, not desire.
Originally it would cost too much to have someone follow you around and keep track of where you're going. This was a kind of check against that system. Now you're an SQL query away from being on some list you don't know exists.
This war along with the War on Terror™ give pretense to all of these abuses of power and need to be undone. The problems they profess to address can be addressed in much simpler, cheaper, and humane ways.
So, standard driving while black (or brown, or Muslim, or whatever is demonized in $CURRENT_YEAR), but extended to new categories? I guess now that it's impinging on the comfortable it's news.
https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/braselton-police-chief-arre...
I now believe we need to not only abolish ICE, but puts the politicians and officers on trial. CBP needs to be purged and rebuilt from the ground up.
Well, that's what happens when you blur the line called the border.
Detaining those they _deem_, without oversight to have such.
If there's a reason for having them, why don't we require them for people? Let's make everyone walk with their id at the front and back. We're for public safety here, right?
/s