20 ms·

CBP is monitoring US drivers and detaining those with suspicious travel patterns

838 points by jjwiseman 11mo ago

themafia 11mo ago
Drive a rental car with California plates through Arizona on eastward and you're likely to find this out first hand. They'll of course pretend that they just saw you commit a minor infraction and that's why you were pulled over.
- mothballed 11mo ago
  When i was building a house next to the border, I drove from the border north every week, but was astonishingly never flagged at the internal checkpoints (ive been brutalized by cbp at the actual border before under false drug smuggling accusations). I also have a lot of foreign, brown 'illegal' looking family (us citizens) whom I'd drive up/down the border regularly through CBP checkpoints as they helped us build. The fact i was never stopped makes me even more terrified of a panopticon. Is their surveillance that bad -- or that good?
  - ahmeneeroe-v2 11mo ago
    >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"
    - cestith 11mo ago
      If it’s so good that it sees everything, and they just haven’t seen anything of interest enough to stop you yet isn’t that scary?
      - ahmeneeroe-v2 11mo ago
        what
- stevenjgarner 11mo ago
  Drove a new Hyundai with dealer plates from AZ to Minnesota and got pulled over by Bethany, MO city police on I-35 in northern MO with no probable cause other than window tint being too dark. They tore the car apart certain that I was muling drugs (removed seats, body panels, etc). Took 6 hours. Never found anything and left me with "we know you have committed a crime, we just cannot find it, but you will get caught". I had to put the car back together myself in the dark. 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.
  - dylan604 11mo ago
    I'm confused. Are you saying they disassembled your car right there where you were pulled over? They had the tools on hand to do this? They didn't tow your car to a shop to have it searched? I've seen many many a car stop get searched by hand and/or with canine. Not once have I ever seen removal of seats/paneling/etc on the side of the road. So this is a bit much to take on first read without further questions
    - stevenjgarner 11mo ago
      Yes that is what I am saying. Most cops carry a multi tool at the minimum (with Phillips screwdriver). They also had a standard 10mm socket (carried by MANY cops and all that is required to dismantle much of any Hyundai). Using their multi tool, they removed the fender liners (wheel well liners) from all 4 wheels, the trunk side trim (luggage compartment side trim) from both sides - all of which just has plastic push-pin scrivets (retainer clips). They broke 5 of them. They folded down my back seats (after removing all my personal items out to the shoulder in the rain), then unbolted and removed the back seat. I do a LOT of interstate driving, and it is not at all uncommon to see this happen. This is not the only time I have been in situations where authority has been exceeded. My attitude is to generally be cooperative (without giving consent) as my experience has taught me that is the most painless way to go.
      - dylan604 11mo ago
- pureagave 11mo ago
  Every rental car I've rented in California seems to have Florida plates and every U-haul I've rented in the country has Arizona plates. I don't know that the issuing state matters. The Article content suggests the main issue is taking multiple short trips to the boarder not driving across a state.
  - MisterTea 11mo ago
    They register the vehicles in states where it's cheaper. It used to be that a lot of people with trailers in New England registered them in Maine because you were(are?) not required to insure the trailer OR live in the same state to register.
- hypeatei 11mo ago
  The idea of a federal agent stopping you for a traffic infraction is insane on its face. That'd be very rare, if not unheard of, in normal times no? How would they charge you? Are there federal laws on the books for speeding or not wearing a seatbelt?
  - themafia 11mo ago
    Look into "dual sworn" officers. Although I've seen a few investigations which show that the federal officers will just send a text message, on a private phone, to uniformed officers when they want them to "check something out."
  - mothballed 11mo ago
    Even worse feds will use local cops as fodder to pull over actual murderous criminals on traffic infractions, not knowing what they are dealing with. They then let the local cops take the risk and come by with their meal team 6 squad afterwards. https://youtu.be/rH6bsr61vrw https://youtu.be/rH6bsr61vrw
  - devilbunny 11mo ago
    The US Park Police can and do enforce basic traffic regulations in national parks - which includes some roads, like the Blue Ridge Parkway, that are “linear parks”. In respect of the fact that these roads are often used by local traffic, they will generally permit things that would be legal under the law of the state you are in (e.g., concealed firearm carry, so long as it’s in the car and not brought into a ranger station or other building on the federal property).
- outside1234 11mo ago
  This makes me want to do this just to jam up the system
- asdff 11mo ago
  And in California you can drive with no plates at all and seemingly never have any issues.
- qingcharles 11mo ago
  Drove a DeLorean from Chicago to LA and back. Got pulled over 4 times on the way there and 7 times on the way back. All for made up infractions just so they could get photos.
duxup 11mo ago
This dragnet style data monitoring is illegal when it comes to phones, it probably should be illegal when it comes to cameras too.
- kgwxd 11mo ago
  We already know they're doing it with phones too, laws don't apply to them.
  - bigyabai 11mo ago
    Nonsense, I have it on good authority that Privacy Is A Human Right or somesuch.
    - nxobject 11mo ago
      ...to be charitable, I think OP is being facetious.
- stevenjgarner 11mo ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45945960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45945960
- Schiendelman 11mo ago
  So how do we do that? Is some organization working on it with a plausible theory of change?
  - duxup 11mo ago
    The phone rulings came from court cases. So sadly it has to reach a case, an in the meantime other folks are hurt with no recourse.
mothballed 11mo ago
License plates aren't compatible with the 4th amendment, and this only becomes more obvious with time.
- Terr_ 11mo ago
  Part of the problem is that you're simply not allowed to sue the people who are misusing the technology to violate the level of privacy everyone actually does expect in public. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/01/you-should-have-right-sue-companies-violate-your-privacy https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/01/you-should-have-right-...
- giantg2 11mo ago
  No, the license plates are not the problem. It's the scanning/recording of them that is. 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.
  - walletdrainer 11mo ago
    The idea of having titles for cars seems fundamentally weird too. We manage fine in most of the rest of the world without any special government paperwork establishing the owner of a vehicle.
    - giantg2 11mo ago
      It's mostly redundant as the registration schemes in most other countries do the same thing.
      - walletdrainer 11mo ago
        Not necessarily, EU car registration usually provides information about who the car is registered to, not who owns it. These are two different things, of which only the first seems like something the government actually might need to know.
LgWoodenBadger 11mo ago
Suspicious behavior is not a crime, and law enforcement is required to have a reasonable, articulable suspicion of a crime in order to detain people.
- lawlessone 11mo ago
  >and law enforcement is required to have a reasonable, articulable suspicion of a crime in order to detain people. They can just say you're not a citizen.
  - engeljohnb 11mo ago
    It's the oldest trick in the fascist book. You can't be a tyrant when the people are used to the idea that citizens have inalienable rights, so you slowly chip away at who counts as a "citizen."
    - randallsquared 11mo ago
      The legal system has been chipping away at the rights themselves (and otherwise expanding governmental power) for hundreds of years, predating fascism (and communism, too). This is just the tactic of the moment.
- anonym29 11mo ago
  Unfortunately, law enforcement often isn't subject to US law in practice, only in theory. And even on those few occasions where they are held to account for crimes against the public, the settlement is paid out with the public's own money rather than the officer's.
  - awesome_dude 11mo ago
    Devil's advocate: If the officer is acting within the policy/training they are given by their employer (and that includes not being told to not do something) then it's the employer's fault, and we (the taxpayer/ultimate employer) are liable for that.
franciscator 11mo ago
Use AI to keep your driving pattern non suspicious ...
- pavel_lishin 11mo ago
  How, exactly, do you propose to do that?
  - lo_zamoyski 11mo ago
    Ask the AI. It will tell you. :)
  - esalman 11mo ago
    Palantir might have a solution for you.
- ActorNightly 11mo ago
  Yeah and if you have your cell phone with you, license plates readers are irrelevant. 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.
shitware_vendor 11mo ago
[dead]
sahaj 11mo ago
But the criminals and illegals and the worst of the worst and the drugs. Think of the children that are being fed illegal drugs thru tubes put in by the trans-national trans gangs. /s
bomewish 11mo ago
Wouldn’t it be trivial for serious criminals - like cartels etc - to just use different vehicles?
- Finnucane 11mo ago
  Sure, but policies that just generally terrorize people aren't primarily about actually catching criminals.
nabla9 11mo ago
65% of the US population, 200 million Americans, live within the 100-Mile "Constitution-Free Zone". 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.
- 1121redblackgo 11mo ago
  What is the rationale for 100 miles? Curious if anyone knows, or if its an arbitrary number a lawmaker decided?
  - nabla9 11mo ago
    The 1946 statute gave CBP the authority to stop and search all vehicles within a “reasonable distance”. CBP defined the reasonable to be 100 miles and it stuck. It's just federal regulation interpreting the law and courts have blessed it.
  - dboreham 11mo ago
    Supreme Court rulings it seems. This is the law: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1357# https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1357# But it only says "any reasonable distance". SCOTUS appears to have come up with the 100 mile limit in various cases over time.
- tptacek 11mo ago
  This is mostly a canard, kept alive by fundraising pages at ACLU, but contradicted directly by current pages on the ACLU's site. It feels useful on a message board to call out things like this, but it actually hurts people in the US, who deserve to know that they do not surrender their 4th Amendment rights simply by dint of living within 100 miles of Lake Erie. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45041697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45041697 (There's a really good Penn State law review article on that thread).
wslh 11mo ago
In Saudi Arabia Uber reports all trips to the kingdom [1]. [1] https://blog.careem.com/posts/local-regulatory-data-sharing-requirements-in-saudi-arabia https://blog.careem.com/posts/local-regulatory-data-sharing-...
- Ms-J 11mo ago
  That's good to know and I wouldn't use the service in that country after learning this. It's always good to know how different countries try to violate us in different ways.
ericbarrett 11mo ago
One of the most striking things about this article were the photos of the disguised cameras, especially the ones dressed up as traffic cones and electrical boxes.
- dylan604 11mo ago
  How is that striking? We've had nanny cams with cameras hidden in teddy bears and other items for a really long time now. That's like saying you're shocked cops go undercover and do not ID themselves as cops.
  - MattDamonSpace 11mo ago
    I think most Americans would be struck by the revelation that the government has hidden cameras in traffic cones
    - dylan604 11mo ago
      Have most Americans never considered undercover operations? If you are investigating someone, you don't want them to know about it. Otherwise, you wouldn't be bothering with the undercover aspect. Now that the department has cool hidden cameras, of course they will be used for other purposes. It's not like I'm out there hunting down police abuses, but having hidden cameras is just something I would absolutely expect them to have. I did not know they specifically had cameras hidden as traffic cones, but I'm also not shocked they do. That's the shocking part to me is the shock of others instead of others also going "of course they do"
hypeatei 11mo ago
It's been fascinating watching the party of "small government" turn into one that supports ever expanding powers of a three letter agency whose job is supposed to be patrolling the border. It's like a new 9/11 Patriot act moment, except it's only one side supporting it this time.
- arealaccount 11mo ago
  I don't know what you mean by "turn into" it's always been that way
  - hypeatei 11mo ago
    "turn into" is referring to the mask off nature of it all. Before, they might be a little embarrassed or pretend they still stand for those principles. But all I've seen are conservatives explaining why it might be technically allowed or straight up cheering it on.
    - mrguyorama 11mo ago
      No, they still insist, while building a stasi, that they are the party of small government. The people who voted for them and are still cheering them on are insisting that they voted for and are getting small government! They are divorced from what words mean
- codegeek 11mo ago
  There is nothing small Govt anymore. Both parties are the same when it comes to extending Govt's power (just for different reasons). It is just a talking point now.
  - smallmancontrov 11mo ago
    State's Rights (to own slaves) vs No State Rights (to shelter slaves) is probably the most infamous example, and it's from a while ago.
- 11mo ago
csours 11mo ago
100 Mile Border Zone - https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone 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.
codegeek 11mo ago
"Suddenly, drivers find themselves pulled over — often for reasons cited such as speeding, failure to signal, the wrong window tint or even a dangling air freshener blocking the view. They are then aggressively questioned and searched, with no inkling that the roads they drove put them on law enforcement’s radar." Wow, this is incredibly concerning. So they can pull me over, lie about why and then try to manufacture something ?
- tclancy 11mo ago
  Yes, it's very important to let them lie about it or else they will have to reveal the actual giant surveillance state and all the technology behind it and that would cause us to lose WWII. 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-swastika-is-no-longer-a-hate-symbol https://www.juneauindependent.com/post/coast-guard-says-swas...
- LocalH 11mo ago
  It should be illegal for law enforcement not currently participating in a proper sting operation to lie to the person they wish to investigate. But it's not.
  - FuriouslyAdrift 11mo ago
    It is in some jurisdictions. In Illinois and Oregon, laws have been passed that prohibit law enforcement officers from using deception when dealing with suspects under the age of 18. Other states, such as Washington, Connecticut, Delaware, and New York, are considering similar legislation that may extend these prohibitions to all individuals being interrogated. https://www.timesleaderonline.com/uncategorized/2022/11/police-are-allowed-to-legally-lie-to-you-in-some-states/ https://www.timesleaderonline.com/uncategorized/2022/11/poli...
- adolph 11mo ago
  > Wow, this is incredibly concerning. So they can pull me over, lie about why and then try to manufacture something? 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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
standardUser 11mo ago
> often for reasons cited such as speeding, failure to signal, the wrong window tint or even a dangling air freshener 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.
hugkdlief 11mo ago
[flagged]
- hugkdlief 11mo ago
  Must have struck a chord saying "AI sycophants". Sorry. I should have said, "AI cucks". It is much more applicable, since you all are empowering these AI megacorps to fuck everyone else while idling sitting there watching it happen.
  - cindyllm 11mo ago
    [dead]
- gosub100 11mo ago
  they're the same ones who vote for big government, and come from blue states. so it's no surprise
- mmmlinux 11mo ago
  I guarantee someone here worked on this system and is very proud of their work.
- ActorNightly 11mo ago
  I mean, its no different from a gun. The idea that some metal moving fast harms a human started way back when the first broadheads were shot from bows. Gun is just decades of technology applied to that idea. The problem isn't tech, the problem is its use, just like with everything else.
simonw 11mo ago
License plate scanners are one of the most under-appreciated violations of personal privacy that exist today. 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/ 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/ https://drndata.com/about/ Good Vice story about that: https://www.vice.com/en/article/i-tracked-someone-with-license-plate-readers-drn/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/i-tracked-someone-with-licen...
- baggachipz 11mo ago
  Flock is extremely egregious. https://deflock.me https://deflock.me
  - vkou 11mo ago
    WA state has figured out a solution to the Flock problem. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/washington-court-rules-data-captured-flock-safety-cameras-are-public-records 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.
  - Lammy 11mo ago
    Relevant federal payola https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary?id=D000116304 https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary... https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/lobbyists?cycle=2025&id=D000116304 https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/lobbyis...
lbrito 11mo ago
This is what the world's most perfect democracy looks like. Peak Freedom.
- nxor 11mo ago
  According to Pew Research, more foreigners make up the US population today than ever recorded. People here are allowed to question who is coming.
  - deleted 11mo ago
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  - walthamstow 11mo ago
    What even is a foreigner in a place like the USA?
  - deleted 11mo ago
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  - ImPleadThe5th 11mo ago
    I will always find it weird that people who think the fact their consciousness randomly popped into existence through pure luck in a privileged country means that they deserve it more than someone who popped into existence somewhere else. Even that aside, how does that give them the right to infringe on the rights and privacy of citizens?
  - lbrito 11mo ago
    Not sure about the "ever recorded" part - how far back are we talking? There were some pretty massive waves of illegal aliens flooding the East Coast back in the 1600s.
    - newfriend 11mo ago
      The United States didn't exist in the 1600s.
russellbeattie 11mo ago
[flagged]
- lesuorac 11mo ago
  Not sure the phrasing of "undocumented immigrants have had their lives ruined" is the angle you want. The angle should be that CBP is causing a lot of unjustified problems for legal residents and citizens. People having to spend 20k to get back property that the government never should've taken is not good for deterring undocumented immigrants. When CBP agents need to spend 20 days of the month rounding up people on farms and home depot to meet quota those are 20 days _not_ spent searching for drug dealers.
  - russellbeattie 11mo ago
    I'm not looking for a political angle, I'm straight up asking: Has the 70,000 people put in concentration camps and then deported made their lives demonstrably better and happier?
- nxor 11mo ago
  Iryna Zarutska's life was ruined. When liberals downplay events like these, it pushes people to the other side, even if the other side has issues. It's not hateful to want less crime.
  - bigyabai 11mo ago
    Sure, and Charlie Kirk was murdered by a US citizen. It's okay for us to correlate a rising trend in political violence with something other than immigration. It's not as pleasant or vindictive as saying "the nonwhites did it" but it certainly seems to hold true when the political pot boils over. It's rarely the immigrants taking potshots at the president or storming the capitol, but instead deluded ideologues who are naturalized Americans.
    - russellbeattie 11mo ago
      You mean "natural" citizens. Naturalized is when one is not a citizen, but is made one. On that note, the administration has started the process of de-naturalizing immigrants, which is something I'd never thought I'd see except in extreme cases.
ChrisArchitect 11mo ago
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45991257 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45991257
shortrounddev2 11mo ago
In the last admin I used to think that "abolish ICE" was hysterical. 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.
greenavocado 11mo ago
Modern cars log their GPS coordinates about every 60 seconds and maintain weeks of records at minimum. Police regularly obtain search warrants to view weeks of GPS logs from your infotainment system.
gosub100 11mo ago
just saw this [1] today where the police chief was using license plate readers to stalk and harass "multiple victims". This is why you don't collect the information in the first place. I am sure the lawyers are one step ahead, but I think Flock should pay these victims directly (in addition to the PD) for failing to stop the misuse of their technology. https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/braselton-police-chief-arrested-hours-after-announcing-retirement https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/braselton-police-chief-arre...
pstuart 11mo ago
It's germane to point out the War on Drugs™ is a war on the people and has never been about "keeping people safe". I know that a lot of people say that cannabis is ok but hard drugs should not be legal to keep people safe. Look at how well that's worked out, as well as how the people involved with those drugs are treated (users are treated like dangerous criminals rather than with substance abuse issues). 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.
billy99k 11mo ago
Canada has been authoritarian for awhile, while trying to claim to be 'nice'. The protestors during Covid got de-banked, fired, and arrested. Democracies with Liberal leaders can quite literally get away with murder.
- bigyabai 11mo ago
  > 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.
arnonejoe 11mo ago
You can sue the government for violating your 4th amendment rights.
micromacrofoot 11mo ago
Intentionally driving suspiciously to get illegally detained sounds like an easy lawsuit.
- jkestner 11mo ago
  If only the application of the law was as binary as code.
- nmeagent 11mo ago
  Beware of "you can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride." Some people don't survive that ride. Sometimes that ride lasts many years.
stackedinserter 11mo ago
Remind me, why do we need license plates? 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?
deleted 11mo ago
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hnburnsy 11mo ago
Does anyone know if ALPRs are being combined with Bluetooth/TPMS scanning to associate devices across vehicles or if TPMS is getting associated to vehicles (like if a stolen plate is put on another vehicle because the TPMS doesn't match)?
- Ms-J 11mo ago
  TPMS scanning is particularly nasty. I've been meaning to read up more about all of the potential ways it can violate our privacy. Sorry that I don't have any further info about it in this case.
scblock 11mo ago
> "detaining those with suspicious travel patterns" Detaining those they _deem_, without oversight to have such.
Padriac 11mo ago
This is good news. Punish the wrongdoers so we can live in a peaceful safe society.
hnburnsy 11mo ago
What bugs me the most about all this surveillance is that crime clearance rates dont seem to be improving, I guess it just makes law enforcents job easier, they just click click click instead of actual shoe leathering. Murder clearance rates in the 50s was in the high ninety percent.
- ntonozzi 11mo ago
  There are some good reasons it is lower now, like defense lawyers and Miranda rights. Obviously it'd be good if we had both good civil rights AND high murder clearance, but they seem in obvious tension with each other.
jimt1234 11mo ago
I drive back-country roads all the time to go hiking and camping. I guess that makes me an outlaw now. Great. /s
cratermoon 11mo ago
"Suddenly, drivers find themselves pulled over — often for reasons cited such as speeding, failure to signal, the wrong window tint or even a dangling air freshener blocking the view. They are then aggressively questioned and searched, with no inkling that the roads they drove put them on law enforcement’s radar." 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.
fudged71 11mo ago
Anyone can be targeted, anyone can be pulled over, anyone can be detained, anyone can be labelled a terrorist, anyone can be deported to a black hole in el salvador. These are dark times.
superkuh 11mo ago
The border patrol should only be able to do this within the 100 mile no constitution zone that extends from all foreign borders (including internal borders like the great lakes). If they do this in Minneapolis, Minnesota or Denver, Colorado it would be unconstitutional.
- nmeagent 11mo ago
  No. They shouldn't be able to do this within 100 miles of a border either, since that's not a reasonable distance for the border exception to apply by any sane reasoning. The rights of roughly 2/3 of the US population don't evaporate because of some absurd assertion of distance that is clearly off by two orders of magnitude. We must uproot this particular crop of dystopian bullshit and salt the earth in its place.
hising 11mo ago
It is so tragic to see where the US is going in real time from an outside observer. So much for "freedom".
ddalex 11mo ago
Land of the free.....
whatsupdog 11mo ago
> Once limited to policing the nation’s boundaries, the Border Patrol has built a surveillance system stretching into the country’s interior Well, that's what happens when you blur the line called the border.
jdprgm 11mo ago
It feels like the past 25 years has been a continuous slowly constricting circle just chipping away at privacy and freedom and it almost never goes in the other direction or even just reverts a policy back to baseline. People largely don't seem to care though and I don't think there are any politicians seriously fighting against it and prioritizing as a primary policy.
greedo 11mo ago
Technology is going to change a lot of things... 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.
- wiml 11mo ago
  Don't need anything as clumsy as a drone swarm. There are systems designed to aerially record an entire city at high enough resolution to follow each individual. And to keep history long enough to go back to before you thought you had to be careful.
  - greedo 11mo ago
    I was extrapolating a lower cost version of Gorgon Stare. I remember when Rivet Joint first came on line and it was possible to track Warsaw Pact units as they traveled, and you could extrapolate their C3 units as well as their POL supplies. Never thought it would become part of modern police surveillance, but I was a young naive person back then.
QuiEgo 11mo ago
Remember the movie Minority Report? Where a central plot point was the main character being tracked (by their retina in that case), and how to defeat the tracking? Vibes.
puppycodes 11mo ago
Terrifying and unconstitutional
bloomingeek 11mo ago
After graduating high school, our daughter became a "member" working for Disney World. We made several driving trips back and forth to visit or bring her stuff she wanted or just for the heck of it. Then after a while we flew out, rented a van and brought all her things and her back home. Was that suspicious? 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?
EchoReflection 11mo ago
good? why is this "news-worthy"? "Law-enforcement personnel are paying attention to people behaving 'suspiciously'" seems like: "people are doing their jobs". Gasp! The audacity!
- beeflet 11mo ago
  This comment is suspicious. I'm gonna need to see some ID
  - BizarroLand 11mo ago
    72 hours in a cell while I rifle through their entire life for anything I can use to extend their stay at the Graybar Hotel should be enough to cool their heels.
Mawr 11mo ago
Ah, the freedom of a car. Well, in any case, this is easy to circumvent—use public transport or ride a bike. Wait, what country are we talking about here? Oh... right.
- beeflet 11mo ago
  it will not protect you from camera surveilance
peteforde 11mo ago
Benn Jordan's recent video on Flock Security cameras is a must-watch IMO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lY
mumber_typhoon 11mo ago
>In February, Lorenzo Gutierrez Lugo, a driver for a small trucking company that specializes in transporting furniture, clothing and other belongings to families in Mexico, was driving south to the border city of Brownsville, Texas, carrying packages from immigrant communities in South Carolina’s low country. 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-smuggling-at-the-u-s-mexico-border-an-overview/ https://forumtogether.org/article/illicit-fentanyl-and-drug-...
- kart23 11mo ago
  Carrying cash isn't a crime. The fact that no charges were brought says that they couldn't prove a crime was committed either. And please read the fifth amendment. > No criminal charges were ultimately brought against Gutierrez Lugo
  - mumber_typhoon 11mo ago
    >Carrying cash isn't a crime. No but carrying over $10,000 into the US requires you to declare it and maybe pay taxes if you can't prove its source or risk being sized (which is fine if it's drug money).
- thesh4d0w 11mo ago
  > driving south to the border city of Brownsville, Texas > 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.
anarticle 11mo ago
"They'll never use it for evil!" 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.
insane_dreamer 11mo ago
The US is turning into China, which has perfected the surveillance state.
ragebol 11mo ago
Here goes the "I have nothing to hide" argument. They'll find new stuff that'll make you suspicious.
ndsipa_pomu 11mo ago
What's needed is to have license plates with little displays that show some Disney cartoon or other copyrighted work. Then it's a matter of informing Disney that their IP is being illegally copied.
34679 11mo ago
This honestly has me considering replacing my plates with something that says "The driver of this vehicle invokes their 4th and 5th Amendment rights."
silexia 11mo ago
This is the problem with government... it is impossible to shrink or close agencies, and they only ever grow and grab more power. We need Constitutional limits on government size and power. Don't trust politicians when they promise you things.
burnt-resistor 11mo ago
Vacationing too much with too many people? "Human trafficking!"
stevenalowe 11mo ago
Or so they say. Could just be DWB (driving while black/brown) with a new smokescreen

838 points by jjwiseman 11mo ago

Drive a rental car with California plates through Arizona on eastward and you're likely to find this out first hand. They'll of course pretend that they just saw you commit a minor infraction and that's why you were pulled over.

mothballed 11mo ago
When i was building a house next to the border, I drove from the border north every week, but was astonishingly never flagged at the internal checkpoints (ive been brutalized by cbp at the actual border before under false drug smuggling accusations). I also have a lot of foreign, brown 'illegal' looking family (us citizens) whom I'd drive up/down the border regularly through CBP checkpoints as they helped us build. The fact i was never stopped makes me even more terrified of a panopticon. Is their surveillance that bad -- or that good?
- ahmeneeroe-v2 11mo ago
  >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"
  - cestith 11mo ago
    If it’s so good that it sees everything, and they just haven’t seen anything of interest enough to stop you yet isn’t that scary?
    - ahmeneeroe-v2 11mo ago
      what
stevenjgarner 11mo ago
Drove a new Hyundai with dealer plates from AZ to Minnesota and got pulled over by Bethany, MO city police on I-35 in northern MO with no probable cause other than window tint being too dark. They tore the car apart certain that I was muling drugs (removed seats, body panels, etc). Took 6 hours. Never found anything and left me with "we know you have committed a crime, we just cannot find it, but you will get caught". I had to put the car back together myself in the dark. 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.
- dylan604 11mo ago
  I'm confused. Are you saying they disassembled your car right there where you were pulled over? They had the tools on hand to do this? They didn't tow your car to a shop to have it searched? I've seen many many a car stop get searched by hand and/or with canine. Not once have I ever seen removal of seats/paneling/etc on the side of the road. So this is a bit much to take on first read without further questions
  - stevenjgarner 11mo ago
    Yes that is what I am saying. Most cops carry a multi tool at the minimum (with Phillips screwdriver). They also had a standard 10mm socket (carried by MANY cops and all that is required to dismantle much of any Hyundai). Using their multi tool, they removed the fender liners (wheel well liners) from all 4 wheels, the trunk side trim (luggage compartment side trim) from both sides - all of which just has plastic push-pin scrivets (retainer clips). They broke 5 of them. They folded down my back seats (after removing all my personal items out to the shoulder in the rain), then unbolted and removed the back seat. I do a LOT of interstate driving, and it is not at all uncommon to see this happen. This is not the only time I have been in situations where authority has been exceeded. My attitude is to generally be cooperative (without giving consent) as my experience has taught me that is the most painless way to go.
    - dylan604 11mo ago
pureagave 11mo ago
Every rental car I've rented in California seems to have Florida plates and every U-haul I've rented in the country has Arizona plates. I don't know that the issuing state matters. The Article content suggests the main issue is taking multiple short trips to the boarder not driving across a state.
- MisterTea 11mo ago
  They register the vehicles in states where it's cheaper. It used to be that a lot of people with trailers in New England registered them in Maine because you were(are?) not required to insure the trailer OR live in the same state to register.
hypeatei 11mo ago
The idea of a federal agent stopping you for a traffic infraction is insane on its face. That'd be very rare, if not unheard of, in normal times no? How would they charge you? Are there federal laws on the books for speeding or not wearing a seatbelt?
- themafia 11mo ago
  Look into "dual sworn" officers. Although I've seen a few investigations which show that the federal officers will just send a text message, on a private phone, to uniformed officers when they want them to "check something out."
- mothballed 11mo ago
  Even worse feds will use local cops as fodder to pull over actual murderous criminals on traffic infractions, not knowing what they are dealing with. They then let the local cops take the risk and come by with their meal team 6 squad afterwards. https://youtu.be/rH6bsr61vrw https://youtu.be/rH6bsr61vrw
- devilbunny 11mo ago
  The US Park Police can and do enforce basic traffic regulations in national parks - which includes some roads, like the Blue Ridge Parkway, that are “linear parks”. In respect of the fact that these roads are often used by local traffic, they will generally permit things that would be legal under the law of the state you are in (e.g., concealed firearm carry, so long as it’s in the car and not brought into a ranger station or other building on the federal property).
outside1234 11mo ago
This makes me want to do this just to jam up the system
asdff 11mo ago
And in California you can drive with no plates at all and seemingly never have any issues.
qingcharles 11mo ago
Drove a DeLorean from Chicago to LA and back. Got pulled over 4 times on the way there and 7 times on the way back. All for made up infractions just so they could get photos.

duxup 11mo ago

This dragnet style data monitoring is illegal when it comes to phones, it probably should be illegal when it comes to cameras too.

kgwxd 11mo ago
We already know they're doing it with phones too, laws don't apply to them.
- bigyabai 11mo ago
  Nonsense, I have it on good authority that Privacy Is A Human Right or somesuch.
  - nxobject 11mo ago
    ...to be charitable, I think OP is being facetious.
stevenjgarner 11mo ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45945960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45945960
Schiendelman 11mo ago
So how do we do that? Is some organization working on it with a plausible theory of change?
- duxup 11mo ago
  The phone rulings came from court cases. So sadly it has to reach a case, an in the meantime other folks are hurt with no recourse.

mothballed 11mo ago

License plates aren't compatible with the 4th amendment, and this only becomes more obvious with time.

Terr_ 11mo ago
Part of the problem is that you're simply not allowed to sue the people who are misusing the technology to violate the level of privacy everyone actually does expect in public. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/01/you-should-have-right-sue-companies-violate-your-privacy https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/01/you-should-have-right-...
giantg2 11mo ago
No, the license plates are not the problem. It's the scanning/recording of them that is. 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.
- walletdrainer 11mo ago
  The idea of having titles for cars seems fundamentally weird too. We manage fine in most of the rest of the world without any special government paperwork establishing the owner of a vehicle.
  - giantg2 11mo ago
    It's mostly redundant as the registration schemes in most other countries do the same thing.
    - walletdrainer 11mo ago
      Not necessarily, EU car registration usually provides information about who the car is registered to, not who owns it. These are two different things, of which only the first seems like something the government actually might need to know.

LgWoodenBadger 11mo ago

Suspicious behavior is not a crime, and law enforcement is required to have a reasonable, articulable suspicion of a crime in order to detain people.

lawlessone 11mo ago
>and law enforcement is required to have a reasonable, articulable suspicion of a crime in order to detain people. They can just say you're not a citizen.
- engeljohnb 11mo ago
  It's the oldest trick in the fascist book. You can't be a tyrant when the people are used to the idea that citizens have inalienable rights, so you slowly chip away at who counts as a "citizen."
  - randallsquared 11mo ago
    The legal system has been chipping away at the rights themselves (and otherwise expanding governmental power) for hundreds of years, predating fascism (and communism, too). This is just the tactic of the moment.
anonym29 11mo ago
Unfortunately, law enforcement often isn't subject to US law in practice, only in theory. And even on those few occasions where they are held to account for crimes against the public, the settlement is paid out with the public's own money rather than the officer's.
- awesome_dude 11mo ago
  Devil's advocate: If the officer is acting within the policy/training they are given by their employer (and that includes not being told to not do something) then it's the employer's fault, and we (the taxpayer/ultimate employer) are liable for that.

franciscator 11mo ago

Use AI to keep your driving pattern non suspicious ...

pavel_lishin 11mo ago
How, exactly, do you propose to do that?
- lo_zamoyski 11mo ago
  Ask the AI. It will tell you. :)
- esalman 11mo ago
  Palantir might have a solution for you.
ActorNightly 11mo ago
Yeah and if you have your cell phone with you, license plates readers are irrelevant. 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.

shitware_vendor 11mo ago

[dead]

sahaj 11mo ago

But the criminals and illegals and the worst of the worst and the drugs. Think of the children that are being fed illegal drugs thru tubes put in by the trans-national trans gangs. /s

bomewish 11mo ago

Wouldn’t it be trivial for serious criminals - like cartels etc - to just use different vehicles?

Finnucane 11mo ago
Sure, but policies that just generally terrorize people aren't primarily about actually catching criminals.

nabla9 11mo ago

65% of the US population, 200 million Americans, live within the 100-Mile "Constitution-Free Zone". 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.

1121redblackgo 11mo ago
What is the rationale for 100 miles? Curious if anyone knows, or if its an arbitrary number a lawmaker decided?
- nabla9 11mo ago
  The 1946 statute gave CBP the authority to stop and search all vehicles within a “reasonable distance”. CBP defined the reasonable to be 100 miles and it stuck. It's just federal regulation interpreting the law and courts have blessed it.
- dboreham 11mo ago
  Supreme Court rulings it seems. This is the law: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1357# https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1357# But it only says "any reasonable distance". SCOTUS appears to have come up with the 100 mile limit in various cases over time.
tptacek 11mo ago
This is mostly a canard, kept alive by fundraising pages at ACLU, but contradicted directly by current pages on the ACLU's site. It feels useful on a message board to call out things like this, but it actually hurts people in the US, who deserve to know that they do not surrender their 4th Amendment rights simply by dint of living within 100 miles of Lake Erie. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45041697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45041697 (There's a really good Penn State law review article on that thread).

wslh 11mo ago

In Saudi Arabia Uber reports all trips to the kingdom [1]. [1] https://blog.careem.com/posts/local-regulatory-data-sharing-requirements-in-saudi-arabia https://blog.careem.com/posts/local-regulatory-data-sharing-...

Ms-J 11mo ago
That's good to know and I wouldn't use the service in that country after learning this. It's always good to know how different countries try to violate us in different ways.

ericbarrett 11mo ago

One of the most striking things about this article were the photos of the disguised cameras, especially the ones dressed up as traffic cones and electrical boxes.

dylan604 11mo ago
How is that striking? We've had nanny cams with cameras hidden in teddy bears and other items for a really long time now. That's like saying you're shocked cops go undercover and do not ID themselves as cops.
- MattDamonSpace 11mo ago
  I think most Americans would be struck by the revelation that the government has hidden cameras in traffic cones
  - dylan604 11mo ago
    Have most Americans never considered undercover operations? If you are investigating someone, you don't want them to know about it. Otherwise, you wouldn't be bothering with the undercover aspect. Now that the department has cool hidden cameras, of course they will be used for other purposes. It's not like I'm out there hunting down police abuses, but having hidden cameras is just something I would absolutely expect them to have. I did not know they specifically had cameras hidden as traffic cones, but I'm also not shocked they do. That's the shocking part to me is the shock of others instead of others also going "of course they do"

hypeatei 11mo ago

It's been fascinating watching the party of "small government" turn into one that supports ever expanding powers of a three letter agency whose job is supposed to be patrolling the border. It's like a new 9/11 Patriot act moment, except it's only one side supporting it this time.

arealaccount 11mo ago
I don't know what you mean by "turn into" it's always been that way
- hypeatei 11mo ago
  "turn into" is referring to the mask off nature of it all. Before, they might be a little embarrassed or pretend they still stand for those principles. But all I've seen are conservatives explaining why it might be technically allowed or straight up cheering it on.
  - mrguyorama 11mo ago
    No, they still insist, while building a stasi, that they are the party of small government. The people who voted for them and are still cheering them on are insisting that they voted for and are getting small government! They are divorced from what words mean
codegeek 11mo ago
There is nothing small Govt anymore. Both parties are the same when it comes to extending Govt's power (just for different reasons). It is just a talking point now.
- smallmancontrov 11mo ago
  State's Rights (to own slaves) vs No State Rights (to shelter slaves) is probably the most infamous example, and it's from a while ago.
11mo ago

csours 11mo ago

100 Mile Border Zone - https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone 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.

codegeek 11mo ago

"Suddenly, drivers find themselves pulled over — often for reasons cited such as speeding, failure to signal, the wrong window tint or even a dangling air freshener blocking the view. They are then aggressively questioned and searched, with no inkling that the roads they drove put them on law enforcement’s radar." Wow, this is incredibly concerning. So they can pull me over, lie about why and then try to manufacture something ?

tclancy 11mo ago
Yes, it's very important to let them lie about it or else they will have to reveal the actual giant surveillance state and all the technology behind it and that would cause us to lose WWII. 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-swastika-is-no-longer-a-hate-symbol https://www.juneauindependent.com/post/coast-guard-says-swas...
LocalH 11mo ago
It should be illegal for law enforcement not currently participating in a proper sting operation to lie to the person they wish to investigate. But it's not.
- FuriouslyAdrift 11mo ago
  It is in some jurisdictions. In Illinois and Oregon, laws have been passed that prohibit law enforcement officers from using deception when dealing with suspects under the age of 18. Other states, such as Washington, Connecticut, Delaware, and New York, are considering similar legislation that may extend these prohibitions to all individuals being interrogated. https://www.timesleaderonline.com/uncategorized/2022/11/police-are-allowed-to-legally-lie-to-you-in-some-states/ https://www.timesleaderonline.com/uncategorized/2022/11/poli...
adolph 11mo ago
> Wow, this is incredibly concerning. So they can pull me over, lie about why and then try to manufacture something? 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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

standardUser 11mo ago

> often for reasons cited such as speeding, failure to signal, the wrong window tint or even a dangling air freshener 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.

hugkdlief 11mo ago

[flagged]

hugkdlief 11mo ago
Must have struck a chord saying "AI sycophants". Sorry. I should have said, "AI cucks". It is much more applicable, since you all are empowering these AI megacorps to fuck everyone else while idling sitting there watching it happen.
- cindyllm 11mo ago
  [dead]
gosub100 11mo ago
they're the same ones who vote for big government, and come from blue states. so it's no surprise
mmmlinux 11mo ago
I guarantee someone here worked on this system and is very proud of their work.
ActorNightly 11mo ago
I mean, its no different from a gun. The idea that some metal moving fast harms a human started way back when the first broadheads were shot from bows. Gun is just decades of technology applied to that idea. The problem isn't tech, the problem is its use, just like with everything else.

simonw 11mo ago

License plate scanners are one of the most under-appreciated violations of personal privacy that exist today. 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/ 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/ https://drndata.com/about/ Good Vice story about that: https://www.vice.com/en/article/i-tracked-someone-with-license-plate-readers-drn/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/i-tracked-someone-with-licen...

baggachipz 11mo ago
Flock is extremely egregious. https://deflock.me https://deflock.me
- vkou 11mo ago
  WA state has figured out a solution to the Flock problem. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/washington-court-rules-data-captured-flock-safety-cameras-are-public-records 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.
- Lammy 11mo ago
  Relevant federal payola https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary?id=D000116304 https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary... https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/lobbyists?cycle=2025&id=D000116304 https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/lobbyis...

lbrito 11mo ago

This is what the world's most perfect democracy looks like. Peak Freedom.

nxor 11mo ago
According to Pew Research, more foreigners make up the US population today than ever recorded. People here are allowed to question who is coming.
- deleted 11mo ago
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- deleted 11mo ago
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- walthamstow 11mo ago
  What even is a foreigner in a place like the USA?
- deleted 11mo ago
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- ImPleadThe5th 11mo ago
  I will always find it weird that people who think the fact their consciousness randomly popped into existence through pure luck in a privileged country means that they deserve it more than someone who popped into existence somewhere else. Even that aside, how does that give them the right to infringe on the rights and privacy of citizens?
- lbrito 11mo ago
  Not sure about the "ever recorded" part - how far back are we talking? There were some pretty massive waves of illegal aliens flooding the East Coast back in the 1600s.
  - newfriend 11mo ago
    The United States didn't exist in the 1600s.

russellbeattie 11mo ago

[flagged]

lesuorac 11mo ago
Not sure the phrasing of "undocumented immigrants have had their lives ruined" is the angle you want. The angle should be that CBP is causing a lot of unjustified problems for legal residents and citizens. People having to spend 20k to get back property that the government never should've taken is not good for deterring undocumented immigrants. When CBP agents need to spend 20 days of the month rounding up people on farms and home depot to meet quota those are 20 days _not_ spent searching for drug dealers.
- russellbeattie 11mo ago
  I'm not looking for a political angle, I'm straight up asking: Has the 70,000 people put in concentration camps and then deported made their lives demonstrably better and happier?
nxor 11mo ago
Iryna Zarutska's life was ruined. When liberals downplay events like these, it pushes people to the other side, even if the other side has issues. It's not hateful to want less crime.
- bigyabai 11mo ago
  Sure, and Charlie Kirk was murdered by a US citizen. It's okay for us to correlate a rising trend in political violence with something other than immigration. It's not as pleasant or vindictive as saying "the nonwhites did it" but it certainly seems to hold true when the political pot boils over. It's rarely the immigrants taking potshots at the president or storming the capitol, but instead deluded ideologues who are naturalized Americans.
  - russellbeattie 11mo ago
    You mean "natural" citizens. Naturalized is when one is not a citizen, but is made one. On that note, the administration has started the process of de-naturalizing immigrants, which is something I'd never thought I'd see except in extreme cases.

ChrisArchitect 11mo ago

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45991257 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45991257

shortrounddev2 11mo ago

In the last admin I used to think that "abolish ICE" was hysterical. 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.

greenavocado 11mo ago

Modern cars log their GPS coordinates about every 60 seconds and maintain weeks of records at minimum. Police regularly obtain search warrants to view weeks of GPS logs from your infotainment system.

gosub100 11mo ago

just saw this [1] today where the police chief was using license plate readers to stalk and harass "multiple victims". This is why you don't collect the information in the first place. I am sure the lawyers are one step ahead, but I think Flock should pay these victims directly (in addition to the PD) for failing to stop the misuse of their technology. https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/braselton-police-chief-arrested-hours-after-announcing-retirement https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/braselton-police-chief-arre...

pstuart 11mo ago

It's germane to point out the War on Drugs™ is a war on the people and has never been about "keeping people safe". I know that a lot of people say that cannabis is ok but hard drugs should not be legal to keep people safe. Look at how well that's worked out, as well as how the people involved with those drugs are treated (users are treated like dangerous criminals rather than with substance abuse issues). 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.

billy99k 11mo ago

Canada has been authoritarian for awhile, while trying to claim to be 'nice'. The protestors during Covid got de-banked, fired, and arrested. Democracies with Liberal leaders can quite literally get away with murder.

bigyabai 11mo ago
> 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.

arnonejoe 11mo ago

You can sue the government for violating your 4th amendment rights.

micromacrofoot 11mo ago

Intentionally driving suspiciously to get illegally detained sounds like an easy lawsuit.

jkestner 11mo ago
If only the application of the law was as binary as code.
nmeagent 11mo ago
Beware of "you can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride." Some people don't survive that ride. Sometimes that ride lasts many years.

stackedinserter 11mo ago

Remind me, why do we need license plates? 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?

deleted 11mo ago

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hnburnsy 11mo ago

Does anyone know if ALPRs are being combined with Bluetooth/TPMS scanning to associate devices across vehicles or if TPMS is getting associated to vehicles (like if a stolen plate is put on another vehicle because the TPMS doesn't match)?

Ms-J 11mo ago
TPMS scanning is particularly nasty. I've been meaning to read up more about all of the potential ways it can violate our privacy. Sorry that I don't have any further info about it in this case.

scblock 11mo ago

> "detaining those with suspicious travel patterns" Detaining those they _deem_, without oversight to have such.

Padriac 11mo ago

This is good news. Punish the wrongdoers so we can live in a peaceful safe society.

hnburnsy 11mo ago

What bugs me the most about all this surveillance is that crime clearance rates dont seem to be improving, I guess it just makes law enforcents job easier, they just click click click instead of actual shoe leathering. Murder clearance rates in the 50s was in the high ninety percent.

ntonozzi 11mo ago
There are some good reasons it is lower now, like defense lawyers and Miranda rights. Obviously it'd be good if we had both good civil rights AND high murder clearance, but they seem in obvious tension with each other.

jimt1234 11mo ago

I drive back-country roads all the time to go hiking and camping. I guess that makes me an outlaw now. Great. /s

cratermoon 11mo ago

"Suddenly, drivers find themselves pulled over — often for reasons cited such as speeding, failure to signal, the wrong window tint or even a dangling air freshener blocking the view. They are then aggressively questioned and searched, with no inkling that the roads they drove put them on law enforcement’s radar." 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.

fudged71 11mo ago

Anyone can be targeted, anyone can be pulled over, anyone can be detained, anyone can be labelled a terrorist, anyone can be deported to a black hole in el salvador. These are dark times.

superkuh 11mo ago

The border patrol should only be able to do this within the 100 mile no constitution zone that extends from all foreign borders (including internal borders like the great lakes). If they do this in Minneapolis, Minnesota or Denver, Colorado it would be unconstitutional.

nmeagent 11mo ago
No. They shouldn't be able to do this within 100 miles of a border either, since that's not a reasonable distance for the border exception to apply by any sane reasoning. The rights of roughly 2/3 of the US population don't evaporate because of some absurd assertion of distance that is clearly off by two orders of magnitude. We must uproot this particular crop of dystopian bullshit and salt the earth in its place.

hising 11mo ago

It is so tragic to see where the US is going in real time from an outside observer. So much for "freedom".

ddalex 11mo ago

Land of the free.....

whatsupdog 11mo ago

> Once limited to policing the nation’s boundaries, the Border Patrol has built a surveillance system stretching into the country’s interior Well, that's what happens when you blur the line called the border.

jdprgm 11mo ago

It feels like the past 25 years has been a continuous slowly constricting circle just chipping away at privacy and freedom and it almost never goes in the other direction or even just reverts a policy back to baseline. People largely don't seem to care though and I don't think there are any politicians seriously fighting against it and prioritizing as a primary policy.

greedo 11mo ago

Technology is going to change a lot of things... 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.

wiml 11mo ago
Don't need anything as clumsy as a drone swarm. There are systems designed to aerially record an entire city at high enough resolution to follow each individual. And to keep history long enough to go back to before you thought you had to be careful.
- greedo 11mo ago
  I was extrapolating a lower cost version of Gorgon Stare. I remember when Rivet Joint first came on line and it was possible to track Warsaw Pact units as they traveled, and you could extrapolate their C3 units as well as their POL supplies. Never thought it would become part of modern police surveillance, but I was a young naive person back then.

QuiEgo 11mo ago

Remember the movie Minority Report? Where a central plot point was the main character being tracked (by their retina in that case), and how to defeat the tracking? Vibes.

puppycodes 11mo ago

Terrifying and unconstitutional

bloomingeek 11mo ago

After graduating high school, our daughter became a "member" working for Disney World. We made several driving trips back and forth to visit or bring her stuff she wanted or just for the heck of it. Then after a while we flew out, rented a van and brought all her things and her back home. Was that suspicious? 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?

EchoReflection 11mo ago

good? why is this "news-worthy"? "Law-enforcement personnel are paying attention to people behaving 'suspiciously'" seems like: "people are doing their jobs". Gasp! The audacity!

beeflet 11mo ago
This comment is suspicious. I'm gonna need to see some ID
- BizarroLand 11mo ago
  72 hours in a cell while I rifle through their entire life for anything I can use to extend their stay at the Graybar Hotel should be enough to cool their heels.

Mawr 11mo ago

Ah, the freedom of a car. Well, in any case, this is easy to circumvent—use public transport or ride a bike. Wait, what country are we talking about here? Oh... right.

beeflet 11mo ago
it will not protect you from camera surveilance

peteforde 11mo ago

Benn Jordan's recent video on Flock Security cameras is a must-watch IMO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lY

mumber_typhoon 11mo ago

>In February, Lorenzo Gutierrez Lugo, a driver for a small trucking company that specializes in transporting furniture, clothing and other belongings to families in Mexico, was driving south to the border city of Brownsville, Texas, carrying packages from immigrant communities in South Carolina’s low country. 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-smuggling-at-the-u-s-mexico-border-an-overview/ https://forumtogether.org/article/illicit-fentanyl-and-drug-...

kart23 11mo ago
Carrying cash isn't a crime. The fact that no charges were brought says that they couldn't prove a crime was committed either. And please read the fifth amendment. > No criminal charges were ultimately brought against Gutierrez Lugo
- mumber_typhoon 11mo ago
  >Carrying cash isn't a crime. No but carrying over $10,000 into the US requires you to declare it and maybe pay taxes if you can't prove its source or risk being sized (which is fine if it's drug money).
thesh4d0w 11mo ago
> driving south to the border city of Brownsville, Texas > 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.

anarticle 11mo ago

"They'll never use it for evil!" 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.

insane_dreamer 11mo ago

The US is turning into China, which has perfected the surveillance state.

ragebol 11mo ago

Here goes the "I have nothing to hide" argument. They'll find new stuff that'll make you suspicious.

ndsipa_pomu 11mo ago

What's needed is to have license plates with little displays that show some Disney cartoon or other copyrighted work. Then it's a matter of informing Disney that their IP is being illegally copied.

34679 11mo ago

This honestly has me considering replacing my plates with something that says "The driver of this vehicle invokes their 4th and 5th Amendment rights."

silexia 11mo ago

This is the problem with government... it is impossible to shrink or close agencies, and they only ever grow and grab more power. We need Constitutional limits on government size and power. Don't trust politicians when they promise you things.

burnt-resistor 11mo ago

Vacationing too much with too many people? "Human trafficking!"

stevenalowe 11mo ago

Or so they say. Could just be DWB (driving while black/brown) with a new smokescreen