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Automatic license plate readers and search and seizure?

bongsaway said:
When I walk down the street I'm on public display, does that give the cops the right to go through my wallet?
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If you are somehow waving around or otherwise exposing the contents of your wallet while walking in public then yes.
 
GDViking said:
Last one told me he stopped me because he read my plates. I got a bit obnoxious and asked him how he could read my plate at sixty miles an hour in the dark. The only answer I could get out of him was " I don't know".

If it's such a good tool why are they lying about why they pulled me over?
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I got hit with one too, but to be honest, turns out my registration lapsed, due to back taxes on an additional water "projects" bill. No registration, no insurance. Which is a problem. And of course, despite cutting the checks that paid registration...the office can't be bothered to send me any notification that due to a tax issue, my check was no good.

Had to hear it from the five O.
 
I just spoke to a lawyer and found that LE can pretty much use their new toys in anyway they see fit.
 
GDViking said:
So is it a civil liberties problem with police randomly running your plates and collecting data?

Discussion...
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Mixed feelings about the technology.

License plates are required to be displayed at all times. Whether an official calls in the plate, or a reader runs the plate, the result is the same.

On the other hand, I have a thing about slippery slopes, and the grade of this particular road looks like it could downhill and the surface potentially slick......
 
Check Google Images for "Obama watching TV.

OMG!!! President Obama watched TV too! The federal government should immediately pass a law outlawing all politicians and anyone else who works for government from watching television. Outlaw them from reading newspapers too.
 
GDViking said:
To me it seems to be more of a stop and frisk.

I have been getting stopped a lot lately for no reason, it finally occurred to me they are reading my plates and stopping me for past tickets.
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Stop and Frisk is far more intrusive requiring the person be stopped and actually searched. Instead of observed and identified from afar. If they stopped the car and searched the contents, that would be similar to stop and frisk
 
Napoleon said:
The license plate is publicly displayed so there can be no reasonable expectation of privacy in terms of the data linked to it. There is no violation if the police are just being looky-loos. Where a civil liberties problem does occur is in a scenario where the police then use that data for reasons unrelated to law enforcement.
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While I agree with you I have to point that a society where we’re constantly under surveillance in public and constantly have to worry that any inadvertent misstep will bring LE down on our heads is not exactly what I’d call free. Nor is it one that a sane person would actually want to live in.
 
bongsaway said:
When I walk down the street I'm on public display, does that give the cops the right to go through my wallet?
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no, but if you happen to be wearing a license plate, he can run that tag thru the database
 
GDViking said:
A license plate does not tell you who is behind the wheel, it tells you if the car is properly licensed to be on the road. If it is and there are no other reasons to pull you over that is an unwarranted stop.
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say that there is a person of interest for a recent crime and that same name is shown on the database matching the license registration, would that not warrant pulling said driver over?
 
Sure does appear to violate the term 'probable cause'. The legal geniuses will have to interpret how that is applied, but I have a problem with it.
 
Versions of this have happened as far back as when I began driving back in the 70s and Im sure long before that. "Do you know why I pulled you over?" is a fishing line. As a kid we used to get pulled over by the sheriffs office regularly. In the military...it happened at least once a week when we worked the grave shift and had to go off base at 2-4 AM for grub or when leaving the Legion Hall. Invariably they would say some weak **** like"you used your turn signal too early" or "You changed lanes too abruptly" but we always knew it was an excuse to push their face in the car and smell for alcohol. Always the same...ok...Im going to let you off with just a warning...
 
justabubba said:
say that there is a person of interest for a recent crime and that same name is shown on the database matching the license registration, would that not warrant pulling said driver over?
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That is different they are searching for a criminal, not a crime.
And if the guy is wanted doesn't it stand to reason that they would already have an apb out for his plates, and there would be no reason to run them.
 
GDViking said:
To me it seems to be more of a stop and frisk.

I have been getting stopped a lot lately for no reason, it finally occurred to me they are reading my plates and stopping me for past tickets.
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Nah, they're just checking liberals more often. :lol:
 
GDViking said:
So is it a civil liberties problem with police randomly running your plates and collecting data?
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It looks like a device designed to help a totalitarian state.

justabubba said:
it violates no personal rights while making law enforcement more efficient
which factors seem to be a good thing
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You think you are a law abiding citizen, don't you?

Can you tell us how many criminal laws are there in the US? I'm very curious(and also curious about how one can obey them if they're too many)

Napoleon said:
The license plate is publicly displayed so there can be no reasonable expectation of privacy in terms of the data linked to it.
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It depends. It's one thing when the plate is run on case-by-case scenario by a cop, another thing when it's done automatically every time you get close to a camera, a yet another thing when your each automatically read plate is stored in some system(bye, bye privacy completely - they're actually storing your movements - something totalitarian dream of)

Napoleon said:
Where a civil liberties problem does occur is in a scenario where the police then use that data for reasons unrelated to law enforcement.
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No, not really. Your "civil liberties" no longer exist when you live in a medium with constant surveillance in the name of helping "law enforcement" (anyway, the idea of "civil liberties" in the US is a really bad joke)
 
Nilhus said:
No, not really. Your "civil liberties" no longer exist when you live in a medium with constant surveillance in the name of helping "law enforcement" (anyway, the idea of "civil liberties" in the US is a really bad joke)
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Surveillance would only be a civil liberties violation if there was a civil liberty for criminals to evade law enforcement. There’s no such thing. What you do in public is, by definition, not a private matter so what civil liberty do you think is violated by constant passive surveillance of public life?
 
Napoleon said:
Surveillance would only be a civil liberties violation if there was a civil liberty for criminals to evade law enforcement.
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Wrong. Moreover, nonsensical.

Napoleon said:
What you do in public is, by definition, not a private matter so what civil liberty do you think is violated by constant passive surveillance of public life?
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Wrong again. The details of your life in public are pretty much private. When you enter your PIN for your credit card in a store, that's a private matter despite being in a public place. Your discussion with a person in restaurant or on a bench in a park is also private. Your detailed movements in public are private. If the state tracks your presence/movements then the state infringes on your liberty to be free from state control of your movements in public spaces.

Apparently you're a fan of strong state control and surveillance. Why? Are you so afraid of criminals? Do you trust the state so much?
 
Nilhus said:
Wrong. Moreover, nonsensical.


Wrong again. The details of your life in public are pretty much private. When you enter your PIN for your credit card in a store, that's a private matter despite being in a public place. Your discussion with a person in restaurant or on a bench in a park is also private. Your detailed movements in public are private. If the state tracks your presence/movements then the state infringes on your liberty to be free from state control of your movements in public spaces.

Apparently you're a fan of strong state control and surveillance. Why? Are you so afraid of criminals? Do you trust the state so much?
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The mistake you make in your logic is that you are using the government knowing you do things and the government preventing you from doing those things as interchangeable. They aren’t. You don’t have a right to privacy as it relates to your actions in public. Your PIN is a private matter, but your use of the ATM in public is not.
 
GDViking said:
That is different they are searching for a criminal, not a crime.
And if the guy is wanted doesn't it stand to reason that they would already have an apb out for his plates, and there would be no reason to run them.
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in each plate inquiry entered into the database, are the police not looking for a criminal?
 
Since almost every new vehicle is equipped with either wifi or cellular builtin today, or both, not to mention mapping and location schemes both hardware and software, tracking any vehicle at anytime is not problematic. Even when the antenna is removed from the vehicle, wifi and cellular connections are turned off, sensor chips are still active elsewhere in the vehicle, and truly sensitive equipment in planes, helicopters and satellites can track them by serial #'s. License plates are relatively moot today. More a scheme for state fees than identification of vehicles. New police scanners can id vehicles by their keyless entry system serial #'s from more than 2 miles away. Some can even control locking systems and engine performance. As technology marches on, identification of vehicles and control thereof will only increase in capability. Two years ago my then 12 year old grandson showed me how to unlock my Caddy and start the engine, while we were in my living room, with his smart phone. My 2011 Caddy has keyless entry and remote engine start. His smartphone had software that scanned the remote fob in my pocket, and had greater performance range than my remote. He then showed me other software in his phone, having now id'd my lock system, which could use Find My Phone software from Apple to track my car at all times. He had other schemes for Android, Garmin, Google Maps, and so on.

Don't be that concerned about police, government, or big corporations tracking you. Worry about 12 year olds seeking to make you crazy as they giggle maniacally.
 
Napoleon said:
The mistake you make in your logic is
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There's absolutely no mistake in my logic.

Napoleon said:
you are using the government knowing you do things and the government preventing you from doing those things as interchangeable. They aren’t.
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The government "knowing I do things" prevents me from living without government surveillance. I don't want the government know what I do.

Napoleon said:
You don’t have a right to privacy as it relates to your actions in public. Your PIN is a private matter, but your use of the ATM in public is not.
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Of course you have a right to privacy as it relates to your actions in public. Well, if "your use of the ATM in public is not"(a private matter) then anyone could steal your PIN with a camera.

It's clear by now that you are a fan of totalitarianism, dreaming of 1984 kind of things(and possibly worse) being imposed by the state on the population.

OldFatGuy said:
Don't be that concerned about police, government,
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Historically, governments are by far the biggest criminals. Giving too much power to governments is an enormous MISTAKE! Don't believe that democracy can alleviate the issue, on the contrary, democracy is a pretty sure path towards totalitarianism as the masses are far too stupid to understand what's going on a have a natural tendency to give excessive power to the state due to paranoia(irrational/exaggerated fear of crime or other things)

The rate of incarceration the number of criminal laws in the US should be very telling about what's going on in the US right now. A rational individual should be far more afraid of the american state than of criminals. The crazy amount of criminal legislation makes almost everyone a criminal, it's just a matter of getting caught. Too bad there are too few rational people out there.

OldFatGuy said:
big corporations tracking you
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I wouldn't be concerned about corporations as long as they're not too intrusive and as long as they don't pass data to government or make the data public.
 
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Nilhus said:
I wouldn't be concerned about corporations as long as they're not too intrusive and as long as they don't pass data to government or make the data public.
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There's nothing but mistakes in your logic. Cherry picking corporations from a warning about the skills of 12 year old boys also speaks about your comprehension capabilities and recognition of the sarcasm mocking you.

Are you silly enough not to understand the secret of America? Money. And those with money control the government as well as the big corporations, one way or another. No point in being paranoid about it. Nothing in your life will change as a result. That fear, that paranoia, the source of your irrational illogic.
 
OldFatGuy said:
There's nothing but mistakes in your logic.
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Talking about supposed mistakes in one's logic without being able to point them out and show which logical fallacy is committed, shows that you know absolutely nothing about logic!

OldFatGuy said:
Cherry picking corporations from a warning about the skills of 12 year old boys also speaks about your comprehension capabilities and recognition of the sarcasm mocking you.
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I noticed the sarcasm, which is irrelevant anyway. Many people have concerns about corporations collecting/using private data "the wrong way" - but their concerns are often misplaced as usually there's nothing wrong that can happen from a corporation collecting/using private data - mostly they use it for marketing/advertising purposes - which is harmless! Problems start to appear when corporations pass the data on to government.

OldFatGuy said:
Are you silly enough not to understand the secret of America? Money. And those with money control the government as well as the big corporations, one way or another.
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This is a bit orthogonal to what we were debating. Money do play a certain role in government's actions, but I somewhat doubt that money play a major role in the current state of affairs and the totalitarian inclination of the american state: a crazily large amount of criminal legislation, absurdly high sentences, a huge variety of other restrictions and non-criminal legislation, insane amount of surveillance and data collection. Businesses involved in running private prisons probably do push for this kind of things, but other than that, I have serious doubts that major businesses play a large role in pushing the state curtail individual freedoms. Even if we count various actions by certain large IT companies like facebook in fighting alleged "fake news" - these actions were prompted by state pressure & allegations of election interference by other states. Generally large corporations don't push for restrictions and surveillance against the population.

OldFatGuy said:
No point in being paranoid about it. Nothing in your life will change as a result. That fear, that paranoia, the source of your irrational illogic.
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paranoia = irrational, baseless fear
If you call me "paranoid" you're basically saying that I'm afraid of some "imaginary danger" that doesn't exist. What's that particular "imaginary danger" that you think I'm afraid of?
 
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