From having worked on systems like this, anything that allows a cop to look into people's whereabouts will have extensive logs of queries being performed because abuses are one of the first problems you run into. They happen _all the time_. They'll look up their romantic partners, an ex's new boyfriend, ...
I am of the opinion that automatic gathering of the travel history of a plate should be locked behind judicial approval, and that the data should have a lifetime. But I'm 99.99% confident that the searches are at least logged because we got complaints, like, 1 month in.
I'm worried that YouPeople(TM) (i.e. the reader, HN, some unspecified future group, etc.) will vote in some jerks who will decide that people like me ought to be scrutinized to the full extent of the law. And your cheerleaders will say things like "they shouldn't have broken the law" when it was never possible, by design, to comply with all the laws all the time in the first place.
This happened with the IRS and ICE. Illegal immigrants were told to pay taxes because the IRS didn't reveal their address to ICE. And it didn't. Now the new regime has fired and replaced the people at the IRS responsible for that policy, and the IRS will now report all data it collected about illegal immigrants to ICE.
And the same people crying about that trap (dox yourselves to us, or be guilty of tax evasion) are mostly the same people who think nailing Al Capone for tax evasion was a step forward for policy/government. Drives me up the f-ing wall that people won't take a step back and think about the big picture of policy.
Or a scenario where an arbitrary cop deliberately leaks the information to a nominally private group (perhaps named like the "${Color}${Clothing}s") whose violent activities are ignored or pardoned by the law.
_will_ vote in some folks? see this is what confuses me about the trump is a fascist crowd, aren't we concerned about giving the state this much power because of the people who have already been voted in?
I mean, it's too little too late but likewise it's amazing to me that the same people who are trying to convince me that the current government is fascist is also at the same time still campaigning on behalf of the same government to disarm its citizens.
> it's amazing to me that the same people who are trying to convince me that the current government is fascist is also at the same time still campaigning on behalf of the same government to disarm its citizens.
Why is that amazing? It doesn't really matter if civilians in the US are armed and trained and organized. If the US government decides to violently oppress people, the US government will win. Sure, it'll hurt more fighting against armed civilians, but they'll still win. The idea that the 2nd Amendment creates a populace full of people who could win an engagement against the US military is hilarious.
The ability of the citizens to resist the government's ability to enforce compliance of unpopular stuff is a defense in depth thing.
Not having pervasive surveillance is one layer. Due process that gives huge veto power to whatever the minority on the issue is is another. Being able to decide you'll take an enforcer with you rather than spend life in prison (and the pause and increased resource expenditure and scrutiny that causes the enforcers) is another layer.
The fascism is consolidating power in the executive branch by having a billionaire gut the federal bureaucracy while trying to intimidate judges who rule against the administration and critical news agencies, among other things. Gun restrictions are a separate topic, and there is no serious chance that ordinary citizens are gong to form a militia to take on the US Military.
First of all, you have a point - Trump is a great object lesson for why its probably not a great idea to have a huge, powerful, monolithic state and a commander in chief that can launch nuclear weapons. I don't think anyone would dispute that.
But most people see that the government as currently comported isn't going anywhere, even acknowledging the dedicated if incondite attempts of the current administration to "tame administrative bloat," as they might describe it. Thus your average "liberal" thinks first that government should be executed carefully by professional policy makers that respect the power of the state and second it should "take people's guns away."
But I will say that almost no liberal wants to totally disarm the public, anyway. That is a cartoon position which charitably could be attributed to loud voices on social media or something, but not a real policy position held by typical "libs". Most liberals just want guns to be properly regulated (perhaps even restricted to well regulated militias, to recall a phrase from somewhere). There might be some quibbling about precisely where the line between proper regulation and enabling oppression go, but I'd wager a majority of Americans are in favor of some version of the right to bear arms.
As evidence of this I proffer this pew research poll (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/24/key-facts...) which indicates that more than half of people who do not own guns could see themselves buying one in the future. 32% of people own guns in the U.S.
And I am sure when they are caught the full brunt of the U.S. justice system holds them accountable for their wretched behavior. More likely they just move departments. Logging something is moot if those abusing the power are rarely held accountable for things ranging all the way up to murder.
I agree that we don't have an expectation of privacy on a public road, but I feel like we've been frog boiled in the US into equating that with being tracked everywhere, all the time -- or, rather, constantly surveilled by both private and public entities.
I agree with you on the judicial approval and data expiration, but I don't think the systems should be active until those rules are enacted.
From Justice Sotomayor's concurring opinion in US v. Jones:
'“cases involving even short-term monitoring … require particular attention” because the “Government can store such records and efficiently mine them for information years into the future …. GPS monitoring is cheap … proceeds surreptitiously, [and] it evades the ordinary checks that constrain abusive law enforcement practices: ‘limited police resources and community hostility.'” Id. at *11. Justice Sotomayor expressed concerns that the Government’s use of such technology might chill “associational and expressive freedoms,”'
I am of the opinion that automatic gathering of the travel history of a plate should be locked behind judicial approval, and that the data should have a lifetime. But I'm 99.99% confident that the searches are at least logged because we got complaints, like, 1 month in.