CBP is monitoring US drivers and detaining those with suspicious travel patterns
383 comments
·November 20, 2025simonw
crazygringo
I'm curious what you think the solution is?
Taking a photograph of a car with its license plate is legal. As is selling a photo you've taken, whether it has a license plate or not.
Therefore taking millions of photos in public of cars, and turning their license plate numbers into a database is legal, as is selling that information. It's all data gained in public.
Obviously it's now scary that you're being tracked. But what is the solution? We certainly don't want to outlaw taking photos in public. Is it the mass aggregation of already-public data that should be made illegal? What adverse consequences might that have, e.g. journalists compiling public data to prove governmental corruption?
JumpCrisscross
> curious what you think the solution is?
Require a warrant for law enforcement to poll these databases. And make the database operators strictly liable for breaches and mis-use.
For all we know, "suspicious" travel patterns may include visiting a place of religious worship or an abortion clinic. For a future President, it may be parking near the home of someone who tweeted support for a J6'er.
(And we haven't even touched the national security risk Flock poses [1].)
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/03/lawmakers-say-stolen-polic...
jakelazaroff
> Taking a photograph of a car with its license plate is legal. As is selling a photo you've taken, whether it has a license plate or not.
> Therefore taking millions of photos in public of cars, and turning their license plate numbers into a database is legal, as is selling that information. It's all data gained in public.
One absolutely does not follow the other; there are all sorts of things that are legal only if done for certain purposes, only below a certain scale, etc. The idea that we must permit both or neither is a false dichotomy.
huem0n
Require commercially used photos to not contain identifying information (face license plate) without consent of the owner (of the license plate/face).
This already happens a lot on Google street view.
analog8374
Make everybody secure, happy and sane enough that using such powers for ill becomes uninteresting.
simonw
Not great news for people who want to have affairs. Or (a better example) escape from an abusive relationship.
salawat
It is a matter of law that no digital database of firearms data can be made. The friction is a feature. I'd propose something surrounding license plates, phone info, SIM's and VIN's may be needed. Of course, LE and tax authorities would scream bloody murder, but if we didn't see such flagrant abuse of sensitive identifiers, then maybe they could be trusted with nice things.
xnx
Ironically, you'll have more privacy in a Waymo than your own car.
Animats
No, you have to have a Google or Apple account tracking you under their terms.
sandworm101
Hacker solution: open/crowd source a pirate camera network. People submit feeds of traffic from whatever camera they have. We build tiny/concealable cameras to plant all over state capitals. Client-side software detects plates and reports only those on the target list. That list: every elected leader. The next time they hold a privacy-related hearing, we read out the committee chairperson's daily movements for the last month.
Other idea: AI-enabled dashcam detects and automatically reports "emergency vehicles" to google maps hands free. Goodbye speed traps.
DaSHacka
You don't even need something so complicated. Those Flock cameras are so vulnerable you can easily make a botnet from them and make them serve your own malicious purpose.
batisteo
There is a huge overlap between legal and immoral
baggachipz
Flock is extremely egregious.
vkou
WA state has figured out a solution to the Flock problem.
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.
smoser
Toyota was working on a feature for its cars that would report license plates from amber alerts to authorities. https://x.com/SteveMoser/status/1493990907661766664?s=20
BobaFloutist
That would frankly be a narrow, reasonable application.
The problem is the database building. Law enforcement queries should all be forced to be 1. Require a warrant or an active emergency and 2. Be strictly real-time, for a set duration, and store no information about cars that are not subject to the warrant.
If either of those is not hardcoses into the technology, I don't want my local police department to be allowed to use license plate scanners whatsoever.
ComplexSystems
Don't new cars just directly record your location as you drive them?
nmeagent
Do you think that corporate erosion of (or outright hostility to) privacy is somehow a compelling reason to deny rights to those of us who make different choices in an attempt to protect them? Just because some people decided to buy a smartphone on wheels, do I have to suffer and have my freedom of movement narrowed and protection from arbitrary inspection by government agents denied?
drnick1
They do, but it is relatively easy to nuke the onboard modem to permanently disconnect your car. Unfortunately, most people don't know or don't care that their cars are actively spying on them.
torginus
My guess would be that your car would develop some covert or overt fault if you did that. You might even lose warranty as the manufacturer could claim that the issue they fixed via a software update couldn't be installed on your car - or couldn't monitor some diagnostics which are a prerequisite for in-warranty repair.
Most telco execs would sell their own mothers before offering reasonable data plans - that your car comes with one for free should be very telling
sroussey
So does your phone. And the government just buys the data from data brokers.
sleepybrett
One wonders if any given tesla is harvesting the plates the other cars it see in traffic as well.
xnx
> License plate scanners are one of the most under-appreciated violations of personal privacy that exist today.
Worse than cell phone tracking? Cell phone tracking is higher fidelity, continuous, and works everywhere.
DaSHacka
The difference is you can opt out by leaving it at home.
legitster
I mean... the whole point of a license plate is that it's a public identifier. It should not be that controversial that's publicly registered information. In the same way that flights are tracked.
Multiple Supreme Courts have also made it clear several times that they believe you do not have a right to privacy in public spaces. So all the traffic camera databases do is automate and make easier something that is currently definitively legal.
The more pertinent issue in this case is that driving patterns should not be grounds for detainment without a warrant. Especially if you have no evidence to link the driver to the car. But unfortunately, the recent Supreme Court decision made suspicion of being an illegal immigrant grounds for detainment.
9dev
This line of argument enables all kinds of criminals to do stuff you absolutely do not want them to. From stalkers figuring out the best time to rape their victim to organised crime planning cash truck robbery routes.
ActorNightly
I mean, its possible to subpoena cellphone records and geographically track your movement based on which cell towers you connect to.
But regardless, I always find it funny that most of the rhetoric for personal liberties revolves around being able to do illegal things.
thewebguyd
> revolves around being able to do illegal things.
The problem is, what is legal today might not be tomorrow. Especially depending on the regime in power at the time.
Mass surveillance can implicate someone in a crime if later on some regime decides that what they did or where they went is now a crime when it wasn't before.
Remember the push back against Apple's proposed client side scanning of photos to look for CSAM? What happens when the hash database starts including things like political memes, or other types of photos. What used to be legal is now not, and you get screwed because of the surveillance state.
Absolutely no data should be available without a warrant and subpoena, full stop. Warrants issued by a court, not a secret national security letter with a gag order either. Warrants only issued with true probable cause, not "acting suspicious."
sroussey
Absolutely all your data is available for sale by data brokers. Need to get rid of those first. Then the government would need warrants where they don’t need warrants to just buy your data.
ActorNightly
The idea that US citizens actually give a fuck about defending anything is laughable. All of this is performative virtue signaling.
US literally has ownership of guns codified into constitution, specifically to allow citizens to defend themselves from oppressive regimes that fit CBP to the letter (i.e violence against US citizens), however a CBP officer is yet to be shot in a confrontation.
Its to the point where Trump can literally start confiscating guns, and the amount of armed resistance will be negligible, and most of it originating from organized gangs. When it comes to all the "dont tread on me" people, when armed forces are surrounding their house, and the chance of losing the easy comfortable life they have lived for the past 3 decades is very real, all of them are going to bend over and lube up so fast that they will get whiplash, without a doubt.
holmesworcester
The most important reason for privacy is that without it, social norms calcify.
If a norm is outdated, oppressive, or maladaptive in some way and needs to be changed, it becomes very difficult to change the norm if you cannot build a critical mass of people practicing the replacement norm.
It is even harder if you cannot even talk about building a critical mass of people practicing the replacement norm.
For many norms, like the taboo on homosexuality which was strong in the US and Europe until recently and is still strong in many places today, the taboo and threat of ostracism are strong enough that people need privacy to build critical mass to change the norm even when the taboo is not enshrined in law, or the law is not usually enforced. This was the mechanism of "coming out of the closet": build critical mass for changing the norm in private, and then take the risk of being in public violation once enough critical mass had been organized that it was plausible to replace the old oppressive/maladaptive norm with a new one.
But yes, obsolete/maladaptive/oppressive norms are often enshrined in law too.
Spooky23
For good reason. Being "investigated" for illegal things is a key way to violate personal liberties. If you believe in freedom, you have to accept that some people who are not nice people benefit from those human rights. You may find yourself an "enemy of the people" for a variety of reasons.
In most cases, cell tower data is sold in the open market in aggregate. A commercial real estate developer can buy datasets that provide the average household income of passers by by hour of the day and month of the year, for example. The police can request tower ping data, generally by warrant. There are exceptions, especially in the federal space.
The Feds have a massive surveillance network. Every journey on the interstates between Miami and the border crossings near Buffalo, Watertown, Plattsburgh, Vermont and Maine all the way down to Miami is logged and tracked by a DEA program, which has likely expanded. You can get breadcrumbs of LPR hits and passenger photographs throughout the journey.
Flock is a cancer, as it is deployed by individual jurisdictions (often with Federal grants) and makes each node part of a larger network. They help solve and will likely eliminate some categories of crime. But the laws governing use are at best weak and at worse an abomination. Local cops abuse it by doing the usual dumb cop stuff -- stalking girlfriends, checking up on acquaintances. The Federal government is able to tap in to make it a node in their panopticon. Unlike government systems, stuff like user ids aren't really governed well and the abuses are mostly unauditable.
The private camera networks are a problem for commercial abuse and Federal abuse. They aren't as risky for local PDs because they generally require a paper trail to use. Corrupt/abusive cops don't like accountability.
ActorNightly
>The police can request tower ping data, generally by warrant.
Or Trump can just put legal pressure on cell providers and they will bend the knee like everyone else, and CPB can easily have that data without problems.
Lets not pretend that that is the line they won't cross.
simonw
That is exactly my point: no subpoena or warrant is required for access to license plate scan databases.
ActorNightly
I want you to tell me in exact words that you firmly believe that when the current regime starts requesting records without any legal oversight, cell companies won't comply, because users trust is worth to them more than shareholder value.
onlypassingthru
Only a review of your dossier by the House Un-American Activities Committee† can verify you have not demonstrated any subversive behavior, citizen.
† https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_Un-American_Activities_C...
null
shadowgovt
Counterpoint: when you're sharing a public road, the license of your car to share that road isn't private information.
... But I echo the concern with how the collection and aggregation of the days can be abused. I just didn't have a great solution. "Don't use shared public resources to do secret things; they're incompatible with privacy" might be the rubric here.
hypeatei
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.
JohnTHaller
It's the same as the Republican slogans of being the party of "fiscal responsibility" despite under-performing the Democratic party in nearly all financial metrics and constantly blowing up the deficit or being the party of "family values" while having leaders and 'respected' voices who are the complete opposite.
vlovich123
The party of small government is a slogan. It’s the same party that expanded domestic FBI surveillance, expanded intelligence agencies and lots of other things. It’s also the party that is intimately interested in what private citizens do in their bedroom (sodomy and condom laws) and what medical decisions doctors and patients can undertake.
Scubabear68
To be fair, the current Republican Party bears almost no resemblance to the "classic" Republican Party of....10 years ago.
The Newt and the Tea Party started the slide, normalizing hatred and bombast and FU-politics, and MAGA perfected it.
Whether you love it, hate it, or are indifferent, what you are dealing with now are not really Republicans. They are MAGA-folks. They should really rename themselves the Solipism Party. Nothing matters but the current state of your own head.
And yes, I know parties change and evolve with the times, but I would argue this time is very different.
concinds
The "old" GOP also loved 3 letter agencies, unitary executive theory, and mass surveillance. They did the Patriot Act. And Scalia hated the 5th Amendment, was weird on the 4th, and dramatically increased police powers.
tshaddox
> To be fair, the current Republican Party bears almost no resemblance to the "classic" Republican Party of....10 years ago.
In other aspects, perhaps. But the "small government" or "pro-economy" branding of the Republican Party has been an absurdity for more like 75 years. Democratic administrations have performed better on virtually any conceivable economic metric with very few minor exceptions.
int_19h
It's not like those Tea Party folk appeared out of the blue. They grew, but the core constituency has been pandered to by mainstream Republican leadership since at least Nixon.
masklinn
The current Republican Party is the exact same as 10 years ago, just further along.
10 years ago was basically Trump 1. And 10 years before that was GWB starting the endless wars with an admin outright denying reality. Which Reagan also did. And of course Nixon literally broke into the opposition party’s.
sleepybrett
.. 10 years ago. Yes it fucking does, it's just become more brazen. Those are the motherfuckers that passed the patriot act and then reupped it over and over.
Lammy
There's no need to partisanize this. Why would you immediately turn off half of your possible audience when speaking about an issue that affects everyone equally? San Francisco is covered in Flock cameras just like the ones pictured top-right in the article, and you won't find a more-Democrat-leaning place. One cannot analyze and act on data that does not exist: https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/sf-takes-historic-step-to-s...
throwway120385
Flock is sort of a new kind of animal in the LPR space. Before that there were a lot of LPR companies out there but none of them were providing data in such a way that law enforcement could do what it's doing. LPR has been in use for tolling and for parking enforcement for decades now. It's the same kind of shell game Ring has been running by putting surveillance cameras on everyone's house and then selling access to law enforcement.
ajross
> There's no need to partisanize this.
On the contrary, the only way to drive change in a democracy is via partisanship. Demanding we all adhere to an artificial both-sides framing is manufacturing consensus for the status quo. Politicians only change their positions if they think they'll lose votes because of it.
Also, obviously, because the analysis in this case is clearly wrong. This is a 100% partisan issue. Period. There are good guys and bad guys in the story, and if you won't point out who they are you're just running cover for the bad guys.
pnw
None of this is new. The article states that CBP got authorization to track license plates in 2017 and concerns about law enforcement use of ALPR date back to at least 2010. The ACLU sued the LAPD in 2013 on ALPR.
root_axis
The part that's new is people being detained for "suspicious" traffic patterns.
dragonwriter
The particular manner in which it is being used can be different even if the fact that is being used by CBP is not.
ActorNightly
>CBP got authorization to track license plates in 2017
who was president in 2017?
spicyusername
I mean, the last 20 years is only ~8% of the history of the U.S., so all things considered those changes are pretty "new".
pnw
Sure, but the OP was specifically referring to party politics and this is a bipartisan issue.
csours
I really wish we had a (lower case) republican or conservative party in the US.
I hope we survive this fear driven over-stimulated era of politics.
hamdingers
We have a lower case conservative, pro-status-quo party. The Democrats.
Even now all they can talk about is returning to normal (where normal describes the conditions that led to the current state).
lotsofpulp
They talk about increasing minimum salaries for exempt workers, paid sick and family leave, infrastructure funding, expanding access to healthcare, etc. How is that lower case conservative, or pro status quo?
stackedinserter
They are anti-gun "progressive" nuts, how can they be "conservative". Their "normal" was destruction, so people voted trump in just to stop this idiocy (by starting a new one)
tootie
At this point, what would that party even be? Their only genuine appeal is to Christian fundamentalists who prioritize banning abortion and LGBTQ rights. There hasn't been a coherent domestic or foreign policy from them in decades.
riffic
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ActorNightly
>I would rather prefer the boiler to explode
Just to be clear, you really would prefer to live in crumbling infrastructure, with plenty of violence, martial law, and constant worry of whether you are going to get shot or not trying to get basic supplies?
Because boiler exploding isn't romantic or cool like you think it is. Imagine the worst possible riot, except country wide.
BetaDeltaAlpha
That sounds like a recipe for chaos and famine akin to Russia in the early-mid 90's
bluescrn
People fantasize about revolution, but the reality would mostly be huge amounts of suffering and death.
And there's near-zero chance that the outcome would be the 'high-tech fully-automated luxury communism' that people dream of. There's many much-more-likely outcome that are worse than what exists now.
dralley
Accelerationism never works. There's a long, long list of complete and utter disasters and tremendous suffering inflicted by this moronic logic. Things get better by being made better, not by being made worse.
xenophonf
That's easy to say when you aren't the one under pressure.
BeetleB
The same party that gave us the Patriot Act?
They've not been "small government" since forever.
havblue
While 62 house Democrats voted against it, Patriot Act had bipartisan support, which is why Obama never repealed it.
bluGill
They have been the party of small government when the democrats are in power since forever. When they have power though...
John23832
An interesting fact is that "the border" technically extends 100 miles from any actual border.
Guess how many major metros are in that area.
https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/your-rights-bord...
nabla9
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.
tptacek
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
(There's a really good Penn State law review article on that thread).
nabla9
> (really good Penn State law review article on that thread)
Yes, and what it says is this:
>The Supreme Court has decided that there is a reduced expectation of privacy at the border, holding that the government’s interest in monitoring and controlling entrants outweighs the privacy interest of the individual. Thus, routine searches without a warrant, probable cause, or reasonable suspicion are considered inherently reasonable and automatically justified in that particular context.32 Fourth Amendment rights are therefore significantly circumscribed at the border, and CBP is given an expansive authority to randomly—and without suspicion—search, seize, and detain individuals and property at border crossings that law enforcement officers would not have in other circumstances.
The constitution free, means that constitutional rights are reduced within the area.
tptacek
The whole article is about what at the border actually means.
djoldman
Folks may be talking past each other on the "100 mile" issue.
The dissonance arises from these contradictions:
1. Federal regulations specifically state "100 air miles" with respect to the US Border patrol: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-8/part-287/section-287.1#...
2. The US Border Patrol has lost court cases for things they have done within those 100 miles, essentially saying they shouldn't have done those things.
An informal interpretation of this is that the US Federal Government and BP generally view the powers of the BP as more expansive than the judicial branch, possibly including the legislative.
vel0city
In the end people are being swept upt under what seems to be an obviously unconstitutional thing and yet the courts continue to shrug.
I agree with the Penn State Law Review analysis in your link. Sadly that's not the reality of the world we live in. You're burying your head in the sand pointing to a document that suggest how things should be compared to what has actually been happening. In the end, people are being stopped and nothing is being done about it. Some paper put out by a law review isn't ending the persucation that is happening no matter how hard you ignore it.
Words on some paper mean nothing compared to the actual actions of man.
np-
Border Patrol is doing an operation in Charlotte, NC right now. That is well over 100 miles from any border or coast. So 100 miles itself is fiction, they can just do whatever they want. Who’s gonna stop them?
closeparen
International airports count.
wbxp99
>While the U.S. Border Patrol primarily operates within 100 miles of the border, it is legally allowed “to operate anywhere in the United States,” the agency added.
tptacek
The Border Patrol probably is allowed to operate anywhere within the United States, but being in the Border Patrol doesn't (at least statutorily) give them any magic powers; in particular, you don't get "border search authority" by being a part of CBP, but rather by being any law enforcement officer confronting someone who you reasonably believe crossed the border recently.
sys_64738
We need all these exceptions to the constitution to get a hard reset. SCOTUS has failed to uphold the constitution.
codethief
…and including international airports (and thus all major cities) if I'm informed correctly.
1121redblackgo
What is the rationale for 100 miles? Curious if anyone knows, or if its an arbitrary number a lawmaker decided?
nabla9
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
Supreme Court rulings it seems. This is the law: 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.
jl6
“Constitution-Free Zone”
Now there’s a trumped-up charge.
hnburnsy
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.
LgWoodenBadger
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.
avidiax
> law enforcement is required to have a reasonable, articulable suspicion of a crime in order to detain people.
In theory, yes.
In practice, yes, with many caveats.
LE doesn't have to articulate that reasonable suspicion at the time of the detention. They can come up with that suspicion years later when it comes to deciding in court whether the evidence from that traffic stop can be suppressed. This is assuming that the warrantless search even found anything, the suspect didn't accept a plea deal in lieu of going to trial, and the charges weren't dropped just before trial.
A working system for this sort of thing would be more like:
* The officer needs to record that reasonable suspicion at the time of the detention.
* All of these reasonable suspicion detentions are recorded, along with outcomes. This becomes evidence for reasonability presented in court. An officer with a low hit rate suggests that the suspicion in generally unreasonable, and they are just fishing.
* A 20 minute timer is started at the start of a traffic stop. If the officer can't articulate the reasonable suspicion at the 20 minute mark, detention is considered plainly illegal, and qualified immunity does not apply. This prevents keeping people on the roadside for a hour waiting for the dog to show up.
* Similarly, the hit rate of the police dogs needs to be recorded, and low hit rate should make any evidence from them inadmissible.
For any of this to happen, we would need to start giving standing to supposedly "unharmed" suspects that just had their vehicle torn apart and hours of their lives wasted without charge. Currently, the courts seem to think that a little wait at a traffic stop and an fruitless illegal search that is never seen in the courtroom is no damage at all.
jabroni_salad
I commute to a different state for work and when one of them legalized weed I once got pulled over and dog-searched for "driving exactly the speed limit." When they want to go fishing there is absolutely nothing that will stop them.
LordGrey
I had an acquaintance who was a county constable. He once told me, "Let me watch you drive down the road, any road, for 30 seconds and I will be able to find a valid reason to pull you over." He implied that some part of their training was focused on exactly that.
One data point, and a highly regional one at that, I know.
no_input
The law is not on the citizens' side and never has been. Driving over the limit (even the smallest increment) is technically illegal. Driving under can be considered suspicious and warrant further surveillance (or more likely incite road rage from other drivers) in which you will likely make a mistake. Nobody follows every traffic law perfectly and in all likelyhood cannot. Every cop I have ever known has admitted to this fact and there are even more examples of former(or current) law enforcement officers going on record saying the same thing.
stevenwoo
Law enforcement has enormous discretion for probable cause and can give straight up contradictory reasons for different cases, it is what officers are taught to do (i.e. something like driving too fast, driving too slow, driving too rigidly at the speed limit). This allows individual bias to overwhelm any attempt at equal enforcement. It's pretty well documented in both The New Jim Crow and Usual Cruelty, the Supreme Court has made it difficult to gather data in the last couple decades.
halapro
Outdated information. With the new 2.0 update, anyone with a car can pull you over for whatever reason.
sleepybrett
Any given american citizen is certainly breaking, at minimum, dozens of laws even while asleep in their own bed. If they want to pick you up and they are diligent enough they certainly can. They might be laughed out of court, but they also might not be.
Schiendelman
But once in court, you would probably get that thrown out. The key problem is that we haven't instituted consequences for that sort of police behavior.
jabroni_salad
They did not ticket me so there is no day in court. Chatting you up, seeing everything visible through the windows, leaning in to smell your car, running your license for warrants are all "free" interactions with no oversight.
The fun doesnt stop there, check out 'civil asset forfeiture' when you have a chance.
Also, if you read TFA, it seemed like the owner of a truck and trailer had to spend $20k getting his stuff out of impound when his employee was wrongly arrested. Seems like an innocent judgement isnt everything we think it is.
rileymat2
If you go to court, pay a lawyer for the hours for it, instead of pleading down. In many cases you have already lost just based on the accusation.
pixelatedindex
That’s if you get to go to court. ICE makes mistakes and I doubt any of their detainees get due process.
andy99
The problem with lots of laws, often poorly thought out or framed, is that anyone can be breaking them any time, allowing law enforcement to target people or groups they don’t like with impunity. Drug laws are an obvious one, but so are traffic laws (with ever more rules about distracted driving etc, “drunk” driving ), things like loitering, all the stupid anti-free speech laws in places like the uk.
People get whipped up to support laws but don’t see that more is just worse, especially the petty ones, even if they notionally correct for some bad behaviour, because they allow selective enforcement.
ortusdux
It's borderline impossible to drive from one location to another and not break a law. Some argue that this is by design.
m00x
How? I've never been arrested in my life because I follow laws, so I'm unfamiliar how you can just accidentally break a law. Is this an American thing?
ethin
Where are you from? In the US, there are well over a thousand laws on the books. Might be more like 10000 with respect to criminal law alone. And that's at the federal level. Factor in all the various states and criminal codes for those states and the surface area becomes enormous.
In my state alone, it is illegal to do things like:
* Hold stud poker games by charitable groups more than twice a year
* Keep an elk in a sandbox in your back yard
* Serve both beer and pretzels at a bar or restaurant simultaneously
* Swim naked in the Red River from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m
* Wear a hat while dancing or at any event where a dance is happening
* Lie down and fall asleep with your shoes on
Yes, these are actual crimes in the state I'm in. If you think those are absurd, you should see some other states criminal codes; for example, in Alaska, it is illegal to appear drunk in a bar. No, really, I'm serious. So you literally can't live your life without breaking the law somehow. I'm pretty sure Legal Eagle has an entire video (or more than one) dedicated to downright stupid laws like these.
In a just world, these laws wouldn't exist, but, well...
Edit: just wanted to add that I can't seem to find actual legal citations for some of these but they may be county or city ordinances. Regardless, they are still stupid and still crimes from what I know.
hexbin010
Never ever broken the speed limit?
Idled your vehicle? (Illegal in the UK no idea about the US)
null
dylan604
While suspicious behavior is not a crime, it is certainly going to be used as probable cause. How would you think it to be any other way? See something, say something is nothing but using suspicious behavior
stevenjgarner
Not true. Section 215 of Patriot Act expanded surveillance powers, information-sharing, and intelligence authorities, allowing the FBI to obtain “business records” relevant to counterterrorism, no probable cause required. This does not specifically authorize detention, but show me the "business records" of any enterprise that would not raise questions requiring 48-hour hold.
rileymat2
From the sound of the article, they flag the person for local police that then can almost always find a reason to pull someone over as a pretext.
frank_nitti
Police that I’ve spoken to will readily confirm this. They consider profiling, not necessarily racial, an important part of patrolling. If they decide you look the part, they will find a way within several minutes/miles of watching.
codegeek
Assuming they do the questioning in good faith. When they are ordered to "find something", you are already at a disadvantage as a regular person. I mostly have good interactions when stopped but had my share of bad faith actors and it will be a really bad day if you happen to come across those especially in current climate.
ericbarrett
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
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
I think most Americans would be struck by the revelation that the government has hidden cameras in traffic cones
dylan604
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"
Padriac
This is good news. Punish the wrongdoers so we can live in a peaceful safe society.
themafia
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.
stevenjgarner
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.
kylehotchkiss
The more this flyover-state mentality policing continues (obvious civil asset forfeiture fishing - dealers might be carrying cash from a previous sale, etc), the less people are going to drive through them, further depriving these states of a revenue source. Of course, this mentality could be voted out by the residents of these states, but I'm not optimistic.
stevenjgarner
I hope mightily that you are correct and it is restricted to the flyover states. I fear that the reality is probably that in populated states the police are so preoccupied dealing with real crime they have little opportunity to take "preventative action". Being as empathic as I can, I would say that the cops in flyover states deal with a LOT of transport-related drug crimes (that's why they are called "flyover"), so I get their focus. I have just learned to exist below the radar as much as possible. I no longer drive dealer plated cars and have no vehicles registered in my name (so I never come up in ALPR systems). I try to be compliant in every way possible. But then again that's what real criminals do too.
mzs
This happened to me, in East Germany. I'm sorry it happens now in the Land of the Free.
null
dylan604
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
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.
Diederich
They don't need a lot of tools to do such a deep 'search' of your car, they're not under any requirement or mandate to make it easy or even possible to repair.
In my 40+ years of driving, I've seen such disassembled cars along the road a hand full of times.
cestith
This is regular, typical behavior for some departments.
LocalH
The cruelty is the point
pureagave
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
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
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
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
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.
mothballed
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
>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
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?
outside1234
This makes me want to do this just to jam up the system
duxup
This dragnet style data monitoring is illegal when it comes to phones, it probably should be illegal when it comes to cameras too.
Schiendelman
So how do we do that? Is some organization working on it with a plausible theory of change?
duxup
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.
codegeek
"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 ?
LocalH
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
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/poli...
avidiax
Wait until you hear about parallel construction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2014/feb/03/dea-paral...
adolph
> 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.
ActorNightly
>Wow, this is incredibly concerning.
Well, maybe now you understand that when people were saying Trump is an actual fascist, it wasn't just memes.
Its only gonna get worse. At some point, CBP is gonna shoot someone, nothing is gonna happen, and that will be the turning point of when they can just arbitrarily start shooting citizens with no repercussion.
If you don't have a plan to GTFO the country by now, you are behind.
tclancy
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-swas...
scblock
> "detaining those with suspicious travel patterns"
Detaining those they _deem_, without oversight to have such.
hnburnsy
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)?
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/
I believe Vigilant only provide access to law enforcement, but Digital Recognition Network sell access to others as well: https://drndata.com/about/
Good Vice story about that: https://www.vice.com/en/article/i-tracked-someone-with-licen...