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

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?

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.

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?

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.

So how do we do that? Is some organization working on it with a plausible theory of change?

We already know they're doing it with phones too, laws don't apply to them.

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.

I want to hear out your point more, but by that logic, neither is walking around without a mask, or using a transit pass, or paying for things with a credit card.

People may not understand how deep this goes. With municipalities eagerly allowing companies like Flock to hoover up license plates and centrally aggregate this data there is a very strong argument this is true and amounts to 4A violations when considered in total.

Add that many states have laws that are /more/ punishing if you intentionally obscure your plate than simply not having one, what other conclusion can be drawn? The state’s arguments are thin. “Oh we need it to find criminals / vehicles of interest” oh sure, so you get to suck up all our data to protect a few toll roads and track a few supposed criminals. The balance of benefit to society is dubious at best IMO.

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-...

>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.

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.

If you've nothing to hide you've nothing to fear

(/s incase it isn't obvious)

It's borderline impossible to drive from one location to another and not break a law. Some argue that this is by design.

"Computer said you did something wrong, explain yourself."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

How, exactly, do you propose to do that?

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

What is the rationale for 100 miles? Curious if anyone knows, or if its an arbitrary number a lawmaker decided?

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).

>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.

…and including international airports (and thus all major cities) if I'm informed correctly.

“Constitution-Free Zone”

Now there’s a trumped-up charge.

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.

I don't know what you mean by "turn into" it's always been that way

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.

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.

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.

Very similar feeling to watching the liberal/progressive party fangirl the FBI and the intel community

edit: in reality the times have changed and so has the country and the parties. All of these pre-2008 stereotypes are stupid and not useful anymore.

If you create a problem like this by essentially opening the border and failing to enforce the law, the necessary corrective action is going to have to be a lot heavier than if you’d just patrolled the border in the first place.

One wonders if it was intentional. We count all residents in the census and letting more people in directly translates to political power.

Either way, immigration enforcement isn’t and has never been limited to the border. Their remit covers the United States as a whole.

The “party of small government” has always seen protection of sovereignty and borders as exactly one of the few things a government should actually do.

Pretty sure Republicans always supported defending the border from drug trafficking and illegal immigration.

Small government without control of who comes in is borderline anarchy, and they never claimed to be for anarchy. Small government internally requires border controls, and if the border controls failed in the past do you expect them to just shrug? I can see disagreeing with them, easily, I just don’t see obvious hypocrisy like you are suggesting.

Your comment feels unsubstantiated. What do you mean by that? Or do you just mean the current government has Republicans at the top.

Can you share data on how people of one party are supporting ALPR and the other are against it? I was looking for a public poll on this question and couldn't find one.

edit: Why am I being downvoted?

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.

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.

The same party that gave us the Patriot Act?

They've not been "small government" since forever.

While you're not wrong, not sure it applies here. This is an all-party thing:

Started about a decade ago to fight illegal border-related activities and the trafficking of both drugs and people, it has expanded over the past five years.

Some of the lawsuits (cited in article) to fight this, and illegal pull overs, go back years.

Really? It shows how this tech can be used in ways you don't like, when your party is no longer in power. How whatever laws you pass, surveillance you enact, powers you give, aren't just for you.

But also your political adversary.

> 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

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...

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...

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.

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.

Flock is extremely egregious.

https://deflock.me

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

According to Pew Research, more foreigners make up the US population today than ever recorded. People here are allowed to question who is coming.

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.