The law enforcement agencies which behaved the way law enforcement agencies always behave and did what anyone with even the slightest familiarity with how law enforcement acts thought they would do with the data. This outcome was 1000% predictable even if the details were not.
If you're gonna be angry at someone be angry at the people among us were in favor of the creation of this data set because they foolishly thought it would be used to combat mundane property crime or because perhaps they thought that subjecting motorists to an increased dragnet would be a good thing for alternative transportation, or some other cause, think that they have done no wrong despite warnings of the potential for something like this being raised way back when the cameras and the ALPRs were being put up.
These things will keep happening until it is no longer socially acceptable to advocate for the creation of data collection programs that are a necessary precondition.
> These things will keep happening until it is no longer socially acceptable to advocate for the creation of data collection programs that are a necessary precondition.
The root issue here is that the government is no longer able or willing to control and bind their own law enforcement agencies. Agreed that this program was a bad idea, but the wider issue that law enforcement agencies can and do wantonly disregard direct orders from the state. There's the direct issue of impact on people as a result, and the more intangible idea of the questionable legitimacy of a government that is not able to control its own enforcement agencies.
This needs to be met with swift repercussions for both the individuals that participated, as well as the agencies that allowed it. Lacking that, it seems a reasonable inference that enforcement agencies are no longer bound by the will of the people and are in fact the ruling government.
> The root issue here is that the government is no longer able or willing to control and bind their own law enforcement agencies.
You're correct, but the bigger picture here is: privacy violation rely on benevolence.
We're completely at the whim of parties more powerful than us, and we MUST trust that they will act in our best interests.
Now, we could just hope and cross our fingers that people are good people forever. Do you think that's going to be the case? Because I don't. So the only path forward that makes any sense is to simply not give bad actors the potential to even be bad. Meaning, we shouldn't even collect this data.
We have so many laws of this variety, which rely on our leaders remaining benevolent. This is in stark contrast to the US constitution, which explicitly says NOT to rely on benevolence, and rather construct systems so that we can dismantle our leadership should the time come.
The US has a long history of agencies that decide by themselves to do things that are frequently illicit with the excuse that they're protecting the public. From police to 3 letter agencies, they're all operating illegal programs that should be stoped by the public. Whenever someone tries it, they protect their power using the excuse that they're doing this for the "benefit" of democracy or some similar BS.
> This needs to be met with swift repercussions for both the individuals that participated, as well as the agencies that allowed it.
That’s not going to happen. Cross out that sentence and reason as if we’ve already asked for that and it failed. We’ve heard this song too many times to pretend we don’t know the first verse.
Agree it's never going to happen. The last time people hit the streets for police accountability the political backlash got us a convict in the white house. Democrats are now fully cowed on the topic and Republicans cheer any police overreach.
For the powerful in both government and business there is no rule of law anymore. The "law and order" slogan only means a boot stamping on little people's face forever, the powerful can break the law with impunity.
For any dataset you collect, think about how it can be miss-used. Because in all likelihood it will. Maybe not by you. But maybe by your successor. Or the hacker.
Although it is interesting how inconsistently this principle of is applied to other areas. For example, if you come to HN and advocate against encryption or AI because they can amplify the dangers of bad actors, you are going to be met by fierce opposition. So why do these hypothetical bad actors only become valid concerns in certain conversations?
When it comes to encryption, it helps save actual lives. If you mandate getting rid of encryption, bad actors will still break the law and use encryption to carry on business as normal. Regular citizens lose, oppressive governments & criminals win.
>When it comes to encryption, it helps save actual lives.
So does the license plate data. It is used to find and bring justice to criminals. Does that not make us all safer?
> If you mandate getting rid of encryption, bad actors will still break the law and use encryption to carry on business as normal.
Laws are pointless because the criminals will just break them is a silly argument that can be used against most laws. Why should we have any laws about gun control, money laundering, or drugs if the criminals will just do whatever they want anyway.
And the flip side of this argument should also be considered. Do we think the Nazis would have given up on their genocide if they didn't find this data?
Thank you, this is a perfect example of the type of inconsistencies I’m talking about when discussing these issues. The prior comment says encryption saves lives and that is accepted without question, but the idea that empowering law enforcement saves lives is met with a request for evidence. Why did you not reply to both claims the same way?
And if you truly believe that finding and arresting criminals does not make us safer, that is an indictment of our entire justice system. It would also make license plate cameras a rather silly place to draw the line.
I think it's because you don't have to look too hard to find examples of authoritarian regimes leveraging information technologies for surveillance, censorship, and propaganda. Or how US government agencies use loopholes to get around the 4th amendment and buy sensitive civilian data from private data brokers. Or how data breaches are becoming larger and more frequent each year.
Encryption seems highly likely to have saved many people from, say, losing their life savings by having their banking credentials hijacked.
I am less certain about license plate cameras. Hence, the ask. I will leave the questioning of encryption up to someone who actually questions its utility.
Can you genuinely not think of situations in which law enforcement being able to pin a specific vehicle to a time and place might help them catch dangerous criminals or be used as evidence in a trial to help get them convicted?
Something that seems inherently different between GP's comment and encryption is that encryption is an algorithm / tool, not a dataset. Not creating literal tools because they might have bad use cases is clearly a bad idea (e.g., fire, knives, hammers, etc.).
I'd say that one thing inherently different about datasets is that they are continually used badly, including by well-meaning actors. Data is frequently misinterpreted, with good intent, to draw bad conclusions.
You might hit your thumb with a hammer. That hurts! People would be a lot more careful if misinterpreting data had such clear, immediate effects on them.
Also, there are many different groups with different passionate opinions in any community as large as this one.
What is the distinction you are making between a "dataset" and a "tool"?
To use this specific example of the license plate dataset, this is a tool used to find and bring justice to criminals. How is it any different from any other tool at the disposal of law enforcement? Isn't this system just a scaled up version of a cop with a camera?
This might be too pedantic, but a dataset is not a tool in and of itself. It's something that can be processed by a tool. And it's not simple for anyone to reproduce without significant access, either to the original observational opportunities or to the dataset itself. Information about individuals is often in datasets and those people too seldom have a say in the security practices used to safeguard it.
Tools (or pick another word that illustrates this distinction) like encryption, hammers, etc. do not contain our information. They are fairly straightforward to reproduce. And therefore nearly impossible to contain. Bad actors will have encryption and hammers, whether we want them to or not. The only question is whether good actors will also have them, or if they will be restricted by laws. This, for example, can make it easier for datasets to fall into the wrong hands, because they are less likely to be encrypted.
Isn't an atomic bomb just a scaled up version of a firecracker?
Nobody denies that collection of datasets can have upsides. But the downsides are often not seen/evaluated accurately. And negative effects don't necessarily scale with the same power as positive effects.
>Isn't an atomic bomb just a scaled up version of a firecracker?
Yes and no. I think radiation is a big differentiator, but absent that, I don't think it is better morally or ethically to level a city with conventual bombs than it would be to do it with a nuclear bomb.
>Nobody denies that collection of datasets can have upsides. But the downsides are often not seen/evaluated accurately. And negative effects don't necessarily scale with the same power as positive effects.
I'm not disagreeing with this. I'm asking why this same logic is not applied elsewhere.
The point with the firecracker/bomb is this: Not just because it's the same type of tool means that it has the same cost/benefit analysis. The dangers of, say, firecrackers in the had of the general public, scale dramatically faster than the benefit, going from kid-safe firework to bunker busters. The same goes for "a cop with a camera" to "tag readers at every corner".
I think with encryption, the underestimate is on the other side.
Everyone understand that bad guys using encryption is bad. But people do not see the upsides of encryption for the good guys, pretty much for the same reason as they do not see the downsides of data collection: I have nothing to hide. [or the common related variant: Advertisement doesn't affect me]
> I think with encryption, the underestimate is on the other side. Everyone understand that bad guys using encryption is bad. But people do not see the upsides of encryption for the good guys
And why are you confident that this doesn’t exist for the license plate dataset? You’re confidentially making two opposing arguments with no justification beyond it getting you to your desired conclusion on that specific issue.
That what doesn't exist for the license plate dataset? I am sure there are good reasons for having that dataset. For most data collection, there are good reasons.
My argument is that just because we decided that "police with camera" is a worthy trade-off, you cannot use this as an argument for "license plate scanning is a worthy trade-off". It could be that it is, but it doesn't follow from "it's a scaled up version of police with camera".
This is a good point. If people are willing to push back against giving law enforcement everybody’s data why would they also oppose giving law enforcement everybody’s data? It is inconsistent because if you think about it “giving law enforcement everybody’s data” and “not giving law enforcement everybody’s data” are basically the same th
Encryption is this same exact topic, and the prevailing technical viewpoint is the direct application of the principle of minimizing collected datasets.
Before the Nazi's invaded the main guy who advocated for the civil registry which allowed the Nazi's to easily find jewish people went to his grave believing he did nothing wrong in advocating for such a database.
Clearly we all need to be thinking much more deeply on these issues.
I think the hard counterpoint is
- some ways that American government function are patently insane compared to other industrialized countries. Having moved from US to Nl just having one single source of truth about where I live and who I am for all sources of government is much less of a headache in day-to-day life. Mail forwarding, authentication for municipal governments, health insurance, etc, just takes 0% of my life (compared to the pain of authenticating myself separately to every part of the government, sometimes by answering questions about my life trawled from _private_ data aggregation companies
- the lack of a central civil register does not seem to be particularly effective right now in stopping the Us government from terrorizing its citizens. Gathering this data for everyone is certainly more tedious but i think avoiding the dragnet completely for the average member of society is functionally impossible.
> the lack of a central civil register does not seem to be particularly effective right now in stopping the Us government from terrorizing its citizens.
What do you base this on? How can you be sure that it's not a major impediment to the ambitions of certain political actors, and that their impact wouldn't be far worse if they had access to centralized sources of data?
Because they DO have whatever data they want: From Palintir.
Preventing the government from accumulating a database is meaningless. But it doesn't matter anyway. Even if they didn't have any data, that's not an impediment, because there is zero pushback to literally blackbagging people off the street and sending them to another country. They just want to harass brown people and you don't need a damn database for that. Bootlickers have eyes.
This bullshit about government databases has always been a meaningless distraction. Oppression doesn't want to be precise or efficient, it's counterproductive to the goal of scaring people into compliance.
Tell me, how do you believe they are stymied at all? They've arrested anyone they want.
So I'm in general agreement, especially as things stand. But there is one hell of a counterargument that says if the US govt had an authoritative database of all citizens+residents, and effectively enforced that database, then there wouldn't be so much energy based around demands to remove "the illegals" in the first place.
Once again I do generally agree with the desire to limit the abilities of the government, especially pragmatically in the context of the current situation. And politically I'd say that the general topic is being used in bad faith to drive support for fascism rather than earnest policy fixes (eg killing bipartisan immigration bill, in favor of this).
But in general there is an American blindspot of fallaciously seeing system layers as something like a gradient of less-to-more control rather than a yin-yang where diminished control in one area makes it pop up in another.
> But in general there is an American blindspot of fallaciously seeing system layers as something like a gradient of less-to-more control rather than a yin-yang where diminished control in one area makes it pop up in another.
One of the big ones is the calling to naively eliminate government regulation, imagining that will always make things "more free", while ignoring that corpos are perfectly willing to create private regulations on their own. This often ends up amounting to facilitating de facto government, despite some epsilon of choice.
There are many more-specific examples of this, but maybe a straightforward and less-partisan one is how the (incumbent) electronic payment networks ban a whole host of types of uses, and do so basically in lock step, despite those uses not actually being illegal. That is private regulation, not even accountable to the democratic process by default. And it avoids becoming accountable by fooling people with narratives of "avoiding regulation".
These kind of systems work perfectly and smoothly as long as the human in question lives his life within the box decided by the government. If not, these systems are hell.
In some hyper-bureaucratic nations, everything is tied to your individual tax number. In other hyper-bureaucratic nations, everything is tied to your bank account.
It can also be tied to a postal adress in some nations, which makes it hell for people like sailors, seasonal workers, or other very mobile citizens. You're basically dependent on having to know somebody which you can completely trust to make sure they relay your mail to you. One of the "boxes" the government wants to put people in is that they reside at one adress, but many people do not live like that.
This administration went in and just flagged people on Social Security as deceased. They said 'those people can just get it fixed'. They also said people that complain are cheats.
There are many people on fixed social security that can't afford missing a payment, let alone the 3 it would take at a minimum if it all works out to get this fixed. By that point they could be homeless, their credit could be ruined. These aren't easy things to fix if you are 80+ and depend on Social Security and renting.
Concentrated power even for the best on intentions (in this case deciding in the 1930s 'old people shouldn't have to eat dog food') is extremely easy to abuse.
The Nazis didn't actually need the pre-occupation data from the civil registry to easily find Jewish people.
In January of 1941, the Nazis ordered all Jews in the Netherlands to register themselves and virtually all of them, some 160,000, provided their name, address and information on any Jewish grandparents to the government.
If the lesson one learns from the Holocaust is that one shouldn't collect data just in case some genocidal group comes to power, then I fear one has learned the wrong lesson.
What can we even change? It's likely HN will also go to the grave demanding deregulation amidst a maelstrom of consumer protection malfunctions. We're already there in many respects; the DOJ's case against Google and Apple both seem to have stalled-out while the EU, Japan and South Korea all push forward with their investigations.
In many respects, the attitude of "we'll fix this one day" is exactly why we don't think deeply about these issues. Client-side scanning was proposed only a short while ago, and you can still read the insane amount of apologists on this site who think that unmitigated data collection can be a good thing if you trust the good Samaritan doing it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068741
It will take an utter catastrophe before the deregulation bloc sees what's at stake. This is far from over, despite the unanimous desire to put security in the rearview mirror.
That has never been convincing to them because they are fundamentally incapable of putting themselves in the shoe of an "other" like that. Look at all the people who voted for Trump literally to deport all the illegals and cry foul when he arrests their significant other or parent.
This phenomenon is well documented, from "the only moral abortion is my abortion" to suddenly accepting gay people when your child comes out to a huge quantity of Americans only being accepting of gay marriage rights after watching a damn sitcom, to "deregulate everything" types suddenly screaming for the government to do something after they get scammed/screwed/used as expected like most of the crypto community.
True, but there is a large fraction of people who are not like this, but haven't given the dangers of data collection enough thought. You can reach those. Are that enough people? Let's hope so.
I really fear for our older generations and those who are less tech-affine. What chance do they have to not be scammed by AI generated videos, fed by exfiltrated private data of them and their family. Grandparent scam on steroids.
The simple counterpoint is that lack of data didn't stop the nazis a single fucking bit, and ICE has no problem breaking down random doors and harassing legal establishments.
This absurd idea that all we have to do is "defang" the government and we can safely ignore it, as if the problems that these data sets are built to work towards fixing would magically go away, or magically mean that people who experience those problems wouldn't still try to get something done about them, except now outside of a legal framework of any sort.
Do you actually think people with broken governments are more free in their world of arbitrary penalties and non-existent solutions?
A blinded government isn't less dangerous when it gets hostile. It just makes it more random and less well targeted. But that won't STOP it.
The holocaust would have happened just the same even if we never made counting machines. The main difference with IBM helping the Nazis is that we have good data about who died in the camps and good documentation. Funny that doesn't seem to matter to morons who think it's a hoax though.
Or do you honestly believe Jews faced no oppression and extermination in the areas without good data on them?
The actual answer is, as always, the hard one: Suck it up and pay attention to your government, participate in democracy, advocate for good politicians, understand how our system is somewhat broken and non-representative, and vote for people who will make it more representative.
There's no option to disregard politics and stay safe. If enough people in your country want you dead, no government can protect you of that if you stay disengaged. Ask the native americans how safe they ended up without a comprehensive database of their existence. We nearly exterminated the buffalo to solve that "problem". Because it was popular. No IBM needed.
Not having the data readily available slows it down. Having more random and less well targeted actions hit the supporters, so weakens the support. Is that enough? No. But I still lock my door, even if this will only slow down a determined thief.
Additionally, data collected by the government can also be misused by others. So it's still better to not collect unnecessary.
Its noteworthy to me that it took till 1943 for the reality of the threat to be taken seriously for this outcome
People making parallels I feel have been inaccurate, as the parallels right now are much closer to Europe's 1933 happenings, and people act like 1945's happenings is what will happen the very next day
Not sure what to make of that, just noticing that these particular "resistances" didn't have a prior allegory to watch, and made these choices eventually, and still how late into the story we know that these things occurred
What can I say, it's hard to give up data. So I guess the situation must escalate until the bad outcome was undeniable.
And I don't want to make a point here about current political affairs. My point is that data collection has serious dangers, independent how good you think the current collectors are, how good the intentions of the data collection are, and how good the benefits of the data collection are. We should not pretend that at least some data collection has benefits. But we should also not pretend that any given data collection doesn't have the risk of misuse.
It's up to politics (in the end, us), to make sure that these risks are valued correctly, for example by making sure that data collectors take over some of the risk in a serious way. "The data was protected according to industry standards" is not enough.
Friend, are you really conflating a calculator with a system of records knowingly used to enact the Holocaust? I recognize your point, but the valley between the two things is so large that I'm going to assume you're trolling.
Alternate take, since social consequences only arise after your client gets invaded by 2 superpowers at once, and you don't really know what a party or government is going to do, the downside is very improbable and its rational to continue contracting with them all
I think the whole timeline of WWII is broadly misunderstood in the US. I imagine it’s related to the fact the US entered quite late, and that much of what’s taught in school is fairly US centric.
It’d be very interesting to survey people and see how people’s mental models reflect reality. I imagine very few Americans would identify what was going on in 1933 at all, never mind that Hitler’s first attempt at a coup took place nearly 20 years before the US entered the war.
To be fair, I never heard about the Canadian-US war before I moved to the States. But we went over the Nazi regime multiple times in school [I am German].
Fair enough, but it is also valid to be angry at your local law enforcement if they are acting against the community's preferences. Especially when local law enforcement is breaking state law in the process.
Maybe true, but at a certain point you're just getting angry at the wind for blowing. The system is a scorpion: It cannot, will not go against its nature.
They are a political force, not a force of nature. It is certainly reasonable to get angry at a political force even if their politics are predictable.
I don't think he's throwing his hands up in the air, rather he's implying we need more radical change. If we're going to be waiting around for police to become "good", that's not going to happen. We need to force them to become good.
> There's no law prohibiting local agencies helping feds.
The law prohibiting exactly that is linked in the article.
"Under a decade-old state law, California police are prohibited from sharing data from automated license plate readers with out-of-state and federal agencies. Attorney General Rob Bonta affirmed that fact in a 2023 notice to police."
As someone who works with sensitive healthcare data, I can tell you that the mere existence of a dataset doesn't guarantee its misuse, nor it does it absolve anyone who interacts with that data of responsibility for proper stewardship.
Yes, you are right that we should think carefully before creating a sensitive dataset. If we insist on creating such a dataset, the people involved must put in place guardrails for stewardship of those datasets. But the stewards of that data, past, present, and future, also share responsibility.
Of course if the incentive structures don't line up with concern for mitigation of harm to vulnerable people as is the case with law enforcement in the US, then all of that is out the window.
Anyway, what you have written implies that we need not think about accountability for those who misuse of datasets after they are created, which is clearly absurd as I and anyone else familiar with healthcare data can tell you.
I'm not sure how to think about this. It doesn't make sense to me that the only alternative is one in which traffic laws get brazenly ignored, and shoplifting and property crime is endemic, to prevent any more data gathering by law enforcement.
At some point it seems like we have to trust that governments can act responsibly, in the interest of voters -- in this case local voters, or we should all just pack it in.
The other thought: I get the thought that people will always care more about local concerns of car break ins, shoplifting, and quality of life than larger ideas like privacy and law enforcement abuse. It seems to convince people to care about the larger issues, the local things have to be solved, and not just ignored.
I've lived in San Francisco for over 10 years now, and it's been disappointing to see the lack on progress on basic quality of life issues.
> It doesn't make sense to me that the only alternative is one in which traffic laws get brazenly ignored, and shoplifting and property crime is endemic, to prevent any more data gathering by law enforcement.
The only reason either of these happen is because law enforcement is lazy and dangerous.
We pretty much gave up on most traffic enforcement because law enforcement officers can't help shooting people they pull over. That's a problem - if they would just start acting somewhat decent, the PD would stop losing a few hundred million a year in lawsuits.
To be frank, I have no idea what law enforcement even does these days. They don't speed trap, they barely respond to calls, they're not pulling people over. Are they just sitting on their asses and getting a check, petrified of public discourse?
Also, be angry at those who didn't follow through with promises to severely reduce funding to their police departments in 2020. If an organization consistently behaves in a way we don't like, we should seek alternatives to that organization, not continuously act surprised when they act out and keep giving them more money.
> be angry at those who didn't follow through with promises to severely reduce funding to their police departments in 2020
This was tried. It generated a generational backlash against the left as petty crime and visible homelessness rose.
To the extent police reform has historically worked, it’s been by rebooting a police department. (Think: replacing the Mets with the NYPD.) Not replacing police with a hippie circle.
> This was tried. It generated a generational backlash against the left as petty crime and visible homelessness rose.
Crime has been on a downward trend for a generation, outside of a few areas. In San Francisco specifically, crime also increased due to police officers quietly going on strike against policies they disagreed with. Now that police officers are actually doing their jobs again, shockingly, crime is rapidly falling.
What has actually increased is sensationalist coverage in the media, which you're right, has created a significant political backlash.
Far from it. On one occasion, when the DA in question went after a notorious fence (buyer for stolen goods), he had to rent a u-haul truck because the SFPD would not supply a vehicle to transport the arrestee.
You have to look past the hype. Media on a national scale ran a character assassination program against that DA for trying to rebalance his organization's efforts against the organizers of crime instead of individual delinquents.
This was the sensationalist media narrative, yes. Chesa got kicked out. Brooke Jenkins took over to much fanfare. Aaaand nothing material really changed, either with enforcement or with prosecution. The media stopped talking about it though.
SFPD hadn’t been doing their jobs for far, far longer than Chesa’s tenure. I moved here in 2013 and their non-enforcement practices were already legendary. Blaming Chesa for being in office for like 10 months in 2019-2020 is a hell of a cop out (pun intended).
Even if it were true, it wouldn’t in any way excuse the police for choosing not to do the job they’re paid to do.
I can’t speak credibly to San Francisco. But in New York there was a visible rise and drop in what I’ll call nuisance crime. Petty theft forcing the toothbrushes into cages, homeless people yelling in the middle of the night, subway jumpers, graffiti, et cetera.
The nypd is better funded than many state’s armed forces. Any funding changes would have been minimal and not caused that increase in crime.
The obvious cause of the increase was the pandemic job losses and general societal decay. Oh and the cops quiet quitting because they were upset people hate them.
It would discourage LEOs from being useless. As it stands, many police departments are absolutely worthless, on purpose. They believe it's some sort of protest. The police got a few years of bad press and now, like children, they're playing the silent treatment.
When I drive I almost never see LEOs. I can go months on end without ever spotting a police car. Where are they? What are they doing? Evidently, they're not responding to crimes. And they're not on the roads. But their budget has increased quite a lot! Am I paying for people to sit on their asses and eat donuts? It kind of seems like it!
To me, it's very simple. If you want to avoid bad press you don't have to stop policing. You just have to stop executing innocent people in public. Seems easy, I do that every day and I don't even think about it.
It sort of gives me the impression the police are so morally bankrupt as a system that they just can't help themselves. So, they have to detach instead. Yikes... that's not good.
To second this: LAPD got fired from providing security for the LA Metro public transportation system, and crime rates fell through the floor in the three months since the LAPD officers were replaced with security guards.
It turns out that simply patrolling the stations was enough to deter almost all crimes in the system, which makes everyone immediately wonder: WTF was LAPD during the last few decades?
> Is it a crime to be mentally ill in public in your world?
Yes, yelling in a residential neighbourhood in the middle of the night is a disturbance of peace. The fact that it’s caused by unchecked mental health is somewhat separate. (In many cases, I don’t think it was a mental health issue. I think Rob on the corner got drunk.)
Not sure if "recall" was a pun or not... But the recall campaign for DA Boudin started a month after the 2020 election, so he was effectively DA for 10 months at that point, including during the heart of the pandemic. Interestingly, it was also right after he started trying to implement police accountability reforms in response to the Floyd backlash that year. He did de-prioritize drug prosecution right at the time of major fentanyl spikes in SF, so not a good look.
Quiet quitting does not make the position legally vacant, such that the employer knows they need to fill it. The employer has to notice that the employee is not performing, and then replace that employee. Those steps are often harder than you’d think.
"Defund the police" was never actually tried. (This is not a defense of defunding -- I agree it would have similarly bad outcomes! But you can't just point at changes that weren't defunding the police and say it was tried.)
Police budges were trimmed. Police forces were cut. Police remit, in the form of decriminalisation, was reduced. No jurisdiction abolished law enforcement (though San Francisco de facto got close). But I’d say those count as defunding the police to an extent.
Even then, we got disaster. Shockingly quickly. Shockingly powerfully. There is no threshold theory that suggests you get magical results cutting the police force by 30% instead of 3%; it’s thus reasonable to extrapolate and assume you get more of the bad.
> Police budges were trimmed. Police forces were cut.
Where were police budgets trimmed and forces cut? They weren't; that's the crucial thing you're describing that did not happen. Otherwise, I agree -- lots of reform changes that sounded good on paper led to bad outcomes. But there's no need to inaccurately call other reforms "defunding."
Crime did not rose, crime has been in a downward trajectory for decades, this is likely one of the reasons the crackdown on illegal immigrants is so bad, prison owners are noticing they might lose their cash cow and needs a new population to imprison.
Crime rose significantly in the US over ~2020-2022 or 2023. It was on a downward trend before 2020 and is on a downward trend since 2022/2023. But you can't ignore that period.
But you can largely ignore it. It was a relatively short term small blip in a decades long trend in the right direction, with a clearly rare and unusual cause.
Interesting to historians and public policy folks. Outside of that, the pearl clutching about it probably did more damage than the spike itself.
In addition to what JumpCrisscross said, illegal immigrants are not going to be long-term prison population; they're going to be deported. (At least, that's the campaign promise.) So I don't see how that benefits prison owners.
> Nearly 90% of people in ICE custody are held in facilities run by for-profit, private companies. Two of the largest, Geo Group and CoreCivic, are working to increase their ability to meet the administration's demand.
CoreCivic used to be called the "Corrections Corporation of America". GEO Group used to be "Wackenhut Corrections Corporation".
It should be unsurprising that the folks who make money building and running large, secure facilities to detain people would be interested in doing the same for ICE.
Oh yeah, they benefit. What I’m calling nonsense is the idea that Geo Group is the reason Stephen Miller is in charge. There are more fundamental roots to the anti-immigrant agenda than a convenient corporate bogeyman.
The administration is already talking about indentured labor and slavery, these will soon be work camps where the prison owners will rent the labor to farm and industries.
Chesa Boudin. New York with cashless bail and non-prosecution of petty crimes. That fuck in Chicago.
Defund the police was a marquee policy and messaging failure that underlined why radical minorities capturing the Democratic Party cause it to lose elections.
It was part of the police reform initiative. I supported it. But it massively increased the street population of recidivist bastards in a way I didn’t expect.
It was never about the recidivist bastards and always about the normal guy with a job he doesn't want to lose not losing that job when he can't come up with bail for a DUI. At least where I was it was considered kind of a given the recidivist bastards would get out on bail and that the bondsman getting paid really doesn't affect outcomes.
> It was never about the recidivist bastards and always about the normal guy with a job he doesn't want to lose not losing that job when he can't come up with bail for a DUI
And that’s why I supported it. But for every one of the latter there are many of the former because they started cycling through arrests so fast.
Keep the recidivist bastard in jail, on the other hand, and they are incapacitated for the time being. I’ll admit I didn’t see the utility of that until it was too late.
> Conflating "police reform" and "defund the police" is disingenuous
In New York they were one and the same. The latter simply representing the most extreme expression of the former.
I remember dropping into a leftist conference in Philadelphia years ago where several folks who would become the face of post-Covid police reform were there, including Boudin. At the end of the day they all conceded that their goal was abolishing this, that and the other thing.
I don't doubt you'll find activists espousing both "defund the police" and "end cash bail" policies at the same time. That doesn't make them the same policy.
Oh, they’re totally different policies. But they’re basically the same politics. And they both generated a backlash, one against messaging (because it was too stupid to implement) and one against policy (because it created more visible crime).
Not sure what this is adding to the discussion, but eliminating cash bail has been a success in Illinois. That’s why you don’t hear the right talking about it anymore. Crime in Chicago has fallen every year since it went into effect.
It was not tried, and saying that it was is a fundamentally false claim that is actively pushing public opposition to the idea supported by lies. It’s as reasonable as saying don’t vote for democrats because they have a pedophile office under a pizza store. Are there a bunch of people who were convinced by this lie? Yes. Does that make it anything other than a manipulative lie to say? No.
It was a branding fuckup more than a policy fuckup. The idea that we want types of response units other than armed gunmen available to respond to certain types of emergencies isn’t exactly radical.
We don’t send the police for medical emergencies or house fires. We send personnel with dedicated training for those types of events.
As someone who grew up with a dad who listened to conservative talk radio, "liberal" has been used as an epithet for at least thirty years. I was genuinely stunned in high school when I met people who would willingly refer to themselves as liberals.
You'll have to pardon me for rolling my eyes at the notion that modern liberals have somehow made the term a bad word given the general path of conservatism over the last several decades, not to mention the last eight years specifically.
> don't think we can judge the progressive wing from the antagonistic media coverage and bilateral party disdain of them
No, we can judge by the actions and results. Police reform in New York was a failure. Education priorities in San Francisco were a failure. The entire activist-interest group orientation is broken.
> proactive work for less policing is not some sort of lunacy
It’s not. But the people who attempted it were lunatics.
Defunding the police is dumb. Rebuilding police departments from the ground up is not. Unfortunately the latter requires being realistic about the occurrence of crime and criminals in a population. (They’re not all victims of circumstance. And they can’t all be community organised into a sculpting job or whatever.)
In Los Angeles, crime on the Metro public transportation system has fallen by almost 70% in the three months since the LAPD was booted off the job and replaced by...security guards.
This is pretty good evidence that high crime rates in cities with large police forces are directly related to the police force not actually doing the job it's already being paid to do.
(LA Metro was forced to use LAPD for security a few decades ago, at which point crime rates went from very low to skyrocketing. LAPD serviced the Metro contract exclusively with officers that were in overtime hours (1.5x pay) so at best could only provide 2/3rd of the contracted manpower. That changed earlier this year; the contract was terminated for cause and LAPD was replaced with contract security guards. The contract security guards make substantially less than LAPD officers, so Metro is currently able to field a security presence about 5x the size as the LAPD force. Metro reported this that crime has fallen dramatically in just 2 months.)
Don't speak bullshit. There was more media outrage hullabaloo around the idea of reducing cop funding than there was any actual reduction. Especially because the cops went on strike to ensure that no cuts would happen.
Police forces across the US have never seen higher funding rates.
These people were mostly defeated in elections and the ones promising to shovel even more money got elected, just look at Eric Adams in NYC.
I seriously hope what is happening right now finally radicalizes the rest of the population that law enforcement as it is right now does not work for the public interest.
They aren't even required to protect you according to the supreme court. The only point of cops is to protect private property, not people, and to harass people that conservatives don't like.
"Defund the police" was and remains wildly unpopular with almost everyone, especially minorities (as a reminder to any of those out touch reading this: there are large racial disparities in who is affected by crime, particularly violent crime) . It was quintessential "progressives are out of touch" ammunition, not only used by republicans (obviously), but also establishment democrats in competitive districts.
As another commenter posted, its about not allowing the creation of the data set in the first place.
We really need everyone in this country to go read "Nothing to Hide" by Daniel Solove, because thats how this crazy shit gets through in the first place: innocuous citizens go "Sure, I got nothing to hide"
To be fair, systems like Flocksafety really help departments being squeezed for funding. It's one of the ways the system is sold. It's an effective tool.
I worked for Flock. I was sold during the recruiting process on high ethics and morals and an idealistic vision.
The reality was a surveillance state, and questionable policies on data sharing between agencies, and private installations (HOA, etc.), and a CEO with a weirdly literal belief on how Flock should "eliminate all crime". Not "visionary", but far more literal. Way too Minority Report for my liking.
They have a public "disclosure" site that supposedly shows the agencies using Flock that is absolutely inaccurate (there are three agencies in my County alone using it that are not listed there).
This same argument is true for every bit of authority we give to law enforcement agencies (and really, the government in general). We expect they'll use those powers responsibly and within the limitations that we've ascribed, but it's always a risk that they're used irresponsibly and in situations we don't approve of.
Yes, this is an argument for not giving them more authority than necessary, but it's also an argument for holding them accountable when they do act out of bounds.
To this point, any law that gives power to government officials also needs to have explicit and painful consequences for abuse of those powers. Civilians who break the law face punishment and penalties, but government employees are almost never held to account. That needs to change.
There are mobile survalience cameras systems at my very family friendly park. Everyone has asked the city to tow them away but they refuse. There was no vote on this.
> These things will keep happening until it is no longer socially acceptable to advocate for the creation of data collection programs that are a necessary precondition.
One or two cops locked up for it can also work wonders. But somehow the western world has come to believe that lots of pretty laws with no consequences for transgressions is a wonderful thing. I think not.
If you are a district attorney in a city, you depend on the help and cooperation of the police in your daily work. If you became unpopular with the police they can make your work very difficult and you could also become politically very unpopular. I think district attorneys and police want to do what they think is right but its very understandable to me why a DA does not want to prosecute police.
Click through to the law in question. It's the Civil Code not Criminal Code, and states, "an individual who has been harmed by a violation of this title, including, but not limited to, unauthorized access or use of ALPR information or a breach of security of an ALPR system, may bring a civil action in any court of competent jurisdiction against a person who knowingly caused the harm."
So you have to prove actual harm. You have to identify the individual person who caused the harm. You have to prove they knowingly caused the harm. You have to quantify the harm in monetary terms. Then you can sue them for actual damages + attorneys' fees.
The American judicial system is pure theater. You used to be able to appeal forever. Then the government decided that was too expensive, so they changed it to like 7 days. Then that was too extreme of a limit from 'forever' so they compromised on 14 days. Your right to appeal expires in 14 days in the US. Also during those 14 days you are most likely in a detention center, or being transferred across the nation to a prison, so good luck researching/writing an appeal in those 14 days.
> If you're gonna be angry at someone be angry at the people among us were in favor of the creation of this data set because they foolishly thought it would be used to combat mundane property crime or because perhaps they thought that subjecting motorists to an increased dragnet would be a good thing
Nah, be mad at both the people who enabled the data collection and the agency that abused that data.
This should be grounds for laws that limit or eliminate the use of Flock Safety in the state, and laws that meaningfully punish agencies that use that data inappropriately as well as the individuals who authorized it.
> The law enforcement agencies which behaved the way law enforcement agencies always behave and did what anyone with even the slightest familiarity with how law enforcement acts thought they would do with the data. This outcome was 1000% predictable even if the details were not.
It was predictable that law enforcement agencies would... try to enforce the law?
The use was audited and is now being investigated. The claims were for various local and federal investigations. ICE also contains HSI, the second largest federal law enforcement agency, which prior to their recent mandate has been tasked to solve sex trafficking, import fraud etc. SF has multiple large inter-agency task forces that run multi-year long investigations into all types of crimes. HSI is part of those investigations. Querying flock to establish a suspect’s presence during the commission of a crime seems like it’s within the bounds of reasonable use.
Querying which flock to establish which suspect’s presence during the commission of which crime seems like it’s within the bounds of what reasonable use? I think you've replaced the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave with Round up the usual suspects.
> In sharing the license plate data, how was the OPD enforcing the law?
... the immigration laws? Folks should read the immigration laws. They're actually quite draconian against not only illegal immigration, but anyone who aids and abets illegal immigration. We've just had decades of non-enforcement.
No, the immigration laws are not draconian. They have guidelines around reunification of families, etc. The Reagan era Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 even legalized most illegals from before 1982. That wasn't draconian either. You should read these laws.
Trumpian enforcement? Now that's draconian. It's also economically stupid. And I'm sure you understand the concept of clean hands. So further discussion of Melania and Rosie O'Donnell's citizenship will be unnecessary.
But then this all is just red meat tossed to consumers of red meat. So there's that.
> No, the immigration laws are not draconian. They have guidelines around reunification of families, etc. The Reagan era Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 even legalized most illegals from before 1982.
They really are. For example, there's expensive crimes relating to "encouraging/inducing" illegal immigration that could put a lot of people in prison if they were aggressively enforced: https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual... ("Encouraging/Inducing -- Subsection 1324(a)(1)(A)(iv) makes it an offense for any person who -- encourages or induces an alien to come to, enter, or reside in the United States, knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that such coming to, entry, or residence is or will be in violation of law.")
Similarly, criminal penalties for knowingly continuing to employ an alien one knows is unauthorized: https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual... ("Subsection 1324a(2) makes it unlawful for any person or entity, after hiring an alien for employment, to continue to employ the alien in the United States knowing the alien is or has become an unauthorized alien with respect to such employment.").
> The Reagan era Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 even legalized most illegals from before 1982.
That one-time amnesty was a compromise in return for aggressive enforcement going forward. The pro-immigration folks reneged on that compromise, so now it's mass deportations.
> But then this all is just red meat tossed to consumers of red meat. So there's that.
No, it's vindicating a fundamental collective right to decide who gets to be in this country and who doesn't. It's an effort to undo the effects of decades of broken promises around immigration enforcement: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi...
‘Collective rights’ aren’t in the Constitution. You may wish to read that as well. But I do recognize your sentiment as echoing Trump’s I am your retribution rhetoric. Otherwise, I’m done here.
> HHS rescinded its 1998 interpretation of the term (63 FR 41658) and expanded the agency’s interpretation of “Federal public benefit” to include programs, including Head Start and numerous community health-related programs.
Yeah, I'm not inclined to view clear and open violations of a law the same as "the Feds said it was fine for 27 years, including Trump's first term".
Rayiner, you are supposedly adept with constitutional law.
The state is not allowed to pursue every physically possible means of achieving their justice aims. They are not allowed to overstep their authority period. When they do overstep their authority, it often harms the State's case against the accused, entirely to make it less desirable for a cop to overstep their authority and protect our rights as people in these lands.
For example, a cop cannot just steal a 3rd party's database to get the evidence they are after. They must either get a warrant or consent from that 3d party, following specific and WELL UNDERSTOOD rules.
You cannot possibly pretend to not know this, so why are you being so disingenuous in your argument?
> For example, a cop cannot just steal a 3rd party's database to get the evidence they are after.
Except we're talking about the state's own license plate data, not stealing someone else's data. Since it is California's data, California can complain that Oakland police shared it impermissibly. (Good luck with that!) But that doesn't create a constitutional issue.
>If you're gonna be angry at someone be angry at the people among us were in favor of the creation of this data set
Perhaps I am gifted, but I contain enough anger within for both guilty parties. However, the bulk of is aimed at the police who unambiguously broke the law and will face no consequences for doing so.
A lot of people raised similar objections to dna databases, and later when those same databases was used by law enforcement. It did not take very long until law makers and law enforcement made i praxis that such data bases are up to grab for trawling through. Any objection is meet with the handful of cold cases that was closed because that trawling of data.
Sadly I dont see a realistic stop to the databases. If there are none, law makers will just dictate the creation of it. If there is one, they will argue terrorism or cold cases to start the process of getting access. If car manufacturers get gps logs, those will sooner or later end up being available to law enforcement. They currently have access to every call, when where and to whom. Every internet use. Every movement mobile phones does. Every payment through a credit card, where and to whom. Mass transports get more and more into personal tickets, and those get logged.
I hope we will see unreasonable searches to be expanded/enforcement against trawling of data, but i dont have any hope left to the idea that databases wont be created. Not even gdpr in eu stops law makers from dictating that databases must be created, or stopping law makers from trawling it.
Yeah, I think both things can be true: one is that it is absolutely utterly unacceptable to be in the year 2025 advocating for new data collection programs in the name of "fighting crime" - it should be absolutely abundantly clear to even the most naive of us now that A) the cops have absolutely zero interest in pursuing the kinds of crime we're actually interested in - the closure rate on shoplifting, car and package theft, and other property crime is basically zero, and that's not because the cops don't have enough resources, and B) any of these systems will be abused immediately to target whoever it is the feds have decided are the bad guy this week, be it palestine protestors, trans people, immigrants, ex-girlfriends, or whoever else we've decided is outside the circle of protection today.
At the same time, it's also absolutely goddamn unnacceptable that we've come to just accept that our LEOs are just going to act like unaccountable criminal gangs, and that that mentality has crept so far into the police forces that a thin blue line punisher sticker is an acceptable bit of kit for a cruiser. There are systems that are intended to hold these groups accountable, and we need to keep pressing until they do, because throwing up our hands and just saying "Boys will be boys" ain't cutting it.
> LEOs are just going to act like unaccountable criminal gangs, and that that mentality has crept so far into the police forces that a thin blue line punisher sticker is an acceptable bit of kit for a cruiser.
Well, they are unaccountable state-sanctioned gangs.
They can legally steal (forfeiture).
They can 'smell something' and legally trespass.
They can shoot and kill you for basically any reason. But they can fall back and say 'I thought they were reaching for a weapon'.
SCOTUS, even with more liberal justices, have repeatedly said they are shielded from 'official capacities', and that they have absolutely no requirement of protecting and serving.
You think the police have adequate resources to solve package theft? I’m sorry, what? That’s ridiculous. Here’s the 2023 stats for SF:
Porch thefts: 25,000
Cops: 2000
Obviously not all of those cops are on duty simultaneously, let’s assume they do a 12 hour shift every single day: they would have 25 porch thefts each to solve!
This isn’t a US centric phenomenon either: 70,000 cell phones were stolen in London last year.
Nah, I think as a society we should be able to set up speed cameras to crack down on speeding, without worrying about how it could be misused maliciously against law abiding motorists. Get angry at the people doing bad things. Otherwise we shouldn't build anything that could potentially be misused.
> be angry at [...] the people among us [who] foolishly thought it [...] would be a good thing for alternative transportation
Yikes. That is one tortuous sentence you needed to construct just to blame this on leftists. I applaud your wordcraft. But no, that's ridiculous. Urban transit hippies are very much not to blame for ICE overreach. Just for the record.
If someone points out that the system you're building can be abused, and you don't stop and come up with a solid plan to prevent abuse then you're just building the system for abuse.
It's practically impossible to build a system that "can't be abused". If you set the bar there, then you can block any policy forever by simply enumerating increasingly unlikely ways for it to be abused. It's like a child's version of politics.
I could go into my car right now and plow through a bunch of people. I'm still allowed to own a car. We've made the actual harmful act illegal, not the thing that theoretically made it possible.
At the same time, we do not allow people to have nuclear bombs.
As everything in life, it's a trade-off, but a good trade-off can only be found if people are fully aware of the consequences. It seems to me, people regularly underestimate the negative consequences of data collection (or realize that these consequences will not affect them, but others).
> It's practically impossible to build a system that "can't be abused"
For ALPRs? I’d make queries public with a short delay, including with a unique identifier for the cop initiating the query. Data automatically deleted within an interval.
And then you feel comfortable guaranteeing that it could never be abused?
The issue is being brought up by the state auditor. This article is literally what would happen anyway if your pet policy was enacted. The police would ignore your little policy, and the standard would have to write an article about the abuse. Hopefully that article would drive public opinion enough for change to happen.
As part of a Flock search, police have to provide a “reason” they are performing the lookup. In the “reason” field for searches of Danville’s cameras, officers from across the U.S. wrote “immigration,” “ICE,” “ICE+ERO,”
Well they didn't. The reason we just read the article we read was because they looked in the logs, and the logs included well written reasons that were illegal. So they wrote an article.
How does stopping them from writing "fuck you" in the field (which they provably didn't, considering they found the queries), or giving you access to it, help in any way in this situation? You're going to have to make an argument here for it to make any sense.
There is zero "solid plan" you can produce that prevents a popular thing in a democratic country from happening. Like, sure, there are supposed to be some amount of base rules to prevent you from gulaging people as soon as you get a 51% vote share, but if you have enough popularity for long enough, as designed, you can change those rules and eventually do whatever you want.
You can bet the shit the Nazis did wasn't "allowed" by the Weimar Republic's constitution, but that didn't matter one bit as soon as the brownshirts murdered enough people. Hitler wasn't even that popular at any point. The holocaust didn't happen because Germany didn't have enough "don't do holocausts" rules, it happened because millions of Germans just let it, because they didn't want to die under a brownshirt's boot.
Meanwhile we've had tens of examples of full blown genocides that did not use any database at all. It has never seemed to actually stop a genocide.
The answer, as always, is that it takes hard work to defend your rights, and you can never ignore your government, and you should stop trying to ignore your government. You cannot "defang" a government. If enough people are working to build an authoritarian shithole state, they will get it, and no paper will stop them, because "having enough people who want something" is literally what a government is.
We have thousands and thousands of years of history showing that if you want rights you have to fight for them.
>If someone points out that the system you're building can be abused
Any system of authority can be abused. No paper can fix that. The only thing that can fix that is a popular, credible threat to the people trying to abuse it.
> Importantly, the definition of “public agency” is limited to state or local agencies, including law
enforcement agencies, and does not include out-of-state or federal law enforcement agencies. (See Civ.
Information Bulletin 2023-DLE-06
California Automated License Plate Reader Data Guidance
Page 3
Code, § 1798.90.5, subd. (f).) Accordingly, SB 34 does not permit California LEAs to share ALPR information
with private entities or out-of-state or federal agencies, including out-of-state and federal law enforcement
agencies. This prohibition applies to ALPR database(s) that LEAs access through private or public vendors
who maintain ALPR information collected from multiple databases and/or public agencies.
> Don't be angry at the people building them for good.
I am angry because the same people who've argued for years against the kinds of education systems that teach actual social systemic thinking and who've called me naive and cynical for suggesting their pretty toy is going to get people killed are now throwing up their hands and saying "how could we have known?"
Nope. If you're one of them, as a practitioner you should damn well be able to reasonably foresee the pathological use case. Hell, I only cut myself minimal slack for having grown up believing constant exhortations by Oldtimers that "Kid, no one in their right mind would do that," only to see my peer group replacing them do exactly what the Oldtimers were insistent that common sense dictated wouldn't be done.
It is on us to be realistic about how the systems we create will actually be used. I think we lost sight of that in the last couple decades, or figured it wasn't our problem. And the chickens have come home to roost.
That's right - no one should be angry at the people building and filling up concentration camps, and certainly not at their supporters and cheerleaders. It's all those dogooders collecting data that are the real culprits.
The post you're responding to isn't arguing shifting blame. They're arguing that instrumental actions should be included. If you think expanding the scope of accountability dilutes the pool, that's another argument. But at least have good faith. They're not your enemy.
If you build a curb for someone that is well-known for curb stomping people to death and has a bunch of people behind them saying how great curb stomping is, that's on you.
Maybe! But maybe that area still really does need a curb, and it's the curb-stomping people we need to worry about more than the curb?
The sharing of the database in clear contravention of the law is a symptom of the widespread police culture of immunity from civil oversight in the United States. They do it because they get away with it.
I in no way meant to imply the curb-stompers were in the right, only that building a curb for them when you know very well what it'll be used for makes you culpable as well.
Flock didn’t build a sidewalk. Flock built the stomp-o-tron 9000 with convenient victim loading ramp and mechanical leg.
Flock built a surveillance data repository with convenient sharing mechanisms. Someone then used those mechanisms as designed for their intended purpose.
Did they? The cops shared with other state agencies who then shared with the feds. From what I understand of the situation the cops didn’t break the law, which is the problem.
> Twice, however, OPD staffers searched their system explicitly on behalf of the FBI.
And "other California police departments" are California cops subject to SB34, too.
> Rather, other California police departments searched Oakland’s system on behalf of federal counterparts more than 200 times — providing reasons such as “FBI investigation” for the searches — which appears to mirror a strategy first reported by 404 Media, in which federal agencies that don’t have contracts with Flock turn to local police for backdoor access.
> If you're gonna be angry at someone be angry at the people among us were in favor of the creation of this data set
You're right, they're not shifting blame, they're straight up telling you who is to blame. And apparently, it is not the people who came up with this idea, nor the people carrying out the actions, nor the people supporting them.
These two things are one in the same. Every data broker knows exactly who their ultimate clients are.
That's why Palantir never broke a sweat losing bazillions of dollars for years and years and years. Their final goal is to be essentially an indispensable arm of the police surveillance state.
This is an insane take, and I refuse to be gaslit into believing we can't do anything about crime because "well the cops will misuse it". I live in Oakland where the streets are a killing field with zero accountability being the default result.
I could pour BILLIONS into social programs and we'll still have sociopaths ghost riding or sitting on their phones doing 45 in a 30 zone. The cops have been useless from the get-go.
These cameras have been the last line of defense. The solution is obviously to take the cameras out of the hands of the cops and put them behind elected judges.
I was going to call you out for hyperbole, especially since the (AI) search overview had pedestrian deaths for 2025 at only 4, but previous years at around 10-15, which is pretty bad.
The numbers would be much higher if the city had any foot traffic [1]. It's dead, small businesses are dead, it's just not safe to walk around too much, everyone keeps it to a minimum and drives between parking lots in 5000lb tanks.
I live in Oakland too, and I hate hate hate that we're enabling masked, unnamed government enforcers to kidnap people off the streets and potentially deport them without even verifying they are who they are thought to be.
I also know that we cannot afford to keep letting criminals run this town and destroy public property and kill people on the roads and get away with it
"and I hate hate hate that we're enabling masked, unnamed government"
Sidenote: As per the article, this is already illegal and was a mis-step on the part of SFPD and CHP searching OPD's database (OPD didn't give ICE anything). It sounds like whoever did it will be prosecuted.
I live in Oakland too, and was taken aback at first by calling it a killing field... until I actually admitted to myself that my greatest safety fear here is getting wiped out on foot or bike by some of the most atrocious drivers in the entire bay area with near-zero traffic enforcement.
Voters will nearly always fall for "Think of the children!" Trying to point out how bad of an argument that is has only earned me screaming arguments from my wife. Some people do not prioritize liberty, and so, get less as result of their choices.
Sending people back to their home country, especially when 50% are criminals, is not the same as the holocaust. Comparing it to such is disgusting and insulting to the actual victims of Nazi violence.
ICE is often operating in a racist and dehumanizing way, but it is nowhere near the level of organized atrocity that it is regularly compared to.
I agree that it this comparison is overblown, and do not believe in general that this kind of overstatements do any good to the cause of those who make them.
There is something in common though: that very dangerous belief that lying and ignoring the law is justified by the end goal. Speaking of lies, where did you get this statistics that 50% of expulsed immigrants are criminals? Even their own statistics (https://www.ice.gov/statistics) show that a small minority have ever been convicted (and I would assume that most of those convictions would not be very serious crimes)
afaik they are not accused of parking or jaywalking, but if you're suggesting that's also on their records, can't say I'm surprised, once a scofflaw, always a scofflaw
> In the autumn of 1941, approximately 338,000 Jews remained in Greater Germany. Until this point, Hitler had been reluctant to deport Jews in the German Reich until the war was over because of a fear of resistance and retaliation from the German population. But, in the autumn of 1941, key Nazi figures contributed to mounting pressure on Hitler to deport the German Jews. This pressure culminated in Hitler ordering the deportation of all Jews still in the Greater German Reich and Protectorate between 15-17 September 1941.
That’s not my point. My point is we have no leverage.
A populace with deep and wide skills can be a collective action threat.
A bunch of dead eyed screen addicts are just Wall-E background characters.
We’ll end up manual workers for the rich through state violence (happening right now to Latinos to free up jobs). Because we can’t threaten to walk away and undermine wall streets grip on agency.
Flock is absolutely designed to facilitate and encourage this kind of abuse. They have extensive data sharing built in to their system while promising agencies that the users "own" the data.
My local police department just recently got a grant for these and is in the process of setting them up, and I'm working with a number of local technologists and activists to shut it down. We are showing up at every police commission meeting and every city council meeting and keeping actively engaged with local press. I spent almost three hours yesterday having coffee with a police commissioner and I have meeting requests from a number of other local officials. There are similar efforts ongoing in other cities across the U.S.
Immediately after setting up the system -- before all of the devices were even fully online -- our local PD began sharing access with departments in non-sanctuary states. When we asked questions about it, they hid that section from their transparency page. We are cooking them publicly for that.
Flock is VC-funded commercialized mass surveillance.
The type of crime common here is nearly impossible to address without technological assistance. People steal cars, drive into neighborhoods, then break into other cars and houses. They're gone sometimes before a 911 call can even be made, and far before the police arrive. The criminals know this and are just incredibly brazen about it. They'll finish the job with people watching and recording because they know there's no way for them to be caught. People get followed home and held up in their driveway. The criminals are often armed, and people have been shot and killed for even the mildest of resistance. One guy was killed a block from where I was standing for knocking on the window of a getaway car of some guys stealing another car in broad daylight.
Leaving aside broader and more fundamental fixes for crime, which are much longer term projects, the only near-term thing that actually reduces this kind of crime is arrest and conviction rates. In SF, drones have helped reduced car break-ins, because they've actually caught some crews. Oakland doesn't have drones that I know of, but Flock cameras have enabled enough tracking for police to sometimes actually find these people quickly, even several miles away, and make an arrest.
Those are just the plain facts of the situation. It's understandable that people want some kind of solution here. Without at least starting from that understanding, it'll be very difficult to convince people that a solution that is having a positive impact already is not worth the other costs and risks.
And to me, this is the core conflict at a really high level: the economic and societal fixes for crime are usually opposed by the same people who abuse these kind of surveillance systems for authoritarian purposes. To me it's no coincidence that their preferred solution to crime just happens to help them keep an eye on the whole population.
There's a hugely material difference between deterring local property crime and handing ICE this information.
ICE is deporting people to death camps (e.g. CECOT), not giving people due process, operating masked and with military support. ICE is a gestapo in all but name.
By all means, find ways to get your community police departments to address crime in your communities. Work with systems outside of police to fix the systemic root causes (crime doesn't "just happen", it's a symptom of other problems). But you don't need the secret police to fix car jackings and break-ins.
ICE is running death camps? Let me guess, the showers are totally secret gas chambers and ICE is collecting shoes in heaps for unclear purposes too.
Sorry to hear this type of law-enforcement will have consequences for congressional redistricting that don’t suit you. You can always try a little chamomile tea.
They didn't say ICE was running death camps, please put on your glasses. They said CECOT is essentially a death camp - which is true.
It's a prison that we have no information on in a totalitarian country. We do know they routinely torture their prisoners. I would think Americans, of all people, would take issue with this.
Evidently, the fascists to be in the US are becoming far too brazen.
If you would just extend your quote, like, a couple more sentences, you would see why I said it's a death camp.
That's a neat trick though, including a quote of just a tiny part to give the impression I'm talking out of my ass. Doesn't really work however, because I actually have eyeballs and I think most people here do.
We can just... you know... look, like, 2 inches up.
>It's a prison that we have no information on in a totalitarian country. We do know they routinely torture their prisoners. I would think Americans, of all people, would take issue with this.
I agree that americans should take issue with this, but as bad as totalitarianism and torture is, those do not make a death camp. By the same token, for all the human right abuses committed in Guantanamo Bay, it's not a death camp. Yes, totalitarian torture camps are bad, and so are death camps, but they're separate things and we shouldn't be in the habit of equating bad-but-not-death camps to Auschwitz just to score some rhetorical points.
"They only brought a meal once a day and it had maggots. They never take off the lights for 24 hours. The mosquitoes are as big as elephants," La Figura said.
"They're not respecting our human rights," one man said during the same call. "We're human beings; we're not dogs. We're like rats in an experiment."
"I'm on the edge of losing my mind. I've gone three days without taking my medicine," he said. "It's impossible to sleep with this white light that's on all day."
He also claimed his Bible was confiscated.
"They took the Bible I had and they said here there is no right to religion. And my Bible is the one thing that keeps my faith, and now I'm losing my faith," he said.
inhumane conditions =/= "death camps". There probably is a point where conditions are inhumane enough to cause deaths (think starvation), that it can be called a "death camp" but so far as I can tell from the wikipedia article it's nowhere near that. The article doesn't even mention how many people died there. However, it does mention a poorly supported theory on reddit/X that there's satellite images of body mounds that were subsequently hidden, so that might be what people were thinking of?
My comment shouldn't be read in any way as supporting ICE or giving ICE this information. Doing so is clearly illegal under California law, and what ICE is doing right now is terrible.
But the prevailing sentiment in these comments is the the cameras shouldn't exist at all, not just that the data shouldn't be shared with ICE. My comment is about how useful the cameras are today. If you want them to not exist you need to understand why they do and probably offer up an alternate solution to the very real problems they address.
Anyone, citizen or non-citizen, illegaly here or legally here, can now be kidnapped off the street, stuffed in an unmarked van by masked men not identifying themselves as police, and sent to a foreign prison, without any due process. This is a little bit beyond merely “deporting illegals.”
"The two laws were the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, which forbade marriages and extramarital intercourse between Jews and Germans and the employment of German females under 45 in Jewish households; and the Reich Citizenship Law, which declared that only those of German or related blood were eligible to be Reich citizens."
The Holocaust was, broadly speaking, legal under German law at the time. The Gestapo were frequently enforcing laws with their actions. Eventually, Jews were deported to concentration camps; they were made "illegal".
"Legal" and "moral" are sometimes related, but not always. The Gestapo didn't start with the killings.
They're like the gestapo because they act in secret and hide their identities. They arrest dissidents because they say things the administration doesn't like. See Mahmoud Khalil. They're like the gestapo because hateful people get to just make people "illegal" at their own discretion. Half a million Haitians fleeing violence were here under temporary protected status, the executive branch is choosing to make them "illegal" and lying that Haiti is safe now.
Half a million people were legal. Now they're "illegal".
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/27/haiti-temporar...
They do not follow due process which is guaranteed by the constitution to all persons in the US (not just citizens).
This is hardly a philosophical debate. Oakland is a mess. The previous police chief was fired, and the person that fired him, the mayor, was recalled by voters. And the DA in 2023-2024 was recalled by voters.
The governor warned Oakland in the past to reverse its policy on not engaging in police pursuits. Not surprisingly, the new police chief is proposing changing that policy.
Between this and the abortion story [1] (CEO deflected blame and took zero ownership [2]), it looks like Flock leans into enabling this sort of lawlessness. They should be torn out of our cities.
Do we have a list of their clients?
EDIT: Apparently my town installed them in 2023 [3]. Inciting a couple council members over for dinner this week.
What a ridiculous response. Just say "Flock cameras are designed for law enforcement to use however they see fit, even if it's to chase down abortion-getters, even if it's to kidnap people off the street into unmarked vans"
Another example for the whiteboard of "why 'invest in founders not ideas' doesn't work" I suppose.
The more I look back on it, working for a YC-funded company will forever remain the black eye of my resume. I don't feel even a lick of pride "solving" the "problems" that YC perceives to be important. The greatest minds of my generation are looking at China and envying the confidence of their state.
Occasional reminder that YC application required applicants to give an eample of how they cheated a system for personal gain. YC prefers "naughty" founders over honest ones.
That's way too broad to support the previous comment's claim, and seems to be looking for examples of ingenuity. Modifying your dishwasher to use less water would fit that prompt.
Are you suggesting that YC applications contain trick questions? Or that the questions are intentionally drafted in a confusing and/or misleading way? That seems kind of weird.
Just so everyone remembers: automated collection is an unlawful search by the constitution. Stop advocating for a police state and expecting something different. (Mandatory registration of objects, mandatory medical procedures, mandatory facial accessories, mandatory automatic government payments to fund all of this)
> The OPD didn’t share information directly with the federal agencies. Rather, other California police departments searched Oakland’s system on behalf of federal counterparts more than 200 times — providing reasons such as “FBI investigation” for the searches
Does this mean it wasn't exactly to Oakland Police that violated state law, but rather other CA based law enforcement entities?
it's also possible the other agencies only shared findings rather than specific records.
For example if the law says "plate reader records cannot be shared" and the CHP just confirms the presence of the records , and does not share the records, no violation occurred.
You did a good job reading the article from bottom to top. The headline and lead are usually misleading.
"The OPD (Oakland PD) didn’t share information directly with the federal agencies. Rather, other California police departments searched Oakland’s system on behalf of federal counterparts more than 200 times —
So the headline is misleading. It seems like oakland made their records available to state agencies like CHP, and one of those agencies queried the records and shared the query results with federal agencies.
And the article doesn't specify which results were shared.
So it's clear Oakland didn't violate the law, and there is reasonable doubt that the other agencies didn't violate the law either.
That’s not what is happening here. They shared the records with state agencies legally. And the other agencies may have shared permissible results legally too
It is. Some of it is being accessed illegally (ICE has been given full access to the IRS, which is a violation of the fifth amendment, local LE sharing it in contravention with state laws), and some of it is being accessed legally (local LE sharing it in compliance with state laws).
The criminals are, sadly, running the circus, and they are acting like they'll never lose power.
The only implication that your information was ever safe in America was marketing. Programmers should have been able to read the privacy-destroying tea leaves a decade ago.
ALPR (automated license plate readers) are used across state lines to pull out drug mules and other stuff. Many local law enforcement employees are federal task forces involving drugs/guns/cartels/violence. Obviously, Feds have hands on these databases.
The supremacy clause of the constitution asserts that federal law takes precedence over state laws. There are thousands of state laws on the books that are basically rendered null, because a federal law overrides it. One clear example is segregation laws like interracial marriage which was on the books in some states decades after the civil rights movement.
Example: Alabama was the last state to remove its ban on interracial marriage from its statutes in 2000, though this was largely symbolic as interracial marriage was legalized nationwide by the Supreme Court's ruling in Loving v. Virginia in 1967.
There is probably a specific federal law enforcement authority that may or may not be in conflict with the state law. It's unclear if this is a 10th amendment violation for the state or if federal law enforcement is granted this authority
Federal Law takes precedence over State, but the anti-commandeering doctrine prevents the federal government from directly compelling states to implement or enforce federal law. So local law enforcement is under no obligation to pass information to ICE or assist ICE. It has been ruled on time and time again, from 1842 when Justice Joseph Story affirmed it [1] to Justice Samuel Alito in 2018 [2].
[1] “The clause relating to fugitive slaves is found in the national Constitution, and not in that of any State. It might well be deemed an unconstitutional exercise of the power of interpretation to insist that the States are bound to provide means to carry into effect the duties of the National Government nowhere delegated or entrusted to them by the Constitution.” Prigg v. Pennsylvania https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/41/539/
[2] “Congress may not simply ‘commandeer the legislative process of the States by directly compelling them to enact and enforce a federal regulatory program.” Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association https://www.oyez.org/cases/2017/16-476
My comment shouldn't be read as supporting the activities or really disagreeing with your statement. Was merely indicating that the legal authorities are not as clear cut as the article suggests.
To use your examples:
1) enforcement of borders is a power delegated to the federal government, and it's arguable these activities are within scope.
2) This is not a regulatory program but an enforcement activity (though you could argue that the state doesn't need to support these activities)
I don't think there is a 10th amendment violation or a question of federal authority. States can't be compelled to perform federal law enforcement because of the 10th amendment. States are accordingly allowed to prevent their own law enforcement from performing federal law enforcement. If state law enforcement aids the feds anyway, then they are just breaking state law.
A 10th amendment violation would be if the feds require the state to perform federal law enforcement.
Federal authority is relevant if they e.g. raided state law enforcement offices to take the data without consent, but in this case they are just given the data by state officers.
As part of a Flock search, police have to provide a “reason” they are performing the lookup. In the “reason” field for searches of Danville’s cameras, officers from across the U.S. wrote “immigration,” “ICE,” “ICE+ERO,”
Datasets are created to be used. Once created they will eventually likely be used for purposes other than the original intention. Depending on the power dynamics in play this may be more or less likely.
There are many many such cases and they are obviously not limited to the current regime. Governments will collect all the data they are permitted to collect without a harsh public response, and they will always have a 'good' reason -- just ask them! After all it's for your own good!
Datasets with personal data create a target for crime and for abuses. The problem is these datasets exist at all, thereby reducing humans to numbers. People are not resources and not material not matter what HR says. Reducing people to numbers is to reduce them to something less than they are -- no dataset (model trained on it) captures everything.
We need real privacy laws not the ridiculous current situation. There should be clear consent required without coercion for any data collection -- a necessarily very high bar.
Unauthorized collection of personal data (i.e. without explicit consent not tied to any benefit bait) should be a federal crime and the organizational leadership should always be held to account. That and that alone will curtail future abuses. Otherwise we are just always complaining after the fact and it will keep happening.
That said, good luck getting any government in this world to go along without a revolution.
If you don’t think this system should be used, it should never have been built in the first place. Relying on a state law to prevent sharing data sounds rather naive.
Second, the page barely mentions ice, title is begging for clicks.
But you can't buy one at Wal Mart, and be trusted to only pull that trigger in situations when the uses of that system are legal! We don't sell them to consumers because the anticipated and obvious outcomes are harmful.
Flock Safety generated a treasure trove of highly sensitive data. In theory, there's nothing wrong with collecting that data, or even using it to investigate specific crimes with searches of limited scope under a judicial warrant. It's only harmful when used inappropriately... but no one should be surprised when that happened.
you don't even need license plate data. Every car emits 4 radio frequencies which make you uniquely identifiable even without a camera or plate. We can easily track (and they do) this information. But at least we know our tires arent flat!
The system in place for dealing with corrupt law enforcement is federal law enforcement. It should be obvious why our ever growing police state ruled by fascists is not going to police itself.
The only feasible response to lawlessness of those empowered to uphold the law is to periodically remind them that legal authority is derived from the will of the people. Thomas Jefferson said this more elegantly than I could.
>>What is the mechanism for enforcing laws passed by legislature?
Probably the same as it is at the federal level - voting out of office. During the Biden/Harris term there was a complete dereliction of duty when it came to border enforcement. Actually it was worse than that - they helped people illegally cross the border, even flew them in on the taxpayer dime. This is why we have President Trump today.
It’s illegal because California made it illegal for municipal police to cooperate with federal agents. Trump and future Republicans will use this to accuse Democratic sanctuary cities of being lawless.
I think we've been playing "everyone gets along" for far too long, and it's become obvious to the meek that people are gaming the system whilst pretending to get along. A correction is necessary, and that's precisely what you're witnessing here.
> The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
RBAC for example. Not everyone has and should have the same kind of access. Even at my dayjob I can imagine use cases where it would be inappropriate to provide certain data even to some coworker internally.
Because the drugs are 100x worse than alcohol. These drug addicts behavior is worse than alcoholics.
I’d rather live in a society where people don’t need to turn to drugs. And I would prefer building a coalition of like minded people and stamp out druggies and their enablers.
Some people like to use drugs. It's their body, and should be their right. If you have a problem with specific behavior that you associate with drugs - and that behavior negatively affects other people and is not protected - the regulate that behavior.
Since neither crushing supply nor crushing demand seem to actually work at all, maybe it'd be more effective to directly address the problem of the people on the street.
The people on the street didn’t magically spawn as drug addicts.
They chose that life. And they drive the demand.
I am from a third world hellhole and I find it sad that people here can’t just accept personal responsibility. We didn’t even have running water. Instead of doing drugs we chose to persevere and try.
Here you have public libraries with hella resources and so many charities and public services. I mean there’s medi-cal in California and programs for basically everything. I sometimes volunteer at a food bank and they give out free meals..
Funnily enough, I don't imagine there are many Honduran drug dealers in the kitchens, soccer fields, farms, and home depots where ICE is focusing their efforts these days.
It is a federal law, and thus enforcement should be happening on the federal level. The feds don't get to pass laws and then burden the states with their enforcement. The states are fully within their rights to withhold state law enforcement resources to focus on state laws.
>The feds don't get to pass laws and then burden the states with their enforcement.
Local law enforcement should not just enforce the law of the specific city they are in. They should enforce all applicable laws: city, county, state, country, etc.
Thats not how the balance of power between the State and Federal level work. The anti-commandeering doctrine prevents the federal government from directly compelling states to implement or enforce federal law. It has been ruled on time and time again, from 1842 when Justice Joseph Story affirmed it [1] to Justice Samuel Alito in 2018 [2]. Having to get voluntary buy-in from States for Federally passed laws is a key check on Federal power.
[1] “The clause relating to fugitive slaves is found in the national Constitution, and not in that of any State. It might well be deemed an unconstitutional exercise of the power of interpretation to insist that the States are bound to provide means to carry into effect the duties of the National Government nowhere delegated or entrusted to them by the Constitution.” Prigg v. Pennsylvania https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/41/539/
[2] “Congress may not simply ‘commandeer the legislative process of the States by directly compelling them to enact and enforce a federal regulatory program.” Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association https://www.oyez.org/cases/2017/16-476
You're conflating incomparable things here. The reason why local law enforcement enforces state laws is because municipalities don't have any political sovereignty of their own - they are granted their authority by the state government, and as such, it can come with arbitrary strings attached and can be changed and revoked entirely at any moment.
This is not the case when you consider the relationship between the states and the federal government, though. While the states obviously aren't fully sovereign, the federated structure of our country explicitly grants them limited sovereignty that is innate and not in any way derived or subject to the federal authority. Thus the ability of the federal government to commandeer state governments to its own ends is rather limited and needs to be explicitly spelled out (e.g. National Guard can be federalized, but State Defense Forces cannot). And last I checked, there are no clauses in the Constitution that give the feds the power to commandeer state law enforcement to enforce federal laws; nor did the courts find such power implicit in other clauses.
> Local law enforcement should not just enforce the law of the specific city they are in. They should enforce all applicable laws: city, county, state, country, etc.
Not only shouldn't they do it, they _can't_. You don't want some local sheriff deciding you're guilty of, I dunno, securities fraud, and you don't want the FBI writing parking tickets.
> Importantly, the definition of “public agency” is limited to state or local agencies, including law
enforcement agencies, and does not include out-of-state or federal law enforcement agencies. (See Civ.
Information Bulletin 2023-DLE-06
Code, § 1798.90.5, subd. (f).) Accordingly, SB 34 does not permit California LEAs to share ALPR information
with private entities or out-of-state or federal agencies, including out-of-state and federal law enforcement
agencies. This prohibition applies to ALPR database(s) that LEAs access through private or public vendors
who maintain ALPR information collected from multiple databases and/or public agencies.
> Existing law prohibits the department from selling the data or from making the data available to an agency that is not a law enforcement agency or an individual that is not a law enforcement officer.
> “Public agency” means the state, any city, county, or city and county, or any agency or political subdivision of the state or a city, county, or city and county, including, but not limited to, a law enforcement agency.
Notably: Not federal. My link to the AG's memo quotes this.
Yes. I am not disagreeing with you that they have narrowed down the definition of law enforcement agency. My comment actually links to the section the AG is quoting.
A fairly key aspect of American federalism is there are a lot of things the Feds can't force states to participate in, as provided in the Tenth Amendment. (Known as anti-commandeering doctrine.)
Sadly, Wickard v. Filburn effectively ended this.[1] Also the feds don't have to use force against the states to get compliance. They can do things like not provide funding for freeway maintenance[2], or penalize individuals for not participating (as was the case with the Affordable Care Act).
South Dakota v. Dole held that things like the drinking age can only be tied to related items. Road maintenance in exchange for road rules passes muster, and interstate highways is about as "interstate commerce" as you can probably get.
I'm not prepared to consider the Tenth extinct just yet. That is, among other things, a "you nuke us we nuke you" scenario between the two parties. Things like drinking age work because the two parties largely agree on it.
Genuinely, this. How many green card holders are suddenly at risk of having said card revoked and being tossed into a concentration camp after visiting a dispensary in a legal state? Democrats failure to amend the law as the public wants is going to come back to bite minorities in the ass once again.
Uh no. Tech, agriculture, entertainment, manufacturing, transportation. People love to hate on California but it really is the most productive state in the US. Facts please.
Not sure why the down votes. You are correct. The intro from your link:
"The economy of the State of California is the largest in the United States, with a $4.103 trillion gross state product (GSP) as of 2024.[1] It is the largest sub-national economy in the world. If California was an independent nation, it would rank as the fourth largest economy in the world in nominal terms, behind Germany and ahead of Japan."
The corruption in California is well known and frankly blatant.
Money laundering through tech startups or crypto shell companies, luxury real estate purchases by Chinese or Russian oligarchs for capital flight or laundering, tech-enabled criminal infrastructure: e.g., encrypted phones (Phantom Secure), dark web hosting, or cartel-facilitated Bitcoin laundering. Not to mention major economy sector capture under the guise of "luxury technocommunism" but enables international crime and tax avoidance.
I'm sure many books have been written about Newsom. I won't go there.
> Money laundering through tech startups or crypto shell companies, luxury real estate purchases by Chinese or Russian oligarchs for capital flight…
You could be describing parts of Texas, Florida real estate.... I'm not sure why California gets all the blame. I suspect because it is the wealthiest.
California hardly gets blamed at all. Just look how the cartel-affiliated MJ farm gets busted and the media calls it "strawberry pickers that put food on our table." That kind of media bias is scary and I don't understand how people overlook it.
Yeah, I'd rather we not terrorize the nation and build a national goon squad with a larger budget than most national militaries. I'd rather that goon squad not be unidentifiable and masked. And if we're willing to spend $100+ billion on a law enforcement program, I'd rather it be increasing police wages and firing bad cops and hiring/properly training new cops.
I'd rather not spend $100B on LEO at all, frankly.
There are other ways to crack down on immigration than ramping up the surveillance and police state.
edit: I am disappointed that the responder ignored the six points I made, all of which could be discussed, and instead went for a hollow whatabout.
The only way that could be a purer distillation of abstract whataboutism would be to remove the last lingering traces of specificity, yielding: "[They] do [it] too!"
Even if we accept that that other-bad-thing exists, how does it justify the first-bad-thing we were talking about?
> The OPD didn’t share information directly with the federal agencies. Rather, other California police departments searched Oakland’s system on behalf of federal counterparts more than 200 times — providing reasons such as “FBI investigation” for the searches — which appears to mirror a strategy first reported by 404 Media, in which federal agencies that don’t have contracts with Flock turn to local police for backdoor access.
Shoutout to 404 Media’s reporting on this, it’s causing states to take action against Flock. I’m unsure if oversight would’ve kicked in without this reporting.
Continue with the rest of the paragraph: "Rather, other California police departments searched Oakland’s system on behalf of federal counterparts more than 200 times — providing reasons such as “FBI investigation” for the searches — which appears to mirror a strategy first reported by 404 Media, in which federal agencies that don’t have contracts with Flock turn to local police for backdoor access."
These were approved by governments that promised the data would never be shared with the feds. Only in the most lawyer bullshit word gymnastics could you arrive at the conclusion there is nothing to see here. You are being intellectually dishonest.
> Accordingly, SB 34 does not permit California LEAs to share ALPR information
with private entities or out-of-state or federal agencies, including out-of-state and federal law enforcement
agencies. This prohibition applies to ALPR database(s) that LEAs access through private or public vendors
who maintain ALPR information collected from multiple databases and/or public agencies.
A state law can only be illegal if it violates the state's own constitution or the US constitution.
States are not obligated to participate in the enforcement of federal law, and are entitled to control the official conduct of their own officers and agencies.
If a state has a law that prohibits local police officers from furnishing data to federal agencies, that law is completely valid, and officers that act contrary to it are in violation of state law.
It’s strange to me that we see people being rounded up and sent to concentration camps and many people consider lawfulness to be sufficient justification. No, right and wrong don’t derive from laws. It’s supposed to be the other way round.
if i were to visit any country, and then just randomly stay and try to get a job, I expect that it won't last long. why is this not the case for people that come here?
Because that's not what it's happening. It's a dragnet of paramilitary forces using skin color to determine who to abduct, and they're kidnapping loads of legal residents and even citizens, because skin color and spoken language are not legitimate proxies for legal residency status.
Why do you use these silly words: “abduct”, “kidnapping”? Those are specific crimes and by trying to exploit the emotional weight of those words instead of making an honest account you come off as unsophisticated and manipulative. If what is happening is so problematic why do you need to describe it in bombastic, provably untrue terms?
How else do you describe plainclothes "officers" picking up people from the street, putting people into unmarked vehicles, and locking them up in faraway detainment facilities despite never officially charging them with a crime?
If it was an arrest, wouldn't they be charged with a crime or released after a short processing time if not actually charged? If it was an arrest, why not have the officers properly identify themselves?
Kidnapping does have specific legal meaning depending on jurisdiction. But it also has a common meaning of "the action of abducting someone and holding them captive". Abduction has a common definition of "the action of taking someone away by force or deception". Do these actions not fit these definitions?
You're acting like it's impossible for the government to kidnap or abduct people. Seems like quite a limited world view to believe such a thing.
The ignorance here is just staggering. Every single person arrested for any and all crimes in the US is initially detained without being charged with a crime. This is normal. The police do not charge people with crimes: courts do. This is called an arraignment and it must occur within 48 hours of arrest. There is zero non-standard conduct from ICE in this regard.
ICE officers are required to identify themselves “as soon as practical or safe” as a regulation. They are not required to identify themselves in the same manner as state police because they are not state officers, they are federal officers. Federal law applies to them, not state law. Again, zero non-standard conduct from ICE.
> Do these actions not fit these definitions?
No they absolutely do not, because we’re talking about law enforcement so the only reasonable frame of reference is the legal definition of these words not the “I feel like it” definition. By your definition all arrests are “taking someone away by force” and are therefore abduction: obviously a stupid definition.
I think it’s entirely possible for the government to abduct people: please don’t put strawman words into my mouth. You have, however provided zero evidence to make your case and in fact demonstrated quite clearly that you don't understand the most basic everyday workings of our legal system.
> This is called an arraignment and it must occur within 48 hours of arrest
This isn't happening for these people. They're being locked up for weeks to months without any due process at all. They're being sent to overseas prisons indefinitely once again without ever facing such arraignment or charges or a courtroom. You're saying this is normal, and yet saying an arraignment must occur within 48 hours. Which is normal, being held for months without an arraignment or being released within 48 hours if not being officially charged?
The cognitive dissonance here is astounding. An arraignment must happen or its not normal, but arraignments not happening without being released is normal.
> we’re talking about law enforcement so the only reasonable frame of reference is the legal definition of these words
> I think it’s entirely possible for the government to abduct people
So, the government can choose to pick people up on the street without identifying themselves and lock them away indefinitely in overseas prisons without any arraignment or charges or court case and argue they're removed from the jurisdiction of the US court system, but it's not abduction because the government says it's not. I guess the government only abducts people when it says it abducts people, guess there's nothing to worry about then.
I'm not trying to talk to some specific legal definition in a court of law; I'm speaking to morality. Plainclothes agents failing to identify themselves to normal people and shoving them into the backs of unmarked cars isn't a good thing to do. Having this just become a normal part of life seems pretty fucked up to me, but maybe that's the world you prefer to live in.
I can't see how anyone can look at cases like Abregio Garcia's as anything but kidnapping. He had a legal status of "withholding of removal". His status was changed without any notification to him other than when he was "arrested". No worries though, he'll be arraigned in 48 hours or be charged, right? Nope. Sent to CECOT to be detained indefinitely without having any charges levied against him, and seemingly without having any other options of self-deportation. He wasn't officially charged with a crime until he was removed from CECOT months later and brought back to the US. Where was that arraignment? Where was the due process?
I can't see how anyone can look at cases like Mahmoud Khalil's as anything but kidnapping. He had a green card. He was detained for over 100 days, was seemingly close to also be sent to CECOT indefinitely. To this day he still has not officially been charged with a crime.
And to think what has happened to these people has happened to at least hundreds of others. People without any criminal backgrounds. People never formally charged with a crime. Currently in ICE detention facilities with no clear release date, no court date, no right legal representation, some even in overseas prisons.
> By your definition all arrests are “taking someone away by force” and are therefore abduction: obviously a stupid definition.
A police shooting that results in the death of someone is a homicide. It is potentially a legally and morally justifiable homicide, but it is still a homicide. We agree words can have a legal definition separate from the dictionary definition, right? It's not wrong to use the dictionary definition when we're not a lawyer arguing a case in a courtroom, right?
Do you expect that a properly granted visa will be revoked without any notice and then be quickly hurried off to a for-profit prison without any trial or representation for months?
So not in a concentration camp in Florida without ever formally being charged with a crime, correct? Just sent here, without any representation, without any due process, without any clear end date to your confinement.
Do you believe in due process? Do you think it's wrong to send people to these places without any due process, without formally being charged with a crime, and without any clear release date established?
For a lot of these people that was not even a given option. They went from having legal status in the US to being on a plane to a foreign prison without any notice or chance to do anything else.
> if i were to visit any country, and then just randomly stay and try to get a job, I expect that it won't last long. why is this not the case for people that come here?
If you have ever gone backpacking for any length of time, you will have met large numbers of people all over the developing world from Europe, Australia and America who are living there and working illegally. In general the result of being caught is being asked to leave and come back with a new visa, and not being violently arrested and thrown into a concentration camp indefinitely.
Billionaires have funded a coup, supported climate change, mass surveillance, and a genocide in Gaza. Why are they not held to account for their wrongdoing but immigrants are being sent to concentration camps without due process for the crime of crossing border for work? The reason is that billionaires are powerful and hard to unseat, while immigrants are a convenient scapegoat for society’s ills.
We already agreed "right and wrong" when we enacted certain laws. Any more complicated than that and you might as well live in a war zone. You don't get to cherry-pick laws because your definition of "right" doesn't align to what the democratic process concluded. You want to change it, go vote for it.
With a wave of a billionaire’s hand, officials are elected, the constitution undone, a dictator installed, a new political party formed. This political structure is oligarchy not democracy.
Due process, on the other hand, is a fundamental right of democratic systems. Yet this feature too is being curtailed - in favor of concentrations camps.
Billionaires have made scapegoats out of a racial minority. Basic humans rights are violated. Our democracy is in shambles thanks to this group - through their subversion of democratic processes and the undermining of democratic rights. What we are witnessing is not democracy - quite the opposite.
It is illegal to spend state money (i.e. wages for state and local police) to enforce federal law (the feds have their own budget for that).
California law also makes it illegal to do federal enforcement with state resources and specifically makes sharing this license plate information with federal investigators by state and local police illegal.
This has nothing to do with the supremacy of federal law over state law. It has to do with who does the enforcement of these laws. It is similarly illegal for me to enforce federal law, but I am certainly bound by it.
In fact, under well-established constitutional law it is illegal for the federal government to attempt to compel state governments to enforce federal law. US states are sovereign in their own right and are not administrative arms of the federal government.
The supremacy clause of the constitution asserts that federal law takes precedence over state laws. There are thousands of state laws on the books that are basically rendered null, because a federal law overrides it. One clear example is segregation which was on the books in some states decades after the civil rights movement.
The federal government and DOJ has declined to prosecute Marijuana, but they definitely have the right to do so.
> One clear example is segregation which was on the books in some states decades after the civil rights movement.
Some states took over a decade after Brown v Board to actually integrate school systems. So again, another instance of state laws seeming to trump federal laws.
If the idea is just not enforcing the supremacy of federal laws is enough, then not enforcing the federal law over the state law which bar sharing info with federal agencies is also in place here so far
No -- states repealing their own laws against marijuana have nothing to do with federal law, and do not prevent the feds from enforcing their own laws in any way. The states are not obligated to implement their own policies in order to further federal interests, nor to participate in the enforcement of federal law.
> Under a decade-old state law, California police are prohibited from sharing data from automated license plate readers with out-of-state and federal agencies. Attorney General Rob Bonta affirmed that fact in a 2023 notice to police.
> Adam Schwartz, privacy litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, confirmed that Senate Bill 34 of 2015 prohibits California police from sharing data from automated license plate readers with out-of-state and federal agencies, regardless of what they plan to do with the data or whether they’re working on a joint task force.
> “Just because Oakland has collected ALPR data for purposes of dealing with local crime doesn’t mean this is a ‘come one, come all’ buffet,” Schwartz said.
> The law only prohibits the sharing of data if it's being used for immigration law enforcement.
Citation? The law does not appear to be this narrow.
Per the article: "Under a decade-old state law, California police are prohibited from sharing data from automated license plate readers with out-of-state and federal agencies. Attorney General Rob Bonta affirmed that fact in a 2023 notice to police."
The article refers to Senate Bill 34, but you’ve posted a link to a Wikipedia article for Senate bill 54. How could the article’s content and assertions be made clearer? Should it have spelled out the numerals?
"Accordingly, SB 34 does not permit California LEAs to share ALPR information
with private entities or out-of-state or federal agencies, including out-of-state and federal law enforcement
agencies."
I mean, California Highway Patrol seems to disagree.
> “If any CHP personnel requested license plate data on behalf of ICE for purposes of immigration enforcement, that would be a blatant violation of both state law and longstanding department policy,” the spokesperson wrote. “If these allegations are confirmed, there will be consequences.”
I’ve had my comments removed in the past for saying this, but HN has become toxic the past few years.
I’ve been ok with the nerd sniping, it’s one of the best parts of HN - but recently I’ve noticed a fair amount of disgusting comments and takes.
These users I am often fascinated by, so of course when I view their HN post history it’s all mostly edgy hatred or whataboutism.
I think the biggest issue is this forum has been circulated on X far too often and the gates being wide open, people love to come in thinking they want to disrupt civil concourse for sake of diversion.
I do sometimes wonder how this forum would look if it was only limited to people who either run, work, or worked at a Y company.
edit: also a quick thank you to the mods who I know do their best. this thread is yet another example simply based on the amount of flagged comments
What a persecution complex you have. Those people should have been locked up for a lot longer than they ended up, along with the "leadership" which caused it.
True. They also do not hold insurance and typically do not have drivers licenses. Although CA will give one to anyone with a pulse...
Having been hit twice by non-insured, non-licensed drivers with no paperwork or legal status, they got off free while I had to pay for their crimes, damage and increased insurance rates for years. No sympathy at all for cheaters. Arrest them and confiscate their cars.
1. It's impossible to track X for only one group. In order to know who is in that group, and who is not, you need to be tracking more than that, necessarily.
Meaning, if you want to track which vehicles belong to "illegal immigrants", you need to know which vehicles belong to citizens. That means YOU. You are not exempt from this data collection.
2. This data can, and will, be used for evil. Anyone who believes that governments will always act in benevolence are, frankly, stupid. You're not stupid, are you? Okay, then you should be beginning to see the problem here.
3. Even IF the government always acts benevolently, and that's a huge fucking if, that doesn't mean they don't make mistakes.
Even if you are innocent, there is a risk here! Who is to say you won't accidentally be identified as an "illegal immigrant"? Is that a risk you're willing to take? For me, that risk is absolutely unacceptable - especially considering the sheer incompetence of our law enforcement agencies and the current administration.
I mean, our country is currently being run by drunkards and yes-men. Do you really trust these imbeciles to never make a mistake, ever? No, right? They've already made quiet a few mistakes, right? Remember the whole Signal thing? Yeah.
You have to look at the big picture here. You're advocating for a system that requires an absolutely unbelievable amount of trust in order to run properly. Do you really, truly, not see the flaws in that?
The supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution says that federal laws are supreme over state laws. Therefore, it is illegal not to comply with federal laws.
Which specific federal law is being violated here by SB34?
The Supremacy Clause is regulated, in part, by the Tenth Amendment, which states…
> The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
The law enforcement agencies which behaved the way law enforcement agencies always behave and did what anyone with even the slightest familiarity with how law enforcement acts thought they would do with the data. This outcome was 1000% predictable even if the details were not.
If you're gonna be angry at someone be angry at the people among us were in favor of the creation of this data set because they foolishly thought it would be used to combat mundane property crime or because perhaps they thought that subjecting motorists to an increased dragnet would be a good thing for alternative transportation, or some other cause, think that they have done no wrong despite warnings of the potential for something like this being raised way back when the cameras and the ALPRs were being put up.
These things will keep happening until it is no longer socially acceptable to advocate for the creation of data collection programs that are a necessary precondition.
> These things will keep happening until it is no longer socially acceptable to advocate for the creation of data collection programs that are a necessary precondition.
The root issue here is that the government is no longer able or willing to control and bind their own law enforcement agencies. Agreed that this program was a bad idea, but the wider issue that law enforcement agencies can and do wantonly disregard direct orders from the state. There's the direct issue of impact on people as a result, and the more intangible idea of the questionable legitimacy of a government that is not able to control its own enforcement agencies.
This needs to be met with swift repercussions for both the individuals that participated, as well as the agencies that allowed it. Lacking that, it seems a reasonable inference that enforcement agencies are no longer bound by the will of the people and are in fact the ruling government.
> The root issue here is that the government is no longer able or willing to control and bind their own law enforcement agencies.
You're correct, but the bigger picture here is: privacy violation rely on benevolence.
We're completely at the whim of parties more powerful than us, and we MUST trust that they will act in our best interests.
Now, we could just hope and cross our fingers that people are good people forever. Do you think that's going to be the case? Because I don't. So the only path forward that makes any sense is to simply not give bad actors the potential to even be bad. Meaning, we shouldn't even collect this data.
We have so many laws of this variety, which rely on our leaders remaining benevolent. This is in stark contrast to the US constitution, which explicitly says NOT to rely on benevolence, and rather construct systems so that we can dismantle our leadership should the time come.
The US has a long history of agencies that decide by themselves to do things that are frequently illicit with the excuse that they're protecting the public. From police to 3 letter agencies, they're all operating illegal programs that should be stoped by the public. Whenever someone tries it, they protect their power using the excuse that they're doing this for the "benefit" of democracy or some similar BS.
> This needs to be met with swift repercussions for both the individuals that participated, as well as the agencies that allowed it.
That’s not going to happen. Cross out that sentence and reason as if we’ve already asked for that and it failed. We’ve heard this song too many times to pretend we don’t know the first verse.
Agree it's never going to happen. The last time people hit the streets for police accountability the political backlash got us a convict in the white house. Democrats are now fully cowed on the topic and Republicans cheer any police overreach.
For the powerful in both government and business there is no rule of law anymore. The "law and order" slogan only means a boot stamping on little people's face forever, the powerful can break the law with impunity.
It's a lesson people haven't learned in 80 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1943_Amsterdam_civil_registry_...
For any dataset you collect, think about how it can be miss-used. Because in all likelihood it will. Maybe not by you. But maybe by your successor. Or the hacker.
Although it is interesting how inconsistently this principle of is applied to other areas. For example, if you come to HN and advocate against encryption or AI because they can amplify the dangers of bad actors, you are going to be met by fierce opposition. So why do these hypothetical bad actors only become valid concerns in certain conversations?
When it comes to encryption, it helps save actual lives. If you mandate getting rid of encryption, bad actors will still break the law and use encryption to carry on business as normal. Regular citizens lose, oppressive governments & criminals win.
>When it comes to encryption, it helps save actual lives.
So does the license plate data. It is used to find and bring justice to criminals. Does that not make us all safer?
> If you mandate getting rid of encryption, bad actors will still break the law and use encryption to carry on business as normal.
Laws are pointless because the criminals will just break them is a silly argument that can be used against most laws. Why should we have any laws about gun control, money laundering, or drugs if the criminals will just do whatever they want anyway.
And the flip side of this argument should also be considered. Do we think the Nazis would have given up on their genocide if they didn't find this data?
> Does that not make us all safer?
Is there evidence in that direction?
Thank you, this is a perfect example of the type of inconsistencies I’m talking about when discussing these issues. The prior comment says encryption saves lives and that is accepted without question, but the idea that empowering law enforcement saves lives is met with a request for evidence. Why did you not reply to both claims the same way?
And if you truly believe that finding and arresting criminals does not make us safer, that is an indictment of our entire justice system. It would also make license plate cameras a rather silly place to draw the line.
I think it's because you don't have to look too hard to find examples of authoritarian regimes leveraging information technologies for surveillance, censorship, and propaganda. Or how US government agencies use loopholes to get around the 4th amendment and buy sensitive civilian data from private data brokers. Or how data breaches are becoming larger and more frequent each year.
Encryption seems highly likely to have saved many people from, say, losing their life savings by having their banking credentials hijacked.
I am less certain about license plate cameras. Hence, the ask. I will leave the questioning of encryption up to someone who actually questions its utility.
Can you genuinely not think of situations in which law enforcement being able to pin a specific vehicle to a time and place might help them catch dangerous criminals or be used as evidence in a trial to help get them convicted?
Something that seems inherently different between GP's comment and encryption is that encryption is an algorithm / tool, not a dataset. Not creating literal tools because they might have bad use cases is clearly a bad idea (e.g., fire, knives, hammers, etc.).
I'd say that one thing inherently different about datasets is that they are continually used badly, including by well-meaning actors. Data is frequently misinterpreted, with good intent, to draw bad conclusions.
You might hit your thumb with a hammer. That hurts! People would be a lot more careful if misinterpreting data had such clear, immediate effects on them.
Also, there are many different groups with different passionate opinions in any community as large as this one.
What is the distinction you are making between a "dataset" and a "tool"?
To use this specific example of the license plate dataset, this is a tool used to find and bring justice to criminals. How is it any different from any other tool at the disposal of law enforcement? Isn't this system just a scaled up version of a cop with a camera?
This might be too pedantic, but a dataset is not a tool in and of itself. It's something that can be processed by a tool. And it's not simple for anyone to reproduce without significant access, either to the original observational opportunities or to the dataset itself. Information about individuals is often in datasets and those people too seldom have a say in the security practices used to safeguard it.
Tools (or pick another word that illustrates this distinction) like encryption, hammers, etc. do not contain our information. They are fairly straightforward to reproduce. And therefore nearly impossible to contain. Bad actors will have encryption and hammers, whether we want them to or not. The only question is whether good actors will also have them, or if they will be restricted by laws. This, for example, can make it easier for datasets to fall into the wrong hands, because they are less likely to be encrypted.
Isn't an atomic bomb just a scaled up version of a firecracker?
Nobody denies that collection of datasets can have upsides. But the downsides are often not seen/evaluated accurately. And negative effects don't necessarily scale with the same power as positive effects.
>Isn't an atomic bomb just a scaled up version of a firecracker?
Yes and no. I think radiation is a big differentiator, but absent that, I don't think it is better morally or ethically to level a city with conventual bombs than it would be to do it with a nuclear bomb.
>Nobody denies that collection of datasets can have upsides. But the downsides are often not seen/evaluated accurately. And negative effects don't necessarily scale with the same power as positive effects.
I'm not disagreeing with this. I'm asking why this same logic is not applied elsewhere.
The point with the firecracker/bomb is this: Not just because it's the same type of tool means that it has the same cost/benefit analysis. The dangers of, say, firecrackers in the had of the general public, scale dramatically faster than the benefit, going from kid-safe firework to bunker busters. The same goes for "a cop with a camera" to "tag readers at every corner".
I think with encryption, the underestimate is on the other side. Everyone understand that bad guys using encryption is bad. But people do not see the upsides of encryption for the good guys, pretty much for the same reason as they do not see the downsides of data collection: I have nothing to hide. [or the common related variant: Advertisement doesn't affect me]
> I think with encryption, the underestimate is on the other side. Everyone understand that bad guys using encryption is bad. But people do not see the upsides of encryption for the good guys
And why are you confident that this doesn’t exist for the license plate dataset? You’re confidentially making two opposing arguments with no justification beyond it getting you to your desired conclusion on that specific issue.
That what doesn't exist for the license plate dataset? I am sure there are good reasons for having that dataset. For most data collection, there are good reasons.
My argument is that just because we decided that "police with camera" is a worthy trade-off, you cannot use this as an argument for "license plate scanning is a worthy trade-off". It could be that it is, but it doesn't follow from "it's a scaled up version of police with camera".
I think you are going too deep down individual tangents here. My “cop with a camera” comment was challenging the idea that datasets aren’t tools.
If the issue is purely about amplifying the danger of bad actors and therefore forcing us to reevaluate the tradeoffs, encryption and AI do that too.
>advocate against encryption
This is a good point. If people are willing to push back against giving law enforcement everybody’s data why would they also oppose giving law enforcement everybody’s data? It is inconsistent because if you think about it “giving law enforcement everybody’s data” and “not giving law enforcement everybody’s data” are basically the same th
Encryption is this same exact topic, and the prevailing technical viewpoint is the direct application of the principle of minimizing collected datasets.
Before the Nazi's invaded the main guy who advocated for the civil registry which allowed the Nazi's to easily find jewish people went to his grave believing he did nothing wrong in advocating for such a database.
Clearly we all need to be thinking much more deeply on these issues.
I think the hard counterpoint is - some ways that American government function are patently insane compared to other industrialized countries. Having moved from US to Nl just having one single source of truth about where I live and who I am for all sources of government is much less of a headache in day-to-day life. Mail forwarding, authentication for municipal governments, health insurance, etc, just takes 0% of my life (compared to the pain of authenticating myself separately to every part of the government, sometimes by answering questions about my life trawled from _private_ data aggregation companies - the lack of a central civil register does not seem to be particularly effective right now in stopping the Us government from terrorizing its citizens. Gathering this data for everyone is certainly more tedious but i think avoiding the dragnet completely for the average member of society is functionally impossible.
> the lack of a central civil register does not seem to be particularly effective right now in stopping the Us government from terrorizing its citizens.
What do you base this on? How can you be sure that it's not a major impediment to the ambitions of certain political actors, and that their impact wouldn't be far worse if they had access to centralized sources of data?
Because they DO have whatever data they want: From Palintir.
Preventing the government from accumulating a database is meaningless. But it doesn't matter anyway. Even if they didn't have any data, that's not an impediment, because there is zero pushback to literally blackbagging people off the street and sending them to another country. They just want to harass brown people and you don't need a damn database for that. Bootlickers have eyes.
This bullshit about government databases has always been a meaningless distraction. Oppression doesn't want to be precise or efficient, it's counterproductive to the goal of scaring people into compliance.
Tell me, how do you believe they are stymied at all? They've arrested anyone they want.
So I'm in general agreement, especially as things stand. But there is one hell of a counterargument that says if the US govt had an authoritative database of all citizens+residents, and effectively enforced that database, then there wouldn't be so much energy based around demands to remove "the illegals" in the first place.
Once again I do generally agree with the desire to limit the abilities of the government, especially pragmatically in the context of the current situation. And politically I'd say that the general topic is being used in bad faith to drive support for fascism rather than earnest policy fixes (eg killing bipartisan immigration bill, in favor of this).
But in general there is an American blindspot of fallaciously seeing system layers as something like a gradient of less-to-more control rather than a yin-yang where diminished control in one area makes it pop up in another.
> But in general there is an American blindspot of fallaciously seeing system layers as something like a gradient of less-to-more control rather than a yin-yang where diminished control in one area makes it pop up in another.
Can you provide some examples of this phenomenon?
One of the big ones is the calling to naively eliminate government regulation, imagining that will always make things "more free", while ignoring that corpos are perfectly willing to create private regulations on their own. This often ends up amounting to facilitating de facto government, despite some epsilon of choice.
There are many more-specific examples of this, but maybe a straightforward and less-partisan one is how the (incumbent) electronic payment networks ban a whole host of types of uses, and do so basically in lock step, despite those uses not actually being illegal. That is private regulation, not even accountable to the democratic process by default. And it avoids becoming accountable by fooling people with narratives of "avoiding regulation".
These kind of systems work perfectly and smoothly as long as the human in question lives his life within the box decided by the government. If not, these systems are hell.
Where "the box decided by the government" means having a mail address?
Most advanced countries also view that as a basic human right...
In some hyper-bureaucratic nations, everything is tied to your individual tax number. In other hyper-bureaucratic nations, everything is tied to your bank account.
It can also be tied to a postal adress in some nations, which makes it hell for people like sailors, seasonal workers, or other very mobile citizens. You're basically dependent on having to know somebody which you can completely trust to make sure they relay your mail to you. One of the "boxes" the government wants to put people in is that they reside at one adress, but many people do not live like that.
This administration went in and just flagged people on Social Security as deceased. They said 'those people can just get it fixed'. They also said people that complain are cheats.
There are many people on fixed social security that can't afford missing a payment, let alone the 3 it would take at a minimum if it all works out to get this fixed. By that point they could be homeless, their credit could be ruined. These aren't easy things to fix if you are 80+ and depend on Social Security and renting.
Concentrated power even for the best on intentions (in this case deciding in the 1930s 'old people shouldn't have to eat dog food') is extremely easy to abuse.
The Nazis didn't actually need the pre-occupation data from the civil registry to easily find Jewish people.
In January of 1941, the Nazis ordered all Jews in the Netherlands to register themselves and virtually all of them, some 160,000, provided their name, address and information on any Jewish grandparents to the government.
If the lesson one learns from the Holocaust is that one shouldn't collect data just in case some genocidal group comes to power, then I fear one has learned the wrong lesson.
Who was this guy?
I am having a very hard time finding his name, but there was a section on him in the dutch resistance museum.
I highly suggest visiting it! Sorry for the lack of an online source.
What can we even change? It's likely HN will also go to the grave demanding deregulation amidst a maelstrom of consumer protection malfunctions. We're already there in many respects; the DOJ's case against Google and Apple both seem to have stalled-out while the EU, Japan and South Korea all push forward with their investigations.
In many respects, the attitude of "we'll fix this one day" is exactly why we don't think deeply about these issues. Client-side scanning was proposed only a short while ago, and you can still read the insane amount of apologists on this site who think that unmitigated data collection can be a good thing if you trust the good Samaritan doing it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068741
It will take an utter catastrophe before the deregulation bloc sees what's at stake. This is far from over, despite the unanimous desire to put security in the rearview mirror.
Go out, tell your non-techie friends how data can be misused.
"But I have nothing to hide"
And then tell them the story about the Jewish people in the Netherlands....
Alternatively, ask them how accurately an email need to describe their medical history before they believe it's real and fall for a scam.
That has never been convincing to them because they are fundamentally incapable of putting themselves in the shoe of an "other" like that. Look at all the people who voted for Trump literally to deport all the illegals and cry foul when he arrests their significant other or parent.
This phenomenon is well documented, from "the only moral abortion is my abortion" to suddenly accepting gay people when your child comes out to a huge quantity of Americans only being accepting of gay marriage rights after watching a damn sitcom, to "deregulate everything" types suddenly screaming for the government to do something after they get scammed/screwed/used as expected like most of the crypto community.
True, but there is a large fraction of people who are not like this, but haven't given the dangers of data collection enough thought. You can reach those. Are that enough people? Let's hope so.
I really fear for our older generations and those who are less tech-affine. What chance do they have to not be scammed by AI generated videos, fed by exfiltrated private data of them and their family. Grandparent scam on steroids.
The simple counterpoint is that lack of data didn't stop the nazis a single fucking bit, and ICE has no problem breaking down random doors and harassing legal establishments.
This absurd idea that all we have to do is "defang" the government and we can safely ignore it, as if the problems that these data sets are built to work towards fixing would magically go away, or magically mean that people who experience those problems wouldn't still try to get something done about them, except now outside of a legal framework of any sort.
Do you actually think people with broken governments are more free in their world of arbitrary penalties and non-existent solutions?
A blinded government isn't less dangerous when it gets hostile. It just makes it more random and less well targeted. But that won't STOP it.
The holocaust would have happened just the same even if we never made counting machines. The main difference with IBM helping the Nazis is that we have good data about who died in the camps and good documentation. Funny that doesn't seem to matter to morons who think it's a hoax though.
Or do you honestly believe Jews faced no oppression and extermination in the areas without good data on them?
The actual answer is, as always, the hard one: Suck it up and pay attention to your government, participate in democracy, advocate for good politicians, understand how our system is somewhat broken and non-representative, and vote for people who will make it more representative.
There's no option to disregard politics and stay safe. If enough people in your country want you dead, no government can protect you of that if you stay disengaged. Ask the native americans how safe they ended up without a comprehensive database of their existence. We nearly exterminated the buffalo to solve that "problem". Because it was popular. No IBM needed.
Not having the data readily available slows it down. Having more random and less well targeted actions hit the supporters, so weakens the support. Is that enough? No. But I still lock my door, even if this will only slow down a determined thief.
Additionally, data collected by the government can also be misused by others. So it's still better to not collect unnecessary.
Its noteworthy to me that it took till 1943 for the reality of the threat to be taken seriously for this outcome
People making parallels I feel have been inaccurate, as the parallels right now are much closer to Europe's 1933 happenings, and people act like 1945's happenings is what will happen the very next day
Not sure what to make of that, just noticing that these particular "resistances" didn't have a prior allegory to watch, and made these choices eventually, and still how late into the story we know that these things occurred
What can I say, it's hard to give up data. So I guess the situation must escalate until the bad outcome was undeniable.
And I don't want to make a point here about current political affairs. My point is that data collection has serious dangers, independent how good you think the current collectors are, how good the intentions of the data collection are, and how good the benefits of the data collection are. We should not pretend that at least some data collection has benefits. But we should also not pretend that any given data collection doesn't have the risk of misuse.
It's up to politics (in the end, us), to make sure that these risks are valued correctly, for example by making sure that data collectors take over some of the risk in a serious way. "The data was protected according to industry standards" is not enough.
A lot of that is because of the advent of computer systems built by IBM to maintain records.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
IBM also built a calculator for the IRS in the late 1800s. They have been working with the government before nearly anyone still alive.
Edit: it was for the 1890 US census, not the IRS. I apologize for my prior error.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabulating_machine
Friend, are you really conflating a calculator with a system of records knowingly used to enact the Holocaust? I recognize your point, but the valley between the two things is so large that I'm going to assume you're trolling.
Not at all. I’m saying that IBM has been getting government contracts for a while, and they worked with Nazis in Germany to tabulate undesirables.
Okay, but what's your point? The OP question was about what shifted.
If you believe that IBM carries water for fascists, the history seems to support that.
What’s your point?
Alternate take, since social consequences only arise after your client gets invaded by 2 superpowers at once, and you don't really know what a party or government is going to do, the downside is very improbable and its rational to continue contracting with them all
I think the whole timeline of WWII is broadly misunderstood in the US. I imagine it’s related to the fact the US entered quite late, and that much of what’s taught in school is fairly US centric.
It’d be very interesting to survey people and see how people’s mental models reflect reality. I imagine very few Americans would identify what was going on in 1933 at all, never mind that Hitler’s first attempt at a coup took place nearly 20 years before the US entered the war.
To be fair, I never heard about the Canadian-US war before I moved to the States. But we went over the Nazi regime multiple times in school [I am German].
fwiw we do make a lot of jokes about getting rejected from art school
Fair enough, but it is also valid to be angry at your local law enforcement if they are acting against the community's preferences. Especially when local law enforcement is breaking state law in the process.
Maybe true, but at a certain point you're just getting angry at the wind for blowing. The system is a scorpion: It cannot, will not go against its nature.
They are a political force, not a force of nature. It is certainly reasonable to get angry at a political force even if their politics are predictable.
Politics change, scorpions don't. Throw your hands up in and air and give up if you want, but don't pretend some poor analogy absolves you.
I don't think he's throwing his hands up in the air, rather he's implying we need more radical change. If we're going to be waiting around for police to become "good", that's not going to happen. We need to force them to become good.
Show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome.
At this point it sounds like you have given up believing in checks and balances in politics.
ETA: It’s complicated, but having you give up actually weakens the rule of law even more.
The greater community, i.e. the United States, may have different preferences than San Francisco.
Local governments are under no obligation to help the federal government enforce federal laws.
Those officers are employees of the City, County or State, not the United States.
But that would put them between federal law vs state law and federal law supersedes state law and state law supersedes local laws.
There are plenty of things Federal law can't do under the Tenth Amendment.
As an example, the Feds can round up marijuana users in California, if they like. They can't require California's law enforcement to help.
Doesn't seem like there was 'force' involved.
There's no law prohibiting local agencies helping feds.
> There's no law prohibiting local agencies helping feds.
The law prohibiting exactly that is linked in the article.
"Under a decade-old state law, California police are prohibited from sharing data from automated license plate readers with out-of-state and federal agencies. Attorney General Rob Bonta affirmed that fact in a 2023 notice to police."
Apologies, I was responding to the comment about weed
Why not be angry at all of them?
As someone who works with sensitive healthcare data, I can tell you that the mere existence of a dataset doesn't guarantee its misuse, nor it does it absolve anyone who interacts with that data of responsibility for proper stewardship.
Yes, you are right that we should think carefully before creating a sensitive dataset. If we insist on creating such a dataset, the people involved must put in place guardrails for stewardship of those datasets. But the stewards of that data, past, present, and future, also share responsibility.
Of course if the incentive structures don't line up with concern for mitigation of harm to vulnerable people as is the case with law enforcement in the US, then all of that is out the window.
Anyway, what you have written implies that we need not think about accountability for those who misuse of datasets after they are created, which is clearly absurd as I and anyone else familiar with healthcare data can tell you.
I'm not sure how to think about this. It doesn't make sense to me that the only alternative is one in which traffic laws get brazenly ignored, and shoplifting and property crime is endemic, to prevent any more data gathering by law enforcement.
At some point it seems like we have to trust that governments can act responsibly, in the interest of voters -- in this case local voters, or we should all just pack it in.
The other thought: I get the thought that people will always care more about local concerns of car break ins, shoplifting, and quality of life than larger ideas like privacy and law enforcement abuse. It seems to convince people to care about the larger issues, the local things have to be solved, and not just ignored.
I've lived in San Francisco for over 10 years now, and it's been disappointing to see the lack on progress on basic quality of life issues.
> It doesn't make sense to me that the only alternative is one in which traffic laws get brazenly ignored, and shoplifting and property crime is endemic, to prevent any more data gathering by law enforcement.
The only reason either of these happen is because law enforcement is lazy and dangerous.
We pretty much gave up on most traffic enforcement because law enforcement officers can't help shooting people they pull over. That's a problem - if they would just start acting somewhat decent, the PD would stop losing a few hundred million a year in lawsuits.
To be frank, I have no idea what law enforcement even does these days. They don't speed trap, they barely respond to calls, they're not pulling people over. Are they just sitting on their asses and getting a check, petrified of public discourse?
> At some point it seems like we have to trust that governments can act responsibly
Respectfully, I believe you have it backwards.
Also, be angry at those who didn't follow through with promises to severely reduce funding to their police departments in 2020. If an organization consistently behaves in a way we don't like, we should seek alternatives to that organization, not continuously act surprised when they act out and keep giving them more money.
> be angry at those who didn't follow through with promises to severely reduce funding to their police departments in 2020
This was tried. It generated a generational backlash against the left as petty crime and visible homelessness rose.
To the extent police reform has historically worked, it’s been by rebooting a police department. (Think: replacing the Mets with the NYPD.) Not replacing police with a hippie circle.
> This was tried. It generated a generational backlash against the left as petty crime and visible homelessness rose.
Crime has been on a downward trend for a generation, outside of a few areas. In San Francisco specifically, crime also increased due to police officers quietly going on strike against policies they disagreed with. Now that police officers are actually doing their jobs again, shockingly, crime is rapidly falling.
What has actually increased is sensationalist coverage in the media, which you're right, has created a significant political backlash.
> In San Francisco specifically, crime also increased due to police officers quietly going on strike against policies they disagreed with
If I recall correctly it was the DA refusing to prosecute just about anything.
Far from it. On one occasion, when the DA in question went after a notorious fence (buyer for stolen goods), he had to rent a u-haul truck because the SFPD would not supply a vehicle to transport the arrestee.
https://missionlocal.org/2022/05/the-case-for-recalling-da-c...
You have to look past the hype. Media on a national scale ran a character assassination program against that DA for trying to rebalance his organization's efforts against the organizers of crime instead of individual delinquents.
This was the sensationalist media narrative, yes. Chesa got kicked out. Brooke Jenkins took over to much fanfare. Aaaand nothing material really changed, either with enforcement or with prosecution. The media stopped talking about it though.
SFPD hadn’t been doing their jobs for far, far longer than Chesa’s tenure. I moved here in 2013 and their non-enforcement practices were already legendary. Blaming Chesa for being in office for like 10 months in 2019-2020 is a hell of a cop out (pun intended).
Even if it were true, it wouldn’t in any way excuse the police for choosing not to do the job they’re paid to do.
I can’t speak credibly to San Francisco. But in New York there was a visible rise and drop in what I’ll call nuisance crime. Petty theft forcing the toothbrushes into cages, homeless people yelling in the middle of the night, subway jumpers, graffiti, et cetera.
The nypd is better funded than many state’s armed forces. Any funding changes would have been minimal and not caused that increase in crime.
The obvious cause of the increase was the pandemic job losses and general societal decay. Oh and the cops quiet quitting because they were upset people hate them.
> the cops quiet quitting
Why would it be better if they were overtly fired?
It would discourage LEOs from being useless. As it stands, many police departments are absolutely worthless, on purpose. They believe it's some sort of protest. The police got a few years of bad press and now, like children, they're playing the silent treatment.
When I drive I almost never see LEOs. I can go months on end without ever spotting a police car. Where are they? What are they doing? Evidently, they're not responding to crimes. And they're not on the roads. But their budget has increased quite a lot! Am I paying for people to sit on their asses and eat donuts? It kind of seems like it!
To me, it's very simple. If you want to avoid bad press you don't have to stop policing. You just have to stop executing innocent people in public. Seems easy, I do that every day and I don't even think about it.
It sort of gives me the impression the police are so morally bankrupt as a system that they just can't help themselves. So, they have to detach instead. Yikes... that's not good.
To second this: LAPD got fired from providing security for the LA Metro public transportation system, and crime rates fell through the floor in the three months since the LAPD officers were replaced with security guards.
It turns out that simply patrolling the stations was enough to deter almost all crimes in the system, which makes everyone immediately wonder: WTF was LAPD during the last few decades?
They wouldn't be wasting tax payer money doing nothing.
And do you think this was a result of a ~3% reduction in police officers, or could it have been something else?
> do you think this was a result of a ~3% reduction in police officers, or could it have been something else?
It was a combination of the weird post-Covid crime boom. And the various police reform efforts cities experimented with in the wake of George Floyd.
Be specific. Which police reforms resulted in an increase in nuisance crimes in NYC?
> nuisance crime ... homeless people yelling in the middle of the night
Is it a crime to be mentally ill in public in your world?
> Is it a crime to be mentally ill in public in your world?
Yes, yelling in a residential neighbourhood in the middle of the night is a disturbance of peace. The fact that it’s caused by unchecked mental health is somewhat separate. (In many cases, I don’t think it was a mental health issue. I think Rob on the corner got drunk.)
Not sure if "recall" was a pun or not... But the recall campaign for DA Boudin started a month after the 2020 election, so he was effectively DA for 10 months at that point, including during the heart of the pandemic. Interestingly, it was also right after he started trying to implement police accountability reforms in response to the Floyd backlash that year. He did de-prioritize drug prosecution right at the time of major fentanyl spikes in SF, so not a good look.
SF did not reduce police funding. They quiet quit anyway.
Quiet quitting does not make the position legally vacant, such that the employer knows they need to fill it. The employer has to notice that the employee is not performing, and then replace that employee. Those steps are often harder than you’d think.
"Defund the police" was never actually tried. (This is not a defense of defunding -- I agree it would have similarly bad outcomes! But you can't just point at changes that weren't defunding the police and say it was tried.)
> "Defund the police" was never actually tried
Isn’t this a No True Scotsmen problem?
Police budges were trimmed. Police forces were cut. Police remit, in the form of decriminalisation, was reduced. No jurisdiction abolished law enforcement (though San Francisco de facto got close). But I’d say those count as defunding the police to an extent.
Even then, we got disaster. Shockingly quickly. Shockingly powerfully. There is no threshold theory that suggests you get magical results cutting the police force by 30% instead of 3%; it’s thus reasonable to extrapolate and assume you get more of the bad.
> Isn’t this a No True Scotsmen problem?
No, this is a "this didn't actually happen."
> Police budges were trimmed. Police forces were cut.
Where were police budgets trimmed and forces cut? They weren't; that's the crucial thing you're describing that did not happen. Otherwise, I agree -- lots of reform changes that sounded good on paper led to bad outcomes. But there's no need to inaccurately call other reforms "defunding."
> Where were police budgets trimmed and forces cut?
NYPD’s budget was slashed by over 5% [1]. It was restored by ‘22.
[1] https://cbcny.org/research/was-nypd-budget-cut-1-billion
> No jurisdiction abolished law enforcement (though San Francisco de facto got close).
What year did that occur on their budget chart?
https://x.com/chrisarvinsf/status/1399863666938310663
De facto, not de jure. SFPD went AWOL for a few months. One can’t complain about that and then claim it would be better if they were fired.
(Also, your own chart shows a ‘20 dip.)
Crime did not rose, crime has been in a downward trajectory for decades, this is likely one of the reasons the crackdown on illegal immigrants is so bad, prison owners are noticing they might lose their cash cow and needs a new population to imprison.
Crime rose significantly in the US over ~2020-2022 or 2023. It was on a downward trend before 2020 and is on a downward trend since 2022/2023. But you can't ignore that period.
Did anything else happen around 2020 that might be a confounding variable?
(We see similar crime trends in other countries without BLM/George Floyd/police reform movements during that time period.)
It is almost as if something world shattering had happened in between those years.
I don't know what point you're trying to make. Yes, obviously it's covid-related. So what? It can't be ignored.
But you can largely ignore it. It was a relatively short term small blip in a decades long trend in the right direction, with a clearly rare and unusual cause.
Interesting to historians and public policy folks. Outside of that, the pearl clutching about it probably did more damage than the spike itself.
In addition to what JumpCrisscross said, illegal immigrants are not going to be long-term prison population; they're going to be deported. (At least, that's the campaign promise.) So I don't see how that benefits prison owners.
https://www.npr.org/2025/06/04/nx-s1-5417980/private-prisons...
> Nearly 90% of people in ICE custody are held in facilities run by for-profit, private companies. Two of the largest, Geo Group and CoreCivic, are working to increase their ability to meet the administration's demand.
CoreCivic used to be called the "Corrections Corporation of America". GEO Group used to be "Wackenhut Corrections Corporation".
It should be unsurprising that the folks who make money building and running large, secure facilities to detain people would be interested in doing the same for ICE.
Oh yeah, they benefit. What I’m calling nonsense is the idea that Geo Group is the reason Stephen Miller is in charge. There are more fundamental roots to the anti-immigrant agenda than a convenient corporate bogeyman.
I'm onboard with that.
I'd imagine they do their fair share of lobbying and "crime scary!" PR, though.
The administration is already talking about indentured labor and slavery, these will soon be work camps where the prison owners will rent the labor to farm and industries.
> Crime did not rose
Murders didn’t rise. Petty crime and open-air drug use absolutely did.
> prison owners are noticing they might lose their cash cow
This is nonsense.
Where was it tried? My understanding is that even Minneapolis didn't follow through with it.
> Where was it tried?
Chesa Boudin. New York with cashless bail and non-prosecution of petty crimes. That fuck in Chicago.
Defund the police was a marquee policy and messaging failure that underlined why radical minorities capturing the Democratic Party cause it to lose elections.
>>> be angry at those who didn't follow through with promises to severely reduce funding to their police departments in 2020
>>This was tried. It generated a generational backlash against the left as petty crime and visible homelessness rose.
>Chesa Boudin.
Chesa Boudin is not a police budget, that's a completely unserious nonsequitor. SF's police budget rose throughout the defund the police movement, just not as high as initially allocated. https://abc7news.com/post/sfpd-budget-defund-the-police-depa...
> New York with cashless bail and non-prosecution of petty crimes.
What does that have to do with "defund the police"? Bail money doesn't go into their pockets.
It was part of the police reform initiative. I supported it. But it massively increased the street population of recidivist bastards in a way I didn’t expect.
It was never about the recidivist bastards and always about the normal guy with a job he doesn't want to lose not losing that job when he can't come up with bail for a DUI. At least where I was it was considered kind of a given the recidivist bastards would get out on bail and that the bondsman getting paid really doesn't affect outcomes.
> It was never about the recidivist bastards and always about the normal guy with a job he doesn't want to lose not losing that job when he can't come up with bail for a DUI
And that’s why I supported it. But for every one of the latter there are many of the former because they started cycling through arrests so fast.
Keep the recidivist bastard in jail, on the other hand, and they are incapacitated for the time being. I’ll admit I didn’t see the utility of that until it was too late.
Bail bonds exist.
And yet, there are plenty of people who can't rustle up a couple hundred bucks for them, and wind up in jail for months/years awaiting trial.
Conflating "police reform" and "defund the police" is disingenuous.
> Conflating "police reform" and "defund the police" is disingenuous
In New York they were one and the same. The latter simply representing the most extreme expression of the former.
I remember dropping into a leftist conference in Philadelphia years ago where several folks who would become the face of post-Covid police reform were there, including Boudin. At the end of the day they all conceded that their goal was abolishing this, that and the other thing.
> In New York they were one and the same.
As a NY resident: lol.
I don't doubt you'll find activists espousing both "defund the police" and "end cash bail" policies at the same time. That doesn't make them the same policy.
> That doesn't make them the same policy
Oh, they’re totally different policies. But they’re basically the same politics. And they both generated a backlash, one against messaging (because it was too stupid to implement) and one against policy (because it created more visible crime).
A leftist conference? I don't think actual leftists have much say on policy.
Chicago did not defund its police department.
==That fuck in Chicago.==
Not sure what this is adding to the discussion, but eliminating cash bail has been a success in Illinois. That’s why you don’t hear the right talking about it anymore. Crime in Chicago has fallen every year since it went into effect.
https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/cash-bail-illinois-one-...
It was not tried, and saying that it was is a fundamentally false claim that is actively pushing public opposition to the idea supported by lies. It’s as reasonable as saying don’t vote for democrats because they have a pedophile office under a pizza store. Are there a bunch of people who were convinced by this lie? Yes. Does that make it anything other than a manipulative lie to say? No.
> It generated a generational backlash against the left as petty crime and visible homelessness rose
With "the left" you mean the SF DA?
No, the entire police reform agenda and I’d argue progressive wing of the Democratic Party as a whole. “Defund the police” was a monumental fuckup.
It was a branding fuckup more than a policy fuckup. The idea that we want types of response units other than armed gunmen available to respond to certain types of emergencies isn’t exactly radical.
We don’t send the police for medical emergencies or house fires. We send personnel with dedicated training for those types of events.
> It was a branding fuckup more than a policy fuckup.
And frankly, the folks who turned "liberal" into a dirty word can make any branding into a branding fuckup. That's what they have Fox News for.
Modern liberals made "liberal" a bad word.
Maybe... but something doesn't sit right with that assertion.
Anyone against concentration camps now gets the "liberal" slur thrown at them. Why is that?
As someone who grew up with a dad who listened to conservative talk radio, "liberal" has been used as an epithet for at least thirty years. I was genuinely stunned in high school when I met people who would willingly refer to themselves as liberals.
You'll have to pardon me for rolling my eyes at the notion that modern liberals have somehow made the term a bad word given the general path of conservatism over the last several decades, not to mention the last eight years specifically.
Yes but I don't think we can judge the progressive wing from the antagonistic media coverage and bilateral party disdain of them.
Like, more proactive work for less policing is not some sort of lunacy.
Making them sound naive is so easy. Especially if you choose the protagonists.
> don't think we can judge the progressive wing from the antagonistic media coverage and bilateral party disdain of them
No, we can judge by the actions and results. Police reform in New York was a failure. Education priorities in San Francisco were a failure. The entire activist-interest group orientation is broken.
> proactive work for less policing is not some sort of lunacy
It’s not. But the people who attempted it were lunatics.
Defunding the police is dumb. Rebuilding police departments from the ground up is not. Unfortunately the latter requires being realistic about the occurrence of crime and criminals in a population. (They’re not all victims of circumstance. And they can’t all be community organised into a sculpting job or whatever.)
In Los Angeles, crime on the Metro public transportation system has fallen by almost 70% in the three months since the LAPD was booted off the job and replaced by...security guards.
This is pretty good evidence that high crime rates in cities with large police forces are directly related to the police force not actually doing the job it's already being paid to do.
(LA Metro was forced to use LAPD for security a few decades ago, at which point crime rates went from very low to skyrocketing. LAPD serviced the Metro contract exclusively with officers that were in overtime hours (1.5x pay) so at best could only provide 2/3rd of the contracted manpower. That changed earlier this year; the contract was terminated for cause and LAPD was replaced with contract security guards. The contract security guards make substantially less than LAPD officers, so Metro is currently able to field a security presence about 5x the size as the LAPD force. Metro reported this that crime has fallen dramatically in just 2 months.)
For what it’s worth, I agree with you. We need different police. Not our existing police reformed. But also not no police.
There is a vocal minority of idiots who want no police. At all.
Don't speak bullshit. There was more media outrage hullabaloo around the idea of reducing cop funding than there was any actual reduction. Especially because the cops went on strike to ensure that no cuts would happen.
Police forces across the US have never seen higher funding rates.
These people were mostly defeated in elections and the ones promising to shovel even more money got elected, just look at Eric Adams in NYC.
I seriously hope what is happening right now finally radicalizes the rest of the population that law enforcement as it is right now does not work for the public interest.
I guess this depends on how one defines the public interest. Shielding data from federal authorities surely has both upsides and downsides.
They aren't even required to protect you according to the supreme court. The only point of cops is to protect private property, not people, and to harass people that conservatives don't like.
If you defund police, what do you think will be cut first? The control organs and oversight, or the thing they should oversee?
> If you defund police, what do you think will be cut first?
That's why you don't just go to the cops and say "find $1B in your budget to cut". You give specifics.
So you are saying that the police force is a extra-governmental organization that has full control over how they allocate funds?
All the more reason to reduce their funding!
Sounds like theft, fraud, and abuse to me! Where's the DOGE team digging into police and military budgets?
"Defund the police" was and remains wildly unpopular with almost everyone, especially minorities (as a reminder to any of those out touch reading this: there are large racial disparities in who is affected by crime, particularly violent crime) . It was quintessential "progressives are out of touch" ammunition, not only used by republicans (obviously), but also establishment democrats in competitive districts.
As another commenter posted, its about not allowing the creation of the data set in the first place.
We really need everyone in this country to go read "Nothing to Hide" by Daniel Solove, because thats how this crazy shit gets through in the first place: innocuous citizens go "Sure, I got nothing to hide"
To be fair, systems like Flocksafety really help departments being squeezed for funding. It's one of the ways the system is sold. It's an effective tool.
I worked for Flock. I was sold during the recruiting process on high ethics and morals and an idealistic vision.
The reality was a surveillance state, and questionable policies on data sharing between agencies, and private installations (HOA, etc.), and a CEO with a weirdly literal belief on how Flock should "eliminate all crime". Not "visionary", but far more literal. Way too Minority Report for my liking.
They have a public "disclosure" site that supposedly shows the agencies using Flock that is absolutely inaccurate (there are three agencies in my County alone using it that are not listed there).
This same argument is true for every bit of authority we give to law enforcement agencies (and really, the government in general). We expect they'll use those powers responsibly and within the limitations that we've ascribed, but it's always a risk that they're used irresponsibly and in situations we don't approve of.
Yes, this is an argument for not giving them more authority than necessary, but it's also an argument for holding them accountable when they do act out of bounds.
To this point, any law that gives power to government officials also needs to have explicit and painful consequences for abuse of those powers. Civilians who break the law face punishment and penalties, but government employees are almost never held to account. That needs to change.
There are mobile survalience cameras systems at my very family friendly park. Everyone has asked the city to tow them away but they refuse. There was no vote on this.
A tire and some gasoline seems to work for the Brits.
Spraypaint?
Yeah, this is for kids who can't go to prison :P
> These things will keep happening until it is no longer socially acceptable to advocate for the creation of data collection programs that are a necessary precondition.
One or two cops locked up for it can also work wonders. But somehow the western world has come to believe that lots of pretty laws with no consequences for transgressions is a wonderful thing. I think not.
If you are a district attorney in a city, you depend on the help and cooperation of the police in your daily work. If you became unpopular with the police they can make your work very difficult and you could also become politically very unpopular. I think district attorneys and police want to do what they think is right but its very understandable to me why a DA does not want to prosecute police.
This is evidenced in Oakland, where the recall campaign for Pamela Price began before she took office.
Click through to the law in question. It's the Civil Code not Criminal Code, and states, "an individual who has been harmed by a violation of this title, including, but not limited to, unauthorized access or use of ALPR information or a breach of security of an ALPR system, may bring a civil action in any court of competent jurisdiction against a person who knowingly caused the harm."
So you have to prove actual harm. You have to identify the individual person who caused the harm. You have to prove they knowingly caused the harm. You have to quantify the harm in monetary terms. Then you can sue them for actual damages + attorneys' fees.
Yes. So yet another pretty law with no consequences for transgressions.
The American judicial system is pure theater. You used to be able to appeal forever. Then the government decided that was too expensive, so they changed it to like 7 days. Then that was too extreme of a limit from 'forever' so they compromised on 14 days. Your right to appeal expires in 14 days in the US. Also during those 14 days you are most likely in a detention center, or being transferred across the nation to a prison, so good luck researching/writing an appeal in those 14 days.
*no consequences for transgressions by anyone in law enforcement. Qualified immunity has snowballed into some serious bullshit.
> somehow the western world
Excuse me. While a minority of rabid Anarchists might agree with you, the vast majority of people in Denmark happen to really like our police force.
This is largely an American problem. Don't blame it on "the western world".
I’m Swedish. We have plenty of toothless laws that no one follows. Plenty.
> If you're gonna be angry at someone be angry at the people among us were in favor of the creation of this data set because they foolishly thought it would be used to combat mundane property crime or because perhaps they thought that subjecting motorists to an increased dragnet would be a good thing
Nah, be mad at both the people who enabled the data collection and the agency that abused that data.
This should be grounds for laws that limit or eliminate the use of Flock Safety in the state, and laws that meaningfully punish agencies that use that data inappropriately as well as the individuals who authorized it.
> The law enforcement agencies which behaved the way law enforcement agencies always behave and did what anyone with even the slightest familiarity with how law enforcement acts thought they would do with the data. This outcome was 1000% predictable even if the details were not.
It was predictable that law enforcement agencies would... try to enforce the law?
In sharing the license plate data, how was the OPD enforcing the law? Which laws, exactly which laws, was the OPD enforcing?
The use was audited and is now being investigated. The claims were for various local and federal investigations. ICE also contains HSI, the second largest federal law enforcement agency, which prior to their recent mandate has been tasked to solve sex trafficking, import fraud etc. SF has multiple large inter-agency task forces that run multi-year long investigations into all types of crimes. HSI is part of those investigations. Querying flock to establish a suspect’s presence during the commission of a crime seems like it’s within the bounds of reasonable use.
Querying which flock to establish which suspect’s presence during the commission of which crime seems like it’s within the bounds of what reasonable use? I think you've replaced the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave with Round up the usual suspects.
> In sharing the license plate data, how was the OPD enforcing the law?
... the immigration laws? Folks should read the immigration laws. They're actually quite draconian against not only illegal immigration, but anyone who aids and abets illegal immigration. We've just had decades of non-enforcement.
No, the immigration laws are not draconian. They have guidelines around reunification of families, etc. The Reagan era Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 even legalized most illegals from before 1982. That wasn't draconian either. You should read these laws.
Trumpian enforcement? Now that's draconian. It's also economically stupid. And I'm sure you understand the concept of clean hands. So further discussion of Melania and Rosie O'Donnell's citizenship will be unnecessary.
But then this all is just red meat tossed to consumers of red meat. So there's that.
> No, the immigration laws are not draconian. They have guidelines around reunification of families, etc. The Reagan era Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 even legalized most illegals from before 1982.
They really are. For example, there's expensive crimes relating to "encouraging/inducing" illegal immigration that could put a lot of people in prison if they were aggressively enforced: https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual... ("Encouraging/Inducing -- Subsection 1324(a)(1)(A)(iv) makes it an offense for any person who -- encourages or induces an alien to come to, enter, or reside in the United States, knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that such coming to, entry, or residence is or will be in violation of law.")
Similarly, criminal penalties for knowingly continuing to employ an alien one knows is unauthorized: https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual... ("Subsection 1324a(2) makes it unlawful for any person or entity, after hiring an alien for employment, to continue to employ the alien in the United States knowing the alien is or has become an unauthorized alien with respect to such employment.").
> The Reagan era Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 even legalized most illegals from before 1982.
That one-time amnesty was a compromise in return for aggressive enforcement going forward. The pro-immigration folks reneged on that compromise, so now it's mass deportations.
> But then this all is just red meat tossed to consumers of red meat. So there's that.
No, it's vindicating a fundamental collective right to decide who gets to be in this country and who doesn't. It's an effort to undo the effects of decades of broken promises around immigration enforcement: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi...
‘Collective rights’ aren’t in the Constitution. You may wish to read that as well. But I do recognize your sentiment as echoing Trump’s I am your retribution rhetoric. Otherwise, I’m done here.
That's fine, because the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution are reserved to the people.
You are alluding to the Constitutionally inert 10th Amendment.
> It was predictable that law enforcement agencies would... try to enforce the law?
By breaking a different one?
I mean, yeah, it's predictable. But it's not great.
If you think that's bad, you should dig into state agency violations of PRWORA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Responsibility_and_Wo.... Lot's of illegal conduct going on in blue states.
What, this?
https://www.feldesman.com/hhs-announces-major-changes-to-its...
> HHS rescinded its 1998 interpretation of the term (63 FR 41658) and expanded the agency’s interpretation of “Federal public benefit” to include programs, including Head Start and numerous community health-related programs.
Yeah, I'm not inclined to view clear and open violations of a law the same as "the Feds said it was fine for 27 years, including Trump's first term".
You'll need stronger whataboutism than that.
There's lots of programs being funded that aren't covered by that HHS guidance.
Then why don't you highlight a specific case we can talk about, rather than darkly but vaguely hinting?
Rayiner, you are supposedly adept with constitutional law.
The state is not allowed to pursue every physically possible means of achieving their justice aims. They are not allowed to overstep their authority period. When they do overstep their authority, it often harms the State's case against the accused, entirely to make it less desirable for a cop to overstep their authority and protect our rights as people in these lands.
For example, a cop cannot just steal a 3rd party's database to get the evidence they are after. They must either get a warrant or consent from that 3d party, following specific and WELL UNDERSTOOD rules.
You cannot possibly pretend to not know this, so why are you being so disingenuous in your argument?
> For example, a cop cannot just steal a 3rd party's database to get the evidence they are after.
Except we're talking about the state's own license plate data, not stealing someone else's data. Since it is California's data, California can complain that Oakland police shared it impermissibly. (Good luck with that!) But that doesn't create a constitutional issue.
>If you're gonna be angry at someone be angry at the people among us were in favor of the creation of this data set
Perhaps I am gifted, but I contain enough anger within for both guilty parties. However, the bulk of is aimed at the police who unambiguously broke the law and will face no consequences for doing so.
A lot of people raised similar objections to dna databases, and later when those same databases was used by law enforcement. It did not take very long until law makers and law enforcement made i praxis that such data bases are up to grab for trawling through. Any objection is meet with the handful of cold cases that was closed because that trawling of data.
Sadly I dont see a realistic stop to the databases. If there are none, law makers will just dictate the creation of it. If there is one, they will argue terrorism or cold cases to start the process of getting access. If car manufacturers get gps logs, those will sooner or later end up being available to law enforcement. They currently have access to every call, when where and to whom. Every internet use. Every movement mobile phones does. Every payment through a credit card, where and to whom. Mass transports get more and more into personal tickets, and those get logged.
I hope we will see unreasonable searches to be expanded/enforcement against trawling of data, but i dont have any hope left to the idea that databases wont be created. Not even gdpr in eu stops law makers from dictating that databases must be created, or stopping law makers from trawling it.
Yeah, I think both things can be true: one is that it is absolutely utterly unacceptable to be in the year 2025 advocating for new data collection programs in the name of "fighting crime" - it should be absolutely abundantly clear to even the most naive of us now that A) the cops have absolutely zero interest in pursuing the kinds of crime we're actually interested in - the closure rate on shoplifting, car and package theft, and other property crime is basically zero, and that's not because the cops don't have enough resources, and B) any of these systems will be abused immediately to target whoever it is the feds have decided are the bad guy this week, be it palestine protestors, trans people, immigrants, ex-girlfriends, or whoever else we've decided is outside the circle of protection today.
At the same time, it's also absolutely goddamn unnacceptable that we've come to just accept that our LEOs are just going to act like unaccountable criminal gangs, and that that mentality has crept so far into the police forces that a thin blue line punisher sticker is an acceptable bit of kit for a cruiser. There are systems that are intended to hold these groups accountable, and we need to keep pressing until they do, because throwing up our hands and just saying "Boys will be boys" ain't cutting it.
> LEOs are just going to act like unaccountable criminal gangs, and that that mentality has crept so far into the police forces that a thin blue line punisher sticker is an acceptable bit of kit for a cruiser.
Well, they are unaccountable state-sanctioned gangs.
They can legally steal (forfeiture).
They can 'smell something' and legally trespass.
They can shoot and kill you for basically any reason. But they can fall back and say 'I thought they were reaching for a weapon'.
SCOTUS, even with more liberal justices, have repeatedly said they are shielded from 'official capacities', and that they have absolutely no requirement of protecting and serving.
And some of them have actual, non state-sanctioned gangs in their midst.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LASD_deputy_gangs
https://knock-la.com/tradition-of-violence-lasd-gang-history...
> it is absolutely utterly unacceptable to be in the year 2025 advocating for new data collection programs in the name of "fighting crime"
I’m genuinely curious for data on whether these data have been helpful with property crime in San Francisco and Oakland.
You think the police have adequate resources to solve package theft? I’m sorry, what? That’s ridiculous. Here’s the 2023 stats for SF:
Porch thefts: 25,000 Cops: 2000
Obviously not all of those cops are on duty simultaneously, let’s assume they do a 12 hour shift every single day: they would have 25 porch thefts each to solve!
This isn’t a US centric phenomenon either: 70,000 cell phones were stolen in London last year.
Surely you don't think all 25k porch thefts are performed by 25k individual people?
I’m sure they’re not but we’re talking about the statistic for unsolved crimes not uncaught criminals.
The point is you don't have to catch 25k people nor solve 25k individual crimes one by one.
You have to catch the much smaller number of people who are committing 25k crimes. One porch pirate will steal lots of packages.
I think the frog and the scorpion were both wrong
> If you're gonna be angry at someone be angry at the people among us were in favor of the creation of this data set
I think it's okay to be angry at public servants for "following orders" too.
We didn't let the Nazis get away with that bullshit for a good reason.
if you read the article, this didn't happen.
Nah, I think as a society we should be able to set up speed cameras to crack down on speeding, without worrying about how it could be misused maliciously against law abiding motorists. Get angry at the people doing bad things. Otherwise we shouldn't build anything that could potentially be misused.
> be angry at [...] the people among us [who] foolishly thought it [...] would be a good thing for alternative transportation
Yikes. That is one tortuous sentence you needed to construct just to blame this on leftists. I applaud your wordcraft. But no, that's ridiculous. Urban transit hippies are very much not to blame for ICE overreach. Just for the record.
Can't they sue the bejeesus out of them?
I heard CA built up a large amount of money anticipating a lot of litigation against Trump 2.0.
The opposite of this.
Do be angry at the people misusing the systems. Don't be angry at the people building them for good.
If someone points out that the system you're building can be abused, and you don't stop and come up with a solid plan to prevent abuse then you're just building the system for abuse.
It's practically impossible to build a system that "can't be abused". If you set the bar there, then you can block any policy forever by simply enumerating increasingly unlikely ways for it to be abused. It's like a child's version of politics.
I could go into my car right now and plow through a bunch of people. I'm still allowed to own a car. We've made the actual harmful act illegal, not the thing that theoretically made it possible.
At the same time, we do not allow people to have nuclear bombs.
As everything in life, it's a trade-off, but a good trade-off can only be found if people are fully aware of the consequences. It seems to me, people regularly underestimate the negative consequences of data collection (or realize that these consequences will not affect them, but others).
> It's practically impossible to build a system that "can't be abused"
For ALPRs? I’d make queries public with a short delay, including with a unique identifier for the cop initiating the query. Data automatically deleted within an interval.
And then you feel comfortable guaranteeing that it could never be abused?
The issue is being brought up by the state auditor. This article is literally what would happen anyway if your pet policy was enacted. The police would ignore your little policy, and the standard would have to write an article about the abuse. Hopefully that article would drive public opinion enough for change to happen.
This is the system working.
> police would ignore your little policy
Sorry, I meant to make it technically impossible to query the data without producing a public log.
thats how it is now though ?
One, an officer could put fuck you in that field and execute the search.
Two, those queries aren’t automatically public.
> an officer could put fuck you in that field and execute the search.
then what is the proof for the title of this post
> Oakland cops gave ICE license plate data; SFPD also illegally shared with feds
Well they didn't. The reason we just read the article we read was because they looked in the logs, and the logs included well written reasons that were illegal. So they wrote an article.
How does stopping them from writing "fuck you" in the field (which they provably didn't, considering they found the queries), or giving you access to it, help in any way in this situation? You're going to have to make an argument here for it to make any sense.
> I’d make queries public with a short delay…
Won't that likely victimize people who are presumed innocent of crimes until convicted?
> Won't that likely victimize people who are presumed innocent of crimes until convicted?
Don’t see why. My plate could be scanned because I’m a criminal, or because I’m a witness or a victim.
It could. The content of the query may heavily imply one or the other.
Yes just explain that in the court of public opinion. I’m sure nobody will jump to conclusions.
There is zero "solid plan" you can produce that prevents a popular thing in a democratic country from happening. Like, sure, there are supposed to be some amount of base rules to prevent you from gulaging people as soon as you get a 51% vote share, but if you have enough popularity for long enough, as designed, you can change those rules and eventually do whatever you want.
You can bet the shit the Nazis did wasn't "allowed" by the Weimar Republic's constitution, but that didn't matter one bit as soon as the brownshirts murdered enough people. Hitler wasn't even that popular at any point. The holocaust didn't happen because Germany didn't have enough "don't do holocausts" rules, it happened because millions of Germans just let it, because they didn't want to die under a brownshirt's boot.
Meanwhile we've had tens of examples of full blown genocides that did not use any database at all. It has never seemed to actually stop a genocide.
The answer, as always, is that it takes hard work to defend your rights, and you can never ignore your government, and you should stop trying to ignore your government. You cannot "defang" a government. If enough people are working to build an authoritarian shithole state, they will get it, and no paper will stop them, because "having enough people who want something" is literally what a government is.
We have thousands and thousands of years of history showing that if you want rights you have to fight for them.
>If someone points out that the system you're building can be abused
Any system of authority can be abused. No paper can fix that. The only thing that can fix that is a popular, credible threat to the people trying to abuse it.
If you build the system in a way that enables such highly predictable misuse, you do get to share part of the blame.
This isn’t even misuse. Sharing with other agencies is an intended feature.
Edit for clarity this is not a misuse of Flock.
It's misuse.
https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/2023-dle-06.pdf
> Importantly, the definition of “public agency” is limited to state or local agencies, including law enforcement agencies, and does not include out-of-state or federal law enforcement agencies. (See Civ. Information Bulletin 2023-DLE-06 California Automated License Plate Reader Data Guidance Page 3 Code, § 1798.90.5, subd. (f).) Accordingly, SB 34 does not permit California LEAs to share ALPR information with private entities or out-of-state or federal agencies, including out-of-state and federal law enforcement agencies. This prohibition applies to ALPR database(s) that LEAs access through private or public vendors who maintain ALPR information collected from multiple databases and/or public agencies.
OPD or other California state agencies may have broken the law but Flock is working exactly as intended.
Not when states pass laws explicitly prohibiting such sharing.
My statement is about Flock, not California law.
What, it's in the title. This is illegal. It was first brought up by an oversight agency of the state.
The article clarifies that OPD didn’t directly give feds the data. It was laundered through other state agencies using Flock.
> Don't be angry at the people building them for good.
I am angry because the same people who've argued for years against the kinds of education systems that teach actual social systemic thinking and who've called me naive and cynical for suggesting their pretty toy is going to get people killed are now throwing up their hands and saying "how could we have known?"
Because we fucking told you, that's how.
The same people? Really? Who?
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Nope. If you're one of them, as a practitioner you should damn well be able to reasonably foresee the pathological use case. Hell, I only cut myself minimal slack for having grown up believing constant exhortations by Oldtimers that "Kid, no one in their right mind would do that," only to see my peer group replacing them do exactly what the Oldtimers were insistent that common sense dictated wouldn't be done.
It is on us to be realistic about how the systems we create will actually be used. I think we lost sight of that in the last couple decades, or figured it wasn't our problem. And the chickens have come home to roost.
But, but, but, "I have nothing to hide.........."
That's right - no one should be angry at the people building and filling up concentration camps, and certainly not at their supporters and cheerleaders. It's all those dogooders collecting data that are the real culprits.
The post you're responding to isn't arguing shifting blame. They're arguing that instrumental actions should be included. If you think expanding the scope of accountability dilutes the pool, that's another argument. But at least have good faith. They're not your enemy.
Drawing this line gets tough.
If I build a sidewalk curb, there's a perfectly legitimate use case for it. It can also be used to curb-stomp someone to death.
Can't we build the curb and forbid curb-stomping at the same time? Shouldn't that be our right?
If you build a curb for someone that is well-known for curb stomping people to death and has a bunch of people behind them saying how great curb stomping is, that's on you.
Maybe! But maybe that area still really does need a curb, and it's the curb-stomping people we need to worry about more than the curb?
The sharing of the database in clear contravention of the law is a symptom of the widespread police culture of immunity from civil oversight in the United States. They do it because they get away with it.
I in no way meant to imply the curb-stompers were in the right, only that building a curb for them when you know very well what it'll be used for makes you culpable as well.
Especially when folks were saying, "If you build this curb, the curb-stompers are going to use it for curb stomping."
Flock didn’t build a sidewalk. Flock built the stomp-o-tron 9000 with convenient victim loading ramp and mechanical leg.
Flock built a surveillance data repository with convenient sharing mechanisms. Someone then used those mechanisms as designed for their intended purpose.
Sure. But California forsaw that, and passed a law to prevent that use case.
The cops - public servants, in theory - then blatantly violated that law.
Did they? The cops shared with other state agencies who then shared with the feds. From what I understand of the situation the cops didn’t break the law, which is the problem.
Per the article, yes:
> Twice, however, OPD staffers searched their system explicitly on behalf of the FBI.
And "other California police departments" are California cops subject to SB34, too.
> Rather, other California police departments searched Oakland’s system on behalf of federal counterparts more than 200 times — providing reasons such as “FBI investigation” for the searches — which appears to mirror a strategy first reported by 404 Media, in which federal agencies that don’t have contracts with Flock turn to local police for backdoor access.
> If you're gonna be angry at someone be angry at the people among us were in favor of the creation of this data set
You're right, they're not shifting blame, they're straight up telling you who is to blame. And apparently, it is not the people who came up with this idea, nor the people carrying out the actions, nor the people supporting them.
These two things are one in the same. Every data broker knows exactly who their ultimate clients are. That's why Palantir never broke a sweat losing bazillions of dollars for years and years and years. Their final goal is to be essentially an indispensable arm of the police surveillance state.
This is an insane take, and I refuse to be gaslit into believing we can't do anything about crime because "well the cops will misuse it". I live in Oakland where the streets are a killing field with zero accountability being the default result.
I could pour BILLIONS into social programs and we'll still have sociopaths ghost riding or sitting on their phones doing 45 in a 30 zone. The cops have been useless from the get-go.
These cameras have been the last line of defense. The solution is obviously to take the cameras out of the hands of the cops and put them behind elected judges.
I was going to call you out for hyperbole, especially since the (AI) search overview had pedestrian deaths for 2025 at only 4, but previous years at around 10-15, which is pretty bad.
https://www.oaklandca.gov/Public-Safety-Streets/Traffic-Safe...
The numbers would be much higher if the city had any foot traffic [1]. It's dead, small businesses are dead, it's just not safe to walk around too much, everyone keeps it to a minimum and drives between parking lots in 5000lb tanks.
[1]: https://www.unacast.com/foot-traffic-data/oakland
I live in Oakland too, and I hate hate hate that we're enabling masked, unnamed government enforcers to kidnap people off the streets and potentially deport them without even verifying they are who they are thought to be.
I also know that we cannot afford to keep letting criminals run this town and destroy public property and kill people on the roads and get away with it
"and I hate hate hate that we're enabling masked, unnamed government"
Sidenote: As per the article, this is already illegal and was a mis-step on the part of SFPD and CHP searching OPD's database (OPD didn't give ICE anything). It sounds like whoever did it will be prosecuted.
I live in Oakland too, and was taken aback at first by calling it a killing field... until I actually admitted to myself that my greatest safety fear here is getting wiped out on foot or bike by some of the most atrocious drivers in the entire bay area with near-zero traffic enforcement.
Voters will nearly always fall for "Think of the children!" Trying to point out how bad of an argument that is has only earned me screaming arguments from my wife. Some people do not prioritize liberty, and so, get less as result of their choices.
Sending people back to their home country, especially when 50% are criminals, is not the same as the holocaust. Comparing it to such is disgusting and insulting to the actual victims of Nazi violence.
ICE is often operating in a racist and dehumanizing way, but it is nowhere near the level of organized atrocity that it is regularly compared to.
I agree that it this comparison is overblown, and do not believe in general that this kind of overstatements do any good to the cause of those who make them.
There is something in common though: that very dangerous belief that lying and ignoring the law is justified by the end goal. Speaking of lies, where did you get this statistics that 50% of expulsed immigrants are criminals? Even their own statistics (https://www.ice.gov/statistics) show that a small minority have ever been convicted (and I would assume that most of those convictions would not be very serious crimes)
50% are criminals? Do you have a source for that?
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No; many immigration violations are civil infractions, not criminal ones.
Do you consider parking offenders and jaywalkers to be criminals?
afaik they are not accused of parking or jaywalking, but if you're suggesting that's also on their records, can't say I'm surprised, once a scofflaw, always a scofflaw
cf. https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/criminal-defense/is-illeg...
You're incorrect. A civil infraction is not the same as a criminal offense.
The Nazis actually openly considered deportation before settling on the Final Solution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_Plan
The Holocaust involved quite a bit of large-scale deportation to concentration camps.
https://www.theholocaustexplained.org/how-and-why/how/deport...
> In the autumn of 1941, approximately 338,000 Jews remained in Greater Germany. Until this point, Hitler had been reluctant to deport Jews in the German Reich until the war was over because of a fear of resistance and retaliation from the German population. But, in the autumn of 1941, key Nazi figures contributed to mounting pressure on Hitler to deport the German Jews. This pressure culminated in Hitler ordering the deportation of all Jews still in the Greater German Reich and Protectorate between 15-17 September 1941.
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Subsistence farming isn't a great life.
That’s not my point. My point is we have no leverage.
A populace with deep and wide skills can be a collective action threat.
A bunch of dead eyed screen addicts are just Wall-E background characters.
We’ll end up manual workers for the rich through state violence (happening right now to Latinos to free up jobs). Because we can’t threaten to walk away and undermine wall streets grip on agency.
Flock is absolutely designed to facilitate and encourage this kind of abuse. They have extensive data sharing built in to their system while promising agencies that the users "own" the data.
My local police department just recently got a grant for these and is in the process of setting them up, and I'm working with a number of local technologists and activists to shut it down. We are showing up at every police commission meeting and every city council meeting and keeping actively engaged with local press. I spent almost three hours yesterday having coffee with a police commissioner and I have meeting requests from a number of other local officials. There are similar efforts ongoing in other cities across the U.S.
An interesting one to keep an eye on is Cedar Rapids, which includes a neat teardown of one of the devices: https://eyesoffcr.org/blog/blog-8.html
Immediately after setting up the system -- before all of the devices were even fully online -- our local PD began sharing access with departments in non-sanctuary states. When we asked questions about it, they hid that section from their transparency page. We are cooking them publicly for that.
Flock is VC-funded commercialized mass surveillance.
Chiming in to add crowd-sourced flock camera locations: https://deflock.me/
I live in Oakland and this is a difficult topic.
The type of crime common here is nearly impossible to address without technological assistance. People steal cars, drive into neighborhoods, then break into other cars and houses. They're gone sometimes before a 911 call can even be made, and far before the police arrive. The criminals know this and are just incredibly brazen about it. They'll finish the job with people watching and recording because they know there's no way for them to be caught. People get followed home and held up in their driveway. The criminals are often armed, and people have been shot and killed for even the mildest of resistance. One guy was killed a block from where I was standing for knocking on the window of a getaway car of some guys stealing another car in broad daylight.
Leaving aside broader and more fundamental fixes for crime, which are much longer term projects, the only near-term thing that actually reduces this kind of crime is arrest and conviction rates. In SF, drones have helped reduced car break-ins, because they've actually caught some crews. Oakland doesn't have drones that I know of, but Flock cameras have enabled enough tracking for police to sometimes actually find these people quickly, even several miles away, and make an arrest.
Those are just the plain facts of the situation. It's understandable that people want some kind of solution here. Without at least starting from that understanding, it'll be very difficult to convince people that a solution that is having a positive impact already is not worth the other costs and risks.
And to me, this is the core conflict at a really high level: the economic and societal fixes for crime are usually opposed by the same people who abuse these kind of surveillance systems for authoritarian purposes. To me it's no coincidence that their preferred solution to crime just happens to help them keep an eye on the whole population.
There's a hugely material difference between deterring local property crime and handing ICE this information.
ICE is deporting people to death camps (e.g. CECOT), not giving people due process, operating masked and with military support. ICE is a gestapo in all but name.
By all means, find ways to get your community police departments to address crime in your communities. Work with systems outside of police to fix the systemic root causes (crime doesn't "just happen", it's a symptom of other problems). But you don't need the secret police to fix car jackings and break-ins.
ICE is running death camps? Let me guess, the showers are totally secret gas chambers and ICE is collecting shoes in heaps for unclear purposes too.
Sorry to hear this type of law-enforcement will have consequences for congressional redistricting that don’t suit you. You can always try a little chamomile tea.
They didn't say ICE was running death camps, please put on your glasses. They said CECOT is essentially a death camp - which is true.
It's a prison that we have no information on in a totalitarian country. We do know they routinely torture their prisoners. I would think Americans, of all people, would take issue with this.
Evidently, the fascists to be in the US are becoming far too brazen.
>They said CECOT is essentially a death camp - which is true.
Because people are held there for life, or that the death rates there are high?
If you would just extend your quote, like, a couple more sentences, you would see why I said it's a death camp.
That's a neat trick though, including a quote of just a tiny part to give the impression I'm talking out of my ass. Doesn't really work however, because I actually have eyeballs and I think most people here do.
We can just... you know... look, like, 2 inches up.
If you're talking about
>It's a prison that we have no information on in a totalitarian country. We do know they routinely torture their prisoners. I would think Americans, of all people, would take issue with this.
I agree that americans should take issue with this, but as bad as totalitarianism and torture is, those do not make a death camp. By the same token, for all the human right abuses committed in Guantanamo Bay, it's not a death camp. Yes, totalitarian torture camps are bad, and so are death camps, but they're separate things and we shouldn't be in the habit of equating bad-but-not-death camps to Auschwitz just to score some rhetorical points.
"They only brought a meal once a day and it had maggots. They never take off the lights for 24 hours. The mosquitoes are as big as elephants," La Figura said.
"They're not respecting our human rights," one man said during the same call. "We're human beings; we're not dogs. We're like rats in an experiment."
"I'm on the edge of losing my mind. I've gone three days without taking my medicine," he said. "It's impossible to sleep with this white light that's on all day."
He also claimed his Bible was confiscated.
"They took the Bible I had and they said here there is no right to religion. And my Bible is the one thing that keeps my faith, and now I'm losing my faith," he said.
https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/alligator-alcatraz-detain...
inhumane conditions =/= "death camps". There probably is a point where conditions are inhumane enough to cause deaths (think starvation), that it can be called a "death camp" but so far as I can tell from the wikipedia article it's nowhere near that. The article doesn't even mention how many people died there. However, it does mention a poorly supported theory on reddit/X that there's satellite images of body mounds that were subsequently hidden, so that might be what people were thinking of?
My comment shouldn't be read in any way as supporting ICE or giving ICE this information. Doing so is clearly illegal under California law, and what ICE is doing right now is terrible.
But the prevailing sentiment in these comments is the the cameras shouldn't exist at all, not just that the data shouldn't be shared with ICE. My comment is about how useful the cameras are today. If you want them to not exist you need to understand why they do and probably offer up an alternate solution to the very real problems they address.
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Anyone, citizen or non-citizen, illegaly here or legally here, can now be kidnapped off the street, stuffed in an unmarked van by masked men not identifying themselves as police, and sent to a foreign prison, without any due process. This is a little bit beyond merely “deporting illegals.”
> ICE is deporting illegals. How is that equivalent to the Gestapo?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Laws
"The two laws were the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, which forbade marriages and extramarital intercourse between Jews and Germans and the employment of German females under 45 in Jewish households; and the Reich Citizenship Law, which declared that only those of German or related blood were eligible to be Reich citizens."
The Holocaust was, broadly speaking, legal under German law at the time. The Gestapo were frequently enforcing laws with their actions. Eventually, Jews were deported to concentration camps; they were made "illegal".
"Legal" and "moral" are sometimes related, but not always. The Gestapo didn't start with the killings.
ICE deports US citizens. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/ice-deported-3-childre...
They're like the gestapo because they act in secret and hide their identities. They arrest dissidents because they say things the administration doesn't like. See Mahmoud Khalil. They're like the gestapo because hateful people get to just make people "illegal" at their own discretion. Half a million Haitians fleeing violence were here under temporary protected status, the executive branch is choosing to make them "illegal" and lying that Haiti is safe now. Half a million people were legal. Now they're "illegal". https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/27/haiti-temporar...
They do not follow due process which is guaranteed by the constitution to all persons in the US (not just citizens).
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2025/jul/13/rosie-odonne... Trump wants to make Rosie O'Donnell "illegal". What are your thoughts on this?
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True. You bring up another data point of similarity between ICE and Gestapo: they are/were both legal.
My issue isn't with just the legality, but with morality.
Similarly, the Holocaust was legal under German law, because the Führer willed it so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%BChrerprinzip
Thus illustrating the potential gap between legal and moral.
The Führerprinzip mentioned here, by the way, is basically the same argument the conservative supreme court is making right now.
They call it Unitary executive theory in the States, but same idea.
You're correct, fascists will always make morally deplorable acts they wish to enforce with an iron fist legal. Thank you for pointing that out.
Right it's just morally repugnant but it's legal so who cares.
"illegal" is not a noun and the use of it as such dehumanizes people for terrible reasons.
Merriam-Webster says otherwise.
This is hardly a philosophical debate. Oakland is a mess. The previous police chief was fired, and the person that fired him, the mayor, was recalled by voters. And the DA in 2023-2024 was recalled by voters.
The governor warned Oakland in the past to reverse its policy on not engaging in police pursuits. Not surprisingly, the new police chief is proposing changing that policy.
https://oaklandside.org/2025/05/23/oakland-police-pursuit-po...
[YC S17]
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety
Between this and the abortion story [1] (CEO deflected blame and took zero ownership [2]), it looks like Flock leans into enabling this sort of lawlessness. They should be torn out of our cities.
Do we have a list of their clients?
EDIT: Apparently my town installed them in 2023 [3]. Inciting a couple council members over for dinner this week.
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/05/she-got-abortion-so-te...
[2] https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/statement-network-sharing-u...
[3] https://atlasofsurveillance.org/search?vendor=Flock+Safety
What a ridiculous response. Just say "Flock cameras are designed for law enforcement to use however they see fit, even if it's to chase down abortion-getters, even if it's to kidnap people off the street into unmarked vans"
Another example for the whiteboard of "why 'invest in founders not ideas' doesn't work" I suppose.
The more I look back on it, working for a YC-funded company will forever remain the black eye of my resume. I don't feel even a lick of pride "solving" the "problems" that YC perceives to be important. The greatest minds of my generation are looking at China and envying the confidence of their state.
"The first public safety operating system that eliminates crime."
I've heard of "startup founder hubris" before but this is a new level.
> Our flock of hard-working employees thrive in a positive and inclusive environment
I'm honestly surprised they weren't too woke for them.
Occasional reminder that YC application required applicants to give an eample of how they cheated a system for personal gain. YC prefers "naughty" founders over honest ones.
I was curious about this and found the precise wording of the question:
> Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage.
That's way too broad to support the previous comment's claim, and seems to be looking for examples of ingenuity. Modifying your dishwasher to use less water would fit that prompt.
YC prefers potential profit over anything else it seems, otherwise I can't imagine how this would have gone through.
Because VCs are psychopaths by most measures? I mean just look at Andreesen, or Thiel, or any of the ghouls creating a fascist state.
What YC is (actually) asking: For example, When was a time you went the extra mile to get a job interviewers attention
What HN thinks YC I asking: "how they cheated a system for personal gain"
lol.
Source: Me, I got into YC by answering the question that way.
Are you suggesting that YC applications contain trick questions? Or that the questions are intentionally drafted in a confusing and/or misleading way? That seems kind of weird.
No, just that the questions are obvious to most of us except maybe the most cynical (like OP)
Just so everyone remembers: automated collection is an unlawful search by the constitution. Stop advocating for a police state and expecting something different. (Mandatory registration of objects, mandatory medical procedures, mandatory facial accessories, mandatory automatic government payments to fund all of this)
> The OPD didn’t share information directly with the federal agencies. Rather, other California police departments searched Oakland’s system on behalf of federal counterparts more than 200 times — providing reasons such as “FBI investigation” for the searches
Does this mean it wasn't exactly to Oakland Police that violated state law, but rather other CA based law enforcement entities?
One question is whether OPD violated state law by leaving their data open for anyone to search.
When they signed up to these systems, did they know that federal agencies could search their data without OPD needing to do anything?
it's also possible the other agencies only shared findings rather than specific records.
For example if the law says "plate reader records cannot be shared" and the CHP just confirms the presence of the records , and does not share the records, no violation occurred.
You did a good job reading the article from bottom to top. The headline and lead are usually misleading.
"The OPD (Oakland PD) didn’t share information directly with the federal agencies. Rather, other California police departments searched Oakland’s system on behalf of federal counterparts more than 200 times —
So the headline is misleading. It seems like oakland made their records available to state agencies like CHP, and one of those agencies queried the records and shared the query results with federal agencies.
And the article doesn't specify which results were shared.
So it's clear Oakland didn't violate the law, and there is reasonable doubt that the other agencies didn't violate the law either.
Judgements come from judges, not journalists.
"I posted the answer key openly in the hallway, how could I possibly know people would use this to cheat on their homework!"
They are aware this is happening and are taking no action. They are as culpable as the other agencies.
That’s not what is happening here. They shared the records with state agencies legally. And the other agencies may have shared permissible results legally too
> "If these allegations are confirmed, there will be consequences."
Sure.
Cops do the thing they always wanted to do as soon as leadership vaguely hints that they won't be punished for it, what a surprise.
There’s a lot of casual corruption here. Local cops get deputized as marshalls and get overtime, etc.
US seems like a free for all with sensitive data lately
Free for the rich and for government agencies.
It is. Some of it is being accessed illegally (ICE has been given full access to the IRS, which is a violation of the fifth amendment, local LE sharing it in contravention with state laws), and some of it is being accessed legally (local LE sharing it in compliance with state laws).
The criminals are, sadly, running the circus, and they are acting like they'll never lose power.
At this point they're unlikely to lose power unless there's a military coup dismantling the entire extreme right.
Lately?
The only implication that your information was ever safe in America was marketing. Programmers should have been able to read the privacy-destroying tea leaves a decade ago.
ALPR (automated license plate readers) are used across state lines to pull out drug mules and other stuff. Many local law enforcement employees are federal task forces involving drugs/guns/cartels/violence. Obviously, Feds have hands on these databases.
The supremacy clause of the constitution asserts that federal law takes precedence over state laws. There are thousands of state laws on the books that are basically rendered null, because a federal law overrides it. One clear example is segregation laws like interracial marriage which was on the books in some states decades after the civil rights movement.
Example: Alabama was the last state to remove its ban on interracial marriage from its statutes in 2000, though this was largely symbolic as interracial marriage was legalized nationwide by the Supreme Court's ruling in Loving v. Virginia in 1967.
There is probably a specific federal law enforcement authority that may or may not be in conflict with the state law. It's unclear if this is a 10th amendment violation for the state or if federal law enforcement is granted this authority
Federal Law takes precedence over State, but the anti-commandeering doctrine prevents the federal government from directly compelling states to implement or enforce federal law. So local law enforcement is under no obligation to pass information to ICE or assist ICE. It has been ruled on time and time again, from 1842 when Justice Joseph Story affirmed it [1] to Justice Samuel Alito in 2018 [2].
[1] “The clause relating to fugitive slaves is found in the national Constitution, and not in that of any State. It might well be deemed an unconstitutional exercise of the power of interpretation to insist that the States are bound to provide means to carry into effect the duties of the National Government nowhere delegated or entrusted to them by the Constitution.” Prigg v. Pennsylvania https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/41/539/
[2] “Congress may not simply ‘commandeer the legislative process of the States by directly compelling them to enact and enforce a federal regulatory program.” Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association https://www.oyez.org/cases/2017/16-476
My comment shouldn't be read as supporting the activities or really disagreeing with your statement. Was merely indicating that the legal authorities are not as clear cut as the article suggests.
To use your examples:
1) enforcement of borders is a power delegated to the federal government, and it's arguable these activities are within scope.
2) This is not a regulatory program but an enforcement activity (though you could argue that the state doesn't need to support these activities)
:shrug: This is why we have lawyers
I don't think there is a 10th amendment violation or a question of federal authority. States can't be compelled to perform federal law enforcement because of the 10th amendment. States are accordingly allowed to prevent their own law enforcement from performing federal law enforcement. If state law enforcement aids the feds anyway, then they are just breaking state law.
A 10th amendment violation would be if the feds require the state to perform federal law enforcement.
Federal authority is relevant if they e.g. raided state law enforcement offices to take the data without consent, but in this case they are just given the data by state officers.
We don't know what degree of pressure was or was not exerted on state authorities to compel them to support ICE.
Also, I don't think sharing data would be considered enforcing federal law.
It was Flock? Surprise, surprise…
Datasets are created to be used. Once created they will eventually likely be used for purposes other than the original intention. Depending on the power dynamics in play this may be more or less likely.
There are many many such cases and they are obviously not limited to the current regime. Governments will collect all the data they are permitted to collect without a harsh public response, and they will always have a 'good' reason -- just ask them! After all it's for your own good!
Datasets with personal data create a target for crime and for abuses. The problem is these datasets exist at all, thereby reducing humans to numbers. People are not resources and not material not matter what HR says. Reducing people to numbers is to reduce them to something less than they are -- no dataset (model trained on it) captures everything.
We need real privacy laws not the ridiculous current situation. There should be clear consent required without coercion for any data collection -- a necessarily very high bar.
Unauthorized collection of personal data (i.e. without explicit consent not tied to any benefit bait) should be a federal crime and the organizational leadership should always be held to account. That and that alone will curtail future abuses. Otherwise we are just always complaining after the fact and it will keep happening.
That said, good luck getting any government in this world to go along without a revolution.
You ever notice how basically no justice comes out of the criminal justice system?
Cops doing crime.
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Unfortunately typical, cops have always and will continue to act like a gang free from any consequences.
If you wanna do something about it then help turn the surveillance spotlight back at them: https://app.copdb.org/
If you don’t think this system should be used, it should never have been built in the first place. Relying on a state law to prevent sharing data sounds rather naive.
Second, the page barely mentions ice, title is begging for clicks.
> “We take privacy seriously…
A gun has a trigger. It is a system intended to be used.
You cannot legally use it to rob a bank, though. Specific uses of that system are forbidden.
An ICBM has a trigger, too.
But you can't buy one at Wal Mart, and be trusted to only pull that trigger in situations when the uses of that system are legal! We don't sell them to consumers because the anticipated and obvious outcomes are harmful.
Flock Safety generated a treasure trove of highly sensitive data. In theory, there's nothing wrong with collecting that data, or even using it to investigate specific crimes with searches of limited scope under a judicial warrant. It's only harmful when used inappropriately... but no one should be surprised when that happened.
Law enforcement types don’t think of doing their job as equivalent to “robbing a bank,” so the thought process you are relying on can’t work.
The article mentions ICE usage, including a link to an entire article about it. Nothing wrong with the title mentioning it.
It mentions many usages, but only one made it to the title.
illegal?
you don't even need license plate data. Every car emits 4 radio frequencies which make you uniquely identifiable even without a camera or plate. We can easily track (and they do) this information. But at least we know our tires arent flat!
source for "they do"?
What is the mechanism for enforcing laws passed by legislature?
The local executive is breaking legislature's law.
The governor should be ordering state police and lawyers to prosecute these local officials, or else the legislature should impeach the governor.
The system in place for dealing with corrupt law enforcement is federal law enforcement. It should be obvious why our ever growing police state ruled by fascists is not going to police itself.
The only feasible response to lawlessness of those empowered to uphold the law is to periodically remind them that legal authority is derived from the will of the people. Thomas Jefferson said this more elegantly than I could.
> What is the mechanism for enforcing laws passed by legislature?
State and local attorneys general.
In this case, an individual harmed may also bring civil claims under California law.
Don’t hold your breath.
>>What is the mechanism for enforcing laws passed by legislature?
Probably the same as it is at the federal level - voting out of office. During the Biden/Harris term there was a complete dereliction of duty when it came to border enforcement. Actually it was worse than that - they helped people illegally cross the border, even flew them in on the taxpayer dime. This is why we have President Trump today.
It’s illegal because California made it illegal for municipal police to cooperate with federal agents. Trump and future Republicans will use this to accuse Democratic sanctuary cities of being lawless.
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This is political. Keep it off hacker news.
I can't believe this is such an unpopular opinion. I don't think HN is a place for me anymore.
It's also a very divisive and sensitive topic.
I think we've been playing "everyone gets along" for far too long, and it's become obvious to the meek that people are gaming the system whilst pretending to get along. A correction is necessary, and that's precisely what you're witnessing here.
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> Federal law trumps state law.
Constitution trumps Federal law.
Tenth Amendment:
> The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
The Feds are welcome to enforce immigration law. They cannot require California to participate. https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt10-4-2/AL...
> Federal law trumps state law.
This is absolutely not true in general, and the constitution explicitly circumscribes the jurisdiction of federal law.
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The people of California desired a license plate reader system for certain purposes, but not others. The Tenth Amendment permits them to do so.
RBAC for example. Not everyone has and should have the same kind of access. Even at my dayjob I can imagine use cases where it would be inappropriate to provide certain data even to some coworker internally.
This is a Chesterton’s fence situation. If you can’t identify the problem that this law solves then you aren’t qualified to remove it.
The law exists for a reason, I encourage you to imagine what that might be.
Because that’s not their jurisdiction and are not allowed by the people who pay their salary?
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Why not legalise [some more] drugs to help solve the problems?
The unfortunates get the fix. The dealers won't deal. The state gets the money.
Because the drugs are 100x worse than alcohol. These drug addicts behavior is worse than alcoholics.
I’d rather live in a society where people don’t need to turn to drugs. And I would prefer building a coalition of like minded people and stamp out druggies and their enablers.
Supply and demand. Crush them both.
Been doing that since the 80s, how's it going?
People choose to do drugs. End of day, it is all mental.
Some people like to use drugs. It's their body, and should be their right. If you have a problem with specific behavior that you associate with drugs - and that behavior negatively affects other people and is not protected - the regulate that behavior.
Cool, and most people don't want to see fentanyl zombies and cracked out people shitting/screaming.
You can go drugs, but in a democracy people like me who don't want to deal with the crackheads will win out.
Since neither crushing supply nor crushing demand seem to actually work at all, maybe it'd be more effective to directly address the problem of the people on the street.
The people on the street didn’t magically spawn as drug addicts.
They chose that life. And they drive the demand.
I am from a third world hellhole and I find it sad that people here can’t just accept personal responsibility. We didn’t even have running water. Instead of doing drugs we chose to persevere and try.
Here you have public libraries with hella resources and so many charities and public services. I mean there’s medi-cal in California and programs for basically everything. I sometimes volunteer at a food bank and they give out free meals..
Same
Funnily enough, I don't imagine there are many Honduran drug dealers in the kitchens, soccer fields, farms, and home depots where ICE is focusing their efforts these days.
Its all fucking performative.
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It is a federal law, and thus enforcement should be happening on the federal level. The feds don't get to pass laws and then burden the states with their enforcement. The states are fully within their rights to withhold state law enforcement resources to focus on state laws.
>The feds don't get to pass laws and then burden the states with their enforcement.
Local law enforcement should not just enforce the law of the specific city they are in. They should enforce all applicable laws: city, county, state, country, etc.
Thats not how the balance of power between the State and Federal level work. The anti-commandeering doctrine prevents the federal government from directly compelling states to implement or enforce federal law. It has been ruled on time and time again, from 1842 when Justice Joseph Story affirmed it [1] to Justice Samuel Alito in 2018 [2]. Having to get voluntary buy-in from States for Federally passed laws is a key check on Federal power.
[1] “The clause relating to fugitive slaves is found in the national Constitution, and not in that of any State. It might well be deemed an unconstitutional exercise of the power of interpretation to insist that the States are bound to provide means to carry into effect the duties of the National Government nowhere delegated or entrusted to them by the Constitution.” Prigg v. Pennsylvania https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/41/539/
[2] “Congress may not simply ‘commandeer the legislative process of the States by directly compelling them to enact and enforce a federal regulatory program.” Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association https://www.oyez.org/cases/2017/16-476
You're conflating incomparable things here. The reason why local law enforcement enforces state laws is because municipalities don't have any political sovereignty of their own - they are granted their authority by the state government, and as such, it can come with arbitrary strings attached and can be changed and revoked entirely at any moment.
This is not the case when you consider the relationship between the states and the federal government, though. While the states obviously aren't fully sovereign, the federated structure of our country explicitly grants them limited sovereignty that is innate and not in any way derived or subject to the federal authority. Thus the ability of the federal government to commandeer state governments to its own ends is rather limited and needs to be explicitly spelled out (e.g. National Guard can be federalized, but State Defense Forces cannot). And last I checked, there are no clauses in the Constitution that give the feds the power to commandeer state law enforcement to enforce federal laws; nor did the courts find such power implicit in other clauses.
> Local law enforcement should not just enforce the law of the specific city they are in. They should enforce all applicable laws: city, county, state, country, etc.
Not only shouldn't they do it, they _can't_. You don't want some local sheriff deciding you're guilty of, I dunno, securities fraud, and you don't want the FBI writing parking tickets.
Police don't decide if your guilty or not.
They do need to decide how likely you are to be guilty; that's literally what probable cause is.
This whole mess started because we haven't been doing #1 when it comes to immigration.
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rips huge fart
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To break the law?
What law?
California's SB 34.
The article in question even links to it. https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_201520160sb...
California's AG:
https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/2023-dle-06.pdf
> Importantly, the definition of “public agency” is limited to state or local agencies, including law enforcement agencies, and does not include out-of-state or federal law enforcement agencies. (See Civ. Information Bulletin 2023-DLE-06 Code, § 1798.90.5, subd. (f).) Accordingly, SB 34 does not permit California LEAs to share ALPR information with private entities or out-of-state or federal agencies, including out-of-state and federal law enforcement agencies. This prohibition applies to ALPR database(s) that LEAs access through private or public vendors who maintain ALPR information collected from multiple databases and/or public agencies.
> Existing law prohibits the department from selling the data or from making the data available to an agency that is not a law enforcement agency or an individual that is not a law enforcement officer.
Seems like the law was explicitly written to allow sharing data with other law enforcement agencies then narrowed down by Code, § 1798.90.5, subd. (f). https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/civil-code/civ-sect-1798-90-5/
Your link supports my point.
> “Public agency” means the state, any city, county, or city and county, or any agency or political subdivision of the state or a city, county, or city and county, including, but not limited to, a law enforcement agency.
Notably: Not federal. My link to the AG's memo quotes this.
Yes. I am not disagreeing with you that they have narrowed down the definition of law enforcement agency. My comment actually links to the section the AG is quoting.
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A fairly key aspect of American federalism is there are a lot of things the Feds can't force states to participate in, as provided in the Tenth Amendment. (Known as anti-commandeering doctrine.)
Sadly, Wickard v. Filburn effectively ended this.[1] Also the feds don't have to use force against the states to get compliance. They can do things like not provide funding for freeway maintenance[2], or penalize individuals for not participating (as was the case with the Affordable Care Act).
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Minimum_Drinking_Age_...
Eh, sorta.
South Dakota v. Dole held that things like the drinking age can only be tied to related items. Road maintenance in exchange for road rules passes muster, and interstate highways is about as "interstate commerce" as you can probably get.
I'm not prepared to consider the Tenth extinct just yet. That is, among other things, a "you nuke us we nuke you" scenario between the two parties. Things like drinking age work because the two parties largely agree on it.
This is one Supreme Court case from going away.
In that case putting a light on that "State rights" was just talk.
We already know that from numerous past attempts to restrict abortion on the federal level etc.
Republicans don't care as long as their side is the one owning the Fed. It's only States' Rights when Democrats are in charge of the federal.
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No state is required to criminalize the same things that the feds do, nor to help the feds enforce their laws.
The place that aids drug and human trafficking suddenly cares about laws.
It was. You are maybe forgetting the marijuana industry.
Genuinely, this. How many green card holders are suddenly at risk of having said card revoked and being tossed into a concentration camp after visiting a dispensary in a legal state? Democrats failure to amend the law as the public wants is going to come back to bite minorities in the ass once again.
Uh no. Tech, agriculture, entertainment, manufacturing, transportation. People love to hate on California but it really is the most productive state in the US. Facts please.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_California#/media/F...
Not sure why the down votes. You are correct. The intro from your link:
"The economy of the State of California is the largest in the United States, with a $4.103 trillion gross state product (GSP) as of 2024.[1] It is the largest sub-national economy in the world. If California was an independent nation, it would rank as the fourth largest economy in the world in nominal terms, behind Germany and ahead of Japan."
The corruption in California is well known and frankly blatant.
Money laundering through tech startups or crypto shell companies, luxury real estate purchases by Chinese or Russian oligarchs for capital flight or laundering, tech-enabled criminal infrastructure: e.g., encrypted phones (Phantom Secure), dark web hosting, or cartel-facilitated Bitcoin laundering. Not to mention major economy sector capture under the guise of "luxury technocommunism" but enables international crime and tax avoidance.
I'm sure many books have been written about Newsom. I won't go there.
> Money laundering through tech startups or crypto shell companies, luxury real estate purchases by Chinese or Russian oligarchs for capital flight…
You could be describing parts of Texas, Florida real estate.... I'm not sure why California gets all the blame. I suspect because it is the wealthiest.
Whatabout...
California hardly gets blamed at all. Just look how the cartel-affiliated MJ farm gets busted and the media calls it "strawberry pickers that put food on our table." That kind of media bias is scary and I don't understand how people overlook it.
That's a really loaded way to put it, but okay.
Yeah, I'd rather we not terrorize the nation and build a national goon squad with a larger budget than most national militaries. I'd rather that goon squad not be unidentifiable and masked. And if we're willing to spend $100+ billion on a law enforcement program, I'd rather it be increasing police wages and firing bad cops and hiring/properly training new cops.
I'd rather not spend $100B on LEO at all, frankly.
There are other ways to crack down on immigration than ramping up the surveillance and police state.
edit: I am disappointed that the responder ignored the six points I made, all of which could be discussed, and instead went for a hollow whatabout.
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> California has their own goon squad
The only way that could be a purer distillation of abstract whataboutism would be to remove the last lingering traces of specificity, yielding: "[They] do [it] too!"
Even if we accept that that other-bad-thing exists, how does it justify the first-bad-thing we were talking about?
Would you apply the same framing to marijuana legalization?
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Try reading to the end of the paragraph.
> The OPD didn’t share information directly with the federal agencies. Rather, other California police departments searched Oakland’s system on behalf of federal counterparts more than 200 times — providing reasons such as “FBI investigation” for the searches — which appears to mirror a strategy first reported by 404 Media, in which federal agencies that don’t have contracts with Flock turn to local police for backdoor access.
Shoutout to 404 Media’s reporting on this, it’s causing states to take action against Flock. I’m unsure if oversight would’ve kicked in without this reporting.
Continue with the rest of the paragraph: "Rather, other California police departments searched Oakland’s system on behalf of federal counterparts more than 200 times — providing reasons such as “FBI investigation” for the searches — which appears to mirror a strategy first reported by 404 Media, in which federal agencies that don’t have contracts with Flock turn to local police for backdoor access."
These were approved by governments that promised the data would never be shared with the feds. Only in the most lawyer bullshit word gymnastics could you arrive at the conclusion there is nothing to see here. You are being intellectually dishonest.
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Cool, but SB34 doesn't let this particular set of data be shared with out-of-state agencies for those purposes either.
https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/2023-dle-06.pdf
> Accordingly, SB 34 does not permit California LEAs to share ALPR information with private entities or out-of-state or federal agencies, including out-of-state and federal law enforcement agencies. This prohibition applies to ALPR database(s) that LEAs access through private or public vendors who maintain ALPR information collected from multiple databases and/or public agencies.
They would not be able to refuse a valid federal warrant, however.
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A state law can only be illegal if it violates the state's own constitution or the US constitution.
States are not obligated to participate in the enforcement of federal law, and are entitled to control the official conduct of their own officers and agencies.
If a state has a law that prohibits local police officers from furnishing data to federal agencies, that law is completely valid, and officers that act contrary to it are in violation of state law.
It’s strange to me that we see people being rounded up and sent to concentration camps and many people consider lawfulness to be sufficient justification. No, right and wrong don’t derive from laws. It’s supposed to be the other way round.
if i were to visit any country, and then just randomly stay and try to get a job, I expect that it won't last long. why is this not the case for people that come here?
Because that's not what it's happening. It's a dragnet of paramilitary forces using skin color to determine who to abduct, and they're kidnapping loads of legal residents and even citizens, because skin color and spoken language are not legitimate proxies for legal residency status.
Why do you use these silly words: “abduct”, “kidnapping”? Those are specific crimes and by trying to exploit the emotional weight of those words instead of making an honest account you come off as unsophisticated and manipulative. If what is happening is so problematic why do you need to describe it in bombastic, provably untrue terms?
How else do you describe plainclothes "officers" picking up people from the street, putting people into unmarked vehicles, and locking them up in faraway detainment facilities despite never officially charging them with a crime?
If it was an arrest, wouldn't they be charged with a crime or released after a short processing time if not actually charged? If it was an arrest, why not have the officers properly identify themselves?
Kidnapping does have specific legal meaning depending on jurisdiction. But it also has a common meaning of "the action of abducting someone and holding them captive". Abduction has a common definition of "the action of taking someone away by force or deception". Do these actions not fit these definitions?
You're acting like it's impossible for the government to kidnap or abduct people. Seems like quite a limited world view to believe such a thing.
The ignorance here is just staggering. Every single person arrested for any and all crimes in the US is initially detained without being charged with a crime. This is normal. The police do not charge people with crimes: courts do. This is called an arraignment and it must occur within 48 hours of arrest. There is zero non-standard conduct from ICE in this regard.
ICE officers are required to identify themselves “as soon as practical or safe” as a regulation. They are not required to identify themselves in the same manner as state police because they are not state officers, they are federal officers. Federal law applies to them, not state law. Again, zero non-standard conduct from ICE.
> Do these actions not fit these definitions?
No they absolutely do not, because we’re talking about law enforcement so the only reasonable frame of reference is the legal definition of these words not the “I feel like it” definition. By your definition all arrests are “taking someone away by force” and are therefore abduction: obviously a stupid definition.
I think it’s entirely possible for the government to abduct people: please don’t put strawman words into my mouth. You have, however provided zero evidence to make your case and in fact demonstrated quite clearly that you don't understand the most basic everyday workings of our legal system.
> This is called an arraignment and it must occur within 48 hours of arrest
This isn't happening for these people. They're being locked up for weeks to months without any due process at all. They're being sent to overseas prisons indefinitely once again without ever facing such arraignment or charges or a courtroom. You're saying this is normal, and yet saying an arraignment must occur within 48 hours. Which is normal, being held for months without an arraignment or being released within 48 hours if not being officially charged?
The cognitive dissonance here is astounding. An arraignment must happen or its not normal, but arraignments not happening without being released is normal.
> we’re talking about law enforcement so the only reasonable frame of reference is the legal definition of these words
> I think it’s entirely possible for the government to abduct people
So, the government can choose to pick people up on the street without identifying themselves and lock them away indefinitely in overseas prisons without any arraignment or charges or court case and argue they're removed from the jurisdiction of the US court system, but it's not abduction because the government says it's not. I guess the government only abducts people when it says it abducts people, guess there's nothing to worry about then.
I'm not trying to talk to some specific legal definition in a court of law; I'm speaking to morality. Plainclothes agents failing to identify themselves to normal people and shoving them into the backs of unmarked cars isn't a good thing to do. Having this just become a normal part of life seems pretty fucked up to me, but maybe that's the world you prefer to live in.
I can't see how anyone can look at cases like Abregio Garcia's as anything but kidnapping. He had a legal status of "withholding of removal". His status was changed without any notification to him other than when he was "arrested". No worries though, he'll be arraigned in 48 hours or be charged, right? Nope. Sent to CECOT to be detained indefinitely without having any charges levied against him, and seemingly without having any other options of self-deportation. He wasn't officially charged with a crime until he was removed from CECOT months later and brought back to the US. Where was that arraignment? Where was the due process?
I can't see how anyone can look at cases like Mahmoud Khalil's as anything but kidnapping. He had a green card. He was detained for over 100 days, was seemingly close to also be sent to CECOT indefinitely. To this day he still has not officially been charged with a crime.
And to think what has happened to these people has happened to at least hundreds of others. People without any criminal backgrounds. People never formally charged with a crime. Currently in ICE detention facilities with no clear release date, no court date, no right legal representation, some even in overseas prisons.
> By your definition all arrests are “taking someone away by force” and are therefore abduction: obviously a stupid definition.
A police shooting that results in the death of someone is a homicide. It is potentially a legally and morally justifiable homicide, but it is still a homicide. We agree words can have a legal definition separate from the dictionary definition, right? It's not wrong to use the dictionary definition when we're not a lawyer arguing a case in a courtroom, right?
Do you expect that a properly granted visa will be revoked without any notice and then be quickly hurried off to a for-profit prison without any trial or representation for months?
I expect that if I were to lose my visa status that I would be on a flight within a few days! And with my own money!
So not in a concentration camp in Florida without ever formally being charged with a crime, correct? Just sent here, without any representation, without any due process, without any clear end date to your confinement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alligator_Alcatraz#/media/File...
Or quickly sent to the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo in El Salvador, once again without any kind of hearing or choice of potential outcomes?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_Confinement_Center#/...
Do you believe in due process? Do you think it's wrong to send people to these places without any due process, without formally being charged with a crime, and without any clear release date established?
Honestly, I would rather be in my home country!
Due process is the process that is due! It's not a court hearing it's a much more simplified process.
If the process to get into the country is next to none, then the process to get out is the same.
For a lot of these people that was not even a given option. They went from having legal status in the US to being on a plane to a foreign prison without any notice or chance to do anything else.
as far as I know they all had notice on Jan 20. Tom Homan didn't make any moves for a few weeks.
And even now, the day they announce alligator alc they said, download CBP Home app and get 1k and a free plane ticket!!!!!!
> if i were to visit any country, and then just randomly stay and try to get a job, I expect that it won't last long. why is this not the case for people that come here?
If you have ever gone backpacking for any length of time, you will have met large numbers of people all over the developing world from Europe, Australia and America who are living there and working illegally. In general the result of being caught is being asked to leave and come back with a new visa, and not being violently arrested and thrown into a concentration camp indefinitely.
Billionaires have funded a coup, supported climate change, mass surveillance, and a genocide in Gaza. Why are they not held to account for their wrongdoing but immigrants are being sent to concentration camps without due process for the crime of crossing border for work? The reason is that billionaires are powerful and hard to unseat, while immigrants are a convenient scapegoat for society’s ills.
We already agreed "right and wrong" when we enacted certain laws. Any more complicated than that and you might as well live in a war zone. You don't get to cherry-pick laws because your definition of "right" doesn't align to what the democratic process concluded. You want to change it, go vote for it.
With a wave of a billionaire’s hand, officials are elected, the constitution undone, a dictator installed, a new political party formed. This political structure is oligarchy not democracy.
Due process, on the other hand, is a fundamental right of democratic systems. Yet this feature too is being curtailed - in favor of concentrations camps.
Billionaires have made scapegoats out of a racial minority. Basic humans rights are violated. Our democracy is in shambles thanks to this group - through their subversion of democratic processes and the undermining of democratic rights. What we are witnessing is not democracy - quite the opposite.
It is illegal to spend state money (i.e. wages for state and local police) to enforce federal law (the feds have their own budget for that).
California law also makes it illegal to do federal enforcement with state resources and specifically makes sharing this license plate information with federal investigators by state and local police illegal.
This has nothing to do with the supremacy of federal law over state law. It has to do with who does the enforcement of these laws. It is similarly illegal for me to enforce federal law, but I am certainly bound by it.
Which federal law exactly requires states to spend money to enforce federal law?
I'll give you a hint: none.
In fact, under well-established constitutional law it is illegal for the federal government to attempt to compel state governments to enforce federal law. US states are sovereign in their own right and are not administrative arms of the federal government.
If you think it's illegal, explain how. Don't just toss out innuendos.
Marijuana was legalized in contravention to federal law
The supremacy clause of the constitution asserts that federal law takes precedence over state laws. There are thousands of state laws on the books that are basically rendered null, because a federal law overrides it. One clear example is segregation which was on the books in some states decades after the civil rights movement.
The federal government and DOJ has declined to prosecute Marijuana, but they definitely have the right to do so.
> One clear example is segregation which was on the books in some states decades after the civil rights movement.
Some states took over a decade after Brown v Board to actually integrate school systems. So again, another instance of state laws seeming to trump federal laws.
If the idea is just not enforcing the supremacy of federal laws is enough, then not enforcing the federal law over the state law which bar sharing info with federal agencies is also in place here so far
No -- states repealing their own laws against marijuana have nothing to do with federal law, and do not prevent the feds from enforcing their own laws in any way. The states are not obligated to implement their own policies in order to further federal interests, nor to participate in the enforcement of federal law.
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> Under a decade-old state law, California police are prohibited from sharing data from automated license plate readers with out-of-state and federal agencies. Attorney General Rob Bonta affirmed that fact in a 2023 notice to police.
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> Adam Schwartz, privacy litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, confirmed that Senate Bill 34 of 2015 prohibits California police from sharing data from automated license plate readers with out-of-state and federal agencies, regardless of what they plan to do with the data or whether they’re working on a joint task force.
> “Just because Oakland has collected ALPR data for purposes of dealing with local crime doesn’t mean this is a ‘come one, come all’ buffet,” Schwartz said.
> The law only prohibits the sharing of data if it's being used for immigration law enforcement.
Citation? The law does not appear to be this narrow.
Per the article: "Under a decade-old state law, California police are prohibited from sharing data from automated license plate readers with out-of-state and federal agencies. Attorney General Rob Bonta affirmed that fact in a 2023 notice to police."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Senate_Bill_54_(201...
This article is poorly written.
The article refers to Senate Bill 34, but you’ve posted a link to a Wikipedia article for Senate bill 54. How could the article’s content and assertions be made clearer? Should it have spelled out the numerals?
SB 34 (2015) prohibits sharing the data with out of state agencies, period.
https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/2023-dle-06.pdf
"Accordingly, SB 34 does not permit California LEAs to share ALPR information with private entities or out-of-state or federal agencies, including out-of-state and federal law enforcement agencies."
SB34 != SB54.
I mean, California Highway Patrol seems to disagree.
> “If any CHP personnel requested license plate data on behalf of ICE for purposes of immigration enforcement, that would be a blatant violation of both state law and longstanding department policy,” the spokesperson wrote. “If these allegations are confirmed, there will be consequences.”
You missed the key phrase "for the purposes of immigration enforcement."
If they're looking for a load of meth, it's fair game.
It's not a key phrase. It's alleged that this particular violation was for that purpose.
The law itself - https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_201520160sb... - doesn't specify immigration purposes.
https://www.404media.co/ice-taps-into-nationwide-ai-enabled-... also indicates a number of specific requests had "immigration" as the given reason.
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I’ve had my comments removed in the past for saying this, but HN has become toxic the past few years.
I’ve been ok with the nerd sniping, it’s one of the best parts of HN - but recently I’ve noticed a fair amount of disgusting comments and takes.
These users I am often fascinated by, so of course when I view their HN post history it’s all mostly edgy hatred or whataboutism.
I think the biggest issue is this forum has been circulated on X far too often and the gates being wide open, people love to come in thinking they want to disrupt civil concourse for sake of diversion.
I do sometimes wonder how this forum would look if it was only limited to people who either run, work, or worked at a Y company.
edit: also a quick thank you to the mods who I know do their best. this thread is yet another example simply based on the amount of flagged comments
Seems like it, the user's other comments are an atrocious downgrade to HN standards.
Seriously?
Tracking the vehicles registered to illegal immigrants shouldn't be a controversial subject
How about tracking the vehicles of people who are subject to retribution for political reasons?
How about tracking the vehicles of people who have similar names as supposedly illegal immigrants?
How about tracking the vehicles of people who are legal immigrants?
> How about tracking the vehicles of people who are subject to retribution for political reasons?
You mean like J6 protestors?
What a persecution complex you have. Those people should have been locked up for a lot longer than they ended up, along with the "leadership" which caused it.
True. They also do not hold insurance and typically do not have drivers licenses. Although CA will give one to anyone with a pulse...
Having been hit twice by non-insured, non-licensed drivers with no paperwork or legal status, they got off free while I had to pay for their crimes, damage and increased insurance rates for years. No sympathy at all for cheaters. Arrest them and confiscate their cars.
Sigh. It's controversial because:
1. It's impossible to track X for only one group. In order to know who is in that group, and who is not, you need to be tracking more than that, necessarily.
Meaning, if you want to track which vehicles belong to "illegal immigrants", you need to know which vehicles belong to citizens. That means YOU. You are not exempt from this data collection.
2. This data can, and will, be used for evil. Anyone who believes that governments will always act in benevolence are, frankly, stupid. You're not stupid, are you? Okay, then you should be beginning to see the problem here.
3. Even IF the government always acts benevolently, and that's a huge fucking if, that doesn't mean they don't make mistakes.
Even if you are innocent, there is a risk here! Who is to say you won't accidentally be identified as an "illegal immigrant"? Is that a risk you're willing to take? For me, that risk is absolutely unacceptable - especially considering the sheer incompetence of our law enforcement agencies and the current administration.
I mean, our country is currently being run by drunkards and yes-men. Do you really trust these imbeciles to never make a mistake, ever? No, right? They've already made quiet a few mistakes, right? Remember the whole Signal thing? Yeah.
You have to look at the big picture here. You're advocating for a system that requires an absolutely unbelievable amount of trust in order to run properly. Do you really, truly, not see the flaws in that?
do we track the vehicles of people cited for jaywalking? because "illegal immigration" is mainly a civil offense, not a criminal offense.
is the penalty for jaywalking deportation? are jaywalkers not authorized to be in the United States?
Also a large proportion of illegal aliens crossed the border illegally. Which therefore makes them criminals, since improper entry is a federal crime.
First they came for the illegal immigrants and I did not speak out, because I was not an illegal immigrant.
Then they came for the legal immigrants they didn't like and I did not speak out, because I was not a legal immigrant. [0]
Then they came for their political enemies [1] and I did not speak up, because I was not their political enemy.
Then they came for me - and there was noone left to speak for me.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/01/trump-zohran...
[1] https://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/rnc-2016-lock-her-up-...
The supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution says that federal laws are supreme over state laws. Therefore, it is illegal not to comply with federal laws.
Which specific federal law is being violated here by SB34?
The Supremacy Clause is regulated, in part, by the Tenth Amendment, which states…
> The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.