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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm confused by your timeline here. Trump was already president when the George Floyd / ACAB protests happened. He then lost his reelection in the direct aftermath of those protests. It was only after four years of Biden/Harris being wet noodles and then Biden dropping out of the race to leave Trump facing a woman (again) did he win a reelection.
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.
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?
Yes, but only in the most ignorant "this quarter the state dug through the DB fined the shit out a bunch of people for papers violations and therefor I am safer" line of reasoning.
In all the cases where there's a "real criminal" they're after the database provides very little information that isn't redundant to the old fashioned police work they'd do to begin with (like getting a warrant and looking up the person's phone and transaction records)
>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.
There's a special kind of irony in picking examples that all have large swaths of the populations that think we could wholly do without that category of laws.
This is a rather authoritative and specific claim. How did you reach this conclusion?
>There's a special kind of irony in picking examples that all have large swaths of the populations that think we could wholly do without that category of laws.
If we are playing this game, sharing this information with ICE is also something large swaths of the population support. Let's stop pretending that an idea is valid just because lots of people believe it. If you are still arguing against any form of gun control with the frequency of gun deaths in this country compared to all our peer nations with stricter gun laws, than I frankly don't dare about your opinion anymore as you are clearly living in some libertarian fantasy land.
Is there evidence in that direction?
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 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.
I really don't think that'd be the same if we got rid of encryption tomorrow.
Notice the subtle shifting of the goalposts. Who said anything about "significant capacity"? The original argument was "it helps save actual lives". Now we need to see "widespread successful use" in the "crime stats"? How would that even be possible? These systems can't be implemented in a vacuum and crime stats are constantly fluctuating for countless reasons, so how could the specific cause ever be isolated? Yet crime has generally been on a downward trend for decades, can we be sure these type of systems aren't responsible for some piece of that?
>I really don't think that'd be the same if we got rid of encryption tomorrow.
Once again, why aren't you asking "Is there evidence in that direction?" You are demanding evidence for one and the other is just a hypothetical based of what you "think" might happen. But what is that thought based on? Do crime stats show that identity theft has gone done since the popularization of online banking
You are not treating these issues with the same rigor. Can't you recognize that?
Sure. I have an opinion on the two issues. "Encryption good" is not something I personally feel needs a bunch of references. If someone else does, they can ask for it.
"License plate readers good" is something I'd want more evidence for, because the downsides seem much clearer to me, and the upsides of their widespread adoption over the last decade don't appear to show up in crime stats. I know they're everywhere in my town… and it doesn't seem to have done much?
If someone asserts "I am Chris" I will believe them. If they assert "I am the LORD, your God", I will require slightly more evidence. You may find both claims equally believable; that is your right.
More moving of the goalposts. These weren't the arguments. The question wasn't whether these are net goods, it was whether they save lives. And when it comes to that, these are closer to the "I am Chris" side of the spectrum and it comes off as disingenuous to argue otherwise.
Even ignoring saving lives... encryption is how the entirety of societal interactions online work. Without it, we would not have _most_ of the things we rely on online, which is a large portion of things we rely on overall.
Saying that encryption is necessary for modern life is pretty much like saying food is necessary for modern life. Is it possible to live without it? Sure, but only by changing everything about modern life; for the worse.
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.
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?
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.
Let's look at the sibling comment's example of a nuclear bomb. That's "not simple for anyone to reproduce without significant access" and as citizens we don't "have a say in the security practices used to safeguard it." And international laws have done a relatively good job keeping them out of the hands of bad actors. Does that make them a dataset?
Contrast that with data that is easy to reproduce, like say the name of the 45 different Presidents of the US. That is obviously a dataset. Yet there is no private information involved, it is all public data. Many people can even produce that list entirely from memory. But having that list on a piece of paper in front of me could still be a helpful tool if I was taking a US history test.
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.
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.
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]
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.
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".
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.
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
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
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.
Edit: it was for the 1890 US census, not the IRS. I apologize for my prior error.
What’s your point?
People have values. Deciding who you work with is a legitimate concern. No one alive today at IBM is likely to be a Nazi collaborator, but the company benefitted from Nazi money. I’m not sure if IBM ever paid any reparations or was ever asked to.
I think any company as old and as involved with government contracts as IBM is going to have some conflicts of interest, which says more about the world than it does about IBM.
My original point was that I believe the reason the math was so complicated for the Census and indirectly for the IRS regarding taxation in that period, was due to the Census Bureau also being responsible for tracking the frontier line. The release of the 1890 census marked the official closure of the frontier in the American West.
The closure of the frontier was relevant because it signaled the end of unlimited growth in many ways. Many people today (and probably even back then) don't even know that the US had colonies. In a very real way, we colonized ourselves, but the shame of it is that we colonized others, and the US territories which remain are arguably vestiges of the US empire. Our treaties with the Native American tribes have also been willfully misinterpreted, to their detriment.
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.
Here is an article from 1987 on the German protests against the new census, that was also the last Germany-led census: https://www.nytimes.com/1987/05/10/world/germans-stand-up-no... (BUT Germany has fairly strict rules on registration of your place of living, so perhaps a census is now unnecessary)
Clearly we all need to be thinking much more deeply on these issues.
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.
Most advanced countries also view that as a basic human right...
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.
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?
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.
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.
Can you provide some examples of this phenomenon?
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".
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.
Alternatively, ask them how accurately an email need to describe their medical history before they believe it's real and fall for a scam.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Additionally, data collected by the government can also be misused by others. So it's still better to not collect unnecessary.
ETA: It’s complicated, but having you give up actually weakens the rule of law even more.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If I recall correctly it was the DA refusing to prosecute just about anything.
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.
It doesn’t absolve Chesa’s various failures to enforce the law. (I say this as someone who started on the police reform side.)
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.
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.
Why would it be better if they were overtly fired?
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.
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?
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.
Like, is your standard of proof legal citations?
Now we've pivoted to New York. Great! That's presumably somewhere you do have more context on but it's not somewhere I can speak credibly about. You claim that police reform has been a driver of increased crime there. Police reforms there are something I don't have insight into. So I am simply asking you to tell me what police reforms have occurred and why you think they've resulted in an increase in nuisance crimes. I did some basic Googling and saw a 3% drop in police officers between—IIRC—2020 and 2022, the post-COVID time period I assume we're talking about. That doesn't seem to me like a large enough change to make the kind of impact you're talking about, but you haven't given me much to go on either, only vibes.
I don't need legal citations. I just need an actual claim to examine. "Police reforms caused an increase in crime, but also unrelated COVID stuff had an effect too" is more or less impossible to evaluate. "Police budgets dropped X%, overtime hours dropped Y% as a result, and over the following two years crimes A, B, and C increased by Z%" includes facts and an opinion of cause and effect that can be evaluated in the context of that fact.
This is what a good-faith argument is. Making a falsifiable claim and giving others an opportunity to assess that claim. Making generic statements and backing out when someone asks for more information is not.
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.)
People love repeating this point with absolutely no evidence and then asking the world of those who disagree. Beware, selective calls for rigor.
> Crime has been on a downward trend for a generation, outside of a few areas.
This is basically untrue. The decrease in crime that began in the mid 80s more or less bottomed out in the early 2010s at rates much higher than comparably rich nations. This doesn't include the huge reporting issues with non-violent crimes that manifests in low property and drug crime data juxtaposed with crackheads clearing out any products not behind plexiglass in major American cities.
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.)
There is a vocal minority of idiots who want no police. At all.
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.
What year did that occur on their budget chart?
(Also, your own chart shows a ‘20 dip.)
Cops throwing a tantrum over a dip would seem to prove a point, too.
You can’t advocate for abolishing cops and also complain about cops self abolishing.
If we pretend the spike didn't happen during COVID and in other countries, sure.
> You can’t advocate for abolishing cops and also complain about cops self abolishing.
Sure you can, for the same reason I can get mad at my neighbor if they demolish a shed with a nuke rather than a screwdriver.
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."
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
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.
>>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...
What does that have to do with "defund the police"? Bail money doesn't go into their pockets.
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.
Roughly half a million people are in jail despite not being convicted of anything. That's roughly 25% of the incarcerated population in the US. 1/4 people behind bars are (presumed) innocent right now, even if they may later be found guilty.
That's a problem. Being in jail for a few weeks or even a few days can totally fuck someone's life over, costing them a job, a relationship, their health, or worse.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/cash-bail-illinois-one-...
Previously, if you had lots of liquid money, you could bail out for murder no problem.
I was locked up in Chicago with guys that had $50 bail and nobody to pay it for them.
I was trying to say that the system was previously unfair as it allowed violent crimes with long potential sentences bail (if you were rich), while those with petty offenses would be held (because they were poor).
I'm not sure if there is a perfect system, since everyone should be given the benefit of potential innocence, and jailing anyone who might end up being acquitted is a problem.
> 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.
I'd imagine they do their fair share of lobbying and "crime scary!" PR, though.
(We see similar crime trends in other countries without BLM/George Floyd/police reform movements during that time period.)
Interesting to historians and public policy folks. Outside of that, the pearl clutching about it probably did more damage than the spike itself.
I'm glad the broader trend is that crime is improving, but there was actually a blip upwards in ~covid times, and JumpCrisscross is correct that Dems in charge during that time were punished for it.
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.
With "the left" you mean the SF DA?
We don’t send the police for medical emergencies or house fires. We send personnel with dedicated training for those types of events.
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.
Anyone against concentration camps now gets the "liberal" slur thrown at them. Why is that?
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.
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.
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.)
Any way, I think you are correct in that reducing short term solutions before long term solutions are in effect doesn't play out very well.
Police forces across the US have never seen higher funding rates.
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.
That's why you don't just go to the cops and say "find $1B in your budget to cut". You give specifics.
All the more reason to reduce their funding!
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"
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).
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.
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?
All while patting themselves on the back and calling themselves heros.
Respectfully, I believe you have it backwards.
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.
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.
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.
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".
It was predictable that law enforcement agencies would... try to enforce 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.
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.
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...
> 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.").
These are absolutely reasonable and should be expected.
This has nothing to do with “retribution.” Non-enforcement of the immigration laws has left us with a huge problem—vastly more illegal immigrants than Americans consented to—which requires aggressive enforcement to remedy.
By breaking a different one?
I mean, yeah, it's predictable. But it's not great.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do be angry at the people misusing the systems. Don't be angry at the people building them for good.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Sorry, I meant to make it technically impossible to query the data without producing a public log.
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,”Two, those queries aren’t automatically public.
then what is the proof for the title of this post
> Oakland cops gave ICE license plate data; SFPD also illegally shared with feds
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.
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.
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.
Edit for clarity this is not a misuse of Flock.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LASD_deputy_gangs
https://knock-la.com/tradition-of-violence-lasd-gang-history...
I’m genuinely curious for data on whether these data have been helpful with property crime in San Francisco and Oakland.
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.
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 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.
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.
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)
You're incorrect. A civil infraction is not the same as a criminal offense.
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.
I heard CA built up a large amount of money anticipating a lot of litigation against Trump 2.0.
https://www.oaklandca.gov/Public-Safety-Streets/Traffic-Safe...
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
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.
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?
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.
Flock built a surveillance data repository with convenient sharing mechanisms. Someone then used those mechanisms as designed for their intended purpose.
The cops - public servants, in theory - then blatantly violated that law.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
My issue isn't with just the legality, but with morality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%BChrerprinzip
Thus illustrating the potential gap between legal and moral.
They call it Unitary executive theory in the States, but same idea.
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.
"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...
Because people are held there for life, or that the death rates there are high?
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.
Going back to my previous comparison, does that mean you think Gitmo is basically Auschwitz, and the US (under Bush/Obama, when Gitmo was active) was "just as depraved" as the Nazis?
Between Gitmo and Auschwitz, there's an obvious difference in magnitude, but there's no difference in direction; Gitmo evolves into Auschwitz. If you want to stop the next Auschwitz from happening, you have to stop the current Gitmo. The path to Auschwitz runs through normalizing Gitmo as "not that bad because it's just a torture prison. At least it's not a death camp".
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...
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
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.
I've heard of "startup founder hubris" before but this is a new level.
I'm honestly surprised they weren't too woke for them.
> Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage.
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.
Does this mean it wasn't exactly to Oakland Police that violated state law, but rather other CA based law enforcement entities?
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.
When they signed up to these systems, did they know that federal agencies could search their data without OPD needing to do anything?
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.
They are aware this is happening and are taking no action. They are as culpable as the other agencies.
They are sharing the records with the knowledge that they are being sent to ICE. They could choose to stop sharing the records, but have not. They are culpable in the moral failure.
About as "legal" as the domestic spying workaround from Five Eyes.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/05/she-got-abortion-so-te...
legality is not a strong argument for morality. still, we have constitutional protections against things like warrantless search and seizure, which many would argue that these activities violate.
edited to add - you said, "Judgements [sic] come from judges, not journalists". however, this reporting - like other good investigative journalism - could lead to a suit from EFF or ACLU to stop this from happening.
See also: "California Department of Justice Declares Out-of-State Sharing of License Plate Data Unlawful" https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/10/victory-california-dep...
I encourage people to engage with their reps to make sure the laws are fair.
I can't debate with the morality. I'm personally in favor of civil liberties but I don't have much authority here.
"California police are prohibited from sharing data from automated license plate readers with out-of-state and federal agencies."
If license plate data was sent to ICE, that's a violation of the law. Sometimes it takes journalism to uncover illegal activities. Depending on how the consequences take place, more scrutiny or civic action may be needed.
But dismissing this as saying "nearly every US law enforcement agency does plate reading" is fatalistic, and in this case, ignorant of the legality.
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,”
Sure.
The criminals are, sadly, running the circus, and they are acting like they'll never lose power.
Anyone waiting for that swing has been waiting for hundreds of years, as it's gone through one flavour of despotism to another. Since Peter the Great in the 18th century, the country's had, what... Two years of freedom?
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.
Questions are, should the police have the data and are our immigration policies correct. This issues need to be fix at the legal level. If we really want to change this we need to decide what we want immigration to be and not half ass it by looking the other way.
If you wanna do something about it then help turn the surveillance spotlight back at them: https://app.copdb.org/
Second, the page barely mentions ice, title is begging for clicks.
> “We take privacy seriously…
You cannot legally use it to rob a bank, though. Specific uses of that system are forbidden.
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.
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
[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
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
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.
Also, I don't think sharing data would be considered enforcing federal law.
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.
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 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.
State and local attorneys general.
In this case, an individual harmed may also bring civil claims under California law.
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.
Being "apolitical" is just an implicit endorsement of the status quo.
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...
This is absolutely not true in general, and the constitution explicitly circumscribes the jurisdiction of federal law.
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.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Minimum_Drinking_Age_...
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_California#/media/F...
"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."
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.
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 law exists for a reason, I encourage you to imagine what that might be.
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.
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.
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/
> “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.
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
We don't remove anyone's comments for reasons like that. In fact, we go out of our way not to, which is one reason that there is so much complaining about HN on HN.
If you want a sample, a month ago I wrote on an article about a public art installation of a quirky home in England, I wrote:
“The concept of doing things for the sake of art and fun is lost on most Americans”
I realize i’m complaining about HN on HN now, but this is just one of many cases where I feel like moderation on HN never makes sense (to me).
It was flagged by users, not moderators. Users were correct to flag it, because it's an unsubstantive flamebait comment. (Pejorative generalizations about groups of people, especially large groups like a country, usually count as flamebait.)
Btw, nationalistic flamebait is particularly inflammatory. It sounds like you didn't intend your comment as a provocation, but such effects happen regardless of intent.
I see where you are coming from, and will absolutely keep this in mind going forward on HN. That in no way was an intended bait (as you also presume) - purely just my observation as a designer who lives in the US and often has to travel abroad to have these sort of whimsy public art experiences.
I also saw just yesterday a comment I replied to had been flagged where the user said ““..the EU was being left behind due to AI regulation..”” - that comment was also flagged and removed…but it came back hours later. I suppose again that may have been user flagged, though a mod reviewed it manually and decided to approve it?
Again, I appreciate the work you and the rest of the mod team are doing - I imagine it’s only gotten more and more challenging over the years to maintain civility here - though I am often left with a fragmented user experience as I never get notified when comments are flagged, what the flagged comments even were, and even worse - entire threads become extremely confusing due to lack of hierarchy of context missing.
> 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.
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.
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.
[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
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.
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.
The unfortunates get the fix. The dealers won't deal. The state gets the money.
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.
You can go drugs, but in a democracy people like me who don't want to deal with the crackheads will win out.
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..
Its all fucking performative.
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?
You mean like insurrectionist rebels carrying the battle flag of a long defeated enemy of the US?
There. FTFY.
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.
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-...
Also a large proportion of illegal aliens crossed the border illegally. Which therefore makes them criminals, since improper entry is a federal crime.
that must be proven on a case-by-case basis and is impossible to determine by visual observation alone.
The Gestapo was only enforcing the law! Intermarriages were illegal. Which therefore made the Jews criminals, since violating race laws was a federal crime.
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?
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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?
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.
And even now, the day they announce alligator alc they said, download CBP Home app and get 1k and a free plane ticket!!!!!!
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.
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.
I'll give you a hint: none.
The federal government and DOJ has declined to prosecute Marijuana, but they definitely have the right to do so.
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
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.
Perhaps an inquiry will show otherwise, but there are plenty of reasons ICE via CHP might be looking for a vehicle that aren't related to immigration law enforcement (perhaps they're looking for a truck full of smuggled contraband, for example).
> 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.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
The law only prohibits the sharing of data if it's being used for immigration law enforcement. ICE doesn't just bust undocumented migrants, they also investigate all kinds of other crimes (like smuggled contraband), which is something the CHP would also presumably be involved with. It's perfectly legal to share data if it's not being used in an immigration case.
> “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.
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."
This article is poorly written.
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."
> “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.”
If they're looking for a load of meth, it's fair game.
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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