The Supreme Court has continuously recognized the difference between manual and sustained, remote and automated tracking, even in public spaces [1]. The "seismic shifts in digital technology" we are presently undergoing require vigilance to be maintained in respect of the Bill of Rights.
[1] http://www.scotusblog.com/2018/06/opinion-analysis-court-hol...
The DPPA [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver%27s_Privacy_Protection_...] already restricts who has the ability to convert from plate to actual personal information.
Some of the higher-tier services use ALPR cameras that map plates to GPS coordinates. Property ownership is public information so you can narrow down the owner of a vehicle's plate based on where they're parked overnight. You can deduce where the owner works by tracking where it's parked between 9 and 6. You can deduce who the owner's associates are by tracking who he tends to park near when not at home or work.
The beauty of it is how well it scales. One van can patrol your neighborhood. Another can patrol the mall. Another can drive around and through your office park. Another might catch you simply driving down the road. It's like having spies everywhere, and they're all feeding their observations back to a central database to build a broader profile...which they later sell to law enforcement upon request.
(Or you can make like Vincent Asaro and just give a cop buddy the plate number of the car that cut you off and have your post-roadrage firebomb run expedited. DPPA sure helped that guy!)
If that's not sustained surveillance then please explain your understanding of the concept.
The Government’s position fails to contend
with the seismic shifts in digital technology
that made possible the tracking of not only
Carpenter’s location but also everyone else’s,
not for a short period but for years and years.
Sprint Corporation and its competitors are not
your typical witnesses. Unlike the nosy neighbor
who keeps an eye on comings and goings, they
are ever alert, and their memory is nearly
infallible.
That's the difference, beyond simple public/private. It's not that the license plate display itself is private but storing the data forever and being nearly infallible amounts to an unreasonable intrusion on privacy when handed over to the government. Notably, the USSC in a 9-0 ruling from 2012 held that attaching a GPS tracker to a car also required a warrant. _United States v. Jones, 132 S.Ct. 945 (2012).
perhaps even more interesting, Trump appointee Gorsuch seemed to be saying that even more general data privacy could exist under the fourth amendment: ... it seems to me entirely possible a person's cell-site data could qualify as his papers or effects under existing law.
this offers a far better explanation than i can give: http://reason.com/blog/2018/06/22/scotus-rejects-warrantless...
it’s the same as if a person standing on the street saw your plate and told someone else.
This is one of the areas where scaling really matters, and you can do many things with these sort of databases that were simply intractable before. So I find the conceit that it is "just the same" to be inept.
I don't know where the courts and legislators are eventually going to arrive at on this, but if it is as cut and dried as you suggest then you can look forward to a near future where anyone who cares to can buy a detailed dossier on all of your movements for the last decade, say, with known and inferred contacts, assets, etc. It probably won't be very expensive.
Cool, so you won't mind if i install a GPS tracker in your car that tells me your vehicle's location 24/7, since the exact same information can be gleaned from "a person on the street seeing your plate"?
The problem with ALPR is that it allows a few, otherwise occupied people -- such as parking lot attendants or repo agents or policemen -- to drive around like they normally do and automatically collect massive amounts of data on vehicles and their location without incurring any cost on their behalf (beyond "slightly decreased fuel efficiency because the ALPR equipment needs power from the alternator").
The same act of "looking at a license plate and noting down the location" becomes an entirely different thing when conducted at massive scale and at negligible cost.
There are boundaries between reasonable use of nominally public information and the normal expectation of some degree of privacy outside the home.
It doesn't have the goofball repeatedly calling the police aspect, but that's the less interesting part to me.
My question remains: if it were happening to you, would you be ok with it?
ICE goes after human traffickers too.
If you want open borders that’s fine. We have a congress and they can legally pass that policy. Write your representative and senators or something.
This has nothing to do with open borders. Why would you even bring that up?
Modern criminal law in the West is built on the presumption of innocence. Invading the privacy of many people who are practically guaranteed to be innocent for the sake of finding one criminal that may be hiding among them is directly contrary to that.
It is not wrong for the NSA to try to find terrorists, but it is wrong for them to sift through my text messages "just in case" when they have no reason to believe I'm involved in terrorism. It is not wrong for police to enforce laws, but it is wrong for them to stop you and search your car without any reason to believe you've committed a crime. It is not wrong for ICE to secure our borders, but it is wrong for them to track the movements of millions of everyday people lest they find that one has a pattern of movement that may suggest people smuggling.