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Comment by matte_black | Hacker News Reader

The trigger here is ICE. For many people in this country, anything ICE does is bad now.

The trigger is private companies handing over people’s info to law enforcement en masse without a warrant. s/ICE/FBI/ and people would still be upset. Maybe a bit less just because the FBI occasionally goes after actually dangerous people.

It’s public information. You don’t have an expectation of privacy about your license plate. The exact opposite is true: you’re legally required to display it prominently whenever your vehicle is on the public highway.

ICE goes after human traffickers too.

What’s your point? All sorts of public information is not shared en masse with law enforcement. I’m not trying to argue that this is somehow illegal. This company isn’t committing a crime, they’re just assholes.

I don’t think reporting criminals to the police makes one an asshole.

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.

They’re not reporting criminals, they’re reporting everyone.

This has nothing to do with open borders. Why would you even bring that up?

When everyone is reported, no one is. When everyone is tracked, no one is.

This may have been true once, but no more. In the age of automation, when everyone is tracked, everyone is.

Opposing datapoint here: I approve of ICE's mission, but think large-scale surveillance is an unethical implementation of it.

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.

Well, when you rip kids from parents seeking asylum, and then can't even get them back to their parents in a timely manner, yeah, people get upset.

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