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Comment by kpU8efre7r | Hacker News Reader

>I keep reading about blimps watching us 24/7, license plate readers tracking everywhere we drive.

It's almost as if this "surveillance state" you all imagine doesn't exist. There are checks in place and warrants needed for this. If you see something illegal online you could report it to the FBI perhaps?

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The ability to see something and stop it is not the same as the desire to see something and stop it.

The ability to collect something and the ability to see it are two different things. Just because data about this guy may have been snarfed up, doesn’t mean anybody looked at it.

The data is gathered but it's so much that any signal is drowned in noise. You either spend billions investigating hundreds of thousands of idiots spewing shit on the Internet or you miss "that one." There is no middle really.

Yes there is a middle. It's a cultural problem. Too many people get away with it. By spending some money and cracking down on it it would remind people this isn't acceptable behavior and change the culture. Once the culture is changed it becomes easier to focus on the real threats. We don't need to throw everybody in jail, but a fine here and there (ala speeding tickets) would go a long way to reminding people that this kind of behavior is wrong.

> It's almost as if this "surveillance state" you all imagine doesn't exist.

How do you imagine that billing for EZ Pass and license plate scanners works?

EZ-Pass is RFID based, it doesn't use license plate scanning but a transponder you have to have in your car (typically it's affixed to the windshield, but it doesn't need be)

I've spoken to the Chef Technology Manager and the Chief Executive Director of E-ZPass for some research I did with their system [0] and confirmed that it is not 100% reliant solely on the transponders, and that they do use license plate readers as well.

[0] https://github.com/kwesthaus/ez-sniff

How do you think they bill you when you drive through the system without a transponder?

The surveillance state very much exists, it's just extremely incompetent.

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