The danger of license plate readers in post-Roe America
wired.com
wired.com
Wildly, this strange new paradigm where everything old is new again might really benefit society. Progressives starting to understand the implications of mass surveillance and how it can impact them as well.
I have to say it's enjoyable. Is it too late? Probably, I guess we'll see, but it is refreshing to hear the other side of the spectrum suddenly concerned about massive government overreach and destruction of privacy.
Some people cross the border, others buy Mifepristone on the black market.
Statistics still indicate no abortions and that is frequently used as an argument that the ban is effective.
Given that this should fall into the few relationships that have historically been treated as sacrosanct-a man and his priest, doctor, and counsel/attorney-it’ll be a hard uphill climb to make a case for investigation into/prevention of medical care decisions not being an unreasonable search or unreasonable seizure. Then again IANAL, so again who knows what fun reasoning lawyers will come up with :shrug-again:
4th: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
You also don't seem to have a good grasp on how the constitution works. It has a mechanism for amending itself so it is most appropriate to interpret it in an originalist framework. That is usually interpreted as meaning what the people who wrote it likely meant or, if referring to something in common usage at the time, then the modern item currently in common usage or likely to be in common usage. Abortion was illegal at the time of writing the constitution and also at the time of writing the 4th ammendment and stayed illegal for many decades following so there is no way they meant that procedure was protected by the constitution, it was and is very clearly the purview of the state legislatures (or you can amend the constitution). This is why overturning roe was the right thing to do even if you strongly support the legality of abortion, as I do.
It's pretty likely you carry a cell phone everywhere you go and it's always by you. They are literally tracking devices. It doesn't matter what software you run on the userspace computer on your phone. The cell modem you don't legally control will always be broadcasting beacons and the basestations with their shared accurate clocks are going to be multi-laterating your position down <100m. In the USA they're keeping this data for 2-5 years. And they're going to continue "anonymizing" this data that shows you going to work and home over and over for years by removing names and then selling the raw location data to companies which then sell it to government and special interest groups which de-anonymize it easily.
The only real privacy is turning off your cell phone radio.
The way the title uses "danger" frames criminal activity as a good thing as long as it's an activity you agree with. It should instead be a general call for privacy protections, not a selective call.
The information is out there. You can make it illegal to look, but it doesn't matter.
Consider that a shopkeeper can recognize frequent customers by their face. Our brains are made for face recognition.
Now obviously that's at a different scale than automated plate readers, but the information is there. We just took for granted that no one had the willpower to memorize a million faces. Our privacy was guaranteed not in law, but in practicality.
You can try to ban it, and you can maybe ban municipalities from using it, but the information is there. Anyone can just set up a camera by their house or business and collect the same info.
This is exactly why the rest of your argument is wrong. The difference is scale is so vast that it makes the new surveillance society something completely different from people seeing other people in public as they have done for thousands of years.
> no one had the willpower to memorize a million faces
Because it was literally impossible for someone to memorize a million faces. Let alone a few billion. And their precise location 24x7.
At most you'd have the occasional shopkeeper with a sharp memory who might remember a few thousand regulars. But even that information wasn't available via quick database query. You had to send investigators with photos to interview people.