Sacramento Sheriff sharing license plate reader data with anti-abortion states
sacbee.com
sacbee.com
Not listed in the article is that they also shared with Arizona, Indiana, Louisiana, Nevada, Oregon, Tennessee, Illinois, Mississippi, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Michigan, Utah, Wisconsin, Florida, Colorado, New Mexico, New York (State), North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Ohio, and probably some others that weren't listed.
Is this bad? Absolutely. Is this specifically related to abortion? No.
Its shoddy from a journalism perspective, but the Sacbee does put out some good reporting otherwise, however they tailor headlines to the intended audience, thats for sure
Sheriff Shares License Plate With Other States, Includes Abortion Related Travel
May be more fair while still raising the issue
What a dystopian nightmare it would be to be a single mother barely above the poverty line and somehow get time off work and scrape together the cash for a trip several states away to get an abortion, only to wind up in prison for 10 years because mass data collection and dissemination is standard procedure for law enforcement and no one thought to protect the rights and privacy of pregnant women from out of state.
It's actually sickening to think about. But yea let's talk more about how they should have written the headline to suit our sensibilities.
They're 100% right to raise this issue.
I also think their headlines are overly tailored to "turn heads", so to speak.
Another one of those technically correct but not accurate statements and perhaps the root of the misunderstanding here. You could also frame it as "prevent the mass murder of children".
A headline about this data in another state may say "local police collaborate with murderers" with the same level of accuracy.
You could if your notions of the world are informed by superstitions and ancient dogma rather than science.
>A headline about this data in another state may say "local police collaborate with murderers" with the same level of accuracy.
You've lost the plot.
New York Times headline on September 12, 2001: 274 Skyscrapers Not Attacked
Media both creates and reflects people’s attention and anyone pretending it’s only one or the other is showing their own bias.
I agree. That was my point. But point this truth out to people who work at sacbee and they'll proclaim they are objective beacons of truth.
> Media both creates and reflects people’s attention and anyone pretending it’s only one or the other is showing their own bias.
The media pretends it's only one or the other. That's the point.
The fact that a Sheriff is sharing data that could be used for a controversial prosecution is interesting and worthy of reporting on.
But, with only a 16 point registration advantage for Democrats over Republicans, Sac County is right-of-center for California.
If you look at this in broad spectrum, its hard not to draw that conclusion, however, if you look at how the city tends to vote on a more issue to issue basis, or responds to issues like this, it tends to go up and to the right in terms of supporting liberal policies, by overwhelming majority. Then you look at housing, and they get more right of center to very conservative, depending on the neighborhood (California famous NIMBY stuff). Then if you pivot to say, gun control, you go up and to the right on the liberal scale again, overwhelming majority support further measures on gun control to limit firearms.
Then, if you swing back to issues like water rights, they get pretty conservative again.
Its not as cut and dry as those statistics suggest
Well, the city is somewhat more liberal than the county as a whole, but even there, compared to the state as a whole, I think you are wrong. (But, yes, a +16 advantage for D's over R’s at even the county level is an overwhelming majority to start with; Decline to State even has a two-point advantage over the GOP in the county.)
> Then you look at housing, and they get more right of center to very conservative, depending on the neighborhood (California famous NIMBY stuff).
Compared to other California local governments? Again, I don’t think so.
> Then, if you swing back to issues like water rights, they get pretty conservative again.
What even is “conservative” in this context?
Maybe not, though the Sacramento Metro Region has more land for housing availability than say, the Bay Area, or Los Angeles, in part thanks to being able to build on what used to be massive flood planes by Natomas.
When it comes to augmenting your neighborhood / city laws around housing to make them more friendly for things like housing density, much like other cities in California, they fail more often than not. Mid town in particular wants to keep its "charm" at all costs, and that district of Sacramento pretty reliably opposes any real change in housing policy that would move the needle on this neighborhood to make it more affordable as a result.
Due to being out able to build out though, the region is less pressured on the housing issue than others, but it costs have been rising significantly there none the less, esp. since WFH jobs became more mainstream, housing pressures are heating up significantly again, its why we moved.
With all this said, I would say that in general, the liberal attitudes around other issues doesn't permeate to housing, and thats all I really meant. What you would think liberal leaning town would support around housing doesn't come to fruition, which I think often surprises outside observers. Some of the most liberal areas in California (and the US, for that matter) have some of the most conservative housing politics in the country, as you may well know.
>What even is “conservative” in this context?
Sacramento region, and the city proper, there are lots of familial relationships with farmers because of its proximity to the Central Valley. The city is made up of a lot of people who moved from Stockton, Modesto, Turlock etc. and still have a lot of ties to that area.
They oppose, overwhelmingly, when voting on state initiatives things that limit water rights for farmers in the Central Valley. That's what I mean. Due to the surrounding region and close proximity to the Central Valley, it permeates this upward on state initiatives and politics, based on my lived experience during the droughts when I was part of a campaign to enforce more water conservation practices in farming
The median D-R margin of California's 58 counties is D +3.7%.
This somewhat overstates the D advantage because California’s Decline to State/No Party Preference voters break somewhat Republican in elections; the median by county margin in the last gubernatorial election was about a 5 point GOP advantage (with the more Democratic counties having a huge population advantage, of course.)
Taking a strong subset of the truth may be factually correct but doesn't stand up to the standard of "the truth".
Likely because the headline implies intent (or expects its audience to assume intent), where it doesn't appear any intent exists.
If healthcare included the guaranteed right to a treatment where of adults spend therapeutic time at preschools, then a headline about providing healthcare to sex offenders would absolutely be relevant (as well as obviously truthful).
I disagree. Here's a simple modification I propose that's more accurate: “Sacramento Sheriff is sharing license plate reader data with states, including anti-abortion ones, records show”
It is newsworthy that certain CA precincts might be unlawfully sharing license plate data, and if SacBee is significantly under-reporting the extent of the sharing -- which is the main focus of the story -- in favor of their interpretation of the sharing, that is editorializing.
Nah, most fake news I run into is stuff like "The Russians destroyed 37 HIMARS" or "<place>'s school has a litterbox for a furry student" or "Trans people are hurting your kids"
This would be a bit like a headline including the phrase "serial killer trained at Harvard" to refer to Ted Kaczynski. I loathe Harvard, but I couldn't honestly claim that the nexus of Harvard and Kaczynski had any relevance to his terror campaign.
So, yeah, GP had a solid basis for objecting to the headline. Certainly one beyond the cynical, borderline clairvoyant explanation given.
something something "plausible deniability" something something
Here's a second chance to read paragraph 2 that you apparently missed:
> The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) a digital rights group, has sent Cooper a letter requesting that the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office cease sharing ALPR data with out-of-state agencies that could use it to prosecute someone for seeking an abortion.
https://www.eff.org/press/releases/civil-liberties-groups-de...
https://california.public.law/codes/ca_civ_code_section_1798....
My family recently went to an amusement park.
As we drove in, I saw what looked like a license plate reader camera on the inbound gate to the parking.
On the way out, we pull up to pay at the automated gate kiosk and my wife says: "Oh wow! How did they know how long we've been here??"
I answered: "Because they scanned our plate on the way in and now when we pulled into the exit gate"
Part of me thought this was cool (automation!), part of me thought "well, there is no expectation of privacy since we are in public" and part of me thought "this is very big brother but done by private companies"
On the other hand, if the data is being sold to a data aggregator that is troubling. We see lots of surprising things like this, for example weather apps selling your location data.
This is why we need better data protection rights. GDPR has a lot of good ideas (though implementation was painful). CCPA should be strengthened.
Ideally we’d get a federal law limiting data collection without consent. (The optimist in me thinks this could be bipartisan.)
You can just think things are creepy without being a crime
edit: i guess the difference is you're not selling them the picture, you're providing it for free.
On the other hand, if there’s no way to connect a person to a license plate number without access to the DMV database, then that is not obviously an issue.
What I drive are owned by trusts and LLCs, so on paper they are not connected to my driver license nor to me.
While I understand that cars are designed to be mobile and therefore easy to move around when stolen, I don't understand the necessity of a big plate with unique numbers. I don't have that on my bicycles.
If plates reduce theft, let the insurance companies and manufacturers work that out.
They are publicly available data. If the license plate is associated with OTHER PII it becomes a problem. However reading your license plate on the way into and out of a garage is just reading a publicly available code at different times of day. The fact that that code must always be displayed on your vehicle, and can be tied to your identity is an issue, but the code itself doesn't constitute PII.
Plate info is not public to average Jane and Joe.
In a State in USA I tried to get owner info of a plate marked 'gvt' and was denied because DMV said I'm not a private investigator or something.
They're an inappropriate solution to the technical problem they were invented for now that the internet exists. It used to be that police had limited ways to verify ownership of a vehicle, and a simple state owned database with state issued numbers was a useful tool to solve this problem.
Now.. the police have internet connected mobile terminals. I'm not sure a "number plate" is the right solution to any part of this problem anymore.
Without license plates how are they to tell what that terminal is connect to which white Ford Bronco they are inquiring about? Do they have to actually stop every white Ford Bronco they see so they can read the VIN or get the driver's ID?
The plate numbers are the least likely to be correct and the least likely mechanism of finding the vehicle in question. The plate number will help you discriminate between two vehicles, but it does not aid in the search. Likewise police helicopters have no problem following specific vehicles even though the plates cannot be read.
So, you are imagining a situation where there are two identical suspects that cannot be discriminated from each other using all the above information and it will somehow come down to the plate, and without it, police will be unable to proceed correctly?
Is this actually any different from a suspect on foot or a bicycle or skateboard?
There's this disease within the tech community where people can't see the harm of scaling things up using automation. Potentially harmful thing X, previously moderated and slowed by the high cost of labor to do it at scale, must not be harmful because we've always technically allowed it, so therefore we should not do anything to moderate it now that robots are doing it for us. "We could run this nuclear reaction at a much faster rate if we just removed the moderator, what could go wrong?"
If you don't pay for the property, and you refuse to work out an agreement with the owner, they are entitled to come get their property. How is there additional harm, at this point, by using ALPRs to find the (effectively) stolen property?
It's not as if these things happen suddenly, either. There's months of effort by the lender to try to get you back on track. Repossession comes with risk, and it always comes with a fee. No one is eager to do this.
Not quite true. Buy here pay here dealerships and similar are absolutely eager to do this, and will go out of their way to make it onerous to pay what is owed, so they can sell the same 5 year old Kia for $15K multiple times over.
I'm not even upset about that. Hell, it might be a net good, I dunno.
The thing that I'm concerned about is that there is no guarantee (or even guard rail, really) against selling that data to a law enforcement organization that would otherwise have to undergo judicial scrutiny to get that data. What happens when some hacker gets a hold of their license plate database and uses it for an actual stalking operation? Or who knows what else?
At that point you have the right to ask them to delete their copy of the license plate record that they've certainly already sold on to a network of dozens of fly-by-night data brokers, malicious foreign governments, the police, and so on.
Shotgunning the request to the major players may not give 100% coverage, but I think it would at least reduce the amount of identifying information out there which seems like it would be better than status quo.
I'm curious if anyone has tried this at all.
Opt-in is the only way to make this work, and that's why it will never get passed.
the word “prosecute” intrigues me, how does this work / what people fear? Not familiar with US states legal system…
1. Resident of a state A should follow A’s law even when traveling to state B. That seems weird to me as states/countries usually don’t bind you to their law when you leave their borders. They do it (see “intelligence” agencies) but this seems exceptions. My country won’t send James Bond to catch me smoking pot in South Africa.
2. Resident of state A get an abortion in state B, then sherif of state A got you on their list and wait you at the border and find a legal but absurd way to piss you off as a punishment, eg: waiting for you to double-park where you shouldn’t. Not a good exemple -as a biker I hate cars stationing on my lane- but you got the point.
3. Same as 2. but the sherif lie, eg: “you crossed that red light” (you didn’t). I guess sherif word is more “trustworthy” that yours…
[1] - https://www.nbcnews.com/health/womens-health/idaho-most-extr...
Funny enough, South Korea has explicit laws prohibiting citizens from consuming drugs in other countries, even when it's legal in those countries. [1]
I don't think this would pass muster under the U.S. Constitution, though.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_South_Korea#Kor...
https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ceos/citizens-guide-us-fede...
But I believe there also are states that have passed laws against leaving the state to get an abortion and then returning. I don’t think these have yet been challenged on jurisdictional grounds.
https://abc7news.com/amp/license-plate-thefts-cold-plating-c...
https://abc7news.com/license-plate-thefts-cold-plating-car-b...