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Comment by pnw | Hacker News Reader

None of this is new. The article states that CBP got authorization to track license plates in 2017 and concerns about law enforcement use of ALPR date back to at least 2010. The ACLU sued the LAPD in 2013 on ALPR.

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The part that's new is people being detained for "suspicious" traffic patterns.

Is it? or is the new part that it's being reported? This "news" just looks like an investigation AP conducted on its own. Could they have conducted it years ago, and what would they have found then?

Historically CBP isn't patrolling the entire country, so yeah, at least the scale and reach is definitely new.

This. TFA barely glanced at it but they mentioned "collaboration with the DEA".

The DEA has been jerking off about how they've been doing this stuff on the east coast corridor for over a decade.

The current CBP situation is basically a Ctrl+C Ctrl+V Ctrl+V Ctrl+V Ctrl+V of what DEA was doing under Bush and Obama.

The particular manner in which it is being used can be different even if the fact that is being used by CBP is not.

>CBP got authorization to track license plates in 2017

who was president in 2017?

I mean, the last 20 years is only ~8% of the history of the U.S., so all things considered those changes are pretty "new".

Sure, but the OP was specifically referring to party politics and this is a bipartisan issue.

"detaining those with suspicious travel patterns" is new

No it is not. The DEA has been doing that since at least the 2nd Bush admin and probably would've been under Clinton or Bush 1 had the tech existed at the time.

> this is a bipartisan issue

Where the instance upthread and your instance both occurred under the same president? lol

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