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Comment by righthand | Hacker News Reader

Spying on people is a violation of plenty of amendments. Illegal immigration is a misdemeanor not a felony. Stop treating the law as a binary illegal or not. It just leads to brain dead interpretations of the law. There is plenty of “illegal” things people do every day and yet we don’t install public dragnet cameras to stop it. Illegal immigration hasn’t shown any real harm to people that regular citizens don’t also take part in. Immigration has just been used to rile you up because you can scream “illegal illegal illegal” a bunch of times without reading the 14th amendment and understand that you can’t have a country of rights if you don’t extend those rights to non-citizens within your borders.

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> Illegal immigration is a misdemeanor not a felony.

My understanding is that entering without getting inspected is misdemeanor (or felony in some cases), but that's often not the case. Usually people just overstay and that's civil case. And because it's treated as a civil matter a lot constitutional protections do not apply (to clarify: some still do).

Viz: any public comment session on any proposal to add speed cameras to any American city.

So assuming you drive, when a police car gets really inappropriately close behind you for a couple minutes and then backs off, then they are probably using their eyes to look at your license plate and having someone run that or texting while driving to do that on the computer in the car. I don’t think there is a fundamental difference between this process and using a camera other than a camera doesn’t expect you to give it a pension.

The cops actions are vetted and have responsible party attached. The camera is used to bypass responsibility of bad actors entirely. Infact the camera is used to enable bad actors instead of catching bad actors. Huge difference in my opinion but okay just shrug your shoulders and claim there’s no difference.

And, crucially, cops are expensive, so the percentage of drivers they can do this to is low.

Whereas a stationary camera can scan the license plates of ~100% of cars that go past it and save that data for later fishing expeditions. And is cheap enough that we can (and have) blanketed roads with them.

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