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It's not that I disagree, but police looking up protestors license plates in order to trigger a "law enforcement looked you up" email is one hell of an intimidation tactic

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Welp, glad I posted this, because that's an extremely good point. Will have to think about this more. It kind of reminds me of how the reddit self harm notification system was abused. Maybe it can be an opt in type of system, or even based on some threshold. I wonder though, if I were a protestor, and that lookup happened more some expected number of times, it could be important to know.

In my experience there's almost always a way in which things like this can be abused, which is why I lean more towards it being made illegal altogether and accepting the cost of not having mass surveillance. I am yet to find a way in which its not a large can of worms no matter what you do.

But if prohibiting mass surveillance is not an option, the second best thing would be good checks that make sure tools like this can't be used in silence.

The trigger email should obviously go to somebody with more power than a police officer (so that the fear of getting asked ugly questions might slightly intimidate the police officer). Not sure who exactly that somebody would be.

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