My local town runs their own license plate readers for red light and speed cameras. Not sure how the feds could get access to those.
masfuerte•May 18, 2026
By offering money?
giantg2•May 18, 2026
Or withholding money (grants).
chaps•May 18, 2026
Presumably it's a system that can be viewed from a phone or from dispatch remotely right? All they'd have to do is share the credentials and that's that.
testplzignore•May 18, 2026
The NSA would presumably have all of this.
From a taxpayer perspective, it's such a waste to have multiple agencies doing their own unconstitutional surveillance. Why have two Ministries of Love when one would do? :)
irishcoffee•May 18, 2026
This is the purview of the FBI. The NSA is focused on the rest of the world.
Is there overlap? Sure. But the amount of disinformation on the website about the FBI vs the NSA is comical. If anything, when people say “NSA” they really mean “CIA” and just don’t understand the difference.
cucumber3732842•May 18, 2026
>The NSA is focused on the rest of the world.
In the same way that the CIA doesn't sell cocaine.
I'm sure they "mostly" focus externally but that doesn't mean they're not still doing a hell of a lot domestically.
convolvatron•May 18, 2026
recently there has been some football and stopgap in congress about reauthorizing the patriot act permissions for the NSA to collect any communications where one endpoint is out of the country. so that's at least widely recognized and 'legal'
irishcoffee•May 18, 2026
I covered this with: "Is there overlap? Sure."
The FBI is the boogeyman everyone around these parts wants the NSA to be. The NSA has the skillset, they just don't use it like that, domestically.
That was my point. Carry on. I don't mind if you agree or not.
joquarky•May 18, 2026
> The NSA has the skillset, they just don't use it like that, domestically.
That seems like a statement that needs backed up by sources.
irishcoffee•May 18, 2026
Fat chance. I don’t care if you believe me. I’m not lying to you.
mothballed•May 18, 2026
I believe you but this seems far more like HSI territory, who are comfortable, able, and excessively willing to overstep rights of both citizens and foreigners. They're also an underestimated agency that IIRC is larger than the FBI.
dayofthedaleks•May 18, 2026
It already goes to your local DHS Fusion Center.
asdff•May 18, 2026
These have funny loopholes usually. For our county they have a few connected to running the red light for a busway. But notoriously the information is collected by some company out of state with no actual policing power, who then begs you to pay the ticket with a letter every couple months. You can actually ignore this if you avoid any sign of life that indicates you might have received the ticket, such as looking it up on the county ticket portal. They don't serve you or send it via certified mail. The county courts motioned years ago that they aren't enforcing these tickets. They don't affect your ability to renew your license, register your car, or insurance rates. They don't come up when you get pulled over for anything else. It is basically a scam to support the traffic ticket company out of state hoping you pay them and sustain their business model.
jamiek88•May 18, 2026
Except current immigration enforcement. Ignoring that is enough to have citizenship denied. Just happened to a friend of mine in Houston. Culture is to ignore, courts ignore, police don’t see it. USCIS do.
baggachipz•May 18, 2026
I had already assumed that they were using Flock data for exactly this. I guess paying to speed the nationwide rollout makes it official and will free them from pesky courts and human rights.
delichon•May 18, 2026
It's not that they don't have access but that they don't have legal access that they can use as leverage. Parallel construction is a pain in the ass. They're buying the right to use it in court.
goolz•May 18, 2026
Exactly. It is not that they are not already spying on all of us; they are. Or that they cannot already nail you for something. It is that they need a way to launder their evidence so that it is kosher come prosecution.
scholarnet-AI•May 18, 2026
I believe technology is great but we must regulate to assure personal privacy is maintained.
cute_boi•May 18, 2026
I think we can’t easily choose both, because these agencies will portray it as something they need in order to help children.
bpoyner•May 18, 2026
They'll also need it to track down terrorists. And who determines who is a terrorist? Why, the department of justice does.
nazgulsenpai•May 18, 2026
I don't think regulators (government) protecting the people from the FBI (government) is going to work out.
asdff•May 18, 2026
In socal people might not even use license plates at all. Some people mask them with a towel or something like that. Some run paper dealership plates which I guess don't need to have any license number on them at all, just the dealer logo. Others just take them off and drive. I've seen plates that were sanded clean and with different numbers stuck on them that don't match then indented numbers.
And then of course all the texas plates. No, it isn't just visitors from texas. Texas has a cool loophole where there is no registration information on the plate, it is on a little sticker on the dashboard. As such, there are a dozen plus cars that have been regulars in my neighborhood for years with texas plates, with some several years old sticker on their dashboard.
It is kind of surprising that they don't get hit with a huge ticket for failing to register their car after 20 days. Some even park on the street quite brazenly. But maybe that shows how these systems are, today at least, very poorly connected between states. I've even seen a car being sold locally where the owner openly admits it was never registered or smogged, and they used it as their local neighborhood runabout just rolling the dice that they would not get pulled over. Just an aspect of the driving culture.
giobox•May 18, 2026
> Some run paper dealership plates which I guess don't need to have any license number on them at all, just the dealer logo
In California, isn't this just a normal person buying a new car? If bought from a dealership lot, a new car will run on temporary paper plates for several weeks until the permanent registration and new plate is processed. You see this all the time in CA, because CA buys a lot of new cars. There are even circumstances a used car will roll of the dealer lot with paper plates pending processing.
asdff•May 18, 2026
You can tell when it isn't a normal person buying a new car when it is your neighbor's car you see for multiple years with those "temporary" tags. I catch a lot of out of date registration too. Usually those cars are parked off street but sometimes not. I usually see about two dozen on my walks. Easy to tell at a glance when you recognize what color tag is now very stale.
bagels•May 18, 2026
That isn't how it works anymore, as far as I know (it used to). The dealerships now can print paper license plates with numbers on them.
jerlam•May 18, 2026
Yup, I recently bought a car and you get temporary numbers that are associated with the dealer (who knows who you are and what car you have) until your actual plate with real numbers and registration comes from the DMV.
everdrive•May 18, 2026
Sometimes, yes, but some groups of people just run with temporary tags for a very long time and roll the dice.
acdha•May 18, 2026
There are groups on Facebook Marketplace selling fakes. They used to have those Texas dealer plates but I believe the Texas authorities finally stopped procrastinating on doing something about that.
It used to be easy to search for terms like “tires” and find what were clearly counterfeiting rings.
dfxm12•May 18, 2026
Car culture sucks, but on the other hand, I'm kinda glad we don't live in such a police state that we got people going out of their way looking over our shoulders at this level of detail.
Although, this does get enforced in some places, at least. I remember on Parking Wars, PPA ticketed or maybe impounded a car that had an out of state expired registration.
asdff•May 18, 2026
Well, it directly leads to registration fees and insurance rates being higher than they would normally with everyone paying in properly. There's also air quality concerns with people not going for smog checks. So people not playing that game are getting hurt by the people who do.
jerlam•May 18, 2026
Having laws that only some people follow, and others do not without penalty, bothers everyone's natural sense of fairness and eventually rots the whole concept of following laws.
dfxm12•May 18, 2026
We have a lowering trust society for many reasons. I don't doubt it plays a role, but I'm sure this is low on the list of contributing factors. The required deployment of LEO to our communities to enforce this as suggested would lower trust further. There are many more impactful ways to raise trust, and most of them involve addressing the corruption of those in power.
cucumber3732842•May 18, 2026
>natural sense of fairness
This sets off my spidey senses in the same way that "social contract", "law abiding citizen" and other turns of phrase like that do.
>Having laws that only some people follow
It's not like these people are all part of the system and protected from consequences. They're just saying fuggit consequences be damned. Be happy that some have the balls to tell the system to shove it. You can choose to be one of them any time you want.
mothballed•May 18, 2026
There's a certain kind of person cops don't like to deal with unless it's going to get them a nice promotional-tier felony arrest. Not a lot of people looking to wrestle with a gang banger over a registration ticket. If you look like a functional member of society though they'll ruthlessly enforce whatever money they can get out of you.
cucumber3732842•May 19, 2026
Anyone can buy a Chrysler 300 and pay the local detailing shop to limo tint it. There's nothing stopping you from looking like a tough nut to crack.
Regardless, the cops harass the shit out of people who "look sketchy" because your bullshit license plate or whatever pretext is what gets you the foot in the door to the felony BS.
jkestner•May 18, 2026
Note that Flock says it can identify a car by physical characteristics from dents to bumper stickers.
cucumber3732842•May 18, 2026
Having worked with the result of prior generations (circa 2010) of algorithms for that sort of thing in the radar spectrum (I was not privy to the actual algorithms that underpinned it all) I suspect accuracy drops off exponentially once you get away from text based stuff and flagrant body differences (missing mirror, aftermarket spoiler, etc).
FireBeyond•May 18, 2026
Absolutely they can. Vehicle panel colors, wheel rims, roofrack, tow hitch, bumper stickers, damage all factor into their vehicle fingerprinting.
And once they've got a real license plate for the vehicle, all the historical information for that vehicle fingerprint's activities are now linked.
pizzly•May 18, 2026
You properly could identify cars uniquely by the sound they make. If not now then soon.
ranon•May 19, 2026
My dog could do this 10 years ago. 2 miles away through the canyon she knew exactly who would be showing up in 10 minutes. And it's a popular canyon.
themafia•May 19, 2026
Note that Flock has incorrectly identified several vehicles as "suspects" to police during investigations.
Flock has two obligations. Sell equipment to police. Avoid freaking the public out.
Their statements are almost certainly not reliable.
dawnerd•May 18, 2026
I drive in socal a lot and I rarely see a car without a visible plate.
NoMoreNicksLeft•May 18, 2026
Does anyone sell am eInk display that's 12"x6"? Doesn't have to be color, though bonus points for that...
Nah, I was thinking a raw eInk panel. Not one controlled by the state. One that can flip the numbers for 2 seconds, while driving past the surveillance cameras but be back on my real license plate number immediately just in case there are any cops watching. Hell, I could even run recognition against the rear dash cam, so that it overrides a flip if there are recognizable cop cars within view. Could be fun.
hdgvhicv•May 18, 2026
James Bond had a solution for this decades ago
kylehotchkiss•May 18, 2026
I equate these license plates with terrible money management skills. $900 for a license plate: "a fool and his money are soon parted" regardless of what income bracket they're in
__MatrixMan__•May 18, 2026
Installing a license plate flipper, digital or mechanical, is likely more illegal than just putting bags over the readers.
It's probably never going to happen because neither party cares about protecting Americans rights, but we need to have some sort of law that creates a Chinese firewall between these mass surveillance data and the government, or whoever else.
I don't know if you could ever collect this data and never have foreign entities or NSA moles infiltrate into it by sending their agents to work at that company and steal the data whenever they want. But I can see how this would be good at fighting crime but also a completely and absolute destruction of privacy.
We need politicians that actually care about Americans and their rights but no one who cares is dumb enough to want to go into politics, which is the sad thing.
wmf•May 18, 2026
Just don't collect the data. If it's too dangerous for the government to have then private companies shouldn't have it either. The entire purpose of license plate readers is to assist law enforcement; if we decide as a society that we don't want to do it then just ban it completely.
baby_souffle•May 18, 2026
You can't realistically ban cameras and character recognition software.
wl•May 18, 2026
It’d be hard to keep individuals from doing this. But individuals aren’t running networks of cameras. Companies are. Those companies probably couldn’t fly under the radar selling LPR data if the practice was banned.
pictureofabear•May 18, 2026
You can ban what’s done with the software/hardware, just as we ban assault with a deadly weapon.
MaKey•May 18, 2026
You can make it illegal to use private cameras for surveillance of public spaces. In Europe this is already the case.
pigeons•May 18, 2026
You can ban certain ways of using them, and enforce it and serve punishment for violation.
ipaddr•May 19, 2026
You can ban pictures with certain content.
mothballed•May 19, 2026
There is little chance I could just post up cameras wherever my ex travels and note all the time she arrives and leaves at all intersections and get away with that without at least a restraining order ordering me to stop. What they are actually doing is stalking by method of a network of cameras deliberately installed to follow people from place to place. It isn't generalized observation in pursuit of speech, it arguably isn't even speech, but rather mass individualized stalking. Maybe 1A allows that but that doesn't seem to be the law on the books for anyone else trying to stalk people in such a way.
Personally I don't have a huge problem with 1A being broad enough to including recording literally everything in public and meticulously cataloging and following everyone, but only if the rest of the amendments are read in the same broad and literal manner. Meaning I can own nukes, I don't have to display a plate, the 10th amendment would stop the feds from outlawing intrastate weed, etc. What it looks like what happens is the feds cherry pick interpretations of the bill of rights to trump up their powers and then give the least charitable interpretations to the plebs.
analog31•May 19, 2026
You can ban possession of the data if you attach statutory damages per infraction.
You can ban the commercialization and mass scaling of the technology. Just because you can't prevent something at a small scale doesn't mean you can't prevent corporations and government agencies from doing it without exposing themselves to unacceptable legal risk.
themafia•May 19, 2026
> The entire purpose of license plate readers is to assist law enforcement
It was the repossession companies that deployed them first. The police, as a general rule, are about 10 years behind on technology almost everywhere, so when new stuff drops, it's actually profit driven industries that deploy it.
Our company cut deals with several large business in the area, like malls, and we deployed the cameras at the entrances to their lots. If a car on the "hot list" pulled in, we'd get an alert, then dispatch a truck to go collect the vehicle.
coliveira•May 19, 2026
It is the government that wants these companies to do this, so they can get access to the data!
wmf•May 19, 2026
I would say Congress is not the FBI but I guess that's no longer true.
hdgvhicv•May 18, 2026
Only america can think there no harm in mass collection of data, and actively is against any attempts to limit it (gdpr for example) because it’s “anti growth”
hedora•May 19, 2026
The Swiss are, if anything, worse. They passed a mass surveillance law, it was challenged at referendum, and upheld with 70% of the vote:
"The Great Firewall (GFW; simplified Chinese: 防火长城; traditional Chinese: 防火長城; pinyin: Fánghuǒ Chángchéng) is the combination of legislative actions and technologies enforced by the People's Republic of China to regulate the Internet domestically" [1].
They’re called ethical walls now, for obvious reasons (although the room is still Chinese, for whatever distinction).
tessierashpool•May 19, 2026
but we need to have some sort of law that creates a Chinese firewall between these mass surveillance data and the government
technically we have one, the Fourth Amendment, but SCOTUS defanged it completely, years ago.
SilverElfin•May 19, 2026
The government should not be allowed to violate civil rights by outsourcing the harm to private industry
LocalH•May 18, 2026
If they do, doesn't that make the companies running those readers agents of the state during the collaboration?
charcircuit•May 18, 2026
This information can be critical for understanding the movement of vehicles and can benefit law enforcement giving them more evidence and knowledge to work off of. As long as these systems are accurate and not being maliciously tampered with it keeps everyone accountable to their actions.
__MatrixMan__•May 18, 2026
Corrupt government officials use this data to kidnap people. Not criminals, just people they don't like. Do you really think that's worth tolerating just because it'll help us catch more actual criminals?
Dibby053•May 19, 2026
Helping solve kidnapping cases is a direct and straightforward application of vehicle intelligence data.
charcircuit•May 19, 2026
Yes, I think it's worth tolerating and I think all queries should be logged and monitored for abuse. Kidnapping already is not legal to do.
Zigurd•May 18, 2026
Not that it will help for long distance travel, but if I was running strategy for the big E-bike cartel, I couldn't think of a better meme to promote than the surveillance state getting a chubby about ALPRs.
Seriously, though, I think the Karens out there want E-bike licensed just so cops can keep hassling brown people even when they're not driving clapped out old Toyotas.
dawnerd•May 18, 2026
ALPRs, from Flock in particular, track more than license plates. They've installed Flock cameras on pedestrian paths even.
psadauskas•May 18, 2026
This will never change until we pass laws that make personal data a liability instead of an asset.
mothballed•May 18, 2026
How about a law that says your documents, like your car registration number on a plate, doesn't have to be displayed except in case of reasonable articulable suspicion a crime has been committed. We could call it, the 4th amendment.
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS•May 18, 2026
Your plate is displayed because driving is a privilege, not a right (note that traveling is a right, but you can travel without driving).
So your plate is really the proof that you've paid a bit for the infrastructure to drive on.
It's like having a wrist band to an event. You're not required to attend the event, but if you do attend it, you're required to wear the wrist band.
mothballed•May 18, 2026
>Your plate is displayed because driving is a privilege, not a right (note that traveling is a right, but you can travel without driving).
But the 4th amendment is a right, that applies even when engaging in a "privilege." See also the fact police can't just willy nilly check your driver license while engaging in a "privilege."
>So your plate is really the proof that you've paid a bit for the infrastructure to drive on.
False.
Plates are required even on my own privately owned publicly accessible road, and a large portion of my trips happen on publicly available but 100% privately owned roads with 0 taxes to maintain them (in fact, I maintain a lot of the roads in my community myself because they are all private). In fact some of those roads, I 100% own and maintain, and yet since I legally can't bar anyone from driving on it the law in my state (AZ) requires a displayed plate (even for me).
>It's like having a wrist band to an event. You're not required to attend the event, but if you do attend it, you're required to wear the wrist band.
It's like citing me for not having a wrist band on my own owned road easement, which is the law in my state. There is no property right you are attempting to assert under which that makes sense. I can go about 90% of the way to "town" on privately owned roads in which none of the owners care if I have a "wrist band" yet the state can still cite me for not having it.
brewdad•May 19, 2026
The fact that the road is legally accessible to the public makes it a public road for the sake of this discussion. You must have a license plate to drive on a public road. It really isn’t any more complicated than that.
It doesn’t matter whether the road in front of my house is owned by the federal government, state, county, city, or Bob, I and everyone else is allowed to drive on it, so it’s a public road.
themafia•May 19, 2026
> driving is a privilege
Yet you can have a license without owning a car. They don't issue you a plate to use. So the plate is clearly for something else, mainly I think, to indicate that you've paid the appropriate registration fees on the vehicle. The plates are tied to a vehicle to prevent the obvious "plate swapping" attack that people would use against this regime.
> roof that you've paid a bit for the infrastructure
Actually those are gas and sales taxes, are they not?
> you're required to wear the wrist band.
The wrist band need not have a unique identifier readable from several feet away emblazoned on it in order to function.
xboxnolifes•May 19, 2026
In the US, driving is a hard sell to call a privilege. It's basically a necessity. When society is designed around the assumption of getting around by car, it's no longer a privilege.
Also,
> So your plate is really the proof that you've paid a bit for the infrastructure to drive on.
You paid for a bit of the infrastructure being driven on just by being a tax payer.
janalsncm•May 19, 2026
Sure, but for decades the license plate was an implicit social contract of functional pseudonymity: a random string of characters that for almost everyone on a day to day basis meant the government wasn’t tracking your whereabouts but could identify you if they really wanted to (at a stop).
So what people are really reacting to is the government using technical means to change the terms of that social contract without our input.
Same thing with Flock. People do the whole civic engagement thing and cities still sign contracts anyways.
A lot of people wouldn’t even be opposed if the whole thing was on a ballot measure. It becomes a problem when the government decides they no longer need consent of the governed.
hsuduebc2•May 19, 2026
Car is a neccesity in this country.
US is certainly not known for it's public transportation and walkable cities.
janalsncm•May 19, 2026
I’ll throw you an olive branch and say the registration sticker is completely pointless. The source of truth for whether my car is registered is in a database, not on a sticker. Someone can steal your sticker which results in a false positive for the thief and a false negative (and huge headache) for the victim.
vjvjvjvjghv•May 19, 2026
They will find something else to track you by. I think the idea of no expectation of privacy in public doesn't work anymore with the available tech.
martinbfine•May 18, 2026
Another AI click bait article. Fake news. And a conspiracy theory.
darkstar999•May 18, 2026
If you make a claim like that you should back it up in some way.
foofyter•May 19, 2026
They already know where you are.
tintor•May 19, 2026
How about digital license plates?
That change the code displayed daily.
Not unlike authenticator phone apps.
Police can still use them to identify the vehicle, and verify registration, but mass surveillance and repo companies can't use them to track vehicles for more than a day OR to identify vehicles.
rationalist•May 19, 2026
Flock uses other vehicle characteristics to track vehicles: bumper stickers, dents, etc.
vjvjvjvjghv•May 19, 2026
People are usually afraid of government surveillance but I suspected already a long time ago that all the data that's being collected by private firms will eventually be used by government and companies. Basically we have been building and continue building an infrastructure that Hitler or Stalin would have been envious of. And as we have seen in the last year, companies will fall in line quickly with whoever is in power as long as the profits keep flowing.
The only solution I see is to stop massive data collection no matter who does it. This is probably not going to happen so we will most likely end up with a surveillance society much worse than what "1984" described. And some day an authoritarian will use the data to its full extent.
goshx•May 19, 2026
What are the odds of Elon already providing this kind of service through Teslas?
14 Comments
From a taxpayer perspective, it's such a waste to have multiple agencies doing their own unconstitutional surveillance. Why have two Ministries of Love when one would do? :)
Is there overlap? Sure. But the amount of disinformation on the website about the FBI vs the NSA is comical. If anything, when people say “NSA” they really mean “CIA” and just don’t understand the difference.
In the same way that the CIA doesn't sell cocaine.
I'm sure they "mostly" focus externally but that doesn't mean they're not still doing a hell of a lot domestically.
The FBI is the boogeyman everyone around these parts wants the NSA to be. The NSA has the skillset, they just don't use it like that, domestically.
That was my point. Carry on. I don't mind if you agree or not.
That seems like a statement that needs backed up by sources.
And then of course all the texas plates. No, it isn't just visitors from texas. Texas has a cool loophole where there is no registration information on the plate, it is on a little sticker on the dashboard. As such, there are a dozen plus cars that have been regulars in my neighborhood for years with texas plates, with some several years old sticker on their dashboard.
It is kind of surprising that they don't get hit with a huge ticket for failing to register their car after 20 days. Some even park on the street quite brazenly. But maybe that shows how these systems are, today at least, very poorly connected between states. I've even seen a car being sold locally where the owner openly admits it was never registered or smogged, and they used it as their local neighborhood runabout just rolling the dice that they would not get pulled over. Just an aspect of the driving culture.
In California, isn't this just a normal person buying a new car? If bought from a dealership lot, a new car will run on temporary paper plates for several weeks until the permanent registration and new plate is processed. You see this all the time in CA, because CA buys a lot of new cars. There are even circumstances a used car will roll of the dealer lot with paper plates pending processing.
It used to be easy to search for terms like “tires” and find what were clearly counterfeiting rings.
Although, this does get enforced in some places, at least. I remember on Parking Wars, PPA ticketed or maybe impounded a car that had an out of state expired registration.
This sets off my spidey senses in the same way that "social contract", "law abiding citizen" and other turns of phrase like that do.
>Having laws that only some people follow
It's not like these people are all part of the system and protected from consequences. They're just saying fuggit consequences be damned. Be happy that some have the balls to tell the system to shove it. You can choose to be one of them any time you want.
Regardless, the cops harass the shit out of people who "look sketchy" because your bullshit license plate or whatever pretext is what gets you the foot in the door to the felony BS.
And once they've got a real license plate for the vehicle, all the historical information for that vehicle fingerprint's activities are now linked.
Flock has two obligations. Sell equipment to police. Avoid freaking the public out.
Their statements are almost certainly not reliable.
Source: https://legalclarity.org/are-license-plate-flipper-devices-i...
I don't know if you could ever collect this data and never have foreign entities or NSA moles infiltrate into it by sending their agents to work at that company and steal the data whenever they want. But I can see how this would be good at fighting crime but also a completely and absolute destruction of privacy.
We need politicians that actually care about Americans and their rights but no one who cares is dumb enough to want to go into politics, which is the sad thing.
Personally I don't have a huge problem with 1A being broad enough to including recording literally everything in public and meticulously cataloging and following everyone, but only if the rest of the amendments are read in the same broad and literal manner. Meaning I can own nukes, I don't have to display a plate, the 10th amendment would stop the feds from outlawing intrastate weed, etc. What it looks like what happens is the feds cherry pick interpretations of the bill of rights to trump up their powers and then give the least charitable interpretations to the plebs.
https://gc.nh.gov/rsa/html/XXI/261/261-75-b.htm
It was the repossession companies that deployed them first. The police, as a general rule, are about 10 years behind on technology almost everywhere, so when new stuff drops, it's actually profit driven industries that deploy it.
Our company cut deals with several large business in the area, like malls, and we deployed the cameras at the entrances to their lots. If a car on the "hot list" pulled in, we'd get an alert, then dispatch a truck to go collect the vehicle.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/25/switzerland-vo...
"The Great Firewall (GFW; simplified Chinese: 防火长城; traditional Chinese: 防火長城; pinyin: Fánghuǒ Chángchéng) is the combination of legislative actions and technologies enforced by the People's Republic of China to regulate the Internet domestically" [1].
(I don't think they mean a Chinese wall [2].)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_wall#Alternative_terms
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_wall
technically we have one, the Fourth Amendment, but SCOTUS defanged it completely, years ago.
Seriously, though, I think the Karens out there want E-bike licensed just so cops can keep hassling brown people even when they're not driving clapped out old Toyotas.
So your plate is really the proof that you've paid a bit for the infrastructure to drive on.
It's like having a wrist band to an event. You're not required to attend the event, but if you do attend it, you're required to wear the wrist band.
But the 4th amendment is a right, that applies even when engaging in a "privilege." See also the fact police can't just willy nilly check your driver license while engaging in a "privilege."
>So your plate is really the proof that you've paid a bit for the infrastructure to drive on.
False.
Plates are required even on my own privately owned publicly accessible road, and a large portion of my trips happen on publicly available but 100% privately owned roads with 0 taxes to maintain them (in fact, I maintain a lot of the roads in my community myself because they are all private). In fact some of those roads, I 100% own and maintain, and yet since I legally can't bar anyone from driving on it the law in my state (AZ) requires a displayed plate (even for me).
>It's like having a wrist band to an event. You're not required to attend the event, but if you do attend it, you're required to wear the wrist band.
It's like citing me for not having a wrist band on my own owned road easement, which is the law in my state. There is no property right you are attempting to assert under which that makes sense. I can go about 90% of the way to "town" on privately owned roads in which none of the owners care if I have a "wrist band" yet the state can still cite me for not having it.
It doesn’t matter whether the road in front of my house is owned by the federal government, state, county, city, or Bob, I and everyone else is allowed to drive on it, so it’s a public road.
Yet you can have a license without owning a car. They don't issue you a plate to use. So the plate is clearly for something else, mainly I think, to indicate that you've paid the appropriate registration fees on the vehicle. The plates are tied to a vehicle to prevent the obvious "plate swapping" attack that people would use against this regime.
> roof that you've paid a bit for the infrastructure
Actually those are gas and sales taxes, are they not?
> you're required to wear the wrist band.
The wrist band need not have a unique identifier readable from several feet away emblazoned on it in order to function.
Also,
> So your plate is really the proof that you've paid a bit for the infrastructure to drive on.
You paid for a bit of the infrastructure being driven on just by being a tax payer.
So what people are really reacting to is the government using technical means to change the terms of that social contract without our input.
Same thing with Flock. People do the whole civic engagement thing and cities still sign contracts anyways.
A lot of people wouldn’t even be opposed if the whole thing was on a ballot measure. It becomes a problem when the government decides they no longer need consent of the governed.
US is certainly not known for it's public transportation and walkable cities.
Police can still use them to identify the vehicle, and verify registration, but mass surveillance and repo companies can't use them to track vehicles for more than a day OR to identify vehicles.
The only solution I see is to stop massive data collection no matter who does it. This is probably not going to happen so we will most likely end up with a surveillance society much worse than what "1984" described. And some day an authoritarian will use the data to its full extent.