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from the use-virtual-reality,-instead? dept.
Federal agents have persuaded police officers to scan license plates to gather information about gun-show customers, government emails show, raising questions about how officials monitor constitutionally protected activity.
Emails reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show agents with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency crafted a plan in 2010 to use license-plate readers—devices that record the plate numbers of all passing cars—at gun shows in Southern California, including one in Del Mar, not far from the Mexican border.
Agents then compared that information to cars that crossed the border, hoping to find gun smugglers, according to the documents and interviews with law-enforcement officials with knowledge of the operation.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/gun-show-customers-license-plates-come-under-scrutiny-1475451302
First they came for the Muslims, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Muslim.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 05 2016, @01:40PM
So there used to be an expectation of a good probability of privacy even in public places, but with new technologies, this is fading fast.
This was ensured because folks would not vote for a big enough govt to have staff to watch many given the technology of the time.
The question is if a lack of expectation of privacy due to the new technology should be used to justify using the new technology.
The argument that power corrupts the good guys says that this circular argument is a bad idea.
But not allowing the new technology handicaps law enforcement in the face of bad guys enabled by technology.
Perhaps the answer is to separate the gathering of information from searching or using it.
First something bad has to happen,
Then a very limited search of gathered information is permitted to sort out what happened.
Given the invasiveness of this search, the 'badness' of the act should control how extensive the search is.
This coupled with limiting the time that the information is stored and public disclosure of the searches after time might be a useful compromise.
The problem is how to you build a system that can be trusted to do only this?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 05 2016, @02:16PM
> Perhaps the answer is to separate the gathering of information from searching or using it.
That's a modern sword of Damocles for ordinary citizens. If the information is there, it will eventually be abused because that's human nature. We've seen exactly that scenario play out where anti-terrorism investigative powers are constantly being expanded for non-terrorist investigations to the point of frivolity even, like getting involved in protecting a Harry Potter book from leaking before release. [bbc.com]
There are only two ways to stop abuse of information: (1) don't collect it or, less effectively (2) make searching it a high-effort task, e.g. all security cameras only store their records locally on-site with the camera and are not networked, so if you want footage you have to hoof to each camera and manually copy the recording. Laws of mean can be changed and violated at will, laws of physics can not.