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posted by martyb on Wednesday October 05 2016, @08:37AM   Printer-friendly
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.


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by butthurt on Wednesday October 05 2016, @06:47PM

    by butthurt (6141) on Wednesday October 05 2016, @06:47PM (#410761) Journal

    > By the same logic they could arbitrarily decide that there was probably an enviro-terrorist active inside the green party HQ and therefore target everyone that visits it.

    There was that whole COINTELPRO thing. In the 1980s there were reports about plate numbers being written down during meetings of leftist groups. A group called Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) was investigated.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CISPES#FBI_investigations [wikipedia.org]

    Here's a report about plate numbers being written down as part of that. Sorry for not having a more credible source:

    As a result of the FBI's operations, tens of thousands of names have been added to the bureau’s terrorism files- names of people whose only offense has been to write a letter in support of the nuclear freeze movement (which the FBI obtained by virtue of a mail intercept on the post office box of freeze organizers) or to attend a meeting of CISPES or other groups (where the FBI recorded and traced license plates and other information in order to identify activists)

    The FBI’s five year, nationwide investigation did not result in the arrest of a single activist for criminal or terrorist activities.

    -- http://thoughtcrimeradio.net/2014/10/cointelpro-in-the-80s-the-new-fbi/ [thoughtcrimeradio.net]

    Other groups, says another questionable source, were also investigated:

    The Committee of Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) and 200 other anti- Reagan groups also were targeted by the intelligence community. FBI Director William Sessions - - who eventually moved over to head the CIA -- denied that these operations were ordered by the Reagan White House or that they were politically motivated. When the General Accounting Office attempted to investigate CISPES, the FBI refused to allow the files to be reviewed. However, the GAO did obtain files on 18,144 FBI international terrorism cases between 1982 and 1988.

    -- http://www.angelfire.com/ca3/jphuck/Book16Ch.1.html [angelfire.com]

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