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The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has officially gained agency-wide access to a nationwide license plate recognition database, according to a contract finalized earlier this month. The system gives the agency access to billions of license plate records and new powers of real-time location tracking, raising significant concerns from civil libertarians.
For civil liberties groups, the implications go far beyond immigration. "There are people circulating in our society who are undocumented," says senior policy analyst Jay Stanley, who studies license plate readers with the ACLU. "Are we as a society, out of our desire to find those people, willing to let our government create an infrastructure that will track all of us?"
Meanwhile, countermeasures are already deployed, and obfuscated:
Known as "Bienvenidos," the Spanish word for "Welcome," the app purports to help navigate the treacherous U.S.-Mexico border by alerting users to a range of obstacles and threats.
The anonymous creators of Bienvenidos attempted to pitch their app this month to numerous media outlets before suddenly reversing their announcement. A YouTube video explaining the technology was inexplicably deleted while the Bienvenidos website became password-protected.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday January 28 2018, @01:50AM (4 children)
I don't exactly know what's that I-10 you are taking about, but in any case drones are cheaper.
I suggest you look for them in the budget of your local police [recode.net]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 28 2018, @02:06AM (1 child)
Predator and Reaper drones cost about $2,500-3,500 per flight hour; larger armed systems such as the military’s Global Hawk cost about 10 times as much: approximately $30,000 per flight hour. (source [fcnl.org])
That doesn't sound very cost-effective. I doubt they're cheap to acquire and house, either. I doubt even more that Americans would be thrilled to know that their government is OK with local cops targeting highway-driving citizens with the same hardware that the feds use to murder citizens and civilians when they're outside the country's borders.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday January 28 2018, @02:33AM
Then try DJI drones - about 30 minutes of flight on a battery charge. For the cost of 1h Predator time, you can buy two drones.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday January 28 2018, @05:19AM (1 child)
I-10 is the highway that runs from Florida to Southern California.
The U.S. military contracts with commercial air carriers to make their planes structurally capable of moving materiel (like Humvees, Tanks, etc.) in "times of need." Since we've been in a "War On TERROR" for 15+ years now, why wouldn't they also just attach a stabilized camera to the belly of those same commercial planes that fly coast to coast every 20 minutes, every day? Cheaper than launching satellites, which they also do...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 28 2018, @06:50AM
Clouds? Limited camera resolution?