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If you have an IP-enabled security camera, you can download some free, open-source software from GitHub and boom—you have a fully functional automated license plate reader, reports ArsTechnica .
Matt Hill, OpenALPR's founder, told Ars technica "I'm a big privacy advocate... now you've got LPR just in the hands of the government, which isn't a good thing."
Will "they" like it when "we" have a crowdsourced database of where and when congressmen, judges and cops go throughout their work day?
Does this level the playing field? Open yet another can of worms? Both?
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Open Source License Plate Reader: Little Brother Strikes Back!
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The last time I saw him he was walking down Lover's Lane holding his own hand.
-- Fred Allen
(Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday December 06 2015, @10:41PM
if you want to make guns illegal, do that via the Constitutionally sanctioned process
Same result. When government has nothing to fear, tyranny just comes quicker.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Monday December 07 2015, @05:09AM
if you want to make guns illegal, do that via the Constitutionally sanctioned process
Same result. When government has nothing to fear, tyranny just comes quicker.
And what is it that you think government has to fear from civilian gun ownership?
Let's not even get into the armaments that the Federal government, or even state national guardsmen have.
In most locations, local cops have enough guns, armor and armored vehicles to take on just about anyone with even automatic weapons. And if they can't, there's the state and federal boys. If you think you can hold off the government with guns, you're lying to yourself and others, friend.
Because no one with half a brain (including those authoritarian gub'mint Joes) really believes that any civilian group can hold territory against them.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday December 07 2015, @06:30AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States_who_died_in_office [wikipedia.org]
Eventually there comes a tyrant so nasty that the Military will remember their oath.
Here, let me refresh your memory:
http://www.history.army.mil/html/faq/oaths.html [army.mil]
The wordings of the current oath of enlistment and oath for commissioned officers are as follows:
"I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God." (Title 10, US Code; Act of 5 May 1960 replacing the wording first adopted in 1789, with amendment effective 5 October 1962).
"I, _____ (SSAN), having been appointed an officer in the Army of the United States, as indicated above in the grade of _____ do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office upon which I am about to enter; So help me God." (DA Form 71, 1 August 1959, for officers.)
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Monday December 07 2015, @10:45AM
You miss my point rather completely, sir.
Which is that the government really doesn't care if you have your long guns and/or hand guns, or even some military style MP5s, AR-15s and the like.
Should we get to the point where we have a significant number of mutinous (for *whatever* reason) military personnel, the government may well have an issue. Especially since local and state guys will likely go off the reservation long before the regular military.
All that said, no one is going to take your precious gun(s) away Frojack. Just relax. Sleep with it tonight. Caress it lovingly and call it by name. It will help.
TFA isn't even about guns. It's about the ridiculous idea that we could somehow use crowdsourcing to "get back at" those who are spying on us.
In any case, we can try to limit the amount of mass surveillance being used against us. Personally, I think we should start with our town/county/city councils and convince those folks (you know, our neighbors) that cameras everywhere and license plate readers are useful in certain circumstances, but often just trample on our rights. Once we get some local legislation limiting the use of such stuff, as well as some sane retention and disclosure standards, we can move outward from there.
Fantasy is really powerful, and is pretty much always better than reality. That said, I recommend against raising a militia and storming the statehouse or the White House or mostly anywhere else. As your mother should have (and likely tried) taught you, "use your words, Frojack!"
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Monday December 07 2015, @02:08PM
People who argue against gun ownership in the United States often make the point you are, that even an AR-15 doesn't matter so much against a military that can drop daisy cutters (or whatever much more powerful armament). But you and they ought to pause and reflect how much difficulty the US military has had in defeating similarly armed adversaries in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Syria. And those are in places where most of the American military and public don't much care if you have to kill 100 innocent children to get 1 bad guy.
Now consider an American military that is tasked with suppressing a rebellious citizenry in its own country. Is a fighter pilot from Des Moines, Iowa really going to be willing to strafe his own neighborhood? What bomber crew will obey orders to carpet bomb suburban Philadelphia? Maybe some would, but not most. Given too many of those orders, and the images of American children lying dead and dismembered in the street because some asshole in Washington DC ordered it, and most American generals would turn those guns on the politicians and the bankers that control them in a hot hurry.
There are other considerations, too, like angry patriots seizing those bases and warehouses full of big, bad weapons and destroying lines of supply for that military and all the other things that go along with guerilla warfare, but you get the picture.
It does matter very much that American citizens have guns.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 07 2015, @03:10PM
If the soldiers and police had that much of a conscience why would you need guns to resist them?
Wouldn't killing unarmed people weigh more on your conscience than killing someone pointing a gun at you or your group/tribe members?
(Score: 2) by Tramii on Monday December 07 2015, @05:21PM
Because it's far far far easier to pressure people into arresting innocent civilians than it is to kill them. If the innocent and oppressed don't have weapons, you can use "less-than-lethal" weapons to arrest them. If you have a family locked in their house, you just bash in the front door. If instead they are armed with handguns and rifles, now it's not so simple. Now the cops have to decide if it's really worth murdering the whole family over a stupid/selfish/immoral law.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Tuesday December 08 2015, @12:43AM
You seem to think people will have an inate view of what's right. It won't work like that. The government knows propaganda -- they have to do it well to get into government in the first place, it's evolution, survival of the fittest.
The average american will believe what the government needs them to believe, which means that when the government comes for $GROUP the rest of the country will believe that's the right move. The government may even put up a show of being reluctant, just before they put 70,000 Americans in concentration camps.
How did an armed population go then when it came to defending the constitution?
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Monday December 07 2015, @08:53PM
I said:
Which is that the government really doesn't care if you have your long guns and/or hand guns, or even some military style MP5s, AR-15s and the like.
How you get from there to patriots storming government facilities is beyond me.
What's more, just off the top of my head, I came up with five places where the government suppressed armed citizenry without those folks' neighbors providing any support. Waco [wikipedia.org], Ruby Ridge [wikipedia.org], Attica [wikipedia.org], Watts [google.com] and Little Rock [wikipedia.org].
You can call people sheep or cowards or blind to the truth, but in fact, most folks in the United States (unlike places such as Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.) believe in our system of government.
Yes, our rights are being curtailed. Yes, our government representatives seem to be wallowing in filthy lucre from those who wish to twist our nation to its own ends. But at the end of the day, the vast majority of Americans believe in and support our constitutional republic.
As Churchill (at least it is most often attributed to him) succinctly put it, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others."
I'm not an apologist for government and corporate intrusions into our privacy, nor am I sanguine (see what I did there?) about the prospects for fixing things in the near term.
However, AFAICT we're very far away from any sort of widespread civil insurrection in the U.S. and aside from the epidemic of local/state police murdering unarmed people, the government isn't engaged in (despite the paranoid Jade Helm [wikipedia.org] fantasies) in using the military to suppress dissent or anything else in the U.S.
In fact, aside from the (I believe) unconstitutional "constitution free zones" around border crossings, ports and airports, the Posse Comitatus Act [wikipedia.org] is not being broken.
If you think I'm wrong, please provide me with some evidence. N.B., hysterical ramblings from the blogosphere or talk radio aren't evidence.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday December 08 2015, @05:56AM
Now consider an American military that is tasked with suppressing a rebellious citizenry in its own country. Is a fighter pilot from Des Moines, Iowa really going to be willing to strafe his own neighborhood? What bomber crew will obey orders to carpet bomb suburban Philadelphia? Maybe some would, but not most.
This.
Those that would, would quickly find themselves at the receiving end of incoming from soldiers that could actually REMEMBER their oath.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 07 2015, @03:06PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States_who_died_in_office
Eventually there comes a tyrant so nasty that the Military will remember their oath.
1) And how the fuck does people shooting presidents help? They still do shitty stuff and they already have term limits. If you think the real power would put up with stuff like "term limits" you're silly. The President is responsible for some stuff but much of the real power has moved elsewhere. Go look at who really is responsible for most of those laws and treaties.
2) Term limits are undemocratic and so is assassination of leaders.
3) The people in the USA don't seem to be so good at picking good leaders with their votes. Who really thinks they will do better picking good leaders with their guns?
4) If you pick your leaders by "most firepower" instead of "most votes" it gets quite hard to change the leader later on- since he would have the "most firepower" and by then he would have eliminated most of the major challengers already. That's why most violent revolutions lead to Dictatorships.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 07 2015, @03:13PM