DEA Cameras Tracking Hundreds of Millions of Car Journeys Across the US 152
itwbennett writes: A U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration program set up in 2008 to keep tabs on cars close to the U.S.-Mexican border has been gradually expanded nationwide and is regularly used by other law enforcement agencies in their hunt for suspects. The extent of the system, which is said to contain hundreds of millions of records on motorists and their journeys, was disclosed in documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union as part of a Freedom of Information Act request.
Cam-tastic (Score:5, Insightful)
As a Brit, I'll feel right at home in the US now.
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Re:Cam-tastic (Score:5, Funny)
Just suck it up, citizen. Think of the careers of all those DEA and other law enforcement agents! You wouldn't dare destroy those jobs, now would you?
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Re:Cam-tastic (Score:5, Insightful)
Just suck it up, citizen. Think of the careers of all those DEA and other law enforcement agents! You wouldn't dare destroy those jobs, now would you?
On the opposite end of the spectrum, they're suppressing the creation of jobs and an entire industry by maintaining a bullshit stance and justification for exiting positions.
DEA you want to stop heroin and meth labs? Have at it, but for fucks sake stop spending billions fighting a goddamn plant.
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Like it or not, the DEA is doing the job they're supposed to do. If you want them to do what you said, then get the laws changed.
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Just suck it up, citizen. Think of the careers of all those DEA and other law enforcement agents! You wouldn't dare destroy those jobs, now would you?
On the opposite end of the spectrum, they're suppressing the creation of jobs and an entire industry by maintaining a bullshit stance and justification for exiting positions.
DEA you want to stop heroin and meth labs? Have at it, but for fucks sake stop spending billions fighting a goddamn plant.
Then hurry up and vote it into legality, ffs. You act as if the DEA made the laws they are tasked with enforcing.
Re:Cam-tastic (Score:5, Informative)
One state at a time. Once all states (or at least a majority) have it legal, then the feds will have to either re-evaluate, or double-down on their stance. Considering that the foundation for the relevant laws are tenuous at best, they'll become pretty much useless anyway.
(I live in Oregon... come July, it'll be perfectly legal here. It's already legal for all uses just over the river in Washington. I don't partake, and haven't for 23 years; OTOH, my wife has a medical license, and it works far better for her than the Oxycodone did. After seeing the improvements it's made in her life, well, the DEA can go fuck itself.)
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Is Oregon also outlawing pre-employment drug screening for THC?
Doesn't matter - she doesn't work, I do.
Re:Cam-tastic (Score:4, Insightful)
But they don't have to break the spirit of the laws against unreasonable search and seizure, they shouldn't profile, and they shouldn't selectively enforce (HSBC money-laundered drug money, they were slapped on the wrist).
I'm reminded of the Dave Chappelle sketch about what would happen if drug dealers were treated like Wall Street criminals. Tron, testifying before Congress, takes the "fizzith" amendment to every question and gets off scot-free.
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Well they kind of did, since the AG controls the scheduling of drugs and bases this schedule on DEA input.
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stop spending billions fighting a goddamn plant.
You mean opium?
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I'm guessing that the old thought of using high intensity infrarad LEDs to blow out the cameras doesn't work or we'd have heard more about it by now.
I don't know of laws requiring plates be readable by electronic means, otherwise they'd just have bar codes on them, no?
I'm just getting fed up with the govt. (state/feds) going overboard wight he surveillance. I mean,
Re:Cam-tastic (Score:5, Insightful)
What makes you think they give a damn about the Constitution?
It's now a quaint notion, and every law enforcement agency is making the case that they shouldn't have follow that ... and until a court says otherwise and starts throwing these clowns in jail, do you really think you get a say in the matter?
The law doesn't apply to law enforcement -- which means it's only a matter of time before the outright corruption and shakedowns becomes like every other banana republic where the police can do whatever they choose.
As soon as the feds started teaching law enforcement to use parallel construction, and effectively commit perjury and bypass your Constitutional rights ... everyone was pretty much fucked, because "law enforcement" is now about what they can make stick, not what they can prove through legal means.
You now have a nascent stasi, only some people still cling to the belief that's not actually happening, or that at the very least it's for your own good and therefore OK.
Papers please, comrade -- if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear.
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Re:Cam-tastic (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember, the Constitution doesn't grant YOU rights, those are natural. The Constitution is there to GRANT the federal govt very limited, enumerated rights. Basically it is supposed to be there to grant them rights and responsibilities, and anything NOT in the constitution is not something they are supposed to be able to do. This was the foundation for a limited, and minimally intrusive form of Federal Govt., which has been bastardized over the years, and many of us would prefer to have reigned in.
The govt is not supposed to be there to track me, nor put out a blanket dragnet of surveillance to try to find any wrongdoers out there. Especially at the Federal level. Possibly more able to at the state level, but at least on state and local level, you have a bit more recourse and influence over the local politicians than at a federal level.
Not to mention, if you don't like the rules of one state you are free to move to a more like minded state. If this is done federally and nationally, you lose that freedom.
But yes, the Constitution is there to grant very LIMITED and enumerated rights, roles and responsibilities for the federal govt. If it isn't in it the constitution, it should not be a power they have.
At least, that's the way and thought behind the construction and mandate of our govt. in the beginning.
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The Constitution is there to GRANT the federal govt very limited, enumerated rights.
This is not really true. The Bill of Rights is a list of things that the government specifically cannot do. It would not be necessary if the Constitution didn't grant the federal government some pretty broad powers (such as the power to make and enforce laws).
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The government only has the right to make and enforce those laws Necessary and Proper to the execution of the powers given to it in the constitution.
As for the bill of rights, that was added later as a second line of defense to address some people's concerns that the government might try to expand beyond the powers granted to it. The 9th and 10th amendments made this fairly explicit:
9th: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
10th: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
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No, the Constitution is not an enumeration of rights you have left, it _is_ an enumeration of the rights the Feds have:
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A man in a lawn chair can record hundreds of license plates per second? Are you seriously saying such a ridiculous thing?
As for the differing states, one would at least be able to choose to live in one with good policies.
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http://elsag.com/mobile.htm [elsag.com]
1800 license plates per minute, monitor 4 lanes of traffic at once -- yeah, show me the man in a lawnchair who can do that.
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Are you a car? I know that cars are getting smarter, but this is ridiculous!
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As an American I will forgive you this once for getting the constitution all wrong.
The Constitution does not GRANT ME rights, those are natural.
The Constitution does LIMIT FEDERAL GOVERNMENT rights in a very limited, enumerated way.
Anything NOT in the Constitution can be found in various but also limited amendments.
This is in at least 4th grade through 12th grade education in the USA.
Understanding this is akin to understanding why the federal government today as a body seems to believe anything not explicit
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somebody did, that was quickly legislated out. Now there's a prescribed layout and texture for number plates (at least in the UK), Photoblocker, Laserveil and similar products specifically designed to defeat flash photography (ie GATSO speed cameras) are strictly illegal.
From Wikipedia, links are valid:
Number plates must be displayed in accordance with The Road Vehicles (Display of Registration Marks) Regulations 2001.
All vehicles manufactured after 1 January 1973 must display number plates of reflex-reflec
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Do you think some kind of IR strobe would work? Strobing fast enough to keep the auto-contrast/brightness from being able to keep up?
I also wonder if you couldn't borrow some of the technology from those laser light shows where they can "draw" on the side of a large object. I wonder if its possible to adapt the scanner technology to basically "paint" an object behind you with IR illumination
The only thing I would worry about is if any/many squads have IR cameras linked to displays visible within the squad
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That said having one be photo triggered would be doable but
or fall afoul FCC laws (Score:2)
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You need to understand that they must gather as much evidence as they can to do so. It is not as simple as catching someone or people with contraband in their house, and then put them in jail. You should know already that those people could say we don't know about this. When an operation like this is on going, I am sure that cops and DEA people have communicated and waited for the right time to deal with the issue. It may be frustrated to others around the issue, but ensuring that the criminal gets convicte
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It's *one* problem, but mass surveillance would still be wrong either way.
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But how else would the law enforcement industry guarentee continued profit growth?
Won't somebody please think of the corporations?
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The fact that the populace tolerates government interference in their personal decisions is the problem.
The government has no legitimate right to decide what I can do with my body unless it's directly harming someone else.
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no, the problem is the pharmaceutical industry (in the case of opiates, which USED TO BE LEGAL) and the paper industry (WHICH USED TO BE MADE FROM HEMP) stifling competition with the weight of lobbying and propaganda - which you have swallowed hook, line and sinker.
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And when they were legal, the pharmaceutical industry sold them. Made a tidy amount of money at it, too. Why would they want to ban them?
Well, no, at least in the larger sense. There are a few isolated documented cases of making paper from hemp, but for the most part, mass production of paper has always been from wood pulp. I've heard that processing hemp into
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pretty much every public document printed before ~1893 was printed on vellum (animal hide) or hemp (and 90% of all paper sold up that point was made from hemp fibre). Statutes in the UK are actually still printed for archive on vellum. Galideo wrote on hemp. The first two drafts of the US Declaration of Independence were written on hemp, the copy that was signed was parchment.
Simply put, wood pulp paper needs some pretty nasty chemicals to process, that weren't available 100-odd years ago. Hemp? A shredder,
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oh, and up until 1928 paper money in England was almost exclusively hemp fibre, then the Bradbury was issued in 1914 which was a hemp/cotton mix. These days it's a mix of wood pulp, cotton and flax.
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Because there are much more profitable patented drugs now.
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The UK's automatic numberplate recognition system (Score:3)
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ANRS can be left by the side of the road to happysnap every single vehicle that passes and process the number plate. In fact, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire Police use this very technique to issue random fixed penalties on a straight stretch of the A52 where it is so easy to break the speed limit, you're not even aware of having done it. That being said, how can you defend or fight something you're not even aware you've done (and those cameras only go off if you go too fast, right?
Right?)?
Are they using Waze? (Score:5, Funny)
Had to ask.
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What's good for the goose...
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"Woosh"
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Yes actually, thanks for pointing it out. When I come to /., I normally read the articles from top down, so the "joke" didn't make sense at first.
Preposterous (Score:2)
It seems certain if that if this were the case, in a representative democracy, someone's already scheduling a Congressional hearing to sort this out.
Crap! It's Superbowl week and the Congresscritters are busy commenting on some quarterback's balls.
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Here's a heads up for the news media: nobody gives a shit.
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Vomit away! Here's a heads up for you, some people do care about cheating, and lying about it even after being caught red handed. But we're off-topic here.
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Yes, but the news only reports on it if it is sports related. No Wall Street gate for example, even though the cheating is bigger, more blatant, more clearly deliberate, and does far more harm to the public.
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While I agree with you, and think that a lot of them belong in jail, the news is reporting what captures the most eyeballs.
Welcome to the police state (Score:5, Insightful)
Hope...change....whatever.
Any excuse is given to erode civil liberties. If it wasn't drugs, it would have been something else.
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Re:Welcome to the police state (Score:5, Informative)
Let me simplify that alphabet soup for you ... USA.
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Hope...change....whatever.
Any excuse is given to erode civil liberties. If it wasn't drugs, it would have been something else.
A U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration program set up in 2008 to
But hey, keep blaming the person you probably dont like for the things that happened under the person you probably do like.
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If you're in the big chair, you're responsible. That's part of the package of being the President. If you don't like some existing policy then you work to change it. I haven't seen any evidence of that in this realm by the Obama administration. On the contrary, surveillance seems to be accelerating. And for the record, I didn't vote for the previous guy.
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The Drug Enforcement Administration was established on July 1, 1973, not 2008.
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Fallacies. Your entire argument is based on the faulty assumption that just because you are president you magically know about absolutely every single initiative put in place by absolutely every agency under your purview.
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When you vote for a president, you vote for everyone he brings along. Every Secretary, Ambassador, and anyone else who gets swapped out. So, while your point that the president doesn't know everything is accurate, someone chosen by him most likely does. I judge politicians (and everyone else) by the company they keep. When their friends are slimy, you can be certain that they're just as bad.
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I'm fairly certain the NSA abuses couldn't have escaped his notice. The DEA is out of the bag now, let's see what happens...
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Depends on what you are talking about. The OP implied he was responsible for the initialization of it, not its continued use. Of course, now that we know he knows, he is responsible for changing it, or allowing it to keep running.
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Add in data about any cell phone
And in other news drug smugglers fight back (Score:4, Interesting)
You can get "trusted traveler" status in order to reduce the time it takes to cross the border. Less checks, faster throughput - what's not to love? Even the drug smugglers love it as they have been targeting such travelers and attaching packets of drugs via magnets to the bottoms of said travelers cars. And to make it really helpful for the smugglers, the DEA used to issue decals for the windshield - thus making it really easy to target the travelers.
Smugglers using unwitting drivers to carry drugs from Mexico [sfgate.com]
I see what you did there. (Score:4, Insightful)
Apparently we have no right to go anywhere without car and license plate tracking, and facial recognition software on tens of thousands of cameras. Or in cyberspace without tracking everything. Or using credit and debit cards, to buy anything untracked.
Dictators of old would dream of such a thing at their disposal. England, having abused it badly during the revolution, would have caused the founding fathers to have banned it all...had they succeeded, which would have been far less likely.
More and more government observation can "be done by steam", in the words of Blaise Pascal. It shouldn't be. When politicians have a system "they're supposed to" get a warratlnt for (probably not even that in this case) but no penalty or even alarm if they don't, it will be abused to track political opponents to those in power.
Re:I see what you did there. (Score:5, Insightful)
And any pretense of the 4th amendment no longer being completely shat upon is pretty much gone.
They're pretty much just doing general warrants/blanket surveillance, without probable cause, just in case they find something.
You are not a free society. You think you are.
Someone will say how China actually censors, and the usual sputterings about how you're still free -- but the reality is, every damned thing you do it monitored, tracked, collated, cross-referenced, shared, and cataloged .. and then is dutifully shared across agencies so that if one of them wants to trump up charges on you they can.
With parallel construction, and massive government sharing ... they can incriminate you any number of ways, none of which involve the truth, probably cause, or proper court oversight. If you become troublesome, they'll just sift through the vast catalog of your life and try you for something they find.
Papers, please, comrade.
Western society is pretty much fucked ... the only difference is if those in power will force us to pray, or keep us quiet with American Idol. But "security" is every bit the threat to us as religious extremists.
But make no mistake about it, our freedoms and rights ended on 9/11, and the US is steadily making themselves, and everyone else on the planet, far less free.
America has now become the enemy of freedom and liberty of everybody on the fucking planet.
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And any pretense of the 4th amendment no longer being completely shat upon is pretty much gone.
This was already establish by the 100 mile border zone - which conveniently also covers pretty well all of the US population.
The Constitution in the 100-Mile Border Zone [aclu.org]
Wish I had the money to offer a bounty on cameras. (Score:1)
We'll have to settle for putting a tire around 'em and filling it with gas.
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Those burn too...
Toll roads are coved in Cameras as well (Score:1)
Toll roads are coved in Cameras as well and they can work even at 120+ MPH
Coincidence? (Score:3)
A U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration program set up in 2008
Hmmm that's exactly the year of Breaking Bad [imdb.com] TV show debut...
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The Drug Enforcement Administration was established on July 1, 1973
Cops Frighten Themselves (Score:5, Interesting)
The hunt for suspects (Score:5, Funny)
their hunt for suspects.
Is that the hunt for people already under suspicion, or a hunt for new names to add to the list?
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Must be the former, because everyone's already on the list.
I guess I can drive on toll roads again (Score:2)
I was boycotting them because of the cameras, but now it's like "oh well, either I stay locked in my house all day, invent a Harry Potter cloak for my car and hope I don't get hit because I'm invisible, or smile for the camera."
That middle option is looking mighty attractive right now.
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It's not just plate recognition... I bet most cameras also do some facial recognition (even if it's semi-successful, it can provide a probability of someone being in various places at various times).
Papers Please (Score:2)
In the new millennium, we need not resort to such obvious oppressive methods. We feed you the bullsh*t about how free you are while, at the same time, track every aspect of your life that is possible via technology without your knowledge and / or consent.
If they bother to stop you to ask questions, they're just giving you enough rope to hang yourself with.
They already know the answers.
Seattle does the same thing (Score:3)
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Every time I pass an obvious vehicle like that I'm tempted to find a tarp or something to drape over it.
too much money (Score:1)
If they have money for mass surveillance, they have too much money.
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And yet they claim not to have resources to go after real crimes that they deem petty and unimportant, like theft.
hmm (Score:2)
this is old news and we've known about it for years. There are also commercial companies that run similar networks.
I'm not saying this is a good thing, but where were you guys 4-5 years ago when we first found out about this shit? Not enough people cared then and not enough people care now.
Like we talked about the last time this was in the news, the data is public and there isn't anything you can do about it. The best response is to set up your own network to monitor the government and see how they like