ACLU: Government Tracking All Cars
According to the ACLU, instead of investigating crimes, local and state police departments have created a tracking program for every car in the country. An automated system using scanners has been mindlessly collecting data on the driving habits of everyone. The data is then uploaded to police databases for greater access.
Chances are, your local or state police departments have photographs of your car in their files, noting where you were driving on a particular day, even if you never did anything wrong.
Using automated scanners, law enforcement agencies across the country have amassed millions of digital records on the location and movement of every vehicle with a license plate, according to a study published Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union. Affixed to police cars, bridges or buildings, the scanners capture images of passing or parked vehicles and note their location, uploading that information into police databases. Departments keep the records for weeks or years, sometimes indefinitely.
Freedom is just another word for having your every activity monitored, recorded, and indefinitely archived by the government. And you’ll never guess what the ridiculous pretext is.
As the technology becomes cheaper and more ubiquitous, and federal grants focus on aiding local terrorist detection, even small police agencies are able to deploy more sophisticated surveillance systems. While the Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that a judge’s approval is needed to track a car with GPS, networks of plate scanners allow police effectively to track a driver’s location, sometimes several times every day, with few legal restrictions. The ACLU says the scanners assemble what it calls a “single, high-resolution image of our lives.”
Phone calls, emails, driving habits, is there anything left? Remember when Total Information Awareness was proposed and everyone said “overreach”? Yeah well, here we are.
The police state everyone has been worried about has arrived with a preliminary legal framework under the Patriot Act and NDAA already approved for its use on the public. We have built are own prison, now someone just needs to turn the key.
ACLU: Government Tracking All Cars
According to the ACLU, instead of investigating crimes local and state police departments have created a tracking program for every car in the country. An automated system using scanners has been mindlessly collecting data on the driving habits of everyone. The data is then uploaded to police databases for greater access.
Chances are, your local or state police departments have photographs of your car in their files, noting where you were driving on a particular day, even if you never did anything wrong.
Using automated scanners, law enforcement agencies across the country have amassed millions of digital records on the location and movement of every vehicle with a license plate, according to a study published Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union. Affixed to police cars, bridges or buildings, the scanners capture images of passing or parked vehicles and note their location, uploading that information into police databases. Departments keep the records for weeks or years, sometimes indefinitely.
Freedom is just another word for having your every activity monitored, recorded, and indefinitely archived by the government. And you’ll never guess what the ridiculous pretext is.
As the technology becomes cheaper and more ubiquitous, and federal grants focus on aiding local terrorist detection, even small police agencies are able to deploy more sophisticated surveillance systems. While the Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that a judge’s approval is needed to track a car with GPS, networks of plate scanners allow police effectively to track a driver’s location, sometimes several times every day, with few legal restrictions. The ACLU says the scanners assemble what it calls a “single, high-resolution image of our lives.”
Phone calls, emails, driving habits, is there anything left? Remember when Total Information Awareness was proposed and everyone said “overreach”? Yeah well, here we are.
The police state everyone has been worried about has arrived with a preliminary legal framework under the Patriot Act and NDAA already approved for its use on the public. We have built are own prison, now someone just needs to turn the key.
