Ice accessed car trackers in sanctuary cities that could help in raids, files show
Westchester county has laws limiting cooperation, but Ice has accessed trove of data that holds license plate readers
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If only someone had warned people that mass surveillance would be used for purposes that most voters are opposed to.
Most laws of the limits of surveillance are based on the understanding that it requires time, effort, and expenditure of limited resources to observe someone. We don't require a warrant for publicly available information, like a cop following you around, and writing down where I go all day, because we understand that no police department is going to spend an officers time like that for no reason. It's a self-limiting decision. Similarly, the records of such observation would be limited in scope to the period of time that I have an officer assigned to me. They can't decide today that they want to have been observing me last week.
But with cameras and data storage, booth of those limits are removed. It costs nothing to observe and record where I go all day. Further, they can decide today that they want to have observed me last week, and just pull the data out of the archives.
With this in mind, the general understanding of "publicly available information" needs to be reconsidered, and the laws about what the government is allowed to collect and store about me needs to be updated.
It used to be that there were two categories, "private" and "public." But now there are three, "private," "public," and "panopticon," and almost nobody realizes it yet. The rights that were adequate protection in "public" are no longer good enough.
