Comment by andreygrehov
1 day ago
You're confusing 'seeing a license plate' with 'querying restricted databases'.
Taking a photo is legal. Running plates through law-enforcement/ALPR systems is not, and auto body shops don't have that access.
Real-time identification != observation - it implies unauthorized data access.
Journalists doing ride alongs have already identified the system and it doesn't really on "restricted databases", they rely on observation and multiple attestation. In any case, there are indeed commercial services for looking up license plate data, and they rely on watching the notices that are published when you register your vehicle. It's the same reason why you receive all sorts of scammy warranty "notices" when you buy a car.
In fact the first clue that they look for is having Illinois Permanent plates because that is a strong indicator that they are using rental vehicles. That doesn't take a database, it's just a strong signal that can be confirmed by other evidence.
Do federal agents rent their vehicles?
The crowd sourced lists don't identify the owners of the vehicles, because that does not matter. They identify vehicles that ICE is using, and "likely a rental" is one good signal.
If that was what you meant, you should have said that. Do you have any actual evidence this is happening, or are you just confusing possibility with probability?
I don't buy the claim that it's happening, but they were pretty clearly talking about the lookups, not the photos. They started off by mentioning "insiders".
> If that was what you meant, you should have said that.
I think the choice of the verb "scanning" indicated it clearly enough.
Perhaps for you. This word is equally applicable to visual observation.
There is no evidence of this at all.
There is enough smoke to at least perform an investigation. As I said, this administration has deported 10x less people than the previous administrations.
You seem quite narrowly focused on the number of deportations rather than the methods being implemented. The primary criticisms of the current ICE surge in Minnesota focus on the general aggressiveness and lack of professionalism of these agents, not the deportations numbers.
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> through law-enforcement/ALPR systems
Were they doing that? I haven't read the article, that's why I'm asking.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/minnesota-signal-gate-di...
I don’t see anything there about querying license plate databases. There is a spreadsheet of donors to some kind of organization.
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I don't know what they think they're doing there. If the most interesting thing they found was the public website leading to a fundraising platform for mutual aid a) there is literally nothing illegal there, and b) you can find that website linked to publicly by conservatively 25% of the twin cities population. It's literally the most prominent fundraising website anyone has been posting.
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