Local police help Trump, ICE spy on Americans via license plate readers
From the first day of his second term in office, Donald Trump has used illegal immigration and border security to grow and expand government’s mass surveillance capabilities. One of the ways he is doing this is to have US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) hijack local law enforcement license plate readers to spy on everyone driving on America’s roadways.
This story about the Loveland, CO, police department provides a picture of what this looks like in the Age of Trump (via 9News.com):
The Loveland Police Department (LPD) admits it allowed the federally run Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to access its Flock Safety account, which helps track license plates. Then, a Loveland Police Flock account began conducting searches in the national law enforcement database, listing “ICE” as a reason for searches.
Flock cameras are automated license plate readers that take pictures of each plate that passes and add the plate information into a network. Cities, counties, or agencies can opt in to sharing and receiving data with thousands of other law enforcement agencies across the country.
Public records of a Flock network audit released by the Mount Prospect Police Department in Illinois and later uploaded to the records-sharing site MuckRock, show that Loveland Police searched the national database six times in late April and listed “ICE” as the reason for the searches.
Loveland Police says it wasn’t one of its officers who conducted the searches, but rather a member of the ATF who was given access to the Loveland Police Department’s Flock account.
“By the way, ATF is not a customer of Flock,” said Josh Thomas, Flock’s chief communications officer, on Friday.
Immigration agents are not supposed to have direct access to the network, but they may be getting it from local law enforcement, which could be a violation of state law. Colorado law prohibits local agencies from sharing personal information with ICE without a warrant or subpoena. (Emphasis mine)
In a classic example of the “pass the buck” reaction we typically get from government when it has been caught doing something it shouldn’t be doing, Loveland Police stated in the report that it does not monitor the content of the searches conducted by the ATF on its account, although it is capable of doing so.
Oh, so I guess that lets them off the hook for letting Trump and ICE use their license plate readers to spy on Americans.
Even though Trump has made government spying a priority in his second term, using license plate readers to do the job actually began during his first term in office, using a program originally created during Barack Obama’s presidency.
In January 2015, Obama and the Republican-controlled Congress passed legislation empowering the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to create a national database of license plates and driving habits of Americans. Though originally created to combat drug trafficking, the program was later expanded — just like every liberty-killing idea that comes out of Washington — to track other “criminals.” It was later made available to state-level law enforcement agencies to enable them to “work together” addressing these issues.
This expansion continued in January 2018 when Trump and the Republican Party decided to give Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency-wide access to a nationwide license plate recognition database in the name of immigration and border control.
Later in 2018, a bill was introduced in the House meant to create a real-time national driver surveillance program that would have made it possible for law enforcement to know anything and everything about a driver at the click of a button. Known as the “Safe Drivers Act” (SDA), the bill’s primary purpose was to make everything a motorist does or has ever done available to law enforcement NATIONWIDE by tracking driver’s licenses as well as license plates.
Does your driver’s license have a star on it? It does if your state participates in REAL ID program being mandated by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem. Launched in 2005 to improve airport security, this post-9/11 program effectively laid the groundwork for national IDs and driver’s licenses . . . just a hop, skip, and a jump away from legislation like the Safe Drivers Act.
Had it become law, SDA would have “incentivized” states — code for bribing them with taxpayer-funded grants — to modernize their computer systems to make it possible for states to all work together and make real-time driver information available to one and all.
Using license plate readers to allow ICE and other government agencies to spy on Americans is just one of the many ways Donald Trump is using immigration and border control to destroy liberty and grow the mass surveillance state. Some of the other ways he has done this include:
- Creating new technology to expand government’s mass surveillance capabilities
- Denying immigrants Due Process rights and deporting them to a gulag in El Salvador
- Making biometric digital IDs mandatory
- Looking at ways to suspend habeus corpus
- Making REAL ID mandatory for every American
- Criminalizing free speech critical of Trump
- Using the military as a precursor to declare martial law
In the years following 9/11, we’ve witnessed liberty die a slow and painful death in the name of “safety” and “security.” And while it’s easy to point a finger at Democrats and the far-left for our loss of liberty, the reality is that Republicans have worked hand-in-hand with them to lead us down the road to tyrannical hell. It was, after all, George W. Bush’s Patriot Act that brought us the NSA spying program that would serve as a model for the tyranny we lived under during Donald Trump’s first term in response to COVID.
License plate readers and other technology being developed and used to address border security is making it easier for Trump and ICE to expand government’s mass surveillance capabilities and track our every move; creating a society where liberty can be destroyed at the push of a button.
David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties. He the author of The New Axis of Evil: Exposing the Bipartisan War on Liberty.
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