Awful click-bait headline. The sheriff dep't isn't doing this _specifically_ with "anti-abortion states", they're doing this broadly with other states "including Alabama, Oklahoma and Texas".
Not listed in the article is that they also shared with Arizona, Indiana, Louisiana, Nevada, Oregon, Tennessee, Illinois, Mississippi, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Michigan, Utah, Wisconsin, Florida, Colorado, New Mexico, New York (State), North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Ohio, and probably some others that weren't listed.
Is this bad? Absolutely. Is this specifically related to abortion? No.
This will however play well with their local audience. I lived in Sacramento for 13 years, its a pretty liberal town. If you wanna get people upset about some stuff, there are ways to get them hooked in by a headline or sign etc. like this.
Its shoddy from a journalism perspective, but the Sacbee does put out some good reporting otherwise, however they tailor headlines to the intended audience, thats for sure
No, but the intention of the headline is definitely a grabber, and I think many (myself included) would prefer more neutral toned headlines, or maybe ones that word it so its more clear that its highlighting in part whats happening, IE:
Sheriff Shares License Plate With Other States, Includes Abortion Related Travel
In some people's view, this is not an issue to pussyfoot around over. The states trying to criminalize personal healthcare decisions certainly aren't.
What a dystopian nightmare it would be to be a single mother barely above the poverty line and somehow get time off work and scrape together the cash for a trip several states away to get an abortion, only to wind up in prison for 10 years because mass data collection and dissemination is standard procedure for law enforcement and no one thought to protect the rights and privacy of pregnant women from out of state.
It's actually sickening to think about. But yea let's talk more about how they should have written the headline to suit our sensibilities.
> trying to criminalize personal healthcare decisions
Another one of those technically correct but not accurate statements and perhaps the root of the misunderstanding here. You could also frame it as "prevent the mass murder of children".
A headline about this data in another state may say "local police collaborate with murderers" with the same level of accuracy.
I think its valid to think about both, I'm not slamming the SacBee for good content here, was simply speaking to their history of headline stuff. I was a subscriber when I lived there, I think they do great reporting.
They're 100% right to raise this issue.
I also think their headlines are overly tailored to "turn heads", so to speak.
It needs to be a grabber in order to remind people of specific reasons why general policies like this might be bad. A lot of people operate under the "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" principle; the point of articles like this is to remind folks that yes, you might very well have something to hide, and you shouldn't trust the police to keep it hidden.
Why is everyone blaming the headline, newspaper, and media for connecting this surveillance issue to abortion? The EFF is the one who framed this issue in the context of abortion. The article's headline and reporting are a response to the EFF's actions.
It is shoddy because it clearly shows an agenda and bias. It's why many people now view companies like sacbee as advocacy groups rather than news organization.
It's just Man Bites Dog in action. If states shared data about a murder or something that everyone agrees should be prosecuted, it wouldn't be interesting. Nobody cares about that, because we all agree that if you drive to another state to shoot someone, you should be prosecuted for that.
The fact that a Sheriff is sharing data that could be used for a controversial prosecution is interesting and worthy of reporting on.
Law enforcement agencies shouldn't be sharing licence part reader info with ANYONE, at least without a warrant. For murder or not.
Now it sounds like they are sharing all the data for everyone, which is different than sharing the data in a specific person.
I would also be interested in how a state will prosecute someone for doing something legal.
There is no neutral reporting. The act of deciding to publish something on page one is an inherent choice NOT to publish other things there. The facts are there, show me the lie in this article (vs the “choice of what to highlight”) which is the only thing that could make it shoddy.
Media both creates and reflects people’s attention and anyone pretending it’s only one or the other is showing their own bias.
It is when it is a made up bogeyman. I would love to see how a state will prosecute someone for doing something legal in another state. It isn't going to happen. So no reason for this paper to bring it up.
The real issue is sharing this data with ANYONE, not just out of state.
If you look at this in broad spectrum, its hard not to draw that conclusion, however, if you look at how the city tends to vote on a more issue to issue basis, or responds to issues like this, it tends to go up and to the right in terms of supporting liberal policies, by overwhelming majority. Then you look at housing, and they get more right of center to very conservative, depending on the neighborhood (California famous NIMBY stuff). Then if you pivot to say, gun control, you go up and to the right on the liberal scale again, overwhelming majority support further measures on gun control to limit firearms.
Then, if you swing back to issues like water rights, they get pretty conservative again.
Its not as cut and dry as those statistics suggest
> If you look at this in broad spectrum, its hard not to draw that conclusion, however, if you look at how the city tends to vote on a more issue to issue basis, or responds to issues like this, it tends to go up and to the right in terms of supporting liberal policies, by overwhelming majority.
Well, the city is somewhat more liberal than the county as a whole, but even there, compared to the state as a whole, I think you are wrong. (But, yes, a +16 advantage for D's over R’s at even the county level is an overwhelming majority to start with; Decline to State even has a two-point advantage over the GOP in the county.)
> Then you look at housing, and they get more right of center to very conservative, depending on the neighborhood (California famous NIMBY stuff).
Compared to other California local governments? Again, I don’t think so.
> Then, if you swing back to issues like water rights, they get pretty conservative again.
>Compared to other California local governments? Again, I don’t think so.
Maybe not, though the Sacramento Metro Region has more land for housing availability than say, the Bay Area, or Los Angeles, in part thanks to being able to build on what used to be massive flood planes by Natomas.
When it comes to augmenting your neighborhood / city laws around housing to make them more friendly for things like housing density, much like other cities in California, they fail more often than not. Mid town in particular wants to keep its "charm" at all costs, and that district of Sacramento pretty reliably opposes any real change in housing policy that would move the needle on this neighborhood to make it more affordable as a result.
Due to being out able to build out though, the region is less pressured on the housing issue than others, but it costs have been rising significantly there none the less, esp. since WFH jobs became more mainstream, housing pressures are heating up significantly again, its why we moved.
With all this said, I would say that in general, the liberal attitudes around other issues doesn't permeate to housing, and thats all I really meant. What you would think liberal leaning town would support around housing doesn't come to fruition, which I think often surprises outside observers. Some of the most liberal areas in California (and the US, for that matter) have some of the most conservative housing politics in the country, as you may well know.
>What even is “conservative” in this context?
Sacramento region, and the city proper, there are lots of familial relationships with farmers because of its proximity to the Central Valley. The city is made up of a lot of people who moved from Stockton, Modesto, Turlock etc. and still have a lot of ties to that area.
They oppose, overwhelmingly, when voting on state initiatives things that limit water rights for farmers in the Central Valley. That's what I mean. Due to the surrounding region and close proximity to the Central Valley, it permeates this upward on state initiatives and politics, based on my lived experience during the droughts when I was part of a campaign to enforce more water conservation practices in farming
The split is quite lumpy. At the aggregated level the state has a significant democratic majority. Geographically though I believe most of the counties are quite republican.
> Geographically though I believe most of the counties are quite republican.
The median D-R margin of California's 58 counties is D +3.7%.
This somewhat overstates the D advantage because California’s Decline to State/No Party Preference voters break somewhat Republican in elections; the median by county margin in the last gubernatorial election was about a 5 point GOP advantage (with the more Democratic counties having a huge population advantage, of course.)
Not click-bait at all! The headline accurately describes why the EFF is upset.
Here's a second chance to read paragraph 2 that you apparently missed:
> The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) a digital rights group, has sent Cooper a letter requesting that the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office cease sharing ALPR data with out-of-state agencies that could use it to prosecute someone for seeking an abortion.
> The sheriff dep't isn't doing this _specifically_ with "anti-abortion states", they're doing this broadly with other states "including Alabama, Oklahoma and Texas".
The plates sharing with anti-abortion is definitely worth emphasis, because it carries a lot more risk to a lot more people. And potentially causes a lot more harm.
What you call "awful click-bait", I call "literally true as stated". The Sacramento sheriff is, in fact, sharing license plate reader data with anti-abortion states. If you have a problem with that headline, I suspect your actual motivation might be to try and squash news you find inconvenient.
Come on. If a politician argues in favor of universal health care, would it be reasonable for a headline to say "John Doe supports taxpayer-funded medical treatments for child abusers"?
The truth is that anti-abortion states have made it extremely clear that they are willing to go to great lengths to criminalize personal healthcare decisions (one of the most important ones a person can make in their life). They will use this data to victimize the women unfortunate enough to live in those states and experience an unwanted pregnancy. It's not a matter of if, only when. The headline is exactly as accurate as it needs to be.
If healthcare included the guaranteed right to a treatment where of adults spend therapeutic time at preschools, then a headline about providing healthcare to sex offenders would absolutely be relevant (as well as obviously truthful).
> The headline is exactly as accurate as it needs to be.
I disagree. Here's a simple modification I propose that's more accurate: “Sacramento Sheriff is sharing license plate reader data with states, including anti-abortion ones, records show”
Wordiness is not always a virtue. The absence of your specific phrasing does not imply what you seem to think it implies. If you read a headline and make a bunch of assumptions that is on you. This is beyond criticism of clickbait and getting into pearl-clutching over minor semantics. You can nit-pick just about every headline that is pithy enough to be fit for print for omitting important details and context from the story. That's why headlines and articles fill distinct roles within journalism. Go figure.
On the other hand, it would not be so dishonest to characterize an unremovable app that tracked your location 24/7 as an app that tracked your location 24/7 "for abusive partners." (Because, guess what they end up being used for.)
No you don't understand, if I have a single gripe or nit-pick about an article then the headline is automatically clickbait. Now lets talk about the headline ad nauseum instead of discussing the issues at hand (rinse, repeat for every contentious issue posted on HN or reddit).
This is more burying the lede than clickbait. The situation is actually worse than initially reported. They are just using abortion as an example because many people would find that as the most objectionable "legitimate" use of this technology and policy. It also being used for other purposes doesn't invalidate that concern regarding abortion. It helps show why the concern in the case of abortion should apply to the overall practice. That is likely the EFF's plan here. The abortion framing of this issue is coming from the EFF and not the media.
But the problem isn't that they are sharing the data with anti abortion states. The problem is that they are sharing data. Why distract from the issue by throwing in a non issue, a hypothetical that won't be an issue? Bring up the real issue. Why do they even have this information to begin with?
The headline is a half-truth, since "anti-abortion states" is clearly irrelevant to the sheriff's behavior.
This would be a bit like a headline including the phrase "serial killer trained at Harvard" to refer to Ted Kaczynski. I loathe Harvard, but I couldn't honestly claim that the nexus of Harvard and Kaczynski had any relevance to his terror campaign.
So, yeah, GP had a solid basis for objecting to the headline. Certainly one beyond the cynical, borderline clairvoyant explanation given.
Regardless of one's political orientation, most examples of "fake news" are in fact "literally true as stated". The broader question is whether we should endeavor to present the news holistically.
It is newsworthy that certain CA precincts might be unlawfully sharing license plate data, and if SacBee is significantly under-reporting the extent of the sharing -- which is the main focus of the story -- in favor of their interpretation of the sharing, that is editorializing.
>most examples of "fake news" are in fact "literally true as stated"
Nah, most fake news I run into is stuff like "The Russians destroyed 37 HIMARS" or "<place>'s school has a litterbox for a furry student" or "Trans people are hurting your kids"
I think it gets read as the sheriff intentionally doing it for anti-abortion purposes. This is because the sheriff is a synecdoche in the sentence but gets read as a person.
> The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office isn’t the only one sharing that data; in May, EFF released a report showing that 71 law enforcement agencies in 22 California counties — including Sacramento County — were sharing such data. The practice is in violation of a 2015 law that states “a (California law enforcement) agency shall not sell, share, or transfer ALPR information, except to another (California law enforcement) agency, and only as otherwise permitted by law.”
A friend of mine is a prosecutor in a major metro and said they routinely issue tracking requests for a given license plate and that PRIVATE COMPANIES are doing 75%+ of the tracking, not state or local agencies. These private companies will sell the info to anyone who is willing to pay for it and for any reason at all. This isn't a problem confined to the abortion debate, it's a problem connected to any and all issues you might care about.
> PRIVATE COMPANIES are doing 75%+ of the tracking
My family recently went to an amusement park.
As we drove in, I saw what looked like a license plate reader camera on the inbound gate to the parking.
On the way out, we pull up to pay at the automated gate kiosk and my wife says: "Oh wow! How did they know how long we've been here??"
I answered: "Because they scanned our plate on the way in and now when we pulled into the exit gate"
Part of me thought this was cool (automation!), part of me thought "well, there is no expectation of privacy since we are in public" and part of me thought "this is very big brother but done by private companies"
I see absolutely nothing wrong or big-brother about such a system if the data stays on premises only until you leave (or maybe until the end of the day to give you in-and-out pricing privileges).
On the other hand, if the data is being sold to a data aggregator that is troubling. We see lots of surprising things like this, for example weather apps selling your location data.
This is why we need better data protection rights. GDPR has a lot of good ideas (though implementation was painful). CCPA should be strengthened.
Ideally we’d get a federal law limiting data collection without consent. (The optimist in me thinks this could be bipartisan.)
I've said this before elsewhere, but this is precisely the situation where the distinction is important.
There's this disease within the tech community where people can't see the harm of scaling things up using automation. Potentially harmful thing X, previously moderated and slowed by the high cost of labor to do it at scale, must not be harmful because we've always technically allowed it, so therefore we should not do anything to moderate it now that robots are doing it for us. "We could run this nuclear reaction at a much faster rate if we just removed the moderator, what could go wrong?"
If you don't pay for the property, and you refuse to work out an agreement with the owner, they are entitled to come get their property. How is there additional harm, at this point, by using ALPRs to find the (effectively) stolen property?
It's not as if these things happen suddenly, either. There's months of effort by the lender to try to get you back on track. Repossession comes with risk, and it always comes with a fee. No one is eager to do this.
There's currently months of effort, in part because of the labor constraints. Its not worth paying a guy with a tow truck to go looking for a car that might not even be there. ALPRs exist to lower that cost of labor, potentially to the point that the lender can still make money sending out the repo guy much sooner than 90 days.
I'm not even upset about that. Hell, it might be a net good, I dunno.
The thing that I'm concerned about is that there is no guarantee (or even guard rail, really) against selling that data to a law enforcement organization that would otherwise have to undergo judicial scrutiny to get that data. What happens when some hacker gets a hold of their license plate database and uses it for an actual stalking operation? Or who knows what else?
ALPRs tell you where a plate is. It doesn't tell you who owns the plate. You'd have to know that already. I'm not sure just having the database grants you the ability to stalk, other than at completely random strangers. If you can stalk someone to the point of getting their plate, you can just stick an airtag on their car.
> It's not as if these things happen suddenly, either. There's months of effort by the lender to try to get you back on track. Repossession comes with risk, and it always comes with a fee. No one is eager to do this.
Not quite true. Buy here pay here dealerships and similar are absolutely eager to do this, and will go out of their way to make it onerous to pay what is owed, so they can sell the same 5 year old Kia for $15K multiple times over.
These aren't photos but collection of PII which is then sold. If I took a photo of you walking your dog and posted it to Instagram that's not even remotely the same as writing down your license plate number and selling it to someone wanting to track you.
in the case of instagram isn't it exactly the same? Instagram is going to process the photo, find out who's in it, then their insta/FB account, and then use their association to you and ads you've clicked to try and figure out an ad to serve to them that's most likely to generate a click.
edit: i guess the difference is you're not selling them the picture, you're providing it for free.
They're an inappropriate solution to the technical problem they were invented for now that the internet exists. It used to be that police had limited ways to verify ownership of a vehicle, and a simple state owned database with state issued numbers was a useful tool to solve this problem.
Now.. the police have internet connected mobile terminals. I'm not sure a "number plate" is the right solution to any part of this problem anymore.
So say police are looking for someone who is suspected to be in a white Ford Bronco. They see a white Ford Bronco and want to use their internet connected mobile terminal to see if that is the white Ford Bronco they are looking for.
Without license plates how are they to tell what that terminal is connect to which white Ford Bronco they are inquiring about? Do they have to actually stop every white Ford Bronco they see so they can read the VIN or get the driver's ID?
You have several pieces of identification. The suspect description. The vehicle make, model, condition and color. The last known location. The plate numbers.
The plate numbers are the least likely to be correct and the least likely mechanism of finding the vehicle in question. The plate number will help you discriminate between two vehicles, but it does not aid in the search. Likewise police helicopters have no problem following specific vehicles even though the plates cannot be read.
So, you are imagining a situation where there are two identical suspects that cannot be discriminated from each other using all the above information and it will somehow come down to the plate, and without it, police will be unable to proceed correctly?
Is this actually any different from a suspect on foot or a bicycle or skateboard?
Never use the word ethics around a lawyer because we have a completely separate set of professional codes enforced on us which are unhelpfully called “ethics.” You will confuse the lawyer and he or she will lash out irrationally, possibly with an unhelpful or snarky post, even though deep down the lawyer secretly agrees with you.
They are publicly available data. If the license plate is associated with OTHER PII it becomes a problem. However reading your license plate on the way into and out of a garage is just reading a publicly available code at different times of day. The fact that that code must always be displayed on your vehicle, and can be tied to your identity is an issue, but the code itself doesn't constitute PII.
You’re making a blanket statement here which sounds like a first-principles argument, but in reality it’s nuanced. It seems under GDPR license plate numbers are considered personal data. Not sure about CCPA/CPRA.
It depends. If you are a recognizable figure who people with ill intent are trying to find, then public knowledge of where and when you walk your dog is a big problem.
On the other hand, if there’s no way to connect a person to a license plate number without access to the DMV database, then that is not obviously an issue.
What I drive are owned by trusts and LLCs, so on paper they are not connected to my driver license nor to me.
While I understand that cars are designed to be mobile and therefore easy to move around when stolen, I don't understand the necessity of a big plate with unique numbers. I don't have that on my bicycles.
If plates reduce theft, let the insurance companies and manufacturers work that out.
Yes, you simply find the hidden license plate camera, then figure out who owns it (I suggest social engineering technical support lines with the serial number). At that point, you can write them a letter that includes a ton of your personal information (which they "require" to match your license plate number with their database records).
At that point you have the right to ask them to delete their copy of the license plate record that they've certainly already sold on to a network of dozens of fly-by-night data brokers, malicious foreign governments, the police, and so on.
What they've already sold may already be out there, true, but more importantly the ccpa gives you the right to opt out of future collection.
Shotgunning the request to the major players may not give 100% coverage, but I think it would at least reduce the amount of identifying information out there which seems like it would be better than status quo.
> use it to prosecute someone for seeking an abortion.
the word “prosecute” intrigues me, how does this work / what people fear? Not familiar with US states legal system…
1. Resident of a state A should follow A’s law even when traveling to state B. That seems weird to me as states/countries usually don’t bind you to their law when you leave their borders. They do it (see “intelligence” agencies) but this seems exceptions. My country won’t send James Bond to catch me smoking pot in South Africa.
2. Resident of state A get an abortion in state B, then sherif of state A got you on their list and wait you at the border and find a legal but absurd way to piss you off as a punishment, eg: waiting for you to double-park where you shouldn’t. Not a good exemple -as a biker I hate cars stationing on my lane- but you got the point.
3. Same as 2. but the sherif lie, eg: “you crossed that red light” (you didn’t). I guess sherif word is more “trustworthy” that yours…
> Resident of a state A should follow A’s law even when traveling to state B. That seems weird to me as states/countries usually don’t bind you to their law when you leave their borders. They do it (see “intelligence” agencies) but this seems exceptions. My country won’t send James Bond to catch me smoking pot in South Africa.
Funny enough, South Korea has explicit laws prohibiting citizens from consuming drugs in other countries, even when it's legal in those countries. [1]
I don't think this would pass muster under the U.S. Constitution, though.
There are a few federal laws in the US that prohibit exploiting children sexually, even if done outside the country and in a country where it is legal.
Prosecute may be inaccurate, some states have enacted laws that allow for civil suits to be filed in response to abortions, but not necessarily criminal prosecution. The idea there was to use those suits to dissuade against abortion rather than outlawing it, but now that Roe has been struck down, states don’t need to go this route.
But I believe there also are states that have passed laws against leaving the state to get an abortion and then returning. I don’t think these have yet been challenged on jurisdictional grounds.
This is already done. Highway patrol will often have units that scan plates around them, and if a stolen vehicle is identified, the mobile terminal in the cruiser immediately alerts the officer to the hit.
If those plates are reported stolen, then yes. Are you suggesting we shouldn't use it or benefit from it because an aggressive criminal would still get past it?
I just read the GP as saying that a smart camera could look at a plate, notice it is on the wrong make of car, and alert the officer, rather than just looking for stolen cars listed under that plate.
Exactly this. Organized auto theft rings go back and forth on the bridge with other valid plates (stolen) on their (also stolen) cars. These scanners can alert CHP if there was a chassis mismatch, if the software has this algorithm.
Ah.. you'd have to handle dealer and fleet plates, then. Or, just ignore them, mostly defeating the purpose of that. The kinds of people who play games with plates tend to be the kinds of people who get pulled over for simple violations anyways.
Not listed in the article is that they also shared with Arizona, Indiana, Louisiana, Nevada, Oregon, Tennessee, Illinois, Mississippi, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Michigan, Utah, Wisconsin, Florida, Colorado, New Mexico, New York (State), North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Ohio, and probably some others that weren't listed.
Is this bad? Absolutely. Is this specifically related to abortion? No.