Creepy Cops and Their Scanners
The criteria for defining an illegal search has never been whether you’re aware of the search having been performed. If, for instance, investigators sneak into your house, go through your things – but leave everything so it appears nothing was touched, so you never suspect they were there – it’s still illegal, if it was done without a warrant.
Even to this very day – at least, kinda sorta.
So how about these license plate scanners that cops are using to – yes – search us without our knowledge, much less a warrant?
Maybe you haven’t heard about the scanners – more correctly, these Automated License Plate Readers (APLRs). They are a device that integrates a Panopticon-style camera system with a computer database.
The ALPR – usually there are several, mounted on all four corners of a cop car – scans the plates of all the cars that pass by the cop (if he’s parked) or the cars the cop passes (if he’s moving). The numbers scanned are then automatically filtered through various databases (we’re not allowed to know exactly what data these databases contain) and if there is a “hit” – such as for a stolen car or a car tied to a crime – the cop is aroused from his sugary slumbers to go after the evildoer.
But the point is, we’ve all just been examined, identified and catalogued; that is,searched.
What else is it when we are scanned like a herd of beef cattle with tags in our ears – a “computer cop” checking us each out before we’re allowed to proceed through the chute? The fact that you’re not aware you’ve just been through the chute isn’t the point. The point is, you just got examined, identified and catalogued – they “checked you out” – without your having done a thing to warrant the once-over (much less an actual warrant being involved).
This is creepy, especially the general indifference of the population to this sort of thing – which is arguably even more creepy than the thing itself. One expects government – our “farmers” – to wax tyrannical.
It is, after all, what government does.
But why do the cattle – whoops, the people – accept it so passively?
Probably because they are cattle.
I got really depressed way back in the early 2000s, after the government announced that the Fight For Freedom would include a “Homeland” Security Department (Heimatsicherheitsamt) and that people/cattle would be searched in just about the most degrading way imaginable short of actually having to spread their cheeks, bend over and cough (which is probably coming) just to queue up for an airplane ride.
But it was to be expected; the logical next step (one of them) resulting from the general acceptance, years prior, of this business of randomly stopping and (at least cursorily) searching (and interrogating) drivers for no particular reason other than that they happened to be driving down the road where the “safety” checkpoint was erected.
Obviously – if you’re not an illiterate – a random search is the very definition of an unreasonable search – prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.
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