No law can prevent me from operating a corporation that collects and publishes license plate data for lawful purposes (basic freedom of the press.) If I can see something in public (where no reasonable expectation of privacy exists), I can report on it. Very few exceptions exist to this - think national security or military installations.
> Doesn't mass surveillance plausibly violate the First Amendment, by having a chilling effect on speech and freedom of association?
Plausibly, but no relevant case law I am aware of makes this interpretation.
We can prohibit the government from utilizing and collecting the data: absolutely, but you cannot prevent the people from doing the same.
Alright, I will accept that what you say about license plate data is true (though I know there remains ongoing debate about it, IANAL so I cannot claim to know anything more).
That gets you as far as distributing the license plate, location, and time. But if you combine that data with other non-public data, then it is no longer a First Amendment protected use.
As an aside, if we cannot figure out a way to make this fit with the First Amendment as written today, we need to make updating that a priority already. The founders had no idea that we would end up with computers and cameras that could automatically track every citizen of the country with no effort and store it indefinitely. "No reasonable expectation of privacy" rests on a definition of reasonable that made sense in the 18th century. Our technological progress has changed that calculus.
> As an aside, if we cannot figure out a way to make this fit with the First Amendment as written today, we need to make updating that a priority already. The founders had no idea that we would end up with computers and cameras that could automatically track every citizen of the country
This is a commonly echoed sentiment for the Second Amendment too ("These idiot founders! They could never have imagined so much individual power - We need to take rights away!"), and I am in hard disagreement for both.
I cherish the fact that our legal system is so intentionally slow that these types of "progressive" efforts to reform the Constitution are basically impossible.
The founders clearly intended the second amendment to be about military service, we have contemporary evidence to support that. The idea that it broadly applied to individuals on their own is an interpretation that didn’t really gain steam until well into the 20th century.
Have you ever read any of the Federalist papers? This is extraordinarily ignorant - even left-leaning SCOTUS justices do not agree with you (see Caetano, etc.)
Are you allowed to do the same thing with SSNs? It’s just another government issued ID like a license plate.
As far as I am aware, there's no Federal law prohibiting the publication of SSNs for lawful purposes (which is the typical default.) In Virginia, Ostergren v. Cuccinelli (4th Cir. 2010) touched on this very issue, and ultimately concluded that publishing SSNs is protected speech (some nuance there, but this was the outcome.)
License plates are explicitly designed for legibility and are legally mandated by every state to be displayed in public view. The entire purpose of this object is to be seen and create accountability. An SSN is a private, individually-issued piece of information that isn't intended for public view - and courts are still saying publication is okay.
Law in the United States isn't an autistic, overly-rigid computer system where edge cases can be probed for "gotchas:" judges and case law exist to figure out these tough questions.
I’m surprised that SSNs could be published like that. It’s curious that nobody has attempted to “do a journalism” and publish the SSNs of HNW individuals. It seems there would be little to stop you.
> Law in the United States isn't an autistic, overly-rigid computer system where edge cases can be probed for "gotchas:" judges and case law exist to figure out these tough questions.
That’s obvious, and you seem to be going against yourself here. If some details are considered too sensitive for publication then it would follow that a judge may be able to interpret the law to prevent mass publication of even sensitive public or semi-public data by creating an interpretive carve-out. But if you can publish SSNs then there’s little to no hope for that. It almost seems that the law is “autistically” tilted in favor of data brokers.
Someone ought to set up a tracker that updates a list of known HNW individuals with last detected location based on license plate data and/or facial recognition. Maybe also a list of last detected million dollar+ supercars. That will get some bills started.