Welcome to the Police State

Where government doesn't need a warrant to search your entire life. Most of it, anyway. LexisNexis Helps ICE Spy, Track Cars, and Try to Predict Crime

Federal law enforcement, taken as a whole, looks more and more like the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, or the Ministry for State Security, or the Stasi every day. (That is the old East German secret police, for those of you who don't remember the Cold War.)

The legal research and public records data broker LexisNexis is providing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement with tools to target people who may potentially commit a crime — before any actual crime takes place, according to a contract document obtained by The Intercept.

This is a long article, written by a Journalist/Leftist. But LexisNexis is being sued for collecting data illegally. And they seem to have a tremendous amount of license plate reader data.

LexisNexis’s LEIDS program is, crucially, not an outlier in the United States. For-profit data brokers are increasingly tapped by law enforcement and intelligence agencies for both the vastness of the personal information they collect and the fact that this data can be simply purchased rather than legally obtained with a judge’s approval.

“Today, in a way that far fewer Americans seem to understand, and even fewer of them can avoid, CAI includes information on nearly everyone,” warned a recently declassified report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on so-called commercially available information. Specifically citing LexisNexis, the report said the breadth of the information “could be used to cause harm to an individual’s reputation, emotional well-being, or physical safety.”

The Stasi would have been very happy to have this kind of reach. And just because they are cops, doesn't mean that they are above doing things like stalking their ex-girlfriends/ex-boyfriends or whatever.

Living in a democratic republic was nice while it lasted.