> in case you've lost track

Please argue in good faith and don't revert to sarcasm. I asked in my last comment for you to specify which part of the prior comment you had issue with, it would have been good to mention the specific part you were challenging at that time and not only just now, as my comment indeed touched on multiple related issues.

So if you want specific information regarding NYC and the license plate issues, I can give you some links from reputable sources. I also recommend following up these sources with more research to corroborate claims or answer any further questions you may have, or if these sources simply do not satisfy your curiosity and rightful demands for hard proof.

https://www.nyclu.org/report/automatic-license-plate-readers

https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/documents-uncov...

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/auto...

The above research report mentions a US Supreme Court ruling specifically mentioning a chilling effect with respect to surveillance, United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/565/10-1259/case...

"Awareness that the Government may be watching chills
associational and expressive freedoms. And the Government’s unrestrained power to assemble data that reveal
private aspects of identity is susceptible to abuse"

- Justice Sonia Sotomayor

And in another comment in this thread I mentioned the stop-and-frisk program in NYC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop-and-frisk_in_New_York_Cit...

I could point to this and multitudes of other incidents where the NYC government has grossly overstepped their bounds. I can also point to a high-profile case in my old city of Fort Worth where city officials and police were using government databases to stalk and harass individuals, even ex-girlfriends, and the police chief and head IT guy also got harassed and litigated for attempting to expose it:

https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/former-fort-worth-police-c...

https://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/fort-worth/article2...

Here's what the cops in my current city do: https://www.wbrz.com/news/brpd-narcotics-officer-exposes-wro...

> "At least three to four nights a week they would have us riding through the neighborhoods," Ardoin said. "If you saw a random black person walking around the street and hasn't done anything, they would tell us just to jump out the vehicle, grab them and pat them down without probable cause. I voiced my opinions several times, and I didn't agree with that."

It's why we called the police the "jump out boys" growing up. I personally was subject to years of targeted police and government harassment in my small town, which severely impacted my life. I shudder to think about what those creeps would do with a full ALPR kit across the parish. My state's police force has repeatedly shown that they cannot be trusted to follow the law, and they constantly get caught harassing, stalking, spying, selling drugs, guns and more.

You wouldn't understand unless you grew up in a real police state like Louisiana, with an incarceration rate of over 1%, higher than any independent country in the world. You may have had the privilege of not being a targeted demographic in such a state and thus having the law usually work on your side, and so the potentials for abuse, and the inevitability of such, may not seem immediately obvious to you. You seem interested in learning more and I can only provide so much, so I would definitely recommend following up with more research.

If it's the "authoritarian regime" part you want proof of, and my given examples of general corruption of US police forces is not sufficient for you, you can google some NYC-specific cases, but I assume you're more interested in the effects of mass surveillance and ALPRs.