From The Truth About Guns:  http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2016/10/john-boch/feds-visit-gun-show-parking-lots-scanning-license-plates/

John Boch
October 3, 2016

Leave it to the Obama administration to prod local police to cruise gun show parking lots with license plate scanners. Again. It’s nothing new to us. The plan, originally conceived by bureaucrats at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (and really big fires) back in 2010 is again in the news with a story in the Wall Street Journal.

The program is so shady that even the Journal has qualms about it. They are right. Uncle Sam snooping through parking lots to build a list of who’s naughty and who’s nice at gun shows is more than a little creepy. Especially for an administration that’s proven its willingness to weaponize government against political opponents. What’s next? Cruising the parking lots at Trump rallies? Chick-Fil-A restaurants?

Initially the plan, according to the WSJ, involved comparing gun show attendees’ plates with plates of folks heading south across the Mexican border. Was the BATFE looking for those competing with its own Project Gunrunner/Fast and Furious? That’s the program where the US Government literally gave guns to the Mexican drug cartels.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Gun-Show Customers’ License Plates Come Under Scrutiny
Federal agents enlisted local police to scan cars’ plates at shows’ parking lots

Federal agents have persuaded police officers to scan license plates to gather information about gun-show customers, government emails show, raising questions about how officials monitor constitutionally protected activity.

Emails reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show agents with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency crafted a plan in 2010 to use license-plate readers—devices that record the plate numbers of all passing cars—at gun shows in Southern California, including one in Del Mar, not far from the Mexican border.

Agents then compared that information to cars that crossed the border, hoping to find gun smugglers, according to the documents and interviews with law-enforcement officials with knowledge of the operation.

The investigative tactic concerns privacy and guns-rights advocates, who call it an invasion of privacy. The law-enforcement officials say it is an important and legal tool for pursuing dangerous, hard-to-track illegal activity.

Generally, people have no reasonable expectation of privacy in public settings. That would certainly apply to someone recording your license plate number in a parking lot or public street.

Continue reading at:  http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2016/10/john-boch/feds-visit-gun-show-parking-lots-scanning-license-plates/