>When you drive on public roads, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy.
False. Until the observer effect occurs, I - essentially - do not exist but as a record in a database. Someone who knows me, my car, or has the ability to ascertain who I am from identifiers on the vehicle, is able to collapse that sense of privacy but, until that happens, I am just one of the many of the nameless mass. In that, I have privacy and you would be hard-pressed to prove otherwise.
>Tinted windows which obscure the driver’s face are, to the best of my knowledge, illegal in most of the U.S.
False. Tinted windows which obscure the driver's view is illegal. It's perfectly legal for you to have a high iridescent finish on the outside of your tint, which will obstruct the outside view of the driver (in sunlight).
>...or using them in an otherwise illegal manner.
When - in the history of ever - has law enforcement never abused the resources afforded to them? Your credulous, at best, belief in law enforcement's use of the system largely ignores the prevailing example given in the article - which was that they used the system on someone who was under "suspicious circumstance". The "suspicious circumstance" bar is so low that even a two-dimensional being couldn't limbo under it.
Some might argue that since the agreements were made that the three-lettered agencies would only use them for criminal investigations, that the example of the "suspicious circumstance" that was given just now is in fact illegal.
Is there a non-GDPR-wall, non-pay-wall, non-reenable ads version of this? Even their JS reaches through the the sands of Web Archive time and blocks viewing the article...
If you're starting from scratch, as other users have mentioned, the READMEs, CONTRIBUTING, etc. are all good sources.
After that, take a peek into the Issues. Many people open bugs and/or create pull-requests to resolve something. It's quite plausible that you can gleam a lot of information from what's going on behind the scenes from these; especially, if they're open-source projects with a lot of public consumption.
If it's in a language I don't understand (presumably because I have never had the need to use it), I'll try to write the basic "Hello, world!" apps or something slightly more complicated, just to get the gist of the language. The helped a lot with Rust, for example.
I don't mean to deride you in any form or fashion but your experience seems to be the outlier and the OC's experience seems to be the modus operandi (having experienced it, myself).
As far as could tell, they weren't saying it didn't happen to you but to infer that's (generally) not how things work elsewhere. For example, if you've never heard of the phrase "being managed out"[0,1,2], you're lucky, but others haven't been and will continue to not be for some time.