Because its useful messaging to disarm the populace. "License plate reader" sounds less alarming than "Internet connected camera" or "Mass surveillance device."
Public attitudes vary around a "license plate reader" but will be more uniformly opposed to "Widespread, automated government mass surveillance tracking your every move via camera in real time"
The flag for whether the object/person is law enforcement vs not is interesting as well.
Love that, very cool for quickly filtering out the streams / geodata that might have an officer's actions recorded.
https://docs.flocksafety.com/developer-hub/docs/tracking-obj...
"Warrantless mass surveillance technology" creates a category into which these and similar devices can be aggregated together where people's concerns tend to be about the same.
That phrase was suggested by a local chief of police while we were having discussions on policy.
You could say the same about literally any privately operated device. ‘I don’t know why they call these things cell towers. They do whatever they are programmed to and can be reprogrammed by anyone with access’
Heck the same applies to non electronic things too ‘why do they call it a house? It’s a general purpose structure and could be turned into a shop or a factory or a crack den at any time by anyone with access’
Obviously the electronic networked solution is going to be cheaper and easier to operate. It would be insanely wasteful to force government organizations to use expensive cumbersome processes just to ensure they can’t be misused.
The solution is legislation and enforcement of rules that constrain what local governments are allowed to actually do with equipment they install and the data it collects, not regulation of what the equipment they install could theoretically be converted to accomplish.
> No one expected doorbell cameras to join a mass surveillance network
Doorbell cameras were at least for individual security, initially. There's no attempt being made to market Flock as anything but mass surveillance. Surely we all expect them or their successors to be detecting peoples' faces, walking gates, and who-knows-what-else in the near future.
There's no malintent with it, it just means that the public conversation hasn't gotten to a point where these distinctions can easily be made to a wider audience. We'll get there.
Do you really think people don’t know how they’re framing the situation when they choose to use language this way? It’s all just an innocent misunderstanding, that just so happens to serve the interest of existing power structures?
It's better to raise the voice now for you guys than to say sorry later.
A warrant requirement is not a reasonable bandaid to consider allowing mass spying. There should be no mass spying by default.
A warrant requirement makes sense for something like the locations of customers on cellular networks, because, although it should be improved, it's been built into the tech.
When you make the optional choice to create mass spying, safeguards do not make it acceptable.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects...
Attempts to interpret the Constitution otherwise are, IMHO, attempts at good policy, but unstable as law. So we should fix it either by giving people property rights to that data (so that they can destroy or change it without permission) or to explicitly require warrants for access to PII owned by third parties.
..."and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
There are also the rights of the people to peaceably assemble -both publicly and privately-, peaceably speak publicly, and peaceably bring their grievances to the various governments that govern them. All of those rights interact with regulation of the things we're talking about here... it's not just the 4th amendment that's relevant.
Go against this, and filming your kids baseball game becomes a legal nightmare.
I find this attitude I find kind of tiring. Gosh it’s just sooo hard to figure out the difference between Flock Safety and Big Bill’s Little League Sports Photography. It’s actually very straightforward to determine the difference between these two things. So easy, an idiot could do it. Or a judge.
Yep. And dragnet surveillance has (pretty much?) always been illegal in the US... but it takes the courts an awfully long time to notice the new dragnets the cops set up.
For example, despite the fact that the third-party doctrine says that cops can just walk up and get any ordinary business records someone you do business with has created about you, courts continue to notice and declare illegal new ways in which naive application of that doctrine creates dragnets.
Now is not the time to be giving more power to the executive or its policing functions.
We lost a lot of strong privacy rights we had with landlines when we shifted to cell phones.
We're actually slowly creeping into pre-crime territory. You could have AI searching for possible pre-crime candidates based on unknown identity in the area, disparate pattern to usually movements, etc.
> I think cameras in all public spaces are going to happen. Imagine Ring comes out with a nicer camera system for homeowners....
Indiscriminately filming people in public places is illegal some places, e.g. Germany. Allowing the creation of large networks of cameras surveilling public places is a choice.
In my conversations with law enforcement (mostly at management level, chiefs of police), all of them have had reasonable-sounding objections to a warrant requirement for a search, but zero of them have been able to come up with a reason why a case-or-CAD ID requirement isn't workable. Generally, they argue that in practice obtaining a warrant can be too onerous in time sensitive situations, and can be harder to obtain than the public realizes. Two popular examples are in kidnappings (time sensitive) and missing persons (difficult to obtain).
A case number or CAD ID however simply requires that the details of either a public call for service or an active investigation are associated with the historical search. It closes the door on officers' hobby searching.
Andrew's blog post does note the problems with oversight, which also match my experience, so this isn't a perfect fix. But it will go further in conversations with law enforcement for people that are trying to thread the needle on making "safe" mass surveillance.
(I am personally opposed to mass surveillance in all its forms, but arguing only from that position pretty much immediately excludes me from policy discussions.)
It seems that would easily impede a lot of abuse and it’s straightforward to believe that historical data is rarely so urgent as to not require a warrant.
A matter of defining historical as a sufficiently old enough thing but that seems feasible.
Access control (warrant) doesn't prevent a breach, and the system is not architected in a way to prevent internal abuse. The best way to prevent the abuse of data is to not collect or store it at all.
Why should it be possible for my bits be scooped up and sold for profit against my will.
It's a new paradigm. Flock is the first to blatently collect and sell public whereabouts for private gain.
Conflating this with insurance is a interesting take.
Also, the notion that I have a choice to not have a car is absurd. I'd starve. And, even if I could walk around are traverse my town with only a bike or walking, I'm still sucked into a harddrive against my will by these cameras.
Is it legal for a private entity to do the same with their owned space (like a plaza or mall or office tower)?
Focusing on license-plate-readers seems like car-brain is causing the author to miss the forest for the trees.
1) remove the hazard
2) replace the hazard with something less hazardous
3) isolate the hazard (guards, cages etc)
4) administrative controls (procedures, training, warning, etc)
5) PPE
Implementing some kind of judicial review for these panopticons is something like 4) in the hierarchy. It would be a good thing to have, but we can go far further. Why do we need this shit? Oh what so someone’s car doesn’t get stolen a few times per year? I think my values are in line with the founding fathers and most Americans when I say I would gladly give up a little bit of safety to not have a spy camera trained on me 24/7.
I would like more removal and less procedural controls. The cops cannot abuse a system that does not exist.
I know it's unpopular but I went from not supporting these sorts of systems to embracing them after seeing the positive effects in China.
For crimes that depend on anonymity, theft, assault, hit-and-runs, vandalism, illegal parking, etc., surveillance changes the calculation because the offender expects a higher or even a near certain chance of being identified/caught in China. I think this is a good thing. I also see no issue with someone breaking the law and receiving a ticket almost immediately.
With all systems, it comes down to the design. What sort of oversight is there, how long is footage stored, can it be used for specific crimes or expanded later, and are there mechanisms to correct false identification.
Done right, these systems work well. I would be happy to live in a society where street crime is rare enough that I can leave personal property anywhere, like a bike, without constantly worrying about theft. I think many fears about these systems come from dystopian science fiction and assume the worst possible implementation, rather than recognizing that technology can be designed with strong safeguards.
Why did they need flock?
Reliable studies have shown that increasing the severity of punishment doesn't deter crime, but increasing the chance of being caught does. Cameras directly address the later. You'd have to be a total idiot to steal a car these days.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/04/world/asia/xi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit_system
https://www.csis.org/analysis/old-friends-new-calculations-r...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Hong_Kong_national_securi...
I wonder if people who feel this way will feel safer? In this scenario, you have a Ring camera system observing your entire property. Do you feel safer if someone comes onto your property and triggers an alarm? What if it turns out it's just a kid coming over to grab a stray frisbee? What if your neighbor noticed something needed a quick fix (say you left a can of paint open or something similarly benign) and wanted help in a neighborly way without first checking to see if you were home?
I guess we just take for granted that we live in a low-trust society. But we take that for granted at our peril, because the fear of a low-trust society is actively being exploited by people who want to sell individuals, businesses and municipalities the means to further erode that trust.
The accused has comparatively no rights when an bureaucrat is shaking them down and the accused is often a business rather than an individual it's easy to have sympathy for. Flock could've run their racket for many years, got much praise from the useful idiots, really gotten their system integrated and entrenched, if they'd have chosen that route.
Their mistake was believing in their own bullshit. They thought they could make it cheaper to solve crimes (at great cost to everyone's rights of course, but they thought this was acceptable) and make things better (or at least their definition of it). If only they had been slightly scummier and instead set out to help municipalities collect civil fines they probably could have gotten away without scrutiny.
There are civilian enterprise uses of ALPR. Where do they fall in this? I don't even mean for mass data collection or even for parking enforcement. I'm thinking of like various car washes where they offer monthly memberships and their car wash portal system has plate recognition to tie your membership to your car. Or other enterprise access control applications where the ALPR pops the gates open instead of RFID tags.
This middle ground that municipalities try to carve out where it’s fully open to police without a warrant but not subject to FOIL laws doesn’t appear tenable for much longer.
There’s been too many cases of police officers stalking exes, poking around the data for fun and such so it’s clear police cannot be trusted with the data without better court oversight.
It’s certainly a very powerful investigative tool, but needs solid 4th amendment protections. The Supreme Court’s recent ruling on geofence searches of cell phone records is a good indication on where the Supreme Court’s head is at on this sort of thing, where they said no you can’t just do blanket data dumps like that without a warrant.
Going back through police officers' notes or cruiser dash cam videos and tracking a car's movements by its plate is not an illegal search, is it? Just cumbersome, expensive and likely ineffective. Well, now it's not. A difference in degree (of usefulness and speed), not in kind.
Scale actually matters. Things that are generally OK at a small scale become problematic at larger scales. A single police cruiser writing down license plates isn't able to track you in the same way a huge surveillance network is, and the opportunities for abuse are much lower.
Not only this, this a precedented court opinion.
Is this actually born out in Court Cases? Warrantless Surveillance by NSA seems to be blanket legal for example.
See: https://www.oyez.org/cases/2017/16-402
It comes up fairly often here since the HN audience tends to be mostly programmers/computer people, but it's really important to remember that the law is not a series of rules a computer can directly evaluate to determine whether something is or is not legal; judges frequently use their judgement to balance the assumed intent of laws and the competing interests of various parties. I don't say this to you specifically but really just the HN audience as a whole :)
The only people who want that are the ones that want to subjugate large portions of the population, or those that want those large portions subjugated even if they don't get to do it.
Sheltering humans running away from slavery was also a crime .
It was illegal for black Americans to learn to read and write. Seeking education made them a criminal.
Buying or selling a beer made you a criminal during prohibition.
Do you see how easy it is to make someone a criminal?
from your point, nothing is cheaper and more efficient then mandating an app on all phones through which the governments can track everyone, and consequently whoever doesnt have it would be a criminal. it completely tracks from your argument. You may need to make the app stop tracking while theyre in the home, but thats a technicality. voila. no longer an issue according to your point
Are you suggesting that people couldn’t do that for some reason?
It isn't possible for them to do that without sensors and AI everywhere. That's why using this technology is a red line.
Thankfully, the law isn't as overly simplistic and black and white as that. It'd be very stupid if it were. We have the ability maintain a general principal like "there's no expectation to privacy in public" and still prohibit certain things that are deemed harmful, like taking upskirt photos of people while they are in public spaces.
If you're going to argue platitudes from altitude, you don't get to retreat to the comfort of circumscribed exceptions.
Nobody is talking about cops or flock cameras taking upskirt photos.
Just as we have the ability to pass laws prohibiting that specific harmful use of cameras while in public spaces, we have the ability to do something about the harmful uses of police and flock cameras while in public. The conversation is about the harms of mass surveillance and the exceptions necessary to protect the American public.
Hello, I'm here.
Practically, we do have privacy in public pre-AI. We weren't entitled to complete anonymity, but the ability to track every single person at all times was impossible.
Now that AI and sensors are making it possible, people are saying "No, I don't want that to be the norm".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v.Jones(2012)
> Also left unanswered was the broader question surrounding the privacy implications of a warrantless use of GPS data without a physical intrusion – as might occur, for example, with the electronic collection of GPS data from wireless service providers or factory-installed vehicle tracking and navigation services.[27] The Court left these matters to be decided in some future case, saying, "It may be that achieving the same result through electronic means, without an accompanying trespass, is an unconstitutional invasion of privacy, but the present case does not require us to answer that question."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_v._United_States
> Ultimately, in Carpenter the court determined that the third-party doctrine could not be extended to historical cell site location information (CSLI). Instead, the Court compared "detailed, encyclopedic, and effortlessly compiled" CSLI records to the GPS information at issue in United States v. Jones, recognizing that both forms of data accord the government the ability to track individuals' past movements.[24] Furthermore, the Court noted that CSLI could pose even greater privacy risks than GPS data, as the prevalence of cellphones could accord the government "near perfect surveillance" of an individual's movements. Accordingly, the Court ruled that, under the Fourth Amendment, the government must obtain a search warrant in order to access historical CSLI records.[1]
Of course there are no guarantees on how they'd rule today, but in the past they've ruled that scale and ease of access and compilation are significant enough to mean that fourth amendment protections should apply.
To me, that is precedent in US law that computerized methods of executing human tasks do not fall under the same rules.
All I'm saying is it should have been a problem at that point.. not just because it's easy now to do it at a high scale.
The former is massively damaging to our rights, the latter is almost useless and thus barely a problem worth talking about.
The difference in scale matters.
It's obviously different in that Chatrie was about google location data, and there actually was a warrant. SCOTUS ruled that warrant was too broad since it captured everyone in that location, not a specific person(s).
Constitutional scholars have pointed out the ALPR are next in line to face challenges based on the same principles as Chatrie - LEO can get a warrant for a specific person(s) to search but cannot search the entire universe.
That would not prevent ALPRs from existing, but it would require a warrant to search them. Which seems reasonable and completely in line with the 4th amendment.
Edit: words/spelling
Compelling parties to give up data is different than looking at your own data. And it is firmly established that recording and reviewing footage in public space is totally fine.
So we are back to square one...How do we define scale such that a police camera on a police car is OK, but a police camera on every corner is not. Or that individuals can record in public but police cannot.
They wrestle with the balance there of 4th amendment protections and mass surveillance. It's evolving and generally courts are moving to not allowing mass surveillance -or less so than they have allowed in. Courts have been split on it, and someone already pointed it out that SCOTUS will eventually come up with tests for it.
There were some really interesting parts of those Chatrie opinions that really will test the idea that someone in public gives up their right to any privacy - the fundamental underpinning of why governments can currently point cameras at public places and dont need a warrant to search that video.
Chatrie protected the aggregated viewpoint versus any single public moment - And SCOTUS said the aggregated viewpoint (mass search of location data with no specific person(s)) is not allowed under the 4th amendment. A very interesting precedent.
Gorsuch had an interesting take in that he argued that in Chatrie the location data was Chatrie's personal property and therefore protected from illegal searches from government.
There are a lot of similarities to how ALPRs work, and key differences. Mostly Chatrie deals with a private firms data collection of locations - google vs ALPRs are generally on publicly owned property and recoding things in public.
Still, many justices opened the door to the idea that the government can't mass surveil citizens. We'll have to wait and see how it all plays out.
I am very much of the opinion the government should need a warrant to search through ALPR data (and video for that matter). So, I am hopeful that the tenets of Chatrie extend to ALPRs, video, etc.
Edit: Gorsuch argues that the data is personal and not the government's data - this is what prevents the government from searching for it without a warrant. He did not get into why a body cam or something like that is different.
Five cameras is less than what the number of police on duty are using.
Luckily we never need to do that with words for them to be useful, even in legal contexts.
This is not true of privacy advocates, they do want to limit the ability to fish for circumstantial evidence that targets innocent people and causes suspicion.
A police cruiser sitting at an intersection is visible. People notice it and its presence changes their behavior. They may choose to avoid certain routes through a city where surveillance cruisers hang out. Flock, and similar surveillance systems, are far less noticeable. Many, many people had no idea they existed a year ago when there were already 80,000 devices installed. Flock has been hot in the news cycle lately in part because tons of people are still just beginning to learn they exist. Whereas a police cruiser on a corner is overt surveillance, Flock is a "creepier" incarnation.
There's also capability. In principle, an officer parked on a corner is capable of responding to a variety emergencies. Some people might feel that the presence of the officer there was a net good for public safety. Heart attack in the neighborhood? Your local surveillance officer can start CPR. Older person with late-stage dementia has just walked away from home? Your local surveillance officer could clear that neighborhood.
But these surveillance systems have only one capability: surveillance. They can't render aid. They can't even prevent a crime; they can, at best, discourage it, or maybe aid in the apprehension of someone who committed a crime -- and didn't take adequate measures to avoid detection.
The bigger problem is law enforcement's use of private business as end-around to dodge 4th amendment.
Google and Apple, Verizon and AT&T, auto manufacturers, Flock, and every other business that scoops up our data has a trove of information that would be unquestionably illegal for law enforcement to collect directly due to 4th amendment protections against government mass surveillance. So, instead, the businesses conduct the mass surveillance and then law enforcement gets to access that information -- either with a warrant as is the case for Google and Apple, or with some sort agreement as with Flock.
Businesses (or individuals) that deliver surveillance data to the government, compelled by warrant or otherwise, should be subject to the same constitutional restrictions as the government itself.
Is it common for normal people to set up and use ALPRs?
I suspect when there’s been a few cases of that sort of thing happening the attitude of local politicians towards these cameras will change quite quickly.
I generally thing this data is a good thing, provided it’s locked behind solid 4th amendment protections.
Yes, and I keep thinking an organized, crowd-sourced effort like people do for capturing ADSB data or weather stations would be tempting. Setting up the hardware would be a little more involved though (mostly because of needing to locate it near the street). Cost is probably not even much worse than an ADSB monitor now.
Something like this is probably inevitable, either as a grassroots effort or via something like Amazon's Ring network. Short term it could prompt officials into action, but I fear long term it would be bad for society - laws might be written to prohibit it, but those would have side effects of limiting other things (like the aforementioned ADSB monitoring network).
e.g.:
Arkansas: https://law.justia.com/codes/arkansas/title-12/subtitle-2/ch... > Except as provided in subsection (b) of this section, it is unlawful for an individual, partnership, corporation, association, or the State of Arkansas, its agencies, and political subdivisions to use an automatic license plate reader system.
Maine: https://legislature.maine.gov/statutes/29-A/title29-Asec2117... > Except as otherwise provided in subsection 3, a person may not use an automated license plate recognition system.
Likewise I would expect that the license plates read be redacted. It makes sense to protect it since you are exposing members of the public, not the government.
Once you redact license plate numbers, what is left of substance in the FOIA request?
You have to look at this from a systems point of view. Yes, flock cameras individually only capture their immediate surroundings, but the emergent behavior of the system is a means to follow someone around wherever they go, which is already a no-no in our legal system without at least securing a warrant to do so. And, even securing a warrant for one individual does not give you the right to include everyone in an area, commonly referred to and struck down as dragnet surveillance.
Flock systems and their siblings are wrong and should not be tolerated.
There is already plenty of precedent in existing laws that 'automated' is a distinction that matters. Even on this exact issue, a few states prevent you as a private citizen from operating an automated license plate recognition system. You are free to scribble down the plate numbers all you want, but using an automated system is against the law.
More to the point, there’s a difference between someone writing down license plate numbers on a sheet of paper and and putting that information into a database that can then be mines to identify patterns of behavior, associations between people, etc. Context, use, and scale all matter significantly
But a pretty huge difference. It's the difference between a few individuals throwing waste into a river vs a corporation systemically polluting it. Surely one is more of a problem than the other?
System 1 can refer to the dashcam or the mk1 eyeball + notepad in your example.
System 2: a system for tracking the presence of a person across both time and location
An example of system 2 would be the facial id system being trialled on the london underground currently.
These are a difference in kind not in degree. It doesn't matter how many system 1's you deploy, you cannot unlock the capability of querying where any given face was observed across time and location.
Also, if it's the police, at least they're part of the community and people can monitor and have an effect on what they do. When it's a private company, none of that is true.
No.
A police officer is an expensive asset that requires a lot of investment of both time and money to create. [0] When a police department chooses to put cops on a corner doing surveillance, they're choosing to prefer that activity to any other thing that that cop could be doing. In all but the smallest towns out there, it's certain that the PD doesn't have enough officers on staff to surveil every single street corner in town. In most towns, it's prohibitively expensive (in terms of training cost, opportunity cost, and salaries) to set up a dragnet surveillance when one only uses humans to do the surveillance.
In contrast, cameras are far cheaper to acquire, deploy, and maintain than cops. You also only need a handful of cops to run such a surveillance system, rather than one on every corner. With cameras owned by the police or town, it's totally feasible to set up a dragnet surveillance system in most towns.
As many folks have said in the discussion about this, scale and expense are very important considerations. As few people have said, laws, regulations, and punishments that make sense when you will catch one rulebreaker in a hundred thousand often do not make sense when you will catch one rulebreaker in two. And the sorts of regulations that provide adequate restraint to police and prosecutors from interfering in people peaceably going about their lives are not the same in a society where one has to send out police to ask people face-to-face for information about someone's whereabouts as they are when police can sit at their desk in HQ and pull up complete records of 90% of that person's daily activity with five minutes of keyboard work. [1]
[0] I make no comment as to the average quality of the asset produced. I only note that it's a very limited asset that's expensive to produce.
[1] Note that I'm not saying that the surveillance systems currently deployed provide access to 90% of everyone's daily activities. This is an illustrative example. However, it takes only a few minutes' thought to notice that the police's powers of surveillance are far greater today than they were in the late 1700s.
For example, an officer sitting on a city street is very unlikely to learn where his wife goes every day, an ALPR search will answer that question.
An officer walking along the street making note of what he sees is very unlikely to observe and make note of the precise daily movements of someone in August three years ago, an ALPR search will answer that question.
The degree/kind distinction you’re aiming at is meaningless, it’s like trying to argue that shooting someone with a firearm is the same as shooting someone with a paintball gun in principle, sure but maybe one of them is orders of magnitudes morw powerful and impactful, and so deserves a different degree of consideration in how and when it is applied?
If there were literally hundreds of thousands of government agents on every corner writing down every person/car that walked by, it is quite probable this would be illegal even though you have no expectation of privacy in public. See Carpenter V United States and some of the concurring opinions in United States v. Jones.
"We believe your camera captured the guy who robbed your neighbor, can we see the footage". Virtually everyone says yes to this.
There's no evidence that mass video surveillance, Ring cameras, etc. are leading to higher clearance rates of serious crimes.
> We have had cities in the USA with 10k+ cameras in public spaces for years now without much fanfare.
And if the data from those cameras were processed to allow me to type someone's name into the search and then track their every movement, there would be a lot of fanfare. Palantir is probably building that, but it doesn't seem widespread yet.
But as of now, the directionality is reversed.
With regular video, we know a crime happened and expand our search from there to find a suspect. It's not invading a specific person's privacy.
With Flock, we have a suspect and want to retroactively stalk that person. We don't know if that person had anything to do with any crime yet, and we're invading their privacy.
There is nothing reversed with Flock. There is a crime scene, they see who was entering or leaving and work from there. Without plate readers it takes a team of people many hours, that’s the difference. You can’t know who had anything to do with the crime without investigating, that’s the definition of the word!
> … we're invading their privacy
Who expects privacy driving on public roads? In any sort of developed area you are driving past cameras on every single street. Every Uber has a dash cam, the Teslas are recording (sometimes?), every police car has a camera, etc.
This is a huge problem that people will try to sweep under the rug or hand wave away with wording like "It's the scale the matters".
Ideally, laws need to be written like programs are, where fundamental rules of the system are derived and programmatically put into action. So words like "scale" mean nothing. "I need the variable to go negative when the scale is large". Most programmers here will immediately snag on "scale" not being a hard value.
So what we actually need is a redefining of the fundamental rules, and well, that is very challenging to do such that it's still legal to walk around an record everything in public, but not legal to passively record everything in public all the time. How do we solidly and unambiguously differentiate a cops dashcam, from a police camera on a portable base station, from a flock camera on a corner to a private business with a security came to a firestation with a security camera.
Legally it's a very challenging problem to create a "programmatic differentiation" from the kind of camera use we want, and the kind we don't want.
It seems many people feel it limits what I would consider "freedom of impermanence", or the concept that as an ordinary individual nearly every action or mistake you make will not considered in your future.
I for one would act differently if that were the case. Many vulnerable or stupid moments would not have happened. Many of those moments have allowed me to grow as a person. And this is as a person who has not faced persecution or bias in law enforcement.
I do not have a stance on the matter of general recording currently, but know that I would have acted differently if there was a camera around all the time. There goes my first time asking someone out, there goes frying a 5V board with 12V because I thought I knew better, there goes bar karaoke so bad that even the bartender looked pained. But if this were law, so too goes the guy I saw in a park fire spinning, so too goes the joy I captured on a strangers face at seeing a beautiful chandelier, and so too goes the countless photos of nature that happen to have people in the background.
What is the difference between a security camera watching the municipal tools shack entrance and the security camera watching the main road?
The ultimate goal is to not have a massive database of everything that happened everywhere going back forever. So it even extends far beyond just reading license plates.
> Legally it's a very challenging problem to create a "programmatic differentiation" from the kind of camera use we want, and the kind we don't want.
I don't think that's ideal at all. The questions you're asking already have been answered, judges. It's their whole job to understand that scale changes things.
I get the instinct to be able to objectively codify things, especially in this community, but the law is based on morality and philosophy. Until someone comes up with a perfect solution to the trolley problem, we need a human in the loop making judgements.
More on topic, there's a reason why we have different terms for surveillance and mass surveillance. They feel very different and mass surveillance enables much different behaviors of bad actors.
The difference in scale is so great that it becomes the meaningful, defining factor.
EDIT: i have no doubt that Flock and other ALPRs got so widespread because four ALPRs watching each direction at an intersection is basically invisible in comparison to four cop cars at every intersection.
if plate readers were as visible as cop cars (including agency branding) people would have probably gotten bent out of shape a long time ago.
It's not the first time.
We also see the cops use the flock system as another excuse to treat an encounter over an unpaid bill as if they were taking down Bin Laden - they seem to see "flock hit" as code for "lets try to kill this person".
I am not a criminal nor do I have some sort of fetish for being abused, therefore I don't want some typo to result in unstable, bloodthirsty thugs putting guns in my face. The inefficiency protects me somewhat from these things, and until these issues can be properly addressed, I don't want anything to be scaled to a higher degree.
Yes I'm aware that this means lazy cops won't catch as many speeders and people who have warrants to pay a fine. I don't mind.
The Fourth Amendment bans only unreasonable searches, and the threshold question is whether someone had an expectation of privacy that society is prepared to recognize as reasonable. That standard is contextual by design (what is reasonable to expect is partly technological, but partly societal and cultural). The "difference in degree" you mention is precisely what is being tested.
The recent (and oft-discussed) Chatrie v. United States is relevant. The Court held that the government's acquisition of a person's phone location history is a search requiring a warrant, and refused to set a duration floor. Their stated rationale was both that even short windows expose sensitive movements, and because they did not believe they could answer how many small violations of privacy add up to a big one. As such, the majority decided that warrants were necessary, lest the government be given a "virtual panopticon"
If we took your hypothetical seriously, an army of officers logging every plate by hand probably isn't a search and there's no reasonable expectation of privacy of movement on a public road. But building a searchable index of those notebooks, and querying it to reconstruct an arbitrary car's six months, is a different act from the observing.
That's the act at issue. Nobody argues a camera needs a warrant to see a plate.
The thing I don't understand: why do so many people want the police to _not_ need warrants to surveil the public? Are you historically illiterate? Are you unaware of how big government power tends to be abused? Do you simply trust that the government will always run by people who will support you and will abuse only the people you personally dislike?
I'm legitimately curious what sort of intellectual position you use to justify your active support of authoritarian measures, and why you don't believe the public should have safeguards against government abuse. My questions might have sounded flippant, but they were sincere. I would like to understand if your position is borne of naïveté, or a sincere preference for fascism.
Similar issue: cell phone interception via Stinger cell base stations by law enforcement. A U.S. judge in Ohio ruled that using the device to sweep up data from thousands of unsuspecting individuals to track one suspect gave the government unconstitutional, "unbridled discretion" to monitor private citizens.
Another similar issue: A judge in Mississippi ruled "tower-dump warrants", where law enforcement requests info from cell companies on users/phone numbers in a geographic area in a certain time frame are illegal and too broad. The judge declared them an arbitrary government intrusion that violates the Fourth Amendment's particularity requirement
A third similar issue: In U.S. v. Chatrie, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that reverse-location "geofence warrants" constitute a Fourth Amendment search. The ruling establishes that users maintain a reasonable expectation of privacy over their location data, meaning law enforcement can no longer execute warrantless, sweeping digital dragnets through third-party data.
These are 3 examples of large scale police surveillance that have been ruled illegal because they are broad surveillance and give police too much power without a specific legal justification. This seems very similar and I expect the court cases on ALPR cameras to end up in the same place, but it may take a decade or so.
As a private citizen, I can't just legally look up a license plate and get an owner and address due to data privacy laws.
Wrong.
Automating the system is ABSOLUTELY a difference in kind. The argument "it is the same thing" is reductionist beyond absurdity.
"Quantity has a quality all its own."
Scaling and automation is a difference in kind in every field, and especially in surveillance of a population. To deny it is to assert the Industrial Revolution, the Computer Revolution, and the Internet had no effect on anything.
A cop sitting by the road operating a speed trap time or radar/laser gun can trap enough speeders to moderate the traffic, and individual speeders get few tickets. Implementing the "same" thing with cameras everywhere and timing toll-booth arrival/departure times and issuing tickets automatically would result in the majority of drivers getting multiple speeding tickets every trip (just based on measured average speeds on most roads exceeding the posted limit).
Your example proves the opposite of what you say.
Having a cop personally observing and writing down license plates requires resources - a decision to prioritize those specific resources for that specific investigation on that day. It is a real decision to surveil people in that way. It means people will ONLY be surveilled in that way when it is important.
In contrast, constant, ubiquitous, and near-cost-free surveillance means people will be surveilled all day, every day.
What was once applied only to exceptionally serious crimes is now available to target any citizen for any petty crime. It enables exactly the kind of silent targeting for which every authoritarian government lusts — the appearance of law and order with the ability to target any specific "troublemaker" at will.
With such surveillance, there is no need for an authoritarian to make false charges or highlight a protest. Jack protests, they don't like it, just say "go after Jack". They go to the cameras, find a bunch of petty crimes, and prosecute. Jack now has endless trouble if not jail, and the regime carries on like nothing happened.
If, as you say, you don't understand why it is not different, stop being reductive, look at the larger system.
But often the inverse argument is used in respect of private corporations. Obviously it would be unreasonable to expect Google to vet every ad and YouTube video uploaded tot heir platform, and make responsible editorial decisions about which ads and content to show to children. Surely to allow them to scale arbitrarily large we must make sure not to overly burden them with regulations.
This is how things get regulated. I'm still waiting for a data broker breach which exposes the particulars of congress. That would be quite the shakeup. I think it will happen eventually.
There are MANY cases where the government legitimately possesses personal information that could potentially cause harm if revealed, for operational as well as public safety purposes. Vehicle registration and drivers license records, for example.
This personal information is typically exempt from FOIA laws. I can't go FOIA vehicle registration records to look up where a certain driver lives, but the state and police officers do have access to that information.
A search involves access without consent. Police don't need a search warrant to perform a search with the consent of the owner. In the case of cell phone data the search is without the consent of the data owner (the phone company). In this case the municipality is collecting public-view data themselves, not without the consent of the collector, so there's no search warrant issue.
This is fundamentally a police officer problem. You make it a felony and a terminable offense. You make all or part of the Brady List public and this automatically places an officer on it. ALPRs are just one tool for a police officer to stalk someone, they could just as well park outside their house or place of work and follow them around or do other things. We could require warrants to get the ALPR data but we'd still have these jerks pretending in to protect and serve.
In my perfect world, if we had an Amber alert or we knew there was a particularly violent criminal driving a specific car with a specfic license plate, I think it would be a step forward if all of the information was made available quickly and there was a quick and safe capture. Judges can issue warrants pretty quickly when motivated. Likewise, if some officer is stalking his ex-wife or something, cutting off the license plates is a nice step but I'd rather him not be involved in law enforcement at all.
I'd love for these datasets to be fully audited, but I suspect industry will balk that the very use of it is proprietary.
The lines start to get very blurry when dealing with things like private ALPRs and Ring/Nest etc. because they have the policy of if a LEO asks we provide (in the case of Ring LEOs have access to pretty much all doorbell cameras) but this is really problematic because although it's an attempt at good faith, they are essentially circumventing the legal process of acquiring this data for investigation since involving a judge is a cumbersome process.
But now we have a problem, LEOs are exercising essentially extrajudicial authority by having access to this data. The authority is provided to them by the law (hence why your average joe schmoe can't get this data) but they do not use the mechanisms provided to them to actually get that data. So all data should be provided to anyone regardless of status but if you don't have a lawyer and a reason in a civil case you get told to kick rocks
https://nlets.org/resources/blog/nlets-news-our-nationwide-l...
I want this data to require a warrant to access. Having said that, I agree that it should be open to everyone if warrants aren't required.
I've said this for years and I almost always get the "But stalkers!" pushback.
I think "But stalkers!" can be answered with applications to enable individuals to track their stalkers themselves. Since the police have no duty to protect I'd argue tracking a stalker yourself is probably a better solution anyway.
What?
There is a lot of information privy to police that should not be accessible to anyone. This is such a ridiculous standard. I would want police to know where I live and contact information of my emergency contact for instance, but I wouldn't want that accessible to others.
> There’s been too many cases of police officers stalking exes, poking around the data for fun and such so it’s clear police cannot be trusted with the data without better court oversight.
There have been more cases of "someone broke into my house at exactly [time]. Can you track their license plate and track them down" that I'm willing to make that tradeoff. Those police that abuse their power should be brought to justice and its obviously against policies, but to simply remove their ability to effectively do their job is not the answer
Sounds reasonable, but most police departments will not do this, even if the data is available to them and running the query is easy.
They will tell you to file a report, preferably online, which will then be incorporated in local stats, and may also be useful in your interactions with your insurance company.
But they will not do anything to help your specific case.
Oddly, this was 100% commonplace before about 2000 or so, in the US at least. Every household got a free phone book from the phone company that contained the name, address, and phone number of everyone in town. I think you could opt out, but almost no one did.
It was incredibly handy and sometimes I still miss it. I'm not 100% sure why it was considered OK for so many decades but today would be considered a PII data leak, though I suppose it being limited to your local area vs. searchable by the whole world has something to do with it.
> There have been more cases of "someone broke into my house at exactly [time]. Can you track their license plate and track them down" that I'm willing to make that tradeoff.
I'm not, especially since anecdotally, police are generally unwilling to use these tools to solve petty crime anyway.
Willy-nilly search for relatives, lovers, love-interests, rivals, etc. would potentially be a fireable offence --like HIPAA violations. There is no technical reason there could not be technical controls preventing abuses.
So you're fine with 1984-ish type stuff as long as it's only used to enforce the will of the state and never used by the agents of the state for their own purposes?
Each use of the ALPR should have behind it an actual defensible case.