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.
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."
Go against this, and filming your kids baseball game becomes a legal nightmare.
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.
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 should it be possible for my bits be scooped up and sold for profit against my will.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 verbally thing this data is a good thing, provided it’s locked behind solid 4th amendment protections.
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?
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?
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.
"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.
> 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.
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.
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
Luckily we never need to do that with words for them to be useful, even in legal contexts.
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.
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.
Is this actually born out in Court Cases? Warrantless Surveillance by NSA seems to be blanket legal for example.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://nlets.org/resources/blog/nlets-news-our-nationwide-l...
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.
malwrar•1h ago
alberth•58m ago
jameshart•47m ago
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’
woodrowbarlow•11m ago
chaps•31m ago
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.
mock-possum•19m ago
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?
thewebguyd•16m ago
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"
drtz•11m ago
> 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.