That sentence does make this less of a win tbh, given that with it, it's just an actual example of the technology doing the job it is supposed to do.
Like this, it's almost a trojan horse of something pretending to be PR for A, but actually being effective PR for B.
A survey found that average daily consumption was 0.9g and median 0.35g.
92lb=41.73 kg = 41730g / 0.9g / 365 =127.032 average-user-years. Or basically a month’s supply for a small town.
Like most consumption, the top 10% easily account for >80% of total consumption.
Still, that’s a lot to be tailgating like this lady was as shown in the court filing. Also, “[the arresting officer] told another officer that he ‘could see her carotid artery in my car. That thing was about to pop out of her neck.’”
Sounds like some wild decisions were being made.
(bear with me, this all comes from random podcasting over the past decade)
Originally the Third-party doctrine[1] also would allow searches that were otherwise illegal, but recently exceptions have been made for GPS/location history in the courts in recent years (Carpenter and Chatrie).
So the device should require very specific license plates to scan for—not the current dragnet. The software should only "ping" when there is a confident match with said license plate(s)—and merely log which license plate, time stamp a single photo, and note the confidence level of it being a match.
The frame buffer should be the only place (a frame of) video is ever stored at all (excepting the high-confidence match indicated above).
The only issue remaining would be whether we trust the device/software to have complied (and not have a backdoor) and of course there needs to be a legal warrant for every license plate uploaded (and it should expire fairly frequently, likely requiring a new warrant to continue canning for the plate).
I don't think we can backtrack at this point but at least it should be heavily regulated and restricted (i.e. only run queries if there's a court order, etc).
The idea that law enforcement tapping into existing law enforcement knowledge constitutes as a search of "persons, houses, papers, and effects" does not logically follow for me. It is a search of law enforcements own property.
The roads are not law enforcement's property and my private car on a public road is private property that requires a warrant to search. These things should be totally banned, but even your argument is wrong since Flocks don't mask just the road, they record everything in their field of view.
I was referring data as the property. Accessing a public fact of your car is not the same as actually searching through a car.
>they record everything in their field of view.
And those areas are still part of the public.
> And those areas are still part of the public.
No, it's almost exclusively private land.
Defos swiping this analogy for future use
It does what it's advertised to do: it lets the police track and catch criminals easier.
This is especially meaningful in cases of crimes where either the information availability or the effort of tracking the criminal down often make enforcement prohibitive.
If Flock had better PR people, they'd have no shortage of shoplifters, joyriders, car window smashers, porch poachers, carjackers and drug mules that were caught using their tech to parade around.
It's just that this benefit comes at the cost of privacy being diminished for everyone.
But people don't hate Flock because it's questionable. People hate Flock because they don't like a corporation spying on them and selling data to cops - regardless of how legal or illegal that is. The rest is downstream from that. People only ask "how is this legal" because they hate it already.
Cell phones are kinda weird because they carry some of the elements that were built up around hardline phones (similar to how physical mail has a ton of protections that accumulated historically that make it distinct from other mediums).
This one generally gets treated legally more like any other data collection in a public space. Essentially, it's not a violation of your rights if somebody sits on a street corner and takes a picture of every car that drives by. There's a really interesting debate about whether there should be some concept of scale (Flock makes it really easy to effectively put somebody on every street corner), but the law generally hasn't changed to take that kind of thing into consideration.
You can see the same kind of thing in many of the AI training debates. Training AIs on bulk data has been found in a couple different cases to not be copyright infringement because they're drawing parallels to any other learning, even if the scale here is obviously several orders of magnitude apart from what was ever possible before.
For what it's worth: if I own a business in the US and have a camera pointed at the street, and the police ask me for footage, I don't need to require a subpoena. I can just choose to give it to them.
Never.
Over the course of a days/weeks, the places one visits, roads you drive on, etc. those things should definitely be private.
I didn't search for undercover, but I can find nothing about a warrant being required for a stakeout in the US (and numerous results saying no warrant is required).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katz_v._United_States [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_use_in_United_States_...
My understanding of the rule that has emerged from prior decisions is that there is a twofold requirement, first that a person have exhibited an actual (subjective) expectation of privacy and, second, that the expectation be one that society is prepared to recognize as "reasonable." Thus a man's home is, for most purposes, a place where he expects privacy, but objects, activities, or statements that he exposes to the "plain view" of outsiders are not "protected" because no intention to keep them to himself has been exhibited. On the other hand, conversations in the open would not be protected against being overheard, for the expectation of privacy under the circumstances would be unreasonable.
For this case the guy was inside a phone booth rather than out in the open.
There's nothing from SCOTUS on stingrays, but I looked at one federal case and the data being collected was referred to as a document, so that's where the 4th was found to apply.
In turn I don't think I've greatly oversimplified anything.
Is warrantless wiretapping of open-air payphones legal? Based on the TV show the wire, it's not.
Otherwise maybe I'll just set up my own cameras in public locations. If the police want the data they can pay per minute of footage. I'll let them search for metadata and tell them if footage matches with no visibility to the footage until after payment. If they search for something and don't purchase but come back for it - it's then increased pricing. If this is all public space and we can all build these systems because there's no expectation of privacy then all is fair in access to public right of way along roads.
Sure, if you strapped a camera to a light post without permission, I'd expect it to be taken down. The same way I can put a Ring camera on my door but I can't strap one to the traffic sign on my street.
If your door films the street, this is something that should be considered an invasion of your neighbour's privacy. The fact that it isn't is... disappointing.
Especially given the networked nature of those cameras. The police can access them by asking amazon permission, they don't need to ask you. Are you comfortable with that? I am not.
When that corporation is performing contracted work for the government, they act as the government's agent, making them subject to the same restrictions regarding civil rights as the government itself.
There's an interesting analogy with copyright issues surrounding AI use. Both copyright laws and surveillance were created to (respectively) creative incentives for authors to create novel works; and to protect citizens for indiscriminate surveillance. The laws made sense given the technology available at the time: it simply wasn't feasible to put a cop on every street corner, or to ingest the ideas of every work ever written.
But the laws have been eclipsed by technology. Technology makes a mockery of existing laws, by clearly violating their intent. Much has been written to the effect of "why bother to create new, free materials on the internet when it will just get scooped up by an LLM with no attribution to me." Similarly, Flock cameras have the effect or violating privacy in the exact same way the original laws sought to prevent.
Unfortunately, laws are slow to change, and monied interests will fight tooth-and-nail to put their profits above the rights of ordinary people. It's going to be a difficult decade or so coming up.
Can confirm. I've personally stopped releasing new open source code, and stopped contributing to projects.
Until copyright laws are updated to protect my work from being stolen and my labor exploited by AI companies, there's zero incentive for me to participate in open source.
Even OSI's cuck licenses are being cucked beyond reason. I didn't think that was possible.
What worries me is the fact AIs render licenses irrelevant. What's the point of starting an AGPLv3 project when AIs can just study it and make a proprietary equivalent? The free software movement no longer has any leverage.
I also don't feel any sense of accomplishment anymore. Software is so trivial now. Even if I make some unique thing, others can just have an AI copy it. Nothing is special anymore. Feels like there's no point.
I'd argue they break the fourth amendment:
> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
What are "unreasonable searches" if not being under "indiscriminate mass surveillance?"
A police officer randomly entering your house and going through all of your belongings.
Indiscriminately searching a larger number of people is not necessarily unreasonable. Take for example the TSA at airports where you have to searched to enter and the airpots have a ton of cameras recording every single person there.
What is America's history with tyranny?
Sort of. The problem isn’t necessarily the speed but the range. But it could be used. Bluetooth and WiFi tracking would be more likely in most real world scenarios.
You don't need to look at all tires to make a match, but the more a car has, the more likely one will be broadcasting during the window for detection.
Even if you can’t, if you put enough of them by stop signs and traffic lights it’s a non-issue.
Bluetooth and toll transponders (e.g, EZ-Pass, FastTrak) have been tracking things for decades.
First hand experience in operational rooms where both Bluetooth and the transponders are used for "traffic management" in Delaware and Washington DC. The readers are not at toll gates (only). they are sprinkled throughout highways and "high interest" areas. And, yes individual vehicles can be identified throughout their movements that is the very purpose of tracking so they can see the speed and flow of individual vehicles "to adjust intersection lights".
Building a system with "safeguards" in place that require constant oversight is destined for either regulatory capture of the oversight, or slow dismantling of the oversight.
E.g. warrants -> fisa court warrants -> Xkeyscore
Are you suggesting the set of all license plates of interest should be stored on the device itself?
Bear in mind this is not meaningfully different than previous mechanisms of issuing BOLOs. Law enforcement widely distributes information about plates of interest. In my area, those plates are often on digital billboards already.
that and you don't have any legitimate expectation of privacy while in public because you are in public
the really strange part is the folks that are angry about flock cameras are often the same people who are angry that folks like elon musk want the movements of the private jets to be non-public information
i can get around my community without worrying one bit about flock cameras surveilling me. the bike trails i use generally don't have cameras and even if they did i'm riding a fairly generic bike and wearing neutral and unmemorable clothing.
even with actual dragnet surveillance in NYC they couldn't track a dude on a bike effectively.
qwe----3•1h ago
JumpCrisscross•1h ago
They are—since 2000 Presidents have appointed more polarized judges [1]. (The broader trend began in 1975 [2].) But they’re just as powerful. Their words are absolutely meaningful.
[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w32920
[2] https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2022/04/political-pola...
saghm•1h ago
Madmallard•48m ago
The people in power are just circumventing everything on a whim to get what they want.
saghm•41m ago