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> this sound a lot like a stasi operation. No. Assuming that the parking lot is exposed to the street, there is absolutely nothing wrong with posting an offic

> this sound a lot like a stasi operation. No. Assuming that the parking lot is exposed to the street, there is absolutely nothing wrong with posting an officer in or near the lot and recording the plates of vehicles that travel near the area. The notion that it is 100% okay that things that happen in public view may be subject to notice and recording at any time is very important to preserve. Where this goes oh so wrong is when the PD posts a robot policeman [0] at the location, or a network of them throughout the district that record things (like license plates). There are only so many officers in a district, each of them can only be doing one thing at a time, and every one of them requires OT pay for extended work hours. This means that a district has to decide if plate collection at a location is the best thing that they can be doing with a particular officer. If a district can suddenly -for the price of one meatbag officer- dedicate ten new robot "officers" [1] to the task of car movement surveillance, then their powers have been greatly expanded. It's very important that we protect the right to notice and record things that happen in public. I feel that it's equally important that we work to limit the damage that an entity can do when they have the resources available to record such things on a large scale. [0] AKA: a camera [1] who can work 24/7 and never require OT pay

hellbanner 11y ago
You're saying public recording is fine when it's "expensive" -- costing a human salary, but not when it's a robot? I'm not following you. If police are going to record citizens, citizens should feel comfortable recording police. What their routes are, favorite stops, conversations, etc.
- pavel_lishin 11y ago
  It's not fine when it's expensive, it's fine when it's inherently limited and not omniscient. > If police are going to record citizens, citizens should feel comfortable recording police. Nobody's debating that.
- eximius 11y ago
  But citizens aren't incentivized to record police.
- simoncion 11y ago
  > You're saying public recording is fine when it's "expensive" -- costing a human salary, but not when it's a robot? I'm not following you. You are following me. That's exactly what I'm saying. Human scale surveillance is okay. Because the surveillance is carried out by a human on the scene, it requires the surveillers to decide who should be surveilled, and prevents or eliminates blanket surveillance. > If police are going to record citizens, citizens should feel comfortable recording police. 100% agreed. Because of the extraordinary powers they are entrusted with, on-duty police [0] should be held to a much higher standard than regular folks. Off-duty cops who aren't exercising police power? They're folks like any other and must be afforded the same rights and protections as every other regular citizen. [0] Or off-duty police who are otherwise exercising their police powers.
  - whoopdedo 11y ago
    > Human scale surveillance is okay. Because the surveillance is carried out by a human on the scene, it requires the surveillers to decide who should be surveilled, and prevents or eliminates blanket surveillance. But what we're describing is not a human using his judgment to select probable suspects for further investigation. It's a guy parked pointing a camera at all license plates and feeding them en masse to a computer for automated processing. It is not functionally different than the hypothetical robot you described, only this happens to be a robot with an organic component.
    - simoncion 11y ago
      > It is not functionally different than the hypothetical robot you described, only this happens to be a robot with an organic component. Two things. 1) You appear to have missed this in my original comment: > It's very important that we protect the right to notice and record things that happen in public. I feel that it's equally important that we work to limit the damage that an entity can do when they have the resources available to record such things on a large scale. 2) It's obvious that one can very cost-effectively blanket any urban or semi-urban area in ALPR cameras. When you do this, you gain the ability to track any vehicle in that area forever. For areas of any appreciable size, no police force has the personnel on hand to achieve the same level of coverage with human officers. This means that -if you ban robot officers- you dramatically limit the parts of one's trips that the police can remember. It's the difference between a passive attacker that controls a few nodes in the Tor network, and a passive attacker that controls most of the nodes in the Tor network. In the former situation, that attacker may be able to use traffic analysis to unmask a few Tor users. In the latter situation, they will be able to unmask very many Tor users. [0] Make sense? [0] This is -as the Tor people have always said- not something that Tor protects against.
TheSpiceIsLife 11y ago
It wouldn't have to be a police officer, you could pay minimum wage to (or blackmail) anyone willing to collect number plates etc. From the Stasi article on Wikipedia: By 1995, some 174,000 inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (IMs) Stasi informants had been identified, almost 2.5% of East Germany's population between the ages of 18 and 60.[12] 10,000 IMs were under 18 years of age.[12] From the volume of material destroyed in the final days of the regime, the office of the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Records (BStU) believes that there could have been as many as 500,000 informers.[12] A former Stasi colonel who served in the counterintelligence directorate estimated that the figure could be as high as 2 million if occasional informants were included. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi According to this[1] there are 1.22 million police in the US, which is about 0.373% of the population. Imagine 10 times as many police / informants / analysts / etc. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_number_of_police_officers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
- simoncion 11y ago
  > It wouldn't have to be a police officer, you could pay minimum wage to ... anyone willing to collect number plates etc. I would be very surprised if any Policeman's Union would permit that.
  - sandmansandine 11y ago
    They would just have to be a paid informant.
    - simoncion 11y ago
      You still have to have paperwork on informants. I guarantee you that a Policeman's Union is going to stop you if it looks like you're using informants as a cheap source of labor to perform police scutwork such as stakeouts and other such surveillance.
vectorjohn 11y ago
I have never followed this line of reasoning. I see no reason it should be arbitrarily limited or expensive to do things that technology can do for cheap. It makes no sense. If the problem is that petty things are punished too harshly or are selectively enforced, then that is where attention should be directed. I don't think being caught and prosecuted for a crime should be a roll of the dice. If society decides something is illegal, I want that thing enforced. I don't want my tax money wasted on police sitting around watching for speeders. I want them doing the things that an expensive human is paid for.
- simoncion 11y ago
  > I see no reason it should be arbitrarily limited or expensive to do things that technology can do for cheap. When you hand a powerful tool to a powerful organization you must make sure that there are safeguards in place to limit the damage that can be done when parts of that organization use that tool for evil. For the past couple of decades, the US has been having a painful conversation about the just what this proper privacy/LEO-convenience balance should be. LEO rhetoric notwithstanding, it's abundantly clear that it has never been easier to perform surveillance than it is today. I expect that not many people would object to temporary placement of an ALPR system at a place of interest when all data from that system that is not _clearly_ directly related to a person of interest is purged before it ever gets into the hands of law enforcement. I expect that many (but far too few) people would object to blanketing an entire metro area in ALPR cameras, RFID toll tag readers, DRT boxes, and the like and retaining all of that information forever, just in case it was needed to speed an investigation along later. > I don't want my tax money wasted on police sitting around watching for speeders. Thing is, I do. I want police to have to choose to pay a meatbag to do this sort of scutwork because in way too many cases, those laws are enforced to enrich the department's coffers or to target disfavored people. I totally 100% agree that we should have sane laws that are applied evenly across the board. I would LOVE for prosecutor and police discretion, as well as plea bargaining to be removed, forever. This will not happen in my lifetime, if it ever does. So -for now- we limit the damage evil people can do with the power tools that they have available to them. This makes policing more expensive. That's okay with me.
dawnbreez 11y ago
>The notion that it is 100% okay that things that happen in public view may be subject to notice and recording at any time is very important to preserve. Yes, but the problem here isn't that this number was recorded, it's that it was recorded at a garden supply shop with no real reason to believe that anyone at the shop was growing marijuana. The key bit is that it puts innocent people under suspicion and leads to wasted effort on the police side, along with pointless legal bullshit on the innocent's side. Not everyone who goes to that stpre is gonna be a marijuana dealer, or even a user; garden supply stores are kind of a key place to get supplies for any garden. The chance of that garden being laced with pot is a lot smaller than 100% of the time.
- simoncion 11y ago
  > Yes, but the problem here isn't that this number was recorded, it's that it was recorded at a garden supply shop with no real reason to believe that anyone at the shop was growing marijuana. We all have a right to privacy. However, we all also have a long-standing right to notice and take note of things that happen in plain sight in public areas. Be very careful with how you propose to fix any wrongs here. > The key bit is that it puts innocent people under suspicion and leads to wasted effort on the police side... I'm having difficulty understanding what this has to do with surveillance of a parking lot that was publicly visible. Anyone who has undertaken a non-trivial endeavor understands that one is likely to try many approaches that end up not working out. Police investigation is often non-trivial work. Sometimes, you'll go to a place, collect a bunch of publicly available information, sift through that information, and discover that it was all a dead end. This seems to me to be perfectly okay, as long as your motivation for gathering that information was good. If incompetent or lazy officers are either spending an inordinate amount of time chasing dead ends, or they are throwing cuffs on the first name that floats in front of their faces, they should be corrected. If they can't be corrected, they should be removed from policing. If incompetent or lazy officers end up jailing or causing someone to have to pay legal fees when that someone is obviously not the person(s) that they're after, the department should be required to compensate [0] the person that they fucked over. If malicious officers are using their powers to harass and intimidate, they should face real charges and be removed from policing. [0] This compensation would obviously go above and beyond compensation for direct costs and time lost and cover pain and anguish compensation as well.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

hellbanner 11y ago

You're saying public recording is fine when it's "expensive" -- costing a human salary, but not when it's a robot? I'm not following you. If police are going to record citizens, citizens should feel comfortable recording police. What their routes are, favorite stops, conversations, etc.

pavel_lishin 11y ago
It's not fine when it's expensive, it's fine when it's inherently limited and not omniscient. > If police are going to record citizens, citizens should feel comfortable recording police. Nobody's debating that.
eximius 11y ago
But citizens aren't incentivized to record police.
simoncion 11y ago
> You're saying public recording is fine when it's "expensive" -- costing a human salary, but not when it's a robot? I'm not following you. You are following me. That's exactly what I'm saying. Human scale surveillance is okay. Because the surveillance is carried out by a human on the scene, it requires the surveillers to decide who should be surveilled, and prevents or eliminates blanket surveillance. > If police are going to record citizens, citizens should feel comfortable recording police. 100% agreed. Because of the extraordinary powers they are entrusted with, on-duty police [0] should be held to a much higher standard than regular folks. Off-duty cops who aren't exercising police power? They're folks like any other and must be afforded the same rights and protections as every other regular citizen. [0] Or off-duty police who are otherwise exercising their police powers.
- whoopdedo 11y ago
  > Human scale surveillance is okay. Because the surveillance is carried out by a human on the scene, it requires the surveillers to decide who should be surveilled, and prevents or eliminates blanket surveillance. But what we're describing is not a human using his judgment to select probable suspects for further investigation. It's a guy parked pointing a camera at all license plates and feeding them en masse to a computer for automated processing. It is not functionally different than the hypothetical robot you described, only this happens to be a robot with an organic component.
  - simoncion 11y ago
    > It is not functionally different than the hypothetical robot you described, only this happens to be a robot with an organic component. Two things. 1) You appear to have missed this in my original comment: > It's very important that we protect the right to notice and record things that happen in public. I feel that it's equally important that we work to limit the damage that an entity can do when they have the resources available to record such things on a large scale. 2) It's obvious that one can very cost-effectively blanket any urban or semi-urban area in ALPR cameras. When you do this, you gain the ability to track any vehicle in that area forever. For areas of any appreciable size, no police force has the personnel on hand to achieve the same level of coverage with human officers. This means that -if you ban robot officers- you dramatically limit the parts of one's trips that the police can remember. It's the difference between a passive attacker that controls a few nodes in the Tor network, and a passive attacker that controls most of the nodes in the Tor network. In the former situation, that attacker may be able to use traffic analysis to unmask a few Tor users. In the latter situation, they will be able to unmask very many Tor users. [0] Make sense? [0] This is -as the Tor people have always said- not something that Tor protects against.

TheSpiceIsLife 11y ago

It wouldn't have to be a police officer, you could pay minimum wage to (or blackmail) anyone willing to collect number plates etc. From the Stasi article on Wikipedia: By 1995, some 174,000 inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (IMs) Stasi informants had been identified, almost 2.5% of East Germany's population between the ages of 18 and 60.[12] 10,000 IMs were under 18 years of age.[12] From the volume of material destroyed in the final days of the regime, the office of the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Records (BStU) believes that there could have been as many as 500,000 informers.[12] A former Stasi colonel who served in the counterintelligence directorate estimated that the figure could be as high as 2 million if occasional informants were included. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi According to this[1] there are 1.22 million police in the US, which is about 0.373% of the population. Imagine 10 times as many police / informants / analysts / etc. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_number_of_police_officers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...

simoncion 11y ago
> It wouldn't have to be a police officer, you could pay minimum wage to ... anyone willing to collect number plates etc. I would be very surprised if any Policeman's Union would permit that.
- sandmansandine 11y ago
  They would just have to be a paid informant.
  - simoncion 11y ago
    You still have to have paperwork on informants. I guarantee you that a Policeman's Union is going to stop you if it looks like you're using informants as a cheap source of labor to perform police scutwork such as stakeouts and other such surveillance.

vectorjohn 11y ago

I have never followed this line of reasoning. I see no reason it should be arbitrarily limited or expensive to do things that technology can do for cheap. It makes no sense. If the problem is that petty things are punished too harshly or are selectively enforced, then that is where attention should be directed. I don't think being caught and prosecuted for a crime should be a roll of the dice. If society decides something is illegal, I want that thing enforced. I don't want my tax money wasted on police sitting around watching for speeders. I want them doing the things that an expensive human is paid for.

simoncion 11y ago
> I see no reason it should be arbitrarily limited or expensive to do things that technology can do for cheap. When you hand a powerful tool to a powerful organization you must make sure that there are safeguards in place to limit the damage that can be done when parts of that organization use that tool for evil. For the past couple of decades, the US has been having a painful conversation about the just what this proper privacy/LEO-convenience balance should be. LEO rhetoric notwithstanding, it's abundantly clear that it has never been easier to perform surveillance than it is today. I expect that not many people would object to temporary placement of an ALPR system at a place of interest when all data from that system that is not _clearly_ directly related to a person of interest is purged before it ever gets into the hands of law enforcement. I expect that many (but far too few) people would object to blanketing an entire metro area in ALPR cameras, RFID toll tag readers, DRT boxes, and the like and retaining all of that information forever, just in case it was needed to speed an investigation along later. > I don't want my tax money wasted on police sitting around watching for speeders. Thing is, I do. I want police to have to choose to pay a meatbag to do this sort of scutwork because in way too many cases, those laws are enforced to enrich the department's coffers or to target disfavored people. I totally 100% agree that we should have sane laws that are applied evenly across the board. I would LOVE for prosecutor and police discretion, as well as plea bargaining to be removed, forever. This will not happen in my lifetime, if it ever does. So -for now- we limit the damage evil people can do with the power tools that they have available to them. This makes policing more expensive. That's okay with me.

dawnbreez 11y ago

>The notion that it is 100% okay that things that happen in public view may be subject to notice and recording at any time is very important to preserve. Yes, but the problem here isn't that this number was recorded, it's that it was recorded at a garden supply shop with no real reason to believe that anyone at the shop was growing marijuana. The key bit is that it puts innocent people under suspicion and leads to wasted effort on the police side, along with pointless legal bullshit on the innocent's side. Not everyone who goes to that stpre is gonna be a marijuana dealer, or even a user; garden supply stores are kind of a key place to get supplies for any garden. The chance of that garden being laced with pot is a lot smaller than 100% of the time.

simoncion 11y ago
> Yes, but the problem here isn't that this number was recorded, it's that it was recorded at a garden supply shop with no real reason to believe that anyone at the shop was growing marijuana. We all have a right to privacy. However, we all also have a long-standing right to notice and take note of things that happen in plain sight in public areas. Be very careful with how you propose to fix any wrongs here. > The key bit is that it puts innocent people under suspicion and leads to wasted effort on the police side... I'm having difficulty understanding what this has to do with surveillance of a parking lot that was publicly visible. Anyone who has undertaken a non-trivial endeavor understands that one is likely to try many approaches that end up not working out. Police investigation is often non-trivial work. Sometimes, you'll go to a place, collect a bunch of publicly available information, sift through that information, and discover that it was all a dead end. This seems to me to be perfectly okay, as long as your motivation for gathering that information was good. If incompetent or lazy officers are either spending an inordinate amount of time chasing dead ends, or they are throwing cuffs on the first name that floats in front of their faces, they should be corrected. If they can't be corrected, they should be removed from policing. If incompetent or lazy officers end up jailing or causing someone to have to pay legal fees when that someone is obviously not the person(s) that they're after, the department should be required to compensate [0] the person that they fucked over. If malicious officers are using their powers to harass and intimidate, they should face real charges and be removed from policing. [0] This compensation would obviously go above and beyond compensation for direct costs and time lost and cover pain and anguish compensation as well.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]