5 ms·

The FBI Wants 'Near Real-Time' Access to US License Plate Readers

211 points by Brajeshwar 5mo ago

roxolotl 5mo ago
There’s a lot of local US candidates running this year on pushing back on the federal government. Realistically there’s not a ton that can be done at the level of a mayor or even state senator. However removing local passive surveillance is something that can make a genuine impact. I’d love to see people running on banning red light/license plate cameras and other passive surveillance tools. If the data is never collected it can’t be abused.
- throwaway5752 5mo ago
  Realistically there’s not a ton that can be done at the level of a mayor or even state senator I wish people wouldn't say that, it's not the case. First, pushback requires equivalent effort. If 10,000 towns are uncooperative because 10,000 mayors resist this, the amount of political power to overcome this is incredibly large. The mayors can delay or cancel projects with uncooperative or malicious vendors. They can slow down approvals. This administration and the powers that want this espionage power understand this, which is why they target downstream races, school boards, and sheriff positions. Second, a state senator is much, much more powerful than you give them credit. There are usually much fewer of them than members of the US House or Senate, so they individually more voting power. They can substantially influence state politics, and it is magnified with majorities and committees. Third, resources are pooled and parties coordinate, so starving them of influence, which is root of all their funding, is key to voting undemocratic parties out of office. Don't believe what you read about politics online. It is made for modern, shallow consumption. Little races matter. You can make a large difference by participating directly, too. You don't even have to make a scene about it in your platform. Just run, be boring, win, and talk with your votes.
  - dangus 5mo ago
    One major example is how Chicago Public Schools has a non-cooperation policy and a policy to refuse warrantless access to school property for ICE agents. The school district also refuses to consider immigration status as a prerequisite to enrollment in the school system. This is a huge deal since any state or local school district could decide to do the exact opposite. This makes nearly every minor inaccessible to immigration enforcement officers during business hours.
    - throwaway5752 5mo ago
      Absolutely. Run for the HOA board, run for the school board, run for the town council. Write a letter. Show up to a town hall meeting. Everything makes a difference and people here are more than sufficiently qualified. We have lots of software developers being laid off. An elected position serves as resume filler, too. You'd be shocked what a difference you can make when you try a little.
      - rightbyte 5mo ago
        Ye I more or less got scared with how fast you gain real influence as a local politician by just showing up to some party meetings. I thought there would be a longer vetting period but it is like "oh you breath and don't cite opposing party lines too often we will nominate you for this and this and ...".
        dangus 5mo ago
        It’s also kind of a beautiful thing. Our government is actually run by those who care enough to sign up to do it. There are nonpartisa and partisan resources out there that encourage people to just run for something. On the negative side, I think there’s a lot that is bad about participating in government often being thankless and financially impractical to anyone that isn’t already funded by donors and backers.
        rightbyte 5mo ago
        Ye it is kinda beautiful just not how I imagined. I thought there would be barriers for randoms like me. But that does not seem to be a problem where I live at all. I was unwarrantedly cynical about the political system, locally. YMMV.
  - Forgeties79 5mo ago
    to add to this, if local governments refuse to install the hardware that the federal government wants to tap into, then there’s nothing for them to tap into. It’s a lot harder for the federal government to go around placing all these tools around the country than it is for them to simply vacuum up what is already there. If anybody wants to see the power of controlling local government and its upstream impact, look no further than mom’s for liberty and their assault on school boards nationwide.
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
  - throwaway85825 5mo ago
    [flagged]
- dangus 5mo ago
  This is also why car dependent infrastructure is a bad thing for Americans’ freedom. You have more civil rights as a pedestrian than you do in a licensed motor vehicle.
  - ww520 5mo ago
    Facial and gait recognition tech make the pedestrian vs car point moot.
    - dangus 5mo ago
      Sure, but being identified is only part of the issue. It’s also about the quantity of rights you have in a vehicle versus outside of one.
      - cucumber3732842 5mo ago
        >It’s also about the quantity of rights you have in a vehicle versus outside of one. And who's fault is that? The government could decide tomorrow that driving confers implied consent for them to quarter soldiers in your home and a huge chunk of people would defend it because those people just don't like cars and want to see the users screwed at every turn in order to make other things comparatively less worse. Of course they won't tell you that because they know they're in the wrong so they'll use the pretext that driving is a privilege not a right, public safety etc. etc. Look at the discussion about ebikes. At first iw as all "look how cool and great and free of downsides these are". Now the discussion is all "those darned kids and poors are dangerous" and "nobody needs to go more than 20mph". Give it 10yr and you'll be forced to by insurance for them too. Vehicles are regulated how they are and you have less rights to the extent you do specifically because people 50-70yr ago wrung their hands about them until laws were passed, just like we're doing to ebikes now.
  - engineer_22 5mo ago
    Pedestrians are limited to a ~20 mile radius. Travelling further, without a car, then requires use of public transportation and by using public transportation depending where you are you have implied consent to being searched "for safety". Acknowledging civil asset forfeiture is a problem in some jurisdictions, private automobiles still provide a greater expectation of privacy than public modes of transport.
- engineer_22 5mo ago
  This might seem cynical, but it appears to me the uniparty has already decided it wants a total surveillance state. Having achieved total coverage of the observable domestic cyber realm, the next objective is a physical layer. Anyone arguing against it is a terrorist sympathizer or has criminal intent. This is for the safety of the homeland, after all.
- xnx 5mo ago
  > I’d love to see people running on banning red light/license plate cameras Not me. We've become way too soft on vehicle crime which is often tied to other crimes. I'd love to see a lot more automated enforcement: speeding, red light running, shoulder riding, missing or fake tags, noise violations, car emissions, etc.
  - sitzkrieg 5mo ago
    that’s great but these plate readers have nothing to do with that.
  - c22 5mo ago
    How do you perform automated enforcement of missing or fake tags?
    - xnx 5mo ago
      2 options come to mind, neither perfect: 1) My city already has ALPR vans for finding parking ticket scofflaws. Expand use of those finds to find cars with expired, fake, or missing plates. Boot or tow the cars. 2) Use toolbooths to identify cars with expired, fake, or missing plates. Patrol cars at the ready to pull them over.
hsuduebc2 5mo ago
I must shamefully admit that after vaguely watching American tv shows like CSI for last twenty years I was convinced this is already a thing for a long time. Does it mean you can't see a perfect reflection on a slightly rusted screw?
- Enginerrrd 5mo ago
  I would be genuinely shocked if this isn’t already integrated into the US intelligence apparatus, it just may not be commonly used for domestic cases targeting US citizens, or it currently requires parallel construction to justify how they know things they shouldn’t know. This may just be a way to legalize it or integrate a few new data sources.
morgoths_bane 5mo ago
I am so glad the party of small government is in charge.
- BLKNSLVR 5mo ago
  I do find it interesting that the 'small government' and 'individual freedom above all else' types seem hellbent on regulating and restricting the freedoms of things outside of their own experience and taste. The freedoms they're after also seem to be along the lines of 'don't restrict my ability to scam folks of lesser intellect or education'. The leopards are to only eat _their_ faces.
  - ungreased0675 5mo ago
    [flagged]
  - LocalH 5mo ago
    "For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law."
- throwaway85825 5mo ago
  Sooner or later you will learn that politics don't exist and 3 letter agencies are immune to oversight.
  - mr_toad 5mo ago
    Tell that to the EPA, the CDC, the FCC, the BLS, the FRS.
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
SubiculumCode 5mo ago
Are license plates a federal or state requirement?
majorchord 5mo ago
SCOTUS has already ruled that tracking people's movement over time without a warrant is a Fourth Amendment violation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_v._United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_v._United_States
- roughly 5mo ago
  Unfortunately, “SCOTUS previously declared this unconstitutional” doesn’t have quite the same sense of finality it used to these days.
  - SecretDreams 5mo ago
    It's really more of just polite suggestion these days, sadly. Except any time they vote against legalized abortion or minority issues. Then the rulings are rigidly enforced.
    - throwaway85825 5mo ago
      Legalized abortion needs to be a law, like the democrats promised for decades but never delivered. When the court invents rights then the court can just revoke it. Can't if it's a law.
      - raisedbyninjas 5mo ago
        I thought a lot of rules and norms would be codified into law after 2020.
        throwaway85825 5mo ago
        Whenever an issue is settled they can't use it to ask for donations. As long as the problem lasts forever they can make money from it. The goal of an organization is that which brings in the money.
        5mo ago
edot 5mo ago
Wait, but I was told that my local police department owned the Flock data, and that Flock doesn't own it and cannot share it? Was I lied to, to further expand the surveillance state?
- dgellow 5mo ago
  Yes https://youtu.be/uB0gr7Fh6lY?is=7osD4zLTz9wJ1hJc https://youtu.be/uB0gr7Fh6lY?is=7osD4zLTz9wJ1hJc https://youtu.be/vU1-uiUlHTo?is=zmma8mce5k3nyflw https://youtu.be/vU1-uiUlHTo?is=zmma8mce5k3nyflw
- loteck 5mo ago
  "Ownership" of data may have little or nothing to do with control of the data, depending on what other rights you agree to give up. Your Flock contract may specify your ownership of the data and then in the next sentence release to Flock all or most control of that data (you still own it!).
anadem 5mo ago
[dead]
hombre_fatal 5mo ago
The "15 minute city conspiracy" (anti bike lane, anti mass transit, car = liberty) people sure seem to gloss over inconvenient facts like this. Frankly I don't see a way out from this. Since you must register and insure your vehicle and have a government license to drive it and it hauls two tons at 80mph, it seems like natural creep for the government to know where it is, and the tech to infer it without explicitly scanning plates is only getting better and better. Maybe having just one euro/asian-style dense city with bike lanes in the US wouldn't be such a bad thing to try out?
- gottorf 5mo ago
  > Maybe having just one euro/asian-style dense city with bike lanes in the US wouldn't be such a bad thing to try out? What do you call Manhattan? It would count among the ~10 most dense cities proper in the world.
  - throwaway85825 5mo ago
    Manhattan is a fragile and hellish dystopia with fading relevance.
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
  - hombre_fatal 5mo ago
    The US only has Manhattan because it's grandfathered in from the 60s. It's not a free market for density. - 30% of it is historical district that is basically frozen. - Wastes surface space with 300k curbside parking. - 75% of streetscape goes to cars, apparently bike+bus is <1%. - Still has the same silly zoning issues that plague other cities. I could go on but I don't want this to explode into more of my YIMBY hobby horse. The momentum in NYC has made strides lately which is cool to see. But I'd like a US city to experiment with something less car-/nimby-brained. Until then, it's more sensible to live abroad, which feels ridiculous in a country as big as the US.
tptacek 5mo ago
This article is literally blogspam of an article that got significant front-page coverage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48184350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48184350
- dredmorbius 5mo ago
  Note that the 404 Media article is paywalled whilst the Wired submission is not. I'd hesitate to call Wired "blogspam" as well.
lifeisstillgood 5mo ago
This is a personal opinion, so please be careful, but technology enables new forms of behaviour and opportunity that we can’t always predict. And so …. We will live in a almost totally transparent world - our daily interactions, voice, text and visual are likely recorded by someone at some point - how bosses interact with their employees, how nurses talk to patients and cashiers to customers, how parents talk to children - all of this will be recorded And that can be a Good Thing. Imagine your boss getting real time feedback on coaching style, or you getting pointers on how not to argue with your wife. The challenge is fairly simple - if we lose all secrets, the privacy is just the politeness of our neighbours. And while we can and should have strong laws on this, we need a social chnage to make serving someone ads based on their observable behaviour about the same level of social acceptability as crapping on their doorstep and then pouring petrol on and lighting it. But we could see a world where privacy is protected but epidemiologists can pick apart the most thorny problems, human beings will be raised to be the very best they can be, and society become more communal and robust. It’s possible - tech is neutral And those societies and countries that embrace it will probably have that boost everyone thinks is coming from AI
- ajross 5mo ago
  > we need a social chnage to make serving someone ads based on their observable behaviour about the same level of social acceptability as crapping on their doorstep Every time. Every ?!%@# time on HN. "Here's a story about police state overreach and unconstitutional privacy violation. And that's obviously very bad. Now let me tell you how the really important thing here is how much Google sucks."
  - autoexec 5mo ago
    Feeling guilty? Everyone will happily stop shitting on Google the moment they stop being evil.
    - ajross 5mo ago
      Shitting on Google in a thread about the tech industry is fine. Hijacking a thread about literal state surveillance dystopian policies to talk about advertising (!!) is certifiable. What it tells me is that the commenter is unserious about actual civil liberties, because "the government's bayonets will always be pointed at the Other People", where Google is the enemy they can see today. Historically that always ends up with the bayonets winning.
ChuckMcM 5mo ago
We really should build an open source ALPR system of cameras that gives real time information on the position of every law enforcement vehicle. Including the cars driven by the officers to and from work. That would have been helpful in finding license violations in California by ICE officers. EDIT: We could call it "CopAware" :-)
- dmschulman 5mo ago
  Funny you should mention this. Benn Jordan, on the heels of his Flock camera research, reverse engineered a non-flock ALRP unit and built his own system using some off the shelf parts, a tablet, and 3D printer. He did it mostly as an experiment but also due to the fact that Flock's algorithm for image detection is astoundingly bad and has a high incident of reading plates incorrectly. There are a handful of open-source models for license plate detection, I forget exactly which model outperformed the rest, but it was an excellent watch and help me really understand just how inefficient these commercial systems are and how easy they can be to defeat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ
- Computer0 5mo ago
  I’ve toyed with the concept
- functionmouse 5mo ago
  Everyone's got an old Android phone or two sitting in their junk drawer, right? Place it in your window and connect it to the shared, open, public service. Might work, but then if it's open and shared, Flock can simply connect to the open API and add a new category "Public cameras" to their own data. Any data we make available as an open system will also be available to bad actors.
- ssl-3 5mo ago
  We should. And not just cars related to law enforcement, nor also the cars of public officials who give cops their marching orders and enact laws, nor also the judges who enforce these laws. Instead, let's just be indiscriminate and document everyone's cars and make that raw data available. --- Why everyone? That's easy: It allows organizational roles to be divided up, and dividing these roles promotes operational safety. Having 4 roles seems like it might be the right number right now (but I haven't had my coffee yet): Role 1. The camera operators. This is role sees the highest direct risk because these cameras will be associated with real homes and other buildings that the operators control. It is also the most important group because it requires the highest number of participants, and none of this can happen without a large number of them. By recording everyone, they gain some operational safety through plausible deniability. "Yeah, I've got some cameras that see cars on the road and send what they see to a cloud service. So what? I'm allowed to pay attention to the cars in my neighborhood. I'm even allowed to get help with doing that. Everyone else with a fancy doorbell or a Chinese web cam is doing the same thing; I'm not doing anything weirder than what anyone else is doing." Role 2. The data-mungers. This back-end role collects the data of where cars have been seen. It's also an indiscriminate task; it just collects and sorts data by license plate number. This is less-risky both because it is unfocused and it can happen anywhere on the globe. "Yeah, so these blokes send me a stream of alphanumeric numbers, timestamps, and locations, and I just organize that data for other people to use." Role 3. The filtermakers. Another back-end role, this one just keeps track of which plates are associated with which government people. This is riskier: It is tightly focused and its role is obvious and undeniable. "I keep a list of license plates numbers and names for others to use. Lots of organizations do that; so what?" Role 4. The mapmakers. This role operates the presentation layer. It ingests someone else's collected data, filters and labels it based on someone else's filters and labels, and puts it all on a beautiful map for public consumption. This isn't necessarily structurally the most important role, but it's the most public-facing role and likely to be demonized in media. This role will get heat. "Yeah, you're right. Mapping the locations of people in public in the US is exactly the point of what I'm doing; see the FAQ on the website. Anyway, the weather is beautiful here today in Belize; maybe y'all should get to work on your public surveillance legislation."
abacadaba 5mo ago
Is this as a backup for the system that reads the rfid in our tires? / I assumed this had long been the case
reaperducer 5mo ago
120,000,000 license plate readers in America, and still no sign of Guthrie. I feel safer already.
techteach00 5mo ago
The FBI is a good analogy for the political choices Americans have between Democrats and Republicans. They are completely non-ideological. It's just about power and control over the population. We need to get our rights back somehow.
mannanj 5mo ago
This is IMO the only legitimate use case of a montana-LLC vehicle registration. The corporate veil acts as a privacy protection mechanism from government outreach. IMO we hear a lot of Straw Mans of "Tax evasion!!" here yet the legitimate use remains.
ChrisArchitect 5mo ago
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48184350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48184350

211 points by Brajeshwar 5mo ago

There’s a lot of local US candidates running this year on pushing back on the federal government. Realistically there’s not a ton that can be done at the level of a mayor or even state senator. However removing local passive surveillance is something that can make a genuine impact. I’d love to see people running on banning red light/license plate cameras and other passive surveillance tools. If the data is never collected it can’t be abused.

throwaway5752 5mo ago
Realistically there’s not a ton that can be done at the level of a mayor or even state senator I wish people wouldn't say that, it's not the case. First, pushback requires equivalent effort. If 10,000 towns are uncooperative because 10,000 mayors resist this, the amount of political power to overcome this is incredibly large. The mayors can delay or cancel projects with uncooperative or malicious vendors. They can slow down approvals. This administration and the powers that want this espionage power understand this, which is why they target downstream races, school boards, and sheriff positions. Second, a state senator is much, much more powerful than you give them credit. There are usually much fewer of them than members of the US House or Senate, so they individually more voting power. They can substantially influence state politics, and it is magnified with majorities and committees. Third, resources are pooled and parties coordinate, so starving them of influence, which is root of all their funding, is key to voting undemocratic parties out of office. Don't believe what you read about politics online. It is made for modern, shallow consumption. Little races matter. You can make a large difference by participating directly, too. You don't even have to make a scene about it in your platform. Just run, be boring, win, and talk with your votes.
- dangus 5mo ago
  One major example is how Chicago Public Schools has a non-cooperation policy and a policy to refuse warrantless access to school property for ICE agents. The school district also refuses to consider immigration status as a prerequisite to enrollment in the school system. This is a huge deal since any state or local school district could decide to do the exact opposite. This makes nearly every minor inaccessible to immigration enforcement officers during business hours.
  - throwaway5752 5mo ago
    Absolutely. Run for the HOA board, run for the school board, run for the town council. Write a letter. Show up to a town hall meeting. Everything makes a difference and people here are more than sufficiently qualified. We have lots of software developers being laid off. An elected position serves as resume filler, too. You'd be shocked what a difference you can make when you try a little.
    - rightbyte 5mo ago
      Ye I more or less got scared with how fast you gain real influence as a local politician by just showing up to some party meetings. I thought there would be a longer vetting period but it is like "oh you breath and don't cite opposing party lines too often we will nominate you for this and this and ...".
      - dangus 5mo ago
        It’s also kind of a beautiful thing. Our government is actually run by those who care enough to sign up to do it. There are nonpartisa and partisan resources out there that encourage people to just run for something. On the negative side, I think there’s a lot that is bad about participating in government often being thankless and financially impractical to anyone that isn’t already funded by donors and backers.
        rightbyte 5mo ago
        Ye it is kinda beautiful just not how I imagined. I thought there would be barriers for randoms like me. But that does not seem to be a problem where I live at all. I was unwarrantedly cynical about the political system, locally. YMMV.
- Forgeties79 5mo ago
  to add to this, if local governments refuse to install the hardware that the federal government wants to tap into, then there’s nothing for them to tap into. It’s a lot harder for the federal government to go around placing all these tools around the country than it is for them to simply vacuum up what is already there. If anybody wants to see the power of controlling local government and its upstream impact, look no further than mom’s for liberty and their assault on school boards nationwide.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
- throwaway85825 5mo ago
  [flagged]
dangus 5mo ago
This is also why car dependent infrastructure is a bad thing for Americans’ freedom. You have more civil rights as a pedestrian than you do in a licensed motor vehicle.
- ww520 5mo ago
  Facial and gait recognition tech make the pedestrian vs car point moot.
  - dangus 5mo ago
    Sure, but being identified is only part of the issue. It’s also about the quantity of rights you have in a vehicle versus outside of one.
    - cucumber3732842 5mo ago
      >It’s also about the quantity of rights you have in a vehicle versus outside of one. And who's fault is that? The government could decide tomorrow that driving confers implied consent for them to quarter soldiers in your home and a huge chunk of people would defend it because those people just don't like cars and want to see the users screwed at every turn in order to make other things comparatively less worse. Of course they won't tell you that because they know they're in the wrong so they'll use the pretext that driving is a privilege not a right, public safety etc. etc. Look at the discussion about ebikes. At first iw as all "look how cool and great and free of downsides these are". Now the discussion is all "those darned kids and poors are dangerous" and "nobody needs to go more than 20mph". Give it 10yr and you'll be forced to by insurance for them too. Vehicles are regulated how they are and you have less rights to the extent you do specifically because people 50-70yr ago wrung their hands about them until laws were passed, just like we're doing to ebikes now.
- engineer_22 5mo ago
  Pedestrians are limited to a ~20 mile radius. Travelling further, without a car, then requires use of public transportation and by using public transportation depending where you are you have implied consent to being searched "for safety". Acknowledging civil asset forfeiture is a problem in some jurisdictions, private automobiles still provide a greater expectation of privacy than public modes of transport.
engineer_22 5mo ago
This might seem cynical, but it appears to me the uniparty has already decided it wants a total surveillance state. Having achieved total coverage of the observable domestic cyber realm, the next objective is a physical layer. Anyone arguing against it is a terrorist sympathizer or has criminal intent. This is for the safety of the homeland, after all.
xnx 5mo ago
> I’d love to see people running on banning red light/license plate cameras Not me. We've become way too soft on vehicle crime which is often tied to other crimes. I'd love to see a lot more automated enforcement: speeding, red light running, shoulder riding, missing or fake tags, noise violations, car emissions, etc.
- sitzkrieg 5mo ago
  that’s great but these plate readers have nothing to do with that.
- c22 5mo ago
  How do you perform automated enforcement of missing or fake tags?
  - xnx 5mo ago
    2 options come to mind, neither perfect: 1) My city already has ALPR vans for finding parking ticket scofflaws. Expand use of those finds to find cars with expired, fake, or missing plates. Boot or tow the cars. 2) Use toolbooths to identify cars with expired, fake, or missing plates. Patrol cars at the ready to pull them over.

hsuduebc2 5mo ago

I must shamefully admit that after vaguely watching American tv shows like CSI for last twenty years I was convinced this is already a thing for a long time. Does it mean you can't see a perfect reflection on a slightly rusted screw?

Enginerrrd 5mo ago
I would be genuinely shocked if this isn’t already integrated into the US intelligence apparatus, it just may not be commonly used for domestic cases targeting US citizens, or it currently requires parallel construction to justify how they know things they shouldn’t know. This may just be a way to legalize it or integrate a few new data sources.

morgoths_bane 5mo ago

I am so glad the party of small government is in charge.

BLKNSLVR 5mo ago
I do find it interesting that the 'small government' and 'individual freedom above all else' types seem hellbent on regulating and restricting the freedoms of things outside of their own experience and taste. The freedoms they're after also seem to be along the lines of 'don't restrict my ability to scam folks of lesser intellect or education'. The leopards are to only eat _their_ faces.
- ungreased0675 5mo ago
  [flagged]
- LocalH 5mo ago
  "For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law."
throwaway85825 5mo ago
Sooner or later you will learn that politics don't exist and 3 letter agencies are immune to oversight.
- mr_toad 5mo ago
  Tell that to the EPA, the CDC, the FCC, the BLS, the FRS.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]

SubiculumCode 5mo ago

Are license plates a federal or state requirement?

majorchord 5mo ago

SCOTUS has already ruled that tracking people's movement over time without a warrant is a Fourth Amendment violation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_v._United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_v._United_States

roughly 5mo ago
Unfortunately, “SCOTUS previously declared this unconstitutional” doesn’t have quite the same sense of finality it used to these days.
- SecretDreams 5mo ago
  It's really more of just polite suggestion these days, sadly. Except any time they vote against legalized abortion or minority issues. Then the rulings are rigidly enforced.
  - throwaway85825 5mo ago
    Legalized abortion needs to be a law, like the democrats promised for decades but never delivered. When the court invents rights then the court can just revoke it. Can't if it's a law.
    - raisedbyninjas 5mo ago
      I thought a lot of rules and norms would be codified into law after 2020.
      - throwaway85825 5mo ago
        Whenever an issue is settled they can't use it to ask for donations. As long as the problem lasts forever they can make money from it. The goal of an organization is that which brings in the money.
        5mo ago

edot 5mo ago

Wait, but I was told that my local police department owned the Flock data, and that Flock doesn't own it and cannot share it? Was I lied to, to further expand the surveillance state?

dgellow 5mo ago
Yes https://youtu.be/uB0gr7Fh6lY?is=7osD4zLTz9wJ1hJc https://youtu.be/uB0gr7Fh6lY?is=7osD4zLTz9wJ1hJc https://youtu.be/vU1-uiUlHTo?is=zmma8mce5k3nyflw https://youtu.be/vU1-uiUlHTo?is=zmma8mce5k3nyflw
loteck 5mo ago
"Ownership" of data may have little or nothing to do with control of the data, depending on what other rights you agree to give up. Your Flock contract may specify your ownership of the data and then in the next sentence release to Flock all or most control of that data (you still own it!).

anadem 5mo ago

[dead]

hombre_fatal 5mo ago

The "15 minute city conspiracy" (anti bike lane, anti mass transit, car = liberty) people sure seem to gloss over inconvenient facts like this. Frankly I don't see a way out from this. Since you must register and insure your vehicle and have a government license to drive it and it hauls two tons at 80mph, it seems like natural creep for the government to know where it is, and the tech to infer it without explicitly scanning plates is only getting better and better. Maybe having just one euro/asian-style dense city with bike lanes in the US wouldn't be such a bad thing to try out?

gottorf 5mo ago
> Maybe having just one euro/asian-style dense city with bike lanes in the US wouldn't be such a bad thing to try out? What do you call Manhattan? It would count among the ~10 most dense cities proper in the world.
- throwaway85825 5mo ago
  Manhattan is a fragile and hellish dystopia with fading relevance.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
- hombre_fatal 5mo ago
  The US only has Manhattan because it's grandfathered in from the 60s. It's not a free market for density. - 30% of it is historical district that is basically frozen. - Wastes surface space with 300k curbside parking. - 75% of streetscape goes to cars, apparently bike+bus is <1%. - Still has the same silly zoning issues that plague other cities. I could go on but I don't want this to explode into more of my YIMBY hobby horse. The momentum in NYC has made strides lately which is cool to see. But I'd like a US city to experiment with something less car-/nimby-brained. Until then, it's more sensible to live abroad, which feels ridiculous in a country as big as the US.

tptacek 5mo ago

This article is literally blogspam of an article that got significant front-page coverage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48184350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48184350

dredmorbius 5mo ago
Note that the 404 Media article is paywalled whilst the Wired submission is not. I'd hesitate to call Wired "blogspam" as well.

lifeisstillgood 5mo ago

This is a personal opinion, so please be careful, but technology enables new forms of behaviour and opportunity that we can’t always predict. And so …. We will live in a almost totally transparent world - our daily interactions, voice, text and visual are likely recorded by someone at some point - how bosses interact with their employees, how nurses talk to patients and cashiers to customers, how parents talk to children - all of this will be recorded And that can be a Good Thing. Imagine your boss getting real time feedback on coaching style, or you getting pointers on how not to argue with your wife. The challenge is fairly simple - if we lose all secrets, the privacy is just the politeness of our neighbours. And while we can and should have strong laws on this, we need a social chnage to make serving someone ads based on their observable behaviour about the same level of social acceptability as crapping on their doorstep and then pouring petrol on and lighting it. But we could see a world where privacy is protected but epidemiologists can pick apart the most thorny problems, human beings will be raised to be the very best they can be, and society become more communal and robust. It’s possible - tech is neutral And those societies and countries that embrace it will probably have that boost everyone thinks is coming from AI

ajross 5mo ago
> we need a social chnage to make serving someone ads based on their observable behaviour about the same level of social acceptability as crapping on their doorstep Every time. Every ?!%@# time on HN. "Here's a story about police state overreach and unconstitutional privacy violation. And that's obviously very bad. Now let me tell you how the really important thing here is how much Google sucks."
- autoexec 5mo ago
  Feeling guilty? Everyone will happily stop shitting on Google the moment they stop being evil.
  - ajross 5mo ago
    Shitting on Google in a thread about the tech industry is fine. Hijacking a thread about literal state surveillance dystopian policies to talk about advertising (!!) is certifiable. What it tells me is that the commenter is unserious about actual civil liberties, because "the government's bayonets will always be pointed at the Other People", where Google is the enemy they can see today. Historically that always ends up with the bayonets winning.

ChuckMcM 5mo ago

We really should build an open source ALPR system of cameras that gives real time information on the position of every law enforcement vehicle. Including the cars driven by the officers to and from work. That would have been helpful in finding license violations in California by ICE officers. EDIT: We could call it "CopAware" :-)

dmschulman 5mo ago
Funny you should mention this. Benn Jordan, on the heels of his Flock camera research, reverse engineered a non-flock ALRP unit and built his own system using some off the shelf parts, a tablet, and 3D printer. He did it mostly as an experiment but also due to the fact that Flock's algorithm for image detection is astoundingly bad and has a high incident of reading plates incorrectly. There are a handful of open-source models for license plate detection, I forget exactly which model outperformed the rest, but it was an excellent watch and help me really understand just how inefficient these commercial systems are and how easy they can be to defeat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ
Computer0 5mo ago
I’ve toyed with the concept
functionmouse 5mo ago
Everyone's got an old Android phone or two sitting in their junk drawer, right? Place it in your window and connect it to the shared, open, public service. Might work, but then if it's open and shared, Flock can simply connect to the open API and add a new category "Public cameras" to their own data. Any data we make available as an open system will also be available to bad actors.
ssl-3 5mo ago
We should. And not just cars related to law enforcement, nor also the cars of public officials who give cops their marching orders and enact laws, nor also the judges who enforce these laws. Instead, let's just be indiscriminate and document everyone's cars and make that raw data available. --- Why everyone? That's easy: It allows organizational roles to be divided up, and dividing these roles promotes operational safety. Having 4 roles seems like it might be the right number right now (but I haven't had my coffee yet): Role 1. The camera operators. This is role sees the highest direct risk because these cameras will be associated with real homes and other buildings that the operators control. It is also the most important group because it requires the highest number of participants, and none of this can happen without a large number of them. By recording everyone, they gain some operational safety through plausible deniability. "Yeah, I've got some cameras that see cars on the road and send what they see to a cloud service. So what? I'm allowed to pay attention to the cars in my neighborhood. I'm even allowed to get help with doing that. Everyone else with a fancy doorbell or a Chinese web cam is doing the same thing; I'm not doing anything weirder than what anyone else is doing." Role 2. The data-mungers. This back-end role collects the data of where cars have been seen. It's also an indiscriminate task; it just collects and sorts data by license plate number. This is less-risky both because it is unfocused and it can happen anywhere on the globe. "Yeah, so these blokes send me a stream of alphanumeric numbers, timestamps, and locations, and I just organize that data for other people to use." Role 3. The filtermakers. Another back-end role, this one just keeps track of which plates are associated with which government people. This is riskier: It is tightly focused and its role is obvious and undeniable. "I keep a list of license plates numbers and names for others to use. Lots of organizations do that; so what?" Role 4. The mapmakers. This role operates the presentation layer. It ingests someone else's collected data, filters and labels it based on someone else's filters and labels, and puts it all on a beautiful map for public consumption. This isn't necessarily structurally the most important role, but it's the most public-facing role and likely to be demonized in media. This role will get heat. "Yeah, you're right. Mapping the locations of people in public in the US is exactly the point of what I'm doing; see the FAQ on the website. Anyway, the weather is beautiful here today in Belize; maybe y'all should get to work on your public surveillance legislation."

abacadaba 5mo ago

Is this as a backup for the system that reads the rfid in our tires? / I assumed this had long been the case

reaperducer 5mo ago

120,000,000 license plate readers in America, and still no sign of Guthrie. I feel safer already.

techteach00 5mo ago

The FBI is a good analogy for the political choices Americans have between Democrats and Republicans. They are completely non-ideological. It's just about power and control over the population. We need to get our rights back somehow.

mannanj 5mo ago

This is IMO the only legitimate use case of a montana-LLC vehicle registration. The corporate veil acts as a privacy protection mechanism from government outreach. IMO we hear a lot of Straw Mans of "Tax evasion!!" here yet the legitimate use remains.

ChrisArchitect 5mo ago

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48184350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48184350