12 ms·

I don't understand why a police cruiser can sit in a public space (or even a private one) and write down licence plates and descriptions of passers-by with pen

I don't understand why a police cruiser can sit in a public space (or even a private one) and write down licence plates and descriptions of passers-by with pen and paper, or record everything around them with dashcams and bodycams for later use, but when it comes to cameras on a pole this would require 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.

Forgeties79 2mo ago
Because the ability to scale up a bunch of officers sitting around writing down literally everything they see is limited in comparison. It can only be so invasive and “always-on” everywhere. Throwing up a few dozen flock cameras costs a fraction of that and scales incredibly quickly.
- jameshart 2mo ago
  It is a curious ‘small government’ instinct that wants government capabilities to be restricted from ever becoming efficient or scalable, even though the population and economy and complexity of the world the government is tasked with regulating scales up. 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.
  - Forgeties79 2mo ago
    > 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. I am actually not so sure that’s obvious. I am slowly coming around to the controversial opinion that if they can’t vet what is going up, they shouldn’t be allowed to have an infinite number of uploads/hosted content. They constantly alternate between “don’t worry, we have perfected our algorithms and can catch all of the stuff” and, when they fail, “well you can’t expect us to go over all this stuff. But don’t worry, we pinky promise it’ll be different now.” If I owned 10,000 apartment buildings and one of them collapsed because of negligence, I don’t simply get to go “my real estate empire is too big for you to expect me to follow the law. Shit is just going to collapse sometimes, deal with it.”
    - jameshart 2mo ago
      I guess it wasn’t clear that I share your opinion that it is not ‘obvious’ that companies should be allowed to set aside accountability in pursuit of scale. I was lending expression to an opinion that seems to be orthodoxy, not supporting it.
      - Forgeties79 2mo ago
        Ah my mistake! Misread the intent there.
  - Dylan16807 2mo ago
    > It is a curious ‘small government’ instinct that wants government capabilities to be restricted from ever becoming efficient or scalable Efficiency would be great if it was used to save money. But surely you've heard of the Jevons paradox. This kind of cheap surveillance does not make the government smaller and it has all kinds of bad effects. > even though the population and economy and complexity of the world the government is tasked with regulating scales up. Car stuff isn't changing much. They don't need better tracking of where you drive. > 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. Well, vetting every video would not be reasonable even at a small scale business with the same business model. While vetting every ad is very possible. I don't think I've seen anyone claim youtube is unable to vet ads if they significantly wanted to?
    - jameshart 2mo ago
      YouTube absolutely claim not to be vetting every ad they serve. That is why so many outright fraudulent ads get shown by them. In the same industry we have Meta using AI to generate and display ads that even the advertiser hasn’t vetted. > vetting every video would not be reasonable even at a small scale business with the same business model. A small scale business like… a cable tv company? They certainly historically were assumed to be responsible for every piece of video content they took from a creator and broadcast.
      - Forgeties79 2mo ago
        Exactly. “We’re too big” is the most insane excuse. If I just get big enough I can say “nah the law doesn’t apply to me”? I’m not naïve I understand that’s kind of how the world works, but should be really be supporting this?
      - Dylan16807 2mo ago
        > YouTube absolutely claim not to be vetting every ad they serve. That is a true statement that is very different from my claim that they could. > A small scale business like… a cable tv company? No, cable is a very different business model. If youtube only allowed business accounts worth millions of dollars it would get halfway there. And it would be the end of "you"tube.
kevin_thibedeau 2mo ago
License plates are public property.
- esseph 2mo ago
  But are not public knowledge except to insurance companies and police departments (and probably a ton of companies that have bought the info as well on the gray market). 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.
- TaLiTr 2mo ago
  In Canada, video footage that personally identifies me is considered personal information. This includes the license plate number.
mapt 2mo ago
A difference of a sufficient degree becomes a difference in kind, because whatever the internal justifications, the external implications of the system for society change drastically.
- dbspin 2mo ago
  100% this. I wish more techies could understand this. That same logic underlies the 'scanning books and music and movies without permission is just like a student / artist / filmmaker learning'. Differences in technology and information access elicit different outcomes, different processes and entail radically different consequences for society.
  - danqqq 2mo ago
    [dead]
tempfile 2mo ago
When it comes to surveillance, it is not enough to say "difference in degree, not in kind". The difference is the degree. Memorising someone's face is not surveillance, building a database of faces is. Seeing someone you recognize go into a store is not surveillance, writing down everywhere they go during the day is.
butvacuum 2mo ago
look into "dragnet"'s as that's the term (afaik) and the issue at hand.
cmiles8 2mo ago
But you can generally FOIL records of this. Want body cam footage of what the officer was doing, you can generally get that. Want the video footage from their dash cam while sitting there, you can generally get that. However municipalities treat the data from these license plate cameras like a state secret. That disparity is largely what’s at issue here.
- dave78 2mo ago
  Can I submit a FOIA request to get all the plate reads from Flock for my town's mayor or police chief (their private vehicles) so that I can create a map of where they go and share it online? I genuinely don't know the answer as I've not tried, but from things I've read I'm pretty sure they will not provide this. And that's the point - why can a police officer search the database for any plate they feel like but the public cannot?
  - cmiles8 2mo ago
    They will generally deny you access, but they will access it freely themselves despite this being data collected on public streets. That’s the disparity at issue. However there’s no law from you putting up your own camera, pointing it at a public street and publishing the details of every car that drives past and highlighting any interesting once’s, like the mayor, police chief, etc. I suspect when there’s been a few cases of that sort of thing happening the attitude of local politicians towards these cameras will change quite quickly. I generally thing this data is a good thing, provided it’s locked behind solid 4th amendment protections.
    - dave78 2mo ago
      > That’s the disparity at issue. However there’s no law from you putting up your own camera, pointing it at a public street and publishing the details of every car that drives past and highlighting any interesting once’s, like the mayor, police chief, etc. Yes, and I keep thinking an organized, crowd-sourced effort like people do for capturing ADSB data or weather stations would be tempting. Setting up the hardware would be a little more involved though (mostly because of needing to locate it near the street). Cost is probably not even much worse than an ADSB monitor now. Something like this is probably inevitable, either as a grassroots effort or via something like Amazon's Ring network. Short term it could prompt officials into action, but I fear long term it would be bad for society - laws might be written to prohibit it, but those would have side effects of limiting other things (like the aforementioned ADSB monitoring network).
RussianCow 2mo ago
> A difference in degree 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?
mlfreeman 2mo ago
right now, neither needs a warrant. if searching LPR camera history starts to require a warrant, it probably wouldn't take much to argue that sending officers out to manually do the same thing should require one too. 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.
- lsaferite 2mo ago
  On a recent 3k mile cross-country trip I was shocked to see how prevalent Flock cameras were, even in tiny back-woods locations. I'm fairly certain you cannot drive long distances in the US anymore without Flock having a detailed record of your travels.
CivBase 2mo ago
You are comparing individual human observation with an automated surveillance network. Their capabilities are vastly different. It's like comparing a taser with an M1 Abrams tank.
veec_cas_tant 2mo ago
Police already don’t need warrants to gather video footage from homes and businesses. It certainly isn’t ineffective or else they wouldn’t do it, but everybody knows how effective video footage is. The difference for most does seem to be that it doesn’t cost man hours. We have had cities in the USA with 10k+ cameras in public spaces for years now without much fanfare.
- WarmWash 2mo ago
  They definitely need warrants, but 99% of the time, people/businesses voluntarily hand it over. In fact they do it enthusiastically and even bring it to police without them even asking. "We believe your camera captured the guy who robbed your neighbor, can we see the footage". Virtually everyone says yes to this.
- cmiles8 2mo ago
  They 100% need a warrant if the owner of such footage doesn’t want to voluntarily hand it over. Most people generally voluntarily help out when it’s clear the footage is of value, often calling the police proactively to hand over footage. But if they don’t want to release the footage then they’re under no obligation to do so without a court order.
  - veec_cas_tant 2mo ago
    They ask and everybody turns the footage over. They need nothing at all to ask for the footage, it just takes a large amount of man hours and ends up producing grainy, low-res footage. Everybody knows how important video footage is, so the real issue does seem to be that Flock makes it too easy?
- smt88 2mo ago
  > everybody knows how effective video footage is 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.
WarmWash 2mo ago
As someone who strongly opposes flock cameras... 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.
- nearlyepic 2mo ago
  You realize the law can just make shit up, right? It’s very easy to make a law that says “ALPR data needs a warrant” without impacting the ability of people to record in public. You just need to clearly define ALPR, which isn’t hard.
  - Xirdus 2mo ago
    You don't even need to define it - you can half-ass it and rely on courts to clarify the edge cases. That's how the vast majority of laws work.
    - nearlyepic 2mo ago
      This is also true, but we’ve seen the problems with that idea put on display pretty prominently, lately.
  - WarmWash 2mo ago
    Yeah, but we don't want cameras everywhere, not just auto plate readers. What is the difference between a security camera watching the municipal tools shack entrance and the security camera watching the main road? The ultimate goal is to not have a massive database of everything that happened everywhere going back forever. So it even extends far beyond just reading license plates.
asveikau 2mo ago
Have you met cops? They are not able to sit still or write things down. You expect too much of them.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
kentm 2mo ago
> I don't understand why a police cruiser can sit in a public space (or even a private one) and write down licence plates and descriptions of passers-by with pen and paper, or record everything around them with dashcams and bodycams for later use, but when it comes to cameras on a pole this would require a warrant. 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.
- WarmWash 2mo ago
  Great, now rigidly define scale...
  - chucksta 2mo ago
    How many man hours could the department in question realistically dedicate to the investigation without the technology
  - RHSeeger 2mo ago
    The point at which we decide it's dangerous to the safety, freedom, and happiness of citizens. Every law we have is a balance between "provides good" and "imposes bad" - and we have to adjust where that balance lies on an ongoing basis as things (technology) change.
  - devin 2mo ago
    You don’t need to rigidly define scale to demonstrate at a common sense level that there is a major difference between a couple cops writing down your license plate and a nationwide network of them entering your plate into a searchable ledger.
    - WarmWash 2mo ago
      ...so we only have 5 cameras, one at each entrance to our town. Five cameras is less than what the number of police on duty are using.
UpsideDownRide 2mo ago
Once you remove constraints imposed by needing actual labor you make it a difference in kind since you are allowing for tracking of anyone versus having limited information on a limited area.
esseph 2mo ago
> I don't understand why a police cruiser can sit in a public space (or even a private one) and write down licence plates and descriptions of passers-by with pen and paper, or record everything around them with dashcams and bodycams for later use, but when it comes to cameras on a pole this would require a warrant. 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.
tshaddox 2mo ago
The degree is the problem. I’d have similar complaints if each Flock camera were replaced with an around-the-clock staff of police officers recording every license plate.
- smalltorch 2mo ago
  Thats a good way to look at it. You would be in a constant state of alarm if the poles were officers.
  - veec_cas_tant 2mo ago
    There are police and security all over popular areas, nobody is alarmed. I’m guessing the average person feels safer. Would airports really feel safer without cameras and security?
    - tshaddox 2mo ago
      Again, it's about degree. And no, there absolutely is not a universal feeling of calm and security in places with conspicuous police presence.
phoghed 2mo ago
Simply replace every pole with an officer in their cruiser then and we’ll all be happy.
neodymiumphish 2mo ago
Former law enforcement officer here. I can say that when we conducted surveillance, we weren't allowed to use equipment that wasn't common for normal people to use. So for example, I couldn't use some sort of long-distance microphone to overhear a conversation between two people in public because a normal person wouldn't have that same type of technology. I think this applies in this context to say that a cop just scanning and logging every single plate that traverses a certain area is outside the bounds of what we'd consider lawful for normal surveillance. Alternatively, if a normal person would just sit down and write down every single car description and plate that passed by their house or any other public area, a cop doing the same thing would be reasonable. The scale of modern data collection for police is whats dangerous to individual privacy rights.
- gruez 2mo ago
  That's not a good argument against ALPRs because citizens can theoretically set up an ALPRs too.
  - jmalicki 2mo ago
    And do! A lot of newer home security cameras have ALPRs so you can set up rules like "if a car with a plate number not on this whitelist pulls up on my driveway send me an SMS"
  - cmiles8 2mo ago
    True, but I’d imagine if a few techies in the community setup an open-ALPR network and started a website “where is the police chief and all his family vehicles .com” that the police department’s views towards the free and open use of such data without a warrant would change quite quickly. So long as that data was only collected on public streets it would be perfectly legal.
    - pibaker 2mo ago
      Local Techie Famous For "DIY Flock" Dead With Bullet Holes On the Back Of His Head after Traffic Stop. Police Chief Deems It Suicide And Calls For Better Mental Health Resources.
JohnFen 2mo ago
If the police stationed officers constantly at major intersections doing that, the outcry would be no less than having cameras do it. 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.
- Xirdus 2mo ago
  If it's the police in the streets, people can monitor and have an effect on what they do. When it's the police at a computer inside a secure building, none of that is true.
- simoncion 2mo ago
  > If the police stationed officers constantly at major intersections doing that, the outcry would be no less than having cameras do it. No. A police officer is an expensive asset that requires a lot of investment of both time and money to create. [0] When a police department chooses to put cops on a corner doing surveillance, they're choosing to prefer that activity to any other thing that that cop could be doing. In all but the smallest towns out there, it's certain that the PD doesn't have enough officers on staff to surveil every single street corner in town. In most towns, it's prohibitively expensive (in terms of training cost, opportunity cost, and salaries) to set up a dragnet surveillance when one only uses humans to do the surveillance. In contrast, cameras are far cheaper to acquire, deploy, and maintain than cops. You also only need a handful of cops to run such a surveillance system, rather than one on every corner. With cameras owned by the police or town, it's totally feasible to set up a dragnet surveillance system in most towns. As many folks have said in the discussion about this, scale and expense are very important considerations. As few people have said, laws, regulations, and punishments that make sense when you will catch one rulebreaker in a hundred thousand often do not make sense when you will catch one rulebreaker in two. And the sorts of regulations that provide adequate restraint to police and prosecutors from interfering in people peaceably going about their lives are not the same in a society where one has to send out police to ask people face-to-face for information about someone's whereabouts as they are when police can sit at their desk in HQ and pull up complete records of 90% of that person's daily activity with five minutes of keyboard work. [1] [0] I make no comment as to the average quality of the asset produced. I only note that it's a very limited asset that's expensive to produce. [1] Note that I'm not saying that the surveillance systems currently deployed provide access to 90% of everyone's daily activities. This is an illustrative example. However, it takes only a few minutes' thought to notice that the police's powers of surveillance are far greater today than they were in the late 1700s.
ewhanley 2mo ago
Would you feel similarly if microphones were installed everywhere to record all public conversations for analysis via algorithms? Is that the same as police officers listening to conversation in a public space and taking notes?
- gs17 2mo ago
  That is unfortunately already sort of a thing. A ShotSpotter-recorded conversation was already used as evidence at least twice.
  - FireBeyond 2mo ago
    Which is doubly frustrating given that ShotSpotter has been shown in court to have a willingness to "massage" timestamps to assist police arrest their chosen suspect.
jt2190 2mo ago
I believe you’re trying to articulate the act of witnessing from the act of investigating, and where the boundary between the two is. To me it seems like the boundary should be “does the general public have access to this information?”. If so, it’s allowable. If not, then a justification should be required for starting an investigation.
LPisGood 2mo ago
A difference in degree is a difference in kind. Computer scientists struggle with a lot of legal concepts because they love to reduce situations in attempt to distill some particular facet and argue from analogy. A lot of poor legal analysis regarding things like fraud go similarly: “well in principle isn’t this the same as if I just . . .” 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.
skeeter2020 2mo ago
If your police force installed officers in parked cruisers at every intersection to record license plate numbers and then digitized that information so you can build up a dossier of times and locations for a given individual without probable cause that would be both illegal and a huge waste of resources. ALPR just do it at scale so it's cheaper; still illegal without cause.
- jefftk 2mo ago
  The legality stationing officers to record plates and building a DB is not settled law, and my interpretation is that it's more likely legal than not. Observing things in public is normally legal, and the extent to which scale changes this is very much to be seen.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
shmoe 2mo ago
Aggregation. Correlation.
etdznots 2mo ago
Because of the scale: ALPR’s track where everyone is and was all the time. This allows entire categories of intimate information to be learned, that clearly threaten the civil liberties that the 4th amendment was written to protect. For example, an officer sitting on a city street is very unlikely to learn where his wife goes every day, an ALPR search will answer that question. An officer walking along the street making note of what he sees is very unlikely to observe and make note of the precise daily movements of someone in August three years ago, an ALPR search will answer that question. The degree/kind distinction you’re aiming at is meaningless, it’s like trying to argue that shooting someone with a firearm is the same as shooting someone with a paintball gun in principle, sure but maybe one of them is orders of magnitudes morw powerful and impactful, and so deserves a different degree of consideration in how and when it is applied?
KPGv2 2mo ago
Because the physical impossibility of a department doing that 24/7 every square inch of a city creates an expectation of privacy.
vablings 2mo ago
Because if you wanted to hire the number of police to sit and monitor a public space equal to the number of flock ALPRs you would probably quickly become larger than your average city's entire budget
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
nkrisc 2mo ago
They can. That’s fine, let them do that. The difference in scale is so great that it becomes the meaningful, defining factor.
thaumaturgy 2mo ago
You've already gotten a lot of replies about difference in degree, but there's also two differences in kind: one with visibility, and one with capability. A police cruiser sitting at an intersection is visible. People notice it and its presence changes their behavior. They may choose to avoid certain routes through a city where surveillance cruisers hang out. Flock, and similar surveillance systems, are far less noticeable. Many, many people had no idea they existed a year ago when there were already 80,000 devices installed. Flock has been hot in the news cycle lately in part because tons of people are still just beginning to learn they exist. Whereas a police cruiser on a corner is overt surveillance, Flock is a "creepier" incarnation. There's also capability. In principle, an officer parked on a corner is capable of responding to a variety emergencies. Some people might feel that the presence of the officer there was a net good for public safety. Heart attack in the neighborhood? Your local surveillance officer can start CPR. Older person with late-stage dementia has just walked away from home? Your local surveillance officer could clear that neighborhood. But these surveillance systems have only one capability: surveillance. They can't render aid. They can't even prevent a crime; they can, at best, discourage it, or maybe aid in the apprehension of someone who committed a crime -- and didn't take adequate measures to avoid detection.
sophacles 2mo ago
We see a huge amplification of single mistakes by these automated "efficient" processes. Just yesertday there was a story on the front page of a completely innocent woman who kept getting the felony warrant treatment over a data entry issue. It's not the first time. We also see the cops use the flock system as another excuse to treat an encounter over an unpaid bill as if they were taking down Bin Laden - they seem to see "flock hit" as code for "lets try to kill this person". I am not a criminal nor do I have some sort of fetish for being abused, therefore I don't want some typo to result in unstable, bloodthirsty thugs putting guns in my face. The inefficiency protects me somewhat from these things, and until these issues can be properly addressed, I don't want anything to be scaled to a higher degree. Yes I'm aware that this means lazy cops won't catch as many speeders and people who have warrants to pay a fine. I don't mind.
rootusrootus 2mo ago
> I don't understand why a police cruiser can sit in a public space (or even a private one) and write down licence plates and descriptions of passers-by with pen and paper, or record everything around them with dashcams and bodycams for later use, but when it comes to cameras on a pole this would require a warrant. There is already plenty of precedent in existing laws that 'automated' is a distinction that matters. Even on this exact issue, a few states prevent you as a private citizen from operating an automated license plate recognition system. You are free to scribble down the plate numbers all you want, but using an automated system is against the law.
- MSFT_Edging 2mo ago
  IE self defense, traps, and automatic weapons. You can't automate the trigger pull even in a state with a strong castle doctrine. There needs to be a human in the loop. I think even remotely operated guns move towards the "trap" end of the trigger.
eff4ever 2mo ago
American law leans heavily on "reasonableness". The Fourth Amendment bans only unreasonable searches, and the threshold question is whether someone had an expectation of privacy that society is prepared to recognize as reasonable. That standard is contextual by design (what is reasonable to expect is partly technological, but partly societal and cultural). The "difference in degree" you mention is precisely what is being tested. The recent (and oft-discussed) Chatrie v. United States is relevant. The Court held that the government's acquisition of a person's phone location history is a search requiring a warrant, and refused to set a duration floor. Their stated rationale was both that even short windows expose sensitive movements, and because they did not believe they could answer how many small violations of privacy add up to a big one. As such, the majority decided that warrants were necessary, lest the government be given a "virtual panopticon" If we took your hypothetical seriously, an army of officers logging every plate by hand probably isn't a search and there's no reasonable expectation of privacy of movement on a public road. But building a searchable index of those notebooks, and querying it to reconstruct an arbitrary car's six months, is a different act from the observing. That's the act at issue. Nobody argues a camera needs a warrant to see a plate. The thing I don't understand: why do so many people want the police to _not_ need warrants to surveil the public? Are you historically illiterate? Are you unaware of how big government power tends to be abused? Do you simply trust that the government will always run by people who will support you and will abuse only the people you personally dislike? I'm legitimately curious what sort of intellectual position you use to justify your active support of authoritarian measures, and why you don't believe the public should have safeguards against government abuse. My questions might have sounded flippant, but they were sincere. I would like to understand if your position is borne of naïveté, or a sincere preference for fascism.
- cindyllm 2mo ago
  [dead]
CraigJPerry 2mo ago
System 1: a system for recording an image of a location at a given place over time. System 1 can refer to the dashcam or the mk1 eyeball + notepad in your example. System 2: a system for tracking the presence of a person across both time and location An example of system 2 would be the facial id system being trialled on the london underground currently. These are a difference in kind not in degree. It doesn't matter how many system 1's you deploy, you cannot unlock the capability of querying where any given face was observed across time and location.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
cdrnsf 2mo ago
These systems also facilitate criminal behavior by officers and others with access to them. They can also misidentify vehicles and lead to innocent civilians being pulled over at gunpoint. Problems with officer behavior scales with these systems.
thepryz 2mo ago
Flock records more that just license plates. It’s my understanding they’re also scanning wireless spectrum and tracking Bluetooth and WiFi MAC addresses, among other things. More to the point, there’s a difference between someone writing down license plate numbers on a sheet of paper and and putting that information into a database that can then be mines to identify patterns of behavior, associations between people, etc. Context, use, and scale all matter significantly
duped 2mo ago
The police cruiser's primary role is deterrence not investigation or data collection. A better comparison would be stasi informants.
toss1 2mo ago
>> A difference in degree (of usefulness and speed), not in kind. No. Automating the system is ABSOLUTELY a difference in kind. The argument "it is the same thing" is reductionist beyond absurdity. "Quantity has a quality all its own." Scaling and automation is a difference in kind in every field, and especially in surveillance of a population. To deny it is to assert the Industrial Revolution, the Computer Revolution, and the Internet had no effect on anything. A cop sitting by the road operating a speed trap time or radar/laser gun can trap enough speeders to moderate the traffic, and individual speeders get few tickets. Implementing the "same" thing with cameras everywhere and timing toll-booth arrival/departure times and issuing tickets automatically would result in the majority of drivers getting multiple speeding tickets every trip (just based on measured average speeds on most roads exceeding the posted limit). Your example proves the opposite of what you say. Having a cop personally observing and writing down license plates requires resources - a decision to prioritize those specific resources for that specific investigation on that day. It is a real decision to surveil people in that way. It means people will ONLY be surveilled in that way when it is important. In contrast, constant, ubiquitous, and near-cost-free surveillance means people will be surveilled all day, every day. What was once applied only to exceptionally serious crimes is now available to target any citizen for any petty crime. It enables exactly the kind of silent targeting for which every authoritarian government lusts — the appearance of law and order with the ability to target any specific "troublemaker" at will. With such surveillance, there is no need for an authoritarian to make false charges or highlight a protest. Jack protests, they don't like it, just say "go after Jack". They go to the cameras, find a bunch of petty crimes, and prosecute. Jack now has endless trouble if not jail, and the regime carries on like nothing happened. If, as you say, you don't understand why it is not different, stop being reductive, look at the larger system.
atmavatar 2mo ago
The way these surveillance systems work, a better analogy is one where everyone has a police officer following them around. And, if that were to happen today, you could take that police officer to court for harassment/stalking. Similarly, were the police to attach a GPS tracker to you or your vehicle without a warrant, there's already legal precedent that it's a Fourth Amendment violation. You have to look at this from a systems point of view. Yes, flock cameras individually only capture their immediate surroundings, but the emergent behavior of the system is a means to follow someone around wherever they go, which is already a no-no in our legal system without at least securing a warrant to do so. And, even securing a warrant for one individual does not give you the right to include everyone in an area, commonly referred to and struck down as dragnet surveillance. Flock systems and their siblings are wrong and should not be tolerated.
freejazz 2mo ago
They are saying that a search of the videos created by the cameras should require a warrant, which is different from saying that a warrant is required to record in public spaces
caconym_ 2mo ago
> A difference in degree (of usefulness and speed), not in kind. IIUC courts have signaled in several cases that this distinction matters to them, which is good, because it's such a vast difference in degree that it arguably does become a difference in kind. Police require a warrant to attach a GPS tracker to your car, or to directly obtain your cell phone location records. Why should access to networked ALPRs that compile an equivalently granular record of your movements be treated any differently? IIUC it was this exact line of reasoning ("detailed, encyclopedic, and effortlessly compiled" data equivalent to GPS tracking, for which a precedent had already been established) that supported the decision that now requires warrants for cell phone data (in Carpenter v. United States). Extending the same logic to networked ALPR data would seem obvious if we had the same SCOTUS.
unselect5917 2mo ago
>I don't understand why a police cruiser can sit in a public space (or even a private one) and write down licence plates and descriptions of passers-by with pen and paper, or record everything around them with dashcams and bodycams for later use, but when it comes to cameras on a pole this would require a warrant. A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION -IBM, 1979
- DANmode 2mo ago
  Also, a computer cannot be the initial entity to bring charges of a crime - in many jurisdictions.
  - unselect5917 2mo ago
    That's how it should be. A human being must be in the loop and that human being must be accountable for actions that potent. This is actually a new pet hypothesis I've been testing against the various horrors beyond my comprehension that keep cropping up. Would forcing an individual person into the loop and then holding them accountable - really, not on paper - help?
godwinson__4-8 2mo ago
As one approaches an extreme, one may find it is not so easy to distinguish between a difference in degree and a difference in kind. They may even converge to become the same thing.
aggie 2mo ago
It's similar to why we don't expect to get a speeding ticket when going 66 in a 65. And we often see backlash to traffic cameras that enforce minor infractions relentlessly. Police officer can't practically write down every license plate at every intersection and recreate movement patterns of almost every citizen. Laws are written with practical enforcement realities in mind. When those realities drastically change, the laws should be reassessed.
dredmorbius 2mo ago
Scale fucking matters. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13548498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13548498>
solidsnack9000 2mo ago
The police officer can record and see anything they want; but I'm not sure what that admission changes. Hasn't that always been true? A warrant is for things that other people who are not police wrote down (or otherwise recorded). If a cop had been somewhere and seen it, then they saw it; but in actual fact, they are not everywhere, and so the state wants to get people who were there to turn something over.
nativeit 2mo ago
You’re not trying hard enough.

Forgeties79 2mo ago

Because the ability to scale up a bunch of officers sitting around writing down literally everything they see is limited in comparison. It can only be so invasive and “always-on” everywhere. Throwing up a few dozen flock cameras costs a fraction of that and scales incredibly quickly.

jameshart 2mo ago
It is a curious ‘small government’ instinct that wants government capabilities to be restricted from ever becoming efficient or scalable, even though the population and economy and complexity of the world the government is tasked with regulating scales up. 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.
- Forgeties79 2mo ago
  > 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. I am actually not so sure that’s obvious. I am slowly coming around to the controversial opinion that if they can’t vet what is going up, they shouldn’t be allowed to have an infinite number of uploads/hosted content. They constantly alternate between “don’t worry, we have perfected our algorithms and can catch all of the stuff” and, when they fail, “well you can’t expect us to go over all this stuff. But don’t worry, we pinky promise it’ll be different now.” If I owned 10,000 apartment buildings and one of them collapsed because of negligence, I don’t simply get to go “my real estate empire is too big for you to expect me to follow the law. Shit is just going to collapse sometimes, deal with it.”
  - jameshart 2mo ago
    I guess it wasn’t clear that I share your opinion that it is not ‘obvious’ that companies should be allowed to set aside accountability in pursuit of scale. I was lending expression to an opinion that seems to be orthodoxy, not supporting it.
    - Forgeties79 2mo ago
      Ah my mistake! Misread the intent there.
- Dylan16807 2mo ago
  > It is a curious ‘small government’ instinct that wants government capabilities to be restricted from ever becoming efficient or scalable Efficiency would be great if it was used to save money. But surely you've heard of the Jevons paradox. This kind of cheap surveillance does not make the government smaller and it has all kinds of bad effects. > even though the population and economy and complexity of the world the government is tasked with regulating scales up. Car stuff isn't changing much. They don't need better tracking of where you drive. > 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. Well, vetting every video would not be reasonable even at a small scale business with the same business model. While vetting every ad is very possible. I don't think I've seen anyone claim youtube is unable to vet ads if they significantly wanted to?
  - jameshart 2mo ago
    YouTube absolutely claim not to be vetting every ad they serve. That is why so many outright fraudulent ads get shown by them. In the same industry we have Meta using AI to generate and display ads that even the advertiser hasn’t vetted. > vetting every video would not be reasonable even at a small scale business with the same business model. A small scale business like… a cable tv company? They certainly historically were assumed to be responsible for every piece of video content they took from a creator and broadcast.
    - Forgeties79 2mo ago
      Exactly. “We’re too big” is the most insane excuse. If I just get big enough I can say “nah the law doesn’t apply to me”? I’m not naïve I understand that’s kind of how the world works, but should be really be supporting this?
    - Dylan16807 2mo ago
      > YouTube absolutely claim not to be vetting every ad they serve. That is a true statement that is very different from my claim that they could. > A small scale business like… a cable tv company? No, cable is a very different business model. If youtube only allowed business accounts worth millions of dollars it would get halfway there. And it would be the end of "you"tube.

kevin_thibedeau 2mo ago

License plates are public property.

esseph 2mo ago
But are not public knowledge except to insurance companies and police departments (and probably a ton of companies that have bought the info as well on the gray market). 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.
TaLiTr 2mo ago
In Canada, video footage that personally identifies me is considered personal information. This includes the license plate number.

mapt 2mo ago

A difference of a sufficient degree becomes a difference in kind, because whatever the internal justifications, the external implications of the system for society change drastically.

dbspin 2mo ago
100% this. I wish more techies could understand this. That same logic underlies the 'scanning books and music and movies without permission is just like a student / artist / filmmaker learning'. Differences in technology and information access elicit different outcomes, different processes and entail radically different consequences for society.
- danqqq 2mo ago
  [dead]

tempfile 2mo ago

When it comes to surveillance, it is not enough to say "difference in degree, not in kind". The difference is the degree. Memorising someone's face is not surveillance, building a database of faces is. Seeing someone you recognize go into a store is not surveillance, writing down everywhere they go during the day is.

butvacuum 2mo ago

look into "dragnet"'s as that's the term (afaik) and the issue at hand.

cmiles8 2mo ago

But you can generally FOIL records of this. Want body cam footage of what the officer was doing, you can generally get that. Want the video footage from their dash cam while sitting there, you can generally get that. However municipalities treat the data from these license plate cameras like a state secret. That disparity is largely what’s at issue here.

dave78 2mo ago
Can I submit a FOIA request to get all the plate reads from Flock for my town's mayor or police chief (their private vehicles) so that I can create a map of where they go and share it online? I genuinely don't know the answer as I've not tried, but from things I've read I'm pretty sure they will not provide this. And that's the point - why can a police officer search the database for any plate they feel like but the public cannot?
- cmiles8 2mo ago
  They will generally deny you access, but they will access it freely themselves despite this being data collected on public streets. That’s the disparity at issue. However there’s no law from you putting up your own camera, pointing it at a public street and publishing the details of every car that drives past and highlighting any interesting once’s, like the mayor, police chief, etc. I suspect when there’s been a few cases of that sort of thing happening the attitude of local politicians towards these cameras will change quite quickly. I generally thing this data is a good thing, provided it’s locked behind solid 4th amendment protections.
  - dave78 2mo ago
    > That’s the disparity at issue. However there’s no law from you putting up your own camera, pointing it at a public street and publishing the details of every car that drives past and highlighting any interesting once’s, like the mayor, police chief, etc. Yes, and I keep thinking an organized, crowd-sourced effort like people do for capturing ADSB data or weather stations would be tempting. Setting up the hardware would be a little more involved though (mostly because of needing to locate it near the street). Cost is probably not even much worse than an ADSB monitor now. Something like this is probably inevitable, either as a grassroots effort or via something like Amazon's Ring network. Short term it could prompt officials into action, but I fear long term it would be bad for society - laws might be written to prohibit it, but those would have side effects of limiting other things (like the aforementioned ADSB monitoring network).

RussianCow 2mo ago

> A difference in degree 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?

mlfreeman 2mo ago

right now, neither needs a warrant. if searching LPR camera history starts to require a warrant, it probably wouldn't take much to argue that sending officers out to manually do the same thing should require one too. 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.

lsaferite 2mo ago
On a recent 3k mile cross-country trip I was shocked to see how prevalent Flock cameras were, even in tiny back-woods locations. I'm fairly certain you cannot drive long distances in the US anymore without Flock having a detailed record of your travels.

CivBase 2mo ago

You are comparing individual human observation with an automated surveillance network. Their capabilities are vastly different. It's like comparing a taser with an M1 Abrams tank.

veec_cas_tant 2mo ago

Police already don’t need warrants to gather video footage from homes and businesses. It certainly isn’t ineffective or else they wouldn’t do it, but everybody knows how effective video footage is. The difference for most does seem to be that it doesn’t cost man hours. We have had cities in the USA with 10k+ cameras in public spaces for years now without much fanfare.

WarmWash 2mo ago
They definitely need warrants, but 99% of the time, people/businesses voluntarily hand it over. In fact they do it enthusiastically and even bring it to police without them even asking. "We believe your camera captured the guy who robbed your neighbor, can we see the footage". Virtually everyone says yes to this.
cmiles8 2mo ago
They 100% need a warrant if the owner of such footage doesn’t want to voluntarily hand it over. Most people generally voluntarily help out when it’s clear the footage is of value, often calling the police proactively to hand over footage. But if they don’t want to release the footage then they’re under no obligation to do so without a court order.
- veec_cas_tant 2mo ago
  They ask and everybody turns the footage over. They need nothing at all to ask for the footage, it just takes a large amount of man hours and ends up producing grainy, low-res footage. Everybody knows how important video footage is, so the real issue does seem to be that Flock makes it too easy?
smt88 2mo ago
> everybody knows how effective video footage is 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.

WarmWash 2mo ago

As someone who strongly opposes flock cameras... 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.

nearlyepic 2mo ago
You realize the law can just make shit up, right? It’s very easy to make a law that says “ALPR data needs a warrant” without impacting the ability of people to record in public. You just need to clearly define ALPR, which isn’t hard.
- Xirdus 2mo ago
  You don't even need to define it - you can half-ass it and rely on courts to clarify the edge cases. That's how the vast majority of laws work.
  - nearlyepic 2mo ago
    This is also true, but we’ve seen the problems with that idea put on display pretty prominently, lately.
- WarmWash 2mo ago
  Yeah, but we don't want cameras everywhere, not just auto plate readers. What is the difference between a security camera watching the municipal tools shack entrance and the security camera watching the main road? The ultimate goal is to not have a massive database of everything that happened everywhere going back forever. So it even extends far beyond just reading license plates.

asveikau 2mo ago

Have you met cops? They are not able to sit still or write things down. You expect too much of them.

deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]

kentm 2mo ago

WarmWash 2mo ago
Great, now rigidly define scale...
- chucksta 2mo ago
  How many man hours could the department in question realistically dedicate to the investigation without the technology
- RHSeeger 2mo ago
  The point at which we decide it's dangerous to the safety, freedom, and happiness of citizens. Every law we have is a balance between "provides good" and "imposes bad" - and we have to adjust where that balance lies on an ongoing basis as things (technology) change.
- devin 2mo ago
  You don’t need to rigidly define scale to demonstrate at a common sense level that there is a major difference between a couple cops writing down your license plate and a nationwide network of them entering your plate into a searchable ledger.
  - WarmWash 2mo ago
    ...so we only have 5 cameras, one at each entrance to our town. Five cameras is less than what the number of police on duty are using.

UpsideDownRide 2mo ago

Once you remove constraints imposed by needing actual labor you make it a difference in kind since you are allowing for tracking of anyone versus having limited information on a limited area.

esseph 2mo ago

> I don't understand why a police cruiser can sit in a public space (or even a private one) and write down licence plates and descriptions of passers-by with pen and paper, or record everything around them with dashcams and bodycams for later use, but when it comes to cameras on a pole this would require a warrant. 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.

tshaddox 2mo ago

The degree is the problem. I’d have similar complaints if each Flock camera were replaced with an around-the-clock staff of police officers recording every license plate.

smalltorch 2mo ago
Thats a good way to look at it. You would be in a constant state of alarm if the poles were officers.
- veec_cas_tant 2mo ago
  There are police and security all over popular areas, nobody is alarmed. I’m guessing the average person feels safer. Would airports really feel safer without cameras and security?
  - tshaddox 2mo ago
    Again, it's about degree. And no, there absolutely is not a universal feeling of calm and security in places with conspicuous police presence.

phoghed 2mo ago

Simply replace every pole with an officer in their cruiser then and we’ll all be happy.

neodymiumphish 2mo ago

Former law enforcement officer here. I can say that when we conducted surveillance, we weren't allowed to use equipment that wasn't common for normal people to use. So for example, I couldn't use some sort of long-distance microphone to overhear a conversation between two people in public because a normal person wouldn't have that same type of technology. I think this applies in this context to say that a cop just scanning and logging every single plate that traverses a certain area is outside the bounds of what we'd consider lawful for normal surveillance. Alternatively, if a normal person would just sit down and write down every single car description and plate that passed by their house or any other public area, a cop doing the same thing would be reasonable. The scale of modern data collection for police is whats dangerous to individual privacy rights.

gruez 2mo ago
That's not a good argument against ALPRs because citizens can theoretically set up an ALPRs too.
- jmalicki 2mo ago
  And do! A lot of newer home security cameras have ALPRs so you can set up rules like "if a car with a plate number not on this whitelist pulls up on my driveway send me an SMS"
- cmiles8 2mo ago
  True, but I’d imagine if a few techies in the community setup an open-ALPR network and started a website “where is the police chief and all his family vehicles .com” that the police department’s views towards the free and open use of such data without a warrant would change quite quickly. So long as that data was only collected on public streets it would be perfectly legal.
  - pibaker 2mo ago
    Local Techie Famous For "DIY Flock" Dead With Bullet Holes On the Back Of His Head after Traffic Stop. Police Chief Deems It Suicide And Calls For Better Mental Health Resources.

JohnFen 2mo ago

If the police stationed officers constantly at major intersections doing that, the outcry would be no less than having cameras do it. 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.

Xirdus 2mo ago
If it's the police in the streets, people can monitor and have an effect on what they do. When it's the police at a computer inside a secure building, none of that is true.
simoncion 2mo ago
> If the police stationed officers constantly at major intersections doing that, the outcry would be no less than having cameras do it. No. A police officer is an expensive asset that requires a lot of investment of both time and money to create. [0] When a police department chooses to put cops on a corner doing surveillance, they're choosing to prefer that activity to any other thing that that cop could be doing. In all but the smallest towns out there, it's certain that the PD doesn't have enough officers on staff to surveil every single street corner in town. In most towns, it's prohibitively expensive (in terms of training cost, opportunity cost, and salaries) to set up a dragnet surveillance when one only uses humans to do the surveillance. In contrast, cameras are far cheaper to acquire, deploy, and maintain than cops. You also only need a handful of cops to run such a surveillance system, rather than one on every corner. With cameras owned by the police or town, it's totally feasible to set up a dragnet surveillance system in most towns. As many folks have said in the discussion about this, scale and expense are very important considerations. As few people have said, laws, regulations, and punishments that make sense when you will catch one rulebreaker in a hundred thousand often do not make sense when you will catch one rulebreaker in two. And the sorts of regulations that provide adequate restraint to police and prosecutors from interfering in people peaceably going about their lives are not the same in a society where one has to send out police to ask people face-to-face for information about someone's whereabouts as they are when police can sit at their desk in HQ and pull up complete records of 90% of that person's daily activity with five minutes of keyboard work. [1] [0] I make no comment as to the average quality of the asset produced. I only note that it's a very limited asset that's expensive to produce. [1] Note that I'm not saying that the surveillance systems currently deployed provide access to 90% of everyone's daily activities. This is an illustrative example. However, it takes only a few minutes' thought to notice that the police's powers of surveillance are far greater today than they were in the late 1700s.

ewhanley 2mo ago

Would you feel similarly if microphones were installed everywhere to record all public conversations for analysis via algorithms? Is that the same as police officers listening to conversation in a public space and taking notes?

gs17 2mo ago
That is unfortunately already sort of a thing. A ShotSpotter-recorded conversation was already used as evidence at least twice.
- FireBeyond 2mo ago
  Which is doubly frustrating given that ShotSpotter has been shown in court to have a willingness to "massage" timestamps to assist police arrest their chosen suspect.

jt2190 2mo ago

I believe you’re trying to articulate the act of witnessing from the act of investigating, and where the boundary between the two is. To me it seems like the boundary should be “does the general public have access to this information?”. If so, it’s allowable. If not, then a justification should be required for starting an investigation.

LPisGood 2mo ago

A difference in degree is a difference in kind. Computer scientists struggle with a lot of legal concepts because they love to reduce situations in attempt to distill some particular facet and argue from analogy. A lot of poor legal analysis regarding things like fraud go similarly: “well in principle isn’t this the same as if I just . . .” 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.

skeeter2020 2mo ago

If your police force installed officers in parked cruisers at every intersection to record license plate numbers and then digitized that information so you can build up a dossier of times and locations for a given individual without probable cause that would be both illegal and a huge waste of resources. ALPR just do it at scale so it's cheaper; still illegal without cause.

jefftk 2mo ago
The legality stationing officers to record plates and building a DB is not settled law, and my interpretation is that it's more likely legal than not. Observing things in public is normally legal, and the extent to which scale changes this is very much to be seen.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

shmoe 2mo ago

Aggregation. Correlation.

etdznots 2mo ago

Because of the scale: ALPR’s track where everyone is and was all the time. This allows entire categories of intimate information to be learned, that clearly threaten the civil liberties that the 4th amendment was written to protect. For example, an officer sitting on a city street is very unlikely to learn where his wife goes every day, an ALPR search will answer that question. An officer walking along the street making note of what he sees is very unlikely to observe and make note of the precise daily movements of someone in August three years ago, an ALPR search will answer that question. The degree/kind distinction you’re aiming at is meaningless, it’s like trying to argue that shooting someone with a firearm is the same as shooting someone with a paintball gun in principle, sure but maybe one of them is orders of magnitudes morw powerful and impactful, and so deserves a different degree of consideration in how and when it is applied?

KPGv2 2mo ago

Because the physical impossibility of a department doing that 24/7 every square inch of a city creates an expectation of privacy.

vablings 2mo ago

Because if you wanted to hire the number of police to sit and monitor a public space equal to the number of flock ALPRs you would probably quickly become larger than your average city's entire budget

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

nkrisc 2mo ago

They can. That’s fine, let them do that. The difference in scale is so great that it becomes the meaningful, defining factor.

thaumaturgy 2mo ago

You've already gotten a lot of replies about difference in degree, but there's also two differences in kind: one with visibility, and one with capability. A police cruiser sitting at an intersection is visible. People notice it and its presence changes their behavior. They may choose to avoid certain routes through a city where surveillance cruisers hang out. Flock, and similar surveillance systems, are far less noticeable. Many, many people had no idea they existed a year ago when there were already 80,000 devices installed. Flock has been hot in the news cycle lately in part because tons of people are still just beginning to learn they exist. Whereas a police cruiser on a corner is overt surveillance, Flock is a "creepier" incarnation. There's also capability. In principle, an officer parked on a corner is capable of responding to a variety emergencies. Some people might feel that the presence of the officer there was a net good for public safety. Heart attack in the neighborhood? Your local surveillance officer can start CPR. Older person with late-stage dementia has just walked away from home? Your local surveillance officer could clear that neighborhood. But these surveillance systems have only one capability: surveillance. They can't render aid. They can't even prevent a crime; they can, at best, discourage it, or maybe aid in the apprehension of someone who committed a crime -- and didn't take adequate measures to avoid detection.

sophacles 2mo ago

We see a huge amplification of single mistakes by these automated "efficient" processes. Just yesertday there was a story on the front page of a completely innocent woman who kept getting the felony warrant treatment over a data entry issue. It's not the first time. We also see the cops use the flock system as another excuse to treat an encounter over an unpaid bill as if they were taking down Bin Laden - they seem to see "flock hit" as code for "lets try to kill this person". I am not a criminal nor do I have some sort of fetish for being abused, therefore I don't want some typo to result in unstable, bloodthirsty thugs putting guns in my face. The inefficiency protects me somewhat from these things, and until these issues can be properly addressed, I don't want anything to be scaled to a higher degree. Yes I'm aware that this means lazy cops won't catch as many speeders and people who have warrants to pay a fine. I don't mind.

rootusrootus 2mo ago

MSFT_Edging 2mo ago
IE self defense, traps, and automatic weapons. You can't automate the trigger pull even in a state with a strong castle doctrine. There needs to be a human in the loop. I think even remotely operated guns move towards the "trap" end of the trigger.

eff4ever 2mo ago

American law leans heavily on "reasonableness". The Fourth Amendment bans only unreasonable searches, and the threshold question is whether someone had an expectation of privacy that society is prepared to recognize as reasonable. That standard is contextual by design (what is reasonable to expect is partly technological, but partly societal and cultural). The "difference in degree" you mention is precisely what is being tested. The recent (and oft-discussed) Chatrie v. United States is relevant. The Court held that the government's acquisition of a person's phone location history is a search requiring a warrant, and refused to set a duration floor. Their stated rationale was both that even short windows expose sensitive movements, and because they did not believe they could answer how many small violations of privacy add up to a big one. As such, the majority decided that warrants were necessary, lest the government be given a "virtual panopticon" If we took your hypothetical seriously, an army of officers logging every plate by hand probably isn't a search and there's no reasonable expectation of privacy of movement on a public road. But building a searchable index of those notebooks, and querying it to reconstruct an arbitrary car's six months, is a different act from the observing. That's the act at issue. Nobody argues a camera needs a warrant to see a plate. The thing I don't understand: why do so many people want the police to _not_ need warrants to surveil the public? Are you historically illiterate? Are you unaware of how big government power tends to be abused? Do you simply trust that the government will always run by people who will support you and will abuse only the people you personally dislike? I'm legitimately curious what sort of intellectual position you use to justify your active support of authoritarian measures, and why you don't believe the public should have safeguards against government abuse. My questions might have sounded flippant, but they were sincere. I would like to understand if your position is borne of naïveté, or a sincere preference for fascism.

cindyllm 2mo ago
[dead]

CraigJPerry 2mo ago

System 1: a system for recording an image of a location at a given place over time. System 1 can refer to the dashcam or the mk1 eyeball + notepad in your example. System 2: a system for tracking the presence of a person across both time and location An example of system 2 would be the facial id system being trialled on the london underground currently. These are a difference in kind not in degree. It doesn't matter how many system 1's you deploy, you cannot unlock the capability of querying where any given face was observed across time and location.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

cdrnsf 2mo ago

These systems also facilitate criminal behavior by officers and others with access to them. They can also misidentify vehicles and lead to innocent civilians being pulled over at gunpoint. Problems with officer behavior scales with these systems.

thepryz 2mo ago

Flock records more that just license plates. It’s my understanding they’re also scanning wireless spectrum and tracking Bluetooth and WiFi MAC addresses, among other things. More to the point, there’s a difference between someone writing down license plate numbers on a sheet of paper and and putting that information into a database that can then be mines to identify patterns of behavior, associations between people, etc. Context, use, and scale all matter significantly

duped 2mo ago

The police cruiser's primary role is deterrence not investigation or data collection. A better comparison would be stasi informants.

toss1 2mo ago

>> A difference in degree (of usefulness and speed), not in kind. No. Automating the system is ABSOLUTELY a difference in kind. The argument "it is the same thing" is reductionist beyond absurdity. "Quantity has a quality all its own." Scaling and automation is a difference in kind in every field, and especially in surveillance of a population. To deny it is to assert the Industrial Revolution, the Computer Revolution, and the Internet had no effect on anything. A cop sitting by the road operating a speed trap time or radar/laser gun can trap enough speeders to moderate the traffic, and individual speeders get few tickets. Implementing the "same" thing with cameras everywhere and timing toll-booth arrival/departure times and issuing tickets automatically would result in the majority of drivers getting multiple speeding tickets every trip (just based on measured average speeds on most roads exceeding the posted limit). Your example proves the opposite of what you say. Having a cop personally observing and writing down license plates requires resources - a decision to prioritize those specific resources for that specific investigation on that day. It is a real decision to surveil people in that way. It means people will ONLY be surveilled in that way when it is important. In contrast, constant, ubiquitous, and near-cost-free surveillance means people will be surveilled all day, every day. What was once applied only to exceptionally serious crimes is now available to target any citizen for any petty crime. It enables exactly the kind of silent targeting for which every authoritarian government lusts — the appearance of law and order with the ability to target any specific "troublemaker" at will. With such surveillance, there is no need for an authoritarian to make false charges or highlight a protest. Jack protests, they don't like it, just say "go after Jack". They go to the cameras, find a bunch of petty crimes, and prosecute. Jack now has endless trouble if not jail, and the regime carries on like nothing happened. If, as you say, you don't understand why it is not different, stop being reductive, look at the larger system.

atmavatar 2mo ago

The way these surveillance systems work, a better analogy is one where everyone has a police officer following them around. And, if that were to happen today, you could take that police officer to court for harassment/stalking. Similarly, were the police to attach a GPS tracker to you or your vehicle without a warrant, there's already legal precedent that it's a Fourth Amendment violation. You have to look at this from a systems point of view. Yes, flock cameras individually only capture their immediate surroundings, but the emergent behavior of the system is a means to follow someone around wherever they go, which is already a no-no in our legal system without at least securing a warrant to do so. And, even securing a warrant for one individual does not give you the right to include everyone in an area, commonly referred to and struck down as dragnet surveillance. Flock systems and their siblings are wrong and should not be tolerated.

freejazz 2mo ago

They are saying that a search of the videos created by the cameras should require a warrant, which is different from saying that a warrant is required to record in public spaces

caconym_ 2mo ago

> A difference in degree (of usefulness and speed), not in kind. IIUC courts have signaled in several cases that this distinction matters to them, which is good, because it's such a vast difference in degree that it arguably does become a difference in kind. Police require a warrant to attach a GPS tracker to your car, or to directly obtain your cell phone location records. Why should access to networked ALPRs that compile an equivalently granular record of your movements be treated any differently? IIUC it was this exact line of reasoning ("detailed, encyclopedic, and effortlessly compiled" data equivalent to GPS tracking, for which a precedent had already been established) that supported the decision that now requires warrants for cell phone data (in Carpenter v. United States). Extending the same logic to networked ALPR data would seem obvious if we had the same SCOTUS.

unselect5917 2mo ago

DANmode 2mo ago
Also, a computer cannot be the initial entity to bring charges of a crime - in many jurisdictions.
- unselect5917 2mo ago
  That's how it should be. A human being must be in the loop and that human being must be accountable for actions that potent. This is actually a new pet hypothesis I've been testing against the various horrors beyond my comprehension that keep cropping up. Would forcing an individual person into the loop and then holding them accountable - really, not on paper - help?

godwinson__4-8 2mo ago

As one approaches an extreme, one may find it is not so easy to distinguish between a difference in degree and a difference in kind. They may even converge to become the same thing.

aggie 2mo ago

It's similar to why we don't expect to get a speeding ticket when going 66 in a 65. And we often see backlash to traffic cameras that enforce minor infractions relentlessly. Police officer can't practically write down every license plate at every intersection and recreate movement patterns of almost every citizen. Laws are written with practical enforcement realities in mind. When those realities drastically change, the laws should be reassessed.

dredmorbius 2mo ago

Scale fucking matters. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13548498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13548498>

solidsnack9000 2mo ago

The police officer can record and see anything they want; but I'm not sure what that admission changes. Hasn't that always been true? A warrant is for things that other people who are not police wrote down (or otherwise recorded). If a cop had been somewhere and seen it, then they saw it; but in actual fact, they are not everywhere, and so the state wants to get people who were there to turn something over.

nativeit 2mo ago

You’re not trying hard enough.