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> 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 pe
by 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 agoGreat, now rigidly define scale...
- chucksta 2mo agoHow many man hours could the department in question realistically dedicate to the investigation without the technology
- RHSeeger 2mo agoThe 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 agoYou 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.
- pixl97 2mo agoGiven that in the majority of places police are typically busy doing things like writing speeding tickets and going on calls that leaves a lot less time for them to sit still for an 8 hour shift and record every single plate they can see 24/7/365. Those 5 cameras would represent 15 to 20 officers which is a huge taskforce no matter how large the department.
- autoexec 2mo agoThe number of cameras matters much less than what those cameras are being used for. If police body cam footage was being indiscriminately scanned for any and all license plate data and all of that data was being fed into a national database which was being routinely accessed and abused that would also be problem. As far as I know, that isn't the case.
- saveferris 2mo agoSCOTUS has (sort of) done this in the recent Chatrie case. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-112_0am4.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-112_0am4.pdf It's obviously different in that Chatrie was about google location data, and there actually was a warrant. SCOTUS ruled that warrant was too broad since it captured everyone in that location, not a specific person(s). Constitutional scholars have pointed out the ALPR are next in line to face challenges based on the same principles as Chatrie - LEO can get a warrant for a specific person(s) to search but cannot search the entire universe. That would not prevent ALPRs from existing, but it would require a warrant to search them. Which seems reasonable and completely in line with the 4th amendment. Edit: words/spelling
- WarmWash 2mo agoOK sure, but do they now also need a warrant to look at their own footage from their body cam, or their dashcam? What about the camera on the side of the municipal building? Compelling parties to give up data is different than looking at your own data. And it is firmly established that recording and reviewing footage in public space is totally fine. So we are back to square one...How do we define scale such that a police camera on a police car is OK, but a police camera on every corner is not. Or that individuals can record in public but police cannot.
- connicpu 2mo agoSometimes the law is vibes, SCOTUS will probably create a set of tests where lower courts will have to look at how many points it hits and decide whether it's over the line on a case by case basis.
- amanaplanacanal 2mo agoI don't know what the philosophical answer is, but the real answer is that we don't, the supreme Court does.
- saveferris 2mo agoSCOTUS gets into it in their opinions on Chartrie, you should check it out. They wrestle with the balance there of 4th amendment protections and mass surveillance. It's evolving and generally courts are moving to not allowing mass surveillance -or less so than they have allowed in. Courts have been split on it, and someone already pointed it out that SCOTUS will eventually come up with tests for it. There were some really interesting parts of those Chatrie opinions that really will test the idea that someone in public gives up their right to any privacy - the fundamental underpinning of why governments can currently point cameras at public places and dont need a warrant to search that video. Chatrie protected the aggregated viewpoint versus any single public moment - And SCOTUS said the aggregated viewpoint (mass search of location data with no specific person(s)) is not allowed under the 4th amendment. A very interesting precedent. Gorsuch had an interesting take in that he argued that in Chatrie the location data was Chatrie's personal property and therefore protected from illegal searches from government. There are a lot of similarities to how ALPRs work, and key differences. Mostly Chatrie deals with a private firms data collection of locations - google vs ALPRs are generally on publicly owned property and recoding things in public. Still, many justices opened the door to the idea that the government can't mass surveil citizens. We'll have to wait and see how it all plays out. I am very much of the opinion the government should need a warrant to search through ALPR data (and video for that matter). So, I am hopeful that the tenets of Chatrie extend to ALPRs, video, etc. Edit: Gorsuch argues that the data is personal and not the government's data - this is what prevents the government from searching for it without a warrant. He did not get into why a body cam or something like that is different.
- LPisGood 2mo agoYou don’t need to do that, actually. The legal system in the United States is highly capable of sussing out descriptions like “undue or unreasonable”.
- incorporeal 2mo agoIt’s impossible to “rigidly” define words like “chair” when faced with someone who’s committed to demonstrating ways you’ve failed to do it. Luckily we never need to do that with words for them to be useful, even in legal contexts.
- morkalork 2mo agoScale does matter. Take bacterial infections for example, there's a tipping of scale on the way to full blown sepsis
- eatsyourtacos 2mo agoBut then scale doesn't actually matter. If you have a problem with something that "everyone does" then you should have a problem with something only a few people do.
- Xirdus 2mo agoIt's not about many people vs. few people. It's about a single person doing little with a lot of effort vs. a single person doing an enormous amount with minimal effort.
- eatsyourtacos 2mo agoWhy didn't you have a problem with a single person doing little with a lot of effort? All I'm saying is it should have been a problem at that point.. not just because it's easy now to do it at a high scale.
- nkrisc 2mo agoBecause the outcome is meaningfully different when every citizen can be passively tracked at all times versus a few cops sitting around writing down license plates. The former is massively damaging to our rights, the latter is almost useless and thus barely a problem worth talking about. The difference in scale matters.
- Xirdus 2mo agoI didn't have a problem because the damage that can be caused by doing a little is very limited, and if someone puts too much effort it becomes very visible and they're put under extra scrutiny, preventing them from doing more harm. Also because outlawing standing on a street and taking notes is a very slippery slope.
- dnautics 2mo agothat is not the case. It is not about effort: The court has ruled that single point of time monitoring is fine, but continuous monitoring (a covertly placed gps tracker, e.g.) is a violation of privacy.
- t-3 2mo agoIt's not about scale, it's about oversight. A warrant puts a lock on the data until the request is approved. Leaving it wide open is the reason we have constant news stories about police being arrested for stalking people. Nobody wants to limit the police's ability to investigate crimes, but we do want them to use their power to investigate crimes, not to stalk their baby mama, crush, rival, etc. I fully understand and accept your point that there is no real difference between a cop watching and the cop setting (or hiring) a camera to watch, and I even believe that the more data available the more humanity benefits, and that a total absence of privacy as we know it is inevitable, I think we are not there yet culturally, so strictly requiring warrants for police to access these systems is desirable.
- rileymat2 2mo ago> Nobody wants to limit the police's ability to investigate crimes. This is not true of privacy advocates, they do want to limit the ability to fish for circumstantial evidence that targets innocent people and causes suspicion.
- zahlman 2mo agoThis is non-sequitur. "Investigating crimes" entails knowledge that a crime has actually occurred, and deliberately seeking information specifically related to that crime; "fishing for circumstantial evidence" does not.
- vonneumannstan 2mo ago>Scale actually matters Is this actually born out in Court Cases? Warrantless Surveillance by NSA seems to be blanket legal for example.
- chaps 2mo agoMore and more, yes. This was in June: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-112_0am4.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-112_0am4.pdf
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- sweetjuly 2mo agoYes, this is why a warrant is required to access carrier location data for a phone but one is not required to have a police officer physically following you around town despite the outcome (the police get a trace of your location) being the same. Cell phone location data is too easy and cheap for the government to scale and so courts have found that it demands tighter protection. See: https://www.oyez.org/cases/2017/16-402 https://www.oyez.org/cases/2017/16-402 It comes up fairly often here since the HN audience tends to be mostly programmers/computer people, but it's really important to remember that the law is not a series of rules a computer can directly evaluate to determine whether something is or is not legal; judges frequently use their judgement to balance the assumed intent of laws and the competing interests of various parties. I don't say this to you specifically but really just the HN audience as a whole :)
- pandaman 2mo ago"Yes, this is why" is in reference to scale here? I don't see how it's "why". Cell phone tracking follows you where a police officer physically cannot follow you (on private property, for example). This is why, not because of scale.
- fluidcruft 2mo agoScale is more about efficiency and cost, though. Plenty of people want more policemen patrolling the streets.
- abirch 2mo agoIf we simply mandated that everyone install an app on their phone so that the government can track them scales very well. The people without the app would probably be criminals,
- fluidcruft 2mo agoI don't follow that... posting a police officer in everyone's house is pretty much a Third and Fourth Amendment violation and not primarily constrained by finances.
- ffsm8 2mo agoYoure the one that made the intellectually dishonest argument that scale is about cost and efficiency while the discussion was about scale of the surveillance. from your point, nothing is cheaper and more efficient then mandating an app on all phones through which the governments can track everyone, and consequently whoever doesnt have it would be a criminal. it completely tracks from your argument. You may need to make the app stop tracking while theyre in the home, but thats a technicality. voila. no longer an issue according to your point
- kazinator 2mo ago> Scale actually matters. I don't believe so. The whole purpose of a license plate is to deanonymize vehicles and their drivers. Vehicles must display license plates while driving or parked on public roadways. This is not the same as faces. Faces are not like license plates. People are not given faces by a state licensing authority and then required to display them. The scale of facial surveillance is a problem only because the surveillance of a single face is already a problem. People who don't like license plate tracking should take a bicycle or public transit. When you are given the privilege of riding a two ton murder weapon on a public road, you trade privacy for that.
- dnautics 2mo ago> 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. Not only this, this a precedented court opinion.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- earth-tattoo 2mo ago[flagged]
- semiquaver 2mo agoScale does not matter. Here’s a quote from Chatrie: > Still more fundamentally, we have never understood Fourth Amendment protections as kicking in only once an intrusion “goes too far.” Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon, 260 U. S. 393, 415 (1922) (adopting that approach for regulatory takings). Where the Fourth Amendment applies, it applies—regardless of “the quality or quantity of information” the government obtains. Kyllo, 533 U. S., at 37. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-112_0am4.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-112_0am4.pdf
- dredmorbius 2mo agoScale doesn't matter in a clear 4A violation. Scale does matter in what characterises a clear 4A violation. Nationwide pervasive cross-referenced AI-augmented ALPR is a 4A violation on account of that scale. (I'd argue that that relevant scale threshold is far lower, but probably above the single-officer-in-a-single-cruiser manually taking notes level.)
- judge2020 2mo agoNote that they already don't write down license plates. They use LPRs attached to their cars, and tend to be automatically running every plate immediately through the database, which tends to catch people without insurance or expired registration. Is the line automation? Or 24/7 operation? (genuinely)
- breakpointalpha 2mo agoPersonally the line for me is a human police officer with reasonable judgement and accountability. If an officer was standing next to every Flock camera in America, the public would be hyper aware of the situation we are now in. Mass, warrantless, and perpetual surveillance is incompatible with liberty and unacceptable to the vast majority of Americans. It has to be stopped, or we are doomed.
- judge2020 2mo agoBeen thinking about this today and I agree. If the actionability is reliant on a human in the loop making a decision to create some incident (e.g. traffic stop) then there is a limit to the surveillance while still scaling the law to apply to our growing population. In that vein, I wouldn't be 100% against Flock cameras if their purpose was limited. The problem in the concept is that they store all license plate hits for later retrieval regardless of if anything is actively tying that license plate to some form of illegal activity. Even with a short retention window, this is mass surveillance because it allows later viewing of hits based on any kind of search given. And you can never limit that search query in a 100% effective manner, but you could very well tell police departments "tough luck, we only have hits if the plate was involved in something at the time of scan".