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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
by 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 agoThat's not a good argument against ALPRs because citizens can theoretically set up an ALPRs too.
- jmalicki 2mo agoAnd 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 agoTrue, 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 agoLocal 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.
- convolvatron 2mo agoa single person can't set up a fine-grained nationwide network of cameras with a unified search interface that lets one track everyones daily movements.
- gruez 2mo agoSo by that logic, nation-wide ABPs are also illegal, because a single person can't rally the entire country's law enforcement to find someone?
- trollbridge 2mo agoA nationwide APB is not an investigative activity.
- gruez 2mo agoNeither is writing down license plates.
- TaLiTr 2mo agoYes, it is. If you were investigating a business or building, you would document vehicles coming and going.
- trollbridge 2mo agoYes it is. Non-investigating would be tasks like: - counting the number of vehicles going by - radar’ing every car to produce a report on how many people are speeding and how much - checking all licence plates for valid registrations to produce a report on what percentage of cars have expired tags on the road.
- jjk7 2mo agoNo, but accessing and searching the database is.
- etdznots 2mo agoIt’s not that police can’t use tools that arent available to the general public. It’s that in the US we have the plain view doctrine which defines the boundary between the things that can be plainly observed in public, which don’t constitute a search and thus don’t trigger the 4a protections, and observations that are not plain view observations and which are a search and trigger 4a protections
- baby_souffle 2mo agoI actually have set up a few! On my property, not every major intersection in town, though.
- TheCoelacanth 2mo agoCitizens can theoretically use long-distance microphones too. The criteria is whether they commonly do, not whether it's possible.
- trollbridge 2mo ago"we weren't allowed to use equipment that wasn't common for normal people to use." Is it common for normal people to set up and use ALPRs?
- Scion9066 2mo agoIt's already prohibited in a number of states and I'd bet that if citizens tried to do that at any scale, then laws would be quickly passed to make the state and its corporate partners the only ones allowed to do so everywhere else.
- drtz 2mo agoI think the issue of what your average citizen can or cannot do is a relatively minor. The bigger problem is law enforcement's use of private business as end-around to dodge 4th amendment. Google and Apple, Verizon and AT&T, auto manufacturers, Flock, and every other business that scoops up our data has a trove of information that would be unquestionably illegal for law enforcement to collect directly due to 4th amendment protections against government mass surveillance. So, instead, the businesses conduct the mass surveillance and then law enforcement gets to access that information -- either with a warrant as is the case for Google and Apple, or with some sort agreement as with Flock. Businesses (or individuals) that deliver surveillance data to the government, compelled by warrant or otherwise, should be subject to the same constitutional restrictions as the government itself.