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Hi all, Original Author of the article here - glad to see so much interest and discussion of this topic. There are a few threads going on here but the main one

Hi all, Original Author of the article here - glad to see so much interest and discussion of this topic. There are a few threads going on here but the main one seems to be: Should we care about "privacy" of information available in public, and if so, how do we set rules (Given that it's in public)? I think the answer to the first question is undoubtedly yes because of the way technology is advancing. Yes, we've always been able to see people in public, but we've never been able to do it in a rapid automated fashion on a mass scale, or catalog and query natiowide databases. This creates new implications for privacy. In the past the government simply didn't have the resources to know exactly what religious ceremonies, political meetings, protests every American was going to. Now they do. This may mean an expansion of 4th Amendment protections (@sharemywin mentioned the idea of a new amendment, but I think this is exactly what the 4th Amendment is for). In Jones the Supreme Court said you can't attach GPS devices to cars without a warrant, and 5 Justices said we may need this type of protection for location data generally. Since then many lower courts have applied this protection to location data generated from cell phones (even public locations), which I think is correct. As far as setting a standard, I think the best approach is to require 4th Amendment protections for location data generated from an electronic source/device. This is what a number of states have been doing to address demands for cell phone location data and police use of stringrays. It also directly goes to the issue that electronic devices are given government unprecedented power to record, store, and query our location data, which makes that data more sensitive and suseptible to abuse.

Xeoncross 11y ago
"Yes, we've always been able to see people in public, but we've never been able to do it in a rapid automated fashion on a mass scale... ...This creates new implications for privacy. In the past the government simply didn't have the resources to know exactly what religious ceremonies, political meetings, protests every American was going to. Now they do."
s_q_b 11y ago
I agree. A change in quantity is a change in quality when it comes to privacy. The occasional flyover to look for narcotics operations may be permissible, because there is no expectation of privacy in a public space. But monitoring an entire city with aerostats and quadrotors, or storing the location information of the entire population through license plate readers, while justifiable under the same legal rationale, is a completely different situation. From a practical reading of the Constitution, it is clearly violative of the Fourth Amendment.
pdkl95 11y ago
> 4th Amendment The 4th Amendment - and specifically its warrant requirement - is often misunderstood to be about protecting individuals from government searches. Warrants will generally be granted, and the search of any particular individual is going to happen if the government wants it to. The protection for individuals happens later when evidence that was improperly obtained could be ruled inadmissible by the exclusionary rule. The search will probably happen, but the results of that search may not apply in court. The warrant requirement is an attempt to protect society in general against threats like the writs of assistance that were imposed upon the colonies. From the perspective of an individual search, obtaining a warrant is a trivial speed bump. If you wanted to search an entire city, on the other hand, those speed bumps serve as a rate limiter. It is just not possible for even a large, corrupt, overfunded and overstaffed police force to "particularly describe" what each search is for and get each one rubber stamped by a judge. Our police and judicial systems have many inefficiencies like this by design. In modern times, we probably need to extend this idea to the public space, to impose some kind of new rate-limiter. It doesn't matter if the government can ask for occasional data, but allowing a continual collection and a permanent database is the kind of "general warrant" style collection that we need to prevent. The problem is when data is the aggregated, so we need to strongly rate limit the collection so there is no data to aggregate. By the way - while license plate data is bad enough, I hope everybody remembers that they are making a detailed map of their movements and a graph of probably relationships when they carry a cell phone thanks to COTRAVELER. That slide from the Snowden archive didn't get a lot of press, but it is probably one of the more easily abused programs out of all of the recent revelations.
- makmanalp 11y ago
  > Warrants will generally be granted, and the search of any particular individual is going to happen if the government wants it to. This is true but it protects against "unreasonable" searches. I'd much rather have my house be searched after a judge deems it necessary, rather than there being no accountability or oversight, and the police deciding on their own that they want to. Other than that, I agree.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
samstave 11y ago
There are municipalities in the bay area that are requiring new companies' new head quarters campuses to install these readers on their own properties to monitor ALL traffic driving by them. And if you tell anyone about which city and which company, they threaten you with legal repercussions.
- nitrogen 11y ago
  That sounds egregious. Is there any way of substantiating this? Or online photos of the readers?
  - samstave 11y ago
    I received a threat after I revealed the city and company, so probably not something I can substantiate without risk.
    - nitrogen 11y ago
      Dang. Hopefully someone with more information and less risk can discreetly notify an attorney and/or the EFF and/or the ACLU.
karmacondon 11y ago
I just don't agree with the "technology is advancing" argument. If something is legal, ethical and moral then it doesn't matter if technology makes it easier to do or not. If it's right for the police to follow one person around to see what religious ceremonies, political meetings and protests that person is attending, then it's right for the police to do that same thing at scale. The issue here is: is it right for the police to be able to perform physical surveillance of an individual? It's a yes or no question, regardless of what use the police make of technology. If you think the police shouldn't be able to follow you around to see what meetings you go to, which they can do now without a warrant, then it shouldn't matter if they do it with their feet or by automatically capturing and recording license plate numbers. Technical capability doesn't alter the definition of right and wrong. This is why we should think through laws and rules carefully, so that they apply not only to the present, but to how things might be in the future. If it turns out that we need new laws, then there's a process for changing them. But I don't think that we should let the technical trends of the moment alter how we view our basic principles.
- wheaties 11y ago
  That's an interesting argument and also perspective that I bet will be argued quite strongly in the legal circumstances. In many ways, however, it may not be one particular aspect of surveillance but rather the preponderance of all the surveillance that people are being subjected. That is, by and large a license plate only tells us where your car went but coupled with cell phone records and other means of tracking it gets scary quite quickly. Do remember, that before this technological advance there was a decided cost to surveil someone. A unit or several would have to be placed on detail to monitor one person. That cost has gone down substantially and as a result, what might have seemed innocuous before has taken on a completely different character. We, as a country, tolerated many injustices towards minority groups because it didn't impact us. Now, we are faced with an impact that is total. It doesn't change the question but does reframe the question.
- ghaff 11y ago
  However, as the parent wrote, technology creates differences of degree that become differences of kind. And it creates problems that just weren't problems when the law was written. Maybe the laws should have been written more carefully but that's a rather idealistic position. That laws regarding control of personal airspace over my house didn't anticipate the widespread use of consumer drones is pretty understandable. Ditto lots of laws regarding regulation of weaponry, etc. In this case, we've been seeing nominally public info become more readily available for a while now. There are good reasons most public information (deeds, etc.) are public. But that used to mean someone had to have a good reason to look at them because they'd have to trudge down to the county clerk's office. And maybe the town clerk's office. And then some other clerk's office. Now it's all aggregated in one place at the touch of a button. The good reasons those records were public in the first place haven't gone away. But technology has fundamentally changed the scope of how that information can be used.
wcummings 11y ago
This is how I explain it to people: I can take a picture of you in public, but if I follow you around everywhere you are in public photographing you, it's stalking. There's a similar line somewhere for LE.

Xeoncross 11y ago

"Yes, we've always been able to see people in public, but we've never been able to do it in a rapid automated fashion on a mass scale... ...This creates new implications for privacy. In the past the government simply didn't have the resources to know exactly what religious ceremonies, political meetings, protests every American was going to. Now they do."

s_q_b 11y ago

I agree. A change in quantity is a change in quality when it comes to privacy. The occasional flyover to look for narcotics operations may be permissible, because there is no expectation of privacy in a public space. But monitoring an entire city with aerostats and quadrotors, or storing the location information of the entire population through license plate readers, while justifiable under the same legal rationale, is a completely different situation. From a practical reading of the Constitution, it is clearly violative of the Fourth Amendment.

pdkl95 11y ago

> 4th Amendment The 4th Amendment - and specifically its warrant requirement - is often misunderstood to be about protecting individuals from government searches. Warrants will generally be granted, and the search of any particular individual is going to happen if the government wants it to. The protection for individuals happens later when evidence that was improperly obtained could be ruled inadmissible by the exclusionary rule. The search will probably happen, but the results of that search may not apply in court. The warrant requirement is an attempt to protect society in general against threats like the writs of assistance that were imposed upon the colonies. From the perspective of an individual search, obtaining a warrant is a trivial speed bump. If you wanted to search an entire city, on the other hand, those speed bumps serve as a rate limiter. It is just not possible for even a large, corrupt, overfunded and overstaffed police force to "particularly describe" what each search is for and get each one rubber stamped by a judge. Our police and judicial systems have many inefficiencies like this by design. In modern times, we probably need to extend this idea to the public space, to impose some kind of new rate-limiter. It doesn't matter if the government can ask for occasional data, but allowing a continual collection and a permanent database is the kind of "general warrant" style collection that we need to prevent. The problem is when data is the aggregated, so we need to strongly rate limit the collection so there is no data to aggregate. By the way - while license plate data is bad enough, I hope everybody remembers that they are making a detailed map of their movements and a graph of probably relationships when they carry a cell phone thanks to COTRAVELER. That slide from the Snowden archive didn't get a lot of press, but it is probably one of the more easily abused programs out of all of the recent revelations.

makmanalp 11y ago
> Warrants will generally be granted, and the search of any particular individual is going to happen if the government wants it to. This is true but it protects against "unreasonable" searches. I'd much rather have my house be searched after a judge deems it necessary, rather than there being no accountability or oversight, and the police deciding on their own that they want to. Other than that, I agree.
- dragonwriter 11y ago

samstave 11y ago

There are municipalities in the bay area that are requiring new companies' new head quarters campuses to install these readers on their own properties to monitor ALL traffic driving by them. And if you tell anyone about which city and which company, they threaten you with legal repercussions.

nitrogen 11y ago
That sounds egregious. Is there any way of substantiating this? Or online photos of the readers?
- samstave 11y ago
  I received a threat after I revealed the city and company, so probably not something I can substantiate without risk.
  - nitrogen 11y ago
    Dang. Hopefully someone with more information and less risk can discreetly notify an attorney and/or the EFF and/or the ACLU.

karmacondon 11y ago

I just don't agree with the "technology is advancing" argument. If something is legal, ethical and moral then it doesn't matter if technology makes it easier to do or not. If it's right for the police to follow one person around to see what religious ceremonies, political meetings and protests that person is attending, then it's right for the police to do that same thing at scale. The issue here is: is it right for the police to be able to perform physical surveillance of an individual? It's a yes or no question, regardless of what use the police make of technology. If you think the police shouldn't be able to follow you around to see what meetings you go to, which they can do now without a warrant, then it shouldn't matter if they do it with their feet or by automatically capturing and recording license plate numbers. Technical capability doesn't alter the definition of right and wrong. This is why we should think through laws and rules carefully, so that they apply not only to the present, but to how things might be in the future. If it turns out that we need new laws, then there's a process for changing them. But I don't think that we should let the technical trends of the moment alter how we view our basic principles.

wheaties 11y ago
That's an interesting argument and also perspective that I bet will be argued quite strongly in the legal circumstances. In many ways, however, it may not be one particular aspect of surveillance but rather the preponderance of all the surveillance that people are being subjected. That is, by and large a license plate only tells us where your car went but coupled with cell phone records and other means of tracking it gets scary quite quickly. Do remember, that before this technological advance there was a decided cost to surveil someone. A unit or several would have to be placed on detail to monitor one person. That cost has gone down substantially and as a result, what might have seemed innocuous before has taken on a completely different character. We, as a country, tolerated many injustices towards minority groups because it didn't impact us. Now, we are faced with an impact that is total. It doesn't change the question but does reframe the question.
ghaff 11y ago
However, as the parent wrote, technology creates differences of degree that become differences of kind. And it creates problems that just weren't problems when the law was written. Maybe the laws should have been written more carefully but that's a rather idealistic position. That laws regarding control of personal airspace over my house didn't anticipate the widespread use of consumer drones is pretty understandable. Ditto lots of laws regarding regulation of weaponry, etc. In this case, we've been seeing nominally public info become more readily available for a while now. There are good reasons most public information (deeds, etc.) are public. But that used to mean someone had to have a good reason to look at them because they'd have to trudge down to the county clerk's office. And maybe the town clerk's office. And then some other clerk's office. Now it's all aggregated in one place at the touch of a button. The good reasons those records were public in the first place haven't gone away. But technology has fundamentally changed the scope of how that information can be used.

wcummings 11y ago

This is how I explain it to people: I can take a picture of you in public, but if I follow you around everywhere you are in public photographing you, it's stalking. There's a similar line somewhere for LE.