Either it needs a warrant or it’s fully open and people can start creating websites showing the movements of local politicians.
This middle ground that municipalities try to carve out where it’s fully open to police without a warrant but not subject to FOIL laws doesn’t appear tenable for much longer.
There’s been too many cases of police officers stalking exes, poking around the data for fun and such so it’s clear police cannot be trusted with the data without better court oversight.
It’s certainly a very powerful investigative tool, but needs solid 4th amendment protections. The Supreme Court’s recent ruling on geofence searches of cell phone records is a good indication on where the Supreme Court’s head is at on this sort of thing, where they said no you can’t just do blanket data dumps like that without a warrant.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Yes, 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.
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 :)
But nobody wants their minds connected and all of them to immediately be able to see, comprehend, and act on anything any of them sees. This is what a surveillance dragnet backed by AI is.
The only people who want that are the ones that want to subjugate large portions of the population, or those that want those large portions subjugated even if they don't get to do it.
If 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,
I 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.
Youre 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
No it doesn’t track. In his example, observing license plates is perfectly legal without a warrant. Looking in your phone is not. These are not at all alike.
Of course? We already have private entities doing this today. Private toll road operators such as United Bridge Partners already administers camera systems that collect license plates for toll payments. I would assume parking lot operators also do this, and private citizens could create a nonprofit network too if they wanted.
Are you suggesting that people couldn’t do that for some reason?
Here's my rebuttal: I don't want police sitting down and writing every license plate down 24/7 on every street corner tracking my every movement. That's bad. And they don't do that now, so saying "it happens today" is false.
It isn't possible for them to do that without sensors and AI everywhere. That's why using this technology is a red line.
People either have privacy in public or they do not, but I don't know anyone who seriously claims that there's an expectation of privacy on public roads. What freedom are you talking about?
> People either have privacy in public or they do not
Thankfully, the law isn't as overly simplistic and black and white as that. It'd be very stupid if it were. We have the ability maintain a general principal like "there's no expectation to privacy in public" and still prohibit certain things that are deemed harmful, like taking upskirt photos of people while they are in public spaces.
> Nobody is talking about cops or flock cameras taking upskirt photos.
Just as we have the ability to pass laws prohibiting that specific harmful use of cameras while in public spaces, we have the ability to do something about the harmful uses of police and flock cameras while in public. The conversation is about the harms of mass surveillance and the exceptions necessary to protect the American public.
>I don't know anyone who seriously claims that there's an expectation of privacy on public roads
Hello, I'm here.
Practically, we do have privacy in public pre-AI. We weren't entitled to complete anonymity, but the ability to track every single person at all times was impossible.
Now that AI and sensors are making it possible, people are saying "No, I don't want that to be the norm".
I don't, 95% of what US cops do is harrass and extort people despite most of these people causing nobody else any concern or even a second glance or thought.
But 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.
There hasn't been an explicit ruling from the supreme Court that applies here, but there are indications that they would have ruled that the fourth amendment applied. They've explicitly avoided closing the door on that possibility.
> Also left unanswered was the broader question surrounding the privacy implications of a warrantless use of GPS data without a physical intrusion – as might occur, for example, with the electronic collection of GPS data from wireless service providers or factory-installed vehicle tracking and navigation services.[27] The Court left these matters to be decided in some future case, saying, "It may be that achieving the same result through electronic means, without an accompanying trespass, is an unconstitutional invasion of privacy, but the present case does not require us to answer that question."
> Ultimately, in Carpenter the court determined that the third-party doctrine could not be extended to historical cell site location information (CSLI). Instead, the Court compared "detailed, encyclopedic, and effortlessly compiled" CSLI records to the GPS information at issue in United States v. Jones, recognizing that both forms of data accord the government the ability to track individuals' past movements.[24] Furthermore, the Court noted that CSLI could pose even greater privacy risks than GPS data, as the prevalence of cellphones could accord the government "near perfect surveillance" of an individual's movements. Accordingly, the Court ruled that, under the Fourth Amendment, the government must obtain a search warrant in order to access historical CSLI records.[1]
Of course there are no guarantees on how they'd rule today, but in the past they've ruled that scale and ease of access and compilation are significant enough to mean that fourth amendment protections should apply.
By my understanding, this would be similar to the situation with marketing calls. In the US is it legal for a human to call anyone and market to them. But due to issues from scale, it is illegal for either a program to make the call, or a prerecorded message to be played.
To me, that is precedent in US law that computerized methods of executing human tasks do not fall under the same rules.
It'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.
I 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.
Because 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.
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.
OK 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.
SCOTUS 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.
Sometimes 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.
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.
The 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.
Given 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.
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.
It'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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I 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.
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.
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"
It'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.
a 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.
It’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
OP's contention is that private citizens don't have access to a network of cameras to look for license plates and therefore it isn't "plain view", but I don't see how that's different than law enforcement being able to muster the entire nation's cops to look for a suspect.
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.
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?
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.
> 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).
A number of states already have laws preventing individuals from setting up ALPR. I can't image state or government officials that don't lready have those restrictions in place would allow the public to set up tracking of their movements for very long if someone did try to set up something crowd-sourced or easily searchable.
e.g.:
Arkansas:
https://law.justia.com/codes/arkansas/title-12/subtitle-2/ch...
> Except as provided in subsection (b) of this section, it is unlawful for an individual, partnership, corporation, association, or the State of Arkansas, its agencies, and political subdivisions to use an automatic license plate reader system.
ADSB stuff falls into the much broader legal concept in the US that airwaves are public and if you can receive it and aren’t cracking encryption then it’s fair game to listen to. Many countries have a far more restrictive view of radio traffic, and encryption in ADSB isn’t likely to happen anytime soon if ever.
When you FOIA body cams that will often redact the faces of other individuals.
Likewise I would expect that the license plates read be redacted. It makes sense to protect it since you are exposing members of the public, not the government.
Once you redact license plate numbers, what is left of substance in the FOIA request?
Generally they don’t redact that. They may redact private details not publicly visible (like someone stating a phone number) but if it’s public visible it’s generally not redacted.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I have never heard anyone try and argue that video evidence is not effective. That’s a pretty big stretch.
There is nothing reversed with Flock. There is a crime scene, they see who was entering or leaving and work from there. Without plate readers it takes a team of people many hours, that’s the difference. You can’t know who had anything to do with the crime without investigating, that’s the definition of the word!
> … we're invading their privacy
Who expects privacy driving on public roads? In any sort of developed area you are driving past cameras on every single street. Every Uber has a dash cam, the Teslas are recording (sometimes?), every police car has a camera, etc.
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.
Looking at the sentiment of those around me about public recordings (in this case it was street photography), I would not be surprised if there was a push soon to ban all public recordings. At least, the sharing or usage of those recordings.
It seems many people feel it limits what I would consider "freedom of impermanence", or the concept that as an ordinary individual nearly every action or mistake you make will not considered in your future.
I for one would act differently if that were the case. Many vulnerable or stupid moments would not have happened. Many of those moments have allowed me to grow as a person. And this is as a person who has not faced persecution or bias in law enforcement.
I do not have a stance on the matter of general recording currently, but know that I would have acted differently if there was a camera around all the time. There goes my first time asking someone out, there goes frying a 5V board with 12V because I thought I knew better, there goes bar karaoke so bad that even the bartender looked pained. But if this were law, so too goes the guy I saw in a park fire spinning, so too goes the joy I captured on a strangers face at seeing a beautiful chandelier, and so too goes the countless photos of nature that happen to have people in the background.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
I don't think that's ideal at all. The questions you're asking already have been answered, judges. It's their whole job to understand that scale changes things.
I get the instinct to be able to objectively codify things, especially in this community, but the law is based on morality and philosophy. Until someone comes up with a perfect solution to the trolley problem, we need a human in the loop making judgements.
More on topic, there's a reason why we have different terms for surveillance and mass surveillance. They feel very different and mass surveillance enables much different behaviors of bad actors.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
>> A difference in degree (of usefulness and speed), not in kind.
Wrong.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Either it needs a warrant or it’s fully open and people can start creating websites showing the movements of local politicians.
This is how things get regulated. I'm still waiting for a data broker breach which exposes the particulars of congress. That would be quite the shakeup. I think it will happen eventually.
That doesn't seem untenable at all. It's perfectly consistent with legal precedent and current practice.
There are MANY cases where the government legitimately possesses personal information that could potentially cause harm if revealed, for operational as well as public safety purposes. Vehicle registration and drivers license records, for example.
This personal information is typically exempt from FOIA laws. I can't go FOIA vehicle registration records to look up where a certain driver lives, but the state and police officers do have access to that information.
A search involves access without consent. Police don't need a search warrant to perform a search with the consent of the owner. In the case of cell phone data the search is without the consent of the data owner (the phone company). In this case the municipality is collecting public-view data themselves, not without the consent of the collector, so there's no search warrant issue.
You’re missing the point. It seems like you’re saying how things “generally” are, but not how they legally should play out. For instance, among my lawyer friends, they insist that drug-sniffing dogs should require a warrant as well, and a few have said they’d happily take a case like this pro-bono to start putting the goalposts where they belong.
I'll toss out another alternative idea. Not that I'm against the warrant requirement exactly but I just think it becomes a lot more fuzzy since the data will be managed by private companies that only accumulated it because they already have other ways to monatize it. And it's only one tool that they have to harass people.
This is fundamentally a police officer problem. You make it a felony and a terminable offense. You make all or part of the Brady List public and this automatically places an officer on it. ALPRs are just one tool for a police officer to stalk someone, they could just as well park outside their house or place of work and follow them around or do other things. We could require warrants to get the ALPR data but we'd still have these jerks pretending in to protect and serve.
In my perfect world, if we had an Amber alert or we knew there was a particularly violent criminal driving a specific car with a specfic license plate, I think it would be a step forward if all of the information was made available quickly and there was a quick and safe capture. Judges can issue warrants pretty quickly when motivated. Likewise, if some officer is stalking his ex-wife or something, cutting off the license plates is a nice step but I'd rather him not be involved in law enforcement at all.
I'd love for these datasets to be fully audited, but I suspect industry will balk that the very use of it is proprietary.
I think here what's interesting is that it fundamentally speaks to data privilege. There are two ways that police/lawyers access data. The first way is they request the data to be provided, usually in civil cases it is kind of "give me the data please otherwise I will subpoena you and that's a headache for everyone" and for LEO, it's give me this data to solve a crime otherwise I will get it anyways via a warrant.
The lines start to get very blurry when dealing with things like private ALPRs and Ring/Nest etc. because they have the policy of if a LEO asks we provide (in the case of Ring LEOs have access to pretty much all doorbell cameras) but this is really problematic because although it's an attempt at good faith, they are essentially circumventing the legal process of acquiring this data for investigation since involving a judge is a cumbersome process.
But now we have a problem, LEOs are exercising essentially extrajudicial authority by having access to this data. The authority is provided to them by the law (hence why your average joe schmoe can't get this data) but they do not use the mechanisms provided to them to actually get that data. So all data should be provided to anyone regardless of status but if you don't have a lawyer and a reason in a civil case you get told to kick rocks
It needs to be both open and closed by warrant. Cars aren't people so you aren't necessarily tracking whoever is riding that car, which can be done protecting the identity of the driver, but if the car is being watched as part of a larger investigation against an individual, then it needs a warrant.
There's nothing stopping you from buying an LPR and publishing the data. Also, with a PI license, you (might) be able to access the nationwide Nlets LPR Index.
How is it different from putting out an all-points bulletin? Basically doesn't it just expand the size of the police force and make their eyeballs on the road more accurate?
> Either it needs a warrant or it’s fully open and people can start creating websites showing the movements of local politicians.
I want this data to require a warrant to access. Having said that, I agree that it should be open to everyone if warrants aren't required.
I've said this for years and I almost always get the "But stalkers!" pushback.
I think "But stalkers!" can be answered with applications to enable individuals to track their stalkers themselves. Since the police have no duty to protect I'd argue tracking a stalker yourself is probably a better solution anyway.
Problem is that Flock CEO still has dirtbag access. Didn't he spy on someone at a conference in public view as part of a presentation of the technology?
> Either it needs a warrant or it’s fully open and people can start creating websites showing the movements of local politicians.
What?
There is a lot of information privy to police that should not be accessible to anyone. This is such a ridiculous standard. I would want police to know where I live and contact information of my emergency contact for instance, but I wouldn't want that accessible to others.
> There’s been too many cases of police officers stalking exes, poking around the data for fun and such so it’s clear police cannot be trusted with the data without better court oversight.
There have been more cases of "someone broke into my house at exactly [time]. Can you track their license plate and track them down" that I'm willing to make that tradeoff. Those police that abuse their power should be brought to justice and its obviously against policies, but to simply remove their ability to effectively do their job is not the answer
"someone broke into my house at exactly [time]. Can you track their license plate and track them down"
Sounds reasonable, but most police departments will not do this, even if the data is available to them and running the query is easy.
They will tell you to file a report, preferably online, which will then be incorporated in local stats, and may also be useful in your interactions with your insurance company.
But they will not do anything to help your specific case.
> I would want police to know where I live ... but I wouldn't want that accessible to others.
Oddly, this was 100% commonplace before about 2000 or so, in the US at least. Every household got a free phone book from the phone company that contained the name, address, and phone number of everyone in town. I think you could opt out, but almost no one did.
It was incredibly handy and sometimes I still miss it. I'm not 100% sure why it was considered OK for so many decades but today would be considered a PII data leak, though I suppose it being limited to your local area vs. searchable by the whole world has something to do with it.
> There have been more cases of "someone broke into my house at exactly [time]. Can you track their license plate and track them down" that I'm willing to make that tradeoff.
I'm not, especially since anecdotally, police are generally unwilling to use these tools to solve petty crime anyway.
This is fair, but in my mind, there's still data that's way too accessible for police without proper oversight. What I'd prefer is a system where if the police access it without court approval, they generate a post-access review to confirm that the police did it for a valid reason, such as an emergency. Otherwise, I think any traditional access to that kind of data should have to be via court order.
These companies provide an audit log. This is the obvious answer to prevent abuse rather than relying on courts. Imagine the senior officer or overseer or governing body gets a ping every time a license plate is requested. This isn't a novel problem. Millions of people have access to information like PII in the financial world and they manage it without all the hoops.
No, not a warrant --but what they should have is an tamper-evident logs with HIPAA-like consequences for abuse. In other words, if you have a case where doing registration plate searches can help, you have a policing reason to search.
Willy-nilly search for relatives, lovers, love-interests, rivals, etc. would potentially be a fireable offence --like HIPAA violations. There is no technical reason there could not be technical controls preventing abuses.
>Willy-nilly search for relatives, lovers, love-interests, rivals, etc. would potentially be a fireable offence --like HIPAA violations. There is no technical reason there could not be technical controls preventing abuses.
So you're fine with 1984-ish type stuff as long as it's only used to enforce the will of the state and never used by the agents of the state for their own purposes?
It frustrates me when people call them license plate readers. I guess you need to call them something, but they are general-purpose internet connected cameras. They will do whatever their firmware tells them to do, and could be reprogrammed at any time by anyone with access. No one expected doorbell cameras to join a mass surveillance network, but later the manufacturers added that feature. Why do we treat these cameras like they can do only one thing?
> Why do we treat these cameras like they can do only one thing?
Because its useful messaging to disarm the populace. "License plate reader" sounds less alarming than "Internet connected camera" or "Mass surveillance device."
Public attitudes vary around a "license plate reader" but will be more uniformly opposed to "Widespread, automated government mass surveillance tracking your every move via camera in real time"
I always define them as "Remotely managed, field-upgradeable, multi-interconnected computing devices with full spectrum cameras and other sensory capabilities. Information is monitored in real-time by increasingly capable AI technology. They have edge AI capability for intelligent classification. They can be upgraded without announcement at any time. They can be replaced in the field with higher capabilities at any time. The data they captured can be accessed at any time by anyone with sufficient permissions granted by an entity capable of granting such permissions. Not all users have the same permissions. Multiple user interfaces with differing capabilities exist. There exists a capability to aggregate data streams from multiple sources provided the user has sufficient permissions. Deleted data remains accessible to users with higher clearance."
That's cute and technically accurate but doesn't help when having conversations with the public.
"Warrantless mass surveillance technology" creates a category into which these and similar devices can be aggregated together where people's concerns tend to be about the same.
That phrase was suggested by a local chief of police while we were having discussions on policy.
This amounts to an argument against ever using general purpose computing devices to accomplish anything.
You could say the same about literally any privately operated device. ‘I don’t know why they call these things cell towers. They do whatever they are programmed to and can be reprogrammed by anyone with access’
Heck the same applies to non electronic things too ‘why do they call it a house? It’s a general purpose structure and could be turned into a shop or a factory or a crack den at any time by anyone with access’
I think the point is these aren't just license plate readers. For example, are they recording fingerprintable bluetooth or other wifi signals of occupants of cars that are going by?
i see it more like an argument against increasingly networked solutions. red-light cameras used to just upload when an incident occurred (or maybe required routine physical downloading?). the object itself did one thing. now it's cheap to feed continuous live feeds to a centralized processor... and once it's there, it's cheap to do a lot more.
Okay so is the argument that if a city wants to install red light cameras they must install analog film based systems because if they install a CCD camera with a raspberry pi and a network connection they could use it for other purposes?
Obviously the electronic networked solution is going to be cheaper and easier to operate. It would be insanely wasteful to force government organizations to use expensive cumbersome processes just to ensure they can’t be misused.
The solution is legislation and enforcement of rules that constrain what local governments are allowed to actually do with equipment they install and the data it collects, not regulation of what the equipment they install could theoretically be converted to accomplish.
"Autonomous dragnet surveillance cameras" wasn't as popular with the focus groups.
> No one expected doorbell cameras to join a mass surveillance network
Doorbell cameras were at least for individual security, initially. There's no attempt being made to market Flock as anything but mass surveillance. Surely we all expect them or their successors to be detecting peoples' faces, walking gates, and who-knows-what-else in the near future.
It's simply because the language hasn't caught up with the technology yet. A similar problem happens in courts where legal terminology hasn't caught up with technology.
There's no malintent with it, it just means that the public conversation hasn't gotten to a point where these distinctions can easily be made to a wider audience. We'll get there.
The claim that there’s no mal intent to copaganda comes off as weirdly apologist.
Do you really think people don’t know how they’re framing the situation when they choose to use language this way? It’s all just an innocent misunderstanding, that just so happens to serve the interest of existing power structures?
I think you're misinterpreting my words. Of course there's malintent with copaganda.
I'm talking about the random schmos out there who don't know what "ALPR" even is. These folk are more and more learning about what these things are and pushing back on them.
A warrant isn't an effective safe guard unless you trust the government to only prosecute actual crimes. The US federal government has demonstrated, explicitly, that it is willing to use law enforcement for political ends and will charge private citizens for political reasons (like the reflecting pool case).
Now is not the time to be giving more power to the executive or its policing functions.
You should raise your voices now. For Indians, its too late. Our Indian Government used facial recognition system at mass level in recent students protests and now police is showing up on their homes.
It's better to raise the voice now for you guys than to say sorry later.
A warrant requirement is not a reasonable bandaid to consider allowing mass spying. There should be no mass spying by default.
A warrant requirement makes sense for something like the locations of customers on cellular networks, because, although it should be improved, it's been built into the tech.
When you make the optional choice to create mass spying, safeguards do not make it acceptable.
This is a hole in the Constitution that would be better patched, at least with statute, better with an amendment. The fourth amendment says
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects...
Who is "their" here? In terms of property rights it's the people who own those digital "papers". The individuals who that data is about do no maintain or control that data, and could not destroy it, meaning they do not functionally have property rights over it. If I write in my notebook that you have blonde hair, the notebook is still my property. There isn't anything I could write about you in it that would make it yours (other than maybe "I hereby give this notebook to Joe Bloe").
Attempts to interpret the Constitution otherwise are, IMHO, attempts at good policy, but unstable as law. So we should fix it either by giving people property rights to that data (so that they can destroy or change it without permission) or to explicitly require warrants for access to PII owned by third parties.
..."and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
It was an attempt to secure privacy. "Their" means an individual, a person. Essentially, you control what you control, and do not need to give up this control unless there is suspicion of crime.
If you want to change "their" to mean "data about them" rather than "data owned by them" you have to not give precedence to the original public meaning. The result of that is that ordinary people are in a worse position to know what the law means, because it can fundamentally change by reinterpreting a word.
"data owned by them" is one's papers and/or effects, depending. "data about them" pretty much didn't exist in the late 1700's when we compare it to the enormous scale of that data today. A combination of the third-party doctrine and legal restraints that prevent it from being turned into dragnet surveillance is more or less what applies to that.
There are also the rights of the people to peaceably assemble -both publicly and privately-, peaceably speak publicly, and peaceably bring their grievances to the various governments that govern them. All of those rights interact with regulation of the things we're talking about here... it's not just the 4th amendment that's relevant.
It seems very easy. Always on spy camera installed for the express purpose of dragnet surveillance? Illegal. Film child’s baseball game? Legal.
I find this attitude I find kind of tiring. Gosh it’s just sooo hard to figure out the difference between Flock Safety and Big Bill’s Little League Sports Photography. It’s actually very straightforward to determine the difference between these two things. So easy, an idiot could do it. Or a judge.
While I do agree it's tiring and agree with your point I think the issue is finding the exact point to draw the line. It's easy to differentiate the two ends.
> Haven't stalking and surveillance always had a different interpretation despite mostly taking place in public?
Yep. And dragnet surveillance has (pretty much?) always been illegal in the US... but it takes the courts an awfully long time to notice the new dragnets the cops set up.
For example, despite the fact that the third-party doctrine says that cops can just walk up and get any ordinary business records someone you do business with has created about you, courts continue to notice and declare illegal new ways in which naive application of that doctrine creates dragnets.
Good article. It's a sober look at where we are at.
We lost a lot of strong privacy rights we had with landlines when we shifted to cell phones.
We're actually slowly creeping into pre-crime territory. You could have AI searching for possible pre-crime candidates based on unknown identity in the area, disparate pattern to usually movements, etc.
I do wonder though if the data retention should be restricted at all. This brings up a very good point that even old data (months or more) can be vital to cases or to the defense, but is there any downside to it that would make it worth restricting? And how long?
> I think cameras in all public spaces are going to happen. Imagine Ring comes out with a nicer camera system for homeowners....
Indiscriminately filming people in public places is illegal some places, e.g. Germany. Allowing the creation of large networks of cameras surveilling public places is a choice.
It's a bit more of a gray area in the US, where expectations of privacy in public spaces has been ruled against many times over. When in a public space, you are allowed to film or photograph whomever you want. This likewise extends into private property, where you set the rules of your own property, and also is the only place where you have an expectation of privacy.
There is another middle option that I would have liked to see the author discuss: requiring either a case number or a CAD ID, instead of a "search reason".
In my conversations with law enforcement (mostly at management level, chiefs of police), all of them have had reasonable-sounding objections to a warrant requirement for a search, but zero of them have been able to come up with a reason why a case-or-CAD ID requirement isn't workable. Generally, they argue that in practice obtaining a warrant can be too onerous in time sensitive situations, and can be harder to obtain than the public realizes. Two popular examples are in kidnappings (time sensitive) and missing persons (difficult to obtain).
A case number or CAD ID however simply requires that the details of either a public call for service or an active investigation are associated with the historical search. It closes the door on officers' hobby searching.
Andrew's blog post does note the problems with oversight, which also match my experience, so this isn't a perfect fix. But it will go further in conversations with law enforcement for people that are trying to thread the needle on making "safe" mass surveillance.
(I am personally opposed to mass surveillance in all its forms, but arguing only from that position pretty much immediately excludes me from policy discussions.)
Warrants for historical search with warrant-free flags for ongoing issues seems like a nice middle ground. Convincing. Good article.
It seems that would easily impede a lot of abuse and it’s straightforward to believe that historical data is rarely so urgent as to not require a warrant.
A matter of defining historical as a sufficiently old enough thing but that seems feasible.
Collecting and storing the information is the real problem. The focus on warrants is a distraction.
Access control (warrant) doesn't prevent a breach, and the system is not architected in a way to prevent internal abuse. The best way to prevent the abuse of data is to not collect or store it at all.
Here's a case study of what happens when this information is public (it's linked as the "data-driven" series). This information should not exist unless the plate is flagged and the reason for that is sufficient to obtain a warrant. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/open-records-laws-reve...
Hotlists imply that actual search takes place the moment you pass one, so really, the illegal search happens before. Even if warrants were required to manually search.
None of it is against your will. You have no obligation to own a car or drive. If you want to use the _shared_ resource that is public roads, funded by everyone, you have to agree to certain terms (eg a license, insurance).
You act like it wasn't in place just five years ago.
It's a new paradigm. Flock is the first to blatently collect and sell public whereabouts for private gain.
Conflating this with insurance is a interesting take.
Also, the notion that I have a choice to not have a car is absurd. I'd starve. And, even if I could walk around are traverse my town with only a bike or walking, I'm still sucked into a harddrive against my will by these cameras.
There's a fundamental question: Is it legal for the government to blanket a public space in cameras and do whatever they want to the data that they collect from those cameras?
Is it legal for a private entity to do the same with their owned space (like a plaza or mall or office tower)?
Focusing on license-plate-readers seems like car-brain is causing the author to miss the forest for the trees.
A license plate is already publicly displayed information (and is in most jurisdictions not private property), and you're operating in a public space.
I know it's unpopular but I went from not supporting these sorts of systems to embracing them after seeing the positive effects in China.
For crimes that depend on anonymity, theft, assault, hit-and-runs, vandalism, illegal parking, etc., surveillance changes the calculation because the offender expects a higher or even a near certain chance of being identified/caught in China. I think this is a good thing. I also see no issue with someone breaking the law and receiving a ticket almost immediately.
With all systems, it comes down to the design. What sort of oversight is there, how long is footage stored, can it be used for specific crimes or expanded later, and are there mechanisms to correct false identification.
Done right, these systems work well. I would be happy to live in a society where street crime is rare enough that I can leave personal property anywhere, like a bike, without constantly worrying about theft. I think many fears about these systems come from dystopian science fiction and assume the worst possible implementation, rather than recognizing that technology can be designed with strong safeguards.
The idea that these are needed, and deployed to address a crime problem is false. For example, Irvine, CA has been one of the safest large cites in the US for decades.
Because the residents of Irvine want it to be even safer? Automobile thefts still happen there, crime isn't zero. Who are you to say "stop complaining about your car break-in, it's worse in other cities".
Reliable studies have shown that increasing the severity of punishment doesn't deter crime, but increasing the chance of being caught does. Cameras directly address the later. You'd have to be a total idiot to steal a car these days.
Yeah China is not dystopian at all! They don’t keep millions of people in open air prisons, they don’t keep track of people’s compliance with the government, they don’t support brutal dictatorships, and they definitely don’t pass any laws that would enable them to use their surveillance technology to suppress democratic behavior!
Implementing some kind of judicial review for these panopticons is something like 4) in the hierarchy. It would be a good thing to have, but we can go far further. Why do we need this shit? Oh what so someone’s car doesn’t get stolen a few times per year? I think my values are in line with the founding fathers and most Americans when I say I would gladly give up a little bit of safety to not have a spy camera trained on me 24/7.
I would like more removal and less procedural controls. The cops cannot abuse a system that does not exist.
I am for having it be completely open to the public, or require a warrant. The police should not have special privileges of information lifted directly from the public. Privacy cuts both ways.
> Imagine Ring comes out with a nicer camera system for homeowners that has more comprehensive views around your house and is just as cheap. And we will ultimately be safer for it.
I wonder if people who feel this way will feel safer? In this scenario, you have a Ring camera system observing your entire property. Do you feel safer if someone comes onto your property and triggers an alarm? What if it turns out it's just a kid coming over to grab a stray frisbee? What if your neighbor noticed something needed a quick fix (say you left a can of paint open or something similarly benign) and wanted help in a neighborly way without first checking to see if you were home?
I guess we just take for granted that we live in a low-trust society. But we take that for granted at our peril, because the fear of a low-trust society is actively being exploited by people who want to sell individuals, businesses and municipalities the means to further erode that trust.
My jaded opinion is that Flock's mistake was marketing to police departments. In matters of criminal law the accused has these pesky things called "rights". The police have long violated those rights so there are reams upon reams of precedent reinforcing people's rights.
The accused has comparatively no rights when an bureaucrat is shaking them down and the accused is often a business rather than an individual it's easy to have sympathy for. Flock could've run their racket for many years, got much praise from the useful idiots, really gotten their system integrated and entrenched, if they'd have chosen that route.
Their mistake was believing in their own bullshit. They thought they could make it cheaper to solve crimes (at great cost to everyone's rights of course, but they thought this was acceptable) and make things better (or at least their definition of it). If only they had been slightly scummier and instead set out to help municipalities collect civil fines they probably could have gotten away without scrutiny.
funny question I have to pose now because I haven't thought about it yet in all the ALPR discussions and the like.
There are civilian enterprise uses of ALPR. Where do they fall in this? I don't even mean for mass data collection or even for parking enforcement. I'm thinking of like various car washes where they offer monthly memberships and their car wash portal system has plate recognition to tie your membership to your car. Or other enterprise access control applications where the ALPR pops the gates open instead of RFID tags.
The best solution is to make your plate readable to humans but not cameras, now how would you do that I won’t reveal much else it will be abused, but think out of the pla.. box, I mean.
Either it needs a warrant or it’s fully open and people can start creating websites showing the movements of local politicians.
This middle ground that municipalities try to carve out where it’s fully open to police without a warrant but not subject to FOIL laws doesn’t appear tenable for much longer.
There’s been too many cases of police officers stalking exes, poking around the data for fun and such so it’s clear police cannot be trusted with the data without better court oversight.
It’s certainly a very powerful investigative tool, but needs solid 4th amendment protections. The Supreme Court’s recent ruling on geofence searches of cell phone records is a good indication on where the Supreme Court’s head is at on this sort of thing, where they said no you can’t just do blanket data dumps like that without a warrant.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
>Scale actually matters
Is this actually born out in Court Cases? Warrantless Surveillance by NSA seems to be blanket legal for example.
Yes, 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
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 :)
More and more, yes. This was in June: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-112_0am4.pdf
Scale is more about efficiency and cost, though. Plenty of people want more policemen patrolling the streets.
But nobody wants their minds connected and all of them to immediately be able to see, comprehend, and act on anything any of them sees. This is what a surveillance dragnet backed by AI is.
The only people who want that are the ones that want to subjugate large portions of the population, or those that want those large portions subjugated even if they don't get to do it.
If 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,
Define criminal ? In the USA Under laws like the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and 1850, an enslaved human who escaped was considered a criminal.
Sheltering humans running away from slavery was also a crime .
It was illegal for black Americans to learn to read and write. Seeking education made them a criminal.
Buying or selling a beer made you a criminal during prohibition.
Do you see how easy it is to make someone a criminal?
I 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.
Youre 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
No it doesn’t track. In his example, observing license plates is perfectly legal without a warrant. Looking in your phone is not. These are not at all alike.
Then it should be legal for citizens to deploy their own network that allows anybody to track any license plate?
Of course? We already have private entities doing this today. Private toll road operators such as United Bridge Partners already administers camera systems that collect license plates for toll payments. I would assume parking lot operators also do this, and private citizens could create a nonprofit network too if they wanted.
Are you suggesting that people couldn’t do that for some reason?
Here's my rebuttal: I don't want police sitting down and writing every license plate down 24/7 on every street corner tracking my every movement. That's bad. And they don't do that now, so saying "it happens today" is false.
It isn't possible for them to do that without sensors and AI everywhere. That's why using this technology is a red line.
Spying on the American public shouldn't be cheap or efficient. We shouldn't abandon our freedom to make the fearful feel better.
People either have privacy in public or they do not, but I don't know anyone who seriously claims that there's an expectation of privacy on public roads. What freedom are you talking about?
> People either have privacy in public or they do not
Thankfully, the law isn't as overly simplistic and black and white as that. It'd be very stupid if it were. We have the ability maintain a general principal like "there's no expectation to privacy in public" and still prohibit certain things that are deemed harmful, like taking upskirt photos of people while they are in public spaces.
> nuance for me but not for thee
If you're going to argue platitudes from altitude, you don't get to retreat to the comfort of circumscribed exceptions.
Nobody is talking about cops or flock cameras taking upskirt photos.
> Nobody is talking about cops or flock cameras taking upskirt photos.
Just as we have the ability to pass laws prohibiting that specific harmful use of cameras while in public spaces, we have the ability to do something about the harmful uses of police and flock cameras while in public. The conversation is about the harms of mass surveillance and the exceptions necessary to protect the American public.
>I don't know anyone who seriously claims that there's an expectation of privacy on public roads
Hello, I'm here.
Practically, we do have privacy in public pre-AI. We weren't entitled to complete anonymity, but the ability to track every single person at all times was impossible.
Now that AI and sensors are making it possible, people are saying "No, I don't want that to be the norm".
I don't, 95% of what US cops do is harrass and extort people despite most of these people causing nobody else any concern or even a second glance or thought.
Yeah, bad things are easier to do when you can accomplish them more "efficiently". Thus, the moral hazard.
But 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.
There hasn't been an explicit ruling from the supreme Court that applies here, but there are indications that they would have ruled that the fourth amendment applied. They've explicitly avoided closing the door on that possibility.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v.Jones(2012)
> Also left unanswered was the broader question surrounding the privacy implications of a warrantless use of GPS data without a physical intrusion – as might occur, for example, with the electronic collection of GPS data from wireless service providers or factory-installed vehicle tracking and navigation services.[27] The Court left these matters to be decided in some future case, saying, "It may be that achieving the same result through electronic means, without an accompanying trespass, is an unconstitutional invasion of privacy, but the present case does not require us to answer that question."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_v._United_States
> Ultimately, in Carpenter the court determined that the third-party doctrine could not be extended to historical cell site location information (CSLI). Instead, the Court compared "detailed, encyclopedic, and effortlessly compiled" CSLI records to the GPS information at issue in United States v. Jones, recognizing that both forms of data accord the government the ability to track individuals' past movements.[24] Furthermore, the Court noted that CSLI could pose even greater privacy risks than GPS data, as the prevalence of cellphones could accord the government "near perfect surveillance" of an individual's movements. Accordingly, the Court ruled that, under the Fourth Amendment, the government must obtain a search warrant in order to access historical CSLI records.[1]
Of course there are no guarantees on how they'd rule today, but in the past they've ruled that scale and ease of access and compilation are significant enough to mean that fourth amendment protections should apply.
By my understanding, this would be similar to the situation with marketing calls. In the US is it legal for a human to call anyone and market to them. But due to issues from scale, it is illegal for either a program to make the call, or a prerecorded message to be played.
To me, that is precedent in US law that computerized methods of executing human tasks do not fall under the same rules.
It'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.
Why 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.
I 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.
Because 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.
Great, now rigidly define scale...
SCOTUS has (sort of) done this in the recent Chatrie case. 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
OK 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.
SCOTUS 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.
Sometimes 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.
I don't know what the philosophical answer is, but the real answer is that we don't, the supreme Court does.
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.
...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.
The 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.
Given 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.
You 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”.
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.
It’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.
How many man hours could the department in question realistically dedicate to the investigation without the technology
Scale does matter. Take bacterial infections for example, there's a tipping of scale on the way to full blown sepsis
It'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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I 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.
That's not a good argument against ALPRs because citizens can theoretically set up an ALPRs too.
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.
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"
It'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.
I actually have set up a few! On my property, not every major intersection in town, though.
"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?
Citizens can theoretically use long-distance microphones too. The criteria is whether they commonly do, not whether it's possible.
a 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.
So 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?
It’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
OP's contention is that private citizens don't have access to a network of cameras to look for license plates and therefore it isn't "plain view", but I don't see how that's different than law enforcement being able to muster the entire nation's cops to look for a suspect.
A nationwide APB is not an investigative activity.
Neither is writing down license plates.
Yes, it is. If you were investigating a business or building, you would document vehicles coming and going.
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.
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?
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.
> 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).
A number of states already have laws preventing individuals from setting up ALPR. I can't image state or government officials that don't lready have those restrictions in place would allow the public to set up tracking of their movements for very long if someone did try to set up something crowd-sourced or easily searchable.
e.g.:
Arkansas: https://law.justia.com/codes/arkansas/title-12/subtitle-2/ch... > Except as provided in subsection (b) of this section, it is unlawful for an individual, partnership, corporation, association, or the State of Arkansas, its agencies, and political subdivisions to use an automatic license plate reader system.
Maine: https://legislature.maine.gov/statutes/29-A/title29-Asec2117... > Except as otherwise provided in subsection 3, a person may not use an automated license plate recognition system.
ADSB stuff falls into the much broader legal concept in the US that airwaves are public and if you can receive it and aren’t cracking encryption then it’s fair game to listen to. Many countries have a far more restrictive view of radio traffic, and encryption in ADSB isn’t likely to happen anytime soon if ever.
When you FOIA body cams that will often redact the faces of other individuals.
Likewise I would expect that the license plates read be redacted. It makes sense to protect it since you are exposing members of the public, not the government.
Once you redact license plate numbers, what is left of substance in the FOIA request?
Generally they don’t redact that. They may redact private details not publicly visible (like someone stating a phone number) but if it’s public visible it’s generally not redacted.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
That is unfortunately already sort of a thing. A ShotSpotter-recorded conversation was already used as evidence at least twice.
[delayed]
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?
Simply replace every pole with an officer in their cruiser then and we’ll all be happy.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
I have never heard anyone try and argue that video evidence is not effective. That’s a pretty big stretch.
There is nothing reversed with Flock. There is a crime scene, they see who was entering or leaving and work from there. Without plate readers it takes a team of people many hours, that’s the difference. You can’t know who had anything to do with the crime without investigating, that’s the definition of the word!
> … we're invading their privacy
Who expects privacy driving on public roads? In any sort of developed area you are driving past cameras on every single street. Every Uber has a dash cam, the Teslas are recording (sometimes?), every police car has a camera, etc.
Is it OK to install a GPS tracker on your car if you only drive on public roads? You seem to think that would not compromise your privacy in any way.
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.
Looking at the sentiment of those around me about public recordings (in this case it was street photography), I would not be surprised if there was a push soon to ban all public recordings. At least, the sharing or usage of those recordings.
It seems many people feel it limits what I would consider "freedom of impermanence", or the concept that as an ordinary individual nearly every action or mistake you make will not considered in your future.
I for one would act differently if that were the case. Many vulnerable or stupid moments would not have happened. Many of those moments have allowed me to grow as a person. And this is as a person who has not faced persecution or bias in law enforcement.
I do not have a stance on the matter of general recording currently, but know that I would have acted differently if there was a camera around all the time. There goes my first time asking someone out, there goes frying a 5V board with 12V because I thought I knew better, there goes bar karaoke so bad that even the bartender looked pained. But if this were law, so too goes the guy I saw in a park fire spinning, so too goes the joy I captured on a strangers face at seeing a beautiful chandelier, and so too goes the countless photos of nature that happen to have people in the background.
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.
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.
This is also true, but we’ve seen the problems with that idea put on display pretty prominently, lately.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
I don't think that's ideal at all. The questions you're asking already have been answered, judges. It's their whole job to understand that scale changes things.
I get the instinct to be able to objectively codify things, especially in this community, but the law is based on morality and philosophy. Until someone comes up with a perfect solution to the trolley problem, we need a human in the loop making judgements.
More on topic, there's a reason why we have different terms for surveillance and mass surveillance. They feel very different and mass surveillance enables much different behaviors of bad actors.
They can. That’s fine, let them do that.
The difference in scale is so great that it becomes the meaningful, defining factor.
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.
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.
The police cruiser's primary role is deterrence not investigation or data collection. A better comparison would be stasi informants.
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.
Thats a good way to look at it. You would be in a constant state of alarm if the poles were officers.
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?
Again, it's about degree. And no, there absolutely is not a universal feeling of calm and security in places with conspicuous police presence.
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.
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.
Have you met cops? They are not able to sit still or write things down. You expect too much of them.
> 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.
>> A difference in degree (of usefulness and speed), not in kind.
Wrong.
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.
Aggregation. Correlation.
License plates are public property.
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.
look into "dragnet"'s as that's the term (afaik) and the issue at hand.
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.
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.
Because the physical impossibility of a department doing that 24/7 every square inch of a city creates an expectation of privacy.
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.
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.
> Either it needs a warrant or it’s fully open and people can start creating websites showing the movements of local politicians.
This is how things get regulated. I'm still waiting for a data broker breach which exposes the particulars of congress. That would be quite the shakeup. I think it will happen eventually.
That doesn't seem untenable at all. It's perfectly consistent with legal precedent and current practice.
There are MANY cases where the government legitimately possesses personal information that could potentially cause harm if revealed, for operational as well as public safety purposes. Vehicle registration and drivers license records, for example.
This personal information is typically exempt from FOIA laws. I can't go FOIA vehicle registration records to look up where a certain driver lives, but the state and police officers do have access to that information.
A search involves access without consent. Police don't need a search warrant to perform a search with the consent of the owner. In the case of cell phone data the search is without the consent of the data owner (the phone company). In this case the municipality is collecting public-view data themselves, not without the consent of the collector, so there's no search warrant issue.
You’re missing the point. It seems like you’re saying how things “generally” are, but not how they legally should play out. For instance, among my lawyer friends, they insist that drug-sniffing dogs should require a warrant as well, and a few have said they’d happily take a case like this pro-bono to start putting the goalposts where they belong.
I'll toss out another alternative idea. Not that I'm against the warrant requirement exactly but I just think it becomes a lot more fuzzy since the data will be managed by private companies that only accumulated it because they already have other ways to monatize it. And it's only one tool that they have to harass people.
This is fundamentally a police officer problem. You make it a felony and a terminable offense. You make all or part of the Brady List public and this automatically places an officer on it. ALPRs are just one tool for a police officer to stalk someone, they could just as well park outside their house or place of work and follow them around or do other things. We could require warrants to get the ALPR data but we'd still have these jerks pretending in to protect and serve.
In my perfect world, if we had an Amber alert or we knew there was a particularly violent criminal driving a specific car with a specfic license plate, I think it would be a step forward if all of the information was made available quickly and there was a quick and safe capture. Judges can issue warrants pretty quickly when motivated. Likewise, if some officer is stalking his ex-wife or something, cutting off the license plates is a nice step but I'd rather him not be involved in law enforcement at all.
I'd love for these datasets to be fully audited, but I suspect industry will balk that the very use of it is proprietary.
I think here what's interesting is that it fundamentally speaks to data privilege. There are two ways that police/lawyers access data. The first way is they request the data to be provided, usually in civil cases it is kind of "give me the data please otherwise I will subpoena you and that's a headache for everyone" and for LEO, it's give me this data to solve a crime otherwise I will get it anyways via a warrant.
The lines start to get very blurry when dealing with things like private ALPRs and Ring/Nest etc. because they have the policy of if a LEO asks we provide (in the case of Ring LEOs have access to pretty much all doorbell cameras) but this is really problematic because although it's an attempt at good faith, they are essentially circumventing the legal process of acquiring this data for investigation since involving a judge is a cumbersome process.
But now we have a problem, LEOs are exercising essentially extrajudicial authority by having access to this data. The authority is provided to them by the law (hence why your average joe schmoe can't get this data) but they do not use the mechanisms provided to them to actually get that data. So all data should be provided to anyone regardless of status but if you don't have a lawyer and a reason in a civil case you get told to kick rocks
It needs to be both open and closed by warrant. Cars aren't people so you aren't necessarily tracking whoever is riding that car, which can be done protecting the identity of the driver, but if the car is being watched as part of a larger investigation against an individual, then it needs a warrant.
There's nothing stopping you from buying an LPR and publishing the data. Also, with a PI license, you (might) be able to access the nationwide Nlets LPR Index.
https://nlets.org/resources/blog/nlets-news-our-nationwide-l...
There are actually laws against individuals doing this in a number of states.
How is it different from putting out an all-points bulletin? Basically doesn't it just expand the size of the police force and make their eyeballs on the road more accurate?
> Either it needs a warrant or it’s fully open and people can start creating websites showing the movements of local politicians.
I want this data to require a warrant to access. Having said that, I agree that it should be open to everyone if warrants aren't required.
I've said this for years and I almost always get the "But stalkers!" pushback.
I think "But stalkers!" can be answered with applications to enable individuals to track their stalkers themselves. Since the police have no duty to protect I'd argue tracking a stalker yourself is probably a better solution anyway.
Obviously, letting everyone track everyone is not ideal. I assume this is the intent of your proposal.
Letting the police and government track everyone also seems not ideal. Worse even than letting everyone track everyone.
Problem is that Flock CEO still has dirtbag access. Didn't he spy on someone at a conference in public view as part of a presentation of the technology?
> Either it needs a warrant or it’s fully open and people can start creating websites showing the movements of local politicians.
What?
There is a lot of information privy to police that should not be accessible to anyone. This is such a ridiculous standard. I would want police to know where I live and contact information of my emergency contact for instance, but I wouldn't want that accessible to others.
> There’s been too many cases of police officers stalking exes, poking around the data for fun and such so it’s clear police cannot be trusted with the data without better court oversight.
There have been more cases of "someone broke into my house at exactly [time]. Can you track their license plate and track them down" that I'm willing to make that tradeoff. Those police that abuse their power should be brought to justice and its obviously against policies, but to simply remove their ability to effectively do their job is not the answer
"someone broke into my house at exactly [time]. Can you track their license plate and track them down"
Sounds reasonable, but most police departments will not do this, even if the data is available to them and running the query is easy.
They will tell you to file a report, preferably online, which will then be incorporated in local stats, and may also be useful in your interactions with your insurance company.
But they will not do anything to help your specific case.
Okay, but they should. Putting up barriers like warrants would make it less likely they do something.
> I would want police to know where I live ... but I wouldn't want that accessible to others.
Oddly, this was 100% commonplace before about 2000 or so, in the US at least. Every household got a free phone book from the phone company that contained the name, address, and phone number of everyone in town. I think you could opt out, but almost no one did.
It was incredibly handy and sometimes I still miss it. I'm not 100% sure why it was considered OK for so many decades but today would be considered a PII data leak, though I suppose it being limited to your local area vs. searchable by the whole world has something to do with it.
> There have been more cases of "someone broke into my house at exactly [time]. Can you track their license plate and track them down" that I'm willing to make that tradeoff.
I'm not, especially since anecdotally, police are generally unwilling to use these tools to solve petty crime anyway.
This is fair, but in my mind, there's still data that's way too accessible for police without proper oversight. What I'd prefer is a system where if the police access it without court approval, they generate a post-access review to confirm that the police did it for a valid reason, such as an emergency. Otherwise, I think any traditional access to that kind of data should have to be via court order.
These companies provide an audit log. This is the obvious answer to prevent abuse rather than relying on courts. Imagine the senior officer or overseer or governing body gets a ping every time a license plate is requested. This isn't a novel problem. Millions of people have access to information like PII in the financial world and they manage it without all the hoops.
No, not a warrant --but what they should have is an tamper-evident logs with HIPAA-like consequences for abuse. In other words, if you have a case where doing registration plate searches can help, you have a policing reason to search.
Willy-nilly search for relatives, lovers, love-interests, rivals, etc. would potentially be a fireable offence --like HIPAA violations. There is no technical reason there could not be technical controls preventing abuses.
>Willy-nilly search for relatives, lovers, love-interests, rivals, etc. would potentially be a fireable offence --like HIPAA violations. There is no technical reason there could not be technical controls preventing abuses.
So you're fine with 1984-ish type stuff as long as it's only used to enforce the will of the state and never used by the agents of the state for their own purposes?
So long as the state represents the will of the people where will of the people is a democratic process that respects the constitution.
Each use of the ALPR should have behind it an actual defensible case.
It frustrates me when people call them license plate readers. I guess you need to call them something, but they are general-purpose internet connected cameras. They will do whatever their firmware tells them to do, and could be reprogrammed at any time by anyone with access. No one expected doorbell cameras to join a mass surveillance network, but later the manufacturers added that feature. Why do we treat these cameras like they can do only one thing?
Especially considering Flock's API will give you people not just license plates.
The flag for whether the object/person is law enforcement vs not is interesting as well.
Love that, very cool for quickly filtering out the streams / geodata that might have an officer's actions recorded.
https://docs.flocksafety.com/developer-hub/docs/tracking-obj...
> Why do we treat these cameras like they can do only one thing?
Because its useful messaging to disarm the populace. "License plate reader" sounds less alarming than "Internet connected camera" or "Mass surveillance device."
Public attitudes vary around a "license plate reader" but will be more uniformly opposed to "Widespread, automated government mass surveillance tracking your every move via camera in real time"
I always define them as "Remotely managed, field-upgradeable, multi-interconnected computing devices with full spectrum cameras and other sensory capabilities. Information is monitored in real-time by increasingly capable AI technology. They have edge AI capability for intelligent classification. They can be upgraded without announcement at any time. They can be replaced in the field with higher capabilities at any time. The data they captured can be accessed at any time by anyone with sufficient permissions granted by an entity capable of granting such permissions. Not all users have the same permissions. Multiple user interfaces with differing capabilities exist. There exists a capability to aggregate data streams from multiple sources provided the user has sufficient permissions. Deleted data remains accessible to users with higher clearance."
That's cute and technically accurate but doesn't help when having conversations with the public.
"Warrantless mass surveillance technology" creates a category into which these and similar devices can be aggregated together where people's concerns tend to be about the same.
That phrase was suggested by a local chief of police while we were having discussions on policy.
When speaking, I use a short definition. When writing, I use the expanded definition so it's clear what it means.
This amounts to an argument against ever using general purpose computing devices to accomplish anything.
You could say the same about literally any privately operated device. ‘I don’t know why they call these things cell towers. They do whatever they are programmed to and can be reprogrammed by anyone with access’
Heck the same applies to non electronic things too ‘why do they call it a house? It’s a general purpose structure and could be turned into a shop or a factory or a crack den at any time by anyone with access’
I think the point is these aren't just license plate readers. For example, are they recording fingerprintable bluetooth or other wifi signals of occupants of cars that are going by?
i see it more like an argument against increasingly networked solutions. red-light cameras used to just upload when an incident occurred (or maybe required routine physical downloading?). the object itself did one thing. now it's cheap to feed continuous live feeds to a centralized processor... and once it's there, it's cheap to do a lot more.
Okay so is the argument that if a city wants to install red light cameras they must install analog film based systems because if they install a CCD camera with a raspberry pi and a network connection they could use it for other purposes?
Obviously the electronic networked solution is going to be cheaper and easier to operate. It would be insanely wasteful to force government organizations to use expensive cumbersome processes just to ensure they can’t be misused.
The solution is legislation and enforcement of rules that constrain what local governments are allowed to actually do with equipment they install and the data it collects, not regulation of what the equipment they install could theoretically be converted to accomplish.
By that logic, should private citizens need a background check to buy a computer, since a computer could be programmed to run cyber attacks?
Computer isn't quite it, internet connection itself seems closer. Then again an Android phone with terminal emulator could also run attacks.
Seems like a nonsense comparison either way. These cameras are in public places and provide surveillance intel for governmental entities.
"Autonomous dragnet surveillance cameras" wasn't as popular with the focus groups.
> No one expected doorbell cameras to join a mass surveillance network
Doorbell cameras were at least for individual security, initially. There's no attempt being made to market Flock as anything but mass surveillance. Surely we all expect them or their successors to be detecting peoples' faces, walking gates, and who-knows-what-else in the near future.
It's simply because the language hasn't caught up with the technology yet. A similar problem happens in courts where legal terminology hasn't caught up with technology.
There's no malintent with it, it just means that the public conversation hasn't gotten to a point where these distinctions can easily be made to a wider audience. We'll get there.
The claim that there’s no mal intent to copaganda comes off as weirdly apologist.
Do you really think people don’t know how they’re framing the situation when they choose to use language this way? It’s all just an innocent misunderstanding, that just so happens to serve the interest of existing power structures?
I think you're misinterpreting my words. Of course there's malintent with copaganda.
I'm talking about the random schmos out there who don't know what "ALPR" even is. These folk are more and more learning about what these things are and pushing back on them.
A warrant isn't an effective safe guard unless you trust the government to only prosecute actual crimes. The US federal government has demonstrated, explicitly, that it is willing to use law enforcement for political ends and will charge private citizens for political reasons (like the reflecting pool case).
Now is not the time to be giving more power to the executive or its policing functions.
You should raise your voices now. For Indians, its too late. Our Indian Government used facial recognition system at mass level in recent students protests and now police is showing up on their homes.
It's better to raise the voice now for you guys than to say sorry later.
A warrant is better than no warrant, but:
A warrant requirement is not a reasonable bandaid to consider allowing mass spying. There should be no mass spying by default.
A warrant requirement makes sense for something like the locations of customers on cellular networks, because, although it should be improved, it's been built into the tech.
When you make the optional choice to create mass spying, safeguards do not make it acceptable.
This is a hole in the Constitution that would be better patched, at least with statute, better with an amendment. The fourth amendment says
Who is "their" here? In terms of property rights it's the people who own those digital "papers". The individuals who that data is about do no maintain or control that data, and could not destroy it, meaning they do not functionally have property rights over it. If I write in my notebook that you have blonde hair, the notebook is still my property. There isn't anything I could write about you in it that would make it yours (other than maybe "I hereby give this notebook to Joe Bloe").Attempts to interpret the Constitution otherwise are, IMHO, attempts at good policy, but unstable as law. So we should fix it either by giving people property rights to that data (so that they can destroy or change it without permission) or to explicitly require warrants for access to PII owned by third parties.
If you want to change "their" to mean "data about them" rather than "data owned by them" you have to not give precedence to the original public meaning. The result of that is that ordinary people are in a worse position to know what the law means, because it can fundamentally change by reinterpreting a word.
"data owned by them" is one's papers and/or effects, depending. "data about them" pretty much didn't exist in the late 1700's when we compare it to the enormous scale of that data today. A combination of the third-party doctrine and legal restraints that prevent it from being turned into dragnet surveillance is more or less what applies to that.
There are also the rights of the people to peaceably assemble -both publicly and privately-, peaceably speak publicly, and peaceably bring their grievances to the various governments that govern them. All of those rights interact with regulation of the things we're talking about here... it's not just the 4th amendment that's relevant.
I would love an amendment that adds communications and movements to that list
These cameras are in public, where expectation of privacy has been ruled against a zillion times.
Go against this, and filming your kids baseball game becomes a legal nightmare.
It seems very easy. Always on spy camera installed for the express purpose of dragnet surveillance? Illegal. Film child’s baseball game? Legal.
I find this attitude I find kind of tiring. Gosh it’s just sooo hard to figure out the difference between Flock Safety and Big Bill’s Little League Sports Photography. It’s actually very straightforward to determine the difference between these two things. So easy, an idiot could do it. Or a judge.
While I do agree it's tiring and agree with your point I think the issue is finding the exact point to draw the line. It's easy to differentiate the two ends.
Haven't stalking and surveillance always had a different interpretation despite mostly taking place in public?
> Haven't stalking and surveillance always had a different interpretation despite mostly taking place in public?
Yep. And dragnet surveillance has (pretty much?) always been illegal in the US... but it takes the courts an awfully long time to notice the new dragnets the cops set up.
For example, despite the fact that the third-party doctrine says that cops can just walk up and get any ordinary business records someone you do business with has created about you, courts continue to notice and declare illegal new ways in which naive application of that doctrine creates dragnets.
Good article. It's a sober look at where we are at.
We lost a lot of strong privacy rights we had with landlines when we shifted to cell phones.
We're actually slowly creeping into pre-crime territory. You could have AI searching for possible pre-crime candidates based on unknown identity in the area, disparate pattern to usually movements, etc.
https://reason.com/2026/07/28/minority-report-fbi-seeks-ai-f...
I do wonder though if the data retention should be restricted at all. This brings up a very good point that even old data (months or more) can be vital to cases or to the defense, but is there any downside to it that would make it worth restricting? And how long?
I don't like the article's tone of inevitability:
> I think cameras in all public spaces are going to happen. Imagine Ring comes out with a nicer camera system for homeowners....
Indiscriminately filming people in public places is illegal some places, e.g. Germany. Allowing the creation of large networks of cameras surveilling public places is a choice.
It's a bit more of a gray area in the US, where expectations of privacy in public spaces has been ruled against many times over. When in a public space, you are allowed to film or photograph whomever you want. This likewise extends into private property, where you set the rules of your own property, and also is the only place where you have an expectation of privacy.
There is another middle option that I would have liked to see the author discuss: requiring either a case number or a CAD ID, instead of a "search reason".
In my conversations with law enforcement (mostly at management level, chiefs of police), all of them have had reasonable-sounding objections to a warrant requirement for a search, but zero of them have been able to come up with a reason why a case-or-CAD ID requirement isn't workable. Generally, they argue that in practice obtaining a warrant can be too onerous in time sensitive situations, and can be harder to obtain than the public realizes. Two popular examples are in kidnappings (time sensitive) and missing persons (difficult to obtain).
A case number or CAD ID however simply requires that the details of either a public call for service or an active investigation are associated with the historical search. It closes the door on officers' hobby searching.
Andrew's blog post does note the problems with oversight, which also match my experience, so this isn't a perfect fix. But it will go further in conversations with law enforcement for people that are trying to thread the needle on making "safe" mass surveillance.
(I am personally opposed to mass surveillance in all its forms, but arguing only from that position pretty much immediately excludes me from policy discussions.)
Warrants for historical search with warrant-free flags for ongoing issues seems like a nice middle ground. Convincing. Good article.
It seems that would easily impede a lot of abuse and it’s straightforward to believe that historical data is rarely so urgent as to not require a warrant.
A matter of defining historical as a sufficiently old enough thing but that seems feasible.
Collecting and storing the information is the real problem. The focus on warrants is a distraction.
Access control (warrant) doesn't prevent a breach, and the system is not architected in a way to prevent internal abuse. The best way to prevent the abuse of data is to not collect or store it at all.
Here's a case study of what happens when this information is public (it's linked as the "data-driven" series). This information should not exist unless the plate is flagged and the reason for that is sufficient to obtain a warrant. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/open-records-laws-reve...
Hotlists imply that actual search takes place the moment you pass one, so really, the illegal search happens before. Even if warrants were required to manually search.
They're more than just license plate readers. Much more.
Monetization of public data for private profit is the heart of my qualms.
Why should it be possible for my bits be scooped up and sold for profit against my will.
None of it is against your will. You have no obligation to own a car or drive. If you want to use the _shared_ resource that is public roads, funded by everyone, you have to agree to certain terms (eg a license, insurance).
You act like it wasn't in place just five years ago.
It's a new paradigm. Flock is the first to blatently collect and sell public whereabouts for private gain.
Conflating this with insurance is a interesting take.
Also, the notion that I have a choice to not have a car is absurd. I'd starve. And, even if I could walk around are traverse my town with only a bike or walking, I'm still sucked into a harddrive against my will by these cameras.
A warrant is too much but strict audit logs and other protections like that I agree with.
There's a fundamental question: Is it legal for the government to blanket a public space in cameras and do whatever they want to the data that they collect from those cameras?
Is it legal for a private entity to do the same with their owned space (like a plaza or mall or office tower)?
Focusing on license-plate-readers seems like car-brain is causing the author to miss the forest for the trees.
The FISA court is a similar compromise.
A license plate is already publicly displayed information (and is in most jurisdictions not private property), and you're operating in a public space.
I know it's unpopular but I went from not supporting these sorts of systems to embracing them after seeing the positive effects in China.
For crimes that depend on anonymity, theft, assault, hit-and-runs, vandalism, illegal parking, etc., surveillance changes the calculation because the offender expects a higher or even a near certain chance of being identified/caught in China. I think this is a good thing. I also see no issue with someone breaking the law and receiving a ticket almost immediately.
With all systems, it comes down to the design. What sort of oversight is there, how long is footage stored, can it be used for specific crimes or expanded later, and are there mechanisms to correct false identification.
Done right, these systems work well. I would be happy to live in a society where street crime is rare enough that I can leave personal property anywhere, like a bike, without constantly worrying about theft. I think many fears about these systems come from dystopian science fiction and assume the worst possible implementation, rather than recognizing that technology can be designed with strong safeguards.
The idea that these are needed, and deployed to address a crime problem is false. For example, Irvine, CA has been one of the safest large cites in the US for decades.
Why did they need flock?
Because the residents of Irvine want it to be even safer? Automobile thefts still happen there, crime isn't zero. Who are you to say "stop complaining about your car break-in, it's worse in other cities".
Reliable studies have shown that increasing the severity of punishment doesn't deter crime, but increasing the chance of being caught does. Cameras directly address the later. You'd have to be a total idiot to steal a car these days.
> For example, Irvine, CA has been one of the safest large cites in the US for decades. Why did they need flock?
Uhh, because getting safer is still better? Why the hell does the relative ranking matter?
Yeah China is not dystopian at all! They don’t keep millions of people in open air prisons, they don’t keep track of people’s compliance with the government, they don’t support brutal dictatorships, and they definitely don’t pass any laws that would enable them to use their surveillance technology to suppress democratic behavior!
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/04/world/asia/xi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit_system
https://www.csis.org/analysis/old-friends-new-calculations-r...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Hong_Kong_national_securi...
There is a concept in safety called the hierarchy of hazard controls. There is a ranking of hazard mitigations from most to least effective.
1) remove the hazard
2) replace the hazard with something less hazardous
3) isolate the hazard (guards, cages etc)
4) administrative controls (procedures, training, warning, etc)
5) PPE
Implementing some kind of judicial review for these panopticons is something like 4) in the hierarchy. It would be a good thing to have, but we can go far further. Why do we need this shit? Oh what so someone’s car doesn’t get stolen a few times per year? I think my values are in line with the founding fathers and most Americans when I say I would gladly give up a little bit of safety to not have a spy camera trained on me 24/7.
I would like more removal and less procedural controls. The cops cannot abuse a system that does not exist.
I am for having it be completely open to the public, or require a warrant. The police should not have special privileges of information lifted directly from the public. Privacy cuts both ways.
> Imagine Ring comes out with a nicer camera system for homeowners that has more comprehensive views around your house and is just as cheap. And we will ultimately be safer for it.
I wonder if people who feel this way will feel safer? In this scenario, you have a Ring camera system observing your entire property. Do you feel safer if someone comes onto your property and triggers an alarm? What if it turns out it's just a kid coming over to grab a stray frisbee? What if your neighbor noticed something needed a quick fix (say you left a can of paint open or something similarly benign) and wanted help in a neighborly way without first checking to see if you were home?
I guess we just take for granted that we live in a low-trust society. But we take that for granted at our peril, because the fear of a low-trust society is actively being exploited by people who want to sell individuals, businesses and municipalities the means to further erode that trust.
Yeaaah for seeing Andy on HN. His stuff is always excellent.
My jaded opinion is that Flock's mistake was marketing to police departments. In matters of criminal law the accused has these pesky things called "rights". The police have long violated those rights so there are reams upon reams of precedent reinforcing people's rights.
The accused has comparatively no rights when an bureaucrat is shaking them down and the accused is often a business rather than an individual it's easy to have sympathy for. Flock could've run their racket for many years, got much praise from the useful idiots, really gotten their system integrated and entrenched, if they'd have chosen that route.
Their mistake was believing in their own bullshit. They thought they could make it cheaper to solve crimes (at great cost to everyone's rights of course, but they thought this was acceptable) and make things better (or at least their definition of it). If only they had been slightly scummier and instead set out to help municipalities collect civil fines they probably could have gotten away without scrutiny.
funny question I have to pose now because I haven't thought about it yet in all the ALPR discussions and the like.
There are civilian enterprise uses of ALPR. Where do they fall in this? I don't even mean for mass data collection or even for parking enforcement. I'm thinking of like various car washes where they offer monthly memberships and their car wash portal system has plate recognition to tie your membership to your car. Or other enterprise access control applications where the ALPR pops the gates open instead of RFID tags.
The best solution is to make your plate readable to humans but not cameras, now how would you do that I won’t reveal much else it will be abused, but think out of the pla.. box, I mean.