It is self-evident that a very narrow examination of a very narrow data set is different than the 24/7 unlimited surveillance of everything. The law should support this basic proposition no matter where they decide the dividing line is. Flock is on the wrong side of an open air prison. I hope they lose.
Here's a reminder that a Montana-LLC registered car is a legitimate privacy-preserving use case and not the tax-evasion that Straw Manners and Ad Hominem attackers make appear to be.
You can still pay your use tax and be a good citizen, and in fact, its probably a better demonstration of your duties as a citizen to protect the right to privacy and say to your local governments that have a history of abusing and selling vehicle registration data to 3rd parties that you do not tolerate that.
Happy to share more, the sites for Montana registration can be shady but the dirt legal one is great.
Interestingly I was watching a body cam where an off duty cop road raged punched a driver.
During the investigation the investigating officer had become worried that the assailant would use police resources to further track and harass the victim.
Luckily the guy was driving a company vehicle that did not track to his address.
I address this below. Adding my personal interpretation onto it, I think it's fear-mongering and the only enforcement and successful litigation I've seen on it is when tax is actually not paid.
If you're worried, seek legal council and pay your use tax.
Consider also this Montana-route may require being brave because when you make a stand for something like privacy, which is under attack, you too may be attacked even if you are in the right legally.
I hear you bringing up 2 separate actions that can trigger a registration requirement.
1) Garaging a vehicle, for x days or more.
2) Driving a vehicle, for x days or more.
Have you looked into what the specifics are, and how they are triggered?
Poking some holes at this:
- Are you on the hook to register vehicles you don't own for actions (1) or (2)?
- Look at two example use cases:
(a) renting a vehicle,
(b) driving or housing a friend or someone elses' vehicle.
From your statement of the law, anytime you rent a vehicle, or drive a friends vehicle, or house it, you are now legally obligated to register it. Do you think this is accurate, and if so, do you think it would hold in court of law?
it is not me who thinks the vehicles need to be re-registered, but those who are making the argument that you need to register a vehicle you dont own simply because you drove it in a state or garaged it there.
>not the tax-evasion that Straw Manners and Ad Hominem attackers make appear to be.
Depends on the state, in my former state, Virginia, it is tax evasion. This is not unique to Virginia BTW, Georgia has similar laws. By law in VA, all cars that are garaged in state for longer than 90 days must pay the car tax. Only reason Montana LLC registered cars get away from it is most counties find out who must pay the tax from Virginia DMV so these cars are missed.
> By law in VA, all cars that are garaged in state for longer than 90 days must pay the car tax.
This is a lie. The law is that someone must register and through that process pay the registration tax. However you can't register a vehicle you don't own.
So you are left with one thing: use tax. Is use tax applicable to you?
>in my former state, Virginia, it is tax evasion
I think this is untrue as well. I'm very familiar with Virginia and spent a lot of my life living there. What makes it tax evasion?
To its credit, the article covers all the reasons why the Chatrie decision won’t be determinative for this case.
But the headline and narrative paint a way too optimistic (if you’re anti-Flock) picture of Chatrie’s impact.
In particular the search identified by Chatrie (Google’s database of expected-private location records, including movement in the home and other private spaces) has almost no analog in third-party-owned recordings of public movement.
But Chatrie found that the geofence was unconstitutional because of the wide dragnet which included people not suspected of crimes, not because those people were in private spaces:
> The Court held that police conducted a Fourth Amendment search when they obtained Chatrie's location data, because, as the opinion put it, "an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in his cell-phone location information."
The analogue with Flock is pretty clear then:
> Just as important as the holding is the reasoning: the Court rejected the government's fallback argument that the search was fine because it only pulled a narrow, time-limited slice of a much larger dataset. Once the Fourth Amendment applies, the majority reasoned, it doesn't matter how small a bite investigators took out of an all-encompassing database.
Not sure I agree. The only difference I see is the idea that there's no expectation of privacy while driving on public roads. That's potentially a huge difference, certainly, but I don't think it makes the negative outcome here quite as likely as you think.
Otherwise, it's the same: Google's database is a third-party-owned record of people's movements in public, and Flock's database is a third-party-owned record of people's movement in public.
The ruling in Chatrie had nothing to do with an expectation of privacy, or lack thereof. It was about the dragnet nature of the surveillance. And in that respect, I don't see any meaningful difference between Flock's and Google's systems.
>The only difference I see is the idea that there's no expectation of privacy while driving on public roads.
Isn't there some level of expectation if for your whole life these mass networks didn't exist and you could go to the grocery store without being locked in database prison?
they have little respect for precedent which they agree is wrong, which is a far better standard than letting terrible decisions stand because tradition or because popular.
Yes, while I'm not a fan of fully networked, recorded, ubiquitous license plate tracking, it is quite different than the cell phone.
License plate number is a registered identifier mandated to be fully plainly visible, with that identifier tied to a registered individual; compared to cell phone which has identifiers, sure, but they're not registered to an individual necessarily, and not mandated to be plainly visible, rather only "visible" as a means of service provision.
Is Flock really 3rd party? Yes, they're a private entity, but they largely owe their existence to government contracts. They maintain their database on behalf of various governments. Their primary sales pitch is to law enforcement. It feels like something completely different than Alphabet's or Meta's databases of person/user data.
I do agree that Flock is also not the same as the database of cell phone location data that Verizon or Apple or whoever else might maintain.
It's somewhere in the middle, IMO. At least to my non-lawyer brain.
Somewhere in the middle, indeed. Like shotspotter, bluetooth scanners, wifi scanners, atms scanners, etc.
At the end of the day, though, its use should be provided as exculpatory information to criminal defense attorneys in the defense of their clients. Of the 150 arrests done by Chicago Police department where the RD number was found in Flock's audit logs (ie, someone searched Flock in relation to a criminal investigation and someone was arrested) -- only one actually mentioned the word "Flock".
Defense attorneys deserve to know what led up to their clients' arrests and prosecutors are failing the public by not providing info about whether a flock search was done.
I really hope this doesn’t turn into yet another case of judges looking at irrelevant facts when making decisions.
The fourth amendment does not say “private conversations,” so when police started tapping phones, the courts focused on whether the phone tap physically intruded on somebody’s house, papers, or effects. Police apparently could tap phone conversations by watching reflections on a nearby window, and the fourth amendment didn’t apply because there was no physical intrusion. The “reasonable expectation of privacy” test come from Katz v. US ( https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/389/347/ ) where the Supreme Court realized that whether there was a physical intrusion was irrelevant.
The argument I struggle to get around and would love to hear a counter-argument to: Let's say a local police department hired 175 police officers, each being told "Go stand on this particular intersection with a pad of paper and write down every license plate you see". This would be a stupid use of resources, but is not outside the realm of something a well-funded police department could do. Every night they take their reports back to HQ, and file them away.
This is a modestly different situation than one concerning warrantless tracking of phone locations, if for no other reason than my phone oftentimes in my pocket. It is not always visible to onlooking bystanders. And even if it isn't, externally there is no reliably way to differentiate one iPhone from another. In comparison: license plates, when in public, are always visible, and very easy to discern from one-another (different state-unique numbers); so in my mind the expectation of privacy is far lower.
I abhor what Flock does, but I'm not sure I see a constitutional argument for why what they do is unconstitutional.
I would say the purposeless capture of information is the correct counter argument here.
Specifically, even if a county hired all those officers and did what you suggest if there is no purpose other than recording all this information. I believe it would be a constitutional violation. A person has the right to reasonable privacy outside of their home. License plates can and should be recorded when there is a relevant purpose to it. Such as toll collection, or a scoped traffic watch done by a police officer or a traffic camera. The dragnet collection of data for "maybe its useful" or "we don't know when it will be useful, but it might" has generally been struck down when brought to the supreme court.
For Flock's case, they don't operate as far as I know as ticket issuing traffic cameras which have a much tighter level of control of how they operate. IE:
Traffic cameras have clear signs near them notifying the drivers of their usage, in some states the issuing of the citation cannot be considered criminal (Civil issuance) and must not capture faces of drivers.
> In comparison: license plates, when in public, are always visible, and very easy to discern from one-another (different state-unique numbers); so in my mind the expectation of privacy is far lower.
According to Carpenter:
A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere. To the contrary, 'what [a person] seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.'
Being present in plain view isn't equivalent to a total surrender of privacy.
“This Court has to date not deviated from the understanding that mere visual observation does not constitute a search. See Kyllo, 533 U. S., at 31–32. We accordingly held in Knotts that ‘[a] person traveling in an automobile on public thoroughfares has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements from one place to another.’ 460 U. S., at 281. Thus, even assuming that the concurrence is correct to say that ‘[t]raditional surveillance’ of Jones for a 4-week period ‘would have required a large team of agents, multiple vehicles, and perhaps aerial assistance,’ post, at 12, our cases suggest that such visual observation is constitutionally permissible. 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.”
The fourth amendment is supposed to address invasive and inconvenient general warrants and search warrants. And that’s “inconvenient” from the point of view of the person being investigated. I don’t understand the view that all’s fair as long as the police do a certain amount of busywork, but that does seem to be popular even among some judges.
Scale obviously does not make this more okay; watching many intersections or cell towers is obviously less reasonable than a single intersection or tower.
> In comparison: license plates, when in public, are always visible, and very easy to discern from one-another (different state-unique numbers); so in my mind the expectation of privacy is far lower.
Legally, overhearing a conversation is not different. If you are loudly talking about your drug deals in public in front of an officer, they can use that as evidence. A police department could hire officers to stand everywhere in public and listen to every conversation nearby.
Or, more specifically, they could stand conspicuously close to every payphone and listen. The phones are in public; the officers don't need to be uniformed. Practically speaking this is not at all different from wiretapping. That's what the police did in Katz- wiretap a public payphone.
Flock cameras are not in any meaningful sense different from having officers follow around everyone and record everywhere they go. Its irrelevant whether one officer is following one person or if many people are following them, each within their own small area. That would absolutely not be legal without a warrant. The only difference is a private company is doing it and selling it to the police, something that should clearly not be legal.
The constitution does not really care about scale, though, and that’s my point. It’s a reason why the legislature should care about Flock, but not why the judicial should.
The collection of the data is not whats of concern here. The issue is the use of the data in legal proceedings. Flock can gather all they want, but police accessing it and using it as evidence is where it rubs against the constitution.
It's very telling that Flock has only just hired a CISO recently. Garrett doesn't care much for anything that might hint at compliance for data sharing.
34 comments
[ 0.16 ms ] story [ 75.8 ms ] threadIt's basically a continuous rebalancing of private vs government power, and new technologies cause more rebalancing.
You can still pay your use tax and be a good citizen, and in fact, its probably a better demonstration of your duties as a citizen to protect the right to privacy and say to your local governments that have a history of abusing and selling vehicle registration data to 3rd parties that you do not tolerate that.
Happy to share more, the sites for Montana registration can be shady but the dirt legal one is great.
During the investigation the investigating officer had become worried that the assailant would use police resources to further track and harass the victim.
Luckily the guy was driving a company vehicle that did not track to his address.
I'd be surprised if most other states don't have similar vehicle laws.
If you're worried, seek legal council and pay your use tax.
Consider also this Montana-route may require being brave because when you make a stand for something like privacy, which is under attack, you too may be attacked even if you are in the right legally.
1) Garaging a vehicle, for x days or more.
2) Driving a vehicle, for x days or more.
Have you looked into what the specifics are, and how they are triggered?
Poking some holes at this:
- Are you on the hook to register vehicles you don't own for actions (1) or (2)?
- Look at two example use cases:
(a) renting a vehicle,
(b) driving or housing a friend or someone elses' vehicle.
From your statement of the law, anytime you rent a vehicle, or drive a friends vehicle, or house it, you are now legally obligated to register it. Do you think this is accurate, and if so, do you think it would hold in court of law?
(a) you rent a vehicle,
(b) you drive or choose to house a friends' vehicle.
in both cases, the vehicle would already be registered in the state (by the rental company or by the friend).
it is not clear to me why you think the vehicles would need to be re-registered.
Depends on the state, in my former state, Virginia, it is tax evasion. This is not unique to Virginia BTW, Georgia has similar laws. By law in VA, all cars that are garaged in state for longer than 90 days must pay the car tax. Only reason Montana LLC registered cars get away from it is most counties find out who must pay the tax from Virginia DMV so these cars are missed.
This is a lie. The law is that someone must register and through that process pay the registration tax. However you can't register a vehicle you don't own.
So you are left with one thing: use tax. Is use tax applicable to you?
>in my former state, Virginia, it is tax evasion
I think this is untrue as well. I'm very familiar with Virginia and spent a lot of my life living there. What makes it tax evasion?
But the headline and narrative paint a way too optimistic (if you’re anti-Flock) picture of Chatrie’s impact.
In particular the search identified by Chatrie (Google’s database of expected-private location records, including movement in the home and other private spaces) has almost no analog in third-party-owned recordings of public movement.
> The Court held that police conducted a Fourth Amendment search when they obtained Chatrie's location data, because, as the opinion put it, "an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in his cell-phone location information."
The analogue with Flock is pretty clear then:
> Just as important as the holding is the reasoning: the Court rejected the government's fallback argument that the search was fine because it only pulled a narrow, time-limited slice of a much larger dataset. Once the Fourth Amendment applies, the majority reasoned, it doesn't matter how small a bite investigators took out of an all-encompassing database.
Otherwise, it's the same: Google's database is a third-party-owned record of people's movements in public, and Flock's database is a third-party-owned record of people's movement in public.
The ruling in Chatrie had nothing to do with an expectation of privacy, or lack thereof. It was about the dragnet nature of the surveillance. And in that respect, I don't see any meaningful difference between Flock's and Google's systems.
Isn't there some level of expectation if for your whole life these mass networks didn't exist and you could go to the grocery store without being locked in database prison?
License plate number is a registered identifier mandated to be fully plainly visible, with that identifier tied to a registered individual; compared to cell phone which has identifiers, sure, but they're not registered to an individual necessarily, and not mandated to be plainly visible, rather only "visible" as a means of service provision.
I do agree that Flock is also not the same as the database of cell phone location data that Verizon or Apple or whoever else might maintain.
It's somewhere in the middle, IMO. At least to my non-lawyer brain.
At the end of the day, though, its use should be provided as exculpatory information to criminal defense attorneys in the defense of their clients. Of the 150 arrests done by Chicago Police department where the RD number was found in Flock's audit logs (ie, someone searched Flock in relation to a criminal investigation and someone was arrested) -- only one actually mentioned the word "Flock".
Defense attorneys deserve to know what led up to their clients' arrests and prosecutors are failing the public by not providing info about whether a flock search was done.
The fourth amendment does not say “private conversations,” so when police started tapping phones, the courts focused on whether the phone tap physically intruded on somebody’s house, papers, or effects. Police apparently could tap phone conversations by watching reflections on a nearby window, and the fourth amendment didn’t apply because there was no physical intrusion. The “reasonable expectation of privacy” test come from Katz v. US ( https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/389/347/ ) where the Supreme Court realized that whether there was a physical intrusion was irrelevant.
This is a modestly different situation than one concerning warrantless tracking of phone locations, if for no other reason than my phone oftentimes in my pocket. It is not always visible to onlooking bystanders. And even if it isn't, externally there is no reliably way to differentiate one iPhone from another. In comparison: license plates, when in public, are always visible, and very easy to discern from one-another (different state-unique numbers); so in my mind the expectation of privacy is far lower.
I abhor what Flock does, but I'm not sure I see a constitutional argument for why what they do is unconstitutional.
Specifically, even if a county hired all those officers and did what you suggest if there is no purpose other than recording all this information. I believe it would be a constitutional violation. A person has the right to reasonable privacy outside of their home. License plates can and should be recorded when there is a relevant purpose to it. Such as toll collection, or a scoped traffic watch done by a police officer or a traffic camera. The dragnet collection of data for "maybe its useful" or "we don't know when it will be useful, but it might" has generally been struck down when brought to the supreme court.
For Flock's case, they don't operate as far as I know as ticket issuing traffic cameras which have a much tighter level of control of how they operate. IE: Traffic cameras have clear signs near them notifying the drivers of their usage, in some states the issuing of the citation cannot be considered criminal (Civil issuance) and must not capture faces of drivers.
According to Carpenter:
Being present in plain view isn't equivalent to a total surrender of privacy.“This Court has to date not deviated from the understanding that mere visual observation does not constitute a search. See Kyllo, 533 U. S., at 31–32. We accordingly held in Knotts that ‘[a] person traveling in an automobile on public thoroughfares has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements from one place to another.’ 460 U. S., at 281. Thus, even assuming that the concurrence is correct to say that ‘[t]raditional surveillance’ of Jones for a 4-week period ‘would have required a large team of agents, multiple vehicles, and perhaps aerial assistance,’ post, at 12, our cases suggest that such visual observation is constitutionally permissible. 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.”
The fourth amendment is supposed to address invasive and inconvenient general warrants and search warrants. And that’s “inconvenient” from the point of view of the person being investigated. I don’t understand the view that all’s fair as long as the police do a certain amount of busywork, but that does seem to be popular even among some judges.
> In comparison: license plates, when in public, are always visible, and very easy to discern from one-another (different state-unique numbers); so in my mind the expectation of privacy is far lower.
Legally, overhearing a conversation is not different. If you are loudly talking about your drug deals in public in front of an officer, they can use that as evidence. A police department could hire officers to stand everywhere in public and listen to every conversation nearby.
Or, more specifically, they could stand conspicuously close to every payphone and listen. The phones are in public; the officers don't need to be uniformed. Practically speaking this is not at all different from wiretapping. That's what the police did in Katz- wiretap a public payphone.
Flock cameras are not in any meaningful sense different from having officers follow around everyone and record everywhere they go. Its irrelevant whether one officer is following one person or if many people are following them, each within their own small area. That would absolutely not be legal without a warrant. The only difference is a private company is doing it and selling it to the police, something that should clearly not be legal.