Judges have a pretty direct role in whether or not Flock is able to be used effectively (e.g. the article's example of one granting a search warrant based on the data from it). The views of judges on Flock unequivocally do matter in our current system regardless of how their opinions are formed.
That's an entirely different claim than the one I responded to. If you don't think that judges matter at all, why are you not disagreeing with the parent comment that claimed that the issue is that judges are too political?
> The deputy then used the woman’s travel history in Flock as part of the justification for searching her car, where he allegedly discovered 91 pounds of meth.
That sentence does make this less of a win tbh, given that with it, it's just an actual example of the technology doing the job it is supposed to do.
Like this, it's almost a trojan horse of something pretending to be PR for A, but actually being effective PR for B.
The point it's not just people with 91 pounds of meth who are getting tracked; it does what it's "supposed to" by treating everyone as a suspected criminal. An exterminator who blows up your house to get rid of termites still gets rid of the termites, but that doesn't make it a good solution.
I don't think rolling out mass surveillance to get some meth is a "win". How many innocent people were tracked by the same cameras used to track this single woman?
A major issue with surveillance tech like this is that it actually works.
It does what it's advertised to do: it lets the police track and catch criminals easier.
This is especially meaningful in cases of crimes where either the information availability or the effort of tracking the criminal down often make enforcement prohibitive.
If Flock had better PR people, they'd have no shortage of shoplifters, joyriders, car window smashers, porch poachers, carjackers and drug mules that were caught using their tech to parade around.
It's just that this benefit comes at the cost of privacy being diminished for everyone.
And they’ve carelessly put zero safeguards in place to prevent abuse and that is where all of their bad PR has come from. If a warrant were required for every query, it would be a completely different story
The root problem here is that we've got a government that has a hundred years of legal "litter" they can enforce on a whim.
No one bad law is too bad on it's own, like litter in the park. But you add it all up and it's disgusting. There's a law for everything but each one is defensible in abstract in a "my litter isn't responsible for this whole mess" way.
The prospect of all those laws potentially being enforced and cheaply on the whim of the government really lays bare how bad our laws are in their totality.
But people are not capable of confronting the tough compromise of giving up the laws for things they like so here we are screeching about this easy button that law enforcement has at its disposal.
To a layperson yes. But in american legal philosophy, you cant allow the state to break laws to catch legitimate criminals. It is considered better for society to let the criminal walk free then to create a precedent and incentive for the state violating a citizen's rights.
Basically this will only prove mass surveillance effective to people who think only guilty people pleade the 5th
Yes, that's what they are. But does that mean are they breaking federal law or unconstitutional? I believe we've been told by the courts repeatedly that we should have no expectation of privacy out in public.
I think you're greatly oversimplifying what courts have actually ruled on this over the years. Off the top of my head, the Supreme Court explicitly ruled that wiretapping a public pay phone in a booth is unconstitutional[1], and rulings from lower courts on using Stingrays without warrants are a mixed bag[2]. I don't think there's anything close to a broad precedent that the right to privacy evaporates the moment you go out in public.
My understanding of the rule that has emerged from prior decisions is that there is a twofold requirement, first that a person have exhibited an actual (subjective) expectation of privacy and, second, that the expectation be one that society is prepared to recognize as "reasonable." Thus a man's home is, for most purposes, a place where he expects privacy, but objects, activities, or statements that he exposes to the "plain view" of outsiders are not "protected" because no intention to keep them to himself has been exhibited. On the other hand, conversations in the open would not be protected against being overheard, for the expectation of privacy under the circumstances would be unreasonable.
For this case the guy was inside a phone booth rather than out in the open.
There's nothing from SCOTUS on stingrays, but I looked at one federal case and the data being collected was referred to as a document, so that's where the 4th was found to apply.
In turn I don't think I've greatly oversimplified anything.
> Thus a man's home is, for most purposes, a place where he expects privacy, but objects, activities, or statements that he exposes to the "plain view" of outsiders are not "protected" because no intention to keep them to himself has been exhibited.
And you think this applies to the inside of the woman's car that the article is talking about?
> In turn I don't think I've greatly oversimplified anything.
In this reply, no, you're not greatly oversimplifying. In your parent comment, you said that going out in public means no expectation of privacy, and I gave an example of a place in public that had an expectation of privacy, which you've defined as "not in public". I think that if you have to call a place that's available to anyone and not owned by an individual "not public" in order to make your original statement work, then your original statement was oversimplifying.
From others. Not mass surveillance by a private corporation.
Otherwise maybe I'll just set up my own cameras in public locations. If the police want the data they can pay per minute of footage. I'll let them search for metadata and tell them if footage matches with no visibility to the footage until after payment. If they search for something and don't purchase but come back for it - it's then increased pricing. If this is all public space and we can all build these systems because there's no expectation of privacy then all is fair in access to public right of way along roads.
When that corporation is performing contracted work for the government, they act as the government's agent, making them subject to the same restrictions regarding civil rights as the government itself.
They're not operating on behalf of a local government if they're selling the public data of that local government to others. This is not a simple "contracted work" by a local government. Please don't normalize this as something it's not.
I agree that it's not clear that this breaks federal law. But I do think it's clear that this should break federal law.
There's an interesting analogy with copyright issues surrounding AI use. Both copyright laws and surveillance were created to (respectively) creative incentives for authors to create novel works; and to protect citizens for indiscriminate surveillance. The laws made sense given the technology available at the time: it simply wasn't feasible to put a cop on every street corner, or to ingest the ideas of every work ever written.
But the laws have been eclipsed by technology. Technology makes a mockery of existing laws, by clearly violating their intent. Much has been written to the effect of "why bother to create new, free materials on the internet when it will just get scooped up by an LLM with no attribution to me." Similarly, Flock cameras have the effect or violating privacy in the exact same way the original laws sought to prevent.
Unfortunately, laws are slow to change, and monied interests will fight tooth-and-nail to put their profits above the rights of ordinary people. It's going to be a difficult decade or so coming up.
> why bother to create new, free materials on the internet when it will just get scooped up by an LLM with no attribution to me
Can confirm. I've personally stopped releasing new open source code, and stopped contributing to projects.
Until copyright laws are updated to protect my work from being stolen and my labor exploited by AI companies, there's zero incentive for me to participate in open source.
Even OSI's cuck licenses are being cucked beyond reason. I didn't think that was possible.
AIs make short work of proprietary code as well. Reverse engineering has become trivial. Not releasing any code whatsoever is the only possible defense now. I've made my peace with that.
What worries me is the fact AIs render licenses irrelevant. What's the point of starting an AGPLv3 project when AIs can just study it and make a proprietary equivalent? The free software movement no longer has any leverage.
I also don't feel any sense of accomplishment anymore. Software is so trivial now. Even if I make some unique thing, others can just have an AI copy it. Nothing is special anymore. Feels like there's no point.
> AIs make short work of proprietary code as well. Reverse engineering has become trivial. Not releasing any code whatsoever is the only possible defense now. I've made my peace with that.
This is a false equivalence. Reverse engineering my binary is not the same thing as training on my code. When you RE a binary, what comes out the other side is not the code that I wrote, its some machine-generated code that can reproduce the behavior of the binary. The result can't even be described as 'similar' to the original, because the compilation process is pretty much 100% lossy.
Reverse engineering my binary doesn't concern me too much, as I'm sure there are legal avenues I could take to protect my business were it to become a real problem. And if it comes down it, there's zero competitive advantage someone would have in that scenario, as all they'd have is undifferentiated AI slop.
Taking my work, putting it into your commercial product, and selling it without my permission is what I have a problem with. That's exactly what AI companies are doing with very little push back, and why I won't release my hand-written human code anymore.
> I also don't feel any sense of accomplishment anymore. Software is so trivial now. Even if I make some unique thing, others can just have an AI copy it. Nothing is special anymore. Feels like there's no point.
Software is certainly not 'trivial' now. The only people who believe this are those that have gotten caught up in the AI marketing blitz, or have completely detached/warped perspective on software. I.e. non-engineers wowed by novelty, finance execs wowed by the idea of being able to fire a bunch of people, or oligarchs wowed by the idea of being able to monopolize an entire industry.
The moral of the story is, if you want to make a mass surveillance tool that tracks your every movement and collects all of your most sensitive communications, make sure it has a great camera, a bright large screen and day long battery life.
> But does that mean are they breaking federal law or unconstitutional?
I'd argue they break the fourth amendment:
> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
What are "unreasonable searches" if not being under "indiscriminate mass surveillance?"
>What are "unreasonable searches" if not being under "indiscriminate mass surveillance?"
A police officer randomly entering your house and going through all of your belongings.
Indiscriminately searching a larger number of people is not necessarily unreasonable. Take for example the TSA at airports where you have to searched to enter and the airpots have a ton of cameras watching every single person there.
The US constitution is silent on surveillance. I seriously doubt anyone from the 1700s would consider watching people in public spaces to be a search. Automating watching people doesn't seem like it transforms watching into to a search either.
Do you think the people in the 1700s would have approved of having police follow everyone around at all times in public spaces, taking notes? I think it’s easy to imagine how they would feel in principle, even if they couldn’t imagine the specific technology.
People in the 1700s would not expect all of their movements to be tracked and watched at all times. They would definitely take issue with this. The issue of their time was general warrants/writs of assistance which let the British search anyone anywhere at any time and take their property. [1]
The key issue there was the scope of the British power, not the fact that searches and seizures could happen at all. We wanted warrants that were reasonable and limited.
The issue is not a single security camera from a private bank. The issue is not a single cop in a car investigating someone. The issue is a national and searchable network of cameras where agents of the government can track anyone at any time for no reason at all.
The judge says the police need probable cause and a warrant for a search against an individual.
> Freedom from persistent, dragnet-style surveillance while in public is not a foreign concept in our society, and it is a reasonable expectation that society already accepts. This is the same expectation of privacy that the Supreme Court has continued to recognize in cases like Carpenter and Chatrie. Cell phones also move in public places where people can see you in plain view. But it becomes constitutionally problematic when law enforcement can indiscriminately and passively catalog your whereabouts over an extended period of time and then use that information for any purpose whenever convenient. [2]
Any particular individual's movements could be tracked in the 1700s, and people have been tailed since forever. Your movements are in public space, no warrant was ever needed for that.
The stress on individual was to denote that you can't, for example, get a warrant to search every American's home. It has to be limited in scope.
The judge was saying that the police needed probable cause and a warrant to search the Flock system because it's dragnet surveillance, similar to needing a warrant to access cell phone location data. [1]
Just because you don't have an expectation of privacy while moving in a public space doesn't mean you don't have an expectation of privacy for all of your movements ever in every public space. That scenario wasn't possible in the 1700s.
For an individual today, it's fine for the government to tail someone without a warrant. [2] It's probably not fine for the government to put a long-term GPS tracker on your car without a warrant (probably because the issue was sidestepped with trespass). [3]
Even Alito notes that in the past it would have required too much labor for the government to surveil every movement of an individual for a long period of time and so society has the expectation that the government is not doing that. [4]
I don't think any of this case law is relevant, trackers and requesting info that already exists are different from collecting publicly visible data.
The expectation that the government doesn't tail everyone might have been reasonable, the expectation that the government doesn't tail you without a court-approved excuse is not.
I'm not arguing there shouldn't be protection against total surveillance, I'm arguing the US constitution doesn't offer such protection.
> ...I'm arguing the US constitution doesn't offer such protection.
Luckily, the courts disagree with you, and have for -probably- longer than you've been alive. From printed page 31 of [0], discussion of the Constutionality of putting a radio transmitter in cargo in someone's car and tracking it:
But the defendant in that case raised concerns that “the result of the [Court’s] holding sought by the government would be that ‘twenty-four hour surveillance of any citizen of this country will be possible, without judicial knowledge or supervision.’” Id. at 283 (citing Br. For Resp., at 9). The Court addressed the defendant’s concern:
But the fact is that the “reality hardly suggests abuse[;]” if such dragnet type law enforcement practices as respondent envisions should eventually occur, there will be time enough then to determine whether different constitutional principles may be applicable. Insofar as respondent’s complaint appears to be simply that scientific devices such as the beeper enabled the police to be more effective in detecting crime, it simply has no constitutional foundation. We have never equated police efficiency with unconstitutionality, and we decline to do so now.
Id. at 283–84 (cleaned up).
More than 40 years have passed since the Supreme Court’s decision in Knotts, and this Court is now faced with technology that appears to be approaching the dragnet type law enforcement practice Mr. Knotts warned of. Therefore, lower courts need to reexamine the result in Knotts as technology advances past the rudimentary beeper in that case. Adhering too strictly to the Supreme Court’s language in Knotts about a person’s reasonable expectation of privacy in “his movements from one place to another” risks ignoring the Fourth Amendment principles at stake.
That analysis is from the case that people are quoting when they say "You're not entitled to privacy when you're driving on public roads.", but -as you can see- what was actually said by the court there is more nuanced than that, and very clearly says that the rules that apply to dragnet surveillance must be reconsidered when it becomes feasible. Tragically, it seems like even many judges who cite the case don't bother to actually read it.
The whole document is well worth reading if you have a free fifteen-to-thirty minutes.
> the expectation that the government doesn't tail you without a court-approved excuse is not
Yes but there is an expectation that the government doesn't tail you at all times for your entire life with no warrant, right? Largely because in the past it was infeasible for the government to do so: it cost too much money and required too much manpower.
That's what Alito was arguing in Jones: people expect to be tailed sometimes but they don't expect to be tailed at all times for a whole month. And commentary suggests the Court would have had a similar opinion if they had not sidestepped the issue by leaning on trespass.
As Alito said, the question the Court has not decided (and didn't need to decide in that case) is where the line is drawn. When does tracking a vehicle become a search and enter 4th amendment territory and require a warrant? (He said surely before 4 weeks.)
In the 1700s it was pretty easy to move into a private place and ensure nobody else was listening though too. We didn't have guard posts on every other corner writing down descriptions of every carriage and wagon that passes by.
Watching people isn't the problem, it's the state requirement to be identifiable-- e.g. display plates (or, in some cases to not wear a mask in public) which is the constitutional issue. The privacy issue is downstream from that.
> I believe we've been told by the courts repeatedly that we should have no expectation of privacy out in public.
This is not true. The original "reasonable expectation of privacy" case was about tapping phone booths, which are in public. And the way the law works (or is supposed to work) is that the reasonableness test is based on a typical person. What does or does not violate a reasonable expectation of privacy should not be assigned to us by judges.
So the device should require very specific license plates to scan for—not the current dragnet. The software should only "ping" when there is a confident match with said license plate(s)—and merely log which license plate, time stamp a single photo, and note the confidence level of it being a match.
The frame buffer should be the only place (a frame of) video is ever stored at all (excepting the high-confidence match indicated above).
The only issue remaining would be whether we trust the device/software to have complied (and not have a backdoor) and of course there needs to be a legal warrant for every license plate uploaded (and it should expire fairly frequently, likely requiring a new warrant to continue canning for the plate).
Describing these mass surveillance devices as "license plate readers" is a deliberate tactic to deceive people about their actual use and capability. Flock cameras record everything, not just license plates. They record the faces and bodies of the driver and the passengers that are visible through the windows. They record and analyze all the little dings, bumper stickers and other unique elements of a vehicle above and beyond license plates. They are regularly deployed and used in areas like footpaths where there is no vehicle traffic at all.
That is a technical solution to a problem that has a far cheaper, and less easily abused solution: don't put up cameras at all.
Building a system with "safeguards" in place that require constant oversight is destined for either regulatory capture of the oversight, or slow dismantling of the oversight.
There seems to be a real reduction in property crime in some places with cameras. I don’t think it’s realistic to take these down everywhere. (I was in the camp that they should go down everywhere. I’ve relaxed that position recently.)
You're conflating "any camera" with cameras that are attached to a centralized data aggregation system.
Do you have any evidence that the massive centralized aggregation has had a real reduction in crime versus cameras that are locally controlled?
or are you just spewing poorly thought out horseshit in defense of the destruction of our liberty?
(though even this is through the borderline insane, and staunchly anti-american lens that a reduction in property crime definitively warrants the destruction of privacy and liberty)
Are you aware flock has been used by Palantir / Trump's fascist regime to disappear brown people extrajudicially, possibly resulting in their DEATHS or in other cases, their sale into what amounts to slavery in working prisons abroad?
>We're going to have supervision. Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there's a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on.
-Larry Ellison
This has been the plan of the oligarchs for a while.
Property crime skyrocketed during COVID largely because of intentional decisions around policing. We can easily police property crime without ubiquitous surveillance.
Most Americans know that a small reduction in property crime is not worth trading for constant surveillance by private corporations and the entire government.
Another great innovation was implanting chips in people's brains that send everything they see, hear, say, and think to the nearest police station. That sure helped reduce crime at the low, low cost of an obsolete concept called privacy.
Cameras are great. Especially with diverse ownership.
Police can walk about, ask or order (warrant) for footage.
A network of AI powered cameras linked to the hive mind controlled by real life super mega evil corp inc run by real life super villains... not so great.
Also the 4th amendment is a thing. Mosaic theory is a thing.
I don't think that police should be allowed to ask camera owners to voluntarily hand over footage, even if they would be willing to. That just allows them to privatize the mechanism of surveillance, similar to using data brokers to get around warrant requirements. Instead, I think that even where camera owners would willingly hand over footage, the state should still be required to obtain a warrant for said footage in order to preserve legal safeguards around evidence collection.
Why not? If I see a crime being committed, should I be allowed to report it to police without a warrant? There's no difference with my private camera, it's even better cause the barrier for false/mistaken reporting is higher.
You shouldn't need a warrant to report a crime being committed, but you should need a warrant if you're specifically looking through a neighbour's window waiting for them to commit a crime.
What if I'm sitting on my porch and waiting for the crime to be committed?
Private doorbell cameras (and most flock cameras for that matter) point at mostly, or entirely, public space. Or in case of the former also my own property.
Frankly if I sit on my porch and see thru the window across that my neighbor is beating his wife, should I need a warrant to report it? That sounds ludicrous to me.
Ah, so the camera reporting crime in realtime is ok? Or since I should be able to tell a chasing police officer "I saw him run that way!" a camera reporting suspects movement is also ok.
> hive mind controlled by real life super mega evil corp inc run by real life super villains
I've concluded that the hyperbolic, visceral level of hate for Flock on this forum (a YC startup by the way) is rooted in jealousy of their success by people who wish they thought of it first.
There are a lot of evil authoritarians who are pissed that Flock is gonna rack up some bad precedents before they've had a chance to implement some 1984 type system where some guy winds up losing his house because he drove drunk for 100ft to get his car where it wouldn't be towed for street cleaning or threw a broken TV in a ditch or some other crime that's really not all that bad in the grand scheme of things but deeply offends people of a certain social class and ideological bent.
And there's another whole bunch of petty authoritarians who have grand plans to fine the shit out of everyone they see leaving Home Depot with a water heater and no open building permit. They're also just as pissed off this might get reigned in before they've got their chance to put the population under their jackboot.
Throwing a broken TV in a ditch is actually pretty bad, because it results in ditches that are full of broken TVs and other trash people throw in there once the precedent that the ditch is a de-facto trash dump is established. Driving drunk for 100 feet is also taking a risk with your car and someone else's life or property. I don't think that laws against driving drunk are bad, I don't think it's bad to harshly enforce them on people in order to make people scared of doing it, and it doesn't bother me that there's no exception for doing something that is only a little bit of driving.
I for one do not currently nor will ever work for a company that is actively undermining the rule of law. I of course can't speak for everyone but I assure you, I am not one iota jealous.
Key word: some. Look at London. We should not be giving up our liberties to corporations that would sell their soul for profit just so we can prevent property crime.
I can't speak for everyone, but I've lived in countries where there are cameras everywhere, e.g. Singapore, China, where crime is almost zero compared to the US, and it is incredibly safe to be anywhere at almost any hour. Actual criminals are usually caught and apprehended very quickly. That part feels nice, that it is vanishingly unlikely to get mugged just for going out to get food at 2am.
What can make them suck is authorities abusing them to do enforce arbitrary, unpredictable ideals that are not part of the law, incompetent authorities targeting non-criminals and peaceful protesters, or traumatizing the wrong person because of an incorrect AI face match.
No, it's not a crime. In the US civil/administrative enforcement authorities are given insane authority under the law and "haha, spend $10k on lawyering to exhaust our kangaroo court and then spend another 20 to sue us in big boy court" is your recourse. Your 4th through 8th amendment rights basically don't exist if the subject is one of fines and fees and bureaucrats and not one of gun toting, door kicking cops trying to put you in a cage. And this is the US. I can only imagine what it's like in China.
Read your municipal code (they're fairly homogenous these days because of the feds and their stupid grants) if you don't believe me.
To be honest, China is fairly predictable. If you're doing certain shit, you're going to get arrested. If you don't do said shit, you're not going to get arrested. If you honestly and truly unknowingly do said shit, in almost all cases they'll make it clear to you what they want you to do instead before they arrest you.
Whether said shit should be allowed as a basic constitutional freedom is another qusetion. But at least the rules and enforcement are predictable and if you don't have intentions to violate those areas it's extremely livable.
A warrant requirement is not a reasonable bandaid to consider allowing mass surveillance. There should be no mass surveillance, only targeted surveillance.
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 surveillance, safeguards do not make it acceptable.
Plenty of places have very low crime without mass surveillance.
While I would take down the cameras, I don't think the public will be sold on it. They do see security benefits. And wait until some legitimately horrible crime happens and someone says, 'if we had the cameras, we would have caught the criminal'.
Also, there are too many other cameras for a Flock ban to be consequential: privately owned cameras, law enforcement and other drones, etc.
The solution is good data hygiene (minimization, encryption, etc.) and a warrant requirement. Also, any cameras recording public space should be required to obscure, at the point of capture (before storage or transmission) all identifiable information - people (full body), cars, their dogs, etc.
I would be convinced if, nightly, we saw on the news how video from a Flock camera was critical in apprehending the criminals involved in a car-jacking. Or anything.
> I would be convinced if, nightly, we saw on the news how video from a Flock camera was critical in apprehending the criminals involved in a car-jacking. Or anything.
Interesting! What I read is that police are losing the skill of solving crimes without cameras and other digital information. Cameras identify suspects; tracking cars through a city - to or from the crime - is often how law enforcement finds them. (Any cameras, not just Flock.)
Regardless of our varied experiences, I'm sure we agree that perception and not reality will guide public opinion. I think camera advoctes - including law enforcement - have easy emotional buttons to press. The disparagement of human rights generally greatly weakens the strongest argument against them.
This worked out great for Seattle. A "pathetic" lack of security cameras at the city's most visible tourist attraction, so when gangstas started shooting at each other at a food festival with 3 people dead and 4 others injured, it was complete chaos from a public safety perspective, and they had no evidence from which to draw from.
I wished we lived in your perfect world but unfortunately reality is more like Taxi Driver. Technology provides the tools to help bridge the gap.
Do you have statistics for both? To me, it looks like the reduction of crime is backed by some tentative numbers, whereas even organizations explicitly dedicated to finding violations of privacy report a a small collection of anecdotes.
Not to mention that as far as I am concerned, even someone e.g. breaking into a house - not speaking of violent crime - is far more damaging and traumatizing than some random cop looking up his exes license plate and doing nothing with it. Even if the numbers of instances were comparable.
Some time ago i read somewere that the cameras used for " crime prevention " ended up beign used to punish people for walking dogs or jaywalking. Even the trafic cameras are being used to generate more tickets.
If there are, say, ten thousand license plates of interest at any given time (which seems high), that’s what, 10KB? Not really that hard to update that every 15 minutes (or hell, every minute).
I don’t really see any drawbacks with storing them on the device, they should already be quasi-public knowledge (from warrants/etc) so it’s not like there’s a privacy/security risk there
You could just store it in a bloom filter, which would be non-public but also give you tunable accuracy. For 1 in a million false positives, a bloom filter would cost 28.8 bits per plate.
the legal standard is based off of the idea that a police officer could easily sit in a fixed location and take down license plate numbers that pass by
that and you don't have any legitimate expectation of privacy while in public because you are in public
the really strange part is the folks that are angry about flock cameras are often the same people who are angry that folks like elon musk want the movements of the private jets to be non-public information
i can get around my community without worrying one bit about flock cameras surveilling me. the bike trails i use generally don't have cameras and even if they did i'm riding a fairly generic bike and wearing neutral and unmemorable clothing.
even with actual dragnet surveillance in NYC they couldn't track a dude on a bike effectively.
The real privacy problem is the requirement to display plates... a problem that exists only because of the government's mandate to do so.
I think it breaks the 'its in public so its public' argument. The state requires you to display plates-- its its responsibility to complete the law: e.g. make possession of a third parties plate number a serious felony outside of limited circumstances.
It's why, for example, we don't allow electronic devices to be sold (legally) in the U.S. that put out so much RF such that they interfere with radio broadcasts. An actual FM transmitter is limited to so many milliwatts of radiated power, etc…
Do you mean, capture the image only after a warrant is issued?
That doesn't seem realistic: Almost all the time, we only know about a crime after it happens - when it's too late to obtain a warrant. We get the license plate from the video of the crime.
So I would capture the images, minimize and encrypt it at the point of capture (before storage or transmission), and maybe even setup some PKI where only judges can issue keys to decrypt, if practical.
That and searches for license plates should requiring having the warrant. Not all LEOs might be authorized to carry out the warrant, so they shouldt be able to
I don't think we can backtrack at this point but at least it should be heavily regulated and restricted (i.e. only run queries if there's a court order, etc).
The idea that law enforcement tapping into existing law enforcement knowledge constitutes as a search of "persons, houses, papers, and effects" does not logically follow for me. It is a search of law enforcements own property.
> It is a search of law enforcements own property.
The roads are not law enforcement's property and my private car on a public road is private property that requires a warrant to search. These things should be totally banned, but even your argument is wrong since Flocks don't mask just the road, they record everything in their field of view.
Given that the roads are not law enforcement's property, and in fact public property, they would require public approval and voted on legislation for the police to install cameras on them.
Courts and the law have disagreed with this in the past, see for instance stalking laws. If it’s possible to criminalize individual stalking, it’s possible to criminalize mass stalking.
We are talking about reasonable searching then. Police do go searching 24/7. They are called patrol units and they are active looking in public for crime. Just because there is technology doing the patrol and remember what is seen that doesn't change anything.
Law is more complicated than that. Constitutional rights trump everything else. You have a right to be protected from unreasonable search, more than the police have the right to track your movements at all times for no particular reason. If what they do violates your constitutional right, it's illegal.
The wording here seems problematic. Why is law enforcement entitled to this degree of access to public surveillance as their "property"? That word strongly implies it is theirs to do with as they wish - I don't see how that would be a desirable state of affairs.
You seem to be paraphrasing the US v. Knotts decision. Read pages 30 and 31 of the document found here [0]. If you have fifteen-to-thirty minutes free, you should really read the whole thing.
I think i'm like the last person who's still defending flock. This is as a result of living with very small women for years who were constantly attacked in the streets. This basically ended with surveillance. That being said, I would prefer actual police on every block with crime.
You should stop defending them if a single anecdote of any level of severity is your basis. Hundreds of millions have been placed under potential threat by police.
"Potential" threat? This applies symmetrically. Hundreds of millions of people are "potential" victims of crime, and privacy advocates can only provide a few dozen anecdotes, most of them less impactful than someone stealing your sandwich.
Somehow matters of degree only apply to safety (and my liberty to film whatever I want in public), but they don't apply to privacy, that's absolute.
"Flock is mass surveillance", say people who are posting Ring doorbell footage on Reddit for the 50th time, trying to gangstalk the guy who stole the mail order coffee beans off their porch.
The Constitution pertains to limiting the power of the state, limiting abuses by the people and systems entrusted with enforcing the law, not limiting your neighbors.
I don't know that I've ever seen such unified opposition from the public on both sides of the political spectrum as being against these cameras (and data centers). It gives me hope that for the first time in my life, it looks like we might pump the breaks on increased surveillance and create a permanent culture of resisting it.
It's only unified because we have republicans in power. As soon as we have democrats in power, republicans will only want the opposite of what is being proposed.
America doesnt even have a real national id card. The inevitalism is unfounded. Mass surveillance is not guaranteed. It might still happen, but the defeatism is irrational
Just the other day I got pulled over when a license plate reader false flagged my drivers license. It was an embarrassing traffic stop because it was all due to the automated system.
“Federal judge rules” is a phrase whose impact has been dramatically reduced during the trump era. You know that all flock need do is donate a few mill to trumps idiotic ballroom project or buy some of his idiotic meme coin or hire one of his idiot sons as a consultant and the problem disappears. The US is a despotic kleptocracy.
Lately whenever I take a walk down a certain suburban street there's a security patrol vehicle and often I feel they're paying too much attention to me. Driving slow, flip light bar on. It's very disturbing. Not the first time it's happened, another private security company has seemed to be too interested in me. In each case I've resorted to making obscene gestures to them because it disturbs my peace. It's like a counter punch to a punch, but most would not see it that way. They're just doing their job, or a little more in the case of watching me on a public street. But when it becomes an expected part of a daily routine, it's too much.
No doubt erratic behavior gets me logged by that security team, if not escalated to local police, who may come to check up on me themselves later. Nobody knows what's happening with this footage. What their putting a wrapper in their pocket may look like in low res video.
Mass surveillance thru cameras and movement logging isn't so active but I 100% understand people who take action against the cameras. It's just as in a person's face every single day, in more and more places, and you don't know who is on the other end or what they're looking for or what you are doing may appear as.
To Google and apple's credit they have at the least made location history stored on device instead of dealing with the slippery slope of warrants that ask for all devices around a point. Google specifically decided after a court ruling to get out of the morass of server side storage. There is a lot wrong with how permissioning works on android and Google services but this is not one of them.
That's interesting because that wording implies that Flock
sniffers are breaking the US constitution, since it bypasses
e. g. a judge coming to issuing a warrant. That means that
Flock tries to bypass the judicial system in this regard.
Flock is a tool. The users of Flock (the cops) bypasses the constitution. It’s like the manufacturer of a wiretapping equipment wouldn’t be bypassing the constitution, but the user of it could be.
174 comments
[ 7.7 ms ] story [ 170 ms ] threadThe people in power are just circumventing everything on a whim to get what they want.
That sentence does make this less of a win tbh, given that with it, it's just an actual example of the technology doing the job it is supposed to do.
Like this, it's almost a trojan horse of something pretending to be PR for A, but actually being effective PR for B.
Defos swiping this analogy for future use
It does what it's advertised to do: it lets the police track and catch criminals easier.
This is especially meaningful in cases of crimes where either the information availability or the effort of tracking the criminal down often make enforcement prohibitive.
If Flock had better PR people, they'd have no shortage of shoplifters, joyriders, car window smashers, porch poachers, carjackers and drug mules that were caught using their tech to parade around.
It's just that this benefit comes at the cost of privacy being diminished for everyone.
No one bad law is too bad on it's own, like litter in the park. But you add it all up and it's disgusting. There's a law for everything but each one is defensible in abstract in a "my litter isn't responsible for this whole mess" way.
The prospect of all those laws potentially being enforced and cheaply on the whim of the government really lays bare how bad our laws are in their totality.
But people are not capable of confronting the tough compromise of giving up the laws for things they like so here we are screeching about this easy button that law enforcement has at its disposal.
Basically this will only prove mass surveillance effective to people who think only guilty people pleade the 5th
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katz_v._United_States [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_use_in_United_States_...
My understanding of the rule that has emerged from prior decisions is that there is a twofold requirement, first that a person have exhibited an actual (subjective) expectation of privacy and, second, that the expectation be one that society is prepared to recognize as "reasonable." Thus a man's home is, for most purposes, a place where he expects privacy, but objects, activities, or statements that he exposes to the "plain view" of outsiders are not "protected" because no intention to keep them to himself has been exhibited. On the other hand, conversations in the open would not be protected against being overheard, for the expectation of privacy under the circumstances would be unreasonable.
For this case the guy was inside a phone booth rather than out in the open.
There's nothing from SCOTUS on stingrays, but I looked at one federal case and the data being collected was referred to as a document, so that's where the 4th was found to apply.
In turn I don't think I've greatly oversimplified anything.
And you think this applies to the inside of the woman's car that the article is talking about?
> In turn I don't think I've greatly oversimplified anything.
In this reply, no, you're not greatly oversimplifying. In your parent comment, you said that going out in public means no expectation of privacy, and I gave an example of a place in public that had an expectation of privacy, which you've defined as "not in public". I think that if you have to call a place that's available to anyone and not owned by an individual "not public" in order to make your original statement work, then your original statement was oversimplifying.
Otherwise maybe I'll just set up my own cameras in public locations. If the police want the data they can pay per minute of footage. I'll let them search for metadata and tell them if footage matches with no visibility to the footage until after payment. If they search for something and don't purchase but come back for it - it's then increased pricing. If this is all public space and we can all build these systems because there's no expectation of privacy then all is fair in access to public right of way along roads.
When that corporation is performing contracted work for the government, they act as the government's agent, making them subject to the same restrictions regarding civil rights as the government itself.
There's an interesting analogy with copyright issues surrounding AI use. Both copyright laws and surveillance were created to (respectively) creative incentives for authors to create novel works; and to protect citizens for indiscriminate surveillance. The laws made sense given the technology available at the time: it simply wasn't feasible to put a cop on every street corner, or to ingest the ideas of every work ever written.
But the laws have been eclipsed by technology. Technology makes a mockery of existing laws, by clearly violating their intent. Much has been written to the effect of "why bother to create new, free materials on the internet when it will just get scooped up by an LLM with no attribution to me." Similarly, Flock cameras have the effect or violating privacy in the exact same way the original laws sought to prevent.
Unfortunately, laws are slow to change, and monied interests will fight tooth-and-nail to put their profits above the rights of ordinary people. It's going to be a difficult decade or so coming up.
Can confirm. I've personally stopped releasing new open source code, and stopped contributing to projects.
Until copyright laws are updated to protect my work from being stolen and my labor exploited by AI companies, there's zero incentive for me to participate in open source.
Even OSI's cuck licenses are being cucked beyond reason. I didn't think that was possible.
What worries me is the fact AIs render licenses irrelevant. What's the point of starting an AGPLv3 project when AIs can just study it and make a proprietary equivalent? The free software movement no longer has any leverage.
I also don't feel any sense of accomplishment anymore. Software is so trivial now. Even if I make some unique thing, others can just have an AI copy it. Nothing is special anymore. Feels like there's no point.
This is a false equivalence. Reverse engineering my binary is not the same thing as training on my code. When you RE a binary, what comes out the other side is not the code that I wrote, its some machine-generated code that can reproduce the behavior of the binary. The result can't even be described as 'similar' to the original, because the compilation process is pretty much 100% lossy.
Reverse engineering my binary doesn't concern me too much, as I'm sure there are legal avenues I could take to protect my business were it to become a real problem. And if it comes down it, there's zero competitive advantage someone would have in that scenario, as all they'd have is undifferentiated AI slop.
Taking my work, putting it into your commercial product, and selling it without my permission is what I have a problem with. That's exactly what AI companies are doing with very little push back, and why I won't release my hand-written human code anymore.
> I also don't feel any sense of accomplishment anymore. Software is so trivial now. Even if I make some unique thing, others can just have an AI copy it. Nothing is special anymore. Feels like there's no point.
Software is certainly not 'trivial' now. The only people who believe this are those that have gotten caught up in the AI marketing blitz, or have completely detached/warped perspective on software. I.e. non-engineers wowed by novelty, finance execs wowed by the idea of being able to fire a bunch of people, or oligarchs wowed by the idea of being able to monopolize an entire industry.
I'd argue they break the fourth amendment:
> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
What are "unreasonable searches" if not being under "indiscriminate mass surveillance?"
A police officer randomly entering your house and going through all of your belongings.
Indiscriminately searching a larger number of people is not necessarily unreasonable. Take for example the TSA at airports where you have to searched to enter and the airpots have a ton of cameras watching every single person there.
The key issue there was the scope of the British power, not the fact that searches and seizures could happen at all. We wanted warrants that were reasonable and limited.
The issue is not a single security camera from a private bank. The issue is not a single cop in a car investigating someone. The issue is a national and searchable network of cameras where agents of the government can track anyone at any time for no reason at all.
The judge says the police need probable cause and a warrant for a search against an individual.
> Freedom from persistent, dragnet-style surveillance while in public is not a foreign concept in our society, and it is a reasonable expectation that society already accepts. This is the same expectation of privacy that the Supreme Court has continued to recognize in cases like Carpenter and Chatrie. Cell phones also move in public places where people can see you in plain view. But it becomes constitutionally problematic when law enforcement can indiscriminately and passively catalog your whereabouts over an extended period of time and then use that information for any purpose whenever convenient. [2]
[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt4-2/ALDE_...
[2] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.oknd.76...
The judge was saying that the police needed probable cause and a warrant to search the Flock system because it's dragnet surveillance, similar to needing a warrant to access cell phone location data. [1]
Just because you don't have an expectation of privacy while moving in a public space doesn't mean you don't have an expectation of privacy for all of your movements ever in every public space. That scenario wasn't possible in the 1700s.
For an individual today, it's fine for the government to tail someone without a warrant. [2] It's probably not fine for the government to put a long-term GPS tracker on your car without a warrant (probably because the issue was sidestepped with trespass). [3]
Even Alito notes that in the past it would have required too much labor for the government to surveil every movement of an individual for a long period of time and so society has the expectation that the government is not doing that. [4]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatrie_v._United_States
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Knotts
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jones_(2012)
[4] https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/pdf/10-1259.pdf#page=33
The expectation that the government doesn't tail everyone might have been reasonable, the expectation that the government doesn't tail you without a court-approved excuse is not.
I'm not arguing there shouldn't be protection against total surveillance, I'm arguing the US constitution doesn't offer such protection.
Luckily, the courts disagree with you, and have for -probably- longer than you've been alive. From printed page 31 of [0], discussion of the Constutionality of putting a radio transmitter in cargo in someone's car and tracking it:
That analysis is from the case that people are quoting when they say "You're not entitled to privacy when you're driving on public roads.", but -as you can see- what was actually said by the court there is more nuanced than that, and very clearly says that the rules that apply to dragnet surveillance must be reconsidered when it becomes feasible. Tragically, it seems like even many judges who cite the case don't bother to actually read it.The whole document is well worth reading if you have a free fifteen-to-thirty minutes.
[0] <https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.oknd.76...>
Yes but there is an expectation that the government doesn't tail you at all times for your entire life with no warrant, right? Largely because in the past it was infeasible for the government to do so: it cost too much money and required too much manpower.
That's what Alito was arguing in Jones: people expect to be tailed sometimes but they don't expect to be tailed at all times for a whole month. And commentary suggests the Court would have had a similar opinion if they had not sidestepped the issue by leaning on trespass.
As Alito said, the question the Court has not decided (and didn't need to decide in that case) is where the line is drawn. When does tracking a vehicle become a search and enter 4th amendment territory and require a warrant? (He said surely before 4 weeks.)
What is America's history with tyranny?
See Mosaic theory.
This is not true. The original "reasonable expectation of privacy" case was about tapping phone booths, which are in public. And the way the law works (or is supposed to work) is that the reasonableness test is based on a typical person. What does or does not violate a reasonable expectation of privacy should not be assigned to us by judges.
So the device should require very specific license plates to scan for—not the current dragnet. The software should only "ping" when there is a confident match with said license plate(s)—and merely log which license plate, time stamp a single photo, and note the confidence level of it being a match.
The frame buffer should be the only place (a frame of) video is ever stored at all (excepting the high-confidence match indicated above).
The only issue remaining would be whether we trust the device/software to have complied (and not have a backdoor) and of course there needs to be a legal warrant for every license plate uploaded (and it should expire fairly frequently, likely requiring a new warrant to continue canning for the plate).
Building a system with "safeguards" in place that require constant oversight is destined for either regulatory capture of the oversight, or slow dismantling of the oversight.
E.g. warrants -> fisa court warrants -> Xkeyscore
There seems to be a real reduction in property crime in some places with cameras. I don’t think it’s realistic to take these down everywhere. (I was in the camp that they should go down everywhere. I’ve relaxed that position recently.)
Do you have any evidence that the massive centralized aggregation has had a real reduction in crime versus cameras that are locally controlled?
or are you just spewing poorly thought out horseshit in defense of the destruction of our liberty?
(though even this is through the borderline insane, and staunchly anti-american lens that a reduction in property crime definitively warrants the destruction of privacy and liberty)
-Larry Ellison
This has been the plan of the oligarchs for a while.
Property crime skyrocketed during COVID largely because of intentional decisions around policing. We can easily police property crime without ubiquitous surveillance.
Most Americans know that a small reduction in property crime is not worth trading for constant surveillance by private corporations and the entire government.
How are you sure it wasn't due to a spike in unemployment when a lot of people had to stay home from work?
Police can walk about, ask or order (warrant) for footage.
A network of AI powered cameras linked to the hive mind controlled by real life super mega evil corp inc run by real life super villains... not so great.
Also the 4th amendment is a thing. Mosaic theory is a thing.
Enough of these flocking cameras.
Private doorbell cameras (and most flock cameras for that matter) point at mostly, or entirely, public space. Or in case of the former also my own property.
Frankly if I sit on my porch and see thru the window across that my neighbor is beating his wife, should I need a warrant to report it? That sounds ludicrous to me.
I've concluded that the hyperbolic, visceral level of hate for Flock on this forum (a YC startup by the way) is rooted in jealousy of their success by people who wish they thought of it first.
And there's another whole bunch of petty authoritarians who have grand plans to fine the shit out of everyone they see leaving Home Depot with a water heater and no open building permit. They're also just as pissed off this might get reigned in before they've got their chance to put the population under their jackboot.
This is so silly. There is a well-worn arc of privacy advocacy on this forum. That’s the parsimonious explanation.
Really!
What can make them suck is authorities abusing them to do enforce arbitrary, unpredictable ideals that are not part of the law, incompetent authorities targeting non-criminals and peaceful protesters, or traumatizing the wrong person because of an incorrect AI face match.
That’s crime. Doesn’t make it into the stats tho
Read your municipal code (they're fairly homogenous these days because of the feds and their stupid grants) if you don't believe me.
To be honest, China is fairly predictable. If you're doing certain shit, you're going to get arrested. If you don't do said shit, you're not going to get arrested. If you honestly and truly unknowingly do said shit, in almost all cases they'll make it clear to you what they want you to do instead before they arrest you.
Whether said shit should be allowed as a basic constitutional freedom is another qusetion. But at least the rules and enforcement are predictable and if you don't have intentions to violate those areas it's extremely livable.
And the guy at the Honda dealer says I should buy a CRV.
A warrant requirement is not a reasonable bandaid to consider allowing mass surveillance. There should be no mass surveillance, only targeted surveillance.
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 surveillance, safeguards do not make it acceptable.
Plenty of places have very low crime without mass surveillance.
Also, there are too many other cameras for a Flock ban to be consequential: privately owned cameras, law enforcement and other drones, etc.
The solution is good data hygiene (minimization, encryption, etc.) and a warrant requirement. Also, any cameras recording public space should be required to obscure, at the point of capture (before storage or transmission) all identifiable information - people (full body), cars, their dogs, etc.
Or feel them.
I would be convinced if, nightly, we saw on the news how video from a Flock camera was critical in apprehending the criminals involved in a car-jacking. Or anything.
But I've not seen that at all.
Interesting! What I read is that police are losing the skill of solving crimes without cameras and other digital information. Cameras identify suspects; tracking cars through a city - to or from the crime - is often how law enforcement finds them. (Any cameras, not just Flock.)
Regardless of our varied experiences, I'm sure we agree that perception and not reality will guide public opinion. I think camera advoctes - including law enforcement - have easy emotional buttons to press. The disparagement of human rights generally greatly weakens the strongest argument against them.
This worked out great for Seattle. A "pathetic" lack of security cameras at the city's most visible tourist attraction, so when gangstas started shooting at each other at a food festival with 3 people dead and 4 others injured, it was complete chaos from a public safety perspective, and they had no evidence from which to draw from.
I wished we lived in your perfect world but unfortunately reality is more like Taxi Driver. Technology provides the tools to help bridge the gap.
https://komonews.com/news/local/seattle-city-councilmember-r...
Not to mention that as far as I am concerned, even someone e.g. breaking into a house - not speaking of violent crime - is far more damaging and traumatizing than some random cop looking up his exes license plate and doing nothing with it. Even if the numbers of instances were comparable.
Are you suggesting the set of all license plates of interest should be stored on the device itself?
I don’t really see any drawbacks with storing them on the device, they should already be quasi-public knowledge (from warrants/etc) so it’s not like there’s a privacy/security risk there
that and you don't have any legitimate expectation of privacy while in public because you are in public
the really strange part is the folks that are angry about flock cameras are often the same people who are angry that folks like elon musk want the movements of the private jets to be non-public information
i can get around my community without worrying one bit about flock cameras surveilling me. the bike trails i use generally don't have cameras and even if they did i'm riding a fairly generic bike and wearing neutral and unmemorable clothing.
even with actual dragnet surveillance in NYC they couldn't track a dude on a bike effectively.
I think it breaks the 'its in public so its public' argument. The state requires you to display plates-- its its responsibility to complete the law: e.g. make possession of a third parties plate number a serious felony outside of limited circumstances.
I’d be okay with a 24-hour on device store of scanned plates. That way a stolen car can be tracked ex post facto.
I'd guess probably 50-100.
Are we going to redesign them all to your specs too?
It's why, for example, we don't allow electronic devices to be sold (legally) in the U.S. that put out so much RF such that they interfere with radio broadcasts. An actual FM transmitter is limited to so many milliwatts of radiated power, etc…
That doesn't seem realistic: Almost all the time, we only know about a crime after it happens - when it's too late to obtain a warrant. We get the license plate from the video of the crime.
So I would capture the images, minimize and encrypt it at the point of capture (before storage or transmission), and maybe even setup some PKI where only judges can issue keys to decrypt, if practical.
The problem with this is that it depends on the trustworthiness of those enforcing the restrictions, both now and in the future.
But if we trusted the watchers to watch themselves, we wouldn’t need the restrictions in the first place.
I don't think we can backtrack at this point but at least it should be heavily regulated and restricted (i.e. only run queries if there's a court order, etc).
Yes you can - if the citizenry says no and mobilises/votes to that end, the cameras can be physically removed, whether in a city/state/nationally.
This isn't an instance of "the cat's out the bag, it can't be opt back in" - accepting that is a form of defeatism IMO.
The idea that law enforcement tapping into existing law enforcement knowledge constitutes as a search of "persons, houses, papers, and effects" does not logically follow for me. It is a search of law enforcements own property.
The roads are not law enforcement's property and my private car on a public road is private property that requires a warrant to search. These things should be totally banned, but even your argument is wrong since Flocks don't mask just the road, they record everything in their field of view.
I was referring data as the property. Accessing a public fact of your car is not the same as actually searching through a car.
>they record everything in their field of view.
And those areas are still part of the public.
> And those areas are still part of the public.
No, it's almost exclusively private land.
Is this something you’re in favor of?
Like all the millions of traffic cameras, dashcams, smartphones, and everyone's eyeballs?
The wording here seems problematic. Why is law enforcement entitled to this degree of access to public surveillance as their "property"? That word strongly implies it is theirs to do with as they wish - I don't see how that would be a desirable state of affairs.
You seem to be paraphrasing the US v. Knotts decision. Read pages 30 and 31 of the document found here [0]. If you have fifteen-to-thirty minutes free, you should really read the whole thing.
[0] <https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.oknd.76...>
Somehow matters of degree only apply to safety (and my liberty to film whatever I want in public), but they don't apply to privacy, that's absolute.
Did you have a point?
No doubt erratic behavior gets me logged by that security team, if not escalated to local police, who may come to check up on me themselves later. Nobody knows what's happening with this footage. What their putting a wrapper in their pocket may look like in low res video.
Mass surveillance thru cameras and movement logging isn't so active but I 100% understand people who take action against the cameras. It's just as in a person's face every single day, in more and more places, and you don't know who is on the other end or what they're looking for or what you are doing may appear as.
Pretty sure every judge would issue a warrant when your loved one is missing.