"Our brief details the vast, interconnected network of ALPRs that constantly track drivers around the country and argues that this tracking is a “search” under the meaning of the Fourth Amendment."
Totally agree with the EFF here, many thanks to them defending the Constitution, hope they win.
Real estate companies got together via an app to collude on prices and that was illegal.
I see no difference between that and mass surveillance via bulk data collection, whether private or public, being unconstitutional and being an unreasonable search regardless of who does it.
This is a great step but it needs to go even farther. The ALPR tools should only be able to store hits on license plates that are under an active warrant.
I feel like it’d be an uphill battle to say you can’t use it to find e.g a car in an Amber Alert, or actively escaping. But I don’t know, do they already get warrants for that kind of thing?
It's a shame cops can't be trusted to not abuse it if given access not through the courts. Every single time a tool like this is given to them without massive fetters it's abused so they don't get to have the toy.
There's a ton of things that would make policing easier but we don't do them because they destroy other valuable parts of society. It'd be much easier to solve crimes if everyone had to wear networked body cameras and GPS trackers at all times but we don't do that because it destroys far more important things.
Yep that solves everything. Pack your bags guys. War's over on ALPR's [sarcasm]
Making things illegal does not stop abuse. The cameras should not even be in our communities. There was 0 discussion nor any vote. These things got installed without consent and you want to argue that just placing guardrails that don't even get enforced is going to fix this?
Ultimately this is the actual right answer. Strong regulation is great, but it won't actually curb abuse enough.
Nobody ever wanted this except people with unreasonable pearl-clutching arguments about safety. We've had these devices for years now, and we haven't seen studies showing massive safety improvements in communities that are blanketed in these cameras. We've reached a point where cars are drenched in tracking devices -- I left two separate AirTags in my car, and the car itself also came with online tracking from the manufacturer -- and car theft still happens. Desperate people will commit car thefts whether there are cameras tracking them or not.
These are -- and always have been -- the "cop's ex-girlfriend tracking machine".
"But now the ALPR has to check the plate against a list of plates that it's been told to scan for and then delete non-hits!" That's great, but if a cop can add plates to the list, then they'll just add the plate for the woman they're stalking to the list and then wait 24 hours to see where she goes. The "non-hit rule" is like telling cops to wear body cams in the hope that they'll stop committing police brutality. Feels nice, but they just keep doing it anyway. Just tear these things down.
If they didn’t listen to us about installing them, why should we listen about uninstalling them? They don’t have hard data because crime was not magically solved in the last two years. Crime remains at all time historical lows.
The biggest argument against limits on storing "non-hit" data that the pro-Flock crowd is going to use is that "we need the historical data to find evidence of the whereabouts of criminal suspects".
Counter point police have been able to prosecute crime without being able to defacto track every single person in the US via car and the corrosive effect of having that ability outweighs the gains.
>>"Counter point police have been able to prosecute crime without being able to defacto track every single person in the US"
This is not true, and I dont know why everyone believes that. Real-life policing looks nothing like Law and Order. Moreover, post-George Floyd, police have basically had a work stoppage. Real prosecution requires high agency work by the police and they aren't legally required to do that [1], so they don't, and no amount of voting and police union busting is going to help here. You can't require someone to be "stellar" at their jobs.
Having had real egregious crimes happen around me has exposed me to just how much crime you can simply get away with...all the time. The rich get private security and investigators, us plebes get "Sorry no one saw the shooting happen, so we can't do anything now please leave"
Flock has basically turned a high-agency job that police stopped doing, into a db lookup, that in some circumstances they can be forced into doing.
I agree with EFF, record it all and put it all behind a real warrant and a civilian judge with a high bar for approval.
P.S: Before you quote Benjamin Franklin at me, no I don't want a 100% hit rate, I just want a decent shot at crimes being solved by average police work and just even the slightest hint of deterrence.
Half the working class consistently vote for a soft-on-crime party with a rallying cry of defunding the police and an eye towards virtual amnesty for crimes ranging from immigration violations to DUI resulting in deaths to outright murder.
And I personally think that in some cases that would actually be a net positive for society. Like a kid disappears or a body is found murdered or a serious crime occurs. Being able to look at who was coming and going to solve serious crimes is probably a good thing.
But for tracking petty crimes and with the abuse of the system with things like officers monitoring their exes, as one example, makes the system far too dangerous for a free society. And because of that if they are going to ever get the public on board with flock then we are going to need to establish certain rights and guarantees.
For me that would be things like warrants with the exceptions in only the most extreme cases like a kidnapping or a murder that literally just happened and immediate response was critical.
Next I would want a reasonable time data was stored then deleted. That is not 2 years that is like maybe a couple weeks or perhaps a little longer. Having the history of when and where everyone goes is a huge privacy risk and should not be stored forever as it is a target.
Next I would want rules that it is only used for certain investigations and crimes. Yes to violent crimes and sexual crimes and crimes against children and obvious things all of society can easily say yes those things are bad. But for most other crimes it should be constitutionally forbidden. Think of how laws and public beliefs change over time. Imagine this years back when being gay was a crime. Or tracking people who go to an abortion clinic.
I could go on for a lot longer about how this type of system is dangerous in so many ways if not governed by very well thought out rules and rights given to the public. It is sad that the operators of these systems don't want to meet in the middle to something that most of the public could get on board with but they obviously know that total surveillance is very valuable data to have on people.
But if you want to find a suspect, shouldn’t you only care about where they are NOW? Not where they were 6 hours ago? How does historical data help apprehend a suspect NOW?
Devil's advocate: they may have changed cars. Someone robs a bank, drives a getaway car, abandons it, gets in another car and drives off. Your first breadcrumb is where the getaway car ended up.
It's probably not within range of an ALPR right now, so you look at where it was driving.
This is why we need, as op is suggesting, governments to tell them something doing the lines of "too bad, that's illegal and won't be permitted as evidence".
The original sin is requiring cars to display an identifying plate. Imagine asking the framers about a similar ID display on horseback mounted travelers.
That's the underlying rights violation-- and it's why solutions that otherwise try to restrict ALPR run into oddities about limiting people's ability to observe what is plainly visible in public.
Failing that avenue, we should treat most broad involuntary data collection efforts as a form of stalking/harassment, and treat it accordingly-- including providing a strong civil path for anyone whose data was collected without their knoweldge especially given that law enforcement / prosecutors have a material conflict of interest which will prevent them from enforcing the law.
I agree with the idea that license plates are the biggest part of the problem and that they've had a huge kind of scope creep in terms of what they're used for.
Whenever I've thought about this problem, the challenge with a more high-tech and privacy-friendly alternative is the intuition that it's good if witnesses to a crime or accident can memorize or write down the plate of an involved vehicle in order to make that specific vehicle identifiable. If the vehicles were providing only a cryptographic identity that wasn't memorable or that required special equipment to query, we would lose the "the robbers got away in a car with this plate" or "the pedestrian was run over by a car with this plate" scenario, which feels like a surprising cost somehow.
If it weren't for that, it might be feasible to use some more modern cryptographic approach to ensure that cars are licensed or insured without also making it easy in general to track them or people's activities or whereabouts. But allowing the public to quickly see any car's identity with their eyes and memorize it with their minds is quite a harsh constraint.
Maybe -- it helps the case for plates that often that reporting is almost always about accidents which means the fact that it's easy to remove or swap a plate and people frequently do doesn't undermine some of the plate advantages.
I have sympathy for the reporting running from accidents case, but I'm wary that this isn't just an artifact of the normalization of intrusions that predated me.
Imagine by an accident of history we didn't have plates so far-- and they were proposed today in our world of surveillance automation. Perhaps in some places but not others, it's easier to imagine adopting mandatory identifying plates today in NY than in SD, WY, MT, for example.
Yes, that's an interesting thought. It's also possible that there are more car accidents, and more cars used in crimes, in urban than in rural regions. Maybe people's intuition in urban regions would be more comfortable overall with at least some forms of surveillance-facilitating technologies, because people are somewhat more afraid of accidental or deliberate harms coming out of interactions with other people?
>Imagine asking the framers about a similar ID display on horseback mounted travelers.
It existed for ships and the law passed while George Washington was still president. Ships had to be registered and it was required for the ship's name to be legibly written on the stern.
That was a law that applied to vessels of 5 tons or more "employed in coastal trade or fisheries"-- The analogy there would be identifying marks on semis. We have a lot of travel restrictions on large commercial trucks that would be absolutely intolerable on private transport.
We didn't extend the requirement to ordinary private boats until 1918 and even at that point only applied it to mechanically propelled boats.
Back in the day there was an implicit assumption that surveillance was costly. Although every car displayed a plate, it was completely impractical to write them down unless there was some kind of incident. Likewise you could follow someone to track their location, but it costs many detective-hours so it's only feasible to deploy on real suspects. Mass surveillance was impossible.
This assumes that you don’t get a new administration that decides to throw out all the laws that came before and uses this juicy panopticon camera system in whatever way they want, to do whatever they want.
The cameras are an attractive nuisance for people in power, including any and all law enforcement types. It only takes a few bad apples to spoil that entire ocean.
The real threat is the cameras’ very existence, and that is what has to be eliminated. If a thing doesn’t exist, then it can’t be abused.
That’s an important thing to keep in mind, when you are required to keep in mind the lessons of 1930s Germany. Or the Stasi from East Germany.
When you figure out how to guarantee that you can never, ever again have a 1930s Germany situation pop up, and a government that just casually throws out all the old laws, then we can talk about whether those kinds of cameras might make sense again.
> assumes that you don’t get a new administration that decides to throw out all the laws that came before and uses this juicy panopticon camera system in whatever way they want, to do whatever they want.
What you're suggesting would mean that they wouldn't even have to throw out the laws. They could just install the new cameras themselves. So there's no difference.
It requires a reasonably balanced and trustworthy government no matter what.
If we take a concept like "a new administration can just change it" and put that on the slippery slope, then: We find that we're best off by doing nothing, ever, because it's just waste of time. Head in sand, dick in hand.
This doesn't seem solved. You are getting rid of historical queries and the ability to search by cars and drivers. Swapping plates should not be a viable strategy in the year 2026.
Don’t even need to make that law, just make them ‘public records’, and when people start following the police chief, mayor, etc, those policies will change very, very quickly.
I agree this is all good but you're missing one important point: if someone breaks the rules, there need to be clear and obvious prison sentences for the manufacturer and/or police involved, and a large payout to everyone who's data is affected, and large whistleblower rewards if you report such a crime.
I am skeptical that the Constitution has any legal weight these days, seeing how the law has systematically undermined pretty much every single right enshrined therein.
I don't think they should be keeping data that's not involved in an active warrant.
However, if they do anyway, there should be strong victims' rights protections so that the data is actually used during investigations.
There was a string of burglaries in our area a few years ago, and panopticon N-1 (Google Map's auto recording of all phone GPS traces for marketing information) could have found the perpetrators pretty much instantly.
They hit rural outbuildings in the middle of the night on camera, so timestamps were precise, but faces were obscured. A reverse geofence warrant keyed on time of arrival / departure would have narrowed it down to just the crooks with extremely high probability, and other details in the videos would have corroborated the GPS traces.
None of the victims were politically connected, so the police couldn't (by policy) run the reverse GPS lookups. This is the worst of both worlds: Our data is recorded to be used against us later, but if ever it would be useful, we do not have access to it. The same is true for vehicle black boxes / cameras. They record a few seconds before airbag deploy, but you usually are not allowed to access them as part of an insurance dispute (even the ones from your own car).
They should face criminal penalties for violating people’s rights
> the data is actually used during investigations.
Absolutely no! All that data collected without due process (judicial warrant, paper trail, whatever is the norm in your neck of the woods) has to be treated as tainted.
> All that data collected without due process… has to be treated as tainted.
Maybe I’m naive, but I don’t see why it can’t be collected but not read until a warrant comes through. Similar to gmail data only being accessible by the police with a valid warrant. It seems like that would be enough to avoid egregious issues (fishing expeditions, disgruntled exes, etc.).
could we make this serious criminal
offense with mandatory penalties such that no sane person would ever attempt it or this no longer possible in our society?
This is why I don't think the dataset should exist.
If the dataset does exist, then everyone (including the brownshirts) should have equal access to it, via due process. That should include all the data (even data about the brownshirts).
One litmus test: There must be a near-infinite amount of digital evidence that could be used to prosecute current ICE officers.
The way the system is currently setup, that data can only be used for blackmail or to selectively remove non-cooperating people from political office down the road (hint: the worst of the current ICE officers will eventually be the only ones with access to the data, and they'll be the ones doing the removing).
In a better system, any ICE victim would have the ability to expose the officers' crimes + successfully press for criminal charges.
That was a leap. However, yes, to prevent nazis we need to defend individual rights to privacy at the expense of corporate/government property and free speech.
Throwing Hilter and his political party and followers for beliefs would create more Hilters. The martyr is a powerful symbol that may have won more support in France and England where they may not have gone against Germany after invading Poland.
Jail your enemies is a failed strategy that turns you into the enemy.
> Absolutely no! All that data collected without due process [… should be …] treated as tainted
Cannot get there from here, politically.
Do you know how long it has been since I last talked to coworkers selling their location information for a $50 Target gift card? One week. Do you know how many neighbors have Ring? All of them.
Ring cameras are privately owned, not networked into a searchable panopticon snapshotting time-place-plate-identity, require a warrant to get footage from the owner, and are generally pretty low resolution, enough to see that someone is at your door but not enough to, e.g., identify individual stickers on a passing car.
I wasn't arguing against warrants (and argued the datasets shouldn't exist).
Concretely, for my examples, due process already should give victims access to the data, but does not:
Any judge would write a warrant to pull the reverse geofence data. There's a timestamped video of the robbery, and police took photos of the aftermath.
For the car accidents: At least let me have access to my own camera recordings! No warrant needed. I can imagine the police getting a warrant to pull it off the car too if they wanted (they probably already can).
Right, and just for the record: the definition of the word collect should be the ordinary definition and not some dystopian nonsense like "received and used by an analyst or investigator" or whatever similarly worded horseshit is in effect in IC or law enforcement circles these days.
He's just numbering the various large surveillance networks (panopticons) sequentially with the variable N being the newest/most current one. N = Flock (~2025), N-1 = Maps' GPS data collection (~2015), maybe N-2 is cell phone triangulation via tower signal strength (~2005).
If this data is meant for training algorithms, then they need negative (non-suspicious) examples just as much, if not more, than they need positive (suspicious) examples.
No. Any surveillance is going to have a chilling effect on the community. Why hang out at the local park with this monstrosity out of 1984 is watching you? Why not go literally anywhere else?
Which armed robbers were caught with this technology that were uncatchable before now? Seriously. Ruining all of privacy for everyone does not fix this. This is the same old “if you have nothing to hide” again and again and again and it’s been categorically wrong for hundreds of years. Nothing has changed. Expect the means.
Living in a country (Australia) where ALPRs have been legal and standard for decades I can assure you that people still hang out in local parks. This technology specifically has not led to 1984.
Do people sometimes pee in the bushes knowing there could be a facial recognition camera pointed at them and the police will interpret it as public indecency?
Maybe instead of peeing in a public park or public roadway, you use a bathroom and not have to worry about it. These haven’t carpeted every square foot of BLM forest: if you’re exposing yourself in a public park, that’s really on you.
We should perhaps also keep in mind the the US incarceration rate is nearly 4x that of Australia according to wikipedia and 4X the number of probationers.
20% of the entire world's prison population is in US jails.
Chinese citizens live in a surveillance state and are quite used to it. Are they willing to talk about Tiananmen Square in public? This feels like a point in favor of never installing any of this. Especially without the consent of the governed. Another idea foreign in China.
I am OK with the surveillance if police get a warrant signed by a judge. That keeps people honest and accountable, requires them to enumerate suspicion of a crime.
I am not OK with giving everyone who works for the government complete knowledge of my associations and wherabouts at all times.
The core point that everyone needs to understand here is that ALPR is only a thing because technology sucked until now. Reading a license plate, something designed to be identified easily, took off when the tech got reasonably good enough. But facial recognition and general object recognition is getting to that point now too. If we don't stop ALPR, now, we will have constant track databases on people (if we don't already) in the future because the argument is essentially the same with only technology holding it back. This isn't a slippery slope. Fight this now.
I don't think we should have them at all. If the data is collected, then it can be abused.
So with warrants we're essentially saying, "the government can track everyone's location and we're okay with that but they can't legally look at it without a warrant". Good luck seeing consequences for breaking that when we can't even get consequences for shooting people.
Still better than no warrants, it would be great to get warrants requirement. But we should not live in such a surveilled society.
It's still mass surveillance. Even if it requires a warrant.
Surveillance should work like this: You suspect some of a crime? Then you surveil them and investigate them. you need more powerful tools, then you need to get a warrant from a judge to surveil them more.
We shouldn't be investigating and surveilling people that aren't suspected of crimes. Mass surveillance treats everyone like criminals.
In a functional democracy, all parties are equal under the law.
Under the US Constitution, it is absurd to think that:
- simply occupying a public space opts you out of 4A
- a non-citizen fictional corporate entity can discard the rights granted to citizens for profit without any discernment
- there will not be any legal consequences for setting up cameras to track your neighbors' every move, even if you put those cameras on the right-of-way of your property for safety
If it was about safety and protecting privacy then the implementation would be completely different [1].
> How are you existing privately in a public space?
You don't exist fully privately, but the amount of privacy you used to get was worlds apart in the past. Only people who were in the same place at the same time, cared to look at you and recognized you would have a mental record of you being there. You can't reasonably extrapolate this to a world where entities from all over the country or even the world can have a full record of all the public places you were, organized as a timeline, recognized and processed automatically and available as irrefutable evidence forever. The people arguing this are hinging their argument on a technicality and the fact that the people of the past couldn't have foreseen the world of today. I bet you know full well the difference between automatic digital mass surveillance and your neighbor seeing you on the street.
> In the 90’s everyone was dead certain you couldn’t regulate software because it was speech
By that logic software can do anything at any time because it's software. The de facto assumption that your software has the 'right' to do anything stops where other people begin.
But will Lowes require a warrant to search their own Flocks, or freely give information to the cops that walk in and go buddy-buddy with the LP manager?
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 32.5 ms ] threadTotally agree with the EFF here, many thanks to them defending the Constitution, hope they win.
I don't think the government should be able to bypass our constitutional rights simply by laundering our data through a private company.
I see no difference between that and mass surveillance via bulk data collection, whether private or public, being unconstitutional and being an unreasonable search regardless of who does it.
There's a ton of things that would make policing easier but we don't do them because they destroy other valuable parts of society. It'd be much easier to solve crimes if everyone had to wear networked body cameras and GPS trackers at all times but we don't do that because it destroys far more important things.
Why do you need to see where I was 6 hours ago to do this?
Don’t you want to find them NOW?
Even more interesting, how about silver alerts, where there is no potential crime but a missing adult thought to need help?
* Illegal to collect every plate for later analysis
* Must delete "non hit" plate images within 3 minutes
* Strict forbidden to upload "non hit" camera imagery off the device
I would add that it should also require a warrant to access the ALPR data, but it's a great start.
https://gc.nh.gov/rsa/html/XXI/261/261-75-b.htm
Making things illegal does not stop abuse. The cameras should not even be in our communities. There was 0 discussion nor any vote. These things got installed without consent and you want to argue that just placing guardrails that don't even get enforced is going to fix this?
Nobody ever wanted this except people with unreasonable pearl-clutching arguments about safety. We've had these devices for years now, and we haven't seen studies showing massive safety improvements in communities that are blanketed in these cameras. We've reached a point where cars are drenched in tracking devices -- I left two separate AirTags in my car, and the car itself also came with online tracking from the manufacturer -- and car theft still happens. Desperate people will commit car thefts whether there are cameras tracking them or not.
These are -- and always have been -- the "cop's ex-girlfriend tracking machine".
"But now the ALPR has to check the plate against a list of plates that it's been told to scan for and then delete non-hits!" That's great, but if a cop can add plates to the list, then they'll just add the plate for the woman they're stalking to the list and then wait 24 hours to see where she goes. The "non-hit rule" is like telling cops to wear body cams in the hope that they'll stop committing police brutality. Feels nice, but they just keep doing it anyway. Just tear these things down.
These people will be the first to argue against the removal of the cameras, citing that the crime would be much worse without them.
This is not true, and I dont know why everyone believes that. Real-life policing looks nothing like Law and Order. Moreover, post-George Floyd, police have basically had a work stoppage. Real prosecution requires high agency work by the police and they aren't legally required to do that [1], so they don't, and no amount of voting and police union busting is going to help here. You can't require someone to be "stellar" at their jobs.
Having had real egregious crimes happen around me has exposed me to just how much crime you can simply get away with...all the time. The rich get private security and investigators, us plebes get "Sorry no one saw the shooting happen, so we can't do anything now please leave"
Flock has basically turned a high-agency job that police stopped doing, into a db lookup, that in some circumstances they can be forced into doing.
I agree with EFF, record it all and put it all behind a real warrant and a civilian judge with a high bar for approval.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia
P.S: Before you quote Benjamin Franklin at me, no I don't want a 100% hit rate, I just want a decent shot at crimes being solved by average police work and just even the slightest hint of deterrence.
Put cameras in and on your car, as well as your house.
No one is coming to save you. If you want to be saved, you need to do that yourself.
But for tracking petty crimes and with the abuse of the system with things like officers monitoring their exes, as one example, makes the system far too dangerous for a free society. And because of that if they are going to ever get the public on board with flock then we are going to need to establish certain rights and guarantees.
For me that would be things like warrants with the exceptions in only the most extreme cases like a kidnapping or a murder that literally just happened and immediate response was critical. Next I would want a reasonable time data was stored then deleted. That is not 2 years that is like maybe a couple weeks or perhaps a little longer. Having the history of when and where everyone goes is a huge privacy risk and should not be stored forever as it is a target. Next I would want rules that it is only used for certain investigations and crimes. Yes to violent crimes and sexual crimes and crimes against children and obvious things all of society can easily say yes those things are bad. But for most other crimes it should be constitutionally forbidden. Think of how laws and public beliefs change over time. Imagine this years back when being gay was a crime. Or tracking people who go to an abortion clinic.
I could go on for a lot longer about how this type of system is dangerous in so many ways if not governed by very well thought out rules and rights given to the public. It is sad that the operators of these systems don't want to meet in the middle to something that most of the public could get on board with but they obviously know that total surveillance is very valuable data to have on people.
It's probably not within range of an ALPR right now, so you look at where it was driving.
That's the underlying rights violation-- and it's why solutions that otherwise try to restrict ALPR run into oddities about limiting people's ability to observe what is plainly visible in public.
Failing that avenue, we should treat most broad involuntary data collection efforts as a form of stalking/harassment, and treat it accordingly-- including providing a strong civil path for anyone whose data was collected without their knoweldge especially given that law enforcement / prosecutors have a material conflict of interest which will prevent them from enforcing the law.
Whenever I've thought about this problem, the challenge with a more high-tech and privacy-friendly alternative is the intuition that it's good if witnesses to a crime or accident can memorize or write down the plate of an involved vehicle in order to make that specific vehicle identifiable. If the vehicles were providing only a cryptographic identity that wasn't memorable or that required special equipment to query, we would lose the "the robbers got away in a car with this plate" or "the pedestrian was run over by a car with this plate" scenario, which feels like a surprising cost somehow.
If it weren't for that, it might be feasible to use some more modern cryptographic approach to ensure that cars are licensed or insured without also making it easy in general to track them or people's activities or whereabouts. But allowing the public to quickly see any car's identity with their eyes and memorize it with their minds is quite a harsh constraint.
Maybe -- it helps the case for plates that often that reporting is almost always about accidents which means the fact that it's easy to remove or swap a plate and people frequently do doesn't undermine some of the plate advantages.
I do think it does undermine your robbers example (funny example: https://veronews.com/2022/12/11/sheriff-pulled-over-in-car-w... also note the officer that pulled him over for the chaser: https://veronews.com/2026/11/02/two-irc-deputies-arrested-af...).
I have sympathy for the reporting running from accidents case, but I'm wary that this isn't just an artifact of the normalization of intrusions that predated me.
Imagine by an accident of history we didn't have plates so far-- and they were proposed today in our world of surveillance automation. Perhaps in some places but not others, it's easier to imagine adopting mandatory identifying plates today in NY than in SD, WY, MT, for example.
It existed for ships and the law passed while George Washington was still president. Ships had to be registered and it was required for the ship's name to be legibly written on the stern.
We didn't extend the requirement to ordinary private boats until 1918 and even at that point only applied it to mechanically propelled boats.
The cameras are an attractive nuisance for people in power, including any and all law enforcement types. It only takes a few bad apples to spoil that entire ocean.
The real threat is the cameras’ very existence, and that is what has to be eliminated. If a thing doesn’t exist, then it can’t be abused.
That’s an important thing to keep in mind, when you are required to keep in mind the lessons of 1930s Germany. Or the Stasi from East Germany.
When you figure out how to guarantee that you can never, ever again have a 1930s Germany situation pop up, and a government that just casually throws out all the old laws, then we can talk about whether those kinds of cameras might make sense again.
What you're suggesting would mean that they wouldn't even have to throw out the laws. They could just install the new cameras themselves. So there's no difference.
It requires a reasonably balanced and trustworthy government no matter what.
Because to make historical queries you now have to monitor every vehicle all the time.
If there is an actionable crime with a plate number, you can notify on realtime hits. Why store everything and allow them to go back in time?
However, if they do anyway, there should be strong victims' rights protections so that the data is actually used during investigations.
There was a string of burglaries in our area a few years ago, and panopticon N-1 (Google Map's auto recording of all phone GPS traces for marketing information) could have found the perpetrators pretty much instantly.
They hit rural outbuildings in the middle of the night on camera, so timestamps were precise, but faces were obscured. A reverse geofence warrant keyed on time of arrival / departure would have narrowed it down to just the crooks with extremely high probability, and other details in the videos would have corroborated the GPS traces.
None of the victims were politically connected, so the police couldn't (by policy) run the reverse GPS lookups. This is the worst of both worlds: Our data is recorded to be used against us later, but if ever it would be useful, we do not have access to it. The same is true for vehicle black boxes / cameras. They record a few seconds before airbag deploy, but you usually are not allowed to access them as part of an insurance dispute (even the ones from your own car).
They should face criminal penalties for violating people’s rights
> the data is actually used during investigations.
Absolutely no! All that data collected without due process (judicial warrant, paper trail, whatever is the norm in your neck of the woods) has to be treated as tainted.
Maybe I’m naive, but I don’t see why it can’t be collected but not read until a warrant comes through. Similar to gmail data only being accessible by the police with a valid warrant. It seems like that would be enough to avoid egregious issues (fishing expeditions, disgruntled exes, etc.).
Because then you get a Brownshirt organization that just takes the data to pursue its political enemies while the courts catch up.
If the dataset does exist, then everyone (including the brownshirts) should have equal access to it, via due process. That should include all the data (even data about the brownshirts).
One litmus test: There must be a near-infinite amount of digital evidence that could be used to prosecute current ICE officers.
The way the system is currently setup, that data can only be used for blackmail or to selectively remove non-cooperating people from political office down the road (hint: the worst of the current ICE officers will eventually be the only ones with access to the data, and they'll be the ones doing the removing).
In a better system, any ICE victim would have the ability to expose the officers' crimes + successfully press for criminal charges.
Fact: the same principle applies to Rwanda.
Fact: the same principle applies to Myanmar.
Also fact: Hitler would've used the same law to throw you in jail for opposing the Holocaust.
Also fact: he would do that anyway with or without a law.
Jail your enemies is a failed strategy that turns you into the enemy.
Cannot get there from here, politically.
Do you know how long it has been since I last talked to coworkers selling their location information for a $50 Target gift card? One week. Do you know how many neighbors have Ring? All of them.
Privacy has no value to too many “normal people”.
Make it painful for Ring to subsidise themselves by collecting/selling/providing access to their data.
Concretely, for my examples, due process already should give victims access to the data, but does not:
Any judge would write a warrant to pull the reverse geofence data. There's a timestamped video of the robbery, and police took photos of the aftermath.
For the car accidents: At least let me have access to my own camera recordings! No warrant needed. I can imagine the police getting a warrant to pull it off the car too if they wanted (they probably already can).
IMO this is no different from recording and storing everyone’s phone calls in case the data later proves to be useful.
I might be OOTL and misinterpreting this but a web search for "panopticon N-1" returns only this thread. Is there any more information on this?
It's an open question whether geofence warrants are constitutional at all. I know that at least in the Fifth Circuit, they are not.
Which armed robbers were caught with this technology that were uncatchable before now? Seriously. Ruining all of privacy for everyone does not fix this. This is the same old “if you have nothing to hide” again and again and again and it’s been categorically wrong for hundreds of years. Nothing has changed. Expect the means.
20% of the entire world's prison population is in US jails.
I am not OK with giving everyone who works for the government complete knowledge of my associations and wherabouts at all times.
So with warrants we're essentially saying, "the government can track everyone's location and we're okay with that but they can't legally look at it without a warrant". Good luck seeing consequences for breaking that when we can't even get consequences for shooting people.
Still better than no warrants, it would be great to get warrants requirement. But we should not live in such a surveilled society.
It's still mass surveillance. Even if it requires a warrant.
Surveillance should work like this: You suspect some of a crime? Then you surveil them and investigate them. you need more powerful tools, then you need to get a warrant from a judge to surveil them more.
We shouldn't be investigating and surveilling people that aren't suspected of crimes. Mass surveillance treats everyone like criminals.
Being tough on crime instead of catch and release would get rid of the problem without implementing a surveillance state.
Under the US Constitution, it is absurd to think that:
If it was about safety and protecting privacy then the implementation would be completely different [1].[1] - Benn Jordan's secure 4A respecting design, and efficacy compared: https://youtu.be/OP5GDiLZ1Nw?t=2908
You don't exist fully privately, but the amount of privacy you used to get was worlds apart in the past. Only people who were in the same place at the same time, cared to look at you and recognized you would have a mental record of you being there. You can't reasonably extrapolate this to a world where entities from all over the country or even the world can have a full record of all the public places you were, organized as a timeline, recognized and processed automatically and available as irrefutable evidence forever. The people arguing this are hinging their argument on a technicality and the fact that the people of the past couldn't have foreseen the world of today. I bet you know full well the difference between automatic digital mass surveillance and your neighbor seeing you on the street.
> In the 90’s everyone was dead certain you couldn’t regulate software because it was speech
By that logic software can do anything at any time because it's software. The de facto assumption that your software has the 'right' to do anything stops where other people begin.
A burglar breaking into your house shouldn’t be able to claim privacy concerns about your security camera.