Dating the police is just such an astoundingly egregious violation of this principle that I can only wonder what, if anything, those people are thinking.
Anyway, the key takeaway seems to don't date anyone who dates the police. Firstly, because it directly puts your own safety at risk, as this article exemplifies. Secondly, because it demonstrates terrible judgment; it seems reasonable to assume they are likely to make other terrible decisions in the future.
"Whenever people have the opportunity to commit fraud and there is no monitoring, you can assume they are committing fraud."
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10213582-whenever-you-have-...
(I didn't check the book, though.)
I don’t see how there’s any tension between these statements. The overall occurrence of abuse can be rare while the most common form of the abuse that does occur is of officers tracking people they know.
And what is commonly rare in a country of 342 million? Prairie Grove, Illinois has 1930 people and he did this to at least 3 people according to the report. .15% of the population. If you extrapolate that out to the national population, its roughly 520k people. Or, the entire population of Sacramento, Ca, being victimized by law enforcement with a surveillance power they should never have been allowed to have.
But even that is the wrong focus. One could make the same case for rejecting police body cams because incidents of police abuse are rare, relatively speaking.
The real issue is that the platform isn't completely locked down by default with strict access control grants, monitoring, auditing, etc. Shoot I have way less access at my work to data and systems which do not have that level of sensitivity and have to go through multiple approval steps to be granted anything new.
But I guess those things don't help the sales pitches. To be fair policing the police isn't flock's job and doesn't make them money. Laws and regulations are the only real vehicles of change.
Sell to a LE agency in a state that doesn't allow data sharing in certain ways? Flock certainly won't disable it. They'll even still train you in how to use it.
Garrett is very much a believer in Minority Report.
First statement minimizes the problem's impact, second argues it's still worth tackling.
Attempts to damage state power to ensure crime isn’t prosecuted will be likely met with methods that are immune to them.
Given the constraints we operate under, the ideal number of unsolved crimes is not zero and the ideal number of crimes committed using state apparatus is also not zero. So being informed that either is non-zero is not of use to decision making in my opinion.
I feel this is an _extremely_ good point, the kind that seems obvious only once you hear it. But i feel there’s an implication that could be made explicit here — we should be looking at the distribution of both apparatus-enabled-crimes and unsolved-crimes when we’re discussing this sort of thing. And if those metrics aren’t tabulated for easy access, they probably should be.
I couldn't agree more. They're two different error rates for our society and measuring them accurately would help us go to where we should be on the curve.
Edit: wow I bet this is a project that would be _way_ too difficult to vibe code with AI, with well documented data sources and what not. Sure would be a shame if somebody proved me wrong.
People act like the only options are:
- make it so hard to log in that no one can use a system
- just give everyone root access
You can build systems of approval that are fast, obvious who should be approving and are auditable.
My opposition wouldn't change regardless but are those outcomes real?
What about a bike theft, a jacked car or a stolen parcel though?
There is a price to having information easily available to the law enforcement. There is a price to not having this information easily available to the law enforcement too.
Cops, at least where I live, don't give af about any of those crimes though. Bike gets stolen? You'll be lucky if they even show up at all, let alone do anything about it, surveillance data available or not. They largely don't even get prosecuted when caught.
If you for example knew that stealing had a penalty of 100% of the item value + 10% fine, with a 100% chance of getting caught, you'd never steal anything again even though the penalty is so much smaller than what it is currently in most countries. And then if you make a dumb decision as a teenager or in a lapse of judgement, it won't ruin your life.
The event predated Flock rollout though, so no idea if the distribution of camera sources has shifted.
Regardless though, in the end the phone location data meant a lot more than any of the camera data, which just confirmed the path from phone sources.
The city can set up its own camera for its own use. Is that really that wild of a proposal?
That whole premise of "what if lots of crime happens" -- already false.
Did you know that most places in America are at historically low crime rates in most of our lifetimes? It is garbage to say this needs deep societal focus right now. I don't give a shit about the hypothetical hurt feelings of small town cops whining that they don't have always-on spy equipment.
We do still need deep societal focus, but that's mostly around things like further getting lead out of homes and pipes.
As it is, you can assume that at the very least, every time your vehicle has passed one of the >100k Flock cameras, there's a database entry and a photo that will never, ever be deleted. Your full travel history from this point forward is available for a nominal fee, and without any regard for your privacy.
Furthermore, do you realize that you're free to photograph people in public and sell those images, no permission required: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nussenzweig_v._DiCorcia
People seem to struggle to wrap their head around the fact that privacy laws don't prevent people from recording them in public. You can be recorded at any time in public, by the government or another private person.
Yes, I'm aware of what "expectation of privacy" means. I've been a photographer for ~25 years.
> People seem to struggle to wrap their head around the fact that privacy laws don't prevent people from recording them in public. You can be recorded at any time in public, by the government or another private person.
This isn't about recording in public - it's about building a comprehensive dataset containing the movement and association history of the entire US population. Not only is that without a warrant, it's being collected prior to any accusation being made.
Maybe this needs to be restricted in some capacity, then.
Surveillance often doesn't directly capture crime on camera, but is rather used to identify who traveled to and from the crime scene around the time of the incident
And you're missing that, instead of specifically identifying a specific individual doing a specific thing, this network would be used to place under suspicion, investigation and possible arrest, people who's only documented action was "being somewhere."
Oh, and while your example is "committed a crime", that same network could easily be used to identity and track people who were, say, coming and going from protests. Or libraries. Or voting.
In the example above, the police wouldn't arrest every single person who entered and exited the parking lot. They'd arrest the person who walked out of the lot with your stolen luggage.
> Oh, and while your example is "committed a crime", that same network could easily be used to identity and track people who were, say, coming and going from protests
Again realize that this is legal right? https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/14/us/charlottesville-doxxin...
There's no right to have your public demonstrations off limits for recording. The whole point of a protest is to be seen. If someone is concerned that they will be associated with some group or cause because of their decision to protest, then they seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a protest is.
> Or voting
You realize the government already has that information? Voters literally filled out ballots and delivered it to the government. They don't need a camera to know who voted, they have the ballots.
Did you think our ballots tell the government who we were and how we voted?
Just, setting aside the rest of the idiocy of your defense here, that's ... a shocking thing to think as an adult in America.
And do explain the "idiocy" of the rest of my comment. Do you actually dispute anything I wrote? Do you think that law enforcement weren't monitoring groups like the Proud Boys, Nation of Islam, militia organizations, etc. before Flock came around?
That's more than enough information to correlate voting behavior after a couple of election cycles with a high degree of confidence.
Oh, and ballots aren't just for one race generally. By looking at what races that ballot voted in and a list of people present, there's a very good chance you'd be able to narrow it down to an individual in a single visit.
In my state, we have to sign our name on the envelope containing our ballot. If the government was corrupt and they wanted to identify how people voted, they could just look at the signature. No Flock required.
Of all the things to complain about Flock, the notion that it can somehow de-anonymize ballots is probably one of the most unusual I've heard.
It's not new tech.
This is very much a new thing.
You claimed ballots provided the government with the information they needed to know who voted.
I pointed that is untrue. Ballots explicitly do not.
The fact you posted that tells you know have a Google level understanding of the law in the US, and the fact you posted an article about private citizens using public data as proof of the legality of government-operated mass surveillance data tells me you're a deeply unserious person who should probably read Robert's writing in the majority opinion in Carpenter.
I really appreciate the irony of you alleging a "Google level understanding" on my part, when your own argument was tried in a court of appeals and failed.
The Ninth Circuit in US v Yang specifically did not rule on the applicability of Carpenter or whether ALPR's GPS database was sufficiently similar.
It ruled Yang lacked standing to sue on those grounds because you don't have any expectation of privacy in a rental car after you've turned it in.
It ... has absolutely nothing to do with anything.
I helpfully pointed out the actual case you'd cite in a different comment.
Try Googling that one.
So "The government might not know how you voted, but they know who voted!" still requires a lot of work defining what you mean by "the government".
Second, your "this is already legal!" link pointed to an article about private citizens utilizing publicly volunteered data sets with no legal authority or consequence. I have no idea what that has to do with anything. Other than it sort of proves that mass data collection is likely to generate injustices.
But yes, in the US, you do not have a presumption to privacy when out in public. It is not an assumed universal, but, especially when it comes to private use, public information and public activities are not assumed private and have little if any protections.
However, SCOTUS specifically called out in Carpenter that mass surveillance data (cell phone location in that case) can be treated as a "search" under our Fourth Amendment. When confronted with a case that would look very similar to large network of private surveillance data of otherwise public activity, the court said, "Nope." If the quality and quantity of the data is sufficiently detailed, it cannot be presumed to be "public" information, especially when the mechanism by which it is gathered does not require affirmative consent, and especially when the data is retroactively broad.
Carpenter is the opinion which the ACLU cites, repeatedly, when they attack Flock's network of cameras. Cursory reading about whether Flock constitutional will point you towards Carpenter, and the ACLU's argument that it should/will apply to Flock.
We've had exactly one real test of that argument (Schmidt v Norfolk) that has yet to be make it to SCOTUS. The district court in that case ruled Carpenter didn't apply - but it was a district court whose opinion SCOTUS overruled in Carpenter too.
The next SCOTUS test of mass surveillance data usage will likely be the pending opinion in Chatrie. SCOTUS-watchers seemed divided on where they think the court will land, so who knows. Though based on the dissents in Carpenter, and the current make-up of the court, it's hard to see a world in which the original dissenters change their mind and that ACC doesn't join with them for a 5-4 opinion the other way under some narrow condition set.
I have no idea why you think the government monitoring specific groups has anything to do with mass surveillance networks beyond that the words monitoring and surveillance have similar meanings.
You seem to just be saying things.
We've had at least two: in US vs Yang, the defense tried to invalidate the use of ALPR data using Carpenter to try and argue that it violated the Fourth Amendment. The Ninth Circuit disagreed and did not accept that argument.
You didn't think these cities actually own these Flock cameras, did you?
They key difference is not whether they own their cameras but the automatic data sharing with other agencies and their cameras. Arguably law enforcement does this casually on request anyways but the drastically reduced friction of an automatic system enables easy abuse.
An officer may hesitate to ask a neighboring agency for data on their girlfriend, and would likely be very hesitant to file actual paperwork to request it. But a search in Flock's interface is probably all of the same legal peril in a venue which doesn't feel as intimidating or risky to do and doesn't see the same level of human review or scrutiny.
Obviously in other places, no.
>technology and professional analysts with helping detectives make arrests in 53%
"technology and analysts" "help" "make arrests" not surveillance, not convictions and only the implication that they wouldn't have made the arrest otherwise.
Like look at the example: somebody calls in an OD and a guy sees that the dude ODing matches (the clothing of) a suspect in some other crime and so they arrest him.
Once again an arrest is not a conviction but also what part of that needed/used pervasive surveillance?
ALSO a conviction is not the same thing as truth.
ALSO ALSO by basic subtraction the panopticon wasn't even helpful 47% of the time.
It used to be that news articles would claim that the police used “CCTV from local businesses” to catch a crook. Even back then I knew this was cover for Ring, Flock and who knows what else. they just didn’t want the bad press.
At this point you don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to understand that parallel construction happens all the time. They have more tools that we know about, and they want to keep it that way.
Everyone should throw some money to 404 media. They are independent and doing the best work right now to keep these things in the public eye.
they look for a car that is very similar if not exact make and model of thier stolen vehicle, then they "clone" the victims license plate with a sheet of embossment copper and a stylus, apply paint at thier shop and affix the imposter to the crime vehicle. that buggers the whole LPR thing.
they can replicate dozens of plates in a day and offer the service for contras.
you would have to realize, it is not feasible for a car to be in location 1 thenbe in location 2 many miles away in a few minutes.
the odd thing about criminals is thier effort to perpetuate crime is often far greater than getting a job, but is somehow the preferable option.
You say that but just last week there was a post here about how LPR claimed that the same car was in two locations in a timeframe that would have required the car to have been traveling non-stop at 160mph for 20 minutes through suburban streets, and even then authorities and proponents were defending it as plausible, or that the LPR was right, but there might just have been timing issues, or, or, or.
i think in this case the LPR was right, the same plate number was in two different places, the assumption of how many plates were involved needs review.
160mph for 20min through suburban streets, that kind of attracts attention, there would be a lot of complaints and witnesses if that happened
The more cameras in the network the faster and more likely a duplicated plate will be spotted.
I’m 100% sold on the results.
Unfortunately it also enables a good deal of more heinous crimes against the people its supposed to protect, by the people who are supposed to be protecting them.
Cops: "Well he probably didn't steal them himself."
Me: "Even so, knowingly selling stolen property is a crime too, no?"
Cops: "..."
I guess I’m old enough to remember when 99.9% of us on hacker news were…well, hackers. We valued privacy and freedom over surveillance and “results.”
I miss those days.
The relative value of one over the other depends on the absolute value of either. In a Mad Max scenario, very few would value the principles of privacy and freedom over the immediate need to reestablish basic order.
Take auto theft as an example. Depending on how old you are, the recent spike in auto theft is either "nothing compared to the 80s" or "entirely unacceptable in civilized society"; in select cities, the rate almost tripled in five years[0] (an incredible jump), though remaining well below the historical peak.
However, case clearance rates are at an all time low, which I'm sure furthers frustration for the victims. That is, you're statistically less likely to be a victim of auto theft today than during the historical peak, but if you are, you're statistically more likely to be SOL.
You're probably approaching this from a civil libertarian point of view, but the Constitution is not a suicide pact[1]. Members of society who collectively uphold the law also have a vested interested in the maintenance of the conditions that would further perpetuate upholding the law, i.e. law and order.
[0]: https://counciloncj.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/motor-veh...
[1]: Terminiello v. Chicago, 337 U.S. 1 (1949)
Many Flock cameras are also privately owned, too.
You’d be surprised how many there are.
An officer doesn't need a warrant to sit at a cross section and write down license plate numbers. A device doing the same thing is also legal.
I find a lot of people fail to realize this, both in regards to surveillance and otherwise. Recently in my city there was a big uproar about a nudist beach that was at risk of having nudity prohibited. So a bunch of nudists went out and paraded around the beach while disrobed, some of them bringing their children with them. People sailed by and photographed many of the nudists, and put their images online. Many alleged that must be a violation of some privacy law, but no, the law in Washington (and most, perhaps all, of the US) is quite clear: if you're in public, you can be filmed and photographed. If you don't want to be filmed nude, don't go walking around naked in public.
Regardless, back to the topic at hand, the fact that Flock cameras a in public spaces does in fact mean that there's no requirement to get a warrant to use them.
This is false. While there is no strongly established precedent yet, there are certainly serious and plausible legal arguments being made that unlimited collection and collation/cross-referencing/etc. of "public" information can under certain circumstances constitute a search. It will most certainly not "escape scrutiny moving forward".
e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_theory_of_the_Fourth_Am...
This is as strong as precedent gets, short of a SCOTUS decision.
> This is as stromg (sic) as precedent gets, short of a SCOTUS decision.
Another egregious misrepresentation. The courts are obviously making their rulings as narrow as possible because they know the "mosaic theory" style arguments have some merit. Look at US vs. Yang, for example, in which the court dodged the issue completely with some argument about rental car contract periods. And Schmidt v. Norfolk, which IIUC directly challenges Flock ALPRs on 4A grounds, is pending.
Lots and lots of scrutiny. Your claim that the conclusion is foregone here is obviously absurd. Even when/if it gets to SCOTUS I expect they'll write as narrow an opinion as they can get away with, in whatever direction it falls.
Flying drones are not required, stationary cameras are more than enough outside of specific scenarios like active pursuit.
But no, I just like to dispel the myths people have about their imaginary right to not be filmed in public. Whether it's by the government or by other private people.
You're being exposed to a very specific group of people when you read Hacker News or Reddit. Plenty of people are happy to have Flock cameras in their neighborhood on account of the improved ability to investigate crime.
I dont believe you think the police force could replicate the injest of information these systems allow do you?
The point is, the plain view doctrine means the police don't need a warrant to record observation that are in plain view. The licence plates of cars on the street are in plain view.
I really don't understand how people got this idea in their head that their license plates are private information . How do red light cameras identify cars? How does parking enforcement work? By recording people's license plates. The whole reason why we mandate that cars display license plates to is to facilitate identifying vehicles.
Our country is no longer a country of laws. Laws are only as good as they are enforced. The SCOTUS, the DOJ, the FBI, and congress have openly abdicated any constitutional responsibility to provide checks and balances to reign in the abuses we see posted to HN every day.
I disagree with them, but that isn't relevant.
More generally you're confidently making wild extrapolations from the current very limited case law without regard for either its limitations or the general temperature that can be inferred from the full opinions.
It's an encrypted broadcast, not a public broadcast. This is why the police needed to ask the mobile service providers for this data. It is not public.
> For some reason querying that dataset requires a warrant but querying a broadly analogous dataset from the operator of a network of cameras doesn't?
The data is not broadly analogous. One is encrypted radio traffic. The other is unencrypted, and you can record it yourself with a pen, paper, and the Mk I eyeball. This is why the "plain view" doctrine applies.
Again, the courts have already ruled on the use of ALPRs. The defense tried to use US vs Carpenter in US vs Yang, and the courts did not accept that argument that ALPRs are analogous to cell phone location data.
At least according to the internet which knows everything.
Most people don’t give AF
With flock searches, I (usually) can't because Illinois law exempts ALPR records. Here's the most egregious example I've seen: https://www.muckrock.com/foi/waukegan-11153/flock-safety-alp...
Privacy protects personal dignity, not just illicit behavior. We close bathroom doors, keep journals, and have intimate conversations not because we are breaking the law, but because we value personal modesty and boundaries.
We are quickly approaching a time when we are all guilty until proven innocent by voyeuristic power-hungry psychopathic megalomaniacs who cry the old cry of "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear"
That said, warrants protect law enforcement like searching someone's house. It seems that some less intrusive powers like running someone's plate has been given to the police with lower controls.
And it makes sense right? If every judge needed to approve every potential plate check, it might be too much for daily operations.
So option A, push towards everything being protected under warrants.
Sure, option B, how about protection mechanisms that sit somewhere in the middle? For example, what if some powers were audited (sounds like they are logged already) on a probabilistic basis. What if judges could inspect some fraction of searches after the fact, and ask for justification afterwards. Of course this would have no effect on the actual search, but it would have long term effects on future searches.
Even if 1% of lesser searches are audited, I'm sure most policemen would be much more weary about using them for personal matters like stalking women.
We can pay the regular fees that advertisers pay to have billboards up.
And if we're not allowed to do that, why is Flock?
Again, I'm surprised by how many people don't realize that it's legal to film people in public.
none of them were cops
> Uses slop AI art
Fastest way to make something into a farce.