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Comment by Dr_tldr | Hacker News Reader

This is pretty shocking and should be more widely publicized. A government agency covertly spying on the public with no warrants, no disclosures, and a fundamental lack of accountability rarely ends well. Even worse, both parties and most of the state and federal government bureaucracy are in fundamental agreement about the need for a national security state, only disagreeing about some of the implementation details.

People in tech are in the best position to create some pushback on this, be it through lobbying as stubbornly single-issue voters, or creating some direct (legal) technical counter-measures. It's not that hard to tell which ones are bugged if you inspect the light poles closely, and threatening to imprison people who take pictures of public lightpoles would almost certainly create more backlash than they're willing to risk.

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Can someone start an indiegogo to fund an independent photographer to take high-resolution photos of every utility pole in Seattle?? And then crowdsource inspection of them to identify the cameras?? I would surely contribute and participate.

Or write an app to capture the photos and upload them to a workflow? Similar to http://www.mapillary.com?

You could prioritize high-crime and high-traffic areas, ignoring most boring residential streets. A bike currier could probably get pictures of 90% of them in a weekend.

Or crowd-sourcing people to contribute photos from their neighbourhood and whenever they're out walking around.

A mobile app which:

a) captures GPS location and a photo upload

b) browse pictures like Tinder (with high-res zoom) and upvoting/commenting on ones you think are likely

c) browse (likely) utility poles near your location

Just set up a contest for geocachers, who will immediately dedicate hours of free mapping labor in pursuit of a trinket for the most camera finds.

They're not doing anything Google isn't doing. Public streets are fair game for anyone with a camera, and that includes the police. It's best if that doesn't change.

>Public streets are fair game for anyone with a camera, and that includes the police. It's best if that doesn't change.

While this logic, the "no expectation of privacy" principle, has long been the standard, and is certainly the logic law enforcement and businesses like Google push hard, I think we really do need to have a public discussion and consideration of how technology enabled Emergent Effects, with emphasis, creates new phenomena that are simply completely beyond the realm of human-oriented common sense that was operated under before. Yes, any single human has always in principle been able to happen to see an individual instance of something in view of public property, or follow somebody around, at any point throughout human history. With the advent of the camera, they could even possibly make a clearer, permanent record of that, but that didn't really change much either. Even simple basic video tape was a true shift.

But the ever increasing volume of storage and processing available at ever shrinking cost, combined with similar cost/quality improvements in sensors, objectively changes the situation. Even if it's 100% purely on public property where there is "no expectation of privacy" and involves nothing but video, a ubiquitous surveillance system plugged in to sufficient persistent storage and data processing creates capabilities that are on a different level. It equates to effective location tracking of any individual for a start, but additionally allows inferences to be drawn about everyone they meet with. It becomes possible to start back tracking people's relationship network graphs, and discerning all sorts of higher level private information. The most simple classic example would be knowing John Doe visited a private residence late at night with Jane Doe who is not his wife in a repeated pattern, and boom, blackmail material, but it could easily be used to make high-accuracy judgements on everything from health issues to private interests to overall group memberships.

This is a huge amount of potential power, and it's objectively something very very different from having a single warrant for an individual and having some investigators try to follow them around. Resource usage matters: in the end, all security is fundamentally an economic equation. If an adversary, or even an agency that nominally is supposed to be on "our side" can suddenly do a technique 100000x cheaper and more effectively then it cannot necessarily be judged by old standards. Emergent effects or properties that do not exist in a lesser collection of individual parts are a huge deal in all parts of our world, and they're becoming a big deal for information now too.

We really should not just allow "well, the police/military intel/investigators/big data corp are only doing what any individual could except a billion times more" to go unchallenged, because that "except a billion times more" is a huge deal. No, an individual human could never do that sort of thing themselves, or even with a huge group. Even the biggest, best funded police states of a half century ago, using far more intrusive techniques, couldn't manage the kind of efficient ubiquitous population categorization, information gathering and tracking now becoming possible "merely" through what's available from the sight of public roads. Don't dismiss what a change omniscience makes. I really hope the courts start to recognize that at some point what government is asking for is not a simple extension of what they've always had, it's something entirely new.

Yeah, in cases like these we immediately jump to the legality argument, whereupon the question swings on the reasonable expectation of privacy.

But, for me, there is something beyond strict legality. It's a question of what kind of society we want, and what kind of relationship the government should have with its people.

That's true, but the courts should make decisions based on what is legal currently. And unfortunately the Constitution doesn't give any right to privacy. Only a right to not have yourself or your possessions be subject to unreasonable physical searches by the government.

If google or 'anyone with a camera' established a persistent surveillance operation outside your house that is not legal, that is stalking. http://www.nij.gov/topics/crime/stalking/Pages/welcome.aspx

I also want to say that there was a recent court decision, I don't recall where in the US, that stated law enforcement can't set up camp outside your home and watch your front door without a warrant.

Which is funny to me they try this anyway, how hard is it to get a warrant these days?

> Which is funny to me they try this anyway, how hard is it to get a warrant these days?

Pretty difficult if you don't actually have a specific target

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States

(IANAL) The majority opinion in Kyllo seems to have established that external surveillance featuring commercial, off-the-shelf devices did not require a warrant. Anything which features non-commercially available technology does.

Notably, Scalia dissented in his majority as arguing that even commercial availability (which changes as future tech popularizes) was a dangerous precedent to set and the line should be further in favor of home privacy. The dissent argued that the external nature of the surveillance made a warrant unnecessary.

I wonder if those license plate scanners could be considered stalking.

In Germany for example that is not the case. Which is why Google had a number of problems getting street view started there.

While not comparing to Google, this has been supported in the courts when license plate readers were challenged. even when private companies kept the data.

While I agree what happens on public streets should be open to the public there should however be privacy rules and such when the actor is government or a private entity operating on the behalf or working with the government

> Public streets are fair game for anyone with a camera, and that includes the police

With the resources of modern IT, it renders the 4th Amendment almost useless: It only applies in your windowless, lead-lined basement, with communication coming in or out.

Sorry, that should read:

"... with no communication coming in or out."

But we're not talking about infrared cameras or wall-penetrating radar or even directional antennas... just cameras that have the same limitations as a human standing on the street corner.

That, in itself, does not constitute stalking or invasion of privacy.

If we pass laws saying "No cameras in public," or "No stationary cameras in public," or "No cameras capable of storing more than X megabytes of image data per day in public," or "No public cameras equipped with OCR capability," then we will handicap ourselves far more than we will the police. (Who will, in any event, simply ignore any laws they find inconvenient.)

Infrared cameras need a warrant right now, so probably anything else that sees through walls into a residence would also.

There are windows, garbage, the very many commercial tracking sensors in your home and your pocket, Internet connection, phone calls (at least metadata), etc. Plus everything you do outside your home. Infrared sensors are only one small possibility.

it's a political and not at all a technical problem. legal counter measures are simply made illegal.

It's going to become a social problem when people start knocking/shooting them down, covering them, or spraying the lenses.

no problem, they will simply go to jail

http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2016/04/11/red-light-robin-hood-...

So they'll become more careful.

Good luck putting everyone in jail. But hey, we'll all be safer in cells, right? That's what this is for, isn't it? Our safety?

Have you looked at red light camera traffic death stats? This person cited in the story is correct.

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