City Council to install 20 cameras as automated license-plate recognition system

In other words, you can opt-out of having your comings and goings monitored... as long as you own at least 1 acre of land (LAH's minimum lot size) in one of the top 10 wealthiest ZIP codes in the country.

I wish I lived in a city where 2 converter thefts every 4 decades was the bar for "serious theft problem". The idea that this will "deter criminals" is a joke. That's as likely as hidden photo radar slowing down drivers.

The police chief with statements like "Oh we won't deploy this to residential areas, unless it's on a temporary basis for a specific crime spree" - does 2 thefts in a week, after 40 years count as a spree?

targeting "areas where we're seeing the most amount of crimes we think these would solve." - why not deploy actual police officers to these areas?

Look, I'm a law-abiding citizen, property owner, and as fed up with the light treatment of property crime as these people, but giving carte blanche to private companies to sell tools of mass surveillance and only go on the word of politicians and law enforcement to "trust us"? No thanks.

This is like peak 2023. You create a little bubble where the cost to commit a crime increases slightly, so some percentage of criminals just go somewhere else, maybe even the next neighborhood over, where the risk is lower. Meanwhile, nobody is willing to fund the support services necessary to actually reduce the incentive to commit a crime, so crime numbers stay the same or go up, but they happen to someone else instead of you. Great stuff. If they install some spikes on their park benches homelessness will be solved too! And all with just a few dollars and a 1 hour board meeting. Incredible.

Eventually everyone decides to play the arms race (but mom they have cameras the next town over) and we get the surveillance dystopia that nobody really wanted. Anyone who tries to fix it now has to face "but now randos are stealing muh catalytic converters" as an argument against taking down the cameras. And meanwhile, people still don't have food, shelter, medical care, or a support network. But we spent all that money. It just blows my mind and no I'm not going to run for office to fix it. Sorry.

- Remove their plates before committing a crime

- Use stolen plates

- Make fake plates and put them on other vehicles and have friends drive them around far away places at the same time so they can say, "Your readers must be broken!"

- Make note of where the readers are (since they're fixed) and avoid using those streets during their crimes?

- Other stuff I'm probably not thinking of

The amount of abuse by the police that this opens the citizens up to is just ridiculous.

As mentioned, everybody is supposed to have a license plate - even a temporary one. In reality, it’s rarely to never enforced, cars and/or license plates are frequently stolen (especially Hyundai/Kia), all manner e-ink plates even stickers plates are allowed. Frankly this has really enabled a cottage industry of thieves and criminals.

I’m generally against a surveillance state, but the utter lack of enforcement on this issue enables and possibly encourages a range crimes

1. identify your car stereo bluetooth ID

2. any bluetooth devices on your vehicle

3. has direct access to national registry of stolen plates

4. and a mobile modem in which to send alerts with.

5. HD webcam auto-zooming to the driver's side of the vehicle.

6. lift On-Star ID

Hey, what do I know? I'm just spitballing out there.

These have 72-hour data retention and 30-day data retention at the airport and waterfront.

While SB’s are not placed around the city to track all license plates like the ones in Palo Alto, Reifschneider’s statement of Palo Alto’s retention limits being “the shortest in the state” is not fully accurate.

PDF: https://santabarbaraca.gov/sites/default/files/2022-06/Final...

We went through this exercise last year in Oak Park, with our local PD requesting 20+ cameras --- a tactical misstep, because they'd been piloting a small number of cameras, and the larger request drove their acquisition costs across the threshold of needing board approval, which they were surprised to discover was contentious.

Because the board was split on the prospect of giving OPPD a Village-wide "Google for all movements of any car everywhere" capability, we were able to extract concessions. We got board approval for a much-reduced deployment (I think we have 8 cameras), contingent on recommendations from our citizen police oversight and IT commissions (I'm on one of those).

In the end, we got a General Order issued from OPPD limiting the use of cameras to violent crime, all uses traceable to case numbers reviewable by our police oversight commission, no usage from personal machines by OPPD staff but rather only OPPD-issued equipment, mandatory 2FA, and some other things I forget.

We were much less successful at regulating data sharing. This is a huge feature of Flock, and part of its viral customer acquisition strategy. OPPD found out about Flock by getting access to data from neighboring municipalities; many police departments run "transparency portals" to show you who they're sharing with, and it's often "every law enforcement agency in the region". Which makes sense, if you look at it from the perspective of the police department! But it makes it much harder to regulate how cameras are used, because our PD can't issue General Orders for other PDs, and Flock doesn't appear to provide any tools to enforce limits on data sharing.

The obvious thing to ask for in a pilot deployment is "turn all the sharing off", but that's hard when Flock's foot in the door was sharing from some other department.

I'd have been happier if we'd ended up with zero Flock cameras, but I'm not sure how political realistic that would have been, and I'm surprised we were able to extract as many concessions as we did.

Probably the most important thing we got was a commitment to a review of the effectiveness of the cameras after a year; presumably, if OPPD can't tie the cameras to solving specific violent crimes, we'll stop paying for the cameras.

The Village Board didn't enjoy being blindsided by a random acquisition request, and demanded a process be put in place for future surveillance tech requests. So one happy side effect of this is that we teed up ACLU CCOPS†, which I expect to see passed in the next couple months. CCOPS theoretically prevents municipal agencies from deploying surveillance tech without board approval, even if the cost is below purchasing thresholds.

Get involved in this stuff. You'd be surprised how little engagement there is at the local level, which is where a lot of the most important governing decisions are made.

† https://www.aclu.org/legal-document/community-control-over-p...

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The main problem I see is that people are completely distracted by privacy from corporations - when what we really need to be worried about is privacy from our own governments. So much ink is spilled talking about cookies, ads tracking, etc. But really what's the worst a corporation is going to do? Try to sell you something?

Meanwhile, we continue to allow our governments to regulate and legislate ever more intrusive invasions of our privacy. And they can put us in jail, or worse.

This also gets blurry as governments take increasing control of companies, to the point that some are just about arms of the government, surveilling us in ways that the government can't (yet) do on their own - and being forced to pass that data to the government under penalty of law themselves.

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A lot of the pushback I got is that corporations can do bad things with your data, which of course is true. We should strive for privacy in the general sense, from corporations and our government. I just think, especially outside HN, that the the conversation is far too heavily weighted toward corporations when the far greater harm comes from our governments - and almost no time in general public media is given to this.

I got some pushback as well that if corporations surveil you, they give your data to the government anyway, so it's important to have privacy from corporations. Which is ironic, since that's much like what I said in my last paragraph.

We need privacy generally, but I see law after law and article after article talking about privacy from corporations, while our governments are gaining more and more ground into surveilling us - often with the help of corporations. But let's keep the focus on exactly how our governments are spying on us and try to address that.

Ad-targeting is a small problem compared to the bigger issue of government surveillance - often via corporations (even if I agree that corporate spying is also a problem).

Let's focus on some laws that take away the governments ability to demand our data from Google, FB, etc. Let's stop allowing our governments to put cameras all over the place. Let's demand that our intelligence agencies stop spying on us with wide nets. Let's stop allowing our police forces to buy sophisticated tracking software and phone break-in software.