Pump the Brakes on Your Police Department's Use of Flock Safety
aclu.org
aclu.org
You either had to have a cop or a PI tail you, or spend time and effort talking to neighbors and acquaintances collecting information and correlating it, and it was much harder to do so secretly.
Technology has reduced the cost of surveillance by several orders of magnitude, and although the premise is unchanged - that you've never had privacy in public - the practical impact has changed in an extremely disturbing way.
I think we're long overdue to rethink and strengthen privacy protections in public in the US. Technological limits, and policy limits on specific implementations are better than nothing, but it's clear to me that surveillance will continue to get cheaper and thus your effective privacy in public will continue to erode until a culture and legal shift in public privacy expectations. I'm not optimistic about that.
But that "everyone" isn't a single entity recording everywhere in public with the intent of providing tracking information of everyone else. If I'm in the background of someone's selfie and posts it online, it could be used to get my location at a specific time, sure, but their intent wasn't to do so and the scope of their recording is dramatically more limited than Flock.
I understand how if you wave away all concepts of fallibility or enforceability, you can say to people, "It's cool that all this data exists, just don't be creepy," but you can't wave those concepts away.
The idea that laws are clear-cut is largely a programmers fantasy.
Related: there's a lot of people who think that if you don't technically break the law then you're off the hook.
Uh, no, not how law works. The letter of the law doesn't matter, the spirit does. Being an asshole but not technically breaking the law is still illegal.
Yes, that's a lot different than code, isnt it? But it has to be.
The reason I'm smug is that technical people think they're hyper intelligent and cracked the code.
Ha! Those silly law makers! Don't they know I perfectly followed the laws algorithm and hit an edge case? Now they HAVE to let me off the hook!
No they don't. Why would they have to do that? Laws aren't algorithms, they're natural language intended to curb bad behavior.
If your behavior is bad, and a judge or jury thinks it's bad, you're getting curbed.
The inverse of that is you can actually break the law and get away with it, if the behavior isn't bad. Maybe it's justified, maybe you're a struggling single mother or something... the jury can just say "nahhh" and you go home.
You discovered that there are certain amounts of judgment calls and subjectivity in the legal system, and then you seemed to get really excited, stop thinking, and start patting yourself on the back for your incredible insight. This whole, "Boom, sometimes people use human judgment legal cases, bet you NEVER THOUGHT OF THAT you STUPID TECH PERSON" is the world's most banal insight and the fact that you seem to think it's the entire analysis of the situation suggests that you're a stupid person.
Go find a lawyer (ie, not a tech person), and try this out on them.
Of course there is an element of subjectivity in every law and every case. But there is also a serious and deliberate attempt by the entire apparatus of the legal system to in fact systematize the way that the legal code is applied to human behavior. Yes, there are limits both to how far that systematization can go based on the complexity of real life and how far people want to let it go. But it's a matter of degree, and your whole line about how judges and juries just think that they can and should punish any behavior they think is "bad" without reference to a systemic law is stupid and incorrect.
Sometimes of course laws are written to be extremely vague and judgment based. Those laws have objectively bad outcomes, and are usually either quietly dustbinned, reformed, or the legal system attempts to systematize them, creating judicial doctrines that apply actual rules to how they work. (And, because again it seems like I'm talking to a very naive person, I'll caveat that of course such systems do not remove all ambiguity -- they merely manage it). And this is because the lawyers and judges that you want to imagine as agreeing with you recognize that a system in which you go in front of a judge and he just decides if you're "bad" is a terrible system.
And now I predict that you're going to answer this with some kind of big "nuh-uh, you're dumb." Here's what I suggest instead: I'm done with this thread. If you actually want to improve your understanding of the world instead of trying to shore up your ego, go and find someone in the legal world and ask them what they think of your takes here.
> Having no expectation of privacy in public
>"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
-H. L. Mencken
Oh lord, think of the children folks. We're going to have to shut it all down.
The absolutist "no public privacy" stance suggests that I would be ok (legally and morally) to create a widespread camera system that tracks cellphone screens in public and automatically records any passwords that are being entered within view of the cameras and sends them to me. This is ok because, in the absolutist view, your screen and finger movements were visible in public. This feels pretty wrong to me.
It's the difference between targeted surveillance and dragnet surveillance. Technology has made things that were previously only possible through targeted surveillance to be cheaply achieved through dragnet means, both to governments and individual citizens.
“Breaking The Creepy AI in Police Cameras”, Benn Jordan [36min, 1.7m views, 9d ago]
There's a lot of local Flock maps out there. You can also submit your own.
For those who are more inclined to direct protest, you can spraypaint the lenses and/or the solar panels. If you dont want to get caught with spraypaint, use nutella or peanut butter. Its sticky and easily spreadable. Not that I would ever recommend vandalization.
Sure, the EFF and ACLU are going the legal route. That's all they can do.
Can you describe what this is?
If this is related to your other point about spraypainting lenses, I don't want to accidentally start clicking links for Discords about vandalizing government operations from my home IP address.
It's also illogical to encourage this behavior if your goal is protesting. Smart protesters would practice the most basic of OPSEC practices, like not joining random Discord links shared without context.
Yeah, if you lack imagination ;)
There are many, many forms of protesting that don't escalate to destruction. I really think you're exaggerating what the risks are here. For one, VPNs and disposable accounts exist.
But I truly don't think that clicking on a discord link that already has 1500 people in it is going to be problematic to any degree that would lead to prosecution, banning, etc.
This comment section is about efforts to avoid driving past ALPR cameras that might collect your license plate number while doing innocuous driving around.
Do you not see the logical inconsistency with encouraging people to join a Discord from a comment that talks about vandalizing government property, an actual crime?
Surprisingly ironic, given that the topic is about security cameras from a company that collects data and shares it with law enforcement.
If you don't want to put yourself into a limited risky situation, then you're good. But braver people will and that's okay.
Joining random Discord links from people discussing how to vandalize government property (a literal crime): Perfectly fine, nothing to worry about, just click the link and don't ask questions?
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.Not exaggerating. Have had multiple friends lose Discord accounts suddenly because an old Discord they forgot about was flagged for illegal activity. There's an entire subreddit full of similar posts.
> There are many, many forms of protesting that don't escalate to destruction.
The comment with the Discord was giving advice for vandalizing the cameras. Direct quote to what I was responding to:
> you can spraypaint the lenses and/or the solar panels. If you dont want to get caught with spraypaint, use nutella or peanut butter. Its sticky and easily spreadable.
The discord itself isn't about the destruction of the ALPRs. It's just a community to map the devices and to understand their use throughout the US. Things people do outside of that community is separate.
Have also seen others erect new signs... just conveniently enough right in front of the lenses.
I have to be honest: I don't really want people who wish to avoid police tracking in my neighborhood. I don't care why you don't want to be tracked; I suspect that some subset of those who don't want to be tracked may be criminals, and there's zero loss to me from reduced vehicular traffic, so why not? Why not take advantage of the perceived threat to privacy? It's like putting signs up on one's home or business windows that advertise surveillance cameras are in place — it's either neutral or a win to me no matter why the existence of said surveillance bothers someone.
Governments are not stupid and such tactics don't work.
[1] I was a juror on a case years ago, maybe 2010 - some dudes robbed a jewelry store early in the morning. It took the cops about 15 minutes to figure out who did it because the crooks all brought their cell phones, and it was early, so they were the only cell phones in the area at the time. The accused looked shell-shocked during the trial when the cops explained this. Oh yeah, it didn't help that they told all their friends what they had done, and they tried to pawn the jewelry to a former cop.
AI startup Flock thinks it can eliminate all crime in America
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44561716 ("Oakland cops gave ICE license plate data; SFPD also illegally shared with feds (sfstandard.com)", 563 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40222649 ("Flock Safety is the biggest player in a city-by-city scramble for surveillance (newsobserver.com)", 143 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41979258 ("License Plate Readers Are Creating a US-Wide Database of More Than Just Cars (wired.com)", 24 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33994205 ("Flock is Building a New AI-Driven Mass-Surveillance System [pdf] (aclu.org)", 15 comments)
Benn Jordan did a great video on this.
People on here regularly bash the EU's GDPR, but blocking this kind of corporate-driven police state is a heavy point in its favor.
Huh? Sheriffs are top law enforcement for a county, not a particular city. There's only one per county, everyone else is a deputy. This seems strange for someone like the ACLU to not know this
Additionally, they're the only law enforcement officer directly accountable to the people, since they're elected. This isn't true of literally any other law enforcement at any level (local to fed).
I believe that is an aberration in WA state though.
And the other neighboring county, Prince William, has a distinct sheriff, police department, and the detention center runs itself (not the sheriff). So the sheriff only does court room security and tracking of fugitives.
Usually this is probably a good thing, but sometimes their need to be popular with locals means the position gets filled by loud mouthed showboaters who even get themselves into national news with their not always harmless antics. Most of the most famous/notorious police in America have been sheriffs for this reason. Joe Arpaio, Mike Chitwood, etc.
A “small-town sheriff” is a common idiom describing the sheriff of a county whose seat is a small town, rather than big city. It is a common phrase in American English.
This seems strange that someone commenting on HN that has enough concern for American society to have an opinion about what the ACLU should not know this.
Not everyone. Only the people with access to the surveillance data. This asymmetry is a big problem.
I sort of wish we could go full ADS-B[0] with cars and have public decentralized tracking (like [1]). Level the playing field for everybody.
Since I don't think we can put the genie back in the bottle I'd love to see what kind of useful applications could be created if everybody had access to the same surveillance data that government and large corporations have.
The "what about stalkers" argument always comes next. I suspect being a stalker would be more difficult if the victim (or their agents) had the ability to react to surveillance data about the stalker.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Dependent_Surveillan...
If you knew the location of every police car or city councilman's car, what would that change?
2 - you're lowballing the problem. It's not just current location, it's your full movement history.
I would be much less concerned about the issue if it were limited to the equivalent of a small village. The problem is that it's not.
No. These systems aren't just local, even if the institutions installing them are.
I'm saying that if my privacy is compromised to the people in my immediate community, that's many orders of magnitude better than my privacy being compromised in a widespread, industrial way. At least I know the people in my community.
More importantly, the privacy invasion isn't going to be as all-encompassing as what happens with systems like flock, where everything gets put into databases and combined with the data in other databases. And the potential for me suffering unintended consequences are far lower with the small village.
I was recently reading "A Hangman's Diary", which included a Forward for the modern reader. It would appear that outsiders were viewed with extreme suspicion in those times. Obvi that's just a single snapshot of a single region, but it makes sense.
"what did this person do that they left all their family and friends to come to our town"
We should not be expending effort trying to regulate the state's ability to observe and record any publicly observable thing. When the state takes action to deliberately make public or otherwise observe things that are reasonably private, then we can activate the right to be free of searches and seizures without probably cause.
The one area that I do feel affects this particular debate is whether it should be legal to conceal your vehicle's identity, so long as it is not being done for fraudulent or criminal purposes. Here I think the fact that your car's identity is being observed and recorded is sufficient cause to make it reasonable to mask or alter your license place or other identifying aspects of your car.
But then what can we do? Are we supposed to just never leave our homes? If we can't regulate the power of the state to minimize the harm it can cause, then all is lost.
Also, Flock isn't just a "power of the state" sort of thing. It's a private company and is often used by private entities.
What if a police officer or a nosy neighbor is watching your house specifically and writes down your comings and goings? You surrender a certain amount of privacy by leaving a private space, and this is just how the world works.
The Flock is a private company does not entitle them to fewer powers than the state. The state has a lot of power and is severely constrained; many of those constraints simply do not apply to private entities and individuals. The only reason why this is an issue at all is that law enforcement uses data from Flock, and the various rights that you have prevent agents of the state from doing things that the state itself is not entitled to do.
For "harm" you need to be extremely specific. If the state uses this data to blackmail you or extort you, then they are committing the crimes of blackmail and extortion. Those are illegal already, regardless of the method used to obtain the data.
If they use the data to interfere with the rights of freedom of association in any way then that is also illegal and they should be prosecuted for it, or at the very least be unable to use that as evidence.
Because I don't want to have to live my life under constant surveillance. That means I can no longer really live a free life. Even if you never do anything illegal or unethical, if you're always being watched, you're always having to second-guess everything you do. That effect is the entire point of a panopticon.
In the world you seem to be advocating for, the only time we'd actually be free and able to relax and be ourselves is when we pretty much completely disconnect from society.
It's like how when people know that their use of something is being tracked (think the old "Nielsen families", the tracking that streaming services do, or software telemetry) they use that thing very differently than they otherwise would because they are considering the impact their data will have.
> The Flock is a private company does not entitle them to fewer powers than the state. The state has a lot of power and is severely constrained; many of those constraints simply do not apply to private entities and individuals.
Yes, this is my point exactly. It's why exposure to the state is, in many ways, a lesser risk than private companies.
> Those are illegal already, regardless of the method used to obtain the data.
Not always, and even when they are, that often doesn't matter in practice.
Right. And this discussion is about the amount of privacy we're accepting to lose. Acting like it's a binary choice is very authoritarian of you.
These days, I don’t know. Certainly an instrument of a particular party. Plus, owned by various special interest groups beyond that.
Seriously, though - they’re 100% correct on this one. Flock cameras are abhorrent, and I’m honestly aghast that people aren’t up in arms.
The baseline expectation of anyone operating heavy machinery in public should be that it is tracked for safety and accountability. This is a good thing. We've been installing tracking numbers on them for decades, what did you think they were for?
I understand for many people, their movements and their vehicle's movements are 1:1, so it can feel like tracking their vehicle is tracking them. If you care about privacy, travel without the heavy machinery. Walk, bike, transit. If your region does not allow you to do this, direct your privacy-related energy towards making that possible, rather than reducing accountability for drivers.
Edit: I wonder how the commenters below feel about tracking jets, probably similar to how I feel about tracking their cars.
And then you justify it by lying to us?
> This is a good thing. We've been installing tracking numbers on them for decades, what did you think they were for?
Taxes was priority #1. This is a matter of public record. Being able to ascribe ownership as needed in edge case circumstances as a second order goal. Tracking was never really a priority because it was never really possible to do at scale before.
>Walk, bike, transit.
Ah, yes, the bus and subway with their always on 4k cameras that are being fed into god knows what software and algorithms which are then populating god knows what databases.
We have been putting license plates on vehicles for decades with the intent of tracking their individual movements down to the minute? And here I thought it was for identifying their owners.
> Turn Partial Details Into Leads Start with a vague description and surface real evidence from LPR and video.
> Search With Natural Language Just type what you’re looking for, like “man in blue shirt and cowboy hat,” and get visual matches instantly.
That's the nature of the universe, though. Photons are emitted (including by you), captured, and the impressions they make are recorded and recalled (by biological brains and now electronic ones).
It's the police that we need to abolish, not the cameras that they (and every other organism) uses.
As a thought experiment: imagine that in the next 20 years, a device or procedure is developed which allows a human to copy, from their visual memory, anything that they've seen (or at least seen recently) onto a digital medium, which some sort of verifiability of its veracity. This obviously presents the same scale challenges to which you're pointing - it will be impossible to walk around in public without being seen and identified in a way that's digitally verifiable.
But does it make police states and surveillance more likely, in the same way that Flock does? I think we can probably all agree that it does not.
And that tells us that it's not the vision or the memory of the vision that is the threat.
When the entirety of the commons is recorded, and the recordings made available for analysis by all, it's perfectly possible (and I think, inevitable) that police brutality (and even police legitimacy) will decrease.
We need to develop the bravery to say out loud that, as vision (meaning, better and smaller cameras, cheaper storage, etc) continues to improve, our need for police (and perhaps for states) decreases.
In this way, the problem of scale to which you correctly point is naturally counterbalanced.
I agree that the camera is not the problem per se, but your framing is a bit strange. There's more to a camera than passively receiving photons.
No, I _certainly_ didn't intend to suggest that. In fact, I think that the proliferation of vision is likely to bring about an end to those institutions.
> I agree that the camera is not the problem per se, but your framing is a bit strange. There's more to a camera than passively receiving photons.
Of course, but those properties (namely, storage) are shared widely. At some very low-but-experimentally-verifiable-level, photons are force carriers for many of the most easily observed phenomena in our reality.
From that, I think it's probably the peaceful and radical way to derive that, as time moves forward, the universe (and the human condition in particular) is likely to gain vision and not lose it.
Cameras will get better and smaller. Storage will get faster and cheaper and more distributed. The photons in the public sphere will be captured with ever-increasing fidelity.
When all the public sphere is recorded, and all the recordings are available to everyone's analysis, can we overcome despotic tendencies, corruption, and police brutality, and eventually statism itself?
I think that the answer is 'yes'. So I am very cautious about shifting the blame onto the (inevitably widening) vision instead of the institution. As vision grows, the need for police is decreased (and thus, the need for an abolitionist movement is increased). That's the prize on which I hope we keep our... eye.
No because not everyone can afford to do all of that.
Frankly, it sounds now like _you_ are the one defending the existence of megacorps and states, on the basis that nobody else will have the capability to be a watcher of public spaces.
You mean cycling, which many walkers consider to be dangerously fast? You think they wouldn't start mandating registration tags if it became too popular?
Until there's a substantial number of driverless cars on the roads, LPR systems will always equate to tracking people. You might as well argue that exposing geospatial data about cell phone movements is fine because cell phones aren't people.
These systems, when abused, amount to warrantless monitoring of civilians over long periods of time. A judge can not and will not order someone's movements to be tracked over the last six months. They can facilitate someone's movements going forward to be monitored for a specific period of time.
...and these systems are always abused. To the degree that if you've put an RFP out there for a LPR system that disposes of the scan data after 30 days, suddenly no one wants to submit a proposal.
Abuse is pretty much the default state unless there are hard guardrails against it. That knucklehead in Millersville was pretty obviously using FINCEN data to go looking up the life details of people his political party didn't like, probably because the only safeguard was that someone had to enter a relevant case number to show that the search was legal. Lo and behold a regular audit being performed by the TBI resulted in a near immediate lockout of Millersville from their system and a warranted search of said knucklehead's residence because of "irregularities". It's not hard to figure out what was going on there.
It took months to get the LPR system in Mt. Juliet, TN to actually start disposing of the scanned data, and we've already seen reports of LPR systems being abused by ICE/CBP to search for people all over the nation. What's currently holding up Nashville getting such a system? I'm pretty sure it's the data destruction policy, because the state-level government is being run by people who think such Orwellian surveillance is just dandy.
Nashville has tons of Flock cameras now. I was just there over the weekend and noticed at least four on the interstates.
And if you're actually trying to champion the benefits of increased accountability by tracking where every car goes, then it is incumbent upon you to first push for real effective privacy laws that prevent the already-ongoing abuses of such systems.
[0] can also easily be mandated to have identifying number plates on public roads, especially now with this surveillance infrastructure in place
And in places where bikes need license plates? Or let's say everyone switches to a bike. Do you think Flock would say "oh well, I guess we can't track them anymore" and close up shop?
>transit
Even if they still let you pay with cash, there's cameras all over there too. Maybe not automated tracking through a third party that removes the need for warrants... yet.
So that leaves "walk", which even if feasible, is something Flock already advertises tracking of as a feature. This isn't a "car tracking" issue, it's a warrantless mass surveillance issue. You may think it's only for the drivers you despise right now, but it will come for you too.
I support private vehicle ownership and am opposed to any kind of tracking/nuisance enforcement behavior.