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Comment by travisgriggs | Hacker News Reader

I keep wanting to see the "Rainbows End" style experiment.

The common reaction to surveillance seems to be similar to how we diet. We allow/validate a little bit of the negative agent, but try to limit it and then discuss endlessly how to keep the amount tamped down.

One aspect explored/hypothesized in Rainbows End, is what happens when surveillance becomes so ubiquitous that it's not a privilege of the "haves". I wonder if rather than "deflocking", the counter point is to surround every civic building with a raft of flock cameras that are in the public domain.

Just thinking the contrarian thoughts.

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I started building ALPR and speed detection systems for my house based on RTSP feed. I kind of want to finish this with an outdoor TV that has a leaderboard of the drivers that drive the fastest and their license plate in public display on my property, but visible to the street. In part to make my neighbors aware of how powerful ALPR technology is now, but also many of my neighbors should slow the heck down. I am not sure how popular this would be, but also I kind of like starting the right kind of trouble :)

There is a sign put up by the county on a downward hill with some nice curves in it. It _used_ to display your speed but that was removed in favor of just flashing "Slow Down" once people used it to see how fast they could navigate the bends.

Unintended consequences. Maybe it can just be annoying and show each car its count of speed 10mph over the limit as they pass

Hilarious! If i didnt already have too many projects and hobbies, this is the kind of thing i'd do.

Maybe not a speed leaderboard, that just seems like a challenge to choon heads. But perhaps a "violation count". Also toss in a dB meter for loud exhaust (again dont make it a contest).

Edge compute with alpr/face/gait/whatever object detection at the camera is basically solved. Genie is out of the bottle. I think the most fruitful line of resistance is to regulate what can be done with that data once it leaves the device.

I am the loud exhaust. Where we live the noise pollution is not a concern and I have no complaints around that. Many of my neighbors have lifted trucks and go vroom cars. Ironically the performance cars are the nicest drivers :)

I get it, I used to drive a GTI. I don't mind just loud exhaust by itself, as long as they are tuned well. It's the pops/crackling/backfires that set off all the neighborhood dogs and sound like they split the air that are a scourge around here. These folks also are the ones driving like maniacs in inappropriate contexts.

If you're in CA, I learned recently that any use of automatic license plate recognition here is regulated and has a bunch of rules. Technically just turning on the ALPR feature in your consumer level camera is illegal if you don't also do things like post a public notice with your usage and privacy policy.

The law is a bit old and seems like it was written under the assumption that normal people wouldn't have access to ALPR tech for their homes. I suspect it gets very little enforcement.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...

Cities in CA also often put their own ALPR restrictions on btw so you'll want to check both state and local laws.

I feel if you have a camera on your property with a view of public spaces they have a losing argument. I doubt none of that holds water constitutionally. This is first amendment protected. If you are filming a public space with no expectation of privacy the government has no constitutional authority to restrict you if you are retaining the data private and never sharing it.

So far the only legal area that matters is the government itself being regulated in how they use ALPR since they are the entity that can actually infringe upon constitutional rights.

I fail to see how passively recording a space that you don't own is "first amendment protected". Passively recording a space isn't in and of itself speech.

I can photograph and publish whatever I am allowed to see in public (with very few exceptions - think Naval Air Station Key West), this has been affirmed and reaffirmed by countless courts.

The best part about publishing? You have no right to question when, how, or if I am going to do it - that discretion is also free speech.

Reproducing information is within the legal limits of "speech and press".

You don't have to have a physical, lead-type printing press to be protected by Freedom of the Press, and you don't have to physically vocalize to be protected by Freedom of Speech.

> If you are filming a public space with no expectation of privacy the government has no constitutional authority to restrict you if you are retaining the data private and never sharing it.

This a shitty argument from a time where mass surveillance wasn't possible. If you have "no expectation of privacy in public spaces" than Governments could force you to wear an ankle monitor and body camera at all times since you have "no expectation of privacy".

You are mixing up the duties and rights a government has vs. the duties and rights citizens have. The one area I might start to agree is corporate personhood and giving corporations the same rights as a private citizen in this regard because their interests are very different from a private citizens. The whole point of the constitution is largely what the government can't do to its citizens. The goal is to protect citizens FROM its government by carving out our rights. These of course apply broadly, but I can't, for example, as a private citizen really violate your 4A rights very easily.

> You are mixing up the duties and rights a government has vs. the duties and rights the governments have.

Can you correct that typo? I've been thinking about what you mean for a while and I can't figure it out.

edit: Thank you

No, it's a great right.

You (personally) can't stop me from photographing you in public, Ms. Steisand.

And Freedom of Speech has no sensible connection to being forced to carry objects. Your argument also assumes no one ever goes into private houses, where 1A doesn't apply.

> if you are retaining the data private and never sharing it.

"Never sharing it?" What? Free speech is literally defined by the fact that you can distribute information. Publishing your video feed (a la news helicopters, etc.) is clearly a protected activity - possibly even more so than collecting the data to begin with.

Yes, I agree, but I am saying there are virtually zero grounds to legislate the use case I provided. They try to weasel it on "privacy" grounds and "transparency" when you share the data, but yeah. I agree.

Nearly every right is limited in some way "for the good of society". You can't take pictures of the entire contents of a book and publish it. You can't run into an airport and yell that you've got a bomb. We, as a society, put limits on what we allow people to do because doing so is better for society as a whole.

I expect there are plenty of cases where you can't publish your video feed.

> You can't take pictures of the entire contents of a book and publish it.

> can't run into an airport and yell that you've got a bomb.

Right: now try and argue that a license plate intentionally designed for public visibility is somehow subject to the same restrictions. All 50 states have legislation requiring public display of these objects: what tailoring of the First Amendment would legally be consistent with past case law?

> I expect there are plenty of cases where you can't publish your video feed.

Legally these cases are few and far between, and none of these exceptions apply to the situation being discussed. You're welcome to try and cite a case or explain relevant case law - good luck.

Freedom of the press is extraordinarily broad and is one of the more difficult things to limit using criminal penalties.

> > You can't take pictures of the entire contents of a book and publish it.

> Copyright is "mostly" civil law, not criminal.

Does that matter? Seriously - doesn't the 1st Amendment also protect against the government raising civil complaints?

I think the better point here is: Disney suing you for copyright violations is not a First-Amendment case, because Disney is not the US government - so this isn't a Free Speech issue at all.

You are of course correct. There are always limits on speech. In this area, however, we have already decided how it works. You cannot regulate what private citizens record in public spaces with no expectation of privacy and you definitely cannot regulate what they do with that data.

Interesting. It actually is posted that my property is under video surveillance. Colorado though. It seems like you would have a poor argument that you can’t collect and analyze images of a public space.

One cynical aspect of Colorado law I learned about going down the ALPR rabbit hole: in Colorado it is a higher class misdemeanor than regular traffic violations to purposely obfuscate your plate to interfere with automated plate reading. The law is “well written” in that there is little wiggle room if they could somehow prove your intent. Meanwhile it is a lesser class violation to simply not have a plate at all. Their intent feels pretty clear to me.

> seems like you would have a poor argument that you can’t collect and analyze images of a public space

Absolutely agree... but the CA law is clear that tracking license plates get special treatment! It being public space doesn't matter. It's wild to me that how you analyze the video is regulated. Also that no similar regulation for the regular public doing facial recognition exists. Just ALPR.

I wonder how I'm supposed to comply with the law if I were to take a public webcam feed, like one from a highway[0], and run ALPR on it myself. I obviously can't post any notices there. And I'm not the camera operator so can't comply with anything related to that. But I would be doing ALPR which does require I follow rules. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Will be interesting to see what happens to the law. It feels outdated, but I'm doubtful any CA politician is going to expend karma making ALPR more permissive. So I bet it'll stay on the books and just go largely unenforced.

https://go511.com/TrafficTransit/Cameras

I would blatantly ignore that law. I am in a position to easily fight a state entity with legal resources. They definitely cannot regulate that constitutionally. As a private citizen I am not posting notices. It is bad law that doesn't protect anyone and erodes protected rights.

Maybe they can't regulate that "constitutionally" (for your understanding of that document, which has no legal weight).

They still might be able to regulate it for all practical purposes.

Potentially. I care a lot about this. I think this is a pretty easy case to fight them on 1A grounds as the case law is quite settled and clear per my understanding. So they can have unconstitutional laws on the books, but the long tail of that fight is against the.

Great. Let's stop using Ring cameras for security then

Who uses them anyway? Almost nobody in Europe

That's awesome.

In the US, they are everywhere - apartment buildings, houses, business. Amazon's Ring might the most popular, but there are many vendors.

Build a better, cheaper replacement, then?

I'm curious what does your hardware/software stack look like for your ALPR system?

It is very janky. The speed camera I have an old Core i5 that is running YOLOv8 on the integrated GPU and it can just /barely/ handle 30FPS of inference. The code is all Python and vibe coded (for science). The speed camera needs a perpendicular view to work best for how I set it up (measuring two reference points with a known distance). So the ALPR camera is separate and I basically just buffer video and built this ultra janky scheme where I call an HTTP endpoint and it saves the last few seconds and then I batch process to associate the plate later in the web app. It is all CSV and plain files; this is a perfect append only DB scenario. Eventually it will need the wonders of the big data format SQLite probably, but I am sure Claude will know what to do ;) The long term solution would be to have a proper radar circuit and two cameras facing both road directions to capture the rear plate as people often don't use front plates here even though they are required to by law.

(the point, though, is you don't need a lot of GPU power to do say YOLOv8 inference on the pre-trained models) and OpenCV makes this all pretty darn easy.

Look up the YouTube on project Argus that uses drone cameras in like 2010 or something. every moving object inside a city is classified, identified and tracked in and out of buildings, cars and that's just the declassified part. I've talked to people who've told me or shown me a lot more wild systems they've built for retail decades ago to track user product interactions then tied it to loyalty and credit cards so they know what you looked at vs purchased and how long and mood age etc just from video. tie all that to public data or purchased or given data and it's basically game over for being anonymous.

I have similar, albeit probably more radical, views.

All dragnet surveillance done by law enforcement or given to law enforcement by private entities should be public. (Targeted surveillance by law enforcement is a different thing.)

We should all be able to "profit" from this data collected about us. There are likely a ton of interesting applications that could come from this data.

I would much rather independently run a "track my stalker" application myself versus relying on law enforcement (who have no duty to protect the public in the US, per SCOTUS) to "protect" me, for example.

It might be that such a panopticon would be unpalatable to political leaders and, ideally, we'd see some action to tamp down the use of dragnet surveillance (and maybe even make it illegal).

You may want to check out David Brin's work, he covers the implications of this idea extensively in The Transparent Society: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society

I found it really interesting he frames privacy, surveillance, and power through the lens of information asymmetries.

> All dragnet surveillance done by law enforcement or given to law enforcement by private entities should be public

You can FOIA the cameras outside your local police station today, if you like. Private company data like Flock's is the new grey area.

It's doesn't seem like much of a grey area to me. Presumably Flock serves the useful function of satisfying the third-party doctrine, making the surveillance they gather immune from 4th amendment protection (since I "willingly shared" my location with them by passing one of their cameras). If law enforcement has access to that data without a warrant it's de facto public to me.

FOIA isn't the same thing as having the data at my fingertips like LE does. I think the public deserves the same access LE has. If they can run ad hoc searches so should the public.

Personally I'd rather see all dragnet surveillance just go away.

> law enforcement has access to it without a warrant it's de facto public

I think the public would be entitled to the specific data that was purchased or accessed by the government, but absolutely not the entire corpus of broadly available data. What if law enforcement were required to "pay per search" a la PACER or journal subscriptions?

> What if law enforcement were required to "pay per search" a la PACER or journal subscriptions?

My immediate reaction is that it changes the nature of the surveillance enough to require further reflection. It would put a time-bounded window on the ability of law enforcement to abuse the data (albeit assuming the ALPR companies actually removing data per their stated policies).

I appreciate your comment, for sure. I'll have to ruminate on it and see how it meshes with my more-strongly-held-than-I'd-like reactionary (and probably not well thought out) beliefs. >smile<

A friend of mine in school had a similar thought - make body cams so cheap that everyone has one. Watch the watchmen.

I’ve considered making this a commercial reality, but we’ve seen that ubiquitous cameras don’t necessarily stop cops or authoritarians from kneeling on your neck, if they don’t feel shame.

I specifically have considered this in terms of protecting workers from (otherwise private or hidden) workplace abuse.

Two thoughts:

1. Amazon blink is an interesting hardware platform. With a power-optimized SoC, they achieve several years of intermittent 1080P video on a single AA battery. A similar approach and price point for body cam / dash cam would free users from having to constantly charge.

2. If you're designing cameras to protect human rights, you'll have to carefully consider the storage backend. Users must not lose access to a local copy of their own video because a central video service will be a choke point for censorship where critical evidence can disappear.

AR / AI glasses will be this.

I don't know. Is it better that it's obvious or not? I was thinking a buttonhole camera linked to your phone with an LED indicator when recording.

I’m embarrassed to admit how readily I overlooked the “on” in “buttonhole”, and even more embarrassed how afraid I became when your post still made sense.

Well, for certain fringe definitions of “sense”.

Facial recognition databases of public sector employees will be the straw that breaks this camel's back.

This only works if society was okay with surveillance on private property. The wealthy can afford large tracts of private land and can afford to send people on their behalf to interact in public for many things. They can pay services to come to them as well.

If the wealthy want to hide away in a prison of their own choice I’m ok with that. What I don’t like are the wealthy using their wealth to take over public spaces. Like using Venice for a private wedding.

The "wealthy" can't control the FAA or obtain TFRs (look no further than the issues Elon and Taylor Swift have had with obfuscating their jet registration), so they're basically fucked when it comes to preventing aerial video observation over private property unless this "large tract of private land" exists within 14nm of Washington D.C. (these types of tracts aren't practically obtainable there) or falls within an existing flight-restricted zone (which aren't typically permanent.)

It seems inevitable that cameras will proliferate, and edge compute will do more and more inference at the hardware level, turning heavy video data into lightweight tags that are easy to cross-correlate.

The last thing I want is only a few individuals having that data, whether it be governments, corporations, or billionaires and their meme-theme goon squads. Make it all accessible. Maybe if the public knows everyone (including their stalker/ex/rival) can track anyone, we'd be more hesitant to put all this tracking tech out there.

Indeed, I already see this in the consumer space with Frigate users. Letting modern cameras handle the inference themselves makes running an NVR easier. Pretty soon all cameras will be this way, and as you say the output will be metadata that is easily collected and correlated. Sounds useful for my personal surveillance system and awful for society.

I feel like at some point we need to recognize the futility of solving this issue with technology. It is unstoppable. In the past we had the balls to regulate things like credit bureaus -- would we still do that today if given the choice?

We need to make blanket regulations that cover PII in all forms regardless of who is collecting it. Limits on how it can be used, transparency and control for citizens over their own PII, constitutional protections against the gov't doing an end run around the 4th amendment by using commercial data sources, etc.

> We need to make blanket regulations that cover PII in all forms regardless of who is collecting it

Cool, change the First Amendment first. Your face and name aren't private under our existing framework of laws - no standard legislation can change this.

> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

It says nothing directly about privacy, for or against, let alone surveillance dragnets. I would contend it strongly implies in fact laws should protect and also not chill your ability to:

- go to and from a place of worship - go to and from a peaceful assembly - conduct free speech activities - conduct press/journalism - petition the government

If anything, the existing framework of laws implies a gap, that data should not be able to be hoovered up without prior authorization, since the existence of such a dragnet with a government possibly adversarial to certain political positions (e.g. labeling "AntiFa" terrorists) has quite the chilling effect on your movement and activity. US vs Jones (2012) ruled a GPS tracker constitutes a 4th Amendment search. If I have no phone on me, and a system is able to track my location precisely walking through a city, does it matter if the trace emitted by that black box is attached to me physically, or part of a distributed system? It's still outputting a dataframe of (timestamp, gps) over a huge area.

> It says nothing directly about privacy, for or against

Freedom of the press is directly related to privacy: if I can see something in public as a private citizen, I can report on it, and you may not create any laws abridging this.

I'm not commenting on surveillance dragnets or how the government uses the data or if the government is prohibited from using it by statute or case law - the First Amendment doesn't apply there (Fourth and Fifth do.)

I don't know how the First Amendment applies, could you elaborate? And assuming it does, that does not seem like an impossible barrier; time, place, and manner restrictions are a thing. And like I said, we already do it at some level.

Doesn't mass surveillance plausibly violate the First Amendment, by having a chilling effect on speech and freedom of association? Or is the argument that it's private entities and the Constitution only limits the government?

Even in the latter case, at least we could do something about the government using private data collection to do things they are not otherwise permitted to do under the Constitution. That's some BS we should all be on board with stopping.

No law can prevent me from operating a corporation that collects and publishes license plate data for lawful purposes (basic freedom of the press.) If I can see something in public (where no reasonable expectation of privacy exists), I can report on it. Very few exceptions exist to this - think national security or military installations.

> Doesn't mass surveillance plausibly violate the First Amendment, by having a chilling effect on speech and freedom of association?

Plausibly, but no relevant case law I am aware of makes this interpretation.

We can prohibit the government from utilizing and collecting the data: absolutely, but you cannot prevent the people from doing the same.

Alright, I will accept that what you say about license plate data is true (though I know there remains ongoing debate about it, IANAL so I cannot claim to know anything more).

That gets you as far as distributing the license plate, location, and time. But if you combine that data with other non-public data, then it is no longer a First Amendment protected use.

As an aside, if we cannot figure out a way to make this fit with the First Amendment as written today, we need to make updating that a priority already. The founders had no idea that we would end up with computers and cameras that could automatically track every citizen of the country with no effort and store it indefinitely. "No reasonable expectation of privacy" rests on a definition of reasonable that made sense in the 18th century. Our technological progress has changed that calculus.

> As an aside, if we cannot figure out a way to make this fit with the First Amendment as written today, we need to make updating that a priority already. The founders had no idea that we would end up with computers and cameras that could automatically track every citizen of the country

This is a commonly echoed sentiment for the Second Amendment too ("These idiot founders! They could never have imagined so much individual power - We need to take rights away!"), and I am in hard disagreement for both.

I cherish the fact that our legal system is so intentionally slow that these types of "progressive" efforts to reform the Constitution are basically impossible.

The founders clearly intended the second amendment to be about military service, we have contemporary evidence to support that. The idea that it broadly applied to individuals on their own is an interpretation that didn’t really gain steam until well into the 20th century.

Have you ever read any of the Federalist papers? This is extraordinarily ignorant - even left-leaning SCOTUS justices do not agree with you (see Caetano, etc.)

Are you allowed to do the same thing with SSNs? It’s just another government issued ID like a license plate.

As far as I am aware, there's no Federal law prohibiting the publication of SSNs for lawful purposes (which is the typical default.) In Virginia, Ostergren v. Cuccinelli (4th Cir. 2010) touched on this very issue, and ultimately concluded that publishing SSNs is protected speech (some nuance there, but this was the outcome.)

License plates are explicitly designed for legibility and are legally mandated by every state to be displayed in public view. The entire purpose of this object is to be seen and create accountability. An SSN is a private, individually-issued piece of information that isn't intended for public view - and courts are still saying publication is okay.

Law in the United States isn't an autistic, overly-rigid computer system where edge cases can be probed for "gotchas:" judges and case law exist to figure out these tough questions.

I’m surprised that SSNs could be published like that. It’s curious that nobody has attempted to “do a journalism” and publish the SSNs of HNW individuals. It seems there would be little to stop you.

> Law in the United States isn't an autistic, overly-rigid computer system where edge cases can be probed for "gotchas:" judges and case law exist to figure out these tough questions.

That’s obvious, and you seem to be going against yourself here. If some details are considered too sensitive for publication then it would follow that a judge may be able to interpret the law to prevent mass publication of even sensitive public or semi-public data by creating an interpretive carve-out. But if you can publish SSNs then there’s little to no hope for that. It almost seems that the law is “autistically” tilted in favor of data brokers.

Someone ought to set up a tracker that updates a list of known HNW individuals with last detected location based on license plate data and/or facial recognition. Maybe also a list of last detected million dollar+ supercars. That will get some bills started.

Surround the homes of the politicians and billionaires, and you're onto something. Better yet, make them publicly viewable webcams.

Hrm, I read and loved Rainbows End but must have totally missed this. What was the experiment?

FWIW, what I want is the non-IME/PSP "¡hecho en Paraguay!" chips from the book.

not really, because all the sousveillance in the world doesn't grant the average joe the power of a single cop

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