Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

The entities holding the information here are literally police departments. The information itself is evidence, used in active criminal investigations. It's good to want things, though.

View on HN

The information is not in any way restricted to use in active criminal investigations, and further, has been found to frequently be used for a variety of other purposes.

It's a bit like saying pornography is used in the study of human anatomy.

I don't know what you're talking about. I'm talking about the legislation 'jedberg proposed.

~jedberg is talking about a hypothetical law that would apply to ALPR data. In reply, you said "The information itself is evidence, used in active criminal investigations." ("The information" here referring to ALPR data.) (You also said, "The entities holding the information here are literally police departments.", but I don't see that that's relevant unless we choose to believe that police departments are more deserving of public trust by default than any other organization.)

I was replying to the "used in active criminal investigations" part. Yes, the ALPR data managed by Flock is sometimes used in active criminal investigations. However, it's also used for many other things.

The many other things that it's used for supports ~jedberg's argument.

I know, that's why I said "including law enforcement" :)

So we're clear, you believe there should be a law that, when a police department collects information about you during a criminal investigation, they should notify you directly that they've done so?

Yes.

It does make sense. Police are absolutely not beyond reproach, and there's screwups all the time. They need to be held to a high standard.

It's also easy to imagine reasonable compromises, like a time delay where they only have to report after e.g. 48 hours, and allowing a system whereby a judge can issue a warrant to extend that delay.

That's more or less what a search warrant is, so yes.

Specifically, I believe that if information that is held by a private 3rd party I accessed by anyone, law enforcement or otherwise, that third party should be required to tell you that it was requested and by whom. Just like they can't put a gag order on a search warrant to your home, this hypothetical search would be exempt from gag orders.

Huh? There absolutely are gagged search warrants. Didn't you ever get one at Reddit? They're the norm, the default even.

Not in your home. They can’t sneak in and search your home and not tell you.

Homes might be an exception, I don't know, but I'm of the impression it's routine for police to get physical search warrants with nondisclosure orders attached.

Yes for sure. Only homes are exempt. Which is why I originally said it should be treated as though it’s still in your home.

Right, and my point was, your proposal would proscribe large classes of common law enforcement searches. I'm stipulating the homestead exemption you're talking about here (obvs. neither of us are lawyers), but, given that, you're saying it should be extended far, far outside of homes.

That’s exactly what I’m saying. :)

Are you a little concerned that by advocating a drastic change in policing extending far past ALPR cameras that you're creating room for proponents of the cameras to say that everyone who opposes them wants broadly to hamstring the police?

I watched ALPR proponents in Oak Park make exactly those kinds of arguments.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com