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Comment by jeremywho | Hacker News Reader

> this story has have nothing to do with the cameras or AI

This story wouldn't exist without flock cameras constantly surveilling the public...cameras have EVERYTHING to do with this story.

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"Law enforcement is setting up a multi-county dragnet by putting every version or mistype of a license plate into a warrant list"

wouldn't be a story? It should be! We should have a higher standard for the people with guns and a badge on the street.

Flock is the problem too because their system is enabling the rights violations to scale up.

Its by design. By using a third party, they can get around the 4th amendment.

Using a third-party to bypass legal restrictions should in and of itself be considered willful and knowledgeable intent to violate the Constitution under color of law, regardless of the specific actions taken

I'm not convinced they can always get around it... I think they could challenge their arrest in court on Fourth Amendment grounds and have a chance at winning:

https://epic.org/vehicle-fingerprinting-through-pervasive-ca...

>In the 2018 case Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court affirmed that individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their long term movements (even in public spaces) and, because of that expectation, queries into long term location tracking data constitute a Fourth Amendment search that requires a warrant.

I suppose they would also have to argue that they are not the actual target of the warrant.

That's all fine until you learn about

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

My problem with this is that Flock explicitly does not manage their own equipment or store data obtained by cameras installed by their customers on any Flock-owned servers, so I'm not sure how they would be tipped off to anyone from outside the police department.

And if that did happen, I feel like one could have a strong case against it by claiming that there is no reasonable way to have had that information without obtaining it illegally.

How are they not an 'agent of the state' and how does the 4th not apply? If the government asked for the scan/info on the vehicle, they are acting on behalf of the government?

https://www.fletc.gov/audio/definition-government-agent-unde...

Flock claims that "Fourth Amendment case law overwhelmingly shows that LPRs do not constitute a warrantless search because they take point-in-time photos of cars"

And that may be true, however Carpenter v. US established that long-term tracking of a person's location without a warrant is still not allowed under the Fourth Amendment.

Flock can also fix this by validating the description of the target vehicle against the detected vehicle.

The dispatch backend can fix this by annotating this warrant with a warning that its not this particular vehicle.

Police themselves can fix this by being a human check on dumb entries in computer systems.

As we've seen with multiple incidents across the country, police largely don't want to be a human check. They want the computer to tell them who to arrest, regardless of facts in reality.

This story also wouldn't exist without license plates. License plates are IDs into a state registry of cars prominently placed on the car, in order to make it easy for anyone who sees it, including cops, to identify that car to the criminal justice bureaucracy later. The same issues with Flock cameras correctly identifying the letters and numbers on the plate and then informing law enforcement, which uses them as an index into a corrupted database, apply to any other system, including a human being looking at the car. Any argument for getting rid of Flock cameras for this reason also applies to getting rid of license plates themselves.

And maybe we should get rid of license plates. What breaks if we abolish them, and neither cops nor anyone else is capable of running a license plate number search on the non-existent license plates of the cars around them?

This wouldn't be a story if the cops did not put the wrong license plate in the system. How is it Flock's fault? Flock is just doing what it is being asked to do!

Let me put in simple terms: Flock flags license plates that are given to it. Someone, somewhere says, license plate "ABCD1234" has a warrant out. And guess what, if Flock sees that plate, it _will_ flag it each. and. every. time!

Tomorrow, say an "Amber Alert" is issued for a pink Ford Taurus with plate "PINKLADY" (when in fact it was a red Taurus with the plate "MADLAD"). Don't you think anyone driving around in a pink Ford Taurus with that plate should be pulled over?

How are all these dead baby seals Flock's fault? They simply released the Auto Baby Seal Clubber 9000 on beaches that have baby seals. It's the people that keep submitting "club baby seals" to the system that are the problem.

What I want to know is who is manufacturing these police cars that let these cops travel to execute unlawful warrants. "Oh, but it's not our fault. We just built due-process-violation machines. It's the police who are driving them to citizen's locations and violating due process." Come on.

Once? Maybe. And then the cops do their jobs and determine that PINKLADY is not who they're actually looking for, and they go on their way.

Multiple times? Police laziness fueled by AI incompetence

The people getting caught up in this have been pulled over multiple times.

Pigeonholing responsibility onto one party is what allows these mutually-dependent systems to point fingers at one another to escape blame. Rather, the responsibility here is shared. If you want to focus your call for reform on the police (for both making an overly-broad list, and also for harming innocent motorists without compensating them for the damage), then I agree that's more appropriate for this particular problem. But don't absolve Flock.

>Pigeonholing responsibility onto one party is what allows these mutually-dependent systems to point fingers at one another to escape blame

Exactly. The responsibility can't all be pinned on one party and divided no party has enough of it.

Collective guilt needs to make a comeback. Make people and systems have an incentive to associate with malicious or shoddy people or systems.

If Flock flags license plates at the request of the government, it is acting as an agent of the state and is required to meet governement/constitutional requirements.

How does flock get around this? It can't be an agent of the state AND be private and exempts from 4th amendment/all constitutional requirements?

https://www.fletc.gov/audio/definition-government-agent-unde...

Solari: No sir, unless he was for some reason acting on behalf of the government or had been asked by a government agent to do that. Unless that were the case then if that person was acting in his own private capacity as a UPS or FedEx employee then he would not be a government agent for 4th Amendment purposes.

Miller: Can private parties ever trigger the 4th Amendment?

Solari: Yes, as we discussed, if a private party were to be acting at the behest of the government -- if a government agent were to ask that FedEx person to open up a package and look inside, or to ask someone’s girlfriend to go through their things looking for evidence to turn over to the police, then that would be government activity. That would be the actions of a government agent because government agents can’t ask private parties to do something they themselves couldn’t do under the 4th Amendment, so in that type of instance it would be extended to that private party.

I think if you are driving around in a pink Ford Taurus you are definitely guilty of something even if the plate reads MARYKAY

bad taste isn't a crime lmao

Tell that to the fashion police.

"They can't remove it without knowing who the warrant is for" is absolutely Flocks problem.

They're alerting on a license plate but yet somehow they can't turn off that license plate alert using just the license plate number? Fucking bullshit

Wouldn't it be the purview of the cops to update Flock that the plate is no longer of interest and to stop alerting on it? I'm no fan of Flock, but let's put the onus where it is deserved.

I can tell you've never worked on government software.

> Flock is just doing what it is being asked to do!

Well then clearly they are not a problem.

Hmm, I wonder what Flock proponents would say when immediately asked about guns, after all, it's just a machine doing what it is being asked to do!

This is precisely what they mean when they say "guns don't kill people, bad people with guns kill people"

What that statement misses is that guns make people bad.

Are we up in arms about gun manufacturers selling guns to the police because police sometimes misuse them?

they'd only support fully AI-driven guns with zero oversight

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