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Comment by LocalH | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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.

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