The Supreme Court Just Lit a Fuse Under Flock's License Plate Camera Empire
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But the headline and narrative paint a way too optimistic (if you’re anti-Flock) picture of Chatrie’s impact.
In particular the search identified by Chatrie (Google’s database of expected-private location records, including movement in the home and other private spaces) has almost no analog in third-party-owned recordings of public movement.
> The Court held that police conducted a Fourth Amendment search when they obtained Chatrie's location data, because, as the opinion put it, "an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in his cell-phone location information."
The analogue with Flock is pretty clear then:
> Just as important as the holding is the reasoning: the Court rejected the government's fallback argument that the search was fine because it only pulled a narrow, time-limited slice of a much larger dataset. Once the Fourth Amendment applies, the majority reasoned, it doesn't matter how small a bite investigators took out of an all-encompassing database.
That’s what triggered the essential element of an expectation of privacy, from which the fact of a search was established.
Totally absent in this case, as far as I can tell.
> As Google puts it, and no one seriously disputes, Location History serves as a “diary” or map “of a person’s travels.”
"Diary" is a red herring here. They're referring to a location log, just like what Flock produces.
If we accept your premise that the government can spy on you simply because an activity is regulated, then the Fourth Amendment is effectively dead. Under that logic, the state could mandate interior cameras in every heavily regulated business, or search the backpack of every passenger using public transit without a warrant.
You have a reasonable expectation of privacy for the contents of your trunk, your backpack, and your travel history. The police cannot search your trunk without a warrant just because you are driving on public roads. They should not be able to search your travel history either.
You the right of free travel (with or without your phone). Automobiles are different. You can't take it everywhere; you can't park it everywhere; you can't move it about in secret (plates MUST be displayed, always).
You have an expectation of privacy for the inside of your car. But not the outside of your car. And even the inside... if it's visible from the windows, it's public.
The relevant factors are:
1. It creates a near-complete picture of a person's whereabouts
2. It is effectively not optional to have and carry a cell phone today
You do in fact have a reasonable expectation that the government can't reconstruct a near-perfect timeline of your daily life without a warrant... obviously.
Any automobile may be driven by many people. Only 30% of households are single-person households.
We'll see how this plays out in courts. I'll bet the license plate readers survive. More skeptical about facial recognition though.
No. I just laid out the reasons why cell tower data is different. It has nothing to do with whether a cellphone "is effectively you," which obviously it's not.
Your understanding of privacy misapplies the plain view doctrine. Plain view allows the state to seize evidence provided that the officer seizing the evidence has a lawful right to access or observe the seized object. (Collins v. Virginia)
An officer glancing through a car window is performing a constitutional act.
However, were the state to compile a history of your car's location, which it does, that exposes your "familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations." (Jones) This compilation of data is an action legally defined as a search, since it turns up data NOT readily available in plain view. And this search takes place without warrant.
Can the police take pictures of every car they see and use that to determine your travel history? If the police don't have the expertise to maintain such a network can they pay a third party to do so?
You conflate the generally unremarkable act of taking a picture of a single car in public with the indiscriminate collection of photos of all vehicles. The former is a constitutional, isolated observation. The latter is a search, since in toto it reveals personal information.
> If the police don't have the expertise to maintain such a network can they pay a third party to do so?
May the police pay a third party to execute warrantless searches?
The Framers of the Constitution drafted the Fourth Amendment in direct response to these abusive general warrants, protecting against the exact kind of arbitrary power that placed "the liberty of every man in the hands of every petty officer." (John Adams)
Moreso, Adams maintains:
Writs in their nature are temporary things. When the purposes for which they are issued are answered, they exist no more; but these live forever; no one can be called to account...
But these prove no more than what I before observed, that special writs may be granted on oath and probable suspicion. The act of 7 and 8 William III that the officers of the plantations shall have the same powers, etc., is confined to this sense; that an officer should show probable ground; should take his oath of it; should do this before a magistrate; and that such magistrate, if he think proper, should issue a special warrant to a constable to search the places.
https://www.leonardocompany-us.com/lpr/blog/new-technology-h...
You are focusing exclusively on Justice Scalia's opinion. Five other Justices provided two separate concurrences in that same case, including Alito's:
society’s expectation has been that law enforcement agents and others would not—and indeed, in the main, simply could not—secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period."It may be that achieving the same result through electronic means, without an accompanying trespass, is an unconstitutional invasion of privacy, but the present case does not require us to answer that question."
I didn't say anything about a single car. Can the police department post police officers on every street corner and instruct them to record license plate numbers for every car they see? Would that constitute a search and if so a search of what exactly? If that's not a search why would a police-sanctioned camera be any different? I'm genuinely interested in understanding the distinction.
I'm not in love with the encroaching mass surveillance society but in terms of privacy in public there is little in the US by right.
Let me quote myself on this:
> As Justice Sotomayor noted in United States v. Jones, logging a vehicle's public movements "reflects a wealth of detail about her familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations." An action revealing all this is ipso facto a search.
> I'm not in love with the encroaching mass surveillance society but in terms of privacy in public there is little in the US by right.
Suggesting that a citizen possesses "little privacy in public by right" is to stand the American constitutional order squarely on its head. You have a very Eurocentric understanding of rights, as if they're concessions by the king/government to the people. We do things the opposite way.
The enumeration of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people (Ninth Amendment). Further, the Tenth Amendment explicitly reserves powers not delegated to the government to the states or to the people. What's your proposed basis, historic or constitutionally, granting the state the power to aggregate people's location history? The burden does not fall on the citizen to produce a right not to be monitored; it rests entirely on the state to demonstrate the authority to monitor.
Is the executive empowered to enforce laws? Is recording observations a function of law enforcement? Society recognizes things like "plain view" in that if an officer is legally in a place and can see illegal activity they may act on it. So it would follow that they can record their observations about suspected illegal activity and legal activity alike (because suspected illegal activity might actually be legal in fact).
So if police can observe things freely and they can record their observations, well can't police departments store and search through police records?
The state will take for itself power that the people have but do not wield.
This is unnecessarily reductive; if we reduce all action enough we can justify anything as simply continuous 1 centimeter movement; e.g. grand theft would be innocently grasping an object in a store, and then a series of 1 centimeter movements which you could independently justify as "freedom to move."
We understand complex actions to have complex consequences, and the aggregation of vehicular data is itself a search, which by our laws requires a warrant. Jurisprudence evaluates the totality of an act and its consequences.
> The state will take for itself power that the people have but do not wield.
The Framers of the Constitution would understand this idea as tyranny.
Cars are different. You must be licensed and cars must be registered with the state. Cars must display tags for the purpose of tracking. They must be inspected periodically. When driving a car on public roads, you are subject to implied consent; for example, taking a blood alcohol test on demand.
As they say, "driving is a privilege, not a right". Cars are different.
Ask yourself: If a US state passed a law requiring geo trackers in all automobiles, do you think it would be unconstitutional? What about drones, airplanes, boats?
[0] It should be a far stronger right than what it is right now, but that's separate big debate.
On the other hand, law enforcement can follow your car with a drone, helicopter, or other vehicle without a warrant. Are cameras more like a helicopter or more like a GPS tracker? The Supreme Court has not weighed in yet.
US v Jones ruled that installing a GPS car tracker requires a warrant at least when it involves trespass on private property. That case explicitly did not answer whether it would also require a warrant if no trespass was required, and deferred to Katz v United States analysis. That analysis was used shortly after in Carpenter v United States to answer that the government cannot use third party data that people do not voluntarily give up (like cell tower data) given the completeness of the record.
Fundamentally the issue presented is: "At bottom, the Court must “assur[e] preservation of that degree of privacy against government that existed when the Fourth Amendment was adopted.”"
Obviously "input name, find location at all hours of any day over the past X years" is not the degree of privacy against government that existed when the 4th Amendment was adopted.
The unanimous opinion did not rule on that, but also the 5-0 concurring opinion found specifically and explicitly that even if there were no trespass at all, it still would be a 4th Amendment violation.
Otherwise, it's the same: Google's database is a third-party-owned record of people's movements in public, and Flock's database is a third-party-owned record of people's movement in public.
The ruling in Chatrie had nothing to do with an expectation of privacy, or lack thereof. It was about the dragnet nature of the surveillance. And in that respect, I don't see any meaningful difference between Flock's and Google's systems.
Isn't there some level of expectation if for your whole life these mass networks didn't exist and you could go to the grocery store without being locked in database prison?
Held: Police officers conducted a Fourth Amendment search when they acquired Chatrie’s location data from Google because an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in his cell-phone location information.
Note the possessive “his”. Crucial to the case, this was held to be the individual’s data, not the third-party’s.
In both scenarios, the data is held by a private third party and a person generates this data pretty much by-default.
This is the relevant bit:
In Carpenter, this Court held that accessing cell-site location information (CSLI) constitutes a Fourth Amendment search because “individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their physical movements,” 585 U. S., at 310. The Court reasoned that CSLI provides a “detailed” and “encyclopedic” portrait of a person’s whereabouts, id., at 309, and, with that, “an intimate window into a person’s life,” id., at 311. Because people “compulsively carry” their cell phones “all the time,” the Court explained, a cell phone “tracks nearly exactly the movements of its owner,” and thus “faithfully follows” him not only through “public thoroughfares [but] into private residences, doctor’s offices, political headquarters, and other potentially revealing locales.”
It does seem like that's an element, then -- this is not to say that it's sufficient for anything, since obviously a sufficiently good record of where one goes on public thoroughfares would fail the same test ('reliably reveals that so-and-so went to visit a specialist doctor, divorce attorney, and brothel all on the same day')
Which, I would say, does seem a lot less black-and-white than the cell phone example, and anyone who thinks it's all settled now might be in for a surprise.
Automobiles are not cellphones, and the state is free to regulate automobiles. It could mandate tracking devices in all cars, if there was political will.
A vehicle is literally considered an extension of your body, and this has been held up many times, starting with Carroll in 1929.
More recently, the 9th circuit put forth a ruling vacating a man's conviction because a cop merely touched the vehicle, thus triggering a warrantless search complaint.
There's a lot of case law that goes against what you're thinking.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/license-plate-cameras-will-soo...
United States v Jones already answered this question.
There's nothing special about any particular technology at all. The question is whether people have an option to generate the data for a third party (Google, Flock, or cell tower operators) and then the sensitivity of that resulting data.
Carpenter is pretty simple: If you by virtue of existing in the modern world produce a bunch of super sensitive data that third parties now have, then those third parties aren't allowed to just give the government that data.
For example, this would allow the government to wiretap anyone without warrant.
Katz v United States would be the place to start your research.
I do agree that Flock is also not the same as the database of cell phone location data that Verizon or Apple or whoever else might maintain.
It's somewhere in the middle, IMO. At least to my non-lawyer brain.
For states where law enforcement cannot do such things directly, they can still contract with a private provider, either as an RFP, or (as in some states) "you can't RFP this butttt if some private provider just so happened to provide it, you can use it".
License plate number is a registered identifier mandated to be fully plainly visible, with that identifier tied to a registered individual; compared to cell phone which has identifiers, sure, but they're not registered to an individual necessarily, and not mandated to be plainly visible, rather only "visible" as a means of service provision.
The fourth amendment does not say “private conversations,” so when police started tapping phones, the courts focused on whether the phone tap physically intruded on somebody’s house, papers, or effects. Police apparently could tap phone conversations by watching reflections on a nearby window, and the fourth amendment didn’t apply because there was no physical intrusion. The “reasonable expectation of privacy” test come from Katz v. US ( https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/389/347/ ) where the Supreme Court realized that whether there was a physical intrusion was irrelevant.
It's basically a continuous rebalancing of private vs government power, and new technologies cause more rebalancing.
This is a modestly different situation than one concerning warrantless tracking of phone locations, if for no other reason than my phone oftentimes in my pocket. It is not always visible to onlooking bystanders. And even if it isn't, externally there is no reliably way to differentiate one iPhone from another. In comparison: license plates, when in public, are always visible, and very easy to discern from one-another (different state-unique numbers); so in my mind the expectation of privacy is far lower.
I abhor what Flock does, but I'm not sure I see a constitutional argument for why what they do is unconstitutional.
Specifically, even if a county hired all those officers and did what you suggest if there is no purpose other than recording all this information. I believe it would be a constitutional violation. A person has the right to reasonable privacy outside of their home. License plates can and should be recorded when there is a relevant purpose to it. Such as toll collection, or a scoped traffic watch done by a police officer or a traffic camera. The dragnet collection of data for "maybe its useful" or "we don't know when it will be useful, but it might" has generally been struck down when brought to the supreme court.
For Flock's case, they don't operate as far as I know as ticket issuing traffic cameras which have a much tighter level of control of how they operate. IE: Traffic cameras have clear signs near them notifying the drivers of their usage, in some states the issuing of the citation cannot be considered criminal (Civil issuance) and must not capture faces of drivers.
According to Carpenter:
A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere. To the contrary, 'what [a person] seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.'
One officer would absolutely not be able to record on that piece of paper every single license plate that passed through a busy intersection. Not even close.
The number of officers that _would_ be required to do so would absolutely be "outside the realm of possibility" for even a well-funded police department.
That's why flock is different. It's a level of scale that was previously—despite your assertions—impossible.
“This Court has to date not deviated from the understanding that mere visual observation does not constitute a search. See Kyllo [v US]. ... We accordingly held in [US v] Knotts that ‘[a] person traveling in an automobile on public thoroughfares has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements from one place to another.’ ... Thus, even assuming that the concurrence is correct to say that ‘[t]raditional surveillance’ of Jones for a 4-week period ‘would have required a large team of agents, multiple vehicles, and perhaps aerial assistance,’ ... our cases suggest that such visual observation is constitutionally permissible. It may be that achieving the same result through electronic means, without an accompanying trespass, is an unconstitutional invasion of privacy, but the present case does not require us to answer that question.”
The fourth amendment is supposed to address invasive and inconvenient general warrants and search warrants. And that’s “inconvenient” from the point of view of the person being investigated. I don’t understand the view that all’s fair as long as the police do a certain amount of busywork, but that does seem to be popular even among some judges.
> In comparison: license plates, when in public, are always visible, and very easy to discern from one-another (different state-unique numbers); so in my mind the expectation of privacy is far lower.
Legally, overhearing a conversation is not different. If you are loudly talking about your drug deals in public in front of an officer, they can use that as evidence. A police department could hire officers to stand everywhere in public and listen to every conversation nearby.
Or, more specifically, they could stand conspicuously close to every payphone and listen. The phones are in public; the officers don't need to be uniformed. Practically speaking this is not at all different from wiretapping. That's what the police did in Katz- wiretap a public payphone.
Flock cameras are not in any meaningful sense different from having officers follow around everyone and record everywhere they go. Its irrelevant whether one officer is following one person or if many people are following them, each within their own small area. That would absolutely not be legal without a warrant. The only difference is a private company is doing it and selling it to the police, something that should clearly not be legal.
You can still pay your use tax and be a good citizen, and in fact, its probably a better demonstration of your duties as a citizen to protect the right to privacy and say to your local governments that have a history of abusing and selling vehicle registration data to 3rd parties that you do not tolerate that.
Happy to share more, the sites for Montana registration can be shady but the dirt legal one is great.
I'd be surprised if most other states don't have similar vehicle laws.
1) Garaging a vehicle, for x days or more.
2) Driving a vehicle, for x days or more.
Have you looked into what the specifics are, and how they are triggered?
Poking some holes at this:
- Are you on the hook to register vehicles you don't own for actions (1) or (2)?
Consider two examples:
(a) you rent a vehicle,
(b) you drive or choose to house a friends' vehicle.
From what you've stated, logically, anytime you rent a vehicle or operate or house a friends', you now are asked to register it.
Do you think this is accurate? And if so, do you think it would hold in court of law?
(a) you rent a vehicle,
(b) you drive or choose to house a friends' vehicle.
in both cases, the vehicle would already be registered in the state (by the rental company or by the friend).
it is not clear to me why you think the vehicles would need to be re-registered.
under no circumstance are you (the customer) going to be required to (or even able to) register the car you are renting.
i would not take car registration advice from a person asking about registering someone else's car at the dmv.
If you're worried, seek legal council and pay your use tax.
Consider also this Montana-route may require being brave because when you make a stand for something like privacy, which is under attack, you too may be attacked even if you are in the right legally.
Depends on the state, in my former state, Virginia, it is tax evasion. This is not unique to Virginia BTW, Georgia has similar laws. By law in VA, all cars that are garaged in state for longer than 90 days must pay the car tax. Only reason Montana LLC registered cars get away from it is most counties find out who must pay the tax from Virginia DMV so these cars are missed.
This is a lie. The law is that someone must register and through that process pay the registration tax. However you can't register a vehicle you don't own.
So you are left with one thing: use tax. Is use tax applicable to you?
>in my former state, Virginia, it is tax evasion
I think this is untrue as well. I'm very familiar with Virginia and spent a lot of my life living there. What makes it tax evasion?
I mean, it’s both, right? You’re definitely getting a tax advantage compared to a lot of areas of the country. And how is insurance going to work?
Insurance is a bit tricky though I've heard it's simple. Most companies don't ask or inquire about where the cars registered, and neither do repair shops or parts of the claim process inquire into this. If you're uncomfortable with this, you can DYOR and check what happened for claims if a driver who's personally insured is driving a vehicle registered under an LLC/company. I think it isn't true that just because a vehicle is registered by a company, it cannot be used for personal purposes or that insurance companies would make claims more difficult (though check yourself and I'm happy to know what you find)
Even if you are able to register a vehicle legally in another state, that does not necessarily exempt you from obligations in your own state... even if it would for non-residents passing through.
Can't logically be true right?
When you don't owe tax, you don't pay it. When you owe it, you pay it. However don't cloud up the space and confuse people by saying you owe tax for property you don't own because someone feels that you are evading tax. That's not actually lawful or law based justice, that's hate/fear and prejudice based simply to prove a point. For example here, that privacy is not allowed and that you should be afraid for not taking ownership of things you use such as vehicles.
In cases where you use things you don't own, the law is usually pretty clearly articulated: pay use tax for what you use, pay registration and sales/registration taxes for things you own. Tax authorities know this and will articulate it clearly usually, except I suppose in certain prejudiced and discriminatory cases like when privacy is concerned like vehicle registration by LLCs. Now do you need to take ownership of things you use in a state just so you can hypothetically pay a tax for an evasion accusation that you don't apply to, I would be incredibly surprised to see if any state actually is saying this - I don't think its constitutionally or legally sound in any way. Instead, what I see, is fear mongering, authoritarian language and discourse and simply as I originally stated in my post Ad Hominem and logically fallacy based communication.
Legally, single member LLCs often simply pass-through tax obligations. In this situation, the law literally disregards their existence for tax purposes.
> Now do you need to take ownership of things you use in a state just so you can hypothetically pay a tax for an evasion accusation that you don't apply to, I would be incredibly surprised to see if any state actually is saying this - I don't think its constitutionally or legally sound in any way.
No nobody is arbitrarily forcing anyone to trade ownership of anything -- a Montana LLC could register their car locally in CA. But that defeats the point of the "Montana car registration scheme" -- which is tax evasion.
If there is an actual real company in Montana that is giving their employees a car to drive around in California, they need to register it in California and pay tax there.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/california-is-done-with-rich-g...
> One defendant texted that another conspirator “made me provide a fake bill of lading which cost $200 but did allow me to pickup the Urus.”
There's a reason the ultra wealthy and rich have so many umbrella organizations and don't really "own" anything.
During the investigation the investigating officer had become worried that the assailant would use police resources to further track and harass the victim.
Luckily the guy was driving a company vehicle that did not track to his address.