Because its useful messaging to disarm the populace. "License plate reader" sounds less alarming than "Internet connected camera" or "Mass surveillance device."
Public attitudes vary around a "license plate reader" but will be more uniformly opposed to "Widespread, automated government mass surveillance tracking your every move via camera in real time"
They were always internet connected and mass surveillance. It's the addition of search that changed things.
Supreme Court recently ruled that you need a warrant for even the geofence data lookup from 3rd party recently.
That's my impression anyway.
But "anonymous sources" and similar evidence laundering has been in a thing in domestic law enforcement since SCOTUS started imposing prophylactic procedural protections in the 1960s. It was just ad hoc. But now states like Texas and California have built their own intelligence agencies which are beginning to push the boundaries of both mass and targeted surveillance similar to the NSA, and through ubiquitous digital communications and third-parties like Flock, police departments have also organically grown their own whisper networks that allows them to systematically and efficiently do what was ad hoc before.
That said, unlike the post-9/11 NSA parallel construction which was knowing and deliberate and something of an open secret at both the NSA and parts of Federal law enforcement, I think state law enforcement personnel believe they're well within the law. And interestingly I was recently speaking with an FBI financial crimes investigator about this stuff and he had never even heard of the term parallel construction. Building durable parallel construction processes requires maintaining plausible deniability, and the best way to do that is to keep most law enforcement personnel and, preferably, all district attorneys out of the loop and ignorant to what's going on. That happens by high-level officials quietly tasking a handful of mid-level people to launder the evidence. And in that sense parallel construction will never be ordinary practice the way people assume as the vast majority of law enforcement personnel will never see it happening, or at least recognize it for what it is, except for when they do it themselves in an ad hoc manner.
Smart glasses obviously change that equation quite a bit.
But they can’t come close to the panopticon of video cameras everywhere, all the time, capturing everything for years of record-keeping.
Plenty of people did? That was obviously one of the end goals for cloud connected devices pushing recordings to a remote side for processing and storage. Especially when stuff like facial recognition was implemented server side.
I would be highly surprised if this was not pitched in the first internal product meeting.
While I give some grace to the regular population on this topic - anyone posting on HN should have trivially seen this outcome as not only likely, but nearly written in stone. Even if all your imagination captured was “secret NSA warrant” it would be one of the first risks you’d imagine for such a product.
It was obvious that this was the final outcome even back when Facebook first implemented tagging friends in photos before image recognition got cheap and good enough to go back and time and correlate the social graphs of everyone.
The Super Bowl commercial that Ring put out about finding lost dogs spooked people for a reason!
> I give some grace to the regular population on this topic
There is a huge difference between storing and processing recordings for a customer's own use, and aggregating them from multiple sources for organized mass surveillance. With that said, most corporations do not have the principles to resist the latter.
The flag for whether the object/person is law enforcement vs not is interesting as well.
Love that, very cool for quickly filtering out the streams / geodata that might have an officer's actions recorded.
https://docs.flocksafety.com/developer-hub/docs/tracking-obj...
You could say the same about literally any privately operated device. ‘I don’t know why they call these things cell towers. They do whatever they are programmed to and can be reprogrammed by anyone with access’
Heck the same applies to non electronic things too ‘why do they call it a house? It’s a general purpose structure and could be turned into a shop or a factory or a crack den at any time by anyone with access’
As others have noted, I believe the brightline is less “general purpose computer…” and more “…that is remotely accessible & modifiable effectively anywhere in the world”. I worry not just about OEMs and cops, but also criminals, foreign intelligence agencies, etc. Honestly potentially anyone at this point, now that folks have figured out you can use LLMs to do analysis.
This is a sound foundation for concern by itself, don’t you think?
Neither philosophy seems to have a good limiting principle for what they mean governments should be allowed to do to efficiently enforce traffic law
It is broader than that though, and is the distinction I sought to capture with “anyone with access” in my original post. They are connected to the internet, and to a cloud no less! Anyone could be the NSA now, from anywhere in the world. I bet we’ll see these used to collect marketing data too.
Perhaps a limiting principle can be that we simply do not use ALPRs or other surveillance tech, or at least that we don’t connect them to the internet and require a warrant to access and use their data? Personally, I’d just prefer cops enforce traffic law the old fashioned way.
So we’re talking about trading off your concerns over potential abuse and misuse of technology vs concerns about potential abuse and misuse of police powers vs just allowing traffic to kill more cyclists and pedestrians.
The nihilistic libertarian says ‘precisely - government doesn’t work - we can’t hope to make things better by concentrating power’
An optimistic democratic-institutionalist says ‘we can constrain governments at the ballot box and with constitutional limitations’.
I suspect our disagreement lies somewhere in the chasm between these world views.
(To be clear: the government requires you to display a license plate on your car. They do not require that you broadcast an identifiable Bluetooth signature as you drive around. If you happen to do so - something you have a choice to avoid - it seems disingenuous of you to say ‘I don’t want anyone to take any notice of the Bluetooth and WiFi signatures I choose to broadcast’.)
Obviously the electronic networked solution is going to be cheaper and easier to operate. It would be insanely wasteful to force government organizations to use expensive cumbersome processes just to ensure they can’t be misused.
The solution is legislation and enforcement of rules that constrain what local governments are allowed to actually do with equipment they install and the data it collects, not regulation of what the equipment they install could theoretically be converted to accomplish.
for the record: whatever they're called, and in fact even if they just POSTed txt license plate numbers, i'd still be opposed because they're collecting info about people who've done nothing wrong (unlike red light cameras).
No one? There's a reason I never bought one of these things. This was a pretty obvious outcome to anyone who even slightly distrusts corporations or the government.
> No one expected doorbell cameras to join a mass surveillance network
Doorbell cameras were at least for individual security, initially. There's no attempt being made to market Flock as anything but mass surveillance. Surely we all expect them or their successors to be detecting peoples' faces, walking gates, and who-knows-what-else in the near future.
Seems like a nonsense comparison either way. These cameras are in public places and provide surveillance intel for governmental entities.
"Warrantless mass surveillance technology" creates a category into which these and similar devices can be aggregated together where people's concerns tend to be about the same.
That phrase was suggested by a local chief of police while we were having discussions on policy.
https://www.smatstraffic.com/blog/bluetooth-and-radar-traffi...
"They detect Bluetooth or Wi-Fi signals emitted by mobile devices inside passing vehicles and capture the device’s MAC address, a unique identifier that allows the same device to be recognized at multiple locations"
There's no malintent with it, it just means that the public conversation hasn't gotten to a point where these distinctions can easily be made to a wider audience. We'll get there.
Do you really think people don’t know how they’re framing the situation when they choose to use language this way? It’s all just an innocent misunderstanding, that just so happens to serve the interest of existing power structures?
I'm talking about the random schmos out there who don't know what "ALPR" even is. These folk are more and more learning about what these things are and pushing back on them.