Hacker News Reader

Comment by neodymiumphish | Hacker News Reader

Former law enforcement officer here. I can say that when we conducted surveillance, we weren't allowed to use equipment that wasn't common for normal people to use. So for example, I couldn't use some sort of long-distance microphone to overhear a conversation between two people in public because a normal person wouldn't have that same type of technology. I think this applies in this context to say that a cop just scanning and logging every single plate that traverses a certain area is outside the bounds of what we'd consider lawful for normal surveillance. Alternatively, if a normal person would just sit down and write down every single car description and plate that passed by their house or any other public area, a cop doing the same thing would be reasonable. The scale of modern data collection for police is whats dangerous to individual privacy rights.

View on HN

I think the issue of what your average citizen can or cannot do is a relatively minor.

The bigger problem is law enforcement's use of private business as end-around to dodge 4th amendment.

Google and Apple, Verizon and AT&T, auto manufacturers, Flock, and every other business that scoops up our data has a trove of information that would be unquestionably illegal for law enforcement to collect directly due to 4th amendment protections against government mass surveillance. So, instead, the businesses conduct the mass surveillance and then law enforcement gets to access that information -- either with a warrant as is the case for Google and Apple, or with some sort agreement as with Flock.

Businesses (or individuals) that deliver surveillance data to the government, compelled by warrant or otherwise, should be subject to the same constitutional restrictions as the government itself.

That's not a good argument against ALPRs because citizens can theoretically set up an ALPRs too.

And do! A lot of newer home security cameras have ALPRs so you can set up rules like "if a car with a plate number not on this whitelist pulls up on my driveway send me an SMS"

True, but I’d imagine if a few techies in the community setup an open-ALPR network and started a website “where is the police chief and all his family vehicles .com” that the police department’s views towards the free and open use of such data without a warrant would change quite quickly. So long as that data was only collected on public streets it would be perfectly legal.

Local Techie Famous For "DIY Flock" Dead With Bullet Holes On the Back Of His Head after Traffic Stop. Police Chief Deems It Suicide And Calls For Better Mental Health Resources.

a single person can't set up a fine-grained nationwide network of cameras with a unified search interface that lets one track everyones daily movements.

So by that logic, nation-wide ABPs are also illegal, because a single person can't rally the entire country's law enforcement to find someone?

A nationwide APB is not an investigative activity.

Neither is writing down license plates.

Yes, it is. If you were investigating a business or building, you would document vehicles coming and going.

Yes it is.

Non-investigating would be tasks like:

- counting the number of vehicles going by - radar’ing every car to produce a report on how many people are speeding and how much - checking all licence plates for valid registrations to produce a report on what percentage of cars have expired tags on the road.

No, but accessing and searching the database is.

It’s not that police can’t use tools that arent available to the general public. It’s that in the US we have the plain view doctrine which defines the boundary between the things that can be plainly observed in public, which don’t constitute a search and thus don’t trigger the 4a protections, and observations that are not plain view observations and which are a search and trigger 4a protections

OP's contention is that private citizens don't have access to a network of cameras to look for license plates and therefore it isn't "plain view", but I don't see how that's different than law enforcement being able to muster the entire nation's cops to look for a suspect.

Because it is not about some principle that cares about the nature of the action, the principles are related to the civil liberties at risk, and whether or not certain powers jeopardize them.

The level of observability and risk involved in using the entire nation’s police resources is extremely high, whoever asks for that much resources will have to account for what they are doing and many of the details of the event are likely to be scrutinized by many parties, media, other departments, etc. It is unlikely to be wielded to abuse or strip civil liberties or to harass people, as we’ve seen ALPR’s be used

I actually have set up a few! On my property, not every major intersection in town, though.

Citizens can theoretically use long-distance microphones too. The criteria is whether they commonly do, not whether it's possible.

"we weren't allowed to use equipment that wasn't common for normal people to use."

Is it common for normal people to set up and use ALPRs?

It's already prohibited in a number of states and I'd bet that if citizens tried to do that at any scale, then laws would be quickly passed to make the state and its corporate partners the only ones allowed to do so everywhere else.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com