The Constitution does not prohibit government (or anyone for that matter) from recording people in public spaces. ALPRs have been in widespread use since the 90s, I am continuously puzzled where people get the idea that this is new technology.
Persistent technological tracking of a person's public movements can constitute a search. The fact that each individual movement occurs in public does not automatically eliminate fourth amendment protection, nor does it matter that its a third party that does the collecting (Google, Flock, whoever). What matters is that LE is conducting fourth amendment searches using that data.
> The fact that each individual movement occurs in public does not automatically eliminate fourth amendment protection, nor does it matter that its a third party that does the collecting (Google, Flock, whoever).
Sure, doesn't eliminate Fourth Amendment protections: the police can't just search your car because it's in public. But that doesn't meant police can't record public spaces.
> What matters is that LE is conducting fourth amendment searches using that data.
Recording public spaces isn't a Fourth Amendment search. That's what distinguishes Flock from the other cases you mentioned.
"A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere. To the contrary, 'what [one] seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.'"
> But that doesn't meant police can't record public spaces.
> Recording public spaces isn't a Fourth Amendment search.
I'm not saying either of these things. The quote that you're responding to literally says "What matters is that LE is conducting fourth amendment searches using that data". I don't care who collects the data (Flock, or Axon, or Google, or whoever): if the cops are searching a persistent database which monitors and tracks people over time, it is a 4A issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_v._United_States
> The Supreme Court's ruling in Carpenter was narrow and did not otherwise change the third-party doctrine related to other business records that might incidentally reveal location information, nor did it overrule prior decisions concerning conventional surveillance techniques and tools such as security cameras.
You're trying to expand the scope of the decision on Carpenter to encompasses video cameras, or location tracking in general, but that is not true.
> The quote that you're responding to literally says "What matters is that LE is conducting fourth amendment searches using that data".
No, it does not. It says that public activity may be protected, not that it is protected. And you're conveniently ignoring the fact that this decision was narrowly scoped to the context of phone location data.
> if the cops are searching a persistent database which monitors and tracks people over time, it is a 4A issue.
Carpenter only established this in the context of phone location information. You're inventing your own decision when you try to expand this to public facing cameras.
> nor did it overrule prior decisions
I'm not saying it overruled prior decisions. I'm saying the reasoning of the judges has an effect on future surveillance technologies.
> You're trying to expand the scope of the decision on Carpenter to encompasses video cameras, or location tracking in general, but that is not true.
No, I'm saying that the same principles that led to the outcome of Carpenter also apply to technologically-assisted tracking (which includes LE using surveillance cameras to track movements over time).
And this is just a factually wrong statement about the Carpenter decision. The Supreme Court didn't apply the same principles to other methods of surveillance. They could have. But they did not, and instead gave a narrowly scoped decision that was limited to cell phone location data.
What you think the Supreme Court should have decided is irrelevant.
> A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere. To the contrary, “what [one] seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.” Katz, 389 U. S., at 351–352. A majority of this Court has already recognized that individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their physical movements. Jones, 565 U. S., at 430 (Alito, J., concurring in judgment); id., at 415 (Sotomayor, J., concurring). Prior to the digital age, law enforcement might have pursued a suspect for a brief stretch, but doing so “for any extended period of time was difficult and costly and therefore rarely undertaken.” Id., at 429 (opinion of Alito, J.). For that reason, “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.” Id., at 430.
You can continue to tell me that the court narrowed the scope of the final decision, but "A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere" is quite clear. Cool, the final decision narrowed the scope to cell phone location data; that is irrelevant to what we're discussing and doesn't negate that the concurrence literally states that part of the reasoning is that people don't lose 4A rights just because they're being surveilled in public:
> A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere
Just because you want to claim that cell phone location data is somehow completely distinct from photographic location data because people can take photographs in public doesn't make it so.
And even then your quotes are much weaker than you seem to think:
> what [one] seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.”
"May be" means that there are some situations where it is protected, but also means ther exist other situations where it is not.
"the ball is blue", and "the ball may be blue" are two vastly different statements. Even if only a fraction of one percent of balls are blue, we can still make the statement "the ball may be blue".
> ...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.”
Flock cameras don't monitor every movement of a car - only where those cameras are present. Furthermore they're not secret: Flock cameras are publicly visible, and many governments public maps of where cameras have coverage.