Federal judge calls Flock 'indiscriminate mass surveillance'
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
So the device should require very specific license plates to scan for—not the current dragnet. The software should only "ping" when there is a confident match with said license plate(s)—and merely log which license plate, time stamp a single photo, and note the confidence level of it being a match.
The frame buffer should be the only place (a frame of) video is ever stored at all (excepting the high-confidence match indicated above).
The only issue remaining would be whether we trust the device/software to have complied (and not have a backdoor) and of course there needs to be a legal warrant for every license plate uploaded (and it should expire fairly frequently, likely requiring a new warrant to continue canning for the plate).
Sort of. The problem isn’t necessarily the speed but the range. But it could be used. Bluetooth and WiFi tracking would be more likely in most real world scenarios.
You don't need to look at all tires to make a match, but the more a car has, the more likely one will be broadcasting during the window for detection.
Even if you can’t, if you put enough of them by stop signs and traffic lights it’s a non-issue.
Bluetooth and toll transponders (e.g, EZ-Pass, FastTrak) have been tracking things for decades.
First hand experience in operational rooms where both Bluetooth and the transponders are used for "traffic management" in Delaware and Washington DC. The readers are not at toll gates (only). they are sprinkled throughout highways and "high interest" areas. And, yes individual vehicles can be identified throughout their movements that is the very purpose of tracking so they can see the speed and flow of individual vehicles "to adjust intersection lights".
Aren't they static for the life of the sensor which is ~10 years?
I do not know that much about TPMS changing, only anecdotal. Every time a rim is messed up or the device fails the TPMS would change.
They might have been wrong when they told me why they "just" track car BT (and EZPass).
Building a system with "safeguards" in place that require constant oversight is destined for either regulatory capture of the oversight, or slow dismantling of the oversight.
E.g. warrants -> fisa court warrants -> Xkeyscore
There seems to be a real reduction in property crime in some places with cameras. I don’t think it’s realistic to take these down everywhere. (I was in the camp that they should go down everywhere. I’ve relaxed that position recently.)
Do you have any evidence that the massive centralized aggregation has had a real reduction in crime versus cameras that are locally controlled?
or are you just spewing poorly thought out horseshit in defense of the destruction of our liberty?
(though even this is through the borderline insane, and staunchly anti-american lens that a reduction in property crime definitively warrants the destruction of privacy and liberty)
Liberty also means living in an area free of crime, not in constant fear of it. What exactly is the better solution to handling areas plagued by high crime rates? If cameras in those public areas now means those residents living there can walk safely in public without fear of getting robbed or mugged, then good for them, it's a positive development.
Also, the part where you added what "real Americans" value, reads like a satire skit on SNL. I was expecting you'd add V8 big-blocks, AR-15s and grilled steaks halfway through reading it.
Investing in the community and public services?
Do you turn around before they attack you and go "hey, good news, the city allocated some more funds to public services, no need to stab me" and the perp goes "ah shieet, thanks for the good news bro, let's hug and sing kumbaya"?
No matter how much money you throw at public services, criminals will still exist because bad people exist regardless of public services, otherwise you wouldn't need any law enforcement to exist if that was the solution.
And money for social services isn't infinite, you can't buy your way out of crime, if you live in a poor low income are that lacks money. What then? SHould they tolerate lawlessness and rampant crime without strong law enforcement?
And crime and lack of funds are often self reinforcing in a negative feedback loop. Nobody will come and open jobs and businesses in your area to pay the taxes your welfare system needs, if there's high crime without law enforcement and surveillance systems to catch or deter criminals that rob businesses.
We’ve tried increasing surveillance and policing, it does not prevent people from being robbed and stabbed. Could we try funding social services now? We’ve never really done that.
The presence of cameras means a higher chance the perp will get identified and caught and locked up unable to harm another person. Scale these incarcerations up over time and streets can become free of crime again. No cameras, and that person can keep doing crime over and over unless there's witnesses all the time to identify him every time, which is a lot less likely.
>We’ve tried increasing surveillance and policing, it does not prevent people from being robbed and stabbed
Yeah, because soft-on-crime judges let out repeat offenders. That's how you see people who've been arrested 14 times still committing crimes in public, instead of being locked up in jail away from civilized society where they can't hurt anyone anymore. Policing means nothing if the legal system is fucked and just practices catch-and-release.
>Could we try funding social services now? We’ve never really done that.
Parts of Europe has some of the best most funded social services in the world, and crime is only increasing. When do we admit that some people are just bad people, and we can't pay infinity taxes as an extortion racket, to prevent the bottom worst 2% of society from harming us, just because we refuse to lock them up out of misplaced empathy.
And the fact is that you need both the carrot and the stick, you need functioning services AND a strict law enforcement. Having a welfare state without any deterrent against crime means you'll get people gladly exploiting both systems for personal gain, just because they can.
Instead let’s pay infinity taxes locking everyone up!
You won’t find me disagreeing there are some people who are going to commit crime no matter what - i will argue its a lot less than 2%, but whatever let’s go with 2%. What I arguing about is treating the other 98% of people like criminals in need of constant watching, rather than giving them the tools they need to succeed.
> The presence of cameras means a higher chance the perp will get identified and caught and locked up unable to harm another person
Defeated by a $0.15 surgical mask and some mud on the license plate. Meanwhile the gov corruption crime rate spikes because no whistleblower can speak to a journalist without being tracked.
I don't want people locked up, I want them caned like Singapore does. Much cheaper and more effective deterrent against repat offenders.
But if you insist on perps not being locked up, then I hope they all get released from jails ... straight into your neighborhood so you can taste your own medicine for once. You'd sing a different tune if you actually lived in a high crime area instead of a safe community, and crime was only something you read about in the media.
>What I arguing about is treating the other 98% of people like criminals in need of constant watching
All supermarkets, stores and shopping centers have surveillance cameras everywhere even if most shoppers are not criminals, because it works at deterring crime and catching criminals. Without those cameras, shoplifting would be even more rampant because many criminals are opportunistic, they're not serial criminals, they just see there's an opportunity to make an easy score since nobody is watching and there's no consequences if caught, so then why no do it? Add cameras and police and you at least eliminate all the low hanging fruit opportunists.
> rather than giving them the tools they need to succeed
That's based on the flawed blank slate theory that assumes everyone is equal in abilities and can achieve to be the next Albert Einstein if only you give them enough of your (other peoples') resources. Which couldn't be more false. Everyone who went to a public schools knows this because they saw it with their own eyes.
Some people are smart, some people are stupid, some are strong, some are weak, some are hard working, some are lazy, some are anxious, some are confident, some are well behaved, some are prone to violence, etc, take two people and they will achieve different results in life even if they get the exact same tools and opportunities, because people are not equal. People are mostly capped in life by their spawn-RNG and no amount of resources spending on them will change this.
I had a mate in highschool who would post pics of himself on Facebook with baggies of drugs, and start fights including with police officers. These people aren't going to college, they're going to jail, no matter what you do. They're too stupid even for a life of crime, let alone an employer finding them useful given the high labor costs in the west. 200+ years ago these people had a place in society because you'd give them a spear and tell them to vent their anger by charging at the enemy tribe, but in today's western economy of mostly skilled jobs and automation, there's no place for stupid people with no impulse control, so you either pay them welfare to stay at home smoke weed and play CoD to not bother anyone, or you pay for their jail time.
I don't think this is a consensus definition of liberty.
Merriam Webster via Wikipedia: "Liberty is the state of being free within society from restrictions imposed by authority on one's way of life, behavior, or political views."
That is not in the definition of liberty. It's unfortunately common double-speak used by the enemies of liberty in order to justify reducing it. So is saying, 'I should be free of things that offend or alarm me, such as (group of people who are different)'. Liberty is not 'free of' things; it's self-determination, freedom to think and say and do as you choose.
Freedom and safety are often offset, as a trade-off. The over-used quote, 'Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety' portrays them as a trade-off.
It's an increasingly meaningless distinction: most consumer cameras now upload to the cloud and people like it. View from anywhere, AI magic, connect to cloud-based home automation, etc.
I wonder if there is a market for this.
All my shit is local with local AI.
-Larry Ellison
This has been the plan of the oligarchs for a while.
Property crime skyrocketed during COVID largely because of intentional decisions around policing. We can easily police property crime without ubiquitous surveillance.
Most Americans know that a small reduction in property crime is not worth trading for constant surveillance by private corporations and the entire government.
Police can walk about, ask or order (warrant) for footage.
A network of AI powered cameras linked to the hive mind controlled by real life super mega evil corp inc run by real life super villains... not so great.
Also the 4th amendment is a thing. Mosaic theory is a thing.
Enough of these flocking cameras.
I’m not okay with them using the third-party doctrine and going to a company like Amazon and having them do a dragnet for them.
And I’m really not okay with having a company like Flock make all that information publicly available to any bozo with a friend at a law enforcement organization who wants to make a little money on the side.
Are you sure about that?
Not sure where you are what laws specifically apply, but I believe you could be compelled to hand over footage, and jailed for obstruction or destruction of evidence if you didn’t.
Just a thought - you may have less control than you think.
If they need to get a court order signed by a judge to recover material that is directly relevant to a legally justified criminal investigation, then there's significantly less scope for abuse than what cops are doing with the flock mass surveillance system, where some have literally written "LMAO" in the form field describing the reason for their search, and where they've been using the searches to stalk citizens who are not suspected of any crime.
What can make them suck is authorities abusing them to do enforce arbitrary, unpredictable ideals that are not part of the law, incompetent authorities targeting non-criminals and peaceful protesters, or traumatizing the wrong person because of an incorrect AI face match.
That’s crime. Doesn’t make it into the stats tho
Read your municipal code (they're fairly homogenous these days because of the feds and their stupid grants) if you don't believe me.
And the guy at the Honda dealer says I should buy a CRV.
A warrant requirement is not a reasonable bandaid to consider allowing mass surveillance. There should be no mass surveillance, only targeted surveillance.
A warrant requirement makes sense for something like the locations of customers on cellular networks, because, although it should be improved, it's been built into the tech.
When you make the optional choice to create mass surveillance, safeguards do not make it acceptable.
Plenty of places have very low crime without mass surveillance.
Also, there are too many other cameras for a Flock ban to be consequential: privately owned cameras, law enforcement and other drones, etc.
The solution is good data hygiene (minimization, encryption, etc.) and a warrant requirement. Also, any cameras recording public space should be required to obscure, at the point of capture (before storage or transmission) all identifiable information - people (full body), cars, their dogs, etc.
This worked out great for Seattle. A "pathetic" lack of security cameras at the city's most visible tourist attraction, so when gangstas started shooting at each other at a food festival with 3 people dead and 4 others injured, it was complete chaos from a public safety perspective, and they had no evidence from which to draw from.
I wished we lived in your perfect world but unfortunately reality is more like Taxi Driver. Technology provides the tools to help bridge the gap.
https://komonews.com/news/local/seattle-city-councilmember-r...
Not to mention that as far as I am concerned, even someone e.g. breaking into a house - not speaking of violent crime - is far more damaging and traumatizing than some random cop looking up his exes license plate and doing nothing with it. Even if the numbers of instances were comparable.
Are you suggesting the set of all license plates of interest should be stored on the device itself?
Bear in mind this is not meaningfully different than previous mechanisms of issuing BOLOs. Law enforcement widely distributes information about plates of interest. In my area, those plates are often on digital billboards already.
The core problem with Flock is that it tracks innocent citizens on the off chance it helps catch a criminal, when it could be designed to only track already known wanted vehicles.
I don’t really see any drawbacks with storing them on the device, they should already be quasi-public knowledge (from warrants/etc) so it’s not like there’s a privacy/security risk there
that and you don't have any legitimate expectation of privacy while in public because you are in public
the really strange part is the folks that are angry about flock cameras are often the same people who are angry that folks like elon musk want the movements of the private jets to be non-public information
i can get around my community without worrying one bit about flock cameras surveilling me. the bike trails i use generally don't have cameras and even if they did i'm riding a fairly generic bike and wearing neutral and unmemorable clothing.
even with actual dragnet surveillance in NYC they couldn't track a dude on a bike effectively.
Not on a busy road. And not while identifying the faces of the drivers.
Point driven in by fellow commenters this year: scale matters!
I think it breaks the 'its in public so its public' argument. The state requires you to display plates-- its its responsibility to complete the law: e.g. make possession of a third parties plate number a serious felony outside of limited circumstances.
I’d be okay with a 24-hour on device store of scanned plates. That way a stolen car can be tracked ex post facto.
A cop with a cable to a camera pole would be a visible sign to the community that something happened. If someone’s there every day, maybe it’s one of those (rare but…) losers tracking his abused former lover. (Super sick that cop helped his cousin do this.)
This is why anonymity is necessary for true freedom and privacy. If data _can_ be traced and connected, it will be. This aligns with a 1995 Supreme Court opinion (McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission), where Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that "anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority," noting that it "exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation... at the hand of an intolerant society."
Govt. fund a new division of the EFF to address your concerns w/the new offline camera scheme? Unlike acceptable encryption backdoors, it seems possible. Somehow.
I'd guess probably 50-100.
Are we going to redesign them all to your specs too?
That doesn't seem realistic: Almost all the time, we only know about a crime after it happens - when it's too late to obtain a warrant. We get the license plate from the video of the crime.
So I would capture the images, minimize and encrypt it at the point of capture (before storage or transmission), and maybe even setup some PKI where only judges can issue keys to decrypt, if practical.
(bear with me, this all comes from random podcasting over the past decade)
Originally the Third-party doctrine[1] also would allow searches that were otherwise illegal, but recently exceptions have been made for GPS/location history in the courts in recent years (Carpenter and Chatrie).
Cell phones are kinda weird because they carry some of the elements that were built up around hardline phones (similar to how physical mail has a ton of protections that accumulated historically that make it distinct from other mediums).
This one generally gets treated legally more like any other data collection in a public space. Essentially, it's not a violation of your rights if somebody sits on a street corner and takes a picture of every car that drives by. There's a really interesting debate about whether there should be some concept of scale (Flock makes it really easy to effectively put somebody on every street corner), but the law generally hasn't changed to take that kind of thing into consideration.
You can see the same kind of thing in many of the AI training debates. Training AIs on bulk data has been found in a couple different cases to not be copyright infringement because they're drawing parallels to any other learning, even if the scale here is obviously several orders of magnitude apart from what was ever possible before.
For what it's worth: if I own a business in the US and have a camera pointed at the street, and the police ask me for footage, I don't need to require a subpoena. I can just choose to give it to them.
> For what it's worth: if I own a business in the US and have a camera pointed at the street, and the police ask me for footage, I don't need to require a subpoena. I can just choose to give it to them.
Correct, and SCOTUS decided this was inappropriate for cell tower data because 1) you effectively need a cell phone to live in the modern world, and 2) having a cell phone spits of tons of data.
This is directly analogous to Flock. It's more likely than not that this will end up getting a Third Party Doctrine exception (i.e. Flock and similar will be forbidden from providing this data to the government in lieu of a subpoena)
Even if you were correct, it would strengthen the 4th Amendment protections on Flock-collected data, not weaken them.
In theory sure. But the strange truth is that in practice you aren't allowed to do this.
Never.
Over the course of a days/weeks, the places one visits, roads you drive on, etc. those things should definitely be private.
I didn't search for undercover, but I can find nothing about a warrant being required for a stakeout in the US (and numerous results saying no warrant is required).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katz_v._United_States [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_use_in_United_States_...
My understanding of the rule that has emerged from prior decisions is that there is a twofold requirement, first that a person have exhibited an actual (subjective) expectation of privacy and, second, that the expectation be one that society is prepared to recognize as "reasonable." Thus a man's home is, for most purposes, a place where he expects privacy, but objects, activities, or statements that he exposes to the "plain view" of outsiders are not "protected" because no intention to keep them to himself has been exhibited. On the other hand, conversations in the open would not be protected against being overheard, for the expectation of privacy under the circumstances would be unreasonable.
For this case the guy was inside a phone booth rather than out in the open.
There's nothing from SCOTUS on stingrays, but I looked at one federal case and the data being collected was referred to as a document, so that's where the 4th was found to apply.
In turn I don't think I've greatly oversimplified anything.
Is warrantless wiretapping of open-air payphones legal? Based on the TV show the wire, it's not.
And you think this applies to the inside of the woman's car that the article is talking about?
> In turn I don't think I've greatly oversimplified anything.
In this reply, no, you're not greatly oversimplifying. In your parent comment, you said that going out in public means no expectation of privacy, and I gave an example of a place in public that had an expectation of privacy, which you've defined as "not in public". I think that if you have to call a place that's available to anyone and not owned by an individual "not public" in order to make your original statement work, then your original statement was oversimplifying.
Otherwise maybe I'll just set up my own cameras in public locations. If the police want the data they can pay per minute of footage. I'll let them search for metadata and tell them if footage matches with no visibility to the footage until after payment. If they search for something and don't purchase but come back for it - it's then increased pricing. If this is all public space and we can all build these systems because there's no expectation of privacy then all is fair in access to public right of way along roads.
Sure, if you strapped a camera to a light post without permission, I'd expect it to be taken down. The same way I can put a Ring camera on my door but I can't strap one to the traffic sign on my street.
If your door films the street, this is something that should be considered an invasion of your neighbour's privacy. The fact that it isn't is... disappointing.
Especially given the networked nature of those cameras. The police can access them by asking amazon permission, they don't need to ask you. Are you comfortable with that? I am not.
When that corporation is performing contracted work for the government, they act as the government's agent, making them subject to the same restrictions regarding civil rights as the government itself.
There's an interesting analogy with copyright issues surrounding AI use. Both copyright laws and surveillance were created to (respectively) creative incentives for authors to create novel works; and to protect citizens for indiscriminate surveillance. The laws made sense given the technology available at the time: it simply wasn't feasible to put a cop on every street corner, or to ingest the ideas of every work ever written.
But the laws have been eclipsed by technology. Technology makes a mockery of existing laws, by clearly violating their intent. Much has been written to the effect of "why bother to create new, free materials on the internet when it will just get scooped up by an LLM with no attribution to me." Similarly, Flock cameras have the effect or violating privacy in the exact same way the original laws sought to prevent.
Unfortunately, laws are slow to change, and monied interests will fight tooth-and-nail to put their profits above the rights of ordinary people. It's going to be a difficult decade or so coming up.
Can confirm. I've personally stopped releasing new open source code, and stopped contributing to projects.
Until copyright laws are updated to protect my work from being stolen and my labor exploited by AI companies, there's zero incentive for me to participate in open source.
Even OSI's cuck licenses are being cucked beyond reason. I didn't think that was possible.
What worries me is the fact AIs render licenses irrelevant. What's the point of starting an AGPLv3 project when AIs can just study it and make a proprietary equivalent? The free software movement no longer has any leverage.
I also don't feel any sense of accomplishment anymore. Software is so trivial now. Even if I make some unique thing, others can just have an AI copy it. Nothing is special anymore. Feels like there's no point.
I'd argue they break the fourth amendment:
> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
What are "unreasonable searches" if not being under "indiscriminate mass surveillance?"
A police officer randomly entering your house and going through all of your belongings.
Indiscriminately searching a larger number of people is not necessarily unreasonable. Take for example the TSA at airports where you have to searched to enter and the airpots have a ton of cameras recording every single person there.
The key issue there was the scope of the British power, not the fact that searches and seizures could happen at all. We wanted warrants that were reasonable and limited.
The issue is not a single security camera from a private bank. The issue is not a single cop in a car investigating someone. The issue is a national and searchable network of cameras where agents of the government can track anyone at any time for no reason at all.
The judge says the police need probable cause and a warrant for a search against an individual.
> Freedom from persistent, dragnet-style surveillance while in public is not a foreign concept in our society, and it is a reasonable expectation that society already accepts. This is the same expectation of privacy that the Supreme Court has continued to recognize in cases like Carpenter and Chatrie. Cell phones also move in public places where people can see you in plain view. But it becomes constitutionally problematic when law enforcement can indiscriminately and passively catalog your whereabouts over an extended period of time and then use that information for any purpose whenever convenient. [2]
[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt4-2/ALDE_...
[2] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.oknd.76...
The judge was saying that the police needed probable cause and a warrant to search the Flock system because it's dragnet surveillance, similar to needing a warrant to access cell phone location data. [1]
Just because you don't have an expectation of privacy while moving in a public space doesn't mean you don't have an expectation of privacy for all of your movements ever in every public space. That scenario wasn't possible in the 1700s.
For an individual today, it's fine for the government to tail someone without a warrant. [2] It's probably not fine for the government to put a long-term GPS tracker on your car without a warrant (probably because the issue was sidestepped with trespass). [3]
Even Alito notes that in the past it would have required too much labor for the government to surveil every movement of an individual for a long period of time and so society has the expectation that the government is not doing that. [4]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatrie_v._United_States
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Knotts
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jones_(2012)
[4] https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/pdf/10-1259.pdf#page=33
The expectation that the government doesn't tail everyone might have been reasonable, the expectation that the government doesn't tail you without a court-approved excuse is not.
I'm not arguing there shouldn't be protection against total surveillance, I'm arguing the US constitution doesn't offer such protection.
Luckily, the courts disagree with you, and have for -probably- longer than you've been alive. From printed page 31 of [0], discussion of the Constutionality of putting a radio transmitter in cargo in someone's car and tracking it:
But the defendant in that case raised concerns that “the result of the [Court’s] holding sought by the government would be that ‘twenty-four hour surveillance of any citizen of this country will be possible, without judicial knowledge or supervision.’” Id. at 283 (citing Br. For Resp., at 9). The Court addressed the defendant’s concern:
But the fact is that the “reality hardly suggests abuse[;]” if such dragnet type law enforcement practices as respondent envisions should eventually occur, there will be time enough then to determine whether different constitutional principles may be applicable. Insofar as respondent’s complaint appears to be simply that scientific devices such as the beeper enabled the police to be more effective in detecting crime, it simply has no constitutional foundation. We have never equated police efficiency with unconstitutionality, and we decline to do so now.
Id. at 283–84 (cleaned up).
More than 40 years have passed since the Supreme Court’s decision in Knotts, and this Court is now faced with technology that appears to be approaching the dragnet type law enforcement practice Mr. Knotts warned of. Therefore, lower courts need to reexamine the result in Knotts as technology advances past the rudimentary beeper in that case. Adhering too strictly to the Supreme Court’s language in Knotts about a person’s reasonable expectation of privacy in “his movements from one place to another” risks ignoring the Fourth Amendment principles at stake.
The whole document is well worth reading if you have a free fifteen-to-thirty minutes.
[0] <https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.oknd.76...>
What is America's history with tyranny?
See Mosaic theory.
This is not true. The original "reasonable expectation of privacy" case was about tapping phone booths, which are in public. And the way the law works (or is supposed to work) is that the reasonableness test is based on a typical person. What does or does not violate a reasonable expectation of privacy should not be assigned to us by judges.
That sentence does make this less of a win tbh, given that with it, it's just an actual example of the technology doing the job it is supposed to do.
Like this, it's almost a trojan horse of something pretending to be PR for A, but actually being effective PR for B.
A survey found that average daily consumption was 0.9g and median 0.35g.
92lb=41.73 kg = 41730g / 0.9g / 365 =127.032 average-user-years. Or basically a month’s supply for a small town.
Like most consumption, the top 10% easily account for >80% of total consumption.
Still, that’s a lot to be tailgating like this lady was as shown in the court filing. Also, “[the arresting officer] told another officer that he ‘could see her carotid artery in my car. That thing was about to pop out of her neck.’”
Sounds like some wild decisions were being made.
Defos swiping this analogy for future use
It does what it's advertised to do: it lets the police track and catch criminals easier.
This is especially meaningful in cases of crimes where either the information availability or the effort of tracking the criminal down often make enforcement prohibitive.
If Flock had better PR people, they'd have no shortage of shoplifters, joyriders, car window smashers, porch poachers, carjackers and drug mules that were caught using their tech to parade around.
It's just that this benefit comes at the cost of privacy being diminished for everyone.
But people don't hate Flock because it's legally questionable. People hate Flock because they don't like a corporation spying on them and selling data to cops - regardless of how legal or illegal that is. The rest is downstream from that. People only ask "how is this legal" because they hate it already.
No one bad law is too bad on it's own, like litter in the park. But you add it all up and it's disgusting. There's a law for everything but each one is defensible in abstract in a "my litter isn't responsible for this whole mess" way.
The prospect of all those laws potentially being enforced and cheaply on the whim of the government really lays bare how bad our laws are in their totality.
But people are not capable of confronting the tough compromise of giving up the laws for things they like so here we are screeching about this easy button that law enforcement has at its disposal.
Basically this will only prove mass surveillance effective to people who think only guilty people pleade the 5th
Flock cameras are a result of not enforcing existing laws. Judges are too lenient on offenders, repeat offenders are all too common, and so you have a reduction in the degree of trust in what should be a high trust society.
When there is not trust and too many people don't behave, you either start punishing offenders properly and potentially more harshly to disincentivise other would-be offenders, or you get Flock cameras.
You think only about the Flock cameras and their innate problems, but refuse to actually deal with _why_ Flock cameras are needed at all. Think a little.
No doubt erratic behavior gets me logged by that security team, if not escalated to local police, who may come to check up on me themselves later. Nobody knows what's happening with this footage. What their putting a wrapper in their pocket may look like in low res video.
Mass surveillance thru cameras and movement logging isn't so active but I 100% understand people who take action against the cameras. It's just as in a person's face every single day, in more and more places, and you don't know who is on the other end or what they're looking for or what you are doing may appear as.
The idea that law enforcement tapping into existing law enforcement knowledge constitutes as a search of "persons, houses, papers, and effects" does not logically follow for me. It is a search of law enforcements own property.
The roads are not law enforcement's property and my private car on a public road is private property that requires a warrant to search. These things should be totally banned, but even your argument is wrong since Flocks don't mask just the road, they record everything in their field of view.
I was referring data as the property. Accessing a public fact of your car is not the same as actually searching through a car.
>they record everything in their field of view.
And those areas are still part of the public.
> And those areas are still part of the public.
No, it's almost exclusively private land.
Like all the millions of traffic cameras, dashcams, smartphones, and everyone's eyeballs?
Just because the founding fathers 250 years ago couldn’t conceive of a panopticon doesn’t mean that we have to accept it today.
The wording here seems problematic. Why is law enforcement entitled to this degree of access to public surveillance as their "property"? That word strongly implies it is theirs to do with as they wish - I don't see how that would be a desirable state of affairs.
You seem to be paraphrasing the US v. Knotts decision. Read pages 30 and 31 of the document found here [0]. If you have fifteen-to-thirty minutes free, you should really read the whole thing.
[0] <https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.oknd.76...>
I don't think we can backtrack at this point but at least it should be heavily regulated and restricted (i.e. only run queries if there's a court order, etc).
Yes you can - if the citizenry says no and mobilises/votes to that end, the cameras can be physically removed, whether in a city/state/nationally.
This isn't an instance of "the cat's out the bag, it can't be opt back in" - accepting that is a form of defeatism IMO.
Don't be fooled. Flock's CEO has stated multiple times that the purpose of his company is to intimidate people into thinking they will be caught if they commit any crime, in order for him to achieve a crime-free world. The only way to make people think they will always be caught, is if people believe their every movement is tracked everywhere they go. Intimidation via zero privacy. It's literally the surveillance part of Nineteen Eighty Four.
The fact that these aims are impossible (some criminals don't mind going to jail, many are stupid/hubristic, a criminal can spraypaint a camera, etc) should also indicate how disconnected the guy is from reality. He's called people who non-violently protest the cameras terrorists. He's backpedaling now so that he can convince enough people to let him continue installing cameras and doing the same things Flock did before.
Flock keeps hurting people and only tries to do the right thing after so much outrage that it hurts its sales. This is not a company anyone should trust.
The USA is right now in an equilibrium where crime is relatively low. Only a few years ago, we saw that it can... fluctuate. I grew up in Russia in the 90ies so let's put it like that, I would already be open to all kinds of ways to fight crime, if I were in a different one. Most people won't go quite as far as me, but after a couple years in a different equilibrium, even some of the ardent privacy fighters will start coming around, especially if it affects them personally. At El Salvador level of disorder, apparently "put everyone with a tattoo in cages" starts to sound like a great plan to most people.
Now consider how Flock affects this equilibrium. What is the realistic, actual risk to non-criminals from the government? UK has mass surveillance, I mean it's not ideal, but how much of a dystopia is it? And the UK, as far as I understand, doesn't have nearly as many existing legal protections, nor does it have the culture of flipping the government a bird (consider e.g. covid lockdown compliance and enforcement).
On the other hand, to me it appears that surveillance is a relatively cheap and effective way to prevent crime. Aside from being good, that also reduces demand for other solutions that have been tried around the world, and the kinds of candidates who would run on crime/disorder agenda.
Pretty sure every judge would issue a warrant when your loved one is missing.
Using your example, a homeowner with a camera is indeed surveying but it's not mass surveillance. (Unless they actually hacked into other people's cameras, but that would be a completely different example and would in fact lead us back to the conversation about government or corporate responsibility over those other cameras.)
There's nothing hypocritical in pointing out this difference and expecting more restraint on a democratic government that's supposed to serve the common people.
Don't get me wrong, I hate internet mobs too but it's incorrect to assume that they are equivalent to actual governments. They're a separate problem that needs to be handled in its own terms.
Did you have a point?
They are—since 2000 Presidents have appointed more polarized judges [1]. (The broader trend began in 1975 [2].) But they’re just as powerful. Their words are absolutely meaningful.
[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w32920
[2] https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2022/04/political-pola...
The people in power are just circumventing everything on a whim to get what they want.