Yes, that's what they are. But does that mean are they breaking federal law or unconstitutional? I believe we've been told by the courts repeatedly that we should have no expectation of privacy out in public.
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.
This is a false equivalence. Reverse engineering my binary is not the same thing as training on my code. When you RE a binary, what comes out the other side is not the code that I wrote, its some machine-generated code that can reproduce the behavior of the binary. The result can't even be described as 'similar' to the original, because the compilation process is pretty much 100% lossy.
Reverse engineering my binary doesn't concern me too much, as I'm sure there are legal avenues I could take to protect my business were it to become a real problem. And if it comes down it, there's zero competitive advantage someone would have in that scenario, as all they'd have is undifferentiated AI slop.
Taking my work, putting it into your commercial product, and selling it without my permission is what I have a problem with. That's exactly what AI companies are doing with very little push back, and why I won't release my hand-written human code anymore.
> 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.
Software is certainly not 'trivial' now. The only people who believe this are those that have gotten caught up in the AI marketing blitz, or have completely detached/warped perspective on software. I.e. non-engineers wowed by novelty, finance execs wowed by the idea of being able to fire a bunch of people, or oligarchs wowed by the idea of being able to monopolize an entire industry.
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?"
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.
Yes but there is an expectation that the government doesn't tail you at all times for your entire life with no warrant, right? Largely because in the past it was infeasible for the government to do so: it cost too much money and required too much manpower.
That's what Alito was arguing in Jones: people expect to be tailed sometimes but they don't expect to be tailed at all times for a whole month. And commentary suggests the Court would have had a similar opinion if they had not sidestepped the issue by leaning on trespass.
As Alito said, the question the Court has not decided (and didn't need to decide in that case) is where the line is drawn. When does tracking a vehicle become a search and enter 4th amendment territory and require a warrant? (He said surely before 4 weeks.)
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...>
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.
Never.
(bear with me, this all comes from random podcasting over the past decade)
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.
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).
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.
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.
What is America's history with tyranny?
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.
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.
Is warrantless wiretapping of open-air payphones legal? Based on the TV show the wire, it's not.
https://www.cato.org/blog/patriot-powers-roving-wiretaps
> For an ordinary non-roving wiretap, that means you show a judge the “nexus” between evidence of a crime and a particular “place” (a phone line, an e‑mail address, or a physical location you want to bug). You will often have a named target, but you don’t need one: If you have good evidence gang members are meeting in some location or routinely using a specific payphone to plan their crimes, you can get a warrant to bug it without necessarily knowing the names of the individuals who are going to show up. On the other hand, though, you do always need that criminal nexus: No bugging Tony Soprano’s AA meeting unless you have some reason to think he’s discussing his mob activity there. Since places and communications facilities may be used for both criminal and innocent persons, the officer monitoring the facility is only supposed to record what’s pertinent to the investigation.
I’m used to people citing fiction to back up poor arguments, not correct positions, which may be why I misread it. In fact this may be the first time I’ve seen it done this way.