* Illegal to collect every plate for later analysis
* Must delete "non hit" plate images within 3 minutes
* Strict forbidden to upload "non hit" camera imagery off the device
I would add that it should also require a warrant to access the ALPR data, but it's a great start.
https://gc.nh.gov/rsa/html/XXI/261/261-75-b.htm?utm_source=c...
Why would anyone believe that these "forbidden things" are actually prevented? There is no evidence besides occasional anecdotal outings of police doing searches that the only get caught doing after way long after.
So they can use words like "strict" all they want. The system doesnt work that way and neither do the people operating it. Just lipservice.
Making something illegal is the prerequisite to enforcement. These are separate parts of the government. You can't build enforcement infrastructure around something that isn't yet illegal! You don't even know what that would look like until you know what the laws you're enforcing are. Enforcement is the goal of these processes, the laws are the foundation from which enforcement stems.
It is true that simply putting a law down doesn't mean the problem is solved. But solving these problems doesn't happen all at once, so there's no reason to criticize the first step for not being a leap to the finish line.
I think what people want is just tearing all of the cameras down. Law enforcement had their chance to prove flock cameras were good. They proved to be poor stewards for the technology. Now get them the fuck off our streets.
They want you to believe it's not possible to restrict them so that you don't try.
In other words, the rich don't generally break the law to avoid paying taxes. Rather, they find _legal_ loopholes that work for them, and even create them through lobbying.
Which suggests that legal measures _would_ be likely to work!
> You can't build enforcement infrastructure around something that isn't yet illegal!
Yes. Yet merely making something illegal must not be an excuse to set up something that is sooo easy to breach.
In other words, stealing being illegal does not make it a good idea to recklessly leave stacked banknotes unattended on my lawn.
Some laws don't reflect what broader society thinks at all.
Edit: this being said, the New Hampshire laws above seem to be mandating that the data is deleted. Not that it is not accessed. It seems like pretty good start.
But there also could be a law stating "do not set up mass surveillance camera network in public areas".
Selective enforcement is worse than no law at all.
That being said: how about the New Hampshire law plus a provision for independent audits?
And ALPR is only one method that Flock uses. Their pan-tilt-zoom offerings are specifically meant to target pedestrians. They have facial recognition (and I've heard gait as well) and sniff for Bluetooth and other things to try to fingerprint devices.
It needs to be illegal to collect video for later facial recognition analysis as well.
The govt has been steadily eroding privacy and our rights (carnivore reading email, bulk collection of phone metadata, all internet traffic with x-keyscore, stingrays, etc etc etc) and using terrorism as the boogeyman when often it’s just wrong think that will put you in the sights. None of this needed warrants, all of it illegal by a plain reading of the 4th amendment. If a constitutional amendment won’t protect you, a state law is basically toilet paper.
* Illegal to collect every plate for later analysis
* Must delete "non hit" plate images within 3 MILLISECONDS
* Strict forbidden to upload "non hit" camera imagery to NON-VOLATILE STORAGE.
* "HIT" LIST MUST BE CRYPTOGRAPHICALLY SIGNED & ENCRYPTED BY WARRANT KEY ONLY JUDGE HAS ACCESS TO.
Listen to Marc Andreessen, he’s a funder of Flock and a passionate advocate of that position.
Well... Flock only has themselves to blame for it getting politically charged.
I believe I've seen claims the are recording Bluetooth MACs of passing devices, and I've definitely seen that they're also detecting people on the camera feed.
Also, 10 or 15 years back, I wrote an Android app to do ALPR on the live camera view with the phone in a holder that let it see out he windscreen. I collected licence plates by spending an hour or so every few days over a few weeks sitting at cafes that had a good view of the marked and unmarked cars arriving and leaving the three major police stations nearby. It did work, but the camera in the Galaxy S3 and S4s I had to try it on couldn't get images good enough for OCR until the cop car was so close it wasn't useful... I contemplated experimenting with a drone camera gimbal when I was building and flying camera drones around 2014/2015, possibly using one of those clip on telephoto lens's that were common back then - but by then I'd ditched the car and I didn't figure I;d be able to build that to work on any of my motorcycles.
I am different in that I would be fine with these BUT only if there is super strict guardrails with real consequences for misuse:
- Super strict rules around information storage and access. - Ensuring access can only be for an active investigation where there is direct reason to look for a name, face, number plate etc.
- Ensure there is reasonable crime threshold for use so cops don't have the right to track someone because they jay walked or something frivolous to justify use.
- Add a requirement any person looked up then they must be informed within ~6 months with reasons why (or a judge warranted delay every 6 months).
- Legal use only and the data can never be sold for general commercialisation.
- Require human verification of hit if police are going to take action on data so there is clear ownership of incorrect actions.
- Some level of data deletion, after a year type thing.
With something down that route, and naturally more than my quick comment, I feel it could balance benefit vs cost. Without real guardrails and consequences it's openeing a risky path for totalitarianism misuse.
The Federal Driver's Privacy Protection Act limits license plate look ups to law enforcement. In Texas, where I live, there are no restrictions on law enforcement to conduct manual license plate searches.
In Texas every license plate search is logged and those logs are audited and purged after a certain duration.
A quick Google search indicates use of automated license plate reading systems, such as Flock cameras, even by law enforcement are paused pending legal review by the state politicians.
This is all interesting because toll systems in the state read all license plates in an automated way, are less scrutinized, and not associated with law enforcement.
It's not the imagery that's really important, it's tracking the who+when+where.
Longest plates are 8 chars. It seems exceedingly unlikely that the target list is longer than 1,000,000 plates. They all use characters that fit in a single UTF-8 code point. So 8mb initial download, and very small incremental updates.
Likely much more power efficient than sending every plate over the network, and would use considerably less bandwidth over a couple months.
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Is that how they do it? No freaking clue.
But it seems like a very solvable problem, with correctly aligned incentives (ex - it's both cheaper and more private to NOT send the plate over the net, vs sending the list to the device).
1. Every hit is hashed and sent to every camera.
2. Whenever a camera detects a license plate, it hashes the license plate and only reports if the hash matches. Nothing leaves or even stored on the device if the hash does not match.
3. There's no "search for hits", you tell cameras which plates to record and every plate registration is associated with person who registered it and reason.
Any camera system that can be used to track people even if that's not the sole purpose is problematic, but when the entire purpose of the camera is tracking people then it is especially egregious. It's not a problem now, but they've turned the knob to an 11.
The power the flock infrastructure has to target people is unprecedented in the US. And the kind of power I would never want anyone to wield.
Since there can not be any trust in the supply chain and operations, the only way is to ban ALPR outright.