Manuel_D

That doesn't make make it permissible to try and use the comments periods on other meetings to talk about Flock. The point remains, she was not removed for simply voicing opposition to Flock cameras. The was arrested and removed for trying to derail an unrelated meeting.

Someone going on the stand to rant about abortion during a meeting on sidewalk codes would similarly get removed.

That doesn't make make it permissible to hijack other meetings. The point remains, she was not removed for simply voicing opposition to Flock cameras. The was arrested and removed for trying to derail an unrelated meeting.

Someone going on the stand to rant about abortion during a meeting on sidewalk codes would similarly get removed.

What context am I ignoring?

That statement was directed about the trend of posting videos of people getting dragged away from council meetings, in general, not this particular story.

In this particular story, Heider was using the comment period on an unrelated issue to voice her complaints about Flock. Hence her removal once it became clear she was not talking about the issue at hand.

> Heider explained that she waited until the public comment period for a different issue, filled out a form to talk, and then got up to deliver a written statement about Flock cameras.

At a high level it's the same thing: people trying to use public comment periods for protests, rather than actually engage with the topic.

Consider this: what if at every public comments periods, anti-abortion activists incessantly took the stand at unrelated meetings to rant about abortion providers? This becomes so pervasive that good faith community members who actually want to engage with the topic at hand have reduced opportunity to speak. Of course removal of the former is justified if they refuse to abide by the rules of the council meetings.

The comment session was for an entirely unrelated issue.

> Heider explained that she waited until the public comment period for a different issue, filled out a form to talk, and then got up to deliver a written statement about Flock cameras.

It wasn't that the council disagreed with what Heider said, it's that what she was talking about was unrelated to the meeting.

You realize that "de jure" is literally lation for "by law"?

Until some court reinterprets the law, it is legal. E.g. segregated school were until the Brown v. Board of Education landed and made it illegal.

> Where does "Flock tech might currently be illegal pending adjudication" land? Just because someone is doing it, does not make it legal.

It's legal until your expected Supreme Court decision lands. This is just another way of saying "Flock tech is legal, but if the Supreme Court rules the way I want then it will become illegal."

> For reference, US v. Jones was a 9-0 in the SC, in favor of Jones, though bipartisan split on the reasoning, which might be what carries over to any case that gets tried regarding this tech

"Might be" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. And again, until the court actually gives that ruling, Flock is legal.

> companies like Palantir and Anduril are clearly pursuing political objectives, including subverting governance by creating tools which set the frame and context that governance happens in.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by this? How are these companies subverting governance?

The US stopped countless wars from starting in the first place due to deterrence. Look at Ukraine to see what happens to a country that isn't part of an alliance like NATO.

There's a big difference between saying

"Flock and other ALPR tech is illegal"

And

"Flock and other ALPR tech is legal. But it's my personal prediction that some future Supreme Court decision will make them illegal."

> The court doesn't agree, and they've explicitly pointed out that 4A still applies when someone is being monitored and tracked in public.

Only when that tracking is done via cell phone location information. The Carpenter decision did not apply this to all forms of public monitoring. You keep ignoring the fact that the decision was narrowly scoped to cell phone location data, and continue to erroneously claim that it applied to public tracking in general.

If it's not in the Supreme Court's decision then it doesn't matter as far as the law goes. At this point you've basically admitted that the Carpenter decision doesn't have any bearing on Flock, you're just trying to justify your earlier comments that you now realize aren't actually covered by the court cases you cited.

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.

As I've repeatedly explained, the Carpenter decision was narrowly scoped to cell phone location data. The decision did not do anything to restrict other forms of monitoring. The idea that Carpenter restricts governments' ability to video record public spaces is entirely your own invention.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49632990

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49630733

> 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.

Except the narrowness of the final ruling is exactly what makes it not impact the legality of Flock. It doesn't matter whether you think the courts decision should be extended to cameras - your opinion doesn't decide the law, the court's opinion does.

And the point remains, regardless of semantic quibbling: a checkpoint is probably the least surprising place to encounter surveillance. Arguably, it's the whole point of a checkpoint to surveil, "checking" in your terminology, who's passing through.

Picking out one quote doesn't change the fact that the ruling in Carpenter was narrow, limited to cell phone location information. You're just wrong about the scope of Carpenter, and unwilling to accept that fact.

This is just an incorrect description of the ruling in Carpenter v. US. The core of the ruling is that the third-party doctrine doesn't apply to cell phone location data. The ruling was a very narrow one and did not affect other methods of monitoring.

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.

> The data includes "private movements" which is why it's unconstitutional (the SC said aggregation of public data can impel privacy concerns)

But does it? You keep insisting this is the case, but your attempts to back up this claim are cases with totally different scenarios. Namely demanding that telecoms hand over location information.

> - An individual or LE can take a photograph of you or your house, therefore collecting photographs from geolocated cameras and tracking you over time is not constitutionally distinct (but it is)

The point is to emphasize that the information collected by Flock is in plain view. The plain view doctrine is well established. The police don't need a warrant to observe publicly visible things.

> The specific technology at the center of these cases are not ALPRs, therefore the rulings have no bearing on Flock (despite the fact that courts are not litigating the specific technology, but rather the constitutional principles of their use)

The cases you've cited all involved private information being obtained without a warrant. You can't just ignore the fact that a GPS tracker or cell phone location information also reveals private movements, as opposed to public facing camera which only record public activity.

And for the second time, you're trying to dodge the distinguishing factor between Jones and Flock. The former tracked movements in public and in private. The latter, only in public. That, and the Jones case involved the police accessing someone's vehicle without a warrant.

You seem to be under the impression that the opinion of the court in the Jones was that everyone's public movements are private and the police need a warrant to track your public movements through and any all means. But that was not the decision of the court. The police and still just follow you, Jones notwithstanding.

You can desire your public movements to be protected by the Fourth amendment all you want, but that does not make it so.

Seattle is one of the wealthiest metros in the country, with expansive social programs. It's the last place where you can try and blame crime on deprivation.

> Carpenter was not about who owned the data or the technology being used but rather the government reconstructing a person's movements over time, including movements occurring in public.

...and including movements occurring in private.

> The fact that the data is owned by a private company or that some of it is considered private by the individual doesn't matter: it's about tracking individuals over time.

More importantly, tracking their private movements over time, not just their public movements. You're hand waving away an important part of the case. And the decision does not extend to ALPR readers, from what I can tell.

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.

Trying to interpret Carter v. US as prohibiting public security cameras is a very big leap

It's not just the specific technology being used to conduct the search, it's that the information the police obtained Chatrie and in Carpender both included people's private movements. Your phone's GPS data doesn't just track where you drive on public roads, it also tracks you walking around your private property.

> 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.

Again, you keep citing decisions without bothering to understand the context behind the. For instance,

"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);"

This is about the police planting a GPS tracker on someone's car - that's that "Jones" is referring to here. That case involved the police tracking someone in public and in private.

If you owned property, or otherwise got permission from the property owners to put cameras there, then yes.

> This is not true. The question is whether you have a "reasonable expectation of privacy." If you do, then the government needs a warrant. This is why the government can't tap a payphone without a warrant even though it is in public.

"Reasonable expectation of privacy" covers things like restrooms. Not highways, streets, parking lots, etc. This isn't relevant for Flock.

No, for the fifth time, Chatrie and Carpenter dealt with private cell phone location information. This is not the exact same subject matter at all.

I had already addressed your same points an hours earlier:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49629159

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49629142

And yet you still start yet another thread insisting that a database makes public facing video cameras a privacy violation.

When have I been "proven wrong over and over again"? The court cases you've cited are all about governments demanding private cell phone location information. You're trying to take decisions that amount to, "the police need a warrant to demand private cellphone location data from telecoms" and make the enormous leap to your imaginary decision, "the police cannot record people in public and search those recordings".

> The SC's holding was that the government's acquisition of location data from a third party was itself a fourth amendment search because the individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy wrt location data.

Specifically, the GPS coordinates logged by their cellphones.

> So you're kind of agreeing with me here: the data is either private and subject to a warrant, or it is in public where individuals do have a reasonable expectation of privacy wrt aggregated location information.

You're missing the point: Flock camera's don't record where people have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

> And again, a person standing on a street corner is constitutionally distinct from LE following and tracking individuals movement over time.

Wrong: as long as law enforcement are only tracking your movements in public, they don't need a warrant or probable cause.

Carpenter v. United States was about the government accessing telecommunications data. This is not public information, location data also tracks people's movements on private property. Just like the other case you cited, Chatrie v. United States, this is a situation wholly removed from public facing video cameras.