Manuel_D

Uh huh, and? When did the supreme court decide that ALPR data becomes a search the moment it gets logged to a database?

Jesus, how many times are you just going to parrot the same replies over and over? No, the putting public facing camera video into a database does not make it a search. The case you cited, Chatrie vs. United States, involved the government demanding that Google hand over private cellphone location data on everyone inside of a geofence boundary. The court decided that forcing Google to hand over geolocation data was akin to forcing Google to hand over email contents, which requires a warrant. You're trying to turn around and interpret this to saying that the plain view doctrine doesn't apply to ALPRs, which record public spaces.

This isn't the case of law enforcement using a third party to get around constitutional requirements. The government could set up their own cameras doing exactly what Flock does, and it would still not violate anyone's constitutional requirements. Because people don't have a right to not be recorded in public, no matter how much you want that to be the case.

If they're only tracking your movements in public, the no they do not. Again, you're just wrong about what privacy laws protect. They do not prohibit the police from surveilling or tracking you, they only control how the police is able to conduct that surveillance. If the police want to search your house or car, they need a warrant or at least probable cause for the latter. If they want to photograph you in public, they do not.

And? These are still videos of people in public. This information is in plain view. You keep insisting that if you aggregate public information it somehow becomes private information, but that's not true unless the Supreme Court makes some new precedence-setting decision.

But the observations in the Chatrie case weren't made in public. This was private information that only Google had access to, and law enforcement went and demanded that Google hand over that private information.

By contrast, a person can stand on a street corner with their phone and record everything a Flock camera records.

You don't need a warrant to record people in public. You keep throwing around the term "surveil" as though this is a singular activity. Do the police need a warrant to search your house or car? Yes. Do they need a warrant to get Google to hand over your Gmail contents? Yes?

Do they need a warrant to photograph the exterior of your house? No. Do they need a warrant to photograph you in public? No

No, they do not need a warrant to follow you in public. What more is there to say, besides that you're just wrong about what privacy laws protect?

It didn't just reveal Chatrie's movements, it revealed to movements of everyone in the geofenced area. And more importantly, it revealed movements even in private not just in public.

Again, this is far removed from a camera in a public space.

That case didn't cover public-facing cameras, that was about the government demanding telecoms hand over geolocation data on their users. The government was demanding that mobile providers hand over private data, akin to asking Google for your gmail contents.

This is far removed from a camera set up in a public space.

Whether or not the government needs a warrant to surveil someone depends on how the government is conducting that surveillance. The government does, for instance, need a warrant to wiretap you. They do not need a warrant to record people in public spaces. Nor do they need a warrant to, say, photograph the exterior of your house.

A checkpoint is a type of military installation. Specifically an installation with the purpose of monitoring and controlling traffic traveling through the checkpoint.

There's nothing stopping you from setting up a webcam pointed out your window. If you want to set up your own public-facing ALPR cameras, there's nothing stopping you.

ALPRs were always fed into databases, even back during the 90s. The whole point of ALPRs is to automate the task of reading license plates.

And?

The government needs a warrant to search you, your home, your vehicle, your email, etc. The government does not need a warrant to record you in public spaces.

You're correct that the government can't use a third party to circumvent privacy laws. But privacy laws never prohibited what Flock does. The government could directly set up its own cameras in public, and nothing about that violated the Fourth Amendment.

No? Which Supreme Court decision decided that persisting video recorded in public is a violation of the Fourth Amendment?

The ones making the laws are your elected officials. If you want a city to pass a law prohibiting changing the traffic light timings, then go campaign for a candidate that has that on their platform.

The Supreme Court has set precedence that video recordings of public spaces fall under the plain view doctrine: police don't need a warrant or probable cause to record things in public view.

If anything that makes surveillance even less noteworthy. Is it really surprising that a military installation has surveillance?

Drivers have a right not to have their car searched without probable cause. But being photographed in public is not a search.

Except it is? If the traffic light timings are controlled by law then they can't be manipulated in that way.

But Flock isn't searching anybody. You keep calling it a dragnet, or an illegal search, but the courts have repeatedly held that recording images in public needs no warrant or probable case.

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.

The difference is that your example involves physically stopping and searching people. This is not the case with Flock, which records images in public.

The government does not and never did require any warrant or justification to record people in public spaces. Not just the government, but normal people too: you can whip out four phone and start recording people in public any time you want.

> It's pretty clear to be that governments shouldn't be able to 'subcontract' their way out of the limits placed on them via the constitution

At least in the US, they can't. This is already the law.

But what so many people don't understand is that the government does not and never did require a warrant or some other permission to film people in public. Flock isn't allowing the government to bypass limits placed them by the Constitution. Privacy laws, for the most part, protect what people do in private.

One thing the Flock debate had revealed is how many people simply assume everything they don't like is unconstitutional.

The Z3 lacked conditional branching. The hack to make it technically a universal Turing machine is to execute all possible branches of a program and discard the undesired branch results, so the end result is the same as if it had genuine branching abilities. But of course that'd drastically drive up the computation time if you actually tried to use the machine in that way.

And what about pointing out the fact that Flock's activities are legal, contrary to what people claim, is trolling?

It was a very forgiving and accessible MMO, one that really felt like playing diablo 2 on a persistent multiplayer world. That, and warcraft 3 was released not too long, and the Frozen Throne expansion the year before. So the setting and lore was fresh in people's minds.

Pointing out the incorrect assumption that Flock is doing something illegal is not sealioning. There's a reason why none of the replies actually point to the law that Flock is supposedly breaking: because there isn't one.

You assume that some future Supreme Court case will rule that governments' use of Flock violated the Fifth Amendment, but at present Flock is violating now laws. Like I said in the my original reply: nothing is good to be legalized because nothing Flock is doing violates the law.

There's a big difference between "X is illegal" and "X is presently legal, but my prediction is that the Supreme Court will, in the future, rule that X is illegal."