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text0404

810 karma · joined May 16, 2023

Hacker interested in privacy, surveillance tech, and hacktivism; focused on the intersection of politics, policy, civil liberties, and technology.

"This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals."

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text0404··on Iran school bombing: grounds to believe US was behind atrocity, UN finds
I'm sorry you feel that way. Feel free to refute the substance of what I've said.
text0404··on Iran school bombing: grounds to believe US was behind atrocity, UN finds
Because the human rights chief has a lifetime of experience and credentials to be able to make these determinations [1], whereas Hegseth and Trump do not. Furthermore, Hegseth has stated repeatedly that the US military should ignore rules of engagement (and has worked to strip legal oversight from the military), which lends credence to the findings of the UN investigation that the US acted recklessly and without regard to civilians in violation of international humanitarian law [2][3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volker_T%C3%BCrk

[2] US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth commented at a news conference on March 2, 2026, about “stupid rules of engagement,” suggesting that they may interfere with “fight[ing] to win.” These remarks are concerning in light of Hegseth’s actions in the past year that have weakened US military posts and mechanisms intended to ensure compliance with international humanitarian law, also known as the laws of war. - https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/03/02/us-defense-secretarys-me...

[3] "We also don't fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement, just common sense, maximum lethality and authority for warfighters." - https://www.war.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/4318...

text0404··on Iran school bombing: grounds to believe US was behind atrocity, UN finds
That article from March doesn't refute what the UN stated in its report today:

> The UN mission concluded that the strike on Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school constituted an indiscriminate attack causing civilian deaths and damage to civilian infrastructure, amounting to a war crime under international law.

Again, because this was preventable and the US acted recklessly and without regard for civilians ("indiscriminate"), going so far as to ignore the warnings of its own commanders.

text0404··on Iran school bombing: grounds to believe US was behind atrocity, UN finds
They did try to evacuate. The building was hit while they were doing so:

> Hundreds of students are believed to have been inside the building by the time teachers and administrators received the news that bombs had begun falling on Tehran around 9:40 a.m.

> Teachers and administrators thought it prudent to send the children home. They called parents on landline phones, summoning them for an early pickup, two people told the AP. A recently released report by Airwars, a London-based independent group that tracks recent conflicts, also found that parents were called to pick up their children.

> At 10:15 a.m., Iran’s state media sent out an advisory, closing schools across the country.

- https://apnews.com/article/iran-school-strike-baluch-trump-2...

> if you think that America would leave children in that school for longer than 10 minutes after a war was launched

Dude, the US doesn't even protect American schoolchildren from other Americans, let alone a foreign power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uvalde_school_shooting

text0404··on Iran school bombing: grounds to believe US was behind atrocity, UN finds
Which is why the US famously won the Vietnam war...
text0404··on Iran school bombing: grounds to believe US was behind atrocity, UN finds
TFA addresses this. It doesn't matter if it was a "mistake": the US acted recklessly "[amounting] to more than mere negligence," even when warned by their own commanders. Ignorance doesn't excuse crimes.

> The UN mission concluded that the strike on Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school constituted an indiscriminate attack causing civilian deaths and damage to civilian infrastructure, amounting to a war crime under international law.

> According to the report, the US relied on intelligence suggesting a senior Iranian military commander was present at the site but failed to adequately verify the information before launching the strike.

> Investigators said the failure to update targeting intelligence and confirm the building was a military objective amounted to more than mere negligence.

> “Rather, the US directed the strikes at the building of the school while being aware of a substantial risk of striking a civilian object and acting recklessly as regards the possibility that this would happen.”

text0404··on Iran school bombing: grounds to believe US was behind atrocity, UN finds
You seem to be confusing everyone's stances (incompetence vs malice). Some people in this thread believe it was incompetence and therefore not a war crime, and others believe it was malicious and therefore a war crime. I personally don't think stupidity is a good legal defense but what do I know.
text0404··on Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit
Except what I'm discussing is why the court went with that decision and how that reasoning applies to modern technology like Flock cameras. Your original argument was that cameras are in public and location data is private and includes private data, and the distinction is that you have no expectation of privacy in public. The court doesn't agree, and they've explicitly pointed out that 4A still applies when someone is being monitored and tracked in public.
text0404··on Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit
The legal reasoning I'm referring to is quite clear, even if it wasn't part of the court's final decision (it was part of the concurrence, though, which are also used in legal arguments):

> A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere. 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); id., at 415 (Sotomayor, J., concurring). Prior to the digital age, law enforcement might have pursued a suspect for a brief stretch, but doing so “for any extended period of time was difficult and costly and therefore rarely undertaken.” Id., at 429 (opinion of Alito, J.). For that reason, “society’s expectation has been that 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.” Id., at 430.

You can continue to tell me that the court narrowed the scope of the final decision, but "A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere" is quite clear. Cool, the final decision narrowed the scope to cell phone location data; that is irrelevant to what we're discussing and doesn't negate that the concurrence literally states that part of the reasoning is that people don't lose 4A rights just because they're being surveilled in public:

> A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere

Just because you want to claim that cell phone location data is somehow completely distinct from photographic location data because people can take photographs in public doesn't make it so.

text0404··on Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit
You're focused on the narrowness of the final ruling and not the vast legal reasoning that led to it.

Carpenter's reasoning concerning comprehensive records of an individual's movements (regardless of private or public) are relevant when LE uses aggregated Flock data to reconstruct a person's movements over an extended period.

text0404··on Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit
I'm not talking about the specific ruling, I'm quoting the justification that the justices used in coming to that ruling, which is extremely relevant to modern day surveillance and whether LE using surveillance cameras from a third party to reconstruct people's movements constitutes unreasonable searches under 4A. Based on their arguments, it appears so.

> nor did it overrule prior decisions

I'm not saying it overruled prior decisions. I'm saying the reasoning of the judges has an effect on future surveillance technologies.

> 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.

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).

text0404··on Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit
As I quoted before:

> A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere. To the contrary, “what [one] seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.”

This would still be an issue even if they weren't recorded in private spaces. At issue here is the reconstruction of data, regardless of if it happened in public or private spaces.

text0404··on Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit
Carpenter is saying that public movements are part of the protected interest, not just the private movements which were also tracked. If the private movements hadn't been tracked in those cases, it would still be a 4A issue:

"A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere. To the contrary, 'what [one] seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.'"

> But that doesn't meant police can't record public spaces.

> Recording public spaces isn't a Fourth Amendment search.

I'm not saying either of these things. The quote that you're responding to literally says "What matters is that LE is conducting fourth amendment searches using that data". I don't care who collects the data (Flock, or Axon, or Google, or whoever): if the cops are searching a persistent database which monitors and tracks people over time, it is a 4A issue.

text0404··on Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit
I'm not claiming Jones held that cops need a warrant to visually follow someone on a public street. The point you're avoiding is that Carpenter expressly cited Jones for the proposition that people have a fourth amendment interest in the "whole of" their physical movements, and distinguished ordinary observation from technologically enabled, comprehensive tracking. Just because the camera is in public doesn't make it permissible.

And maybe it wasn't the decision in Jones, but Carpenter specifically cites Alito's concurrence for the proposition that a person has a 4A privacy interest in aggregation of movement data and describes GPS tracking in Jones as raising those privacy concerns.

text0404··on Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit
You're confusing the technology used in Jones with the principle Carpenter cited it for: a person can have a 4A privacy interest in the whole of their physical movements, including movements in public.
text0404··on Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit
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.

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.

text0404··on Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit
The specific technology being used to conduct the searches does not matter.

Persistent technological tracking of a person's public movements can constitute a search. 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). What matters is that LE is conducting fourth amendment searches using that data.

text0404··on Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit
Just because the specific ALPR technology was not being litigated doesn't mean that the law doesn't apply to similar technologies. At issue here is the government being able to monitor and track people in public, not that photographs are ok because individuals can take them at will.

> A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere. 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); id., at 415 (Sotomayor, J., concurring). Prior to the digital age, law enforcement might have pursued a suspect for a brief stretch, but doing so “for any extended period of time was difficult and costly and therefore rarely undertaken.” Id., at 429 (opinion of Alito, J.). For that reason, “society’s expectation has been that 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.” Id., at 430.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/16-402

Edit for your edit: you haven't refuted anything man, you keep trotting out the same arguments in those linked threads:

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

- 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 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)

text0404··on Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit
They haven't yet because a case hasn't made its way to the SC. But Chatrie and Carpenter deal with this exact subject matter and both establish that aggregating and searching past data is a (fourth amendment) search.
text0404··on Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit
> Jesus, how many times are you just going to parrot the same replies over and over

The same amount that you do, dude. You're in every single one of these threads, and despite being proven wrong over and over again you keep being "confused" about how people are against this technology. Even in this thread, you keep responding with the same points based on your equivocation of an individual taking a picture in public and a state law enforcement organization aggregating and tracking individuals who haven't committed crimes.

Try reading some SC cases and actually paying attention to the responses you're getting.

text0404··on Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit
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. 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.

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

text0404··on Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit
That precedence-setting decision would be Carpenter v US [1], which established that being in public does not automatically eliminate all fourth amendment protection, and the comprehensive nature of government surveillance can matter constitutionally.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_v._United_States

text0404··on Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit
Law enforcement is using a third party (Flock) to get around constitutional requirements.

A camera pointed at a public street isn't the same constitutional question as LE searching a persistent database to reconstruct someone's movements. The latter falls into fourth amendment search territory.

text0404··on Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit
You keep missing that these aren't singular photographs. This isn't the 70s: these are persistent systems that aggregate video and photographs of everyone, tracking their movements over time. That is enough to make this constitutionally distinct from a cop taking a single picture of your house.
text0404··on Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit
They need a warrant if they're going to record and track my movements over the course of months.
text0404··on Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit
Chatrie was not about the dragnet capturing people in private spaces. It established that LE acquisition and aggregation of location information can constitute a fourth amendment search even when the observations are made in public.
text0404··on Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit
They weren't connected to nationwide databases which automatically record, store, and aggregate individuals' movements. Not constitutionally equivalent.
text0404··on Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit
... and you need a warrant to surveil individuals? And they have to be suspected of crimes?
text0404··on Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit
But they need a warrant to follow me around, record my movements, put them into a database which is searchable by other law enforcement. They're not taking a single photograph of a car, they're creating a database of movement of people who have not committed crimes.
text0404··on Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit
Chatrie held that the government conducted a fourth amendment search when it got the location data, even though the data was held by a third party. The reasoning was that the data revealed Chatrie's physical movements, not that Google itself was somehow a constitutionally private space.
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