This shouldn't be hard to understand. Don't talk to the police, without your attorney present, under any circumstances whatsoever.
Dating the police is just such an astoundingly egregious violation of this principle that I can only wonder what, if anything, those people are thinking.
Anyway, the key takeaway seems to don't date anyone who dates the police. Firstly, because it directly puts your own safety at risk, as this article exemplifies. Secondly, because it demonstrates terrible judgment; it seems reasonable to assume they are likely to make other terrible decisions in the future.
Are you loosely paraphrasing here? The closest thing I could find by Scott Adams was "Whenever you have a lot of money in play, combined with the ability to hide misbehavior behind complexity, you should expect widespread fraud to happen."
Remember that scene from "Men in Black" where K watches surveillance video feed of his ex? In the movie it was meant to be wistful and cute, I guess. Now that such systems are getting closer to reality, you realize the potential for abuse in enormous.
> He characterizes the behavior as rare. He simultaneously identifies it as the most common form of abuse. The tension between those two statements is the problem Flock has left unaddressed.
I don’t see how there’s any tension between these statements. The overall occurrence of abuse can be rare while the most common form of the abuse that does occur is of officers tracking people they know.
The tension is that the abuse is far more likely than any value these cameras bring.
And what is commonly rare in a country of 342 million? Prairie Grove, Illinois has 1930 people and he did this to at least 3 people according to the report. .15% of the population. If you extrapolate that out to the national population, its roughly 520k people. Or, the entire population of Sacramento, Ca, being victimized by law enforcement with a surveillance power they should never have been allowed to have.
In a community of 20 people you have one person who commits robbery, that's 5% of the pop being a robbers. One _could_ extrapolate that but we'd fall victim to the law of small numbers.
Rare in comparison to what, the total number of searches across the platform?
But even that is the wrong focus. One could make the same case for rejecting police body cams because incidents of police abuse are rare, relatively speaking.
The real issue is that the platform isn't completely locked down by default with strict access control grants, monitoring, auditing, etc. Shoot I have way less access at my work to data and systems which do not have that level of sensitivity and have to go through multiple approval steps to be granted anything new.
But I guess those things don't help the sales pitches. To be fair policing the police isn't flock's job and doesn't make them money. Laws and regulations are the only real vehicles of change.
Sell to a LE agency in a state that doesn't allow data sharing in certain ways? Flock certainly won't disable it. They'll even still train you in how to use it.
Garrett is very much a believer in Minority Report.
Ultimately, there’s a sort of homeostasis in people’s tolerance for crime. If you need video evidence for prosecution, those who want it prosecuted will produce video cameras. If you make warrants impossible to produce in a timely manner, the camera search will be warrant exempted.
Attempts to damage state power to ensure crime isn’t prosecuted will be likely met with methods that are immune to them.
Given the constraints we operate under, the ideal number of unsolved crimes is not zero and the ideal number of crimes committed using state apparatus is also not zero. So being informed that either is non-zero is not of use to decision making in my opinion.
> the ideal number of unsolved crimes is not zero and the ideal number of crimes committed using state apparatus is also not zero
I feel this is an _extremely_ good point, the kind that seems obvious only once you hear it. But i feel there’s an implication that could be made explicit here — we should be looking at the distribution of both apparatus-enabled-crimes and unsolved-crimes when we’re discussing this sort of thing. And if those metrics aren’t tabulated for easy access, they probably should be.
> And if those metrics aren’t tabulated for easy access, they probably should be.
I couldn't agree more. They're two different error rates for our society and measuring them accurately would help us go to where we should be on the curve.
Somebody should make a website visualizing the data we do have, perhaps with uncertainty bounds, and a recursive breakdown locale-by-locale… Nose goes!!
Edit: wow I bet this is a project that would be _way_ too difficult to vibe code with AI, with well documented data sources and what not. Sure would be a shame if somebody proved me wrong.
I think there's a bias in public discussion towards idealism, because most discussions will start by the argument that we need to reduce X, or we need to reduce Y. If there is a conflict and there needs to be a trade off, very few discussions and points will be about the tradeoff, but there will be a whole bunch of discussions about just plain reducing X or reducing Y.
You can also build systems that require secondary approvals without needing approval escalation up the chain. Creeping on women is a lot less likely if you need a peer or even a subordinate to review what you're doing.
>>Flock and law enforcement regularly cite documented cases where LPR helped solve violent crimes, recover stolen vehicles, and locate missing persons. Those outcomes are real.
My opposition wouldn't change regardless but are those outcomes real?
Cops can politely ask owners of private cameras for access for things like murder investigation. If the polite answer is no (most people will say yes), they can go to court for a subpoena. This has happened for a long time. This is how it should work. If the cops are too lazy or chicken to ask a judge while investigating a murder, they don't deserve the footage.
This is very doable when what you're dealing with is a Major Crime That Gets Full Institutional and Individual Attention.
What about a bike theft, a jacked car or a stolen parcel though?
There is a price to having information easily available to the law enforcement. There is a price to not having this information easily available to the law enforcement too.
Yes, many cases of people calling the police with actual tracker data showing exactly where their stolen property is, and the response being to get laughed at and told it's not a priority.
Doesn't matter, they should have to follow the same process.
Cops, at least where I live, don't give af about any of those crimes though. Bike gets stolen? You'll be lucky if they even show up at all, let alone do anything about it, surveillance data available or not. They largely don't even get prosecuted when caught.
The majority of crime is committed by a relatively small number of individuals. If citizens feel crime is out of control they need to vote in politicians and judges who sentence repeat offenders to long sentences or involuntary commitment.
Long sentences are far less effective than reliable enforcement. Something that seems to be very true in practice. If you steal or vandalise something in China, there is an extremely high chance you will get caught, you won't get a massive penalty, but it will be enough to cover the damages + some.
If you for example knew that stealing had a penalty of 100% of the item value + 10% fine, with a 100% chance of getting caught, you'd never steal anything again even though the penalty is so much smaller than what it is currently in most countries. And then if you make a dumb decision as a teenager or in a lapse of judgement, it won't ruin your life.
Of course you could still rack up a large penalty / jail time if you cause an incredible amount of damage quickly, but in general you'd catch people before they get that far. Catching a bike thief after the first 1-2 bikes rather than when they have stolen 100.
They can get a subpoena for that, too. The bike and the parcel are already long gone by the time police do anything. (Nor will they do anything other than file a report if you are lucky.)
This was exactly the case on a King County jury I was on. Lots of camera footage, most from security cams of individual businesses, some from red light cameras.
The event predated Flock rollout though, so no idea if the distribution of camera sources has shifted.
Regardless though, in the end the phone location data meant a lot more than any of the camera data, which just confirmed the path from phone sources.
Right and what if lots of crime happens in a place where there are not many businesses? Hardly an implausible scenario given that crime is bad for business.
The city can set up its own camera for its own use. Is that really that wild of a proposal?
That whole premise of "what if lots of crime happens" -- already false.
Did you know that most places in America are at historically low crime rates in most of our lifetimes? It is garbage to say this needs deep societal focus right now. I don't give a shit about the hypothetical hurt feelings of small town cops whining that they don't have always-on spy equipment.
In fact, there's a pretty strong argument that the reason crime has decreased so much in the US is because we've put strict controls and protections limiting lead in the environment.
We do still need deep societal focus, but that's mostly around things like further getting lead out of homes and pipes.
While I would oppose a city setting up CCTV to be used the way Flock is used - that would be orders of magnitude less bad than Flock.
As it is, you can assume that at the very least, every time your vehicle has passed one of the >100k Flock cameras, there's a database entry and a photo that will never, ever be deleted. Your full travel history from this point forward is available for a nominal fee, and without any regard for your privacy.
People seem to struggle to wrap their head around the fact that privacy laws don't prevent people from recording them in public. You can be recorded at any time in public, by the government or another private person.
The city's scope is smaller than Flock's - it's a city, not a multi-national corporation.
Yes, I'm aware of what "expectation of privacy" means. I've been a photographer for ~25 years.
> People seem to struggle to wrap their head around the fact that privacy laws don't prevent people from recording them in public. You can be recorded at any time in public, by the government or another private person.
This isn't about recording in public - it's about building a comprehensive dataset containing the movement and association history of the entire US population. Not only is that without a warrant, it's being collected prior to any accusation being made.
"Anyone can record you at any time in public" is vastly different from "a single entity is recording you over time and locations across the country/state/city"
The hopefully we'll be able to at least narrow down the list of suspects to the people who entered the bathroom around the time they the murder took place.
Surveillance often doesn't directly capture crime on camera, but is rather used to identify who traveled to and from the crime scene around the time of the incident
No? If someone broke into your car as stole your luggage, the surveillance camera might not directly capture the thief breaking into your car. But if the camera recorded someone entering the parking garage and then exiting the garage carrying your luggage a few minutes later, that's strong evidence is it not?
You're missing the part where, for that to work, we have a government with access to a massive surveillance system capable of identifying and tracking the population at scale.
And you're missing that, instead of specifically identifying a specific individual doing a specific thing, this network would be used to place under suspicion, investigation and possible arrest, people who's only documented action was "being somewhere."
Oh, and while your example is "committed a crime", that same network could easily be used to identity and track people who were, say, coming and going from protests. Or libraries. Or voting.
> investigation and possible arrest, people who's only documented action was "being somewhere."
In the example above, the police wouldn't arrest every single person who entered and exited the parking lot. They'd arrest the person who walked out of the lot with your stolen luggage.
> Oh, and while your example is "committed a crime", that same network could easily be used to identity and track people who were, say, coming and going from protests
There's no right to have your public demonstrations off limits for recording. The whole point of a protest is to be seen. If someone is concerned that they will be associated with some group or cause because of their decision to protest, then they seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a protest is.
> Or voting
You realize the government already has that information? Voters literally filled out ballots and delivered it to the government. They don't need a camera to know who voted, they have the ballots.
Yes, ballots are anonymous. But how would Flock cameras somehow de-anonymize votes? I had assumed you were referring to tracking people driving to polling stations to discover who voted - not how they voted. Because how on earth would automated license plate readers somehow de-anonymize individual ballots? Please do explain what you meant by that.
And do explain the "idiocy" of the rest of my comment. Do you actually dispute anything I wrote? Do you think that law enforcement weren't monitoring groups like the Proud Boys, Nation of Islam, militia organizations, etc. before Flock came around?
Well, in my precinct I'd estimate there are ~20 people at the polls to vote at any given time. Given the timestamp of a ballot, there are maybe 50 people it could have possibly been.
That's more than enough information to correlate voting behavior after a couple of election cycles with a high degree of confidence.
Oh, and ballots aren't just for one race generally. By looking at what races that ballot voted in and a list of people present, there's a very good chance you'd be able to narrow it down to an individual in a single visit.
The ballots are timestamped to a degree fine-grained enough to narrow down the set of potential voters to just 50 people? Which state is this? I'm not finding any search results indicating that ballots are timestamped. In fact, some of the results I've encountered specifically say that ballots aren't timestamped to ensure privacy. But happy to learn more of you can explain how ballots in your state are timestamped.
In my state, we have to sign our name on the envelope containing our ballot. If the government was corrupt and they wanted to identify how people voted, they could just look at the signature. No Flock required.
Of all the things to complain about Flock, the notion that it can somehow de-anonymize ballots is probably one of the most unusual I've heard.
At no point did I say it could de-anonymize ballots.
You claimed ballots provided the government with the information they needed to know who voted.
I pointed that is untrue. Ballots explicitly do not.
The fact you posted that tells you know have a Google level understanding of the law in the US, and the fact you posted an article about private citizens using public data as proof of the legality of government-operated mass surveillance data tells me you're a deeply unserious person who should probably read Robert's writing in the majority opinion in Carpenter.
I really appreciate the irony of you alleging a "Google level understanding" on my part, when your own argument was tried in a court of appeals and failed.
But crucially, the police used the ALPR data without a warrant. Regardless of the rental car, the police did use ALPR data without a warrant and the court did allow that to be used in court.
To be clear, ballots are anonymous, and voter rolls are not universally accessible to all offices or functions of any given government. Different localities have different laws regarding the transparency of voting records, with varying degrees of control and confidentially down to the county level in some cases. In most cases, access to that information requires, at a minimum, a documented request though laws vary county by county, state by state, etc.
So "The government might not know how you voted, but they know who voted!" still requires a lot of work defining what you mean by "the government".
Second, your "this is already legal!" link pointed to an article about private citizens utilizing publicly volunteered data sets with no legal authority or consequence. I have no idea what that has to do with anything. Other than it sort of proves that mass data collection is likely to generate injustices.
But yes, in the US, you do not have a presumption to privacy when out in public. It is not an assumed universal, but, especially when it comes to private use, public information and public activities are not assumed private and have little if any protections.
However, SCOTUS specifically called out in Carpenter that mass surveillance data (cell phone location in that case) can be treated as a "search" under our Fourth Amendment. When confronted with a case that would look very similar to large network of private surveillance data of otherwise public activity, the court said, "Nope." If the quality and quantity of the data is sufficiently detailed, it cannot be presumed to be "public" information, especially when the mechanism by which it is gathered does not require affirmative consent, and especially when the data is retroactively broad.
Carpenter is the opinion which the ACLU cites, repeatedly, when they attack Flock's network of cameras. Cursory reading about whether Flock constitutional will point you towards Carpenter, and the ACLU's argument that it should/will apply to Flock.
We've had exactly one real test of that argument (Schmidt v Norfolk) that has yet to be make it to SCOTUS. The district court in that case ruled Carpenter didn't apply - but it was a district court whose opinion SCOTUS overruled in Carpenter too.
The next SCOTUS test of mass surveillance data usage will likely be the pending opinion in Chatrie. SCOTUS-watchers seemed divided on where they think the court will land, so who knows. Though based on the dissents in Carpenter, and the current make-up of the court, it's hard to see a world in which the original dissenters change their mind and that ACC doesn't join with them for a 5-4 opinion the other way under some narrow condition set.
I have no idea why you think the government monitoring specific groups has anything to do with mass surveillance networks beyond that the words monitoring and surveillance have similar meanings.
> We've had exactly one real test of that argument (Schmidt v Norfolk) that has yet to be make it to SCOTUS. The district court in that case ruled Carpenter didn't apply - but it was a district court whose opinion SCOTUS overruled in Carpenter too.
We've had at least two: in US vs Yang, the defense tried to invalidate the use of ALPR data using Carpenter to try and argue that it violated the Fourth Amendment. The Ninth Circuit disagreed and did not accept that argument.
They pay to have them installed and maintained, they're not different in that sense from subscribing to Office 365 licensing, it's a subscription product.
They key difference is not whether they own their cameras but the automatic data sharing with other agencies and their cameras. Arguably law enforcement does this casually on request anyways but the drastically reduced friction of an automatic system enables easy abuse.
An officer may hesitate to ask a neighboring agency for data on their girlfriend, and would likely be very hesitant to file actual paperwork to request it. But a search in Flock's interface is probably all of the same legal peril in a venue which doesn't feel as intimidating or risky to do and doesn't see the same level of human review or scrutiny.
The wording he used was that it helped make arrests in 53% of cases. Nothing about whether those cases were solved, or whether the arrests were correct, or whether he's counting times where the cameras see police making an arrest and count it as 'helping'.
>technology and professional analysts with helping detectives make arrests in 53%
"technology and analysts" "help" "make arrests" not surveillance, not convictions and only the implication that they wouldn't have made the arrest otherwise.
Like look at the example: somebody calls in an OD and a guy sees that the dude ODing matches (the clothing of) a suspect in some other crime and so they arrest him.
Once again an arrest is not a conviction but also what part of that needed/used pervasive surveillance?
ALSO a conviction is not the same thing as truth.
ALSO ALSO by basic subtraction the panopticon wasn't even helpful 47% of the time.
I have no doubt that provided a vast camera network covering every ingress and egress into a city, and every major intersection, plus a database of when and where a license plate was last seen, cops can find their suspect
It used to be that news articles would claim that the police used “CCTV from local businesses” to catch a crook. Even back then I knew this was cover for Ring, Flock and who knows what else. they just didn’t want the bad press.
At this point you don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to understand that parallel construction happens all the time. They have more tools that we know about, and they want to keep it that way.
Everyone should throw some money to 404 media. They are independent and doing the best work right now to keep these things in the public eye.
That's the thing though, I do doubt that. Surveillance that you don't need a warrant to put in front of a jury is a perfect thing to use for the ostensibly-legal construction in parallel construction.
guess what prolific career criminals do with crime cars?
they look for a car that is very similar if not exact make and model of thier stolen vehicle, then they "clone" the victims license plate with a sheet of embossment copper and a stylus, apply paint at thier shop and affix the imposter to the crime vehicle. that buggers the whole LPR thing.
they can replicate dozens of plates in a day and offer the service for contras.
That seems like a lot of effort when you can just take the license plate off and if you're really worried print off a convincing temporary license and tape in the back window.
its effort well worth it, and really is not a lot of effort. if you stole the plate, the theft is evident, when there are duplicates then it becomes difficult to know which one to suspect, and that also presupposes knowledge of the duplication.
you would have to realize, it is not feasible for a car to be in location 1 thenbe in location 2 many miles away in a few minutes.
the odd thing about criminals is thier effort to perpetuate crime is often far greater than getting a job, but is somehow the preferable option.
> you would have to realize, it is not feasible for a car to be in location 1 thenbe in location 2 many miles away in a few minutes.
You say that but just last week there was a post here about how LPR claimed that the same car was in two locations in a timeframe that would have required the car to have been traveling non-stop at 160mph for 20 minutes through suburban streets, and even then authorities and proponents were defending it as plausible, or that the LPR was right, but there might just have been timing issues, or, or, or.
i think i saw that post, i think we're both describing what happens when someone copies plates and doppelgangs people to throw off the surveillance.
i think in this case the LPR was right, the same plate number was in two different places, the assumption of how many plates were involved needs review.
160mph for 20min through suburban streets, that kind of attracts attention, there would be a lot of complaints and witnesses if that happened
Not really because it flags an anomaly where the same plate is found in two places that are impossibly far to reach in the time span. Then police can just pull over that plate when they see it with a 50/50 chance it's the stolen car.
The more cameras in the network the faster and more likely a duplicated plate will be spotted.
Sure. But if we have enough surveillance cameras, we can just trace the full path of the car from the moment of theft to now. I'm reminded of Gorgon Stare [1]. Stolen cars suck. But how about murders? I'm sure all of the people who've had loved ones murdered in, say, South Chicago, might have a more positive opinion of such a system. Especially since it wouldn't have to rely on witnesses who are cowed by the threat of reprisal and anti-snitch culture.
Yes. Prior to flock, my city trialed LPRs attached to the local power company’s poles. In the first month, they recovered more stolen cars than any prior years total recoveries. I’ve got mixed feelings about Flock, LPRs, and what it allows people and governments to do.
Nobody is questioning the value of unconstrained mass surveillance on solving crimes.
Unfortunately it also enables a good deal of more heinous crimes against the people its supposed to protect, by the people who are supposed to be protecting them.
Part of that is cops also doing their jobs in the first place versus "not giving a shit". Like when shown an eBay page of the person who sold my stolen phone. Nearly a hundred iPhones, all "activation locked", "no charger", same for Mac laptops, "no chargers, no accessories, may be locked".
Cops: "Well he probably didn't steal them himself."
Me: "Even so, knowingly selling stolen property is a crime too, no?"
The problem imo is the usage and laws rather than the technology. Security cameras used for public good is good. But it needs to be heavily limited to preventing crime, with strict access logs and penalties for misuse.
> We valued privacy and freedom over surveillance and “results.”
The relative value of one over the other depends on the absolute value of either. In a Mad Max scenario, very few would value the principles of privacy and freedom over the immediate need to reestablish basic order.
Take auto theft as an example. Depending on how old you are, the recent spike in auto theft is either "nothing compared to the 80s" or "entirely unacceptable in civilized society"; in select cities, the rate almost tripled in five years[0] (an incredible jump), though remaining well below the historical peak.
However, case clearance rates are at an all time low, which I'm sure furthers frustration for the victims. That is, you're statistically less likely to be a victim of auto theft today than during the historical peak, but if you are, you're statistically more likely to be SOL.
You're probably approaching this from a civil libertarian point of view, but the Constitution is not a suicide pact[1]. Members of society who collectively uphold the law also have a vested interested in the maintenance of the conditions that would further perpetuate upholding the law, i.e. law and order.
Flock's position, statistically, is that if during the course of an investigation into a crime, a detective queries Flock, and the crime is later solved, that Flock "helped solve a crime", regardless of the merit or value of the query. "Saw a vehicle, look it up, "nope, unrelated", but still "helped solve".
Check your town's website for correspondence with your state's chapter of the ACLU in regards to Flock cameras. If your police chief (not an elected official) is installing them then contact your local ACLU chapter about it. These are 4th amendment violations.
To the contrary, little of what Flock does would be restricted by the 4th amendment. The cameras are in public, and neither the government nor individual citizens need authorization to film people in public.
All flock cameras are privately owned, by flock. They install them at a charge per the jurisdiction that orders them and pays the subscription costs… those subscription fees allow Mr Local Law Abuser to lookup any license plate it has read, when, where, with a picture of the vehicle.
The point is, some of flock's customers are private businesses. E.g. the Home Depot by me uses them. No amount of pressure by voters can take those cameras down.
So when I put a bag over the camera, it's up to flock to remove it? I haven't stuck around to find out who shows up. Sometimes it takes a week or so, other times it's next day.
The case you linked isn't about the government filming people in public, though. Carpenter vs. US was a case about the government demanding private information about users' locations from cell service providers. By comparison, the 9th circuit concluded that the plain view doctrine means electronic license plate readers are legal :https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2020/05/04/1...
An officer doesn't need a warrant to sit at a cross section and write down license plate numbers. A device doing the same thing is also legal.
Of course that's a fair interpretation, I am saying there's some tension between mass surveillance and the fourth just because its "done in public" doesn't mean it automatically escapes scrutiny now or going forward.
No, the fact that it's recording people in public does make it escape scrutiny moving forward. In public you can be filmed by anyone - be they government or private citizens.
I find a lot of people fail to realize this, both in regards to surveillance and otherwise. Recently in my city there was a big uproar about a nudist beach that was at risk of having nudity prohibited. So a bunch of nudists went out and paraded around the beach while disrobed, some of them bringing their children with them. People sailed by and photographed many of the nudists, and put their images online. Many alleged that must be a violation of some privacy law, but no, the law in Washington (and most, perhaps all, of the US) is quite clear: if you're in public, you can be filmed and photographed. If you don't want to be filmed nude, don't go walking around naked in public.
Regardless, back to the topic at hand, the fact that Flock cameras a in public spaces does in fact mean that there's no requirement to get a warrant to use them.
> No, the fact that it's recording people in public does make it escape scrutiny moving forward. In public you can be filmed by anyone - be they government or private citizens.
This is false. While there is no strongly established precedent yet, there are certainly serious and plausible legal arguments being made that unlimited collection and collation/cross-referencing/etc. of "public" information can under certain circumstances constitute a search. It will most certainly not "escape scrutiny moving forward".
The legality of automated license plate readers has gone all the way up to the United States Court of Appeals. That's the second highest court in the country, superseded only by the Supreme Court.
This is as strong as precedent gets, short of a SCOTUS decision.
That doesn't sound like escaping scrutiny to me! Sounds like it's getting pretty thoroughly scrutinized, in fact.
> This is as stromg (sic) as precedent gets, short of a SCOTUS decision.
Another egregious misrepresentation. The courts are obviously making their rulings as narrow as possible because they know the "mosaic theory" style arguments have some merit. Look at US vs. Yang, for example, in which the court dodged the issue completely with some argument about rental car contract periods. And Schmidt v. Norfolk, which IIUC directly challenges Flock ALPRs on 4A grounds, is pending.
Lots and lots of scrutiny. Your claim that the conclusion is foregone here is obviously absurd. Even when/if it gets to SCOTUS I expect they'll write as narrow an opinion as they can get away with, in whatever direction it falls.
So what's the logical conclusion, that there will be a company with a drone following every individual in a public space at all times and that the government will pay for the data?
The logical conclusion is that the US brings itself in line with the rest of the developed world, and realizes video cameras are useful for solving crime.
Flying drones are not required, stationary cameras are more than enough outside of specific scenarios like active pursuit.
Considering how desperately that user is responding to every comment on this post, it seems they have a vested interest in playing blind for Flock, which makes me think they are paid by Flock.
But no, I just like to dispel the myths people have about their imaginary right to not be filmed in public. Whether it's by the government or by other private people.
Manual D, the flock system is still very new. Why are you confident a private companies monetization of public whereabouts will stay legal? There hasent really been any precedent set on this. And the system is wildly unpopular In the public eye?
In case you didn't read it, the 9th circuit upheld the use of Flock cameras. The precedence is as high as it gets, short of a supreme Court decision: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48636421
You're being exposed to a very specific group of people when you read Hacker News or Reddit. Plenty of people are happy to have Flock cameras in their neighborhood on account of the improved ability to investigate crime.
it's not about filming in public. it's about systematic data collection by law enforcement, using private infrastructure present by its nature in public. that's why the Carpenter decision is relevant.
The Carpenter decision was about the US government compelling mobile data providers to hand over private use information. It's really not relevant to flock. That's why the 9th Circuit decided that automated license plate readers don't need a warrant. A cop and stand at an intersection and write down license plate numbers without a warrant. A device can do the same.
If the city hires enough police officers, yes. It'd almost certainly require an unfathomably large budget, but it's not impossible.
The point is, the plain view doctrine means the police don't need a warrant to record observation that are in plain view. The licence plates of cars on the street are in plain view.
I really don't understand how people got this idea in their head that their license plates are private information . How do red light cameras identify cars? How does parking enforcement work? By recording people's license plates. The whole reason why we mandate that cars display license plates to is to facilitate identifying vehicles.
The year is 2026 and the 4th amendment only means what the currently sitting justices say that it means, and the executive branch was literally given a pass to violate any law on the books that they want.
The 9th circuit upheld that the police do not need warrants to operate and access data from license plate readers. The 9th Circuit isn't exactly a conservative stronghold.
That’s really beside the point. It doesn’t matter what the 9th circuit or any other court says.
Our country is no longer a country of laws. Laws are only as good as they are enforced. The SCOTUS, the DOJ, the FBI, and congress have openly abdicated any constitutional responsibility to provide checks and balances to reign in the abuses we see posted to HN every day.
I believe they would all argue that they haven't. They would argue that the current administration is operating within the law towards ends supported, repeatedly, by their constituents.
That's not applicable to Flock, though. That case pertained to the government requesting that mobile service providers give historical location data on users.
I feel like you haven't properly thought this through. Cell towers are monitoring a public broadcast from a beacon you voluntarily carry on your person. For some reason querying that dataset requires a warrant but querying a broadly analogous dataset from the operator of a network of cameras doesn't?
More generally you're confidently making wild extrapolations from the current very limited case law without regard for either its limitations or the general temperature that can be inferred from the full opinions.
> Cell towers are monitoring a public broadcast from a beacon you voluntarily carry on your person.
It's an encrypted broadcast, not a public broadcast. This is why the police needed to ask the mobile service providers for this data. It is not public.
> For some reason querying that dataset requires a warrant but querying a broadly analogous dataset from the operator of a network of cameras doesn't?
The data is not broadly analogous. One is encrypted radio traffic. The other is unencrypted, and you can record it yourself with a pen, paper, and the Mk I eyeball. This is why the "plain view" doctrine applies.
Again, the courts have already ruled on the use of ALPRs. The defense tried to use US vs Carpenter in US vs Yang, and the courts did not accept that argument that ALPRs are analogous to cell phone location data.
But the government is allowed to track people's license plates. There's nothing against the law for a police officer to stand at an intersection writing down all passing car's license plates with a pen and paper. Flock is the same thing, just much more cost efficient.
Yes. Let's restrict police and take away every possible tool they can use to solve and fight crime. Not all criminals are bad criminals. They don't use Flock to spy on their ex-girlfriends but every cop in America has done it.
At least according to the internet which knows everything.
Don't misrepresent what others say. The 4th amendment should not be violated. I can only interpret your response as "the 4th amendment should be violated".
Then you would be wrong. I'm pointing out the internet's liberal obsession with anti-police and, seemingly, pro-criminal activity. The internet likes to find fault with the police while dismissing or ignoring criminal activity. It's a horror I cannot understand. It's pure insanity.
Okay, then pontificate that as a top level comment. Responding to someone saying the 4th amendment should not be circumvented with a refute is a statement about the 4th amendment, not some imagined counter party.
This whole thread represents the imaginary of the internet and it makes me sick. I have to get off the internet. I've spent too much time with it lately.
The fact police can go in and just look at camera footage without warrant proves your point precisely, officers have used it to stalk family members, etc.
This type of thing is definitely real. A friend of mine went on a date with an NYPD cop back in the 90s. She refused a second date, and the stalking began. It wasn't 'tech stalking', like today, but the cop started asking interrogating questions to her landlord and co-workers; she started getting weird/false parking tickets, etc. The only way she made it stop was that her cousin was a veteran with NYPD, and well, he had a little chat with the young, stalking cop. But who knows where it all would've ended up if her cousin wasn't also a cop???
Not sure how much warrants are going to help when a judge will see a stack of requests from a police chief and just rubber stamp them all without looking. This is already a problem in places where warrants are required.
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." -- Cardinal Richelieu
Privacy protects personal dignity, not just illicit behavior. We close bathroom doors, keep journals, and have intimate conversations not because we are breaking the law, but because we value personal modesty and boundaries.
We are quickly approaching a time when we are all guilty until proven innocent by voyeuristic power-hungry psychopathic megalomaniacs who cry the old cry of "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear"
Big fan of court ordered warrants as a way to limit law enforcement here.
That said, warrants protect law enforcement like searching someone's house. It seems that some less intrusive powers like running someone's plate has been given to the police with lower controls.
And it makes sense right? If every judge needed to approve every potential plate check, it might be too much for daily operations.
So option A, push towards everything being protected under warrants.
Sure, option B, how about protection mechanisms that sit somewhere in the middle? For example, what if some powers were audited (sounds like they are logged already) on a probabilistic basis. What if judges could inspect some fraction of searches after the fact, and ask for justification afterwards. Of course this would have no effect on the actual search, but it would have long term effects on future searches.
Even if 1% of lesser searches are audited, I'm sure most policemen would be much more weary about using them for personal matters like stalking women.
Can I set up my own camera on the side of the road (in a public place) to scan people's faces and license plates, link them up to one of the many data brokers (or leaks) and use a big display to show the drivers' pictures and something like "Hey Rick Larsen, it's the 24th time we've seen you this week. We'll let our clients know there's no one home at 2930 Wetmore Avenue, Everett most weekdays between 8 and 4!", and then place them somewhere like oh, I don't know, in close proximity to a capitol building?
We can pay the regular fees that advertisers pay to have billboards up.
And if we're not allowed to do that, why is Flock?
No one has the right to privacy in a public setting. That's why street photographers can roam around and take photos of anyone and publish them. Whether you can publish personally identifiable information based on that, I don't know.
verkada (a building access systems company), had multiple incidents of stalking of employees by other employees, using their own installation in their own hq
Random people at your workplace likely know others with access and use it to spy on their own coworkers. I know of cases where they report the smallest details to Human Resources.
This shouldn't be hard to understand. Don't talk to the police, without your attorney present, under any circumstances whatsoever.
Dating the police is just such an astoundingly egregious violation of this principle that I can only wonder what, if anything, those people are thinking.
Anyway, the key takeaway seems to don't date anyone who dates the police. Firstly, because it directly puts your own safety at risk, as this article exemplifies. Secondly, because it demonstrates terrible judgment; it seems reasonable to assume they are likely to make other terrible decisions in the future.
Scott Adams' had a great line:
"Whenever people have the opportunity to commit fraud and there is no monitoring, you can assume they are committing fraud."
Are you loosely paraphrasing here? The closest thing I could find by Scott Adams was "Whenever you have a lot of money in play, combined with the ability to hide misbehavior behind complexity, you should expect widespread fraud to happen."
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10213582-whenever-you-have-...
(I didn't check the book, though.)
Remember that scene from "Men in Black" where K watches surveillance video feed of his ex? In the movie it was meant to be wistful and cute, I guess. Now that such systems are getting closer to reality, you realize the potential for abuse in enormous.
More like his widow than his ex - he was unable to ever contact her, which is what made it cute rather than creepy.
I mean at least in that situation, K was forbidden from ever making contact with his ex, with far greater consequences.
> He characterizes the behavior as rare. He simultaneously identifies it as the most common form of abuse. The tension between those two statements is the problem Flock has left unaddressed.
I don’t see how there’s any tension between these statements. The overall occurrence of abuse can be rare while the most common form of the abuse that does occur is of officers tracking people they know.
The tension is that the abuse is far more likely than any value these cameras bring.
And what is commonly rare in a country of 342 million? Prairie Grove, Illinois has 1930 people and he did this to at least 3 people according to the report. .15% of the population. If you extrapolate that out to the national population, its roughly 520k people. Or, the entire population of Sacramento, Ca, being victimized by law enforcement with a surveillance power they should never have been allowed to have.
In a community of 20 people you have one person who commits robbery, that's 5% of the pop being a robbers. One _could_ extrapolate that but we'd fall victim to the law of small numbers.
Either way, I support a world where exactly 0/1 Flock corporations exist.
Rare in comparison to what, the total number of searches across the platform?
But even that is the wrong focus. One could make the same case for rejecting police body cams because incidents of police abuse are rare, relatively speaking.
The real issue is that the platform isn't completely locked down by default with strict access control grants, monitoring, auditing, etc. Shoot I have way less access at my work to data and systems which do not have that level of sensitivity and have to go through multiple approval steps to be granted anything new.
But I guess those things don't help the sales pitches. To be fair policing the police isn't flock's job and doesn't make them money. Laws and regulations are the only real vehicles of change.
Yeah, in fact they're very nudge nudge wink wink.
Sell to a LE agency in a state that doesn't allow data sharing in certain ways? Flock certainly won't disable it. They'll even still train you in how to use it.
Garrett is very much a believer in Minority Report.
You're right both can be logically true. Now the tension doesn't reside in the logic, but in the intent of the statements.
First statement minimizes the problem's impact, second argues it's still worth tackling.
Ultimately, there’s a sort of homeostasis in people’s tolerance for crime. If you need video evidence for prosecution, those who want it prosecuted will produce video cameras. If you make warrants impossible to produce in a timely manner, the camera search will be warrant exempted.
Attempts to damage state power to ensure crime isn’t prosecuted will be likely met with methods that are immune to them.
Given the constraints we operate under, the ideal number of unsolved crimes is not zero and the ideal number of crimes committed using state apparatus is also not zero. So being informed that either is non-zero is not of use to decision making in my opinion.
> the ideal number of unsolved crimes is not zero and the ideal number of crimes committed using state apparatus is also not zero
I feel this is an _extremely_ good point, the kind that seems obvious only once you hear it. But i feel there’s an implication that could be made explicit here — we should be looking at the distribution of both apparatus-enabled-crimes and unsolved-crimes when we’re discussing this sort of thing. And if those metrics aren’t tabulated for easy access, they probably should be.
> And if those metrics aren’t tabulated for easy access, they probably should be.
I couldn't agree more. They're two different error rates for our society and measuring them accurately would help us go to where we should be on the curve.
Somebody should make a website visualizing the data we do have, perhaps with uncertainty bounds, and a recursive breakdown locale-by-locale… Nose goes!!
Edit: wow I bet this is a project that would be _way_ too difficult to vibe code with AI, with well documented data sources and what not. Sure would be a shame if somebody proved me wrong.
I think there's a bias in public discussion towards idealism, because most discussions will start by the argument that we need to reduce X, or we need to reduce Y. If there is a conflict and there needs to be a trade off, very few discussions and points will be about the tradeoff, but there will be a whole bunch of discussions about just plain reducing X or reducing Y.
To use a corporate example:
People act like the only options are:
- make it so hard to log in that no one can use a system
- just give everyone root access
You can build systems of approval that are fast, obvious who should be approving and are auditable.
You can also build systems that require secondary approvals without needing approval escalation up the chain. Creeping on women is a lot less likely if you need a peer or even a subordinate to review what you're doing.
And if you need confessions, confessions will be made.
Precisely! Illustrates the problem perfectly.
>>Flock and law enforcement regularly cite documented cases where LPR helped solve violent crimes, recover stolen vehicles, and locate missing persons. Those outcomes are real.
My opposition wouldn't change regardless but are those outcomes real?
In Seattle at least, the majority of homicide cases are solved with the assistance of surveillance cameras (though what % of said cameras are specifically Flock, I'm not sure): https://spdblotter.seattle.gov/2026/03/05/new-analysis-rtcc-...
Cops can politely ask owners of private cameras for access for things like murder investigation. If the polite answer is no (most people will say yes), they can go to court for a subpoena. This has happened for a long time. This is how it should work. If the cops are too lazy or chicken to ask a judge while investigating a murder, they don't deserve the footage.
This is very doable when what you're dealing with is a Major Crime That Gets Full Institutional and Individual Attention.
What about a bike theft, a jacked car or a stolen parcel though?
There is a price to having information easily available to the law enforcement. There is a price to not having this information easily available to the law enforcement too.
Even with Flock, police aren't solving those crimes.
Yes, many cases of people calling the police with actual tracker data showing exactly where their stolen property is, and the response being to get laughed at and told it's not a priority.
Doesn't matter, they should have to follow the same process.
Cops, at least where I live, don't give af about any of those crimes though. Bike gets stolen? You'll be lucky if they even show up at all, let alone do anything about it, surveillance data available or not. They largely don't even get prosecuted when caught.
It's true. We're getting the worst possible outcome. Police state surveillance that tolerates nearly every level of criminality. Anarcho-tyranny.
The majority of crime is committed by a relatively small number of individuals. If citizens feel crime is out of control they need to vote in politicians and judges who sentence repeat offenders to long sentences or involuntary commitment.
Long sentences are far less effective than reliable enforcement. Something that seems to be very true in practice. If you steal or vandalise something in China, there is an extremely high chance you will get caught, you won't get a massive penalty, but it will be enough to cover the damages + some.
If you for example knew that stealing had a penalty of 100% of the item value + 10% fine, with a 100% chance of getting caught, you'd never steal anything again even though the penalty is so much smaller than what it is currently in most countries. And then if you make a dumb decision as a teenager or in a lapse of judgement, it won't ruin your life.
How does that work when you don't have enough assets to cover the cost of the thing you broke or stole?
Of course you could still rack up a large penalty / jail time if you cause an incredible amount of damage quickly, but in general you'd catch people before they get that far. Catching a bike thief after the first 1-2 bikes rather than when they have stolen 100.
If only we had an amendment in the original bill of rights that drew the line here.
They can get a subpoena for that, too. The bike and the parcel are already long gone by the time police do anything. (Nor will they do anything other than file a report if you are lucky.)
This was exactly the case on a King County jury I was on. Lots of camera footage, most from security cams of individual businesses, some from red light cameras.
The event predated Flock rollout though, so no idea if the distribution of camera sources has shifted.
Regardless though, in the end the phone location data meant a lot more than any of the camera data, which just confirmed the path from phone sources.
Right and what if lots of crime happens in a place where there are not many businesses? Hardly an implausible scenario given that crime is bad for business.
The city can set up its own camera for its own use. Is that really that wild of a proposal?
What if what if what if?
That whole premise of "what if lots of crime happens" -- already false.
Did you know that most places in America are at historically low crime rates in most of our lifetimes? It is garbage to say this needs deep societal focus right now. I don't give a shit about the hypothetical hurt feelings of small town cops whining that they don't have always-on spy equipment.
In fact, there's a pretty strong argument that the reason crime has decreased so much in the US is because we've put strict controls and protections limiting lead in the environment.
We do still need deep societal focus, but that's mostly around things like further getting lead out of homes and pipes.
While I would oppose a city setting up CCTV to be used the way Flock is used - that would be orders of magnitude less bad than Flock.
As it is, you can assume that at the very least, every time your vehicle has passed one of the >100k Flock cameras, there's a database entry and a photo that will never, ever be deleted. Your full travel history from this point forward is available for a nominal fee, and without any regard for your privacy.
Who says the city's retention period would be smaller than Flock?
Furthermore, do you realize that you're free to photograph people in public and sell those images, no permission required: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nussenzweig_v._DiCorcia
People seem to struggle to wrap their head around the fact that privacy laws don't prevent people from recording them in public. You can be recorded at any time in public, by the government or another private person.
The city's scope is smaller than Flock's - it's a city, not a multi-national corporation.
Yes, I'm aware of what "expectation of privacy" means. I've been a photographer for ~25 years.
> People seem to struggle to wrap their head around the fact that privacy laws don't prevent people from recording them in public. You can be recorded at any time in public, by the government or another private person.
This isn't about recording in public - it's about building a comprehensive dataset containing the movement and association history of the entire US population. Not only is that without a warrant, it's being collected prior to any accusation being made.
And how are they building that dataset? By recording in public. Yes it is about recording in public.
> People seem to struggle to wrap their head around the fact that privacy laws don't prevent people from recording them in public.
Maybe this needs to be restricted in some capacity, then.
"Anyone can record you at any time in public" is vastly different from "a single entity is recording you over time and locations across the country/state/city"
What if lots of murders happened in bathrooms?
The hopefully we'll be able to at least narrow down the list of suspects to the people who entered the bathroom around the time they the murder took place.
Surveillance often doesn't directly capture crime on camera, but is rather used to identify who traveled to and from the crime scene around the time of the incident
You understand why that's worse, right?
No? If someone broke into your car as stole your luggage, the surveillance camera might not directly capture the thief breaking into your car. But if the camera recorded someone entering the parking garage and then exiting the garage carrying your luggage a few minutes later, that's strong evidence is it not?
You're missing the part where, for that to work, we have a government with access to a massive surveillance system capable of identifying and tracking the population at scale.
And you're missing that, instead of specifically identifying a specific individual doing a specific thing, this network would be used to place under suspicion, investigation and possible arrest, people who's only documented action was "being somewhere."
Oh, and while your example is "committed a crime", that same network could easily be used to identity and track people who were, say, coming and going from protests. Or libraries. Or voting.
> investigation and possible arrest, people who's only documented action was "being somewhere."
In the example above, the police wouldn't arrest every single person who entered and exited the parking lot. They'd arrest the person who walked out of the lot with your stolen luggage.
> Oh, and while your example is "committed a crime", that same network could easily be used to identity and track people who were, say, coming and going from protests
Again realize that this is legal right? https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/14/us/charlottesville-doxxin...
There's no right to have your public demonstrations off limits for recording. The whole point of a protest is to be seen. If someone is concerned that they will be associated with some group or cause because of their decision to protest, then they seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a protest is.
> Or voting
You realize the government already has that information? Voters literally filled out ballots and delivered it to the government. They don't need a camera to know who voted, they have the ballots.
... I'm sorry. Are you not aware ballots are anonymous? Is that not a thing you knew?
Did you think our ballots tell the government who we were and how we voted?
Just, setting aside the rest of the idiocy of your defense here, that's ... a shocking thing to think as an adult in America.
Yes, ballots are anonymous. But how would Flock cameras somehow de-anonymize votes? I had assumed you were referring to tracking people driving to polling stations to discover who voted - not how they voted. Because how on earth would automated license plate readers somehow de-anonymize individual ballots? Please do explain what you meant by that.
And do explain the "idiocy" of the rest of my comment. Do you actually dispute anything I wrote? Do you think that law enforcement weren't monitoring groups like the Proud Boys, Nation of Islam, militia organizations, etc. before Flock came around?
Well, in my precinct I'd estimate there are ~20 people at the polls to vote at any given time. Given the timestamp of a ballot, there are maybe 50 people it could have possibly been.
That's more than enough information to correlate voting behavior after a couple of election cycles with a high degree of confidence.
Oh, and ballots aren't just for one race generally. By looking at what races that ballot voted in and a list of people present, there's a very good chance you'd be able to narrow it down to an individual in a single visit.
The ballots are timestamped to a degree fine-grained enough to narrow down the set of potential voters to just 50 people? Which state is this? I'm not finding any search results indicating that ballots are timestamped. In fact, some of the results I've encountered specifically say that ballots aren't timestamped to ensure privacy. But happy to learn more of you can explain how ballots in your state are timestamped.
In my state, we have to sign our name on the envelope containing our ballot. If the government was corrupt and they wanted to identify how people voted, they could just look at the signature. No Flock required.
Of all the things to complain about Flock, the notion that it can somehow de-anonymize ballots is probably one of the most unusual I've heard.
My point wasn't that Flock allows this, but that it allows an entire class of surveillance that was previously not available.
What wasn't previously available? Automated license plate readers have been around since the 70s, and started being widely deployed in the 1990s as technology got cheaper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recogni...
It's not new tech.
The closest thing to it was repo companies sharing data.
This is very much a new thing.
At no point did I say it could de-anonymize ballots.
You claimed ballots provided the government with the information they needed to know who voted.
I pointed that is untrue. Ballots explicitly do not.
The fact you posted that tells you know have a Google level understanding of the law in the US, and the fact you posted an article about private citizens using public data as proof of the legality of government-operated mass surveillance data tells me you're a deeply unserious person who should probably read Robert's writing in the majority opinion in Carpenter.
The 9th circuit upheld the use of automated license plate readers in US vs. Yang. The defense attempted to use Carpenter to argue against the legality of ALPR data, and failed: https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca7/21...
I really appreciate the irony of you alleging a "Google level understanding" on my part, when your own argument was tried in a court of appeals and failed.
If you're going to Google a rebuttal to sound smart, please read the opinion before you do.
The Ninth Circuit in US v Yang specifically did not rule on the applicability of Carpenter or whether ALPR's GPS database was sufficiently similar.
It ruled Yang lacked standing to sue on those grounds because you don't have any expectation of privacy in a rental car after you've turned it in.
It ... has absolutely nothing to do with anything.
I helpfully pointed out the actual case you should cite in a different comment.
Try Googling that one.
But crucially, the police used the ALPR data without a warrant. Regardless of the rental car, the police did use ALPR data without a warrant and the court did allow that to be used in court.
To be clear, ballots are anonymous, and voter rolls are not universally accessible to all offices or functions of any given government. Different localities have different laws regarding the transparency of voting records, with varying degrees of control and confidentially down to the county level in some cases. In most cases, access to that information requires, at a minimum, a documented request though laws vary county by county, state by state, etc.
So "The government might not know how you voted, but they know who voted!" still requires a lot of work defining what you mean by "the government".
Second, your "this is already legal!" link pointed to an article about private citizens utilizing publicly volunteered data sets with no legal authority or consequence. I have no idea what that has to do with anything. Other than it sort of proves that mass data collection is likely to generate injustices.
But yes, in the US, you do not have a presumption to privacy when out in public. It is not an assumed universal, but, especially when it comes to private use, public information and public activities are not assumed private and have little if any protections.
However, SCOTUS specifically called out in Carpenter that mass surveillance data (cell phone location in that case) can be treated as a "search" under our Fourth Amendment. When confronted with a case that would look very similar to large network of private surveillance data of otherwise public activity, the court said, "Nope." If the quality and quantity of the data is sufficiently detailed, it cannot be presumed to be "public" information, especially when the mechanism by which it is gathered does not require affirmative consent, and especially when the data is retroactively broad.
Carpenter is the opinion which the ACLU cites, repeatedly, when they attack Flock's network of cameras. Cursory reading about whether Flock constitutional will point you towards Carpenter, and the ACLU's argument that it should/will apply to Flock.
We've had exactly one real test of that argument (Schmidt v Norfolk) that has yet to be make it to SCOTUS. The district court in that case ruled Carpenter didn't apply - but it was a district court whose opinion SCOTUS overruled in Carpenter too.
The next SCOTUS test of mass surveillance data usage will likely be the pending opinion in Chatrie. SCOTUS-watchers seemed divided on where they think the court will land, so who knows. Though based on the dissents in Carpenter, and the current make-up of the court, it's hard to see a world in which the original dissenters change their mind and that ACC doesn't join with them for a 5-4 opinion the other way under some narrow condition set.
I have no idea why you think the government monitoring specific groups has anything to do with mass surveillance networks beyond that the words monitoring and surveillance have similar meanings.
You seem to just be saying things.
> We've had exactly one real test of that argument (Schmidt v Norfolk) that has yet to be make it to SCOTUS. The district court in that case ruled Carpenter didn't apply - but it was a district court whose opinion SCOTUS overruled in Carpenter too.
We've had at least two: in US vs Yang, the defense tried to invalidate the use of ALPR data using Carpenter to try and argue that it violated the Fourth Amendment. The Ninth Circuit disagreed and did not accept that argument.
We create doors that physically limit access to one person at a time.
That is not this, however. This is the city hooking into a private, nationwide surveillance network.
You didn't think these cities actually own these Flock cameras, did you?
They pay to have them installed and maintained, they're not different in that sense from subscribing to Office 365 licensing, it's a subscription product.
They key difference is not whether they own their cameras but the automatic data sharing with other agencies and their cameras. Arguably law enforcement does this casually on request anyways but the drastically reduced friction of an automatic system enables easy abuse.
An officer may hesitate to ask a neighboring agency for data on their girlfriend, and would likely be very hesitant to file actual paperwork to request it. But a search in Flock's interface is probably all of the same legal peril in a venue which doesn't feel as intimidating or risky to do and doesn't see the same level of human review or scrutiny.
In America, yes.
Obviously in other places, no.
The wording he used was that it helped make arrests in 53% of cases. Nothing about whether those cases were solved, or whether the arrests were correct, or whether he's counting times where the cameras see police making an arrest and count it as 'helping'.
That's not what that says though.
>technology and professional analysts with helping detectives make arrests in 53%
"technology and analysts" "help" "make arrests" not surveillance, not convictions and only the implication that they wouldn't have made the arrest otherwise.
Like look at the example: somebody calls in an OD and a guy sees that the dude ODing matches (the clothing of) a suspect in some other crime and so they arrest him.
Once again an arrest is not a conviction but also what part of that needed/used pervasive surveillance?
ALSO a conviction is not the same thing as truth.
ALSO ALSO by basic subtraction the panopticon wasn't even helpful 47% of the time.
Even better, they saw a guy who was nearby the dude ODing.
Historically Seattle's surveillance has been fulfilled via Axon.
I have no doubt that provided a vast camera network covering every ingress and egress into a city, and every major intersection, plus a database of when and where a license plate was last seen, cops can find their suspect
It used to be that news articles would claim that the police used “CCTV from local businesses” to catch a crook. Even back then I knew this was cover for Ring, Flock and who knows what else. they just didn’t want the bad press.
At this point you don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to understand that parallel construction happens all the time. They have more tools that we know about, and they want to keep it that way.
Everyone should throw some money to 404 media. They are independent and doing the best work right now to keep these things in the public eye.
That's the thing though, I do doubt that. Surveillance that you don't need a warrant to put in front of a jury is a perfect thing to use for the ostensibly-legal construction in parallel construction.
guess what prolific career criminals do with crime cars?
they look for a car that is very similar if not exact make and model of thier stolen vehicle, then they "clone" the victims license plate with a sheet of embossment copper and a stylus, apply paint at thier shop and affix the imposter to the crime vehicle. that buggers the whole LPR thing.
they can replicate dozens of plates in a day and offer the service for contras.
That seems like a lot of effort when you can just take the license plate off and if you're really worried print off a convincing temporary license and tape in the back window.
its effort well worth it, and really is not a lot of effort. if you stole the plate, the theft is evident, when there are duplicates then it becomes difficult to know which one to suspect, and that also presupposes knowledge of the duplication.
you would have to realize, it is not feasible for a car to be in location 1 thenbe in location 2 many miles away in a few minutes.
the odd thing about criminals is thier effort to perpetuate crime is often far greater than getting a job, but is somehow the preferable option.
> you would have to realize, it is not feasible for a car to be in location 1 thenbe in location 2 many miles away in a few minutes.
You say that but just last week there was a post here about how LPR claimed that the same car was in two locations in a timeframe that would have required the car to have been traveling non-stop at 160mph for 20 minutes through suburban streets, and even then authorities and proponents were defending it as plausible, or that the LPR was right, but there might just have been timing issues, or, or, or.
i think i saw that post, i think we're both describing what happens when someone copies plates and doppelgangs people to throw off the surveillance.
i think in this case the LPR was right, the same plate number was in two different places, the assumption of how many plates were involved needs review.
160mph for 20min through suburban streets, that kind of attracts attention, there would be a lot of complaints and witnesses if that happened
Not really because it flags an anomaly where the same plate is found in two places that are impossibly far to reach in the time span. Then police can just pull over that plate when they see it with a 50/50 chance it's the stolen car.
The more cameras in the network the faster and more likely a duplicated plate will be spotted.
Sure. But if we have enough surveillance cameras, we can just trace the full path of the car from the moment of theft to now. I'm reminded of Gorgon Stare [1]. Stolen cars suck. But how about murders? I'm sure all of the people who've had loved ones murdered in, say, South Chicago, might have a more positive opinion of such a system. Especially since it wouldn't have to rely on witnesses who are cowed by the threat of reprisal and anti-snitch culture.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Stare
Yes. Prior to flock, my city trialed LPRs attached to the local power company’s poles. In the first month, they recovered more stolen cars than any prior years total recoveries. I’ve got mixed feelings about Flock, LPRs, and what it allows people and governments to do.
I’m 100% sold on the results.
Nobody is questioning the value of unconstrained mass surveillance on solving crimes.
Unfortunately it also enables a good deal of more heinous crimes against the people its supposed to protect, by the people who are supposed to be protecting them.
Part of that is cops also doing their jobs in the first place versus "not giving a shit". Like when shown an eBay page of the person who sold my stolen phone. Nearly a hundred iPhones, all "activation locked", "no charger", same for Mac laptops, "no chargers, no accessories, may be locked".
Cops: "Well he probably didn't steal them himself."
Me: "Even so, knowingly selling stolen property is a crime too, no?"
Cops: "..."
The problem imo is the usage and laws rather than the technology. Security cameras used for public good is good. But it needs to be heavily limited to preventing crime, with strict access logs and penalties for misuse.
Imagine if the police had the names and faces of every marcher in every protest. They too would be (are) 100% sold on the results.
Flock doesnt scan faces, only cars.
So they claim. But the footage will continue to exist if somebody or themselves decide to identify faces.
Flock provide more than LPRs. Check out the "Condor" cameras.
So, ends justifies the means. Got it.
I guess I’m old enough to remember when 99.9% of us on hacker news were…well, hackers. We valued privacy and freedom over surveillance and “results.”
I miss those days.
> We valued privacy and freedom over surveillance and “results.”
The relative value of one over the other depends on the absolute value of either. In a Mad Max scenario, very few would value the principles of privacy and freedom over the immediate need to reestablish basic order.
Take auto theft as an example. Depending on how old you are, the recent spike in auto theft is either "nothing compared to the 80s" or "entirely unacceptable in civilized society"; in select cities, the rate almost tripled in five years[0] (an incredible jump), though remaining well below the historical peak.
However, case clearance rates are at an all time low, which I'm sure furthers frustration for the victims. That is, you're statistically less likely to be a victim of auto theft today than during the historical peak, but if you are, you're statistically more likely to be SOL.
You're probably approaching this from a civil libertarian point of view, but the Constitution is not a suicide pact[1]. Members of society who collectively uphold the law also have a vested interested in the maintenance of the conditions that would further perpetuate upholding the law, i.e. law and order.
[0]: https://counciloncj.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/motor-veh...
[1]: Terminiello v. Chicago, 337 U.S. 1 (1949)
Flock's position, statistically, is that if during the course of an investigation into a crime, a detective queries Flock, and the crime is later solved, that Flock "helped solve a crime", regardless of the merit or value of the query. "Saw a vehicle, look it up, "nope, unrelated", but still "helped solve".
Right, that's more or less my suspicion.
The AI slop in that quote sure is real.
Check your town's website for correspondence with your state's chapter of the ACLU in regards to Flock cameras. If your police chief (not an elected official) is installing them then contact your local ACLU chapter about it. These are 4th amendment violations.
To the contrary, little of what Flock does would be restricted by the 4th amendment. The cameras are in public, and neither the government nor individual citizens need authorization to film people in public.
Many Flock cameras are also privately owned, too.
All flock cameras are privately owned, by flock. They install them at a charge per the jurisdiction that orders them and pays the subscription costs… those subscription fees allow Mr Local Law Abuser to lookup any license plate it has read, when, where, with a picture of the vehicle.
https://deflock.org
You’d be surprised how many there are.
The point is, some of flock's customers are private businesses. E.g. the Home Depot by me uses them. No amount of pressure by voters can take those cameras down.
So when I put a bag over the camera, it's up to flock to remove it? I haven't stuck around to find out who shows up. Sometimes it takes a week or so, other times it's next day.
https://www.wired.com/story/carpenter-v-united-states-suprem... https://www.eff.org/cases/us-v-jones There has been plenty of past rulings that indicate long term collection of data is not something that the fourth amendment had baked in.
The case you linked isn't about the government filming people in public, though. Carpenter vs. US was a case about the government demanding private information about users' locations from cell service providers. By comparison, the 9th circuit concluded that the plain view doctrine means electronic license plate readers are legal :https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2020/05/04/1...
An officer doesn't need a warrant to sit at a cross section and write down license plate numbers. A device doing the same thing is also legal.
Of course that's a fair interpretation, I am saying there's some tension between mass surveillance and the fourth just because its "done in public" doesn't mean it automatically escapes scrutiny now or going forward.
No, the fact that it's recording people in public does make it escape scrutiny moving forward. In public you can be filmed by anyone - be they government or private citizens.
I find a lot of people fail to realize this, both in regards to surveillance and otherwise. Recently in my city there was a big uproar about a nudist beach that was at risk of having nudity prohibited. So a bunch of nudists went out and paraded around the beach while disrobed, some of them bringing their children with them. People sailed by and photographed many of the nudists, and put their images online. Many alleged that must be a violation of some privacy law, but no, the law in Washington (and most, perhaps all, of the US) is quite clear: if you're in public, you can be filmed and photographed. If you don't want to be filmed nude, don't go walking around naked in public.
Regardless, back to the topic at hand, the fact that Flock cameras a in public spaces does in fact mean that there's no requirement to get a warrant to use them.
> No, the fact that it's recording people in public does make it escape scrutiny moving forward. In public you can be filmed by anyone - be they government or private citizens.
This is false. While there is no strongly established precedent yet, there are certainly serious and plausible legal arguments being made that unlimited collection and collation/cross-referencing/etc. of "public" information can under certain circumstances constitute a search. It will most certainly not "escape scrutiny moving forward".
e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_theory_of_the_Fourth_Am...
The legality of automated license plate readers has gone all the way up to the United States Court of Appeals. That's the second highest court in the country, superseded only by the Supreme Court.
This is as strong as precedent gets, short of a SCOTUS decision.
That doesn't sound like escaping scrutiny to me! Sounds like it's getting pretty thoroughly scrutinized, in fact.
> This is as stromg (sic) as precedent gets, short of a SCOTUS decision.
Another egregious misrepresentation. The courts are obviously making their rulings as narrow as possible because they know the "mosaic theory" style arguments have some merit. Look at US vs. Yang, for example, in which the court dodged the issue completely with some argument about rental car contract periods. And Schmidt v. Norfolk, which IIUC directly challenges Flock ALPRs on 4A grounds, is pending.
Lots and lots of scrutiny. Your claim that the conclusion is foregone here is obviously absurd. Even when/if it gets to SCOTUS I expect they'll write as narrow an opinion as they can get away with, in whatever direction it falls.
So what's the logical conclusion, that there will be a company with a drone following every individual in a public space at all times and that the government will pay for the data?
The logical conclusion is that the US brings itself in line with the rest of the developed world, and realizes video cameras are useful for solving crime.
Flying drones are not required, stationary cameras are more than enough outside of specific scenarios like active pursuit.
Considering how desperately that user is responding to every comment on this post, it seems they have a vested interest in playing blind for Flock, which makes me think they are paid by Flock.
Lol, I should be getting paid.
But no, I just like to dispel the myths people have about their imaginary right to not be filmed in public. Whether it's by the government or by other private people.
Manual D, the flock system is still very new. Why are you confident a private companies monetization of public whereabouts will stay legal? There hasent really been any precedent set on this. And the system is wildly unpopular In the public eye?
In case you didn't read it, the 9th circuit upheld the use of Flock cameras. The precedence is as high as it gets, short of a supreme Court decision: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48636421
You're being exposed to a very specific group of people when you read Hacker News or Reddit. Plenty of people are happy to have Flock cameras in their neighborhood on account of the improved ability to investigate crime.
And this is how freedom dies, not by the letter of the law, but by the spirit.
it's not about filming in public. it's about systematic data collection by law enforcement, using private infrastructure present by its nature in public. that's why the Carpenter decision is relevant.
The Carpenter decision was about the US government compelling mobile data providers to hand over private use information. It's really not relevant to flock. That's why the 9th Circuit decided that automated license plate readers don't need a warrant. A cop and stand at an intersection and write down license plate numbers without a warrant. A device can do the same.
>A cop and stand at an intersection and write down license plate numbers without a warrant.
I dont believe you think the police force could replicate the injest of information these systems allow do you?
If the city hires enough police officers, yes. It'd almost certainly require an unfathomably large budget, but it's not impossible.
The point is, the plain view doctrine means the police don't need a warrant to record observation that are in plain view. The licence plates of cars on the street are in plain view.
I really don't understand how people got this idea in their head that their license plates are private information . How do red light cameras identify cars? How does parking enforcement work? By recording people's license plates. The whole reason why we mandate that cars display license plates to is to facilitate identifying vehicles.
The year is 2026 and the 4th amendment only means what the currently sitting justices say that it means, and the executive branch was literally given a pass to violate any law on the books that they want.
The 9th circuit upheld that the police do not need warrants to operate and access data from license plate readers. The 9th Circuit isn't exactly a conservative stronghold.
That’s really beside the point. It doesn’t matter what the 9th circuit or any other court says.
Our country is no longer a country of laws. Laws are only as good as they are enforced. The SCOTUS, the DOJ, the FBI, and congress have openly abdicated any constitutional responsibility to provide checks and balances to reign in the abuses we see posted to HN every day.
I believe they would all argue that they haven't. They would argue that the current administration is operating within the law towards ends supported, repeatedly, by their constituents.
I disagree with them, but that isn't relevant.
Wrong. See Carpenter v US.
That's not applicable to Flock, though. That case pertained to the government requesting that mobile service providers give historical location data on users.
I feel like you haven't properly thought this through. Cell towers are monitoring a public broadcast from a beacon you voluntarily carry on your person. For some reason querying that dataset requires a warrant but querying a broadly analogous dataset from the operator of a network of cameras doesn't?
More generally you're confidently making wild extrapolations from the current very limited case law without regard for either its limitations or the general temperature that can be inferred from the full opinions.
> Cell towers are monitoring a public broadcast from a beacon you voluntarily carry on your person.
It's an encrypted broadcast, not a public broadcast. This is why the police needed to ask the mobile service providers for this data. It is not public.
> For some reason querying that dataset requires a warrant but querying a broadly analogous dataset from the operator of a network of cameras doesn't?
The data is not broadly analogous. One is encrypted radio traffic. The other is unencrypted, and you can record it yourself with a pen, paper, and the Mk I eyeball. This is why the "plain view" doctrine applies.
Again, the courts have already ruled on the use of ALPRs. The defense tried to use US vs Carpenter in US vs Yang, and the courts did not accept that argument that ALPRs are analogous to cell phone location data.
The government may not purchase services for acts it is not allowed to do itself: Pinkerton Act.
But the government is allowed to track people's license plates. There's nothing against the law for a police officer to stand at an intersection writing down all passing car's license plates with a pen and paper. Flock is the same thing, just much more cost efficient.
Yes. Let's restrict police and take away every possible tool they can use to solve and fight crime. Not all criminals are bad criminals. They don't use Flock to spy on their ex-girlfriends but every cop in America has done it.
At least according to the internet which knows everything.
Don't misrepresent what others say. The 4th amendment should not be violated. I can only interpret your response as "the 4th amendment should be violated".
Then you would be wrong. I'm pointing out the internet's liberal obsession with anti-police and, seemingly, pro-criminal activity. The internet likes to find fault with the police while dismissing or ignoring criminal activity. It's a horror I cannot understand. It's pure insanity.
Okay, then pontificate that as a top level comment. Responding to someone saying the 4th amendment should not be circumvented with a refute is a statement about the 4th amendment, not some imagined counter party.
This whole thread represents the imaginary of the internet and it makes me sick. I have to get off the internet. I've spent too much time with it lately.
I’m right here with you. This is a genuinely cool useful technology that helps solve crimes and all we get is pearl clutching.
Most people don’t give AF
Nit: the police chief was also stalking and harassing at least one man
The fact police can go in and just look at camera footage without warrant proves your point precisely, officers have used it to stalk family members, etc.
This type of thing is definitely real. A friend of mine went on a date with an NYPD cop back in the 90s. She refused a second date, and the stalking began. It wasn't 'tech stalking', like today, but the cop started asking interrogating questions to her landlord and co-workers; she started getting weird/false parking tickets, etc. The only way she made it stop was that her cousin was a veteran with NYPD, and well, he had a little chat with the young, stalking cop. But who knows where it all would've ended up if her cousin wasn't also a cop???
Yeah what in the world, now imagine that nowadays with FLOCK cameras. I see that going nowhere good
So glad we got them kicked out of Mountain View.
When flock data was FOIAd the state just exempted the data from FOIA.
Not sure how much warrants are going to help when a judge will see a stack of requests from a police chief and just rubber stamp them all without looking. This is already a problem in places where warrants are required.
With a search warrant, I can submit FOIA requests or go to the courthouse.
With flock searches, I (usually) can't because Illinois law exempts ALPR records. Here's the most egregious example I've seen: https://www.muckrock.com/foi/waukegan-11153/flock-safety-alp...
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." -- Cardinal Richelieu
Privacy protects personal dignity, not just illicit behavior. We close bathroom doors, keep journals, and have intimate conversations not because we are breaking the law, but because we value personal modesty and boundaries.
We are quickly approaching a time when we are all guilty until proven innocent by voyeuristic power-hungry psychopathic megalomaniacs who cry the old cry of "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect
I do not disagree with the intentions of the quote, however it is disputed.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Cardinal_Richelieu#Disputed
Yes this is how freedoms are restored. Next we need a story of flock tracking a reporter or political figure. Put that 4th amendment into sharp focus.
Imagine what Musk can do with all the SSA and Tax data he stole in the most blatant and underreported data heist in history.
No it shows why mass surveillance systems should be outlawed.
As far as I can tell from the news, Flock is only used to commit crimes.
They silently stole $46 million secretly from Canada
Big fan of court ordered warrants as a way to limit law enforcement here.
That said, warrants protect law enforcement like searching someone's house. It seems that some less intrusive powers like running someone's plate has been given to the police with lower controls.
And it makes sense right? If every judge needed to approve every potential plate check, it might be too much for daily operations.
So option A, push towards everything being protected under warrants.
Sure, option B, how about protection mechanisms that sit somewhere in the middle? For example, what if some powers were audited (sounds like they are logged already) on a probabilistic basis. What if judges could inspect some fraction of searches after the fact, and ask for justification afterwards. Of course this would have no effect on the actual search, but it would have long term effects on future searches.
Even if 1% of lesser searches are audited, I'm sure most policemen would be much more weary about using them for personal matters like stalking women.
Can I set up my own camera on the side of the road (in a public place) to scan people's faces and license plates, link them up to one of the many data brokers (or leaks) and use a big display to show the drivers' pictures and something like "Hey Rick Larsen, it's the 24th time we've seen you this week. We'll let our clients know there's no one home at 2930 Wetmore Avenue, Everett most weekdays between 8 and 4!", and then place them somewhere like oh, I don't know, in close proximity to a capitol building?
We can pay the regular fees that advertisers pay to have billboards up.
And if we're not allowed to do that, why is Flock?
No one has the right to privacy in a public setting. That's why street photographers can roam around and take photos of anyone and publish them. Whether you can publish personally identifiable information based on that, I don't know.
Yes, you are allowed to set up a camera, as long as you own the land you're putting the camera on or you have permission from the landowner.
Again, I'm surprised by how many people don't realize that it's legal to film people in public.
You can probably do that, so long as you're doing it on property you own.
Statistically, police officers are much more likely than your average person to be a perpetrator of domestic abuse
This problem is 99% cops and 1% flock.
It's sort of 50/50.
verkada (a building access systems company), had multiple incidents of stalking of employees by other employees, using their own installation in their own hq
none of them were cops
No? A mass surveillance apparatus is a pretty enormous problem.
Random people at your workplace likely know others with access and use it to spy on their own coworkers. I know of cases where they report the smallest details to Human Resources.
Regular reminder that their CEO called Deflock a terrorist organization. I hope they go out of business and their cameras end up as e-waste.
If I'm a terrorist, I've not been a very good one to this point.
> Important subject
> Uses slop AI art
Fastest way to make something into a farce.
It's genuinely triggering rage to see this on a "serious" article.