Posted by sbuttgereit 4 days ago
I've posted here before about this, but: we did a give-to-get in my local municipality. The police (and voters), concerned about a wave of carjackings, wanted a Flock deployment. Activists opposed the cameras. There was a board fight, which came down to a tie-breaking vote from the board president.
In exchange for a pilot deployment of Flock, we ultimately:
* Disabled automatic sharing of Flock data to out-of-state entities (I tried getting sharing disabled altogether, but we solved a murder with shared access to another muni's cameras)
* Revised the police department's General Order regarding ALPR cameras to get a bunch of privacy/security stuff added (mandatory 2FA, use exclusively from PD computers, monthly audits of Flock stops, etc). The General Order we approved also forbade the use of Flock cameras for non-violent crimes.
* Got the ACLU's CCOPS model ordinance enacted, which mandates board approval of any new surveillance technology --- we're the first muni in Illinois to do that (put us on your silly maps, ACLU!), and, finally
* Forbade the police department from using Flock to stop "stolen" cars (the Illinois "hot list" of stolen cars is surprisingly bad, with months sometime passing after cars reported stolen being removed when it turned out they weren't); we instead monitor for stolen license plates (for which there are no innocent explanations).
None of this is perfect. The activists certainly aren't happy! On the other hand, we probably have the most tightly restricted ALPR deployment in the country, and we were up against an electorate that, if it had to choose between no cameras and 5x as many cameras with zero restrictions, would have sided with the cameras. So I'm calling it a huge win.
I wish such fights and compromise were more common, rather than the furtive implementations and blind acceptance that is standard.
If you live inside the borders of a huge city, it's probably a different story (somebody go report it out). But I live in an inner-ring suburb of Chicago, and I think what I'm saying is probably true for basically all suburbs.
What's the point of a surveillance system if you are not going to use it to solve property crimes? The biggest issues with liveability in a lot of "nice" US cities like SF are property crime and law enforcement choosing to go after "easy" white collar crime like traffic and parking violations instead of the blue collar crimes that affect safety and property.
* The privacy/safety tradeoff is different between the two kinds of crimes. There's a distinction between computers passively collecting data and humans actively investigating (and stopping) cars.
* Violent crimes are the local enforcement priority, and if you give police tools to clear non-priority crimes, you are changing their incentive structure.
* The link between the car and the crime is especially tenuous in routine property crime; it's just as likely we'd be stopping people's mothers and grandparents as that we'd be stopping actual criminal suspects. That's obviously not true with a carjacking.
* Being specific about the crimes we want to apply Flock to makes it easier for us to track (and, much more importantly, talk about) whether the cameras are successful. It's a real mixed bag right now!
Having said all that, the pro-camera contingent certainly does want Flock cameras used to catch package thieves and shoplifters. But they were up against anti-camera people who wanted no cameras at all. We took the opening and set our own terms.
Going after "easy" stuff like traffic and parking violations (neither of which can be enforced using Flock cameras here) is definitely not a problem we have. Our municipality is extraordinarily safe, but it's nestled into one of the less-safe areas in Chicagoland.
That isn't limited to SF either: https://www.npr.org/2023/04/06/1167980495/americas-roads-are...
SF is also planning to install dozens of speed enforcement cameras.
I dont know about that. My block in NYC in a school zone had a lot of people speeding along so the city installed a speed camera. It didn't seem to do much because people instantly learned it was there, slowed down, then gas it hard the next block. And that is the story with every speed camera: people learn where they are, do the brake pedal dance, then gas it.
I honestly believe they do close to nothing except make the contractors wealthy. As for the camera on my block: the city got smart and took it down less than two years after it went up. In its place they installed all-way stop signs on two consecutive corners. A low tech solution involving a few sheet metal signs bolted to a metal pole. They work better but there are still jackasses who gas it after the second sign. Jerks going to be jerks.
If we could roll out red light cameras villagewide, I'd sign on.
If I catch a burglar in my home I will certainly be violent to them, to pre-empt them from becoming a risk to me. I've been burgled several times and I've felt very violated.
Unfortunately here in Europe the courts don't really agree with that but that's a later matter. I think it's more 'fair game' in states like Texas. I keep a huge flashlight by my bed for that reason. It's not deadly but it will be enough to submit an intruder.
It could happen because I often don't bother to answer the door when I'm home and not expecting any parcels. Because most of the callers to my door are sales trash or scummy people trying to get into the communal stairwell.
But anyway my point is these things are not that black and white. It's more like a scale.
How is it identifying the car without the plate? VIN?
https://ij.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/2024.10.21-1-Compl...
Related,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40222649 ("Flock Safety is the biggest player in a city-by-city scramble for surveillance", 143 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33994205 ("Flock is Building a New AI-Driven Mass-Surveillance System", 15 comments)
I rarely say this, but we need legislation.
Accepting the premise that the 4th Amendment doesn't apply here is to accept the very premise that allows governments to try this sort of thing. The courts making clear that the 4th Amendment should be interpreted broadly and that it doesn't matter how novel your surveillance/search methods are to that end is ultimately superior to playing legislative whack-a-mole.
But yes, it's a massive oversight and should be closed. But it won't be because the government benefits soooo much from being able to scrutinize any person's past metadata going back god knows how long on a whim.
And speaking of "going back god knows how long". I hope I'm not the only one who noticed that in the whole Fani Lewis Georgia thing they at one point introduced 10yo (!!!) cell location data as evidince in court like it was nothing and normal evidince to have on hand. I forget which side introduced the data or what the "sides" even were in that case but imagine having to defend your cherry picked whereabouts a decade ago from a prosecution team who's already built a narrative about them.
> In 2023, Norfolk Police partnered with a company called Flock Safety, Inc. to install 172 automatic license plate reading cameras across town. The cameras were strategically placed to create what Norfolk Police Chief Mark Talbot referred to as a “nice curtain of technology,” which would make it “difficult to drive anywhere of any distance without running into a camera somewhere.”
> Unlike traditional traffic cameras—which capture an image only when they sense speeding or someone running a red light—Flock’s cameras capture images of every car driving by, which it retains for at least 30 days. Artificial intelligence then uses those images to create a “Vehicle Fingerprint” that enables any Flock subscriber to both track where that vehicle has gone and identify what other vehicles it has been seen nearby.
This makes it a little ambiguous whether the Flock subscription is for the specific added service of tracking a car around, or access to the whole system.
The principle is what is being tested here and, should the IJ prevail against the city, that ruling would apply as equally to Amazon as it does to Flock Safety.
If the constituency didn't balk then, at the very least, the data would be available to the public and would help balance the power dynamic with the government.
"I ran his vehicle through a License Plate Reader, and it showed his vehicle traveled through New Mexico westbound and back eastbound in New Mexico three days later."
In this case the dog theoretically alerted on amphetamines, which are not always illegal since there are numerous prescribable versions of amphetamines. The rest of the "probable cause" wasn't indicative of any crime in particular (traveling to Oklahoma and New Mexico is hardly proof of anything).
OTOH, if you are going to be traficking drugs for a living, don't leave duffel bags in plain sight, and use your turn signal.
> 100% Homicide cases cleared in Cobb County, Georgia and Riverside, California with the help of Flock*
> *As of March 2023 Cobb County PD in Georgia reports, “Over the last two years... we’ve had 62 homicides and solved 100% of those homicides.”
I'm sure people's initial gut reaction is "100% murder solves is awesome!" because, well, yeah. But we need to quantify what a "solve" is: You charge someone with murder; the secondary concern is if they did it.
When you read extremely high figures like 100% solves in 62 murders over two-years, one has to wonder if this is the most effective detective work ever, or they're finding any warm bodies to charge to pump the stats. As the article about this says, the national average is closer to 50%, and even that is known to contain wrongly charged and or convicted people.
Do people really believe that a couple of hundred cameras in fixed public locations really improved the solve rate that much? I'm extremely skeptical.
And:
> 90% Michigan freeway shootings resulted in arrests with the help of Flock*
> * As of July 2023, Michigan State Police reports using Flock in 90% of the freeway shootings having an arrest in all of them.
So now we're using arresting people (not charges, or convictions) as our yard stick? So we're rewarding police departments for going out and finding anyone who may be loosely connected, taking away their civil liberties, in order to look better on paper? That's outright gross. Major red flag.
Let's just say for the sake of argument that "Flock Safety" helps police find/arrest/charge legitimate suspects. There must be better ways of showing it. Also someone needs to look into Cobb County PD in Georgia for the quality of their murder charges, because that stat is more indicative of abuse than competence.*
It's long been established that you don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy when moving about in public. However that precident was established at a time when tracking people en masse was technically impossible. An individual, or a place could be surveilled, but not everyone, everywhere.
To my mind, such mass surveillance databases, given that they are now possible and do have some clear beneficial uses, must be protected in ways that were not necessary in the past. Warrants should be required to access the data for specific places at specific times, at minimum. And the governments that contract for these services should own the data, not Flock or other vendors.
There's no constitutional right to privacy (Roe v Wade overturned, remember), it's legal to photograph people in public in that country, and doing something legal 60 times per second in 170 locations automatically doesn't make it illegal.
-city's attorney, probably.
"“Under color of law” refers to actions taken by government officials (such as police officers or public officials) that are done in their official capacity but violate someone’s rights or are unlawful. These actions appear legal because the person is using their official authority, but in reality, they can be an abuse of power or a violation of laws or civil rights.
In the United States, such actions can lead to legal consequences under federal law, particularly 42 U.S. Code § 1983, which allows people to sue for civil rights violations committed under color of law." - ChatGPT
Which is exactly the category that "basically stalking, but don't worry we're the government so it's fine" would fall into since "basically stalking" is illegal generally.
Edit: The answer to your question is yes.
"“Middle ground” is not how rights work. The government cannot infringe on your right to bear arms, to free speech, and to be safe of searches and seizures, among others. The rights have limits, but the limits need to be reasonable. The rights are not given to you by the government. You were born with them.
This system is casting a wide net, and people for which the government lacks reasonable articulate suspicion of a crime are getting unreasonable caught in it.
The government is unreasonably infringing on your right."
You haven't ever been entitled to privacy on public roads. To me laws against this will just increase the cost to investigate crimes, moving the bar for a crime to actually get investigated ever higher.
And I swear traffic cameras have been around for ages. The only difference being you no longer have to pay someone to comb through footage.