Posted by jhonovich 1 day ago
Cancel that, they do try to talk to me every damn chance they get!
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.
There are still quite a few people who think the police are the friendly government-provided customer service agents of life, although I've watched this viewpoint decline markedly over the last twenty years at least.
Locally, a woman went on a hiking date with a Phoenix cop and wound up dead [0]. Notably, the woman was from New England, while the cop was local and absolutely should have known better how dangerous conditions would be. The police, of course, investigated themselves and found they did nothing wrong.
[0] https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/hiker-recalls-seeing-woman...
Unless you have a better article on that, that really ain't evidence of anything.
Peak police.
I only see problems with police [generally speaking] in two scenarios.
1) Very large cities like NYC where police don't [cannot afford] to live in the area they work in.
2) Very small citie where the mayor, judge and sherrif are all related.
What if they didn’t come when called? What if they weren’t respectful? What if they weren’t a part of your community?
What recourse do you have against cops?
She's a permanent resident and has already been given the do not talk to the police speech and role play practice from me.
Oh but I did. Multiple times, without a lawyer ever, how shocking:
"Hey, my bicycle was stolen, I need to file it so I get insurance payout"
"Hey, this demonstration and the roadblock of yours for guarding it, will it be around for much longer?"
"Hey, nice weather, isn't it?"
(Misdirecting small talk, while they were searching for drugs on the road to a festival, but then didn't really check me)
"Yes I know I have to have a light with a bicycle, but the battery went out and it was a emergency now to go anyway"
(Did not had to pay a fine)
And countless other examples like this.
Also more serious ones.
"Yes, it was those neonazis who beat up my friend"
So .. I never cared much for this online advice, but then again I also don't live in the US. Maybe there they shoot and arrest anyone approaching them on general principle?
Well in my world, that was actually shaped a lot by anarchistic anti establishment people, I found that one can talk to cops as inhuman cops, then they will act like one, or you talk to them as humans and might be surprised that they reply as humans.
That doesn't mean, that there ain't lots of assholes on a power trip in uniforms, but the "never talk to them advice" assumes they all are. And this is just wrong and act as a self fullfilling prophecy.
Also no, in the drug search example I just wanted to be left alone (and not have them find the small bag of weed). So I answered, but talked about harmless things.
“Don’t talk to the cops” is not global advice. In some countries it harms your defense in court. In others it gets you beaten.
Most times you hear it it’s an American talking to Americans.
In all countries it harms your defence if you confess something wrong. But itnis not a general rule that it always hurts.
> You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.
Basically, your alibi is considered much less credible if your first mention of it is at trial.
I’ve seen the advice several times on HN (a global site) and it never claimed to be USA-only.
I grew up outside of the US and immigrated here in 1995. US police are on a completely different level.
You could have said that up front and we would immediately know to skip the rest, as the advice is founded on the behavior of police in the US.
Lots of political beliefs are like this! There are plenty of things people believe very strongly, and get near universal reinforcement on in their communities, that don't survive contact with actual living grass. The median American has an extraordinarily high opinion of Amazon, for instance, something you'd never know unless you sought out polling (or, you know, took a walk down a residential block and looked at the stoops.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE
If this isn't trustworthy, I don't know what is.
I don't even know what to do with the "never date police officers" thing. Most police officers are married. It's a shift-work job, so they have high divorce rates, but they just remarry.
Try growing up poor and see how your perspective changes on the police.
They have also unusually high domestic violence rates. That is where the bit comes from.
The factors police have and firemen dont are a.) victim not being able to go to police, cause those are his buddies b.) training teaches cops to take and keep charge (escalating aggression until compliance is acquired).
The question in my mind is what people are expecting? What do they think this proves? Policing is a conflict focused job that involves violence so I wouldnt expect it to be the same as baseline to begin with.
I would caution against "just so" explainations. There are obviously lots of complex reasons and one can speculate a lot of stories one way or another.
The general attitude seems extremely positively correlated with income, and the average American isn’t particularly well off.
But perhaps that just reflects the public/private split when it comes to quality of services
There are multiple examples of prominent law professors bringing in ex-police professionals who all say the exact same thing: never talk to the police. If you spend five minutes around a lawyer they will say the same thing. If you ever end up finding yourself in legal turmoil it is the very first thing a lawyer will directly advise you to do.
People being stupid I don't think suddenly makes this advice terminally online. I was hearing it, in person, when I was in college over a decade ago.
I've read threads here where people have made impassioned arguments that you yourself should never volunteer information to the police investigating a crime such as a hit and run. The police will turn it against you and somehow make you the target of their investigation! Ordinary people out in the world do not think that way, and you will not succeed in making them think that way by showing them videos of lawyers explaining why the only thing you should ever say is "I do not consent to any searches and will not answer any of your questions".
If you said that to a police officer doing a canvass in my neighborhood, people would look at you like a space alien.
I think it's helpful to understand all this stuff when reading things about Flock. People on HN and in activist communities seem gobsmacked that all the Flock cameras haven't been taken down yet (in fact: ALPR deployments are growing, not shrinking). But they have wildly different priors about policing than the median resident of a muni with ALPR cameras.
Yes, that is why they don't do it. It does not mean the advice is "terminally online". It is the advice coming from layers that deal with the system.
Layers saying those things, online and offline, are not terminally online.
And I will also claim that layers have way less distorted view of the system then us, people whose view of the system is based on movies and rare cases that hit the news.
Though: the validity of "nobody should ever talk to the police" is highly disputable. It assumes the only objective anybody would have in a police encounter is not being prosecuted. Prosecution is unlikely, and there are other important objectives.
Not that its always benign to do in cases like this, you can easily talk yourself into becoming a person of interest. Especially true if the officer happens to have a 'bad day' or is a bad apple, you can't really tell because the police keeps employing these people. An example I saw a woman went into the station to provide a video from their phone as evidence of some event and ending up getting taken to the ground in the lobby and arrested for resisting arrest or some bullshit. All because the officer tried to snatch the phone out of her hand without saying anything and then used her keeping hold of the phone as a reason for assaulting her.
Not true, the context I have seen it very much included being a witness who is not a person of interest to the police. It especially explicitly included that situation.
> An example I saw a woman went into the station to provide a video from their phone as evidence of some event and ending up getting taken to the ground in the lobby and arrested for resisting arrest or some bullshit. All because the officer tried to snatch the phone out of her hand without saying anything and then used her keeping hold of the phone as a reason for assaulting her.
That is egregious abuse of power. The layers I have in mind were not explicitly mentioning that high level of lawlessness from the police.
Even without context, its good advice. By talking to them you might even be confessing to some crime that you didn't even know exist.
>That is egregious abuse of power. The layers I have in mind were not explicitly mentioning that high level of lawlessness from the police.
That's the entire point. This idealized version of the police you seem to have, maybe some European countries come close it due to their requirements on officers and training, is not reality. Departments allow officers that act like this to resign so they can move to a different department.
This is a deeply masculine take, Zuck would be proud.
This is such a widely known problem, I’m really surprised you’re not familiar with it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Officer-involved_domestic_viol...
“Never date a cop” is very common advice women will give to each other, has nothing to do with politics or being excessively online.
A municipality comparable to Berkeley, California or New Rochelle, New York?
What?
I agree with you that a blanket statement of not talking to the police is ridiculous, but arguing that Oak Park is a good representation outside of affluent America is not to be taken seriously.
Berkeley is more affluent than Oak Park, and (by a little bit) so is New Rochelle.
This is far more similar to stalking than just public viewing. If you followed somebody around and took pictures of their car and their person, just because, you'd likely end up with a restraining order or stalking charges.
I doubt the founders of your country predicted private companies being able to easily mass surveil citizens without their knowledge & sell this data to the highest bidder. You forget that this data isn't just sold to government agencies. It's also sold to.. Lowe's? Random HOAs (Home Owner Associations)? Your local big box retail store?
Even flock’s own employees (including the VP) accessed cameras stationed at a children’s gymnasium. They claim it was for a sales pitch but who knows. The names of the cameras imply they’re inside the facility, not on the street corner.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/flock-safety-employees-w...
"Whenever people have the opportunity to commit fraud and there is no monitoring, you can assume they are committing fraud."
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10213582-whenever-you-have-...
(I didn't check the book, though.)
Don't put people in situations of great temptation, like access to company cash with no oversight. They'll often fall for the temptation and ruin their lives in the process.
It's a slightly different framing from the "evil people will take advantage and get away with it" but they both lead to putting some kind of process in place to prevent abuse.
Imagining a condition where you had to lock away your valuables in your own home out of concern for them being taken by people in your own home probably makes it a bit more apparent to some people who can mentally model alternatives.
If you were ever to go to places where the rich are in what are effectively little oasis, kind of like “green zones” where they hide away from the chaos and misery they cause the wider society, no one locks their doors even though the homes are all full of stuff that is worth more than the average person will ever even earn in their whole lifetime and they walk around with jewelry and clothing multiple times more expensive than the average house price. They literally, by various mechanisms and methods “keep absolute all bad guys out”, effectively, without locks on every door.
What we’ve long lost was systematic secure systems architecture and we replaced it with extremely costly, expensive and risky brute force, hard coded illusion of saver of the kind you refer to that is ironically not even necessary in most cases either. Locks don’t keep good people out at all, good people aren’t emoted and wouldn’t enter a place that isn’t locked without permission in the first place; hence my above point of locks being a good indicator of the health of a society and the failure of a government, i.e., the cluster and quality of the people left in control of things.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's the legislator's fallacy. "Something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do this."
Suppose you address the problem in other ways, e.g. improve the economy and reduce poverty so there is less crime, or reform the laws so that we're not providing violent gangs with funding sources by criminalizing the consensual behavior of adults.
Warrantless surveillance is not the only option and it's a bad one.
> Attempts to damage state power to ensure crime isn’t prosecuted will be likely met with methods that are immune to them.
This has the same shape as "attempts to enforce the law will be likely met with methods that are immune to it".
Government agencies are going to buck attempts to hold them accountable for abuse. The goal is to make their attempts ineffective, not to throw up our hands because doing it right isn't easy.
Or let's turn your reasoning against itself: We have a law against the police misusing surveillance, so then all the cameras should be destroyed as the backlash against the police violating the law, right? Either your argument is sound and we should get on with destroying all the cameras because the police are breaking the law and we'll just have to use other means to deal with other people breaking other laws, or people are actually willing to tolerate a significant amount of lawbreaking, and then we should get on with destroying all the cameras because they're dangerous and the claim that we can't because people won't tolerate the law going unenforced is empirically deficient.
The idea that reducing poverty will entirely eliminate crime is laughable.
If you disagree with what they said, address it directly instead of addressing an exaggeration of what they said.
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.
Why dont we have a AI verify that each search is tied to a real case, and if its not block their access and they now have to go before a judge to explain why they should be unblocked and what they where doing. If they are going to use AI against us, then we should use AI to make sure they dont commit any crimes.
The same or a similar thing already exists with doctors and nurses, particularly when a celebrity patient comes round. Not your patient/zero nexus for you to be involved in accessing their private medical charts?
Out you go
That statement doesn't make any sense. What's the ideal number? +Infinity? "Not zero" includes that too. There has to be a way to place a ceiling on the number, asking for a non-zero "ideal" doesn't do that, on the contrary, it hides the all important question of what will keep the numbers low enough.
Using this case an example, if the offender wasn't abusing the system hundreds of times in the span of 1.5 years, he would've never been caught. So, we don't even know the real, "non-zero", number of such cases. That's a big problem.
There is a trade-off where a more complete and accessible surveillance apparatus could allow crimes to be solved but invites the system to be abused by police. So when we think about how much of a surveillance system we as a society want to allow, it is probably somewhere between "nothing" and "everything". Therefore,
- It is worth allowing some crimes to go unsolved in order to prevent abuse of the surveillance state. ("The ideal amount of unsolved crime is not zero")
- It might be worth allowing enough surveillance that it will inevitably be abused to some degree in order to help solve crime. ("The ideal amount of abuse of surveillance is not zero")
Thus instead of centering discussions around "thing bad", it's probably more productive to talk about how we can get as much as possible of the upside while reigning in a use, and considering where we want the tradeoff to be.
Given the power dynamics at play I'm not convinced I agree -- Flock is closely associated with Peter Thiel who is explicitly anti-democracy, and police are notorious for covering up crimes committed by fellow police. But I suppose it is worth considering that safe ethical surveillance (if it existed) could have some value, while keeping in mind that what we are getting is very far from that.
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.
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.
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.
First statement minimizes the problem's impact, second argues it's still worth tackling.
My opposition wouldn't change regardless but are those outcomes real?
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.
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.
In my experience, the police will follow the leads if they have them. I had several bikes stolen by homeless so they hid them in some commercial property few blocks away. One bike had a tracker, which they found and disabled but they did it near where they ultimately hid the bikes. Using the last location from the tracker cops were able to find the bikes and return them. If there were cameras they might be able to also find the perps and put them to jail.
Don't ALPRs do exactly this?
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.
If you can reliably prosecute the repeat offenders you catch, and put them behind bars for a long time? You stop them from committing more crimes. The crime rate falls, and the amount of enforcement manpower you have available per crime rises. Making it easier to catch and prosecute the remaining offenders.
Most of the low level crime isn't done by "a dumb decision as a teenager or in a lapse of judgement". It's done by someone who has done it 5 times before and will do it again. Unless jailed, that is. The jail doesn't fix whatever's wrong with them, but it is hard to keep doing crimes while behind bars.
You are making a very common mistake of assuming that criminals are prone to making good decisions.
If they were, they probably wouldn't offend the first time. And almost certainly wouldn't reoffend - once the costs of getting caught are clear to them.
"Consistently" is not very realistic without a way of making repeat offenders stop reoffending. You need the level of law enforcement to completely overpower the crime rate - and that means either getting better funded, better staffed, better equipped, more professional enforcement, or lowering crime rates. "We need to overfund the police" is expensive and unpopular, "we need to give the police more surveillance powers" is extremely unpopular, and there are very few ways of getting lower crime rates. Jail bars, however, are a proven one.
A little friction in the right places is a good thing.
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.
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.
We do still need deep societal focus, but that's mostly around things like further getting lead out of homes and pipes.
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.
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.
Similar to "free speech", it is not as simple as that. Harassment and stalking among other things. I dare you to try hanging around a school with a DSLR taking pictures of kids in the playground and defend yourself with "But I'm in public!"
Without going into the list of misdemeanors, generally the point is intent.
If you take a picture, or ten, ostensibly of Times Square, no one cares. You can't piece together a person's day.
The application of computing@scale (processing, storage, pattern recognition) changes the outcomes significantly. The hard to piece together day of the everyperson suddenly becomes a trivial query away.
Whether that should be legal or not is quite rightly up for debate.
You'll probably get harassed by school staff and parents, but the police will have no grounds to arrest you.
> If you take a picture, or ten, ostensibly of Times Square, no one cares. You can't piece together a person's day.
Yes, you can. Private investigators often do exactly that.
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.
Maybe this needs to be restricted in some capacity, then.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
It's not new tech.
This is very much a new thing.
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.
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.
It's still a court that came down in favor of warrantless use of ALPR data, even if the situation around the overdue rental car might limit it's application more broadly.
The court didn't come down in favor of warrantless use of ALPR data. It said that the defendant did not have standing to challenge the use of ALPR data, warrant or not, because said person had no expectation of privacy in a vehicle they had no legal claim to during the period the data covered.
FFS, the court, in the opinion, which you linked to prove you're smart, quoted, verbatim:
"We do not address the potential Fourth Amendment privacy interests that may be implicated by the warrantless use of this ALPR technology because we conclude that Yang does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the historical location data of the Yukon under the facts of this case."
You are deeply dishonest and exhausting.
1) The police did use ALPR data without a warrant.
2) The court upheld the use of ALPR data without a warrant in this case.
How widely this will get applied remains to be seen.
The court did not say that a warrant would be required had Yang not been in a rental car, which is what people seem to be implying.
The court ruled, as hundreds of cases have been ruled before, that Fourth Amendment protections only apply if there is an expectation of privacy. Its opinion made clear that they were ignoring whether warrantless use of APLR data is a Fourth Amendment issue because you can't have a Fourth Amendment issue if there is no expectation of privacy and there can be no expectation of privacy in Yang's specific situation.
It didn't uphold the use of the data. It said it didn't need to address the use of the data, because it was a moot point.
This is like arguing with someone that a court didn't say Dragons couldn't be charged with a crime because the court only said Dragons aren't real.
Please stop doubling down.
You googled, someone mentioned US v Yang, and you found a Seventh Court decision about a different case altogether, that had nothing to do with ALPR data or Carpenter, and linked it. Without reading the link.
I knew the case so I didn't need to read the link to know you were wrong about it. Didn't bother to click it.
That is ... absolutely hilarious.
And you were evidently able to find the correct case regardless.
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 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.
Schmidt was explicitly about license plate reader data and whether a locality could install and utilize such a surveillance network without violating the Fourth Amendment.
Next time you get into this argument, point to Schmidt and its opinion. It has all the elements you need to make the point that a government funded mass scale video surveillance network is legal under current US law.
Then people will think you actually know what you're talking about.
Please go actually read the opinion.
If you do, you'll see the concurrence specifically says, "Hey, I agree we should reject Yang's case, but we should have probably decided this on Fourth Amendment grounds and actually said ALPR data doesn't require a warrant and Carpenter doesn't apply", because the majority EXPLICITLY did not do that and the concurring judge wanted to.
What's baffling here is it's not even that long an opinion. With the dissent, it's less than 30 pages. It's incredibly straightforward.
You apparently just can't accept the ego hit that you were decisively wrong about something.
That's really sad, dude.
Then we would start putting cameras in bathrooms? Or start closing public bathrooms? Nobody wants to go into a bathroom and get murdered. We as a society are not going to just accept a high bathroom murder rate. Culture will adapt to reality, one way or another.
If you're so scared of your own shadow you'd tie a noose around your own neck and hand the other end to those in power in exchange for an illusion of safety, I won't stand in your way.
Build that cage around yourself and hope the jailer will be benevolent. Just don't drag others down with you. Some of us have decided to learn from history.
You didn't think these cities actually own these Flock cameras, did you?
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.
Obviously in other places, no.
>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.
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.
I’m 100% sold on the results.
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.
Cops: "Well he probably didn't steal them himself."
Me: "Even so, knowingly selling stolen property is a crime too, no?"
Cops: "..."
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.
I'm not sure there was ever a time when 99.9% of the userbase, or even a much smaller percentage, actually valued privacy and freedom rather than seeing them as obstacles to value extraction.
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)
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.
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 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 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
The more cameras in the network the faster and more likely a duplicated plate will be spotted.
The sexist undertones of your response aside, you seem to have very poor reading comprehension.
Many Flock cameras are also privately owned, too.
You’d be surprised how many there are.
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.
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.
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...
This is as strong as precedent gets, short of a SCOTUS decision.
> 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.
Flying drones are not required, stationary cameras are more than enough outside of specific scenarios like active pursuit.
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.
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.
Of course their is no reasonable expectation of privacy here. It's not his car lol. The LEARN db query was auxillary to the precedent here.
I can't see the jump your making at all or how this precedent holds any would hold water in the case of a innocent party. Its probably just a matter of time until the perfect case is presented and new case law established. Precedents change you know?
People generally don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy in public. That's why you can record and photograph people in public whether or not they agree to be recorded. It's the same logic that makes red light cameras and parking license plate scanners legal.
I dont believe you think the police force could replicate the injest of information these systems allow do you?
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.
If the precedent was set based on this idea. It will fall apart with further scrutiny.
>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.
I don't think that is where the crux of the issue lay.
Privacy laws are generally about protecting what you do in private, not in public. In the US, anyone can film you in public, government or otherwise.
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 disagree with them, but that isn't relevant.
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.
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.
At least according to the internet which knows everything.
Most people don’t give AF
Flock is a new tool, with a string of related abuses already and an unconvincing record of successes. Removing it is in no way tantamount to taking away every possible tool.
Surveillance technology potentially enables a lot of abuse if used without checks and balances. But the same technology also enables monitoring for abuse. Use of surveillance technology should be actively monitored and supervised. There should be auditable logs, footage, etc. with very long retention periods and active spot checks. In case of conflicts/abuse, there should be ample evidence.