Posted by chirau 16 hours ago
(To be clear: I think the current generation of ALPRs is a policy failure and that major changes need to happen inside state law enforcement systems before they can be deployed successfully. But I also think people on HN have a real problem in convincing themselves about the obvious righteousness of their anti-surveillance arguments.)
[†] I heard arguments like these because I was deeply involved in getting the cameras disabled in the inner-ring Chicago suburb in which I live, getting the first ACLU CCOPS ordinance in Illinois passed there, and helping draft what are probably the most detailed ALPR police General Orders in any municipality, or at least were at the time. Which is a long and pretentious way of saying I spent a lot of time talking to people who are not Very Online.
> I never hear that question from Flock supporters. The question I hear is "why shouldn't we be pulling over stolen cars?"
These are the same Constitutional question.
In order to determine what cars are stolen, all cars must be inspected. If all cars are inspected, there is a reasonable case that the 4th amendment is being violated:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons,
houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches
and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall
issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or
affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be
searched, and the persons or things to be seized.[0]
See above.
0 - https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-4/
I get that this sounds like standard-issue message board rhetoric where I'm Mary Sue'ing normies to make my points for me, but I don't agree with my neighbors about this stuff, and you'll probably have to take my word for it that I'm not making any of this up.
>>> I never hear that question from Flock supporters. The question I hear is "why shouldn't we be pulling over stolen cars?"
>> These are the same Constitutional question.
> They're not remotely the same Constitutional question.
They absolutely are the same Constitutional question; surveillance by the State without a warrant supported by probable cause, verified by the judiciary and issued thusly, does not have "an upside" of coincidentally identifying criminality. Remember this portion of the 4th amendment:
... and particularly describing the place to be searched,
and the persons or things to be seized.
And how could the question "why shouldn't we be pulling over stolen cars?" be answered without "why should I worry about surveillance if I have nothing to hide" being aligned?
They are the same Constitutional question - to accept one is to accept the other.
Just because I feel bad for taking advantage of the above statement, here is a snippet from "Warrants in U.S. Law: The Ultimate Guide":
Imagine your home is your castle, and the U.S. Constitution
has built a protective wall around it called the Fourth
Amendment. This wall protects your right to privacy and
security from government intrusion. Now, imagine a police
officer wants to enter your castle. They can't just knock
down the gate; they need a special key. A warrant is that
key. It's not just any key, though. It's a special
permission slip, signed by a neutral judge (a magistrate),
that says the government has a very good, specific
reason—called Probable Cause—to believe that evidence of a
crime is inside your home, or that you have committed a
crime. This document acts as a crucial check on government
power, ensuring that law enforcement can't search your
property or arrest you on a whim. It's a fundamental
safeguard that forces the government to justify its actions
before it invades your privacy, protecting every citizen
from unreasonable searches and seizures.[0]
Policing enforces U.S. criminal law.
By this logic, there is no need for "day-to-day policing" to have warrants for:
- phone taps
- SMS messages
- GPS history
- email
- banking information
- justified arrests
- court approved searches
The reason the current generation of ALPR cameras doesn't work is the one you gave. Illinois LEADS was never intended for realtime enforcement and isn't updated reliably, so we ended up pulling over almost as many innocent motorists as we did stolen cars. To that, add: a plurality of all our camera-driven enforcement actions ended up being failure-to-appeal warrant enforcement, which effectively had our police force doing municipal debt collection for other suburbs, at enormous expense.
Maybe it makes sense to track specific vehicles, with safeguards such as warrants and also checking make/model/color, but it makes less sense to just give the government a 30-day rolling database of the public's movements in total, especially when 30% of those data points are inaccurate and thus not useful as evidence.
The "why shouldn't we be pulling over stolen cars?" question is just a more specific variant of GP's "nothing to hide" question. i.e., the only people asking it are those who aren't stealing cars, thus have "nothing to hide".
The answer is the same.
I’m starting to think that you’re having a conversation with yourself and your perception of people online, not actual people and the things that they’re saying.
Are you sure about that?
How about if your license plate were stolen without your knowledge, placed on another vehicle of the same make and model, then photographed leaving the scene of a crime?
First, I never implied disallowing analysis at a crime scene. What I described is a realistic activity criminals do in order to disguise their identity.
Second, "stealing your hair" is a very different thing than stealing license plates off of your vehicle. This should be obvious.
> Someone framing me in this manner is incredibly unlikely, would be disproven by the other broad investigative powers afforded to law enforcement, and, at least in my opinion, is ridiculously less likely than the cameras photographing real criminals.
The point is that it would be you having to defend yourself for something you did not do. Could you successfully do so? Maybe. It depends on what the crime was and if you could afford a skilled enough lawyer.
And therein lies the rub.
You would have to drop tens-of-thousands of dollars in defense of your not being one of the "real criminals." Because the police are not going to sit there and say, "gee wiz, veec_cas_tant could not possibly be a 'real criminal' because they said they are being framed!"
They are going to say, "we can place you at the scene of the crime."
I've never read about this happening.
You weren't implying that video evidence of a car should be off-limits to the police?
If stealing hair is too hardcore for a criminal, just use your example and imagine that, instead of having the plate captured on camera, they find it at the scene of a vehicular homicide. Should that license plate be investigated, or should it be off-limits? In this example, as the victim of a stolen license plate, I think I should be quite happy with numerous high-definition cameras that can help prove my case.
> You weren't implying that video evidence of a car should be off-limits to the police?
No, I did not.
A car is not a crime scene. Neither is "video evidence of a car" a crime scene.
> If stealing hair is too hardcore for a criminal ...
What I wrote was:
Second, "stealing your hair" is a very different thing than
stealing license plates off of your vehicle. This should be
obvious.
> ... just use your example and imagine that, instead of having the plate captured on camera, they find it at the scene of a vehicular homicide.
Then that would be entirely different than your original assertion, which was:
The misuse of license plate data wouldn't make my top ten
list of potential powers that law enforcement might abuse.
> Should that license plate be investigated, or should it be off-limits?
What are you even talking about? You said license plate data "wouldn't make my top ten".
When did I raise the question about license plates being investigated or off-limits?
> How about if your license plate were stolen without your knowledge, placed on another vehicle of the same make and model, then photographed leaving the scene of a crime?
> You would have to drop tens-of-thousands of dollars in defense of your not being one of the "real criminals." Because the police are not going to sit there and say, "gee wiz, veec_cas_tant could not possibly be a 'real criminal' because they said they are being framed!"
But are claiming:
> A car is not a crime scene. Neither is "video evidence of a car" a crime scene... When did I raise the question about license plates being investigated or off-limits?
It might be easier if you just stated your actual view instead of playing twenty questions, because I have tried to read your posts from multiple angles and can't find any way to reconcile them. If you aren't arguing against the use of camera footage of cars in police investigations, why bring up the stolen plate scenario, along with the legal costs of defending against it, in the first place?
Just to be clear: I would be absolutely fine with law enforcement investigating the appearance of my stolen plates at a crime scene using video footage obtained from private or public cameras. Police using camera footage to investigate a crime scene is not at all a misuse, and I think everybody would be happy that there was footage of the crime.
If you have the energy you can do all 3 in parallel.
Here's my attempt at 2: https://rmnoflock.com/2026/07/29/rolling-meadows-flock-camer...
Does anyone have advice or experience with 2?
I'm cynical enough about how work-organizations function to worry that those at the top will be selective in firing officers found violating policies.
It does make me wonder whether electronic evidence of police behavior will materially impact actual behavior over time. But given that the normal reaction is to deny access to evidence, I doubt it.
The people who want to be police officers tend not to be the people everyone else would want to be police officers.
It's tiring for good people when everyone they interact with thinks they're the villain.
Gotta make a statement with the low level grunts so the citizenry think these systems have accountability.
All of these officers will have new jobs lined up by the end of the week.
It's not on the unions, it's on the people who hired the officers.
This model you have inside your head, where there are public officials responsible for hiring that can exercise whatever they imagine are the prerogatives of the public at large when making hiring decisions, is fictional. Public sector unions, for better or worse, have long since obviated such jeopardy and effectively call all shots with regard to who is hired for what.
The real teeth behind these disciplinary events, at least in suburban/metro areas, are that departments don't want to lose the cameras, and know that they will if abuses aren't answered.
What is remarkable about this story is that something happened to them. Now were they prosecuted for any of a hundred laws they probably broke?
No.
This is somewhat solved problem in other areas, like banking and government. Not zero, but asymptotically low.
I think we need to criminalize misuse more clearly, preferably on a federal level. We need clear justifications for each use of data. And, we should require periodic audits by an independent third party - perhaps funded in the purchase contracts as a line item and held in reserve.
This doesn’t solve the problem of legal use - which could be contentious now or in the future. But, this technology isn’t going away and good legislation to control it makes sense.
I wonder if it does a disservice to readers to not make that same comparison against more similar countries instead (UK, Germany, Australia to name a few examples)?
And those same officers, even when it has been found they violated the rights of those they're sworn and paid to serve, are all too often shielded from the consequences of their actions and from their victims seeking recourse. Qualified immunity is legal doctrine which prevents victims from seeking justice in cases where there is no previous precedent for such an action being allowed. I would expect that license plate readers, mass-surveillance assisted by AI technologies, etc. are sufficiently novel that the case would have to make the U.S. supreme court to survive a motion to dismiss under qualified immunity.
So if you believe in there being legal consequences for police officers and other government officials violating the rights of the governed, I would hope to see in your next comments you standing with me and demanding the elimination of the "qualified immunity" doctrine which today goes along way to protect the guilty from the legal recourse sought by the victims of such officers. This is especially needed in those cases where the officers, bureaucracy, and politicians fail to "act true", as you might suggest that they can, to prevent injustices with these police systems.
For those curious about what "qualified immunity" is in the US, take a look at:
https://ij.org/issues/project-on-immunity-and-accountability...
and
https://ij.org/issues/project-on-immunity-and-accountability...
All part of the Institute for Justice's work on immunity and accountability:
https://ij.org/issues/project-on-immunity-and-accountability...
The second sentence is just wrong. Qualified immunity is a shield from civil actions without regard to if the violation was/was not malicious or with/without intent.
This is from one of the IJ pages I linked:
"Does qualified immunity apply when government workers intentionally violate the law?
Yes. Qualified immunity applies even when officials intentionally or recklessly violate the law. The primary consideration in a qualified immunity analysis is whether there is an earlier court case specifically stating that the particular actions of an official are unconstitutional. So, for example, the Ninth Circuit U.S Court of Appeals held that police accused of stealing $225,000 while executing a search warrant were entitled to qualified immunity because that court had 'never addressed whether the theft of property covered by the terms of a search warrant…violates the Fourth Amendment.' It did not matter 'that virtually every human society teaches that theft generally is morally wrong.'"
-- (https://ij.org/issues/project-on-immunity-and-accountability...)
Or more directly from the summary of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals opinion:
"The panel held that at the time of the incident, there was no clearly established law holding that officers violate the Fourth or Fourteenth Amendment when they steal property seized pursuant to a warrant. For that reason, the City Officers were entitled to qualified immunity."
https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2019/09/04/1...
Theft requires criminality and intent and is arguably malicious. Yet, the court held that they couldn't even be sued on the basis of qualified immunity being applicable... that's not saying that the victims sued and lost... but that the suit was never heard on those grounds.
At least the court went on to say that the police should have known theft was morally wrong:
"The panel held that although the City Officers ought to have recognized that the alleged theft was morally wrong, they did not have clear notice that it violated the Fourth Amendment. The panel further held that the Fourth Circuit’s unpublished decision in Mom’s Inc. v. Willman, 109 F. App’x 629, 636–37 (4th Cir. 2004)—the only case law that the time of the incident holding that the theft of property pursuant to a warrant violates the Fourth Amendment—did not put the 'constitutional question beyond debate.'"
Because the question was not previously answered, the officers received the de facto protection of qualified immunity and not having to face the civil suit, criminality/intent/maliciousness notwithstanding.