YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Federal judge calls Flock 'indiscriminate mass surveillance'

47 points sbulaev 38 minutes ago 19 comments

qwe----3 26 minutes ago | parent

TBH the words of an individual judge shouldn't mean too much now -> they are obviously very political judges now.

JumpCrisscross 16 minutes ago | parent

> they are obviously very political judges now

They are—since 2000 Presidents have appointed more extreme judges. But they’re just as powerful.

saghm 8 minutes ago | parent

Judges have a pretty direct role in whether or not Flock is able to be used effectively (e.g. the article's example of one granting a search warrant based on the data from it). The views of judges on Flock unequivocally do matter in our current system regardless of how their opinions are formed.

hypfer 25 minutes ago | parent

> The deputy then used the woman’s travel history in Flock as part of the justification for searching her car, where he allegedly discovered 91 pounds of meth.

That sentence does make this less of a win tbh, given that with it, it's just an actual example of the technology doing the job it is supposed to do.

Like this, it's almost a trojan horse of something pretending to be PR for A, but actually being effective PR for B.

JumpCrisscross 17 minutes ago | parent

91 pounds? That’s 2 million doses at 20 mg/dose [1].

[1] https://dancesafe.org/speed/

NDlurker 9 minutes ago | parent

That's less than $130,000 worth of product. It's a lot, but not crazy

KingMachiavelli 4 minutes ago | parent

That’s more like a therapeutic/occasional recreation dose and habitual users consume it multiple times a day.

A survey found that average daily consumption was 0.9g and median 0.35g.

92lb=41.73 kg = 41730g / 0.9g / 365 =127.032 average-user-years. Or basically a month’s supply for a small town.

Like most consumption, the top 10% easily account for >80% of total consumption.

junofan 2 minutes ago | parent

A gram a day is more typical [1].

Still, that’s a lot to be tailgating like this lady was as shown in the court filing. Also, “[the arresting officer] told another officer that he ‘could see her carotid artery in my car. That thing was about to pop out of her neck.’”

Sounds like some wild decisions were being made.

[1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40385390/

saghm 11 minutes ago | parent

The point it's not just people with 91 pounds of meth who are getting tracked; it does what it's "supposed to" by treating everyone as a suspected criminal. An exterminator who blows up your house to get rid of termites still gets rid of the termites, but that doesn't make it a good solution.

joshheitzman 14 minutes ago | parent

Yes, that's what they are. But does that mean are they breaking federal law or unconstitutional? I believe we've been told by the courts repeatedly that we should have no expectation of privacy out in public.

Waterluvian 11 minutes ago | parent

I’m no American but isn’t it a 4th Amendment issue, and the problem is how the various local, state, federal governments are using a private contractor (Flock) to do an end run around this by pretending that it’s no different from any private citizen recording another in a public space?

LPisGood 10 minutes ago | parent

This has been allowed generally in US courts, to use private companies to collect data, etc.

Waterluvian 8 minutes ago | parent

Is there a whole thing in the U.S. where it’s a no no with regards to cell data without a warrant? This feels like that.

(bear with me, this all comes from random podcasting over the past decade)

helterskelter2 6 minutes ago | parent

There may be a solid legal argument that since Flock is operating hand in glove with the government that they effectively are the government within the context of 4A. IMHO, it's not out of the realm of possibility that courts reexamine the government's ability to buy up private data which they would normally be precluded from collecting, and establish limits on their ability to do so.

helterskelter2 9 minutes ago | parent

We never had Flock before, it's possible that some legal principles will be reexamined and reinterpreted because they were made around prior assumptions which have been upended by new technology. Who knows, maybe Congress will legislate something.

moralestapia 6 minutes ago | parent

No expectation of privacy does not mean you can follow someone around all day and keep a log of what they do, which is essentially what this thing does.

Over the course of a days/weeks, the places one visits, roads you drive on, etc. those things should definitely be private.

JKCalhoun 8 minutes ago | parent

License plate reader?

So the device should require very specific license plates to scan for—not the current dragnet. The software should only "ping" when there is a confident match with said license plate(s)—and merely log which license plate, time stamp a single photo, and note the confidence level of it being a match.

The frame buffer should be the only place (a frame of) video is ever stored at all (excepting the high-confidence match indicated above).

The only issue remaining would be whether we trust the device/software to have complied (and not have a backdoor) and of course there needs to be a legal warrant for every license plate uploaded (and it should expire fairly frequently, likely requiring a new warrant to continue canning for the plate).

moralestapia 7 minutes ago | parent

That's exactly what it is. Great news.

I don't think we can backtrack at this point but at least it should be heavily regulated and restricted (i.e. only run queries if there's a court order, etc).

charcircuit 4 minutes ago | parent

What you do on public roads is public.

The idea that law enforcement tapping into existing law enforcement knowledge constitutes as a search of "persons, houses, papers, and effects" does not logically follow for me. It is a search of law enforcements own property.