Yet another Hacker News

Federal judge calls Flock 'indiscriminate mass surveillance'

502 points sbulaev 5 days ago 274 comments

qwe----3 5 days ago | parent

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

JumpCrisscross 5 days ago | parent

> they are obviously very political judges now

They are—since 2000 Presidents have appointed more polarized judges [1]. (The broader trend began in 1975 [2].) But they’re just as powerful. Their words are absolutely meaningful.

[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w32920

[2] https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2022/04/political-pola...

saghm 5 days 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.

Madmallard 5 days ago | parent

? Flock is like one of many surveillance systems being installed in place.

The people in power are just circumventing everything on a whim to get what they want.

saghm 5 days ago | parent

That's an entirely different claim than the one I responded to. If you don't think that judges matter at all, why are you not disagreeing with the parent comment that claimed that the issue is that judges are too political?

hypfer 5 days 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 5 days ago | parent

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

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

NDlurker 5 days ago | parent

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

KingMachiavelli 5 days 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 5 days 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/

mitxela 5 days ago | parent

Why is that relevant?

saghm 5 days 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.

greggoB 5 days ago | parent

> 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.

Defos swiping this analogy for future use

newspaper1 5 days ago | parent

I don't think rolling out mass surveillance to get some meth is a "win". How many innocent people were tracked by the same cameras used to track this single woman?

ACCount39 5 days ago | parent

A major issue with surveillance tech like this is that it actually works.

It does what it's advertised to do: it lets the police track and catch criminals easier.

This is especially meaningful in cases of crimes where either the information availability or the effort of tracking the criminal down often make enforcement prohibitive.

If Flock had better PR people, they'd have no shortage of shoplifters, joyriders, car window smashers, porch poachers, carjackers and drug mules that were caught using their tech to parade around.

It's just that this benefit comes at the cost of privacy being diminished for everyone.

SonOfKyuss 5 days ago | parent

And they’ve carelessly put zero safeguards in place to prevent abuse and that is where all of their bad PR has come from. If a warrant were required for every query, it would be a completely different story

ACCount39 5 days ago | parent

No, it would be the same story. "Warrantless surveillance" is just a thing for people to latch on to that might be actually illegal about Flock.

But people don't hate Flock because it's legally questionable. People hate Flock because they don't like a corporation spying on them and selling data to cops - regardless of how legal or illegal that is. The rest is downstream from that. People only ask "how is this legal" because they hate it already.

sneak 5 days ago | parent

It also lets the police stalk and harass people much easier, without consequences because laws don’t apply to any police in practice.

ACCount39 5 days ago | parent

The police is on the receiving end of surveillance too: body cams are increasingly expected and increasingly mandated. It's harder to get away with "stalking and harassing people" when you have a camera strapped to you, and any sufficiently pointed inquiry would result in footage getting looked at.

newspaper1 5 days ago | parent

More often than not the police just turn those off or they "malfunction". Even the prison cameras "malfunctioned" when Jeffery Epstein "killed himself".

cucumber3732842 5 days ago | parent

The root problem here is that we've got a government that has a hundred years of legal "litter" they can enforce on a whim.

No one bad law is too bad on it's own, like litter in the park. But you add it all up and it's disgusting. There's a law for everything but each one is defensible in abstract in a "my litter isn't responsible for this whole mess" way.

The prospect of all those laws potentially being enforced and cheaply on the whim of the government really lays bare how bad our laws are in their totality.

But people are not capable of confronting the tough compromise of giving up the laws for things they like so here we are screeching about this easy button that law enforcement has at its disposal.

nkrisc 5 days ago | parent

I find it concerning that your recorded movements by mass surveillance devices can be used as justification subject you to a search.

MichaelDickens 5 days ago | parent

It's very common for civil liberties to be tested on cases where the person is actually guilty.

samrus 5 days ago | parent

To a layperson yes. But in american legal philosophy, you cant allow the state to break laws to catch legitimate criminals. It is considered better for society to let the criminal walk free then to create a precedent and incentive for the state violating a citizen's rights.

Basically this will only prove mass surveillance effective to people who think only guilty people pleade the 5th

joshheitzman 5 days 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 5 days 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 5 days ago | parent

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

Waterluvian 5 days 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)

ranger_danger 5 days ago | parent

My understanding is they can get a current location with just a subpoena (not a warrant) already, but looking at a history of past locations to watch their movements constitutes a Fourth Amendment search requiring a warrant and probable cause.

Originally the Third-party doctrine[1] also would allow searches that were otherwise illegal, but recently exceptions have been made for GPS/location history in the courts in recent years (Carpenter and Chatrie).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine

akerl_ 5 days ago | parent

"It's complicated."

Cell phones are kinda weird because they carry some of the elements that were built up around hardline phones (similar to how physical mail has a ton of protections that accumulated historically that make it distinct from other mediums).

This one generally gets treated legally more like any other data collection in a public space. Essentially, it's not a violation of your rights if somebody sits on a street corner and takes a picture of every car that drives by. There's a really interesting debate about whether there should be some concept of scale (Flock makes it really easy to effectively put somebody on every street corner), but the law generally hasn't changed to take that kind of thing into consideration.

You can see the same kind of thing in many of the AI training debates. Training AIs on bulk data has been found in a couple different cases to not be copyright infringement because they're drawing parallels to any other learning, even if the scale here is obviously several orders of magnitude apart from what was ever possible before.

For what it's worth: if I own a business in the US and have a camera pointed at the street, and the police ask me for footage, I don't need to require a subpoena. I can just choose to give it to them.

estearum 5 days ago | parent

The law doesn't need to change. Court opinions just need to emerge (hasn't been tested yet), and this is quite clearly angling in the direction of the cell tower data decision.

> For what it's worth: if I own a business in the US and have a camera pointed at the street, and the police ask me for footage, I don't need to require a subpoena. I can just choose to give it to them.

Correct, and SCOTUS decided this was inappropriate for cell tower data because 1) you effectively need a cell phone to live in the modern world, and 2) having a cell phone spits of tons of data.

This is directly analogous to Flock. It's more likely than not that this will end up getting a Third Party Doctrine exception (i.e. Flock and similar will be forbidden from providing this data to the government in lieu of a subpoena)

akerl_ 5 days ago | parent

Flock isn’t a third party here, when they’re being contracted by the government.

estearum 5 days ago | parent

You are incorrect. Flock is not a government agency – it is a privately owned business – therefore it is a third party as it's relevant to Third Party Doctrine. Whether it's contracted by the government or not is irrelevant.

Even if you were correct, it would strengthen the 4th Amendment protections on Flock-collected data, not weaken them.

sixothree 5 days ago | parent

> Essentially, it's not a violation of your rights if somebody sits on a street corner and takes a picture of every car that drives by.

In theory sure. But the strange truth is that in practice you aren't allowed to do this.

akerl_ 5 days ago | parent

Do you have an example of that?

helterskelter2 5 days 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.

ratmice 5 days ago | parent

This is a good point, especially since it appears that the access flock given is basically reserved for the government. For instance we can't buy from flock a boyfriend stalking pass. The offerings aren't really in line with what flock provides HOAs and private companies...

zhivota 5 days ago | parent

This provides an interesting avenue for getting the law changed. If there is no expectation to privacy in public, there should be nothing stopping someone from renting space to install cameras all around their town and selling access to "where are your representatives right now" data feeds.

StanislavPetrov 5 days ago | parent

When a "private company" is using public land and public money to set up their surveillance devices, it is no longer private.

SAI_Peregrinus 5 days ago | parent

And when it only sells to government customers.

z3c0 5 days ago | parent

"Digital effects" have always been a grey area for unreasonable search-and-seizure. This was an infamous moment for the late Antonin Scalia, who, iirc, argued that the constistution couldn't reasonably be addressing this matter, as the Founding Fathers had no concept of digital effects when defining "documents and effects".

helterskelter2 5 days 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.

pessimizer 5 days ago | parent

> Who knows, maybe Congress will legislate something.

Never.

qmr 5 days ago | parent

Too busy day trading and vacationing to avoid uncomfortable votes.

moralestapia 5 days 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.

satvikpendem 5 days ago | parent

Isn't that what paparazzi do already? Seems like you can do that.

joshheitzman 5 days ago | parent

Isn't that exactly what a stakeout is? Or an undercover operation?

I didn't search for undercover, but I can find nothing about a warrant being required for a stakeout in the US (and numerous results saying no warrant is required).

SonOfKyuss 5 days ago | parent

Sure, and if the same level of effort were required to get the same amount of information, this probably wouldn’t even be up for discussion. But now we have technology to basically stake out every single citizen at any time with just a few mouse clicks. We can’t just pretend those things are equal.

Dma54rhs 5 days ago | parent

Why doesn't it mean that?

saghm 5 days ago | parent

I think you're greatly oversimplifying what courts have actually ruled on this over the years. Off the top of my head, the Supreme Court explicitly ruled that wiretapping a public pay phone in a booth is unconstitutional[1], and rulings from lower courts on using Stingrays without warrants are a mixed bag[2]. I don't think there's anything close to a broad precedent that the right to privacy evaporates the moment you go out in public.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katz_v._United_States [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_use_in_United_States_...

joshheitzman 5 days ago | parent

This looks like the key part for the first link:

My understanding of the rule that has emerged from prior decisions is that there is a twofold requirement, first that a person have exhibited an actual (subjective) expectation of privacy and, second, that the expectation be one that society is prepared to recognize as "reasonable." Thus a man's home is, for most purposes, a place where he expects privacy, but objects, activities, or statements that he exposes to the "plain view" of outsiders are not "protected" because no intention to keep them to himself has been exhibited. On the other hand, conversations in the open would not be protected against being overheard, for the expectation of privacy under the circumstances would be unreasonable.

For this case the guy was inside a phone booth rather than out in the open.

There's nothing from SCOTUS on stingrays, but I looked at one federal case and the data being collected was referred to as a document, so that's where the 4th was found to apply.

In turn I don't think I've greatly oversimplified anything.

kennywinker 5 days ago | parent

> For this case the guy was inside a phone booth rather than out in the open.

Is warrantless wiretapping of open-air payphones legal? Based on the TV show the wire, it's not.

iamnothere 5 days ago | parent

TV show plots usually aren’t admissible as precedent.

kennywinker 5 days ago | parent

Weird, TV show hosts seem to be admissible as presidents.

iamnothere 4 days ago | parent

Cute joke but it doesn’t change the facts here. Please don’t assume that fiction has any bearing on the legal landscape.

kennywinker 4 days ago | parent

The Wire was notoriously well reviewed by lawyers.

https://www.cato.org/blog/patriot-powers-roving-wiretaps

> For an ordinary non-roving wiretap, that means you show a judge the “nexus” between evidence of a crime and a particular “place” (a phone line, an e‑mail address, or a physical location you want to bug). You will often have a named target, but you don’t need one: If you have good evidence gang members are meeting in some location or routinely using a specific payphone to plan their crimes, you can get a warrant to bug it without necessarily knowing the names of the individuals who are going to show up. On the other hand, though, you do always need that criminal nexus: No bugging Tony Soprano’s AA meeting unless you have some reason to think he’s discussing his mob activity there. Since places and communications facilities may be used for both criminal and innocent persons, the officer monitoring the facility is only supposed to record what’s pertinent to the investigation.

iamnothere 4 days ago | parent

I apologize, I misread your comment and thought you were saying that warrantless roving wiretaps were allowed, and your evidence was that the show mentioned it. You actually said they were not allowed which is correct. I regret the error.

I’m used to people citing fiction to back up poor arguments, not correct positions, which may be why I misread it. In fact this may be the first time I’ve seen it done this way.

saghm 5 days ago | parent

> Thus a man's home is, for most purposes, a place where he expects privacy, but objects, activities, or statements that he exposes to the "plain view" of outsiders are not "protected" because no intention to keep them to himself has been exhibited.

And you think this applies to the inside of the woman's car that the article is talking about?

> In turn I don't think I've greatly oversimplified anything.

In this reply, no, you're not greatly oversimplifying. In your parent comment, you said that going out in public means no expectation of privacy, and I gave an example of a place in public that had an expectation of privacy, which you've defined as "not in public". I think that if you have to call a place that's available to anyone and not owned by an individual "not public" in order to make your original statement work, then your original statement was oversimplifying.

windexh8er 5 days ago | parent

From others. Not mass surveillance by a private corporation.

Otherwise maybe I'll just set up my own cameras in public locations. If the police want the data they can pay per minute of footage. I'll let them search for metadata and tell them if footage matches with no visibility to the footage until after payment. If they search for something and don't purchase but come back for it - it's then increased pricing. If this is all public space and we can all build these systems because there's no expectation of privacy then all is fair in access to public right of way along roads.

kraken_cult 5 days ago | parent

If someone set up their own camera and analytics platform outside of politicians and police officers homes and places of work, they would be taken down the next day. It's clearly biased towards people they see as not being able to fight back.

akerl_ 5 days ago | parent

Aren't politicians pretty routinely followed by people with cameras doing analysis on all their movements?

Sure, if you strapped a camera to a light post without permission, I'd expect it to be taken down. The same way I can put a Ring camera on my door but I can't strap one to the traffic sign on my street.

kennywinker 5 days ago | parent

> The same way I can put a Ring camera on my door

If your door films the street, this is something that should be considered an invasion of your neighbour's privacy. The fact that it isn't is... disappointing.

Especially given the networked nature of those cameras. The police can access them by asking amazon permission, they don't need to ask you. Are you comfortable with that? I am not.

__MatrixMan__ 5 days ago | parent

I didn't give flock permission to put cameras all over my traffic infrastructure. Admittedly it jointly belongs to other taxpayers, but I don't think they gave that permission either. So as you say, they should expect them to be taken down. And from what I've been seeing around town, that's exactly what is happening to them. I wonder how long it will take Flock to stop putting them back up.

akerl_ 5 days ago | parent

Flock didn’t just yolo decide to slap cameras up. Your elected officials signed contracts to let them.

__MatrixMan__ 5 days ago | parent

Perhaps, but that was overreach on their part.

hackyhacky 5 days ago | parent

> Not mass surveillance by a private corporation.

When that corporation is performing contracted work for the government, they act as the government's agent, making them subject to the same restrictions regarding civil rights as the government itself.

windexh8er 5 days ago | parent

They're not operating on behalf of a local government if they're selling the public data of that local government to others. This is not a simple "contracted work" by a local government. Please don't normalize this as something it's not.

hackyhacky 5 days ago | parent

I agree that it's not clear that this breaks federal law. But I do think it's clear that this should break federal law.

There's an interesting analogy with copyright issues surrounding AI use. Both copyright laws and surveillance were created to (respectively) creative incentives for authors to create novel works; and to protect citizens for indiscriminate surveillance. The laws made sense given the technology available at the time: it simply wasn't feasible to put a cop on every street corner, or to ingest the ideas of every work ever written.

But the laws have been eclipsed by technology. Technology makes a mockery of existing laws, by clearly violating their intent. Much has been written to the effect of "why bother to create new, free materials on the internet when it will just get scooped up by an LLM with no attribution to me." Similarly, Flock cameras have the effect or violating privacy in the exact same way the original laws sought to prevent.

Unfortunately, laws are slow to change, and monied interests will fight tooth-and-nail to put their profits above the rights of ordinary people. It's going to be a difficult decade or so coming up.

bogwog 5 days ago | parent

> why bother to create new, free materials on the internet when it will just get scooped up by an LLM with no attribution to me

Can confirm. I've personally stopped releasing new open source code, and stopped contributing to projects.

Until copyright laws are updated to protect my work from being stolen and my labor exploited by AI companies, there's zero incentive for me to participate in open source.

Even OSI's cuck licenses are being cucked beyond reason. I didn't think that was possible.

matheusmoreira 5 days ago | parent

AIs make short work of proprietary code as well. Reverse engineering has become trivial. Not releasing any code whatsoever is the only possible defense now. I've made my peace with that.

What worries me is the fact AIs render licenses irrelevant. What's the point of starting an AGPLv3 project when AIs can just study it and make a proprietary equivalent? The free software movement no longer has any leverage.

I also don't feel any sense of accomplishment anymore. Software is so trivial now. Even if I make some unique thing, others can just have an AI copy it. Nothing is special anymore. Feels like there's no point.

joshheitzman 5 days ago | parent

Indeed. I specifically decided to open-source my AI coding agent harness (coming later this month) because I felt like I was never going to be able to protect any the trade secrets due to how easy reverse engineering is now.

jasomill 4 days ago | parent

Easy doesn’t mean legal, and the fact that the law hasn’t caught up doesn’t mean that it won’t. And if both public sentiment and LLM feedback loops trend in the directions I fear they will, retribution may be swift and not easily reversed.

bogwog 4 days ago | parent

> AIs make short work of proprietary code as well. Reverse engineering has become trivial. Not releasing any code whatsoever is the only possible defense now. I've made my peace with that.

This is a false equivalence. Reverse engineering my binary is not the same thing as training on my code. When you RE a binary, what comes out the other side is not the code that I wrote, its some machine-generated code that can reproduce the behavior of the binary. The result can't even be described as 'similar' to the original, because the compilation process is pretty much 100% lossy.

Reverse engineering my binary doesn't concern me too much, as I'm sure there are legal avenues I could take to protect my business were it to become a real problem. And if it comes down it, there's zero competitive advantage someone would have in that scenario, as all they'd have is undifferentiated AI slop.

Taking my work, putting it into your commercial product, and selling it without my permission is what I have a problem with. That's exactly what AI companies are doing with very little push back, and why I won't release my hand-written human code anymore.

> I also don't feel any sense of accomplishment anymore. Software is so trivial now. Even if I make some unique thing, others can just have an AI copy it. Nothing is special anymore. Feels like there's no point.

Software is certainly not 'trivial' now. The only people who believe this are those that have gotten caught up in the AI marketing blitz, or have completely detached/warped perspective on software. I.e. non-engineers wowed by novelty, finance execs wowed by the idea of being able to fire a bunch of people, or oligarchs wowed by the idea of being able to monopolize an entire industry.

doctorpangloss 5 days ago | parent

The moral of the story is, if you want to make a mass surveillance tool that tracks your every movement and collects all of your most sensitive communications, make sure it has a great camera, a bright large screen and day long battery life.

rglover 5 days ago | parent

> But does that mean are they breaking federal law or unconstitutional?

I'd argue they break the fourth amendment:

> 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.

What are "unreasonable searches" if not being under "indiscriminate mass surveillance?"

charcircuit 5 days ago | parent

>What are "unreasonable searches" if not being under "indiscriminate mass surveillance?"

A police officer randomly entering your house and going through all of your belongings.

Indiscriminately searching a larger number of people is not necessarily unreasonable. Take for example the TSA at airports where you have to searched to enter and the airpots have a ton of cameras recording every single person there.

kennywinker 5 days ago | parent

Frankly, the TSAs security theater should not be taken as an example of reasonable gov behaviour.

Quekid5 5 days ago | parent

TBF they are quite good at finding water/shampoo containers.

joshheitzman 5 days ago | parent

The US constitution is silent on surveillance. I seriously doubt anyone from the 1700s would consider watching people in public spaces to be a search. Automating watching people doesn't seem like it transforms watching into to a search either.

istjohn 5 days ago | parent

There's also: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

joshheitzman 5 days ago | parent

That sentence may as well not even be there for all the good it does. Even the enumerated rights keep getting whittled down.

kennywinker 5 days ago | parent

You need a warrant to tap somebody's phone.

LadyCailin 5 days ago | parent

Do you think the people in the 1700s would have approved of having police follow everyone around at all times in public spaces, taking notes? I think it’s easy to imagine how they would feel in principle, even if they couldn’t imagine the specific technology.

Brybry 5 days ago | parent

People in the 1700s would not expect all of their movements to be tracked and watched at all times. They would definitely take issue with this. The issue of their time was general warrants/writs of assistance which let the British search anyone anywhere at any time and take their property. [1]

The key issue there was the scope of the British power, not the fact that searches and seizures could happen at all. We wanted warrants that were reasonable and limited.

The issue is not a single security camera from a private bank. The issue is not a single cop in a car investigating someone. The issue is a national and searchable network of cameras where agents of the government can track anyone at any time for no reason at all.

The judge says the police need probable cause and a warrant for a search against an individual.

> Freedom from persistent, dragnet-style surveillance while in public is not a foreign concept in our society, and it is a reasonable expectation that society already accepts. This is the same expectation of privacy that the Supreme Court has continued to recognize in cases like Carpenter and Chatrie. Cell phones also move in public places where people can see you in plain view. But it becomes constitutionally problematic when law enforcement can indiscriminately and passively catalog your whereabouts over an extended period of time and then use that information for any purpose whenever convenient. [2]

[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt4-2/ALDE_...

[2] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.oknd.76...

jojobas 5 days ago | parent

Any particular individual's movements could be tracked in the 1700s, and people have been tailed since forever. Your movements are in public space, no warrant was ever needed for that.

Brybry 5 days ago | parent

The stress on individual was to denote that you can't, for example, get a warrant to search every American's home. It has to be limited in scope.

The judge was saying that the police needed probable cause and a warrant to search the Flock system because it's dragnet surveillance, similar to needing a warrant to access cell phone location data. [1]

Just because you don't have an expectation of privacy while moving in a public space doesn't mean you don't have an expectation of privacy for all of your movements ever in every public space. That scenario wasn't possible in the 1700s.

For an individual today, it's fine for the government to tail someone without a warrant. [2] It's probably not fine for the government to put a long-term GPS tracker on your car without a warrant (probably because the issue was sidestepped with trespass). [3]

Even Alito notes that in the past it would have required too much labor for the government to surveil every movement of an individual for a long period of time and so society has the expectation that the government is not doing that. [4]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatrie_v._United_States

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Knotts

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jones_(2012)

[4] https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/pdf/10-1259.pdf#page=33

jojobas 5 days ago | parent

I don't think any of this case law is relevant, trackers and requesting info that already exists are different from collecting publicly visible data.

The expectation that the government doesn't tail everyone might have been reasonable, the expectation that the government doesn't tail you without a court-approved excuse is not.

I'm not arguing there shouldn't be protection against total surveillance, I'm arguing the US constitution doesn't offer such protection.

simoncion 5 days ago | parent

> ...I'm arguing the US constitution doesn't offer such protection.

Luckily, the courts disagree with you, and have for -probably- longer than you've been alive. From printed page 31 of [0], discussion of the Constutionality of putting a radio transmitter in cargo in someone's car and tracking it:

  But the defendant in that case raised concerns that “the result of the [Court’s] holding sought by the government would be that ‘twenty-four hour surveillance of any citizen of this country will be possible, without judicial knowledge or supervision.’” Id. at 283 (citing Br. For Resp., at 9). The Court addressed the defendant’s concern:
   
    But the fact is that the “reality hardly suggests abuse[;]” if such dragnet type law enforcement practices as respondent envisions should eventually occur, there will be time enough then to determine whether different constitutional principles may be applicable. Insofar as respondent’s complaint appears to be simply that scientific devices such as the beeper enabled the police to be more effective in detecting crime, it simply has no constitutional foundation. We have never equated police efficiency with unconstitutionality, and we decline to do so now.
  
  Id. at 283–84 (cleaned up).
  
  More than 40 years have passed since the Supreme Court’s decision in Knotts, and this Court is now faced with technology that appears to be approaching the dragnet type law enforcement practice Mr. Knotts warned of. Therefore, lower courts need to reexamine the result in Knotts as technology advances past the rudimentary beeper in that case. Adhering too strictly to the Supreme Court’s language in Knotts about a person’s reasonable expectation of privacy in “his movements from one place to another” risks ignoring the Fourth Amendment principles at stake.

That analysis is from the case that people are quoting when they say "You're not entitled to privacy when you're driving on public roads.", but -as you can see- what was actually said by the court there is more nuanced than that, and very clearly says that the rules that apply to dragnet surveillance must be reconsidered when such surveillance becomes feasible. Tragically, it seems like even many judges who cite the case don't bother to actually read it.

The whole document is well worth reading if you have a free fifteen-to-thirty minutes.

[0] <https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.oknd.76...>

jojobas 5 days ago | parent

Courts disagree with wildest things all the time, the court hasn't spoken.

Brybry 4 days ago | parent

> the expectation that the government doesn't tail you without a court-approved excuse is not

Yes but there is an expectation that the government doesn't tail you at all times for your entire life with no warrant, right? Largely because in the past it was infeasible for the government to do so: it cost too much money and required too much manpower.

That's what Alito was arguing in Jones: people expect to be tailed sometimes but they don't expect to be tailed at all times for a whole month. And commentary suggests the Court would have had a similar opinion if they had not sidestepped the issue by leaning on trespass.

As Alito said, the question the Court has not decided (and didn't need to decide in that case) is where the line is drawn. When does tracking a vehicle become a search and enter 4th amendment territory and require a warrant? (He said surely before 4 weeks.)

missedthecue 5 days ago | parent

Ben Franklin intercepted and published private mail in his newspaper

AngryData 5 days ago | parent

In the 1700s it was pretty easy to move into a private place and ensure nobody else was listening though too. We didn't have guard posts on every other corner writing down descriptions of every carriage and wagon that passes by.

nullc 5 days ago | parent

Watching people isn't the problem, it's the state requirement to be identifiable-- e.g. display plates (or, in some cases to not wear a mask in public) which is the constitutional issue. The privacy issue is downstream from that.

iAMkenough 5 days ago | parent

If indiscriminate mass surveillance is legal, should it continue to be?

What is America's history with tyranny?

timschmidt 5 days ago | parent

Same as everyone else's: bad when they do it to us, good when we do it to them.

qmr 5 days ago | parent

This is wildly different than someone taking photos in public.

See Mosaic theory.

UncleMeat 5 days ago | parent

> I believe we've been told by the courts repeatedly that we should have no expectation of privacy out in public.

This is not true. The original "reasonable expectation of privacy" case was about tapping phone booths, which are in public. And the way the law works (or is supposed to work) is that the reasonableness test is based on a typical person. What does or does not violate a reasonable expectation of privacy should not be assigned to us by judges.

HelloMcFly 5 days ago | parent

This is the question the judge ruled on, their opinion is precisely delving into this topic.

JKCalhoun 5 days 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).

StanislavPetrov 5 days ago | parent

Describing these mass surveillance devices as "license plate readers" is a deliberate tactic to deceive people about their actual use and capability. Flock cameras record everything, not just license plates. They record the faces and bodies of the driver and the passengers that are visible through the windows. They record and analyze all the little dings, bumper stickers and other unique elements of a vehicle above and beyond license plates. They are regularly deployed and used in areas like footpaths where there is no vehicle traffic at all.

TimeBearingDown 5 days ago | parent

Just to add, some can identify Bluetooth signals, and I wouldn’t be surprised if identification via direct TPMS (tire pressure) is added eventually.

bix6 5 days ago | parent

What do you mean direct TPMS ID? Read all 4 tires as a fingerprint? Can you do that remotely at speed?

garciasn 5 days ago | parent

https://networks.imdea.org/your-cars-tire-sensors-could-be-u...

Sort of. The problem isn’t necessarily the speed but the range. But it could be used. Bluetooth and WiFi tracking would be more likely in most real world scenarios.

linkjuice4all 5 days ago | parent

You could just mount them to a bunch of fleet vehicles [0]. Hopefully they don't pick up any stray signals from nearby vehicles moving at low speeds (relatively) around them or have any AI, API, or Cloud integrations to combine that data with other mobile and stationary telematics.

[0] https://www.revvo.ai/product/revvo-connect/

tonyarkles 5 days ago | parent

Honestly, I was shocked by how many of them were successfully decided by rtl_433 running on a cheap RTL-SDR inside my house. I don’t live on a busy street. It picked mine up first but snagged a bunch more through the evening

tzs 5 days ago | parent

I believe people have demonstrated this works at up to 100m with directional antennas.

Terr_ 5 days ago | parent

I think the main difficulty is how infrequently the devices broadcast.

You don't need to look at all tires to make a match, but the more a car has, the more likely one will be broadcasting during the window for detection.

Barbing 5 days ago | parent

Tire kicking suddenly a sign of privacy mindedness, not rude Craigslist window shopping behavior

koolba 5 days ago | parent

> Can you do that remotely at speed?

Even if you can’t, if you put enough of them by stop signs and traffic lights it’s a non-issue.

lodovic 4 days ago | parent

The only way to fight against this dragnet is flooding these devices with fake data.

qmr 5 days ago | parent

Yes. I'll bet fifty of what you like there's a demo on YouTube.

WaitWaitWha 5 days ago | parent

I have never seen TPMS ID trackers as they change relatively frequently and there are passive ones too; not to say they do not exists. Built-in BT ID of a vehicle or mobile phone rarely does.

Bluetooth and toll transponders (e.g, EZ-Pass, FastTrak) have been tracking things for decades.

First hand experience in operational rooms where both Bluetooth and the transponders are used for "traffic management" in Delaware and Washington DC. The readers are not at toll gates (only). they are sprinkled throughout highways and "high interest" areas. And, yes individual vehicles can be identified throughout their movements that is the very purpose of tracking so they can see the speed and flow of individual vehicles "to adjust intersection lights".

unsnap_biceps 5 days ago | parent

> they change relatively frequently

Aren't they static for the life of the sensor which is ~10 years?

WaitWaitWha 5 days ago | parent

Yes, you are likely right.

I do not know that much about TPMS changing, only anecdotal. Every time a rim is messed up or the device fails the TPMS would change.

They might have been wrong when they told me why they "just" track car BT (and EZPass).

rgrieselhuber 5 days ago | parent

They are also able to read / capture things like stickers on your car, facial recog, etc.

kennywinker 5 days ago | parent

That is a technical solution to a problem that has a far cheaper, and less easily abused solution: don't put up cameras at all.

Building a system with "safeguards" in place that require constant oversight is destined for either regulatory capture of the oversight, or slow dismantling of the oversight.

E.g. warrants -> fisa court warrants -> Xkeyscore

JumpCrisscross 5 days ago | parent

> don't put up cameras at all

There seems to be a real reduction in property crime in some places with cameras. I don’t think it’s realistic to take these down everywhere. (I was in the camp that they should go down everywhere. I’ve relaxed that position recently.)

HPsquared 5 days ago | parent

I wonder if that just displaces the crime to a different area, though. Depends on how organised the perps are. Although complete coverage would probably reduce it.

porkshoe 5 days ago | parent

You're conflating "any camera" with cameras that are attached to a centralized data aggregation system.

Do you have any evidence that the massive centralized aggregation has had a real reduction in crime versus cameras that are locally controlled?

or are you just spewing poorly thought out horseshit in defense of the destruction of our liberty?

(though even this is through the borderline insane, and staunchly anti-american lens that a reduction in property crime definitively warrants the destruction of privacy and liberty)

PorciiVorbesc 5 days ago | parent

>but real Americans are not like you. Real Americans value liberty

Liberty also means living in an area free of crime, not in constant fear of it. What exactly is the better solution to handling areas plagued by high crime rates? If cameras in those public areas now means those residents living there can walk safely in public without fear of getting robbed or mugged, then good for them, it's a positive development.

Also, the part where you added what "real Americans" value, reads like a satire skit on SNL. I was expecting you'd add V8 big-blocks, AR-15s and grilled steaks halfway through reading it.

slowin 5 days ago | parent

> What exactly is the better solution to handling areas plagued by high crime rates?

Investing in the community and public services?

PorciiVorbesc 5 days ago | parent

How will that deter someone wanting to break into your house or trying to rob you?

Do you turn around before they attack you and go "hey, good news, the city allocated some more funds to public services, no need to stab me" and the perp goes "ah shieet, thanks for the good news bro, let's hug and sing kumbaya"?

No matter how much money you throw at public services, criminals will still exist because bad people exist regardless of public services, otherwise you wouldn't need any law enforcement to exist if that was the solution.

And money for social services isn't infinite, you can't buy your way out of crime, if you live in a poor low income are that lacks money. What then? SHould they tolerate lawlessness and rampant crime without strong law enforcement?

And crime and lack of funds are often self reinforcing in a negative feedback loop. Nobody will come and open jobs and businesses in your area to pay the taxes your welfare system needs, if there's high crime without law enforcement and surveillance systems to catch or deter criminals that rob businesses.

kennywinker 5 days ago | parent

No, instead i turn around and say “there’s a flock camera on the street and a ring doorbell, i am surveilled wherever i go! No need to stab me!”

We’ve tried increasing surveillance and policing, it does not prevent people from being robbed and stabbed. Could we try funding social services now? We’ve never really done that.

PorciiVorbesc 5 days ago | parent

>No, instead i turn around and say “there’s a flock camera on the street and a ring doorbell, i am surveilled wherever i go! No need to stab me!”

The presence of cameras means a higher chance the perp will get identified and caught and locked up unable to harm another person. Scale these incarcerations up over time and streets can become free of crime again. No cameras, and that person can keep doing crime over and over unless there's witnesses all the time to identify him every time, which is a lot less likely.

>We’ve tried increasing surveillance and policing, it does not prevent people from being robbed and stabbed

Yeah, because soft-on-crime judges let out repeat offenders. That's how you see people who've been arrested 14 times still committing crimes in public, instead of being locked up in jail away from civilized society where they can't hurt anyone anymore. Policing means nothing if the legal system is fucked and just practices catch-and-release.

>Could we try funding social services now? We’ve never really done that.

Parts of Europe has some of the best most funded social services in the world, and crime is only increasing. When do we admit that some people are just bad people, and we can't pay infinity taxes as an extortion racket, to prevent the bottom worst 2% of society from harming us, just because we refuse to lock them up out of misplaced empathy.

And the fact is that you need both the carrot and the stick, you need functioning services AND a strict law enforcement. Having a welfare state without any deterrent against crime means you'll get people gladly exploiting both systems for personal gain, just because they can.

kennywinker 5 days ago | parent

> and we can't pay infinity taxes as an extortion racket, to prevent the bottom worst 2% of society from harming us, just because we refuse to lock them up out of misplaced empathy.

Instead let’s pay infinity taxes locking everyone up!

You won’t find me disagreeing there are some people who are going to commit crime no matter what - i will argue its a lot less than 2%, but whatever let’s go with 2%. What I arguing about is treating the other 98% of people like criminals in need of constant watching, rather than giving them the tools they need to succeed.

> The presence of cameras means a higher chance the perp will get identified and caught and locked up unable to harm another person

Defeated by a $0.15 surgical mask and some mud on the license plate. Meanwhile the gov corruption crime rate spikes because no whistleblower can speak to a journalist without being tracked.

PorciiVorbesc 5 days ago | parent

>Instead let’s pay infinity taxes locking everyone up!

I don't want people locked up, I want them caned like Singapore does. Much cheaper and more effective deterrent against repat offenders.

But if you insist on perps not being locked up, then I hope they all get released from jails ... straight into your neighborhood so you can taste your own medicine for once. You'd sing a different tune if you actually lived in a high crime area instead of a safe community, and crime was only something you read about in the media.

>What I arguing about is treating the other 98% of people like criminals in need of constant watching

All supermarkets, stores and shopping centers have surveillance cameras everywhere even if most shoppers are not criminals, because it works at deterring crime and catching criminals. Without those cameras, shoplifting would be even more rampant because many criminals are opportunistic, they're not serial criminals, they just see there's an opportunity to make an easy score since nobody is watching and there's no consequences if caught, so then why no do it? Add cameras and police and you at least eliminate all the low hanging fruit opportunists.

> rather than giving them the tools they need to succeed

That's based on the flawed blank slate theory that assumes everyone is equal in abilities and can achieve to be the next Albert Einstein if only you give them enough of your (other peoples') resources. Which couldn't be more false. Everyone who went to a public schools knows this because they saw it with their own eyes.

Some people are smart, some people are stupid, some are strong, some are weak, some are hard working, some are lazy, some are anxious, some are confident, some are well behaved, some are prone to violence, etc, take two people and they will achieve different results in life even if they get the exact same tools and opportunities, because people are not equal. People are mostly capped in life by their spawn-RNG and no amount of resources spending on them will change this.

I had a mate in highschool who would post pics of himself on Facebook with baggies of drugs, and start fights including with police officers. These people aren't going to college, they're going to jail, no matter what you do. They're too stupid even for a life of crime, let alone an employer finding them useful given the high labor costs in the west. 200+ years ago these people had a place in society because you'd give them a spear and tell them to vent their anger by charging at the enemy tribe, but in today's western economy of mostly skilled jobs and automation, there's no place for stupid people with no impulse control, so you either pay them welfare to stay at home smoke weed and play CoD to not bother anyone, or you pay for their jail time.

kennywinker 5 days ago | parent

Ok bud.

slowin 4 days ago | parent

> How will that deter someone wanting to break into your house or trying to rob you?

This isn't something I worry about but, a dog? Maybe a gun? Certainly calling the police isn't going to stop a crime in action.

Incarcerating people has a net negative effect on society and does little to "scare" people into not committing crimes. It's also extremely costly, taking money that can actually improve society in general and lower crime rates by improving education, social services and public infrastructure.

PorciiVorbesc 4 days ago | parent

>Incarcerating people has a net negative effect on society

As long as you are willing to accept ownership and direct consequences for your ultra liberal political beliefs, and have them geofenced to you, then it's fine by me. Empty the jails, all of them, but strictly into your neighborhood where your family members and kids live, work and study. Then we can talk.

Because since I live in a low income area, the consequences of your policies are always dumped on my doorstep, so it's easy for you to virtue signal and want criminals out on the street, when someone else has to deal with the consequences of your choices.

>money that can actually improve society in general and lower crime rates by improving education, social services and public infrastructure

How much education does one need to know you shouldn't punch a cop to end up in jail, and how much more money in education will teach you that?

Look how much Californiania spent on that and look at the results. Robbing people of more taxes and throwing it on bullshit doesn't fix issues that are societal at root (low impulse control, fatherless families, etc)

slowin 3 days ago | parent

I'm not a liberal. That being said, you're missing the other half of the equation. If we empty the prisons and invest all of that money back in my own community. That's absolutely a no brainer, yes!

California has an insane amount of homelessness. They're not spending their money solving that, which would be the #1 way to lower crime.

PorciiVorbesc 3 days ago | parent

And you forgot to explain how "more money invested in the community" would have prevented, for example, the guy who stabbed Irina Zaretska on the bus, or the dozens of people who lash out at cops and get to jail for the nth time?

On what will you invest that money if those people can't graduate school? What jobs will they do? Do you think they'll build jet engines and semiconductors?

slowin 2 days ago | parent

Laying the foundation for better mental health would stop a lot of these instances. "Lashing out at cops" is because cops are belligerent and everywhere harassing people, that's not the same type of crime as the others. Less cops = less lashing out at cops.

We should be investing our money in feeding and housing people, that will be the #1 way to lower crime.

1shooner 5 days ago | parent

>Liberty also means living in an area free of crime

I don't think this is a consensus definition of liberty.

Merriam Webster via Wikipedia: "Liberty is the state of being free within society from restrictions imposed by authority on one's way of life, behavior, or political views."

mmooss 5 days ago | parent

> Liberty also means living in an area free of crime

That is not in the definition of liberty. It's unfortunately common double-speak used by the enemies of liberty in order to justify reducing it. So is saying, 'I should be free of things that offend or alarm me, such as (group of people who are different)'. Liberty is not 'free of' things; it's self-determination, freedom to think and say and do as you choose.

Freedom and safety are often offset, as a trade-off. The over-used quote, 'Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety' portrays them as a trade-off.

PorciiVorbesc 2 days ago | parent

>That is not in the definition of liberty.

It very much is when you're dealing with crime on a daily basis and fear of your safety.

Are you really free when you can't go out of the house for fear of your life. Are you really free when you're afraid to park your care because someone will smash your windows to rob it? You're only free in the theoretical sense, but not in the practical one.

>The over-used quote, 'Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety' portrays them as a trade-off.

Overused by those who don't live in high-crime areas to justify defanging law enforcement that keeps crime high just so they can feel good about having high liberates in their majority white suburbia gated communities.

Let me give you another quote "freedom on criminals is tyranny on the innocent".

porkshoe 3 days ago | parent

I mean, I have a V8, an Ar-15, and plenty of steak. Those are all great things.

But setting aside your open mockery of America: you made a claim that was unsupported by the facts you cited. And you are so pathetically scared, that despite living in an INCREDIBLY low crime era, you are still willing to destroy freedom, without evidence and without even considering alternatives.

socializer 5 days ago | parent

> You're conflating "any camera" with cameras that are attached to a centralized data aggregation system.

It's an increasingly meaningless distinction: most consumer cameras now upload to the cloud and people like it. View from anywhere, AI magic, connect to cloud-based home automation, etc.

qmr 5 days ago | parent

I've spent a lot of time pondering a startup built around local storage security cameras with OPTIONAL encrypted offsite storage.

I wonder if there is a market for this.

All my shit is local with local AI.

porkshoe 3 days ago | parent

There's a world of difference between 'video to the cloud' and 'video to the cloud where it is aggregated so that anybody with access to one specific system can do a broad search against all of the cameras'

Dig1t 5 days ago | parent

>We're going to have supervision. Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there's a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on.

-Larry Ellison

This has been the plan of the oligarchs for a while.

Property crime skyrocketed during COVID largely because of intentional decisions around policing. We can easily police property crime without ubiquitous surveillance.

Most Americans know that a small reduction in property crime is not worth trading for constant surveillance by private corporations and the entire government.

fugalfervor 4 days ago | parent

> Property crime skyrocketed during COVID largely because of intentional decisions around policing

How are you sure it wasn't due to a spike in unemployment when a lot of people had to stay home from work?

kennywinker 5 days ago | parent

We found that by putting all humans in cages with no ability to contact eachother or interact with the outside world crime fell to almost zero.

warkdarrior 5 days ago | parent

Not a bad idea. Just launched a company around that concept, with a full range of cage options. I bet ICE will subcontract to us.

SauciestGNU 5 days ago | parent

Geo Group and CoreCivic seem to already have a decent moat in that sector. How will you differentiate your offerings?

hn_go_brrrrr 5 days ago | parent

By putting them in cages. Pretty difficult to offer a competing product if you're in a cage.

marcosdumay 5 days ago | parent

Does the tower where Gandalf is kept in Lord of the Rings have a name? Is the .com still available?

kennywinker 5 days ago | parent

Orthanc, but maybe we just go with “frodo but evil” https://theonion.com/creatively-tapped-out-peter-thiel-launc...

AlienRobot 5 days ago | parent

Another great innovation was implanting chips in people's brains that send everything they see, hear, say, and think to the nearest police station. That sure helped reduce crime at the low, low cost of an obsolete concept called privacy.

qmr 5 days ago | parent

Cameras are great. Especially with diverse ownership.

Police can walk about, ask or order (warrant) for footage.

A network of AI powered cameras linked to the hive mind controlled by real life super mega evil corp inc run by real life super villains... not so great.

Also the 4th amendment is a thing. Mosaic theory is a thing.

Enough of these flocking cameras.

SauciestGNU 5 days ago | parent

I don't think that police should be allowed to ask camera owners to voluntarily hand over footage, even if they would be willing to. That just allows them to privatize the mechanism of surveillance, similar to using data brokers to get around warrant requirements. Instead, I think that even where camera owners would willingly hand over footage, the state should still be required to obtain a warrant for said footage in order to preserve legal safeguards around evidence collection.

bradknowles 5 days ago | parent

I’m okay with them asking private citizens. I own my own cameras, and that video lives on my own NVRs, and all of that is 100% on my own property. And I get to choose if I want to share that with them, presumably to help solve a crime that has affected one of my neighbors. But they need to come ask me and talk to me in person.

I’m not okay with them using the third-party doctrine and going to a company like Amazon and having them do a dragnet for them.

And I’m really not okay with having a company like Flock make all that information publicly available to any bozo with a friend at a law enforcement organization who wants to make a little money on the side.

kennywinker 5 days ago | parent

> And I get to choose if I want to share that with them

Are you sure about that?

Not sure where you are what laws specifically apply, but I believe you could be compelled to hand over footage, and jailed for obstruction or destruction of evidence if you didn’t.

Just a thought - you may have less control than you think.

jacobolus 5 days ago | parent

> you could be compelled to hand over footage

If they need to get a court order signed by a judge to recover material that is directly relevant to a legally justified criminal investigation, then there's significantly less scope for abuse than what cops are doing with the flock mass surveillance system, where some have literally written "LMAO" in the form field describing the reason for their search, and where they've been using the searches to stalk citizens who are not suspected of any crime.

kennywinker 5 days ago | parent

Oh absolutely. Non-cloud cameras are far less prone to abuse. But to say you control the footage isn’t entirely true. For instance, if the government wanted to build a case against you for something you’ve done they didn't like…

SauciestGNU 5 days ago | parent

This is the current status quo and has been generally reasonable in the past, but with dragnet surveillance becoming the norm I would vastly prefer that a judge review and authorize any police interest in my footage. I don't think we can trust that the state is being forthright about their reasons for wanting the footage or that the investigation for which the footage requested is legitimate, and the state has extreme latitude to lie to people in order to further its interests.

voakbasda 5 days ago | parent

The problem is that you cannot trust the judges either. Most are former prosecutors, so they have a natural predisposition to believe all of the lies coming out of the mouths of the police. At the point, I view the government as a bonafide terrorist organization.

conception 5 days ago | parent

There’s definitely no way a group of police officers could… encourage you to hand over your video over a period of time.

psjs 5 days ago | parent

Do your camera’s film anything outside your property?

sershe 5 days ago | parent

Why not? If I see a crime being committed, should I be allowed to report it to police without a warrant? There's no difference with my private camera, it's even better cause the barrier for false/mistaken reporting is higher.

ndsipa_pomu 4 days ago | parent

You shouldn't need a warrant to report a crime being committed, but you should need a warrant if you're specifically looking through a neighbour's window waiting for them to commit a crime.

sershe 4 days ago | parent

What if I'm sitting on my porch and waiting for the crime to be committed?

Private doorbell cameras (and most flock cameras for that matter) point at mostly, or entirely, public space. Or in case of the former also my own property.

Frankly if I sit on my porch and see thru the window across that my neighbor is beating his wife, should I need a warrant to report it? That sounds ludicrous to me.

qmr 4 days ago | parent

Exigent circumstances.

sershe 3 days ago | parent

Ah, so the camera reporting crime in realtime is ok? Or since I should be able to tell a chasing police officer "I saw him run that way!" a camera reporting suspects movement is also ok.

goolz 5 days ago | parent

Key word: some. Look at London. We should not be giving up our liberties to corporations that would sell their soul for profit just so we can prevent property crime.

qurren 5 days ago | parent

I can't speak for everyone, but I've lived in countries where there are cameras everywhere, e.g. Singapore, China, where crime is almost zero compared to the US, and it is incredibly safe to be anywhere at almost any hour. Actual criminals are usually caught and apprehended very quickly. That part feels nice, that it is vanishingly unlikely to get mugged just for going out to get food at 2am.

What can make them suck is authorities abusing them to do enforce arbitrary, unpredictable ideals that are not part of the law, incompetent authorities targeting non-criminals and peaceful protesters, or traumatizing the wrong person because of an incorrect AI face match.

kennywinker 5 days ago | parent

> What can make them suck is authorities abusing them to do enforce arbitrary, unpredictable ideals that are not part of the law,

That’s crime. Doesn’t make it into the stats tho

cucumber3732842 5 days ago | parent

No, it's not a crime. In the US civil/administrative enforcement authorities are given insane authority under the law and "haha, spend $10k on lawyering to exhaust our kangaroo court and then spend another 20 to sue us in big boy court" is your recourse. Your 4th through 8th amendment rights basically don't exist if the subject is one of fines and fees and bureaucrats and not one of gun toting, door kicking cops trying to put you in a cage. And this is the US. I can only imagine what it's like in China.

Read your municipal code (they're fairly homogenous these days because of the feds and their stupid grants) if you don't believe me.

hazbot 4 days ago | parent

I think it's fair to say the the parent comment's usage of 'crime' was likely in the informal sense, not in the legal technical sense.

hnburnsy 5 days ago | parent

Is that because of the cameras or the punitive penalties or maybe both?

tmnvix 5 days ago | parent

Or maybe some other cultural reason?

JKCalhoun 4 days ago | parent

Japan too—almost no crime. Cameras are not a thing there though. I suspect it's more cultural then technological.

nik282000 5 days ago | parent

> There seems to be a real reduction in property crime in some places with cameras. I don’t think it’s realistic to take these down everywhere.

And the guy at the Honda dealer says I should buy a CRV.

Cider9986 5 days ago | parent

A warrant is better than no warrant, but:

A warrant requirement is not a reasonable bandaid to consider allowing mass surveillance. There should be no mass surveillance, only targeted surveillance.

A warrant requirement makes sense for something like the locations of customers on cellular networks, because, although it should be improved, it's been built into the tech.

When you make the optional choice to create mass surveillance, safeguards do not make it acceptable.

Plenty of places have very low crime without mass surveillance.

mmooss 5 days ago | parent

While I would take down the cameras, I don't think the public will be sold on it. They do see security benefits. And wait until some legitimately horrible crime happens and someone says, 'if we had the cameras, we would have caught the criminal'.

Also, there are too many other cameras for a Flock ban to be consequential: privately owned cameras, law enforcement and other drones, etc.

The solution is good data hygiene (minimization, encryption, etc.) and a warrant requirement. Also, any cameras recording public space should be required to obscure, at the point of capture (before storage or transmission) all identifiable information - people (full body), cars, their dogs, etc.

JKCalhoun 4 days ago | parent

"They do see security benefits."

Or feel them.

I would be convinced if, nightly, we saw on the news how video from a Flock camera was critical in apprehending the criminals involved in a car-jacking. Or anything.

But I've not seen that at all.

mmooss 4 days ago | parent

> I would be convinced if, nightly, we saw on the news how video from a Flock camera was critical in apprehending the criminals involved in a car-jacking. Or anything.

Interesting! What I read is that police are losing the skill of solving crimes without cameras and other digital information. Cameras identify suspects; tracking cars through a city - to or from the crime - is often how law enforcement finds them. (Any cameras, not just Flock.)

Regardless of our varied experiences, I'm sure we agree that perception and not reality will guide public opinion. I think camera advoctes - including law enforcement - have easy emotional buttons to press. The disparagement of human rights generally greatly weakens the strongest argument against them.

sippingabonedry 5 days ago | parent

> don't put up cameras at all

This worked out great for Seattle. A "pathetic" lack of security cameras at the city's most visible tourist attraction, so when gangstas started shooting at each other at a food festival with 3 people dead and 4 others injured, it was complete chaos from a public safety perspective, and they had no evidence from which to draw from.

I wished we lived in your perfect world but unfortunately reality is more like Taxi Driver. Technology provides the tools to help bridge the gap.

https://komonews.com/news/local/seattle-city-councilmember-r...

Cider9986 5 days ago | parent

While individual examples of crime and murder are upsetting and are certainly abused by politicians to gain more power, they are actually a small cause of death and they don't justify destroying privacy.

sershe 5 days ago | parent

Do you have statistics for both? To me, it looks like the reduction of crime is backed by some tentative numbers, whereas even organizations explicitly dedicated to finding violations of privacy report a a small collection of anecdotes.

Not to mention that as far as I am concerned, even someone e.g. breaking into a house - not speaking of violent crime - is far more damaging and traumatizing than some random cop looking up his exes license plate and doing nothing with it. Even if the numbers of instances were comparable.

JKCalhoun 4 days ago | parent

"Gangstas" started shooting each other and the police were left completely hamstrung? Hard to imagine how we ever prosecuted crimes before Flock.

jeanpah 4 days ago | parent

Some time ago i read somewere that the cameras used for " crime prevention " ended up beign used to punish people for walking dogs or jaywalking. Even the trafic cameras are being used to generate more tickets.

dataflow 5 days ago | parent

> The software should only "ping" when there is a confident match with said license plate(s)

Are you suggesting the set of all license plates of interest should be stored on the device itself?

ocdtrekkie 5 days ago | parent

There is a meaningful value in catching stolen vehicles and child abductors. Not high enough to justify capturing every single plate, but there's a value.

Bear in mind this is not meaningfully different than previous mechanisms of issuing BOLOs. Law enforcement widely distributes information about plates of interest. In my area, those plates are often on digital billboards already.

qmr 5 days ago | parent

There's no difference between a BOLO and a panopticon dragnet of always on AI powered cameras?

ocdtrekkie 5 days ago | parent

If they solely look for and record sightings of specific plates associated with active investigations? Not a lot, no.

The core problem with Flock is that it tracks innocent citizens on the off chance it helps catch a criminal, when it could be designed to only track already known wanted vehicles.

Spivak 5 days ago | parent

You are committing the scale invariant fallacy where two things are the same if they only differ by scale. A chance encounter with a human who reports the sighting to be investigated isn't even surveillance, your massively watered down flock still turns a bolo into 24/7 surveillance of the vehicle going forward. Which if we use the test of could humans do this it would at minimum require a warrant.

jmb99 5 days ago | parent

If there are, say, ten thousand license plates of interest at any given time (which seems high), that’s what, 10KB? Not really that hard to update that every 15 minutes (or hell, every minute).

I don’t really see any drawbacks with storing them on the device, they should already be quasi-public knowledge (from warrants/etc) so it’s not like there’s a privacy/security risk there

felixgallo 5 days ago | parent

You could just store it in a bloom filter, which would be non-public but also give you tunable accuracy. For 1 in a million false positives, a bloom filter would cost 28.8 bits per plate.

JKCalhoun 4 days ago | parent

What is the problem with that?

jamesjhare 5 days ago | parent

the legal standard is based off of the idea that a police officer could easily sit in a fixed location and take down license plate numbers that pass by

that and you don't have any legitimate expectation of privacy while in public because you are in public

the really strange part is the folks that are angry about flock cameras are often the same people who are angry that folks like elon musk want the movements of the private jets to be non-public information

i can get around my community without worrying one bit about flock cameras surveilling me. the bike trails i use generally don't have cameras and even if they did i'm riding a fairly generic bike and wearing neutral and unmemorable clothing.

even with actual dragnet surveillance in NYC they couldn't track a dude on a bike effectively.

JumpCrisscross 5 days ago | parent

> a police officer could easily sit in a fixed location and take down license plate numbers that pass by

Not on a busy road. And not while identifying the faces of the drivers.

Barbing 5 days ago | parent

Nor the dents and identifying marks, effectively. Nor within a realistic budget (24/7 * average officer hourly rate * # of Flocks nationwide + time spent sharing with desired other jurisdictions + cost to analyze).

Point driven in by fellow commenters this year: scale matters!

nullc 5 days ago | parent

The real privacy problem is the requirement to display plates... a problem that exists only because of the government's mandate to do so.

I think it breaks the 'its in public so its public' argument. The state requires you to display plates-- its its responsibility to complete the law: e.g. make possession of a third parties plate number a serious felony outside of limited circumstances.

JumpCrisscross 5 days ago | parent

> the device should require very specific license plates to scan for

I’d be okay with a 24-hour on device store of scanned plates. That way a stolen car can be tracked ex post facto.

sneak 5 days ago | parent

These machines are online 24/7. There is no technical difference to storing it in the device flash or the Flock sql database.

Barbing 5 days ago | parent

I want them offline. Plug in physically to download what’s needed. Or park in closest safe location. Either way, create a log with access + warrant. No warrant, no access (or legal penalties when logs are reviewed, if warrant can’t be a precondition on a technical level).

A cop with a cable to a camera pole would be a visible sign to the community that something happened. If someone’s there every day, maybe it’s one of those (rare but…) losers tracking his abused former lover. (Super sick that cop helped his cousin do this.)

schrodinger 5 days ago | parent

I agree — but in practice, once data exists, it tends to become streamed, stored, indexed, searchable, and immortal. It’s the nature of data to want to be free which cuts both ways good and bad, and is why sometimes the only way to have privacy and freedom is to not record in the first place, unfortunately.

This is why anonymity is necessary for true freedom and privacy. If data _can_ be traced and connected, it will be. This aligns with a 1995 Supreme Court opinion (McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission), where Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that "anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority," noting that it "exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation... at the hand of an intolerant society."

Barbing 5 days ago | parent

I’m OK if lack of a panopticon means a relative’s murderer gets away (“…give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety…”) but hoped I could eat my cake & have it… good thinker for me

Govt. fund a new division of the EFF to address your concerns w/the new offline camera scheme? Unlike acceptable encryption backdoors, it seems possible. Somehow.

PunchyHamster 5 days ago | parent

you kinda need the image to be 100% sure there wasn't some software glitch or inaccurate OCR

sippingabonedry 5 days ago | parent

How many cloud-connected cameras are on your street?

I'd guess probably 50-100.

Are we going to redesign them all to your specs too?

Barbing 5 days ago | parent

Great suggestion. Stinks Amazon records every walk I go on.

JKCalhoun 4 days ago | parent

Well, that is why we have laws.

It's why, for example, we don't allow electronic devices to be sold (legally) in the U.S. that put out so much RF such that they interfere with radio broadcasts. An actual FM transmitter is limited to so many milliwatts of radiated power, etc…

mmooss 5 days ago | parent

Do you mean, capture the image only after a warrant is issued?

That doesn't seem realistic: Almost all the time, we only know about a crime after it happens - when it's too late to obtain a warrant. We get the license plate from the video of the crime.

So I would capture the images, minimize and encrypt it at the point of capture (before storage or transmission), and maybe even setup some PKI where only judges can issue keys to decrypt, if practical.

jasomill 4 days ago | parent

This sounds suspiciously like the NSA’s justification for what would otherwise be illegal domestic surveillance.

The problem with this is that it depends on the trustworthiness of those enforcing the restrictions, both now and in the future.

But if we trusted the watchers to watch themselves, we wouldn’t need the restrictions in the first place.

samrus 5 days ago | parent

That and searches for license plates should requiring having the warrant. Not all LEOs might be authorized to carry out the warrant, so they shouldt be able to

moralestapia 5 days 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).

greggoB 5 days ago | parent

> I don't think we can backtrack at this point

Yes you can - if the citizenry says no and mobilises/votes to that end, the cameras can be physically removed, whether in a city/state/nationally.

This isn't an instance of "the cat's out the bag, it can't be opt back in" - accepting that is a form of defeatism IMO.

charcircuit 5 days 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.

slowin 5 days ago | parent

> It is a search of law enforcements own property.

The roads are not law enforcement's property and my private car on a public road is private property that requires a warrant to search. These things should be totally banned, but even your argument is wrong since Flocks don't mask just the road, they record everything in their field of view.

charcircuit 5 days ago | parent

>The roads are not law enforcement's property

I was referring data as the property. Accessing a public fact of your car is not the same as actually searching through a car.

>they record everything in their field of view.

And those areas are still part of the public.

slowin 5 days ago | parent

Given that the roads are not law enforcement's property, and in fact public property, they would require public approval and voted on legislation for the police to install cameras on them.

> And those areas are still part of the public.

No, it's almost exclusively private land.

charcircuit 5 days ago | parent

Basically, anyone is allowed to record what is in public view without getting any kind of permission ahead of time.

iamnothere 5 days ago | parent

Courts and the law have disagreed with this in the past, see for instance stalking laws. If it’s possible to criminalize individual stalking, it’s possible to criminalize mass stalking.

charcircuit 5 days ago | parent

It's against the first amendment to criminalize recording someone so eventually such laws will be struck down.

iamnothere 4 days ago | parent

Really? You think anti-stalking laws will be struck down?

Is this something you’re in favor of?

0xbadcafebee 5 days ago | parent

The point of these lawsuits is that they don't have the right to search the data they have now, and possibly don't even have a right to have that data. The law says they need a good reason to search not just your property, but for information about you that isn't necessarily your property. Searching where you go 24/7 is a search, just like searching the phone company for what phone numbers you call is a search. In each case they are looking for information about you that they don't have a right to have without a very good reason.

charcircuit 5 days ago | parent

We are talking about reasonable searching then. Police do go searching 24/7. They are called patrol units and they are active looking in public for crime. Just because there is technology doing the patrol and remember what is seen that doesn't change anything. Technology is making law enforcement more efficient. Instead of having to scale enforcement by hiring more humans, we can now purchase technology instead.

0xbadcafebee 5 days ago | parent

Law is more complicated than that. Constitutional rights trump everything else. You have a right to be protected from unreasonable search, more than the police have the right to track your movements at all times for no particular reason. If what they do violates your constitutional right, it's illegal.

sippingabonedry 5 days ago | parent

> they record everything in their field of view

Like all the millions of traffic cameras, dashcams, smartphones, and everyone's eyeballs?

slowin 5 days ago | parent

Traffic cameras certainly have the same issues, but the others aren't aggregated and searchable by the police, they're for personal use.

nkrisc 5 days ago | parent

It’s public, but that does not necessarily imply that I will be surveilled at all times by the state while out in public.

charcircuit 5 days ago | parent

It does not imply that, but it does imply that you do not have control over the distribution of facts of what happens there.

macintux 5 days ago | parent

I don’t have control over my freedom of speech, either, but I still appreciate it.

Just because the founding fathers 250 years ago couldn’t conceive of a panopticon doesn’t mean that we have to accept it today.

nkrisc 5 days ago | parent

I believe the constitution says otherwise.

greggoB 5 days ago | parent

> It is a search of law enforcements own property

The wording here seems problematic. Why is law enforcement entitled to this degree of access to public surveillance as their "property"? That word strongly implies it is theirs to do with as they wish - I don't see how that would be a desirable state of affairs.

user3939382 5 days ago | parent

Omniscience outside private property is “existing law enforcement knowledge”?

simoncion 5 days ago | parent

> What you do on public roads is public.

You seem to be paraphrasing the US v. Knotts decision. Read pages 30 and 31 of the document found here [0]. If you have fifteen-to-thirty minutes free, you should really read the whole thing.

[0] <https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.oknd.76...>

alexnewman 5 days ago | parent

I think i'm like the last person who's still defending flock. This is as a result of living with very small women for years who were constantly attacked in the streets. This basically ended with surveillance. That being said, I would prefer actual police on every block with crime.

sneak 5 days ago | parent

You should stop defending them if a single anecdote of any level of severity is your basis. Hundreds of millions have been placed under potential threat by police.

sershe 4 days ago | parent

"Potential" threat? This applies symmetrically. Hundreds of millions of people are "potential" victims of crime, and privacy advocates can only provide a few dozen anecdotes, most of them less impactful than someone stealing your sandwich.

Somehow matters of degree only apply to safety (and my liberty to film whatever I want in public), but they don't apply to privacy, that's absolute.

kylepomykala 5 days ago | parent

I'm honestly kind of surprised it took this long.

PunchyHamster 5 days ago | parent

so just like anyone else except people profiting or abusing it

sippingabonedry 5 days ago | parent

"Flock is mass surveillance", say people who are posting Ring doorbell footage on Reddit for the 50th time, trying to gangstalk the guy who stole the mail order coffee beans off their porch.

PorciiVorbesc 5 days ago | parent

"It's mass surveillance when law enforcement catches me breaking the law. When I catch and doxx other people breaking the law, it's justice being served."

qmr 5 days ago | parent

Comedy is when you break your leg, tragedy is when I stub my toe?

marc_abonce 5 days ago | parent

Yes, there's a massive difference between a government's power and a common citizen's power, both in scope and in the responsibility that this difference in power conveys.

Using your example, a homeowner with a camera is indeed surveying but it's not mass surveillance. (Unless they actually hacked into other people's cameras, but that would be a completely different example and would in fact lead us back to the conversation about government or corporate responsibility over those other cameras.)

There's nothing hypocritical in pointing out this difference and expecting more restraint on a democratic government that's supposed to serve the common people.

Don't get me wrong, I hate internet mobs too but it's incorrect to assume that they are equivalent to actual governments. They're a separate problem that needs to be handled in its own terms.

qmr 5 days ago | parent

"Yet you participate in society. Interesting!"

softwaredoug 5 days ago | parent

“Some people exist in this intersection of arbitrary groups I just made! Therefore the whole group is a fraud!”

anigbrowl 5 days ago | parent

Well poisoning fallacy

ProllyInfamous 5 days ago | parent

I also don't use email nor own a cell phone.

Did you have a point?

oxygen_crisis 5 days ago | parent

The Constitution pertains to limiting the power of the state, limiting abuses by the people and systems entrusted with enforcing the law, not limiting your neighbors.

cryptozeus 5 days ago | parent

"he allegedly discovered 91 pounds of meth"....not helping the case but overall I agree against mass surveillance like this

vjvjvjvjghv 5 days ago | parent

Is there realistically a chance that we won't get total surveillance in the next decades? Unless something dramatically changes, I just don't see how it won't end any other way.

slowin 5 days ago | parent

I don't know that I've ever seen such unified opposition from the public on both sides of the political spectrum as being against these cameras (and data centers). It gives me hope that for the first time in my life, it looks like we might pump the breaks on increased surveillance and create a permanent culture of resisting it.

sixothree 5 days ago | parent

It's only unified because we have republicans in power. As soon as we have democrats in power, republicans will only want the opposite of what is being proposed.

samrus 5 days ago | parent

America doesnt even have a real national id card. The inevitalism is unfounded. Mass surveillance is not guaranteed. It might still happen, but the defeatism is irrational

frunklooper 5 days ago | parent

I love activist judges

kittikitti 5 days ago | parent

Just the other day I got pulled over when a license plate reader false flagged my drivers license. It was an embarrassing traffic stop because it was all due to the automated system.

mitxela 5 days ago | parent

The more false stops happen, the less cops will like this system and the less it will be deployed.

0xbadcafebee 5 days ago | parent

> Flock CEO Garretty Langley — who we’ll be interviewing on-stage at TechCrunch Disrupt — has called for a “compromise” between privacy and safety

Don't be fooled. Flock's CEO has stated multiple times that the purpose of his company is to intimidate people into thinking they will be caught if they commit any crime, in order for him to achieve a crime-free world. The only way to make people think they will always be caught, is if people believe their every movement is tracked everywhere they go. Intimidation via zero privacy. It's literally the surveillance part of Nineteen Eighty Four.

The fact that these aims are impossible (some criminals don't mind going to jail, many are stupid/hubristic, a criminal can spraypaint a camera, etc) should also indicate how disconnected the guy is from reality. He's called people who non-violently protest the cameras terrorists. He's backpedaling now so that he can convince enough people to let him continue installing cameras and doing the same things Flock did before.

Flock keeps hurting people and only tries to do the right thing after so much outrage that it hurts its sales. This is not a company anyone should trust.

kingcauchy 5 days ago | parent

I'm pretty sure we're living in the prequel to Minority Report right now.

qmr 5 days ago | parent

Water found to be wet. Experts assert Pope "almost certainly Catholic". News at 11.

dools 5 days ago | parent

“Federal judge rules” is a phrase whose impact has been dramatically reduced during the trump era. You know that all flock need do is donate a few mill to trumps idiotic ballroom project or buy some of his idiotic meme coin or hire one of his idiot sons as a consultant and the problem disappears. The US is a despotic kleptocracy.

writtenone 5 days ago | parent

archived; with no ads or bs: https://nonograph.com/federal-judge-calls-flock-indiscrimina...

harlanji 5 days ago | parent

Lately whenever I take a walk down a certain suburban street there's a security patrol vehicle and often I feel they're paying too much attention to me. Driving slow, flip light bar on. It's very disturbing. Not the first time it's happened, another private security company has seemed to be too interested in me. In each case I've resorted to making obscene gestures to them because it disturbs my peace. It's like a counter punch to a punch, but most would not see it that way. They're just doing their job, or a little more in the case of watching me on a public street. But when it becomes an expected part of a daily routine, it's too much.

No doubt erratic behavior gets me logged by that security team, if not escalated to local police, who may come to check up on me themselves later. Nobody knows what's happening with this footage. What their putting a wrapper in their pocket may look like in low res video.

Mass surveillance thru cameras and movement logging isn't so active but I 100% understand people who take action against the cameras. It's just as in a person's face every single day, in more and more places, and you don't know who is on the other end or what they're looking for or what you are doing may appear as.

fatesblind 5 days ago | parent

They suck until they find your missing child/wife/husband... Resolving abuse of the system should be the focus.

hnburnsy 5 days ago | parent

> They suck until they find your missing child/wife/husband... Resolving abuse of the system should be the focus.

Pretty sure every judge would issue a warrant when your loved one is missing.

ghm2180 5 days ago | parent

To Google and apple's credit they have at the least made location history stored on device instead of dealing with the slippery slope of warrants that ask for all devices around a point. Google specifically decided after a court ruling to get out of the morass of server side storage. There is a lot wrong with how permissioning works on android and Google services but this is not one of them.

user3939382 5 days ago | parent

Is that characterization even controversial? Isn’t this their self description and marketing pitch?

shevy-java 5 days ago | parent

That's interesting because that wording implies that Flock sniffers are breaking the US constitution, since it bypasses e. g. a judge coming to issuing a warrant. That means that Flock tries to bypass the judicial system in this regard.

kccqzy 4 days ago | parent

Flock is a tool. The users of Flock (the cops) bypasses the constitution. It’s like the manufacturer of a wiretapping equipment wouldn’t be bypassing the constitution, but the user of it could be.

whatever1 5 days ago | parent

Isn’t it crazy that we still don’t know what flock cameras capture? We only have the corporate speak from flock and their parrots.

wonderwonder 5 days ago | parent

The issue with flock is pair it with a competent Ai system and you have full realtime surveilance of every civilian everywhere there are flock cameras. Press a button and you have "Bob Smith's" or very likely "Ex GF of legal figure" complete travel history on demand as well as current location. It's too much power to give a government let alone flawed individual humans

anjel 5 days ago | parent

Parallel construction is a crime in itself

simianparrot 5 days ago | parent

It is surprising to see so little thinking in the response from most of the commenters frequenting this website.

Flock cameras are a result of not enforcing existing laws. Judges are too lenient on offenders, repeat offenders are all too common, and so you have a reduction in the degree of trust in what should be a high trust society.

When there is not trust and too many people don't behave, you either start punishing offenders properly and potentially more harshly to disincentivise other would-be offenders, or you get Flock cameras.

You think only about the Flock cameras and their innate problems, but refuse to actually deal with _why_ Flock cameras are needed at all. Think a little.

sershe 5 days ago | parent

One thing to remember is that for most people, safety at some level of disorder becomes an overriding concern, with hardly any regard for liberty, fairness, prosperity or anything. This is how people elect Bukele, Duterte, or even to an extent Putin. Heck Seattle once voted for a Republican prosecutor, even though disorder in Seattle is nowhere near overwhelming.

The USA is right now in an equilibrium where crime is relatively low. Only a few years ago, we saw that it can... fluctuate. I grew up in Russia in the 90ies so let's put it like that, I would already be open to all kinds of ways to fight crime, if I were in a different one. Most people won't go quite as far as me, but after a couple years in a different equilibrium, even some of the ardent privacy fighters will start coming around, especially if it affects them personally. At El Salvador level of disorder, apparently "put everyone with a tattoo in cages" starts to sound like a great plan to most people.

Now consider how Flock affects this equilibrium. What is the realistic, actual risk to non-criminals from the government? UK has mass surveillance, I mean it's not ideal, but how much of a dystopia is it? And the UK, as far as I understand, doesn't have nearly as many existing legal protections, nor does it have the culture of flipping the government a bird (consider e.g. covid lockdown compliance and enforcement).

On the other hand, to me it appears that surveillance is a relatively cheap and effective way to prevent crime. Aside from being good, that also reduces demand for other solutions that have been tried around the world, and the kinds of candidates who would run on crime/disorder agenda.

Barbing 5 days ago | parent

This post got kicked the flock off the front page https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=49948254

roody15 4 days ago | parent

As a former city councilman of a community that installed six flock cameras I can say that the connection with law enforcement and the cameras capabilities and uses is obfuscated.

They are advertised as locally owned and data locally controlled. However when asked what the data can be used for was not given a direct answer.

I asked since the public purchased these cameras can we use the data to determine how many people attended a festival or other city event.

Not any identifiable information just general like how many people traveled to our community to attend the 4th of July fireworks show or local outdoor concert night.

Silence. Nope as the city we cannot access or use any of the data and instead trust that these will be used for law enforcement and safety.

Upon questioning how they would be used and who would be accessing the data found the answers to be quite generalized.

My two cents is if we are going to have flock cameras or not … law enforcement and the company need to be more transparent on what data is stored, how it is accessed, who can access, how it links to other cameras in other communities, how is misuse identified, what access do federal agencies have to this data (do they have to ask the local community first or can they just login with some super user account and pull data etc)

I get the sense that if Flock were to be transparent about how these truly function less communities would be willing to purchase .. but I could be wrong.