today at 10:37 PM
License plate reader?
So the device should require very specific license plates to scan forânot the current dragnet. The software should only "ping" when there is a confident match with said license plate(s)âand 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).
today at 11:28 PM
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
today at 11:31 PM
> 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?
today at 11:31 PM
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.
today at 10:48 PM
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.
today at 10:55 PM
Just to add, some can identify Bluetooth signals, and I wouldnât be surprised if identification via direct TPMS (tire pressure) is added eventually.
today at 11:37 PM
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".
today at 11:02 PM
What do you mean direct TPMS ID? Read all 4 tires as a fingerprint? Can you do that remotely at speed?
today at 11:09 PM
https://networks.imdea.org/your-cars-tire-sensors-could-be-u...
Sort of. The problem isnât necessarily the speed but the range. But it could be used. Bluetooth and WiFi tracking would be more likely in most real world scenarios.
today at 11:39 PM
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/
today at 11:12 PM
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.
today at 11:15 PM
> Can you do that remotely at speed?
Even if you canât, if you put enough of them by stop signs and traffic lights itâs a non-issue.
today at 11:16 PM
They are also able to read / capture things like stickers on your car, facial recog, etc.
today at 10:31 PM
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.
today at 10:49 PM
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.
today at 11:03 PM
> 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.
today at 11:33 PM
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.
today at 11:37 PM
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.
today at 10:57 PM
> 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?"
today at 11:14 PM
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.
today at 11:29 PM
There's also: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
today at 11:39 PM
That sentence may as well not even be there for all the good it does. Even the enumerated rights keep getting whittled down.
today at 11:33 PM
You need a warrant to tap somebody's phone.
today at 11:35 PM
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 itâs easy to imagine how they would feel in principle, even if they couldnât imagine the specific technology.
today at 11:10 PM
>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.
today at 11:34 PM
Frankly, the TSAs security theater should not be taken as an example of reasonable gov behaviour.
today at 10:36 PM
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.
today at 11:39 PM
> Who knows, maybe Congress will legislate something.
Never.
today at 10:34 PM
Iâm no American but isnât 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 itâs no different from any private citizen recording another in a public space?
today at 10:35 PM
This has been allowed generally in US courts, to use private companies to collect data, etc.
today at 10:39 PM
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.
today at 11:22 PM
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...
today at 10:37 PM
Is there a whole thing in the U.S. where itâs 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)
today at 11:15 PM
"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.
today at 11:13 PM
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
today at 10:38 PM
today at 10:49 PM
When a "private company" is using public land and public money to set up their surveillance devices, it is no longer private.
today at 11:12 PM
And when it only sells to government customers.
today at 10:48 PM
"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".
today at 10:46 PM
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.
today at 10:48 PM
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.
today at 11:10 PM
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.
today at 11:38 PM
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 them to stop putting them back up.
today at 11:36 PM
> 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.
today at 11:15 PM
> 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.
today at 11:09 PM
If indiscriminate mass surveillance is legal, should it continue to be?
What is America's history with tyranny?
today at 11:27 PM
Same as everyone else's: bad when they do it to us, good when we do it to them.
today at 10:39 PM
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.
today at 10:55 PM
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).
today at 11:18 PM
Sure, and if the same level of effort were required to get the same amount of information, this probably wouldnât 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 canât just pretend those things are equal.
today at 10:52 PM
Isn't that what paparazzi do already? Seems like you can do that.
today at 11:06 PM
Why doesn't it mean that?
today at 10:52 PM
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.
today at 10:46 PM
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_...
today at 11:33 PM
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.
today at 11:38 PM
> 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.
today at 10:20 PM
> The deputy then used the womanâs 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.
today at 10:35 PM
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.
today at 11:39 PM
> 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
today at 11:07 PM
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.
today at 11:21 PM
And theyâve 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
today at 11:30 PM
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 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.
today at 11:08 PM
I find it concerning that your recorded movements by mass surveillance devices can be used as justification subject you to a search.
today at 10:28 PM
91 pounds? Thatâs 2 million doses at 20 mg/dose [1].
[1] https://dancesafe.org/speed/
today at 10:41 PM
Thatâs 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 monthâs supply for a small town.
Like most consumption, the top 10% easily account for >80% of total consumption.
today at 11:32 PM
today at 10:36 PM
That's less than $130,000 worth of product. It's a lot, but not crazy
today at 10:43 PM
A gram a day is more typical [1].
Still, thatâs a lot to be tailgating like this lady was as shown in the court filing. Also, â[the arresting officer] told another officer that he âcould see her carotid artery in my car. That thing was about to pop out of her neck.ââ
Sounds like some wild decisions were being made.
[1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40385390/
today at 11:06 PM
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?
today at 11:10 PM
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.
today at 10:38 PM
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).
today at 10:41 PM
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.
today at 11:03 PM
> 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.
today at 11:20 PM
>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.
today at 11:37 PM
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.
today at 11:09 PM
Itâs public, but that does not necessarily imply that I will be surveilled at all times by the state while out in public.
today at 11:21 PM
It does not imply that, but it does imply that you do not have control over the distribution of facts of what happens there.
today at 10:19 PM
TBH the words of an individual judge shouldn't mean too much now -> they are obviously very political judges now.
today at 10:37 PM
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.
today at 10:58 PM
? 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.
today at 11:05 PM
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?
today at 10:29 PM
> they are obviously very political judges now
They areâsince 2000 Presidents have appointed more polarized judges [1]. (The broader trend began in 1975 [2].) But theyâre 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...