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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

>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.

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.

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".

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

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.

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

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.)

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!

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.

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...

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

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.

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.

You need a warrant to tap somebody's phone.

Ben Franklin intercepted and published private mail in his newspaper

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.

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

Too busy day trading and vacationing to avoid uncomfortable votes.

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.

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)

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

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I believe the constitution says otherwise.

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?