Also, there is a competing interpretation of the law called "Mosaic Theory" that is at the root of the argument against the 1983 ruling. In Carpenter v. United States (2018)...

> [t]he Supreme Court ruled that law enforcement requires a warrant to access historical cell-site location information (CSLI). Chief Justice John Roberts noted that individuals do not surrender all Fourth Amendment protections simply by venturing into the public sphere. The Court determined that compiling a "detailed and comprehensive record of the person’s movements" is vastly different from a police officer casually observing a car drive by.

This is a clear application of "detailed and comprehensive record" creation, and I can't see how Flock could argue with this recent precedent.

The other problem with this opinion piece is that the author assumes that if a citizen is not physically pulled over, they are being "left alone." He completely dismisses the reality that capturing, logging, and storing the movements of millions of innocent, law-abiding citizens in a searchable database is inherently intrusive.

This sounds like the system working?

These can both be true: Your car's location is not private, and its travel history is not grounds for a search.

> a hand-wavy attitude towards abuse and negligence

Cops in a nutshell

> The article takes a hand-wavy attitude towards abuse and negligence, with little attempt to counter-balance it with transparent accountability.

What do you mean? It addresses the matter explicitly, making the argument that it's hard to abuse with impunity. Is there a particular point you think it should have addressed that it didn't?

At least he cites a study...

Well then we differ. I have insurance, and I'm willing to suffer inconveniences if that's what it takes to avoid an Orwellian surveillance state.

There are lots of other ways we get tracked, and I oppose those as well.

Are you pro camera and crime fighting, or are you pro-Flock, a for-profit company who is exploiting our lives for profit ?

I think theres a difference.

You're conflating ALPR with Flock. I think that's a mistake, given Flock's other major implementation issues and other features that have nothing to do with ALPR.

There used to be a saying, back before the prole uprisings, "a Republican is a Freedom Party member that hasn't been chipped yet".

The modern equivalent is something like "people hate autonomous hunter-killer drones right up until their external nervous system gets stolen".

I used to live in a high crime area. It sucked. I would have accepted any number of armed drones of any type to make the crime stop.

There are a million ways you can be shot, from cops to criminals to misbehaving security turrets, so armed drones are hardly new or threatening. But they make exobrains practically unstealable, and that's why I've come 'round to being pro-hunter-killer drone. Sorry.

Almost every violation of our privacy would make law enforcement easier and more effective. Nevertheless, we value privacy. I am not convinced by this "well if ended up benefiting from it you'd change your tune."

That Rizzo/Kristol quote hasn't been borne out in studies [1][2], so it's not exactly a great place to start from (ps: as a data point of 1 my car was stolen out of my apartment's gated garage and more cameras would have been completely useless). Extending it to flock is even more erroneous, because it still requires the police/government to actually act on that data. And that's before considering all the privacy issues with storing historical data and the lowering of resources required for tracking someone, which i think are much more important.

But I really want to focus on the idea that more cameras will make the crime stop, because that is especially fallacious. It won't. Not by itself. What will make crime stop is government/community intervention. We could get into a whole broken window vs enhancing economic opportunity vs early targeted intervention approach debate, but the specific type of intervention isn't relevant to my point (so long as it's effective), which is that more data is only useful it it's actually used and not just stored in a warehouse without ever being looked at.

Let me give you more details from the car theft i mentioned before of my car getting stolen in 2020/2021 in San Francisco from my gated (and security camera-ed) apartment garage.

The car was taken a few days before July 4th. Since I work from home, I didn't notice until I went to use it on the 4th. I immediately reported it to police and was able to use the police report to get the relevant security camera feeds from the apartment (we can see the person from when they hop the fence to when they drive away in my car). The week before American Thanksgiving (about 4 months later) I get a call from the impound lot: "we've just received my car at the impound lot. You can come get it." That's when the happy narrative unraveled, and I learned what actually happened.

My car got towed up for blocking a driveway more than a day before i even noticed it was missing. When it arrived at the impound lot they noted that it had a license plate for the wrong type of vehicle that had separately already been reported as stolen (same make but a different model in a different color and manufactured 10 years after my car). Even though the system flagged the plate as stolen and for the wrong vehicle the VIN was never scanned. I know the VIN was never scanned because there's systems constantly checking impounded car VINs and licenses against all the open stolen car cases, and separate systems that should notify owners when they call in to see if their car was towed/impounded. My report of the stolen car from july 4th should have immediately triggered a match since the car was already in the impound lot. Instead the car sat in impound lots until they were ready to auction it off, because it was only ever recorded with the stolen license plate. It's actually worse than just that one error because a month later (and now after the car was reported as stolen) they moved it from the first impound lot to their long term storage lot, so in total they didn't scan the VIN 4 separate times (when they towed it, when it entered impound lot, when it exited the impound lot, and when it entered the long term storage impound lot) even when the system immediately warned them the plate didn't match the car. In order to auction it off they need to get a clean title, which caused them to finally run the actual VIN for the car and not just the stolen license plate. The cross-check system was finally able to work, and they immediately notified me based on the open stolen car report. All this got reconstructed for me because they had to figure out what happened as part refunding the over $10,000 of impound lot fees that had accrued, since they aren't allowed to charge for tows/impoundment if the vehicle is reported as stolen in a timely manner.

Flock provides absolutely nothing that SFPD didn't already have access to while was car was in their possession. When my car got towed for blocking a driveway and when it entered the impound lot their existing systems reported that the license plate was incorrect for the car, which should have triggered scanning the VIN (even without a theft report yet, if they had scanned the VIN then it would have triggered a notice to the registered owner). When the car moved from the impound lot to long term impound lot the system again reported that the license plate was stolen and incorrect for the car, and at this point scanning the VIN would have alerted them to the open car theft report. All their fancy cross-checking systems failed because SFPD employees were too lazy or overworked or apathetic to follow policy to scan the VIN of the vehicle until they absolutely had to scan it.

[1]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233614385_A_Liberal... [2]: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1462474508101490

> a Democrat is a Republican that hasn't been mugged yet

This quote is utter nonsense, considering that it's Democrats who get mugged by living in bad neighborhoods. Republicans don't live in such neighborhoods. As for everything else that follows, well, it doesn't really follow.

I think what a lot of people don't like is:

1. They don't have access to the data.

2. They don't trust those that do.

3. They don't believe that violations in how it is used will be appropriately punished (article clearly disagrees, citing a study).

4. They believe the Federal government will misuse the data, and there won't be a record of the misuse.

One solution is: Make the data a public good. Instead of trying to ban such things, make the feeds accessible to everyone. It levels the playing field.

Bans aren't really going to work in the long run. I could hook up a camera on my property, facing the street, and record and stream. You can do the same. We can set up a common protocol for all such people to share their streams. Municipalities banning this type of behavior will be as effective as banning piracy.

Will society be better off as a result? I seriously doubt it. Some things will drastically improve. Others will get a lot worse. But it's a likely solution going forward.

You give cops an inch, they take a mile. It's been shown time and time again, with Flock and ALPR specifically, that if the technology is easy enough to abuse it will be.

Until sufficient measures are in place to prevent abuse (and I have doubts it's even possible) then the cameras gotta go and they can do their jobs the same way the did decades before.

> but I don't understand why people choose the solution that basically throws the baby out with the bathwater.

Mass surveillance apparatus like flock cameras and their ilk have a huge surface area for abuse, meaning there must be at least as large a positive impact to even be worth considering.

Unfortunately, we already have plenty of historical evidence from areas that deployed cameras all over - e.g., London, where there was a near-zero drop in crime afterward, and multiple cities in the US, where police immediately began abusing the systems.

There is no baby to throw out, and the bathwater is toxic.

It's not the path of least resistance to get the cameras banned. It's been a highly resistant path and that's what most people want.

Flock took the path of least resistance setting them up often skirting any normal discussion that should have taken place with the community before they were installed.

This doesn't tend to work. When we look at the history of the courts okaying some privacy invasion under the premise that it is actually well constrained by guardrails or that it really isn't a very big deal, those guardrails crumble. Just look at Terry Stops. In principle they don't seem like a big deal. In practice they led to things like NYC's Stop-And-Frisk and widespread and routine invasions of privacy.

We know that

- cops will push right up against the rules

- cops will break the rules

- courts will often not hold cops accountable when they break the rules

Cops are regularly not punished for repeated acts of violence, theft, lying, or any other form of malice. The worst case for most is paid leave, being fired, and then being hired by a different department. There are almost never criminal charges for criminal behavior by police and so increased penalties are meaningless.

That’s a long winded way of saying, if they can abuse a system they will. There are no repercussions, and so the only way to stop the abuse is to prevent it from happening. I’d absolutely love to see massive reform to police in the US, but it’s unlikely to happen anytime soon.

But better-trained, less militarized, beat cops for the most part, who can interact with the public as though they are public servants and not an occupying force.

It's funny because having visited America I assumed it was vastly over policed with it being not uncommon to see 3 or 4 apparently different agency vehicles (highway patrol, sheriff's office, etc) on a relatively short journey.

I was quite surprised to find that the figures don't back that up. I'm not sure how to account for it. Perhaps the fact that every mall security guard is given a mock police uniform, a gun and a huge SUV contributes to the feeling.

Without significant reform, more cops wouldn't help. Usually more cops only increases the false conviction rate.

Great, but a Punisher sticker on your car is a disqualifier.

So something like this?

https://ring.com/support/articles/uds27/Community-request

If you believe ubiquitous cameras (dunno why that was censored) is creating a surveillance state then what does it being de-centralized accomplish here?

Like many solutions that could work, the problem is often somewhere in adoption.

I'll take the first hammer to it:

Downsides:

1) Same software could be used by national/state authorities, to create their own system, that doesn't follow the above rules.

Major Downsides:

1) See above.

Critiques:

2.5) Said open-source camera software and hardware will likely be packaged up by commercial vendors, who will happily store your data in the cloud and resell it (I mean Empower Law Enforcement) on the side. This will probably be the majority of installs.

3) Queryable in what way? If the query reveals presence/absence of a person, they already have the info they need - if it doesn't, users won't know who to pay.

4) It's easy to pretend to be a victim of crime. Stalkers can easily abuse this to find their victims. Cops are also highly-trusted by a lot of the public, and also can use this to stalk people.

5) Morally, seems bad to charge a person looking for their lost child. Less bad if it's a fixed fee, rather than deciding what to charge after hearing the request - but that goes a little against the idea of point 4 to be able to approve/deny certain requests.

6) Ubiquitous surveillance is probably still bad even when decentralized.

> if Flock was solving felonies, especially violent crime, every statement about it would open with all those stats

> Except they don't, which means it doesn't

This is not how logic works.

Is a felony considered "solved" when the perp is caught and released on a much lower change?