Scott Adams' had a great line:
"Whenever people have the opportunity to commit fraud and there is no monitoring, you can assume they are committing fraud."
Flock-Powered Police Chiefs Stalking Women Shows Why Warrants Are Needed
141–150 of 382 posts
Re: Flock-Powered Police Chiefs Stalking Women Shows Why Warrants Are Needed
#142Ultimately, there’s a sort of homeostasis in people’s tolerance for crime. If you need video evidence for prosecution, those who want it prosecuted will produce video cameras. If you make warrants impossible to produce in a timely manner, the camera search will be warrant exempted. Attempts to damage state power to ensure crime isn’t prosecuted will be likely met with methods that are immune to them. Given the constr…
To use a corporate example:
People act like the only options are:
- make it so hard to log in that no one can use a system
- just give everyone root access
You can build systems of approval that are fast, obvious who should be approving and are auditable.
Re: Flock-Powered Police Chiefs Stalking Women Shows Why Warrants Are Needed
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lol, I should be getting paid. But no, I just like to dispel the myths people have about their imaginary right to not be filmed in public. Whether it's by the government or by other private people.
Manual D, the flock system is still very new. Why are you confident a private companies monetization of public whereabouts will stay legal? There hasent really been any precedent set on this. And the system is wildly unpopular In the public eye?
In case you didn't read it, the 9th circuit upheld the use of Flock cameras. The precedence is as high as it gets, short of a supreme Court decision: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48636421
You're being exposed to a very specific group of people when you read Hacker News or Reddit. Plenty of people are happy to have Flock cameras in their neighborhood on account of the improved ability to investigate crime.
Re: Flock-Powered Police Chiefs Stalking Women Shows Why Warrants Are Needed
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
To the contrary, little of what Flock does would be restricted by the 4th amendment. The cameras are in public, and neither the government nor individual citizens need authorization to film people in public. Many Flock cameras are also privately owned, too.
All flock cameras are privately owned, by flock. They install them at a charge per the jurisdiction that orders them and pays the subscription costs… those subscription fees allow Mr Local Law Abuser to lookup any license plate it has read, when, where, with a picture of the vehicle. https://deflock.org You’d be surprised how many there are.
The point is, some of flock's customers are private businesses. E.g. the Home Depot by me uses them. No amount of pressure by voters can take those cameras down.
Re: Flock-Powered Police Chiefs Stalking Women Shows Why Warrants Are Needed
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Carpenter decision was about the US government compelling mobile data providers to hand over private use information. It's really not relevant to flock. That's why the 9th Circuit decided that automated license plate readers don't need a warrant. A cop and stand at an intersection and write down license plate numbers without a warrant. A device can do the same.
>A cop and stand at an intersection and write down license plate numbers without a warrant. I dont believe you think the police force could replicate the injest of information these systems allow do you?
If the city hires enough police officers, yes. It'd almost certainly require an unfathomably large budget, but it's not impossible.
The point is, the plain view doctrine means the police don't need a warrant to record observation that are in plain view. The licence plates of cars on the street are in plain view.
I really don't understand how people got this idea in their head that their license plates are private information . How do red light cameras identify cars? How does parking enforcement work? By recording people's license plates. The whole reason why we mandate that cars display license plates to is to facilitate identifying vehicles.
Re: Flock-Powered Police Chiefs Stalking Women Shows Why Warrants Are Needed
#146No it shows why mass surveillance systems should be outlawed.
Re: Flock-Powered Police Chiefs Stalking Women Shows Why Warrants Are Needed
#147Remember that scene from "Men in Black" where K watches surveillance video feed of his ex? In the movie it was meant to be wistful and cute, I guess. Now that such systems are getting closer to reality, you realize the potential for abuse in enormous.
More like his widow than his ex - he was unable to ever contact her, which is what made it cute rather than creepy.
Re: Flock-Powered Police Chiefs Stalking Women Shows Why Warrants Are Needed
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cops can politely ask owners of private cameras for access for things like murder investigation. If the polite answer is no (most people will say yes), they can go to court for a subpoena. This has happened for a long time. This is how it should work. If the cops are too lazy or chicken to ask a judge while investigating a murder, they don't deserve the footage.
Right and what if lots of crime happens in a place where there are not many businesses? Hardly an implausible scenario given that crime is bad for business. The city can set up its own camera for its own use. Is that really that wild of a proposal?
While I would oppose a city setting up CCTV to be used the way Flock is used - that would be orders of magnitude less bad than Flock.
As it is, you can assume that at the very least, every time your vehicle has passed one of the >100k Flock cameras, there's a database entry and a photo that will never, ever be deleted. Your full travel history from this point forward is available for a nominal fee, and without any regard for your privacy.
Re: Flock-Powered Police Chiefs Stalking Women Shows Why Warrants Are Needed
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Yes, ballots are anonymous. But how would Flock cameras somehow de-anonymize votes? I had assumed you were referring to tracking people driving to polling stations to discover who voted - not how they voted. Because how on earth would automated license plate readers somehow de-anonymize individual ballots? Please do explain what you meant by that. And do explain the "idiocy" of the rest of my comment. Do you actually…
Well, in my precinct I'd estimate there are ~20 people at the polls to vote at any given time. Given the timestamp of a ballot, there are maybe 50 people it could have possibly been.
That's more than enough information to correlate voting behavior after a couple of election cycles with a high degree of confidence.
Oh, and ballots aren't just for one race generally. By looking at what races that ballot voted in and a list of people present, there's a very good chance you'd be able to narrow it down to an individual in a single visit.
Re: Flock-Powered Police Chiefs Stalking Women Shows Why Warrants Are Needed
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right and what if lots of crime happens in a place where there are not many businesses? Hardly an implausible scenario given that crime is bad for business. The city can set up its own camera for its own use. Is that really that wild of a proposal?
While I would oppose a city setting up CCTV to be used the way Flock is used - that would be orders of magnitude less bad than Flock. As it is, you can assume that at the very least, every time your vehicle has passed one of the >100k Flock cameras, there's a database entry and a photo that will never, ever be deleted. Your full travel history from this point forward is available for a nominal fee, and without any re…
Who says the city's retention period would be smaller than Flock?
Furthermore, do you realize that you're free to photograph people in public and sell those images, no permission required: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nussenzweig_v._DiCorcia
People seem to struggle to wrap their head around the fact that privacy laws don't prevent people from recording them in public. You can be recorded at any time in public, by the government or another private person.