Live data from Hacker News

License plate reader searches should require a warrant

andrewpwheeler.com

21–30 of 423 posts

Re: License plate reader searches should require a warrant

#21
Good article. It's a sober look at where we are at.

We lost a lot of strong privacy rights we had with landlines when we shifted to cell phones.

We're actually slowly creeping into pre-crime territory. You could have AI searching for possible pre-crime candidates based on unknown identity in the area, disparate pattern to usually movements, etc.

Re: License plate reader searches should require a warrant

#23
post #18
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A difference of a sufficient degree becomes a difference in kind, because whatever the internal justifications, the external implications of the system for society change drastically.

100% this. I wish more techies could understand this. That same logic underlies the 'scanning books and music and movies without permission is just like a student / artist / filmmaker learning'. Differences in technology and information access elicit different outcomes, different processes and entail radically different consequences for society.

[dead]

Re: License plate reader searches should require a warrant

#24
post #3

Either it needs a warrant or it’s fully open and people can start creating websites showing the movements of local politicians. This middle ground that municipalities try to carve out where it’s fully open to police without a warrant but not subject to FOIL laws doesn’t appear tenable for much longer. There’s been too many cases of police officers stalking exes, poking around the data for fun and such so it’s clear p…

I don't understand why a police cruiser can sit in a public space (or even a private one) and write down licence plates and descriptions of passers-by with pen and paper, or record everything around them with dashcams and bodycams for later use, but when it comes to cameras on a pole this would require a warrant. Going back through police officers' notes or cruiser dash cam videos and tracking a car's movements by it…

Police already don’t need warrants to gather video footage from homes and businesses. It certainly isn’t ineffective or else they wouldn’t do it, but everybody knows how effective video footage is. The difference for most does seem to be that it doesn’t cost man hours. We have had cities in the USA with 10k+ cameras in public spaces for years now without much fanfare.

Re: License plate reader searches should require a warrant

#25
post #3

Either it needs a warrant or it’s fully open and people can start creating websites showing the movements of local politicians. This middle ground that municipalities try to carve out where it’s fully open to police without a warrant but not subject to FOIL laws doesn’t appear tenable for much longer. There’s been too many cases of police officers stalking exes, poking around the data for fun and such so it’s clear p…

I don't understand why a police cruiser can sit in a public space (or even a private one) and write down licence plates and descriptions of passers-by with pen and paper, or record everything around them with dashcams and bodycams for later use, but when it comes to cameras on a pole this would require a warrant. Going back through police officers' notes or cruiser dash cam videos and tracking a car's movements by it…

As someone who strongly opposes flock cameras...

This is a huge problem that people will try to sweep under the rug or hand wave away with wording like "It's the scale the matters".

Ideally, laws need to be written like programs are, where fundamental rules of the system are derived and programmatically put into action. So words like "scale" mean nothing. "I need the variable to go negative when the scale is large". Most programmers here will immediately snag on "scale" not being a hard value.

So what we actually need is a redefining of the fundamental rules, and well, that is very challenging to do such that it's still legal to walk around an record everything in public, but not legal to passively record everything in public all the time. How do we solidly and unambiguously differentiate a cops dashcam, from a police camera on a portable base station, from a flock camera on a corner to a private business with a security came to a firestation with a security camera.

Legally it's a very challenging problem to create a "programmatic differentiation" from the kind of camera use we want, and the kind we don't want.

Re: License plate reader searches should require a warrant

#26
post #3

Either it needs a warrant or it’s fully open and people can start creating websites showing the movements of local politicians. This middle ground that municipalities try to carve out where it’s fully open to police without a warrant but not subject to FOIL laws doesn’t appear tenable for much longer. There’s been too many cases of police officers stalking exes, poking around the data for fun and such so it’s clear p…

I don't understand why a police cruiser can sit in a public space (or even a private one) and write down licence plates and descriptions of passers-by with pen and paper, or record everything around them with dashcams and bodycams for later use, but when it comes to cameras on a pole this would require a warrant. Going back through police officers' notes or cruiser dash cam videos and tracking a car's movements by it…

Have you met cops? They are not able to sit still or write things down. You expect too much of them.

Re: License plate reader searches should require a warrant

#27
I don't like the article's tone of inevitability:

> I think cameras in all public spaces are going to happen. Imagine Ring comes out with a nicer camera system for homeowners....

Indiscriminately filming people in public places is illegal some places, e.g. Germany. Allowing the creation of large networks of cameras surveilling public places is a choice.

Re: License plate reader searches should require a warrant

#29
post #3

Either it needs a warrant or it’s fully open and people can start creating websites showing the movements of local politicians. This middle ground that municipalities try to carve out where it’s fully open to police without a warrant but not subject to FOIL laws doesn’t appear tenable for much longer. There’s been too many cases of police officers stalking exes, poking around the data for fun and such so it’s clear p…

I don't understand why a police cruiser can sit in a public space (or even a private one) and write down licence plates and descriptions of passers-by with pen and paper, or record everything around them with dashcams and bodycams for later use, but when it comes to cameras on a pole this would require a warrant. Going back through police officers' notes or cruiser dash cam videos and tracking a car's movements by it…

> I don't understand why a police cruiser can sit in a public space (or even a private one) and write down licence plates and descriptions of passers-by with pen and paper, or record everything around them with dashcams and bodycams for later use, but when it comes to cameras on a pole this would require a warrant.

Scale actually matters. Things that are generally OK at a small scale become problematic at larger scales. A single police cruiser writing down license plates isn't able to track you in the same way a huge surveillance network is, and the opportunities for abuse are much lower.

Re: License plate reader searches should require a warrant

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why a police cruiser can sit in a public space (or even a private one) and write down licence plates and descriptions of passers-by with pen and paper, or record everything around them with dashcams and bodycams for later use, but when it comes to cameras on a pole this would require a warrant. Going back through police officers' notes or cruiser dash cam videos and tracking a car's movements by it…

Police already don’t need warrants to gather video footage from homes and businesses. It certainly isn’t ineffective or else they wouldn’t do it, but everybody knows how effective video footage is. The difference for most does seem to be that it doesn’t cost man hours. We have had cities in the USA with 10k+ cameras in public spaces for years now without much fanfare.

They definitely need warrants, but 99% of the time, people/businesses voluntarily hand it over. In fact they do it enthusiastically and even bring it to police without them even asking.

"We believe your camera captured the guy who robbed your neighbor, can we see the footage". Virtually everyone says yes to this.

Post reply on HN