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License plate reader searches should require a warrant

andrewpwheeler.com

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Re: License plate reader searches should require a warrant

#81

Post by jmalicki »

cmiles8 wrote: post #15
kspacewalk2 wrote: post #6

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…

But you can generally FOIL records of this. Want body cam footage of what the officer was doing, you can generally get that. Want the video footage from their dash cam while sitting there, you can generally get that. However municipalities treat the data from these license plate cameras like a state secret. That disparity is largely what’s at issue here.

When you FOIA body cams that will often redact the faces of other individuals.

Likewise I would expect that the license plates read be redacted. It makes sense to protect it since you are exposing members of the public, not the government.

Once you redact license plate numbers, what is left of substance in the FOIA request?

Re: License plate reader searches should require a warrant

#82

Post by fluidcruft »

cmiles8 wrote: 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…

How is it different from putting out an all-points bulletin? Basically doesn't it just expand the size of the police force and make their eyeballs on the road more accurate?

Re: License plate reader searches should require a warrant

#83

Post by GuinansEyebrows »

> Imagine Ring comes out with a nicer camera system for homeowners that has more comprehensive views around your house and is just as cheap. And we will ultimately be safer for it.

I wonder if people who feel this way will feel safer? In this scenario, you have a Ring camera system observing your entire property. Do you feel safer if someone comes onto your property and triggers an alarm? What if it turns out it's just a kid coming over to grab a stray frisbee? What if your neighbor noticed something needed a quick fix (say you left a can of paint open or something similarly benign) and wanted help in a neighborly way without first checking to see if you were home?

I guess we just take for granted that we live in a low-trust society. But we take that for granted at our peril, because the fear of a low-trust society is actively being exploited by people who want to sell individuals, businesses and municipalities the means to further erode that trust.

Re: License plate reader searches should require a warrant

#84

Post by veec_cas_tant »

cmiles8 wrote: post #53
veec_cas_tant wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 100% need a warrant if the owner of such footage doesn’t want to voluntarily hand it over. Most people generally voluntarily help out when it’s clear the footage is of value, often calling the police proactively to hand over footage. But if they don’t want to release the footage then they’re under no obligation to do so without a court order.

They ask and everybody turns the footage over. They need nothing at all to ask for the footage, it just takes a large amount of man hours and ends up producing grainy, low-res footage. Everybody knows how important video footage is, so the real issue does seem to be that Flock makes it too easy?

Re: License plate reader searches should require a warrant

#85

Post by falsemyrmidon »

eatsyourtacos wrote: post #44
kentm wrote: post #29

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. Scale actually matters. Things that are generally OK at a small scale become problematic at larger scal…

But then scale doesn't actually matter. If you have a problem with something that "everyone does" then you should have a problem with something only a few people do.

There hasn't been an explicit ruling from the supreme Court that applies here, but there are indications that they would have ruled that the fourth amendment applied. They've explicitly avoided closing the door on that possibility.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v.Jones(2012)

> Also left unanswered was the broader question surrounding the privacy implications of a warrantless use of GPS data without a physical intrusion – as might occur, for example, with the electronic collection of GPS data from wireless service providers or factory-installed vehicle tracking and navigation services.[27] The Court left these matters to be decided in some future case, saying, "It may be that achieving the same result through electronic means, without an accompanying trespass, is an unconstitutional invasion of privacy, but the present case does not require us to answer that question."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_v._United_States

> Ultimately, in Carpenter the court determined that the third-party doctrine could not be extended to historical cell site location information (CSLI). Instead, the Court compared "detailed, encyclopedic, and effortlessly compiled" CSLI records to the GPS information at issue in United States v. Jones, recognizing that both forms of data accord the government the ability to track individuals' past movements.[24] Furthermore, the Court noted that CSLI could pose even greater privacy risks than GPS data, as the prevalence of cellphones could accord the government "near perfect surveillance" of an individual's movements. Accordingly, the Court ruled that, under the Fourth Amendment, the government must obtain a search warrant in order to access historical CSLI records.[1]

Of course there are no guarantees on how they'd rule today, but in the past they've ruled that scale and ease of access and compilation are significant enough to mean that fourth amendment protections should apply.

Re: License plate reader searches should require a warrant

#86

Post by TehCorwiz »

WarmWash wrote: post #47
delichon wrote: post #14

This is a hole in the Constitution that would be better patched, at least with statute, better with an amendment. The fourth amendment says The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects... Who is "their" here? In terms of property rights it's the people who own those digital "papers". The individuals who that data is about do no maintain or control that data, and could not destroy…

These cameras are in public, where expectation of privacy has been ruled against a zillion times. Go against this, and filming your kids baseball game becomes a legal nightmare.

Haven't stalking and surveillance always had a different interpretation despite mostly taking place in public?

Re: License plate reader searches should require a warrant

#87

Post by skeeter2020 »

kspacewalk2 wrote: post #6
cmiles8 wrote: 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…

If your police force installed officers in parked cruisers at every intersection to record license plate numbers and then digitized that information so you can build up a dossier of times and locations for a given individual without probable cause that would be both illegal and a huge waste of resources. ALPR just do it at scale so it's cheaper; still illegal without cause.

Re: License plate reader searches should require a warrant

#88

Post by Xirdus »

JohnFen wrote: post #48
kspacewalk2 wrote: post #6

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…

If the police stationed officers constantly at major intersections doing that, the outcry would be no less than having cameras do it. Also, if it's the police, at least they're part of the community and people can monitor and have an effect on what they do. When it's a private company, none of that is true.

If it's the police in the streets, people can monitor and have an effect on what they do. When it's the police at a computer inside a secure building, none of that is true.

Re: License plate reader searches should require a warrant

#89

Post by cmiles8 »

jmalicki wrote: post #81
cmiles8 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you can generally FOIL records of this. Want body cam footage of what the officer was doing, you can generally get that. Want the video footage from their dash cam while sitting there, you can generally get that. However municipalities treat the data from these license plate cameras like a state secret. That disparity is largely what’s at issue here.

When you FOIA body cams that will often redact the faces of other individuals. Likewise I would expect that the license plates read be redacted. It makes sense to protect it since you are exposing members of the public, not the government. Once you redact license plate numbers, what is left of substance in the FOIA request?

Generally they don’t redact that. They may redact private details not publicly visible (like someone stating a phone number) but if it’s public visible it’s generally not redacted.

Re: License plate reader searches should require a warrant

#90

Post by convolvatron »

gruez wrote: post #59
neodymiumphish wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Former law enforcement officer here. I can say that when we conducted surveillance, we weren't allowed to use equipment that wasn't common for normal people to use. So for example, I couldn't use some sort of long-distance microphone to overhear a conversation between two people in public because a normal person wouldn't have that same type of technology. I think this applies in this context to say that a cop just sc…

That's not a good argument against ALPRs because citizens can theoretically set up an ALPRs too.

a single person can't set up a fine-grained nationwide network of cameras with a unified search interface that lets one track everyones daily movements.
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