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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

#91

Post by mlsu »

There is a concept in safety called the hierarchy of hazard controls. There is a ranking of hazard mitigations from most to least effective.

1) remove the hazard

2) replace the hazard with something less hazardous

3) isolate the hazard (guards, cages etc)

4) administrative controls (procedures, training, warning, etc)

5) PPE

Implementing some kind of judicial review for these panopticons is something like 4) in the hierarchy. It would be a good thing to have, but we can go far further. Why do we need this shit? Oh what so someone’s car doesn’t get stolen a few times per year? I think my values are in line with the founding fathers and most Americans when I say I would gladly give up a little bit of safety to not have a spy camera trained on me 24/7.

I would like more removal and less procedural controls. The cops cannot abuse a system that does not exist.

Re: License plate reader searches should require a warrant

#92

Post by vonneumannstan »

kentm wrote: post #29
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…

> 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…

>Scale actually matters

Is this actually born out in Court Cases? Warrantless Surveillance by NSA seems to be blanket legal for example.

Re: License plate reader searches should require a warrant

#93

Post by thewebguyd »

Zak wrote: post #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.

It's a bit more of a gray area in the US, where expectations of privacy in public spaces has been ruled against many times over. When in a public space, you are allowed to film or photograph whomever you want. This likewise extends into private property, where you set the rules of your own property, and also is the only place where you have an expectation of privacy.

Re: License plate reader searches should require a warrant

#94

Post by woodrowbarlow »

jameshart wrote: post #10
malwrar wrote: post #2

It frustrates me when people call them license plate readers. I guess you need to call them something, but they are general-purpose internet connected cameras. They will do whatever their firmware tells them to do, and could be reprogrammed at any time by anyone with access. No one expected doorbell cameras to join a mass surveillance network, but later the manufacturers added that feature. Why do we treat these came…

This amounts to an argument against ever using general purpose computing devices to accomplish anything. You could say the same about literally any privately operated device. ‘I don’t know why they call these things cell towers. They do whatever they are programmed to and can be reprogrammed by anyone with access’ Heck the same applies to non electronic things too ‘why do they call it a house? It’s a general purpose…

i see it more like an argument against increasingly networked solutions. red-light cameras used to just upload when an incident occurred (or maybe required routine physical downloading?). the object itself did one thing. now it's cheap to feed continuous live feeds to a centralized processor... and once it's there, it's cheap to do a lot more.

Re: License plate reader searches should require a warrant

#95

Post by Xirdus »

nearlyepic wrote: post #52
WarmWash wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".…

You realize the law can just make shit up, right? It’s very easy to make a law that says “ALPR data needs a warrant” without impacting the ability of people to record in public. You just need to clearly define ALPR, which isn’t hard.

You don't even need to define it - you can half-ass it and rely on courts to clarify the edge cases. That's how the vast majority of laws work.

Re: License plate reader searches should require a warrant

#96

Post by rileymat2 »

t-3 wrote: post #78
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…

It's not about scale, it's about oversight. A warrant puts a lock on the data until the request is approved. Leaving it wide open is the reason we have constant news stories about police being arrested for stalking people. Nobody wants to limit the police's ability to investigate crimes, but we do want them to use their power to investigate crimes, not to stalk their baby mama, crush, rival, etc. I fully understand a…

> Nobody wants to limit the police's ability to investigate crimes.

This is not true of privacy advocates, they do want to limit the ability to fish for circumstantial evidence that targets innocent people and causes suspicion.

Re: License plate reader searches should require a warrant

#97

Post by drtz »

malwrar wrote: post #2

It frustrates me when people call them license plate readers. I guess you need to call them something, but they are general-purpose internet connected cameras. They will do whatever their firmware tells them to do, and could be reprogrammed at any time by anyone with access. No one expected doorbell cameras to join a mass surveillance network, but later the manufacturers added that feature. Why do we treat these came…

"Autonomous dragnet surveillance cameras" wasn't as popular with the focus groups.

> No one expected doorbell cameras to join a mass surveillance network

Doorbell cameras were at least for individual security, initially. There's no attempt being made to market Flock as anything but mass surveillance. Surely we all expect them or their successors to be detecting peoples' faces, walking gates, and who-knows-what-else in the near future.

Re: License plate reader searches should require a warrant

#98

Post by baby_souffle »

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.

I actually have set up a few! On my property, not every major intersection in town, though.

Re: License plate reader searches should require a warrant

#99

Post by gruez »

convolvatron wrote: post #90
gruez wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So by that logic, nation-wide ABPs are also illegal, because a single person can't rally the entire country's law enforcement to find someone?

Re: License plate reader searches should require a warrant

#100

Post by cmiles8 »

dave78 wrote: post #67
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.

Can I submit a FOIA request to get all the plate reads from Flock for my town's mayor or police chief (their private vehicles) so that I can create a map of where they go and share it online? I genuinely don't know the answer as I've not tried, but from things I've read I'm pretty sure they will not provide this. And that's the point - why can a police officer search the database for any plate they feel like but the…

They will generally deny you access, but they will access it freely themselves despite this being data collected on public streets. That’s the disparity at issue. However there’s no law from you putting up your own camera, pointing it at a public street and publishing the details of every car that drives past and highlighting any interesting once’s, like the mayor, police chief, etc.

I suspect when there’s been a few cases of that sort of thing happening the attitude of local politicians towards these cameras will change quite quickly.

I generally thing this data is a good thing, provided it’s locked behind solid 4th amendment protections.

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