There is another middle option that I would have liked to see the author discuss: requiring either a case number or a CAD ID, instead of a "search reason". In my conversations with law enforcement (mostly at management level, chiefs of police), all of them have had reasonable-sounding objections to a warrant requirement for a search, but zero of them have been able to come up with a reason why a case-or-CAD ID requir…
Yeah but that is the exact purpose of the warrant. It's suppose to add friction so you can't do this exact thing, even if it's useful and faster not to.
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…
They are saying that a search of the videos created by the cameras should require a warrant, which is different from saying that a warrant is required to record in public spaces
There's nothing stopping you from buying an LPR and publishing the data. Also, with a PI license, you (might) be able to access the nationwide Nlets LPR Index. https://nlets.org/resources/blog/nlets-news-our-nationwide-l...
There are actually laws against individuals doing this in a number of states.
I would be very interested to see how these laws deal with camera systems that do not do ALPR. At work, we had a system that would scrape offline video and pull faces, plates, etc. and identify them and that system is over 15 years old. No AI, no ALPR.
Then it should be legal for citizens to deploy their own network that allows anybody to track any license plate?
Of course? We already have private entities doing this today. Private toll road operators such as United Bridge Partners already administers camera systems that collect license plates for toll payments. I would assume parking lot operators also do this, and private citizens could create a nonprofit network too if they wanted. Are you suggesting that people couldn’t do that for some reason?
The challenge here is to ensure that any controls that apply to law enforcement operating their own hardware for this purpose would also apply to them obtaining this information from a third party. We don't need the mayor setting up "Totally Not The Cops, LLC" that collects this data and "sells" it to his police department to bypass warrant requirements.
A nationwide APB is not an investigative activity.
Neither is writing down license plates.
Yes it is.
Non-investigating would be tasks like:
- counting the number of vehicles going by
- radar’ing every car to produce a report on how many people are speeding and how much
- checking all licence plates for valid registrations to produce a report on what percentage of cars have expired tags on the road.
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…
> A difference in degree (of usefulness and speed), not in kind.
IIUC courts have signaled in several cases that this distinction matters to them, which is good, because it's such a vast difference in degree that it arguably does become a difference in kind.
Police require a warrant to attach a GPS tracker to your car, or to directly obtain your cell phone location records. Why should access to networked ALPRs that compile an equivalently granular record of your movements be treated any differently? IIUC it was this exact line of reasoning ("detailed, encyclopedic, and effortlessly compiled" data equivalent to GPS tracking, for which a precedent had already been established) that supported the decision that now requires warrants for cell phone data (in Carpenter v. United States). Extending the same logic to networked ALPR data would seem obvious if we had the same SCOTUS.
It seems very easy. Always on spy camera installed for the express purpose of dragnet surveillance? Illegal. Film child’s baseball game? Legal. I find this attitude I find kind of tiring. Gosh it’s just sooo hard to figure out the difference between Flock Safety and Big Bill’s Little League Sports Photography. It’s actually very straightforward to determine the difference between these two things. So easy, an idiot c…
While I do agree it's tiring and agree with your point I think the issue is finding the exact point to draw the line. It's easy to differentiate the two ends.
I think the operative difference here is that in the case of the little league photography, the cameras are not fixed in place, are temporary, and are not set up with the intent to capture the identity and actions of everyone in the background. Fixed-installation cameras are permanent, do attempt to capture all possible subjects in its frame, and have an alternate, obvious intent to identify them all. I don't think a Private investigator, paparazzi, or parked police cruiser on a stakeout represent anywhere near the same practical or legal problems as fixed, always-on surveillance cameras. As such, this seems to me like a good place to draw the line.
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…
There is another middle option that I would have liked to see the author discuss: requiring either a case number or a CAD ID, instead of a "search reason". In my conversations with law enforcement (mostly at management level, chiefs of police), all of them have had reasonable-sounding objections to a warrant requirement for a search, but zero of them have been able to come up with a reason why a case-or-CAD ID requir…
This is already the current status quo on paper. I bet the majority of the cases IJ identified of mis-use the PDs already had this policy. (That is the same standard when you do a background criminal history check in New York, need to put in a case number, FYI.)
I did not want to go into too many technical details on the post -- I think you could do an AI audit at the point in time of the search query to prevent people putting in junk cases. That said I believe there will always need to be third party audits at a minimum.
Part of the issue is policies on paper are not effectively enforced. So people saying "just have policy X to prevent abuse" is a non-answer.
I wrote the post mainly because people arguing for limited data retention I think is bad for both sides -- it neither protects civil liberties and simultaneously makes it harder for long term criminal investigations.
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. There is already plenty of precedent in existing laws that 'automated' is a distinction that matters. E…
IE self defense, traps, and automatic weapons. You can't automate the trigger pull even in a state with a strong castle doctrine. There needs to be a human in the loop. I think even remotely operated guns move towards the "trap" end of the trigger.