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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

#291

Post by sbuttgereit »

speak_plainly wrote: post #68

A license plate is already publicly displayed information (and is in most jurisdictions not private property), and you're operating in a public space. I know it's unpopular but I went from not supporting these sorts of systems to embracing them after seeing the positive effects in China. For crimes that depend on anonymity, theft, assault, hit-and-runs, vandalism, illegal parking, etc., surveillance changes the calcu…

> I know it's unpopular but I went from not supporting these sorts of systems to embracing them after seeing the positive effects in China.

Any police state can absolutely achieve a low rate of crime: both those crimes that even those of us that embrace individual rights want to see stopped but also those crimes that us liberal types would consider exercise of rights.... but are definitely crimes in China.

The problem is, you can't stop the real, mutually agreed crime with tools like this without endangering the elimination of legitimate individual rights.

In more liberal societies, this means we have real barriers for evidence collection and usage which absolutely let some universally recognized bad guys get away... because those barriers help ensure that the law doesn't become a tool against the merely politically inconvenient opposition members who properly should be able to speak out against the powerful.

If you had a perfectly objective government filled with dispassionate people dedicated to their legitimate role of protecting the rights of the citizenry... perhaps there wouldn't be any issue. But when you have people that decide to turn their opponents into criminals only because of their opposition or questionable loyalty.... No thank you... you can stay in China if that's the kind of society you're willing to accept.

Re: License plate reader searches should require a warrant

#292

Post by woodrowbarlow »

jameshart wrote: post #181
woodrowbarlow wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Okay so is the argument that if a city wants to install red light cameras they must install analog film based systems because if they install a CCD camera with a raspberry pi and a network connection they could use it for other purposes? Obviously the electronic networked solution is going to be cheaper and easier to operate. It would be insanely wasteful to force government organizations to use expensive cumbersome…

the argument is that they should be called traffic surveillance cameras.

for the record: whatever they're called, and in fact even if they just POSTed txt license plate numbers, i'd still be opposed because they're collecting info about people who've done nothing wrong (unlike red light cameras).

Re: License plate reader searches should require a warrant

#293

Post by fluidcruft »

estearum wrote: post #265
fluidcruft wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People either have privacy in public or they do not, but I don't know anyone who seriously claims that there's an expectation of privacy on public roads. What freedom are you talking about?

This is actually not how the law works. Nice try though!

Convincing argument vs plain view doctrine.

Re: License plate reader searches should require a warrant

#294

Post by TitaRusell »

kbrannigan wrote: post #228
abirch wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we simply mandated that everyone install an app on their phone so that the government can track them scales very well. The people without the app would probably be criminals,

Define criminal ? In the USA Under laws like the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and 1850, an enslaved human who escaped was considered a criminal. Sheltering humans running away from slavery was also a crime . It was illegal for black Americans to learn to read and write. Seeking education made them a criminal. Buying or selling a beer made you a criminal during prohibition. Do you see how easy it is to make someone a cr…

That's why you need to go out and vote against the Christian conservatives. Lest you wake up one day in Gilead.

Re: License plate reader searches should require a warrant

#295

Post by throwway120385 »

fluidcruft wrote: post #175
autoexec wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spying on the American public shouldn't be cheap or efficient. We shouldn't abandon our freedom to make the fearful feel better.

People either have privacy in public or they do not, but I don't know anyone who seriously claims that there's an expectation of privacy on public roads. What freedom are you talking about?

Great! Can you send me the link to your personal bodycam so I can watch you at all times while you're out of the house?

Re: License plate reader searches should require a warrant

#296

Post by henryaj »

Any idea why this is so much less acceptable to people in the US than in the UK? In the UK we've had ANPR for more than twenty years and AFAICT there's no mass controversy surrounding it. It catches people with no licence, no insurance, who are wanted in various serious crimes. I'm surprised at the difference in attitude.

(I am aware that the UK has a less-than-stellar privacy track record... but nonetheless it's curious that for this particular technology, as opposed to the Online Safety Act, there's such a difference.)

Re: License plate reader searches should require a warrant

#298

Post by Glyptodon »

I think we have the ability to get rid of license plates altogether and restore some privacy. It's not like license plates stop LEOs from shooting people, like when they were chasing Dornier and unloaded on a Blue Toyota Tacoma when they knew his vehicle was a Grey Nissan Titan.

Re: License plate reader searches should require a warrant

#300

Post by phil21 »

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…

> No one expected doorbell cameras to join a mass surveillance network, but later the manufacturers added that feature.

Plenty of people did? That was obviously one of the end goals for cloud connected devices pushing recordings to a remote side for processing and storage. Especially when stuff like facial recognition was implemented server side.

I would be highly surprised if this was not pitched in the first internal product meeting.

While I give some grace to the regular population on this topic - anyone posting on HN should have trivially seen this outcome as not only likely, but nearly written in stone. Even if all your imagination captured was “secret NSA warrant” it would be one of the first risks you’d imagine for such a product.

It was obvious that this was the final outcome even back when Facebook first implemented tagging friends in photos before image recognition got cheap and good enough to go back and time and correlate the social graphs of everyone.

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