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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

#371
post #359
post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just for my own epistemic hygiene, would you mind clarifying your familiarity with applying for and receiving a similar warrant and the duration you envision when you say "wouldn't take a long time"? Very reasonable not to, of course, but it helps me adjust my understanding of things. And yes, if a warrant is a 10 min process at p95 from call receipt to warrant acceptance then that certainly allows for things like "t…

With electronic warrant systems and on-call judges, it can be 15 minutes or less, but that's typically for the simplest cases (e.g. DUI blood draw). However, given how non-seriously they take things currently I have little reason to believe "let me search Flock for this car reported stolen for the next week" wouldn't be a rubber stamp.

If warrant requests are guaranteed accepted or rejected in tJust to clarify, the timelines you describe are from experience, knowledge, or theorycrafting?

Re: License plate reader searches should require a warrant

#372

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 cur…

>Any idea why this is so much less acceptable to people in the US than in the UK?

The US had only about a hundred years to get used to bending over and taking it from a government that doesn't really represent the people whereas the British have just shy of a thousand. So of course the US is more uppity.

Re: License plate reader searches should require a warrant

#373

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 cur…

I was just reading a detective novel set in Michigan..apparently in that state at least, private investigators can look up plates just by calling the Sec of State's office and giving their badge number. Seems like it wouldn't take much to get a company designated in a similar way.

Re: License plate reader searches should require a warrant

#374

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".…

Looking at the sentiment of those around me about public recordings (in this case it was street photography), I would not be surprised if there was a push soon to ban all public recordings. At least, the sharing or usage of those recordings. It seems many people feel it limits what I would consider "freedom of impermanence", or the concept that as an ordinary individual nearly every action or mistake you make will no…

The most private people I know would not ban all public recordings or to share all public recordings. They would ban with some exceptions to share recordings of people without their consent. Some would ban to keep recordings without consent. And they would not ban this if street photographers or so respected other people.

> But if this were law, so too goes the guy I saw in a park fire spinning,

He would have been there without you seemingly. Everyone who saw him there would have seen him. You meant your recording?

> so too goes the joy I captured on a strangers face at seeing a beautiful chandelier,

They would have seen the chandelier and felt joy without you seemingly. You meant your recording?

Did you ask to send them a copy? Did you ask to keep it? Did you ask to share it?

> and so too goes the countless photos of nature that happen to have people in the background.

A recording of a person and a recording of nature which happens to have people in the background are different. And some countries understood this when they made their laws.

Re: License plate reader searches should require a warrant

#375

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 cur…

It's mass surveillance that people can feel. Combined with ICE using it. Our police overlords are not so polite. In the UK there's severe limitations on freedom of speech, which would never be accepted in the US. The countries have very different values.

> In the UK there's severe limitations on freedom of speech

Sure, but those are just as controversial here as in the US, in a way that ANPR is a non-issue.

Re: License plate reader searches should require a warrant

#376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should read SCOTUS opinions instead of forming beliefs based on media tropes, duh.

I’d like it if you provided relevant quotes from these opinions that support your assertions. It’s not very persuasive otherwise. These cases are highly nuanced. Also, you’re being kind of a dick. Knock it off.

> I’d like it if you provided relevant quotes from these opinions that support your assertions... These cases are highly nuanced.

That nuance is why it's worth reading the entire opinion.

Anyway here you go:

> GPS monitoring generates a precise, comprehensive record of a person’s public movements that reflects a wealth of detail about her familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations. See, e.g., People v. Weaver, 12 N.Y.3d 433, 441–442, 909 N.E.2d 1195, 1199 (2009) (“Disclosed in [GPS] data . . . will be trips the indisputably private nature of which takes little imagination to conjure: trips to the psychiatrist, the plastic surgeon, the abortion clinic, the AIDS treatment center, the strip club, the criminal defense attorney, the by-the-hour motel, the union meeting, the mosque, synagogue or church, the gay bar and on and on”). The Government can store such records and efficiently mine them for information years into the future. Pineda-Moreno, 617 F. 3d, at 1124 (opinion of Kozinski, C. J.). And because GPS monitoring is cheap in comparison to conventional surveillance techniques and, by design, proceeds surreptitiously, it evades the ordinary checks that constrain abusive law enforcement practices: “limited police resources and community hostility.” Illinois v. Lidster, 540 U.S. 419, 426 (2004).

> Awareness that the Government may be watching chills associational and expressive freedoms. And the Government’s unrestrained power to assemble data that reveal private aspects of identity is susceptible to abuse. The net result is that GPS monitoring—by making available at a relatively low cost such a substantial quantum of intimate information about any person whom the Government, in its unfettered discretion, chooses to track—may “alter the relationship between citizen and government in a way that is inimical to democratic society.” United States v. Cuevas-Perez, 640 F.3d 272, 285 (CA7 2011) (Flaum, J., concurring).

> I would take these attributes of GPS monitoring into account when considering the existence of a reasonable societal expectation of privacy in the sum of one’s public movements. I would ask whether people reasonably expect that their movements will be recorded and aggregated in a manner that enables the Government to ascertain, more or less at will, their political and religious beliefs, sexual habits, and so on. I do not regard as dispositive the fact that the Government might obtain the fruits of GPS monitoring through lawful conventional surveillance techniques. See Kyllo, 533 U. S., at 35, n. 2; ante, at 11 (leaving open the possibility that duplicating traditional surveillance “through electronic means, without an accompanying trespass, is an unconstitutional invasion of privacy”). I would also consider the appropriateness of entrusting to the Executive, in the absence of any oversight from a coordinate branch, a tool so amenable to misuse, especially in light of the Fourth Amendment’s goal to curb arbitrary exercises of police power to and prevent “a too permeating police surveillance,” United States v. Di Re, 332 U.S. 581, 595 (1948).[1]*

=======

Now the question is: is this characterization true only of GPS monitoring? Or is it also true of a sufficiently broad network for ALPRs? The answer of course is the latter.

Here, Sotomayor + 4 other Justices are saying it's actually not as simple as Fluidcruft's "you're in public so plain view doctrine answers it"

Re: License plate reader searches should require a warrant

#377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that’s a very different concern - your take is more ‘governments shouldn’t deploy these things because they are incompetent’ whereas the original concern seemed to be ‘governments shouldn’t deploy these things because they are malicious’. Neither philosophy seems to have a good limiting principle for what they mean governments should be allowed to do to efficiently enforce traffic law

Don’t get me wrong, governments putting these things up for one purpose and then using them for another (my read on your use of “malicious”) is a major concern I have. It is broader than that though, and is the distinction I sought to capture with “anyone with access” in my original post. They are connected to the internet, and to a cloud no less! Anyone could be the NSA now, from anywhere in the world. I bet we’ll s…

The old fashioned way cops enforce traffic law is, typically: unevenly, ineffectively, expensively, and with a large dose of racism.

So we’re talking about trading off your concerns over potential abuse and misuse of technology vs concerns about potential abuse and misuse of police powers vs just allowing traffic to kill more cyclists and pedestrians.

The nihilistic libertarian says ‘precisely - government doesn’t work - we can’t hope to make things better by concentrating power’

An optimistic democratic-institutionalist says ‘we can constrain governments at the ballot box and with constitutional limitations’.

I suspect our disagreement lies somewhere in the chasm between these world views.

Re: License plate reader searches should require a warrant

#378

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 cur…

I believe they've also been in the US for 20 years. However, they aren't centralized like Flock. Flock cameras also all look the same so it's more present and in people's faces. The opposition to these is really heating up right now.

Re: License plate reader searches should require a warrant

#379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a curious ‘small government’ instinct that wants government capabilities to be restricted from ever becoming efficient or scalable, even though the population and economy and complexity of the world the government is tasked with regulating scales up. But often the inverse argument is used in respect of private corporations. Obviously it would be unreasonable to expect Google to vet every ad and YouTube video up…

> It is a curious ‘small government’ instinct that wants government capabilities to be restricted from ever becoming efficient or scalable Efficiency would be great if it was used to save money. But surely you've heard of the Jevons paradox. This kind of cheap surveillance does not make the government smaller and it has all kinds of bad effects. > even though the population and economy and complexity of the world the…

YouTube absolutely claim not to be vetting every ad they serve. That is why so many outright fraudulent ads get shown by them. In the same industry we have Meta using AI to generate and display ads that even the advertiser hasn’t vetted.

> vetting every video would not be reasonable even at a small scale business with the same business model.

A small scale business like… a cable tv company? They certainly historically were assumed to be responsible for every piece of video content they took from a creator and broadcast.

Re: License plate reader searches should require a warrant

#380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yeah sure. Parallel construction doesn't exist. Government surveillance is completely benign as long as they can't bring a criminal case with the information, right? I mean, we have rules now, so it's all good.

Parallel construction doesn't seem to me to be ordinary practice. That's my impression anyway.

Seems to me that as long as parallel construction doesn't lead to long prison sentences for the perpetrators, you should assume it's ordinary practice. Police and other surveillance authorities have zero legal reason to take their hand out of the cookie jar, and every reason to keep this out of public knowledge.
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