Automated License Plate Readers Threaten Our Privacy

I found Professor Orin Kerr's discussion of United States v. Jones (2012) at the Volokh Conspiracy both enlightening and depressing. Professor Kerr's analysis there, if I recall it correctly, was that any violation occurred when the GPS device was physically placed on Jones' car violating the seizure part of unreasonable search and seizure. That the search itself was legal.

And I think that's how the government's attorney and Scalia and the Court saw it. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jones_(2012))

But presumably according to Kerr, and I am very likely distorting his views since a) I ain't a lawyer and b) sometime has passed, that if the same tracking information against Jones was obtained by having ALPR devices mounted on city street lights, freeway overpasses and freeway ramps, then Jones (and us!) would have no more expectation of privacy than if Jones had been seen by a cop walking a beat.

I think there is a fundamental difference between a cop walking a beat recognizing a citizen and having an array of massively cheap cameras hooked into an ALPR network tracking all citizens 24x7.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States

(And at other times, various courts have ruled:

    * citizens cannot decrypt encrypted cable tv signals passing through their homes
    * citizens cannot monitor even unencrypted cell phone transmissions) (I think)

But that's not the point. There is a societal benefit to tracking people this way. Well, there is expected to be one - of road pricing, congestion and crime reduction.

The handling of loss of privacy, which seems pretty much inevitable, is something we do need to deal with - just not try to stop it.

The purpose of a speed limit is not to make people not go more than 55 miles per hour. The purpose of a speed limit is to make driving safe, and particularly to make driving safe for society, even moreso than for the individual. If everybody is driving at 65 in the 55 zone, but everybody is safe, the higher purpose of the law is being met, and citations for speeding are just punitive for no gain. When conditions make 55 unsafe, people need to slow down enough to be safe, regardless of what the local speed limit is.

Because we've never been able to rigidly enforce laws, it was very easy to conflate the two concepts. Now we are starting to develop some tech that does let us rigidly enforce laws. The solution is, don't do that. The laws we have on the books today were not designed for rigid enforcement. They were designed to be tools for creating public safety that could be used by the legal system, they are not themselves the specification of public safety. No such specification can really be created, and people are going to have to learn that.

Hopefully we learn that before we really box ourselves in with even better tech. Either way we do seem very determined to learn this the hard way.

This idea has applications to all sorts of modern day issues popular on HN; copyright law isn't really to prevent you from sharing a copy of a song with a friend, it's to prevent massive pirating enterprises that impact the market. Patent law isn't intended to provide mechanisms to sue end-user consumers of scanners that violate patents, it's intended to protect innovators from having their ideas taken without compensation by large engineering firms. Regulations in general are intended to produce certain results, usually some sort of social safety, they are not intended to becomes gods in and of themselves. But the actions of pretty much everybody in the system from top to bottom proves this idea is poorly understood.

You seem to be begging the question (in the formal sense) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question)