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The Supreme Court Just Lit a Fuse Under Flock's License Plate Camera Empire

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Re: The Supreme Court Just Lit a Fuse Under Flock's License Plate Camera Empire

#71

Post by maxlybbert »

827a wrote: post #43

The argument I struggle to get around and would love to hear a counter-argument to: Let's say a local police department hired 175 police officers, each being told "Go stand on this particular intersection with a pad of paper and write down every license plate you see". This would be a stupid use of resources, but is not outside the realm of something a well-funded police department could do. Every night they take the…

The Supreme Court mentioned your question in 2012 in US v. Jones ( https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/565/400/ ), without giving an actual answer:

“This Court has to date not deviated from the understanding that mere visual observation does not constitute a search. See Kyllo [v US]. ... We accordingly held in [US v] Knotts that ‘[a] person traveling in an automobile on public thoroughfares has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements from one place to another.’ ... Thus, even assuming that the concurrence is correct to say that ‘[t]raditional surveillance’ of Jones for a 4-week period ‘would have required a large team of agents, multiple vehicles, and perhaps aerial assistance,’ ... our cases suggest that such visual observation is constitutionally permissible. It may be that achieving the same result through electronic means, without an accompanying trespass, is an unconstitutional invasion of privacy, but the present case does not require us to answer that question.”

The fourth amendment is supposed to address invasive and inconvenient general warrants and search warrants. And that’s “inconvenient” from the point of view of the person being investigated. I don’t understand the view that all’s fair as long as the police do a certain amount of busywork, but that does seem to be popular even among some judges.

Re: The Supreme Court Just Lit a Fuse Under Flock's License Plate Camera Empire

#72

Post by nateb2022 »

nateb2022 wrote: post #67
skinfaxi wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The police cannot search your trunk without a warrant just because you are driving on public roads. They should not be able to search your travel history either. Can the police take pictures of every car they see and use that to determine your travel history? If the police don't have the expertise to maintain such a network can they pay a third party to do so?

> Can the police take pictures of every car they see and use that to determine your travel history? You conflate the generally unremarkable act of taking a picture of a single car in public with the indiscriminate collection of photos of all vehicles. The former is a constitutional, isolated observation. The latter is a search, since in toto it reveals personal information. > If the police don't have the expertise to…

In the 1760s there was something called a writ of assistance, which allowed British officers to search any location for smuggled goods without specific suspicion.

The Framers of the Constitution drafted the Fourth Amendment in direct response to these abusive general warrants, protecting against the exact kind of arbitrary power that placed "the liberty of every man in the hands of every petty officer." (John Adams)

Moreso, Adams maintains:

  Writs in their nature are temporary things. When the purposes for which they are issued are answered, they exist no more; but these live forever; no one can be called to account...

  But these prove no more than what I before observed, that special writs may be granted on oath and probable suspicion. The act of 7 and 8 William III that the officers of the plantations shall have the same powers, etc., is confined to this sense; that an officer should show probable ground; should take his oath of it; should do this before a magistrate; and that such magistrate, if he think proper, should issue a special warrant to a constable to search the places.
As Justice Sotomayor noted in United States v. Jones, logging a vehicle's public movements "reflects a wealth of detail about her familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations." An action revealing all this is ipso facto a search; and Flock performs this search in the very absence of a specific warrant that Adams so vehemently opposed.

Re: The Supreme Court Just Lit a Fuse Under Flock's License Plate Camera Empire

#73

Post by estearum »

stickfigure wrote: post #70
nateb2022 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Automobiles are highly regulated and driving is a privilege. There is no _right_ to drive a vehicle from point A to point B, in secret or not. If we accept your premise that the government can spy on you simply because an activity is regulated, then the Fourth Amendment is effectively dead. Under that logic, the state could mandate interior cameras in every heavily regulated business, or search the backpack of ever…

We probably all agree that a cellphone is closely associated with you and acts as a surrogate brain, so it gets treated as "you", at least as much as the _inside_ of your house or car. You the right of free travel (with or without your phone). Automobiles are different. You can't take it everywhere; you can't park it everywhere; you can't move it about in secret (plates MUST be displayed, always). You have an expecta…

The reason cell tower data is excluded from Third Party Doctrine has nothing to do with the contents of a cell phone. Cell tower data doesn't have any relationship whatsoever to the contents of the phone.

The relevant factors are:

1. It creates a near-complete picture of a person's whereabouts

2. It is effectively not optional to have and carry a cell phone today

You do in fact have a reasonable expectation that the government can't reconstruct a near-perfect timeline of your daily life without a warrant... obviously.

Re: The Supreme Court Just Lit a Fuse Under Flock's License Plate Camera Empire

#74

Post by NDlurker »

FireBeyond wrote: post #57
NDlurker wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in North Dakota and the cost of maintaining a Montana LLC would be more than my yearly registration fee. Something I started doing is getting new plates every year so historical data of my movement based on plate number only goes back a year.

Now all you have to do is ensure your state's DOL doesn't enter into a data sharing agreement with Flock for historical license plate correlation...

Yeah. I'll have to look into that

Re: The Supreme Court Just Lit a Fuse Under Flock's License Plate Camera Empire

#75

Post by stickfigure »

1shooner wrote: post #63
stickfigure wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flock produces a record of a car's travel history. Automobiles are highly regulated and driving is a privilege. There is no _right_ to drive a vehicle from point A to point B, in secret or not.

SCOTUS unanimously ruled that a GPS car tracker is a 4th amendment search.

US v Jones ruled that installing a GPS car tracker requires a warrant because it trespasses on private property (the vehicle).

On the other hand, law enforcement can follow your car with a drone, helicopter, or other vehicle without a warrant. Are cameras more like a helicopter or more like a GPS tracker? The Supreme Court has not weighed in yet.

Re: The Supreme Court Just Lit a Fuse Under Flock's License Plate Camera Empire

#76

Post by hwillis »

827a wrote: post #43

The argument I struggle to get around and would love to hear a counter-argument to: Let's say a local police department hired 175 police officers, each being told "Go stand on this particular intersection with a pad of paper and write down every license plate you see". This would be a stupid use of resources, but is not outside the realm of something a well-funded police department could do. Every night they take the…

Scale obviously does not make this more okay; watching many intersections or cell towers is obviously less reasonable than a single intersection or tower.

> In comparison: license plates, when in public, are always visible, and very easy to discern from one-another (different state-unique numbers); so in my mind the expectation of privacy is far lower.

Legally, overhearing a conversation is not different. If you are loudly talking about your drug deals in public in front of an officer, they can use that as evidence. A police department could hire officers to stand everywhere in public and listen to every conversation nearby.

Or, more specifically, they could stand conspicuously close to every payphone and listen. The phones are in public; the officers don't need to be uniformed. Practically speaking this is not at all different from wiretapping. That's what the police did in Katz- wiretap a public payphone.

Flock cameras are not in any meaningful sense different from having officers follow around everyone and record everywhere they go. Its irrelevant whether one officer is following one person or if many people are following them, each within their own small area. That would absolutely not be legal without a warrant. The only difference is a private company is doing it and selling it to the police, something that should clearly not be legal.

Re: The Supreme Court Just Lit a Fuse Under Flock's License Plate Camera Empire

#77

Post by mr_luc »

estearum wrote: post #29
stickfigure wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not about the contents. It's the fact that the data is presented in full public view with the specific intention that it be read.

Nope, this is not an element whatsoever in the most relevant cases, being Carpenter and now Chatrie.

Above was a quote from Carpenter, and the Court seems to have called out that the completeness of the record meant it recorded them, 'not only in public thoroughfares', but also private homes and doctor's office and so forth.

It does seem like that's an element, then -- this is not to say that it's sufficient for anything, since obviously a sufficiently good record of where one goes on public thoroughfares would fail the same test ('reliably reveals that so-and-so went to visit a specialist doctor, divorce attorney, and brothel all on the same day')

Re: The Supreme Court Just Lit a Fuse Under Flock's License Plate Camera Empire

#78

Post by stickfigure »

estearum wrote: post #73
stickfigure wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We probably all agree that a cellphone is closely associated with you and acts as a surrogate brain, so it gets treated as "you", at least as much as the _inside_ of your house or car. You the right of free travel (with or without your phone). Automobiles are different. You can't take it everywhere; you can't park it everywhere; you can't move it about in secret (plates MUST be displayed, always). You have an expecta…

The reason cell tower data is excluded from Third Party Doctrine has nothing to do with the contents of a cell phone. Cell tower data doesn't have any relationship whatsoever to the contents of the phone. The relevant factors are: 1. It creates a near-complete picture of a person's whereabouts 2. It is effectively not optional to have and carry a cell phone today You do in fact have a reasonable expectation that the…

A cellphone is effectively you in the eyes of the law.

Any automobile may be driven by many people. Only 30% of households are single-person households.

We'll see how this plays out in courts. I'll bet the license plate readers survive. More skeptical about facial recognition though.

Re: The Supreme Court Just Lit a Fuse Under Flock's License Plate Camera Empire

#79

Post by estearum »

stickfigure wrote: post #78
estearum wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason cell tower data is excluded from Third Party Doctrine has nothing to do with the contents of a cell phone. Cell tower data doesn't have any relationship whatsoever to the contents of the phone. The relevant factors are: 1. It creates a near-complete picture of a person's whereabouts 2. It is effectively not optional to have and carry a cell phone today You do in fact have a reasonable expectation that the…

A cellphone is effectively you in the eyes of the law. Any automobile may be driven by many people. Only 30% of households are single-person households. We'll see how this plays out in courts. I'll bet the license plate readers survive. More skeptical about facial recognition though.

> A cellphone is effectively you in the eyes of the law.

No. I just laid out the reasons why cell tower data is different. It has nothing to do with whether a cellphone "is effectively you," which obviously it's not.

Re: The Supreme Court Just Lit a Fuse Under Flock's License Plate Camera Empire

#80

Post by estearum »

stickfigure wrote: post #75
1shooner wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SCOTUS unanimously ruled that a GPS car tracker is a 4th amendment search.

US v Jones ruled that installing a GPS car tracker requires a warrant because it trespasses on private property (the vehicle). On the other hand, law enforcement can follow your car with a drone, helicopter, or other vehicle without a warrant. Are cameras more like a helicopter or more like a GPS tracker? The Supreme Court has not weighed in yet.

No no no, not true.

US v Jones ruled that installing a GPS car tracker requires a warrant at least when it involves trespass on private property. That case explicitly did not answer whether it would also require a warrant if no trespass was required, and deferred to Katz v United States analysis. That analysis was used shortly after in Carpenter v United States to answer that the government cannot use third party data that people do not voluntarily give up (like cell tower data) given the completeness of the record.

Fundamentally the issue presented is: "At bottom, the Court must “assur[e] preservation of that degree of privacy against government that existed when the Fourth Amendment was adopted.”"

Obviously "input name, find location at all hours of any day over the past X years" is not the degree of privacy against government that existed when the 4th Amendment was adopted.

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