I don't think they're going to win. But I do worry a bit about Flock, which is extraordinarily popular (for some good reasons and some bad ones).
I've posted here before about this, but: we did a give-to-get in my local municipality. The police (and voters), concerned about a wave of carjackings, wanted a Flock deployment. Activists opposed the cameras. There was a board fight, which came down to a tie-breaking vote from the board president.
In exchange for a pilot deployment of Flock, we ultimately:
* Disabled automatic sharing of Flock data to out-of-state entities (I tried getting sharing disabled altogether, but we solved a murder with shared access to another muni's cameras)
* Revised the police department's General Order regarding ALPR cameras to get a bunch of privacy/security stuff added (mandatory 2FA, use exclusively from PD computers, monthly audits of Flock stops, etc). The General Order we approved also forbade the use of Flock cameras for non-violent crimes.
* Got the ACLU's CCOPS model ordinance enacted, which mandates board approval of any new surveillance technology --- we're the first muni in Illinois to do that (put us on your silly maps, ACLU!), and, finally
* Forbade the police department from using Flock to stop "stolen" cars (the Illinois "hot list" of stolen cars is surprisingly bad, with months sometime passing after cars reported stolen being removed when it turned out they weren't); we instead monitor for stolen license plates (for which there are no innocent explanations).
None of this is perfect. The activists certainly aren't happy! On the other hand, we probably have the most tightly restricted ALPR deployment in the country, and we were up against an electorate that, if it had to choose between no cameras and 5x as many cameras with zero restrictions, would have sided with the cameras. So I'm calling it a huge win.
This seems kindof heroic to me. I really appreciate such conscientious diligence with this subject and the comparatively fair, well-considered compromise of privacy vs slime control.
I wish such fights and compromise were more common, rather than the furtive implementations and blind acceptance that is standard.
It is, and I am not making this up or exaggerating in the least, literally a version of HN where instead of karma you get ordinances passed. Way more people here should do it. I keep meaning to write a post about it. Also, HN is like the prison planet Salusa Secondus comparatively; if you're comfortable operating here, and you can read a room even a little bit, you may find that you're more or less unstoppable out there.
If you live inside the borders of a huge city, it's probably a different story (somebody go report it out). But I live in an inner-ring suburb of Chicago, and I think what I'm saying is probably true for basically all suburbs.
> The General Order we approved also forbade the use of Flock cameras for non-violent crimes.
What's the point of a surveillance system if you are not going to use it to solve property crimes? The biggest issues with liveability in a lot of "nice" US cities like SF are property crime and law enforcement choosing to go after "easy" white collar crime like traffic and parking violations instead of the blue collar crimes that affect safety and property.
* The privacy/safety tradeoff is different between the two kinds of crimes. There's a distinction between computers passively collecting data and humans actively investigating (and stopping) cars.
* Violent crimes are the local enforcement priority, and if you give police tools to clear non-priority crimes, you are changing their incentive structure.
* The link between the car and the crime is especially tenuous in routine property crime; it's just as likely we'd be stopping people's mothers and grandparents as that we'd be stopping actual criminal suspects. That's obviously not true with a carjacking.
* Being specific about the crimes we want to apply Flock to makes it easier for us to track (and, much more importantly, talk about) whether the cameras are successful. It's a real mixed bag right now!
Having said all that, the pro-camera contingent certainly does want Flock cameras used to catch package thieves and shoplifters. But they were up against anti-camera people who wanted no cameras at all. We took the opening and set our own terms.
Going after "easy" stuff like traffic and parking violations (neither of which can be enforced using Flock cameras here) is definitely not a problem we have. Our municipality is extraordinarily safe, but it's nestled into one of the less-safe areas in Chicagoland.
We had a stolen Porsche here in Seattle about a half a year ago, the SPD broke off its chase because of restrictive state liability rules, the kids who stole the car later went to Costco to grab purses and killed a woman (the kids were refugees, one was caught, one fled back to their home country, the woman was also a foreign national). I wonder how many murders would be prevented by more aggressive policing of stolen cars, or even just goin after people with outstanding warrants. The bar for progress is incredibly low right now.
Understand: we are policing stolen cars. I have been a broken record about stolen cars as a driver for escalating violent crime (search [kia by:tptacek]). What we're not doing is driving automatic enforcement off the Illinois stolen car hotlist, because: it doesn't work. We tried it. The false positive rate was enormous.
We really need an identifier that can’t easily be rendered useless by plate swapping, like a transponder that can’t be tampered with very easily. We could totally get the false positive rate down, but not with pointless license plate tech that is already outdated.
“The city already has more than a dozen red light cameras that automatically ticket motorists who run the red. Since 2019, those cameras have been used to issue over 56,000 citations, according to Sernoffsky. That figure, which isn’t included in SFPD’s data on traffic citations and may help explain why citation revenue hasn’t dropped as dramatically as the moving violation totals would seem to predict, will continue to grow as the city installs more cameras.”
SF is also planning to install dozens of speed enforcement cameras.
As they should. It's trivial to install these and is safer across the board for everyone, cops included. It's cheaper too. Not to mention without cops pre-occupied with simple traffic violations, they can commit to more elaborate operations. It's easy to catch someone speeding, it's a lot harder to crack down on, say, cat thefts.
> It's trivial to install these and is safer across the board for everyone, cops included.
I dont know about that. My block in NYC in a school zone had a lot of people speeding along so the city installed a speed camera. It didn't seem to do much because people instantly learned it was there, slowed down, then gas it hard the next block. And that is the story with every speed camera: people learn where they are, do the brake pedal dance, then gas it.
I honestly believe they do close to nothing except make the contractors wealthy. As for the camera on my block: the city got smart and took it down less than two years after it went up. In its place they installed all-way stop signs on two consecutive corners. A low tech solution involving a few sheet metal signs bolted to a metal pole. They work better but there are still jackasses who gas it after the second sign. Jerks going to be jerks.
A fun thing I learned only this year: in Illinois, you need a population exceeding 1,000,000 residents to install traffic enforcement cameras (the kind that automatically issue tickets).
If we could roll out red light cameras villagewide, I'd sign on.
Yeah, there's a surprising number of laws in Illinois that have that >1m barrier to make them only apply to Chicago/Cook County. I remember when the bodycams were coming in, Chicago fell under one of those >1m exemptions which I think gave them more time to implement?
A burglary isn't really a non violent crime imo. It's very invasive and if someone is home it can easily lead to violence.
If I catch a burglar in my home I will certainly be violent to them, to pre-empt them from becoming a risk to me. I've been burgled several times and I've felt very violated.
Unfortunately here in Europe the courts don't really agree with that but that's a later matter. I think it's more 'fair game' in states like Texas. I keep a huge flashlight by my bed for that reason. It's not deadly but it will be enough to submit an intruder.
It could happen because I often don't bother to answer the door when I'm home and not expecting any parcels. Because most of the callers to my door are sales trash or scummy people trying to get into the communal stairwell.
But anyway my point is these things are not that black and white. It's more like a scale.
I'm not so totally pessimistic about their chances of winning. That 4th Cir. case is interesting. Carpenter touched on this subject. So did Jones in 2012. Nobody thought that Jones would be decided the way it was because practically every court had swung in favor of the cops. Obviously the makeup of the court was different, but I'm not sure this is a partisan case?
Jones relied on the fact pattern of a physical intrusion on private property (the police placing a sensor on a car). Here, the only difference between Flock and the closed-circuit cameras that have blanketed America for decades is the fact that a computer is looking at the images.
> Forbade the police department from using Flock to stop "stolen" cars (the Illinois "hot list" of stolen cars is surprisingly bad, with months sometime passing after cars reported stolen being removed when it turned out they weren't); we instead monitor for stolen license plates
How is it identifying the car without the plate? VIN?
It's all based on plates; we just key off reported stolen license plates rather than reported stolen cars (stolen with their plates). Car thieves in Chicagoland swap plates after cars are taken, as a way to get past ALPRs; the theory is there's no innocent explanation for a car driving with reported stolen plates.
I do really hope some day we get legislation that recognizes the data broker hole in the 4th Amendment. IMO if the information would require a warrant/subpoena to get if the police collect it it should require a warrant for them to purchase the data from a 3rd party.
I actually hope that we __don't__ get a law. What I hope is that cases like this succeed in getting the precedent and recognition that we already have a law that prohibits systematic data collection and use like this: the 4th Amendment.
Accepting the premise that the 4th Amendment doesn't apply here is to accept the very premise that allows governments to try this sort of thing. The courts making clear that the 4th Amendment should be interpreted broadly and that it doesn't matter how novel your surveillance/search methods are to that end is ultimately superior to playing legislative whack-a-mole.
There isn't even a hint of extending "papers and effects" to "digital stuff held by a 3rd party" yet. I wouldn't hold my breath.
But yes, it's a massive oversight and should be closed. But it won't be because the government benefits soooo much from being able to scrutinize any person's past metadata going back god knows how long on a whim.
And speaking of "going back god knows how long". I hope I'm not the only one who noticed that in the whole Fani Lewis Georgia thing they at one point introduced 10yo (!!!) cell location data as evidince in court like it was nothing and normal evidince to have on hand. I forget which side introduced the data or what the "sides" even were in that case but imagine having to defend your cherry picked whereabouts a decade ago from a prosecution team who's already built a narrative about them.
I could see the courts or legislature taking action on things like location data tracking and some other stuff but I'm not super hopeful on that much less the kind of metadata generated by calls and what not. Ideally both would be covered but I think the former might get some protection before things like call or contact metadata.
I feel like if we don't like the government buying this data from a broker, we should make laws that make it so NO one can buy that data from a broker.
I would much rather they pass laws that you can't acquire, indefinitely hold, or sell the data. Meta and Google should not know where I went for breakfast if I didn't use their services to get there.
The nearly unlimited acquisition of private data should be tightly regulated, ephemeral by default, require total transparency in disclosure to any party for any use. Any time any ad or government agency or private individual obtains your data, you should be notified at the expense of the entity obtaining the data. Everything should be proactive and favor the rights of individuals. Not following regulations should be lethal to corporations, disincentivizing the mindless global surveillance apparatus we have now.
How would it be different if Amazon does it than the current company they're partnering with? It already sounds like there's a subscription structure, which I think implies that the partner company and not the city owns and runs the camera network?
> In 2023, Norfolk Police partnered with a company called Flock Safety, Inc. to install 172 automatic license plate reading cameras across town. The cameras were strategically placed to create what Norfolk Police Chief Mark Talbot referred to as a “nice curtain of technology,” which would make it “difficult to drive anywhere of any distance without running into a camera somewhere.”
> Unlike traditional traffic cameras—which capture an image only when they sense speeding or someone running a red light—Flock’s cameras capture images of every car driving by, which it retains for at least 30 days. Artificial intelligence then uses those images to create a “Vehicle Fingerprint” that enables any Flock subscriber to both track where that vehicle has gone and identify what other vehicles it has been seen nearby.
This makes it a little ambiguous whether the Flock subscription is for the specific added service of tracking a car around, or access to the whole system.
This suit is against the city and for its actions, not the company (Flock Safety). While Flock Safety can be used for rights violating purposes, it's ultimately the city's decisions that take advantage of that enablement and actually violate rights.
The principle is what is being tested here and, should the IJ prevail against the city, that ruling would apply as equally to Amazon as it does to Flock Safety.
or Meta with their future Ray Bans (i love mine) could create an opt in program where each users can share in revenue from cities to have their feeds while in public recorded/archived. Sure everyone would love that...
I think we need legislation requiring government-held warrantless surveillance data, regardless of how it was obtained (via subscription or gathered themselves), to be made available as a public record. I would assume wild unpopularity with the constituency would work to curtail the use of such surveillance.
If the constituency didn't balk then, at the very least, the data would be available to the public and would help balance the power dynamic with the government.
If you enter New Mexico then exit New Mexico three days later you are at high risk of being pulled over several states away due to ALPRs
"I ran his vehicle through a License Plate Reader, and it showed his vehicle traveled through New Mexico westbound and back eastbound in New Mexico three days later."
The bigger issue here is the use of drug sniffing dogs as probable cause. These dogs aren't tested for accuracy by any sort of independent auditor, and it is clear that in many cases they are really just being used for fishing expeditions.
In this case the dog theoretically alerted on amphetamines, which are not always illegal since there are numerous prescribable versions of amphetamines. The rest of the "probable cause" wasn't indicative of any crime in particular (traveling to Oklahoma and New Mexico is hardly proof of anything).
OTOH, if you are going to be traficking drugs for a living, don't leave duffel bags in plain sight, and use your turn signal.
They pulled him over for a completely bogus reason. They were going to search him no matter what. Concealment would do nothing since they were already dead set on searching the car.
In cases like those, police are almost always on information obtained from an informant. They are looking for the specific vehicle, they are intend to stop the vehicle, and they are going to run a drug dog around the vehicle — because they know it is being used for drug trafficking. It’s not a random stop.
If you dig deeper on the net you will see ALPRs are used to trap many people. It's not going to be widely publicized, just like nobody is going to loudly proclaim their use of Stingrays
> 100% Homicide cases cleared in Cobb County, Georgia and Riverside, California with the help of Flock*
> *As of March 2023 Cobb County PD in Georgia reports, “Over the last two years... we’ve had 62 homicides and solved 100% of those homicides.”
I'm sure people's initial gut reaction is "100% murder solves is awesome!" because, well, yeah. But we need to quantify what a "solve" is: You charge someone with murder; the secondary concern is if they did it.
When you read extremely high figures like 100% solves in 62 murders over two-years, one has to wonder if this is the most effective detective work ever, or they're finding any warm bodies to charge to pump the stats. As the article about this says, the national average is closer to 50%, and even that is known to contain wrongly charged and or convicted people.
Do people really believe that a couple of hundred cameras in fixed public locations really improved the solve rate that much? I'm extremely skeptical.
And:
> 90% Michigan freeway shootings resulted in arrests with the help of Flock*
> * As of July 2023, Michigan State Police reports using Flock in 90% of the freeway shootings having an arrest in all of them.
So now we're using arresting people (not charges, or convictions) as our yard stick? So we're rewarding police departments for going out and finding anyone who may be loosely connected, taking away their civil liberties, in order to look better on paper? That's outright gross. Major red flag.
Let's just say for the sake of argument that "Flock Safety" helps police find/arrest/charge legitimate suspects. There must be better ways of showing it. Also someone needs to look into Cobb County PD in Georgia for the quality of their murder charges, because that stat is more indicative of abuse than competence.*
There's no doubt in my mind that this sort of technology and omnipresent surveillance helps the police solve crimes. That is obviously beneficial to the rest of us. However it gets back to the old argument over trading liberty for safety.
It's long been established that you don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy when moving about in public. However that precident was established at a time when tracking people en masse was technically impossible. An individual, or a place could be surveilled, but not everyone, everywhere.
To my mind, such mass surveillance databases, given that they are now possible and do have some clear beneficial uses, must be protected in ways that were not necessary in the past. Warrants should be required to access the data for specific places at specific times, at minimum. And the governments that contract for these services should own the data, not Flock or other vendors.
it's not unnoticed, it's just not illegal. And how often do you notice cameras?
There's no constitutional right to privacy (Roe v Wade overturned, remember), it's legal to photograph people in public in that country, and doing something legal 60 times per second in 170 locations automatically doesn't make it illegal.
The police following one person’s car isn’t unconstitutional, but following everyone’s cars very much is. The IJ press release mentions this: the 4th Circuit (which covers Virginia) ruled several years ago that Baltimore’s near-continuous aerial surveillance was unconstitutional in part because it “ transcends mere augmentation of ordinary police capabilities.” I think there’s an entirely reasonable argument to be made that what the City of Norfolk is doing by contracting Flock to create a database of where every car has been for the past 30 days similarly crosses that line.
Except as the article noted previous courts have ruled that prolonged and detailed surveillance can constitute a search and is protected by the fourth amendment.
I'm not sure, but it's probably not too far of a stretch to call this surveillance harassment. Sure, if I'm walking down the street on public property and film houses and people, it's fine. If I showed up every day in front of your house and set up a camera to watch you, your family, and property... I'm pretty sure I could get a restraining order as it's a pattern of intimidation, stalking, and/or harassment. These cameras are there to threaten you.
Doesn't "under color of law" mean that it is unlawful, just appears to be lawful?
"“Under color of law” refers to actions taken by government officials (such as police officers or public officials) that are done in their official capacity but violate someone’s rights or are unlawful. These actions appear legal because the person is using their official authority, but in reality, they can be an abuse of power or a violation of laws or civil rights.
In the United States, such actions can lead to legal consequences under federal law, particularly 42 U.S. Code § 1983, which allows people to sue for civil rights violations committed under color of law." - ChatGPT
>Doesn't "under color of law" mean that it is unlawful, just appears to be lawful?
Which is exactly the category that "basically stalking, but don't worry we're the government so it's fine" would fall into since "basically stalking" is illegal generally.
The "article" obviously takes a maximalist interpretation of their own position. Libertarians think license plates are unconstitutional altogether, so it can't be a surprise that IJ wants ALPRs outlawed.
"“Middle ground” is not how rights work.
The government cannot infringe on your right to bear arms, to free speech, and to be safe of searches and seizures, among others. The rights have limits, but the limits need to be reasonable. The rights are not given to you by the government. You were born with them.
This system is casting a wide net, and people for which the government lacks reasonable articulate suspicion of a crime are getting unreasonable caught in it.
The government is unreasonably infringing on your right."
If they accumulate the plate data as a searchable data base, you have 10 billion grains of sand, but you know nothing about each grain, just their number. Then a warrant is issued for XYZ123 and you sift the sand for XYZ123 and know all about it from plate filings and you can see where it was with time slices.
Thus only a judge approved plate is tracked and you would have no saleable data - but each state might?? sell plate databases?
The headline had me confused because of the capitalization; it's about a city in Virginia (or, seemingly, multiple such cities), and not Virginia City (a town in my area notorious for being a tourist trap and a cesspool of racism).
Honestly what's the difference between this and simply asking someone 'have you seen a red Honda civic'? You can do that without a warrant today.
You haven't ever been entitled to privacy on public roads. To me laws against this will just increase the cost to investigate crimes, moving the bar for a crime to actually get investigated ever higher.
And I swear traffic cameras have been around for ages. The only difference being you no longer have to pay someone to comb through footage.
This isn't so similar to 'have you seen a red Honda civic' as it is requiring you to wear a GPS tracker and report your location to the police at all times.
While I agree the concept of "Warrantless" here is bad, I think we can find solutions here that meet the spirit of the law.
For very long our justice system has operated under the principle that Law enforcement cannot catch every criminal and we shouldn't even try, instead we need to make an "example" out of every criminal we do catch to deter enough of the percentage of the population to make crime not a problem. This leads to aggressive prosecution [1]. Now as blowback, justifiably, we've started under-prosecuting and an overburdened (and frankly quiet quitting) police force catches no criminals, even simple traffic crime in major cities is basically not policed [2]
As a resident of Oakland, California, I find this kind of technology a decent middle-ground. I'd like to be able to catch a decent percentage of criminals so as to make crime statistically pointless.I'd love for someone to explore expanded "digital" warrant courts and civilian oversight commissions instead of preemptive blanket ban of this technology via lawsuit.
Why do you think there's necessarily a preemptive blanket ban being asked for? Here is the specific request for relief from the suit itself:
"REQUEST FOR RELIEF
Plaintiffs respectfully request that the Court issue judgment against Defendants as follows:
a. Declaring that Defendants’ policies and customs described in this Complaint are
unlawful and violate the Fourth Amendment (incorporated through the Fourteenth
Amendment) to the U.S. Constitution;
b. Permanently enjoining Defendants from operating the Flock Cameras;
c. Ordering Defendants to delete all images, records, and other data generated by the
Flock Cameras;
d. Permanently enjoining Defendants and their officers, employees, agents, and any
others acting on their behalf from using the Flock Cameras to collect images or
information without first obtaining a warrant based on probable cause;
e. Permanently enjoining Defendants and their officers, employees, agents, and any
others acting on their behalf from accessing any images, records, or other data
generated by the Flock Cameras without first obtaining a warrant based on probable
cause;
f. Awarding Plaintiffs’ counsel reasonable attorneys’ fees and litigation costs,
including but not limited to fees, costs, and disbursements pursuant to 42 U.S.C.
§ 1988; and
g. Ordering all other relief to which Plaintiffs are entitled, regardless of whether such
relief is demanded in this Complaint."
You could argue that point b is a blanket ban, but in fact it's kinda limited: it asks to prohibit the city from operating the cameras, but says nothing of any other party operating them. All the other points simply ask for the city to be required to obtain a warrant, just like it would have to do under normal circumstances.
The city should be able to put cameras where it sees fit (especially on public property where no one else can). I agree though that the footage should be only accessible with a narrowly definable warrant.
We really don't need this much hand-wringing, the solution seems pretty straightforward.
> As a resident of Oakland, California, I find this kind of technology a decent middle-ground. I'd like to be able to catch a decent percentage of criminals so as to make crime statistically pointless.
That's not at all what's going to happen. I don't think we have reason to believe it's going to significantly reduce crime let alone make it "statistically pointless."
What it will do is, you know, conduct mass surveillance. This technology will support the policing doctrine that everybody is a criminal suspect. That means you are a criminal suspect, and the police will watch you, and if they want to, they'll stop or arrest you for something or other. You don't need to be dangerous to anyone, that's irrelevant. Just vulnerable. And this tech makes you more vulnerable.
Is that a price worth paying for a pipe dream of safety?
Just applying the same rules should work if we ignore the "database could be hacked" argument: you can collect the data, but as long as the access control is in the hands of judges, it theoretically achieves the desired criteria.
>I'd love for someone to explore expanded "digital" warrant courts and civilian oversight commissions instead of preemptive blanket ban of this technology via lawsuit.
No. Just normal warrants for surveillance like always, and ban "warrantless" subscriptions to data sources that might be used to investigate or prosecute crime.
Here's a New York Times article for today "As Election Nears, Kelly Warns Trump Would Rule Like a Dictator"
And you want warrantless broad spectrum surveillance to prevent crime.
I've posted here before about this, but: we did a give-to-get in my local municipality. The police (and voters), concerned about a wave of carjackings, wanted a Flock deployment. Activists opposed the cameras. There was a board fight, which came down to a tie-breaking vote from the board president.
In exchange for a pilot deployment of Flock, we ultimately:
* Disabled automatic sharing of Flock data to out-of-state entities (I tried getting sharing disabled altogether, but we solved a murder with shared access to another muni's cameras)
* Revised the police department's General Order regarding ALPR cameras to get a bunch of privacy/security stuff added (mandatory 2FA, use exclusively from PD computers, monthly audits of Flock stops, etc). The General Order we approved also forbade the use of Flock cameras for non-violent crimes.
* Got the ACLU's CCOPS model ordinance enacted, which mandates board approval of any new surveillance technology --- we're the first muni in Illinois to do that (put us on your silly maps, ACLU!), and, finally
* Forbade the police department from using Flock to stop "stolen" cars (the Illinois "hot list" of stolen cars is surprisingly bad, with months sometime passing after cars reported stolen being removed when it turned out they weren't); we instead monitor for stolen license plates (for which there are no innocent explanations).
None of this is perfect. The activists certainly aren't happy! On the other hand, we probably have the most tightly restricted ALPR deployment in the country, and we were up against an electorate that, if it had to choose between no cameras and 5x as many cameras with zero restrictions, would have sided with the cameras. So I'm calling it a huge win.