Having no expectation of privacy in public used to be a reasonable stance when there was a real time+money cost to extended surveillance, which meant that you still had a moderate amount of privacy unless someone was willing to personally target you and spend significant resources.
You either had to have a cop or a PI tail you, or spend time and effort talking to neighbors and acquaintances collecting information and correlating it, and it was much harder to do so secretly.
Technology has reduced the cost of surveillance by several orders of magnitude, and although the premise is unchanged - that you've never had privacy in public - the practical impact has changed in an extremely disturbing way.
I think we're long overdue to rethink and strengthen privacy protections in public in the US. Technological limits, and policy limits on specific implementations are better than nothing, but it's clear to me that surveillance will continue to get cheaper and thus your effective privacy in public will continue to erode until a culture and legal shift in public privacy expectations. I'm not optimistic about that.
aetherson 53 minutes ago [-]
I agree with your historical analysis, and I'm also uncomfortable with the total surveillance, but I'm not sure I buy there exist effective legal solutions. The truth is that everyone carries a camera, that all vehicles have cameras and will to a greater and greater degree be using those cameras all the time. I don't know what kind of limits we can put on the lack of privacy there that aren't incredibly intrusive attempts to control everyone's behavior or stop all technology.
godelski 41 minutes ago [-]
> Having no expectation of privacy in public
This has always been a false narrative. There's always been some expectation of privacy in public. It's just that it got messier. You should expect to not be overheard by walking away from others. You should expect not to be seen by entering the stall of a public restroom. The thing that changed is now we can see without eyes and hear without ears.
nickff 51 minutes ago [-]
People have been getting more risk-averse, as well as nosier over time. Both of these changes increase the push for surveillance. I agree with your intuition that people shouldn't have to worry about being constantly monitored, but if you look at the recent internet pile-on after both the Coldplay concert and tennis match incidents, I am not sure the (voting) public agrees.
>"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
-H. L. Mencken
Barbing 2 hours ago [-]
For a video overview of this stuff:
“Breaking The Creepy AI in Police Cameras”, Benn Jordan [36min, 1.7m views, 9d ago]
I'm currently experimenting with this. It's been hard for me to find a pattern that the ai can't read without making it hard to visually read the plate.
There's a lot of local Flock maps out there. You can also submit your own.
For those who are more inclined to direct protest, you can spraypaint the lenses and/or the solar panels. If you dont want to get caught with spraypaint, use nutella or peanut butter. Its sticky and easily spreadable. Not that I would ever recommend vandalization.
Sure, the EFF and ACLU are going the legal route. That's all they can do.
MisterTea 2 hours ago [-]
Why not link to an actual map such as https://deflock.me/ instead of a walled garden that is likely a surveillance and data mining platform?
If this is related to your other point about spraypainting lenses, I don't want to accidentally start clicking links for Discords about vandalizing government operations from my home IP address.
1970-01-01 2 hours ago [-]
So if you're scared to even look at countermeasures, they've already won.
It's also illogical to encourage this behavior if your goal is protesting. Smart protesters would practice the most basic of OPSEC practices, like not joining random Discord links shared without context.
chaps 1 hours ago [-]
"It's also illogical to encourage this behavior if your goal is protesting."
Yeah, if you lack imagination ;)
There are many, many forms of protesting that don't escalate to destruction. I really think you're exaggerating what the risks are here. For one, VPNs and disposable accounts exist.
freedomben 45 minutes ago [-]
I don't disagree, but you are arguing against a strawman that was started upthread. GP didn't say they were afraid to look at countermeasures, they were questioning the wisdom of clicking a random link that goes to a closed platform that collects a ton of surveillance data and has a history of sharing with law enforcement. I try to avoid Discord for everything, regardless how innocuous the subject matter is.
chaps 34 minutes ago [-]
We're agreement that discord sucks and should not be used for these sorts of communities.
But I truly don't think that clicking on a discord link that already has 1500 people in it is going to be problematic to any degree that would lead to prosecution, banning, etc.
Aurornis 52 minutes ago [-]
> I really think you're exaggerating what the risks are here
Not exaggerating. Have had multiple friends lose Discord accounts suddenly because an old Discord they forgot about was flagged for illegal activity. There's an entire subreddit full of similar posts.
chaps 32 minutes ago [-]
Yes, I'm aware that discord does it. But what I'm responding to is you saying that that the act of clicking a discord link will lead to a ban. That's an exaggeration.
1970-01-01 1 hours ago [-]
Oh, come on yourself. Being in trouble for visiting a chatroom about illegal surveillance can be a badge of honor.
pavel_lishin 1 hours ago [-]
Some of us prefer not to wear badges.
freedomben 2 hours ago [-]
This is terrible advice unless you're trying to be a martyr. Considering and asking links before you click them is not unreasonable.
bongodongobob 57 minutes ago [-]
Yep just shut up and comply.
freedomben 52 minutes ago [-]
Yep, because there are only two possibilities in this entirely binary world: click opaque links from strangers on the internet, or just shut up and comply
crackez 24 minutes ago [-]
"you're either with me or you're against me" is an indicator for a bad decision being forced upon you, often by a bad person. Best to just disregard and move on.
bongodongobob 29 minutes ago [-]
You're right. Holding signs in the government approved free speech zone has totally worked historically.
The discord itself isn't about the destruction of the ALPRs. It's just a community to map the devices and to understand their use throughout the US. Things people do outside of that community is separate.
ProllyInfamous 2 hours ago [-]
I've seen when trashbags and duct tape cover them: no damage, but knocks'em out.
Have also seen others erect new signs... just conveniently enough right in front of the lenses.
JohnFen 2 hours ago [-]
I use flock maps (but not this discord -- it smells suspicious to me) so that I can be aware of what streets to avoid traveling on.
aerostable_slug 52 minutes ago [-]
It's an abuse of the system so I'm not advocating it, but there's a temptation to add my residential subdivision to the map.
I have to be honest: I don't really want people who wish to avoid police tracking in my neighborhood. I don't care why you don't want to be tracked; I suspect that some subset of those who don't want to be tracked may be criminals, and there's zero loss to me from reduced vehicular traffic, so why not? Why not take advantage of the perceived threat to privacy? It's like putting signs up on one's home or business windows that advertise surveillance cameras are in place — it's either neutral or a win to me no matter why the existence of said surveillance bothers someone.
53 minutes ago [-]
Citizen8396 2 hours ago [-]
Using one surveillance platform to organize against another...
Der_Einzige 1 hours ago [-]
Giving detailed instructions and then saying "but I wouldn't recommend it" is just saying "please do this but don't put me in jail for telling you to do it".
Governments are not stupid and such tactics don't work.
Just throw a SovCit plate on the back of your car. You weren't driving, you were traveling.
gogurt2000 48 minutes ago [-]
I certainly expect Tesla to use the cameras on their cars for similar purposes if they haven't already. Although I would expect them to distance themselves from it by selling the location data 'in aggregate' to another company that interfaces with law enforcement agencies.
jimt1234 51 minutes ago [-]
I used to say, "If you're gonna commit crimes, leave your cell phone at home." [1] However, now it's, "If you're gonna commit crimes, leave your cell phone at home at cover your license plates." ... But seriously, just don't commit crimes.
[1] I was a juror on a case years ago, maybe 2010 - some dudes robbed a jewelry store early in the morning. It took the cops about 15 minutes to figure out who did it because the crooks all brought their cell phones, and it was early, so they were the only cell phones in the area at the time. The accused looked shell-shocked during the trial when the cops explained this. Oh yeah, it didn't help that they told all their friends what they had done, and they tried to pawn the jewelry to a former cop.
potato3732842 13 minutes ago [-]
During the whole Fannie Willis shindig they dredged up decade old (i.e. before any of these people mattered) cell location data reports and introduced them as evidince with less than no fanfare as though they were as standard as googling someone's name. I think that speaks volumes about the kind of tracking we're subject to.
dylan604 2 hours ago [-]
"Such a system provides even small-town sheriffs access"
Huh? Sheriffs are top law enforcement for a county, not a particular city. There's only one per county, everyone else is a deputy. This seems strange for someone like the ACLU to not know this
BryantD 14 minutes ago [-]
It's an American English idiom -- "small town" as a synonym for remote rural areas. Not incredibly common but not unusual. It shows up as a tag in TMDB (movie database) and Goodreads, and I believe there's at least one romance novel using the term.
ahmeneeroe-v2 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, in Washington state law, sheriffs are called out "the chief executive officer and conservator of the peace of the county."
Additionally, they're the only law enforcement officer directly accountable to the people, since they're elected. This isn't true of literally any other law enforcement at any level (local to fed).
alistairSH 1 hours ago [-]
Here in Fairfax County, VA, we have a sheriff, who is elected, but they only run the courthouse and prison. We also have an unelected (appointed by the county board of supervisors, who are elected) police department that handles regular law enforcement.
ahmeneeroe-v2 1 hours ago [-]
Very interesting. In King County WA they have an elected "County Executive" who then appoints the King County Sheriff. That Sheriff does have normal law enforcement and court duties.
I believe that is an aberration in WA state though.
alistairSH 38 minutes ago [-]
Neighboring Loudoun County has a sheriff handle all law enforcement duties.
And the other neighboring county, Prince William, has a distinct sheriff, police department, and the detention center runs itself (not the sheriff). So the sheriff only does court room security and tracking of fugitives.
lupusreal 2 hours ago [-]
> Additionally, they're the only law enforcement officer directly accountable to the people, since they're elected.
Usually this is probably a good thing, but sometimes their need to be popular with locals means the position gets filled by loud mouthed showboaters who even get themselves into national news with their not always harmless antics. Most of the most famous/notorious police in America have been sheriffs for this reason. Joe Arpaio, Mike Chitwood, etc.
alistairSH 2 hours ago [-]
While true, they're still accountable to their electorate. Their electorate just happens to love loudmouthed bullies.
ahmeneeroe-v2 2 hours ago [-]
This is the primary critique of democracy, not just American sheriffs.
kube-system 2 hours ago [-]
A sheriff would typically have an office in the county seat, and that county seat could be a small town. This is what the sentence is referring to.
buildbot 2 hours ago [-]
More of turn of phrase than a statement of belief on where sheriffs work I’d say. Calling in a vague wild west vibe.
aerostable_slug 1 hours ago [-]
That's exactly it. The ACLU would be well-advised to police their use of that kind of language (pun intended), because it comes off as the kind of thing a member of the coastal elite who unironically uses the phrase "flyover state" would say.
dragonwriter 2 hours ago [-]
> Huh? Sheriffs are top law enforcement for a county, not a particular city. There's only one per county, everyone else is a deputy. This seems strange for someone like the ACLU to not know this
A “small-town sheriff” is a common idiom describing the sheriff of a county whose seat is a small town, rather than big city. It is a common phrase in American English.
This seems strange that someone commenting on HN that has enough concern for American society to have an opinion about what the ACLU should not know this.
Once again I am struck by how tech makes the world smaller. We're back to a small village or tribal camp where everyone knows your business all the time. It appears the last 50-100 years were a golden age of privacy and an aberration, not the norm.
vjvjvjvjghv 2 hours ago [-]
"everyone knows your business all the time"
Not everyone. Only the people with access to the surveillance data. This asymmetry is a big problem.
EvanAnderson 26 minutes ago [-]
The asymmetry bothers the heck out of me. I've been personally involved in investigations of law enforcement officers abusing access to privileged information. I don't get the sense that it's at all rare.
I sort of wish we could go full ADS-B[0] with cars and have public decentralized tracking (like [1]). Level the playing field for everybody.
Since I don't think we can put the genie back in the bottle I'd love to see what kind of useful applications could be created if everybody had access to the same surveillance data that government and large corporations have.
The "what about stalkers" argument always comes next. I suspect being a stalker would be more difficult if the victim (or their agents) had the ability to react to surveillance data about the stalker.
I'd have to think about this. It doesn't seem true.
If you knew the location of every police car or city councilman's car, what would that change?
redserk 48 minutes ago [-]
I’d be willing to bet they would take privacy protections a bit more seriously.
potato3732842 11 minutes ago [-]
Or at the very least they'd think twice before grandstanding against the construction of a strip club or whatever when anyone can look back and see their patronage of such.
bobbylarrybobby 35 minutes ago [-]
It would change how much surveillance there was in the first place.
hooverd 26 minutes ago [-]
Oh no no no, those are private for security reasons!
JohnFen 2 hours ago [-]
> We're back to a small village or tribal camp where everyone knows your business all the time.
I would be much less concerned about the issue if it were limited to the equivalent of a small village. The problem is that it's not.
ahmeneeroe-v2 2 hours ago [-]
I think if you were in that small village you wouldn't appreciate the distinction ("meet the new boss same as the old boss").
JohnFen 1 hours ago [-]
Having lived in such a small village for a long while, I absolutely appreciate the distinction.
ahmeneeroe-v2 1 hours ago [-]
I'm having trouble parsing your position. Are you saying you're okay with this tech being used by law enforcement of small villages, but not so much big cities?
JohnFen 1 hours ago [-]
> Are you saying you're okay with this tech being used by law enforcement of small villages, but not so much big cities?
No. These systems aren't just local, even if the institutions installing them are.
I'm saying that if my privacy is compromised to the people in my immediate community, that's many orders of magnitude better than my privacy being compromised in a widespread, industrial way. At least I know the people in my community.
More importantly, the privacy invasion isn't going to be as all-encompassing as what happens with systems like flock, where everything gets put into databases and combined with the data in other databases. And the potential for me suffering unintended consequences are far lower with the small village.
ahmeneeroe-v2 37 minutes ago [-]
Makes a ton of sense. Thanks for the response.
Sanzig 2 hours ago [-]
At least you could always leave the small village. Can't really do that anymore.
ahmeneeroe-v2 2 hours ago [-]
I don't know that this was true.
I was recently reading "A Hangman's Diary", which included a Forward for the modern reader. It would appear that outsiders were viewed with extreme suspicion in those times. Obvi that's just a single snapshot of a single region, but it makes sense.
"what did this person do that they left all their family and friends to come to our town"
barbazoo 2 hours ago [-]
There's archeological evidence that early humans mixed with outsiders quite a but so it's probably something that comes and goes depending on what's happening at the time.
giraffe_lady 20 minutes ago [-]
You couldn't in practical terms. The vast majority of premodern people were peasant farmers who owned no capital other than (possibly!) the land & livestock they farmed and the tools used to farm them, itself having almost no liquid value in the market such as it existed at the time. It was essentially impossible to pick up and start over somewhere else. That's aside from if you even had the right to do that; depending on time and place peasants were sometimes legally bound to their landlord.
squigz 2 hours ago [-]
You couldn't always just leave your village. Family, friends, livelihood was all tied there. And it's still just as difficult to up and leave.
1970-01-01 2 hours ago [-]
I will argue that it was heavily decentralized, but there was never a golden era when the village didn't know what you were up to. Even if someone was well known in the mafia and street goons weren't talking, there were detectives writing down who you were talking to, and putting it all together, and saving it in a filing cabinet.
antibull 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
troupo 2 hours ago [-]
Anything you've read about and was appalled by in dystopian literature is already here, and not in some distant future.
technothrasher 2 hours ago [-]
Wait, you mean if I go for a nice morning drive, I'm going to get harassed by people in Modern Safety Vehicles trying to run my MGB off the road?
linksnapzz 57 minutes ago [-]
Happened to me once, while visiting my elderly uncle out in the countryside.
andrewla 2 hours ago [-]
I continue to believe that privacy in public spaces is not a civil liberty and we should not be treating it as such. You have the right to be secure in your home or in private spaces, but it is your obligation to ensure that you have made an effort to preserve that privacy. Once you are in public, there should be no expectation that anything that another person could see or otherwise observe is not subject to public exposure.
We should not be expending effort trying to regulate the state's ability to observe and record any publicly observable thing. When the state takes action to deliberately make public or otherwise observe things that are reasonably private, then we can activate the right to be free of searches and seizures without probably cause.
The one area that I do feel affects this particular debate is whether it should be legal to conceal your vehicle's identity, so long as it is not being done for fraudulent or criminal purposes. Here I think the fact that your car's identity is being observed and recorded is sufficient cause to make it reasonable to mask or alter your license place or other identifying aspects of your car.
JohnFen 1 hours ago [-]
> We should not be expending effort trying to regulate the state's ability to observe and record any publicly observable thing.
But then what can we do? Are we supposed to just never leave our homes? If we can't regulate the power of the state to minimize the harm it can cause, then all is lost.
Also, Flock isn't just a "power of the state" sort of thing. It's a private company and is often used by private entities.
andrewla 3 minutes ago [-]
No, go ahead and leave your home. Why wouldn't you leave your home?
What if a police officer or a nosy neighbor is watching your house specifically and writes down your comings and goings? You surrender a certain amount of privacy by leaving a private space, and this is just how the world works.
The Flock is a private company does not entitle them to fewer powers than the state. The state has a lot of power and is severely constrained; many of those constraints simply do not apply to private entities and individuals. The only reason why this is an issue at all is that law enforcement uses data from Flock, and the various rights that you have prevent agents of the state from doing things that the state itself is not entitled to do.
For "harm" you need to be extremely specific. If the state uses this data to blackmail you or extort you, then they are committing the crimes of blackmail and extortion. Those are illegal already, regardless of the method used to obtain the data.
If they use the data to interfere with the rights of freedom of association in any way then that is also illegal and they should be prosecuted for it, or at the very least be unable to use that as evidence.
hamdingers 1 hours ago [-]
Remember that you are not being tracked, the vehicle is, because the vehicle is the dangerous thing.
The baseline expectation of anyone operating heavy machinery in public should be that it is tracked for safety and accountability. This is a good thing. We've been installing tracking numbers on them for decades, what did you think they were for?
I understand for many people, their movements and their vehicle's movements are 1:1, so it can feel like tracking their vehicle is tracking them. If you care about privacy, travel without the heavy machinery. Walk, bike, transit. If your region does not allow you to do this, direct your privacy-related energy towards making that possible, rather than reducing accountability for drivers.
Edit: I wonder how the commenters below feel about tracking jets, probably similar to how I feel about tracking their cars.
potato3732842 1 hours ago [-]
That's a whole lotta words for "it's ok because it's happening to people who do a thing I don't like"
And then you justify it by lying to us?
> This is a good thing. We've been installing tracking numbers on them for decades, what did you think they were for?
Taxes was priority #1. This is a matter of public record. Being able to ascribe ownership as needed in edge case circumstances as a second order goal. Tracking was never really a priority because it was never really possible to do at scale before.
>Walk, bike, transit.
Ah, yes, the bus and subway with their always on 4k cameras that are being fed into god knows what software and algorithms which are then populating god knows what databases.
hiatus 1 hours ago [-]
> We've been installing tracking numbers on them for decades, what did you think they were for?
We have been putting license plates on vehicles for decades with the intent of tracking their individual movements down to the minute? And here I thought it was for identifying their owners.
alistairSH 1 hours ago [-]
While I sort of agree with the premise, Flock is a camera system - I can't opt out of being recorded by the camera. By walking, I'm only opting out of being easily catalogued by default. It's not a reach for Flock to add a "men with black hoodies" mechanism alongside the existing "BMW with plate ABC-1234" mechanism.
jMyles 1 hours ago [-]
> I can't opt out of being recorded by the camera.
That's the nature of the universe, though. Photons are emitted (including by you), captured, and the impressions they make are recorded and recalled (by biological brains and now electronic ones).
It's the police that we need to abolish, not the cameras that they (and every other organism) uses.
alistairSH 44 minutes ago [-]
It's the scale - 20 years ago, somebody could stall a VHS camera and record me, but that video didn't get fed into massive databases that linked back to my purchases that day, job history, medical history, etc. Yeah, drawing a line on what's close enough to the past vs what's unpalatable is tricky - does't mean massive surveillance and data processing is a good thing.
24 minutes ago [-]
LtWorf 1 hours ago [-]
Megacorps hoarding your data and oppressive governments are part of the nature of the universe‽
I agree that the camera is not the problem per se, but your framing is a bit strange. There's more to a camera than passively receiving photons.
foxyv 1 hours ago [-]
It's not just license plates.
> Turn Partial Details Into Leads
Start with a vague description and surface real evidence from LPR and video.
> Search With Natural Language
Just type what you’re looking for, like “man in blue shirt and cowboy hat,” and get visual matches instantly.
I dont't recall this being anywhere in the documentation or terms of the licensing of a vehicle. Did I miss that part?
kevin_thibedeau 1 hours ago [-]
You don't own your license plate. It is government property, as is a driver's license.
2close4comfort 51 minutes ago [-]
Yes, but there is nothing that says that I have to consent to a random 3rd party monitoring where I go for either of those licenses.
sylos 14 minutes ago [-]
You sound like a "if you have nothing to hide" kind of person
rconti 31 minutes ago [-]
You mean transit, where they increasingly use facial recognition?
You mean cycling, which many walkers consider to be dangerously fast? You think they wouldn't start mandating registration tags if it became too popular?
kevin_thibedeau 1 hours ago [-]
They are tracking people. It's trivial to add a passive phone IMEI catcher at every video surveillance site and correlate them with plate numbers.
2close4comfort 1 hours ago [-]
Just one more data point for any 3rd party to buy from Flock and use how ever they please. Well you know as long as the check clears.
evilDagmar 55 minutes ago [-]
This is completely missing the point.
Until there's a substantial number of driverless cars on the roads, LPR systems will always equate to tracking people. You might as well argue that exposing geospatial data about cell phone movements is fine because cell phones aren't people.
These systems, when abused, amount to warrantless monitoring of civilians over long periods of time. A judge can not and will not order someone's movements to be tracked over the last six months. They can facilitate someone's movements going forward to be monitored for a specific period of time.
...and these systems are always abused. To the degree that if you've put an RFP out there for a LPR system that disposes of the scan data after 30 days, suddenly no one wants to submit a proposal.
Abuse is pretty much the default state unless there are hard guardrails against it. That knucklehead in Millersville was pretty obviously using FINCEN data to go looking up the life details of people his political party didn't like, probably because the only safeguard was that someone had to enter a relevant case number to show that the search was legal. Lo and behold a regular audit being performed by the TBI resulted in a near immediate lockout of Millersville from their system and a warranted search of said knucklehead's residence because of "irregularities". It's not hard to figure out what was going on there.
It took months to get the LPR system in Mt. Juliet, TN to actually start disposing of the scanned data, and we've already seen reports of LPR systems being abused by ICE/CBP to search for people all over the nation. What's currently holding up Nashville getting such a system? I'm pretty sure it's the data destruction policy, because the state-level government is being run by people who think such Orwellian surveillance is just dandy.
gs17 44 minutes ago [-]
>bike
And in places where bikes need license plates? Or let's say everyone switches to a bike. Do you think Flock would say "oh well, I guess we can't track them anymore" and close up shop?
>transit
Even if they still let you pay with cash, there's cameras all over there too. Maybe not automated tracking through a third party that removes the need for warrants... yet.
So that leaves "walk", which even if feasible, is something Flock already advertises tracking of as a feature. This isn't a "car tracking" issue, it's a warrantless mass surveillance issue. You may think it's only for the drivers you despise right now, but it will come for you too.
antinomicus 1 hours ago [-]
and I think you would do well to remember this system has led to dozens of false arrests and traumatic experiences for small children in the cases of faulty OCR identifying the wrong car, and millions in taxpayer settlement money having to be spent as a result. Okay, let’s say your premise is correct, that for some reason, the size of our vehicles means they must be tracked everywhere they go (but also how exactly does this make sense? A license plate is a far cry from an ALPR, they serve very different functions) — Do you honestly think that we should as a society allow a private company to do this job?
mindslight 1 hours ago [-]
Please don't engage in simplistic whataboutism to push your tangential hobby horse about cars. Surveillance cameras will just as easily track pedestrians, bicycles [0], and public transit use.
And if you're actually trying to champion the benefits of increased accountability by tracking where every car goes, then it is incumbent upon you to first push for real effective privacy laws that prevent the already-ongoing abuses of such systems.
[0] can also easily be mandated to have identifying number plates on public roads, especially now with this surveillance infrastructure in place
hnpolicestate 55 minutes ago [-]
I'm sorry but is this argument in good faith? There is a loud minority of anti-car activists on HN and Reddit that simply will advocate for any policy that harass drivers.
I support private vehicle ownership and am opposed to any kind of tracking/nuisance enforcement behavior.
Rendered at 18:00:05 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
You either had to have a cop or a PI tail you, or spend time and effort talking to neighbors and acquaintances collecting information and correlating it, and it was much harder to do so secretly.
Technology has reduced the cost of surveillance by several orders of magnitude, and although the premise is unchanged - that you've never had privacy in public - the practical impact has changed in an extremely disturbing way.
I think we're long overdue to rethink and strengthen privacy protections in public in the US. Technological limits, and policy limits on specific implementations are better than nothing, but it's clear to me that surveillance will continue to get cheaper and thus your effective privacy in public will continue to erode until a culture and legal shift in public privacy expectations. I'm not optimistic about that.
>"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
-H. L. Mencken
“Breaking The Creepy AI in Police Cameras”, Benn Jordan [36min, 1.7m views, 9d ago]
https://youtu.be/Pp9MwZkHiMQ
There's a lot of local Flock maps out there. You can also submit your own.
For those who are more inclined to direct protest, you can spraypaint the lenses and/or the solar panels. If you dont want to get caught with spraypaint, use nutella or peanut butter. Its sticky and easily spreadable. Not that I would ever recommend vandalization.
Sure, the EFF and ACLU are going the legal route. That's all they can do.
Can you describe what this is?
If this is related to your other point about spraypainting lenses, I don't want to accidentally start clicking links for Discords about vandalizing government operations from my home IP address.
It's also illogical to encourage this behavior if your goal is protesting. Smart protesters would practice the most basic of OPSEC practices, like not joining random Discord links shared without context.
Yeah, if you lack imagination ;)
There are many, many forms of protesting that don't escalate to destruction. I really think you're exaggerating what the risks are here. For one, VPNs and disposable accounts exist.
But I truly don't think that clicking on a discord link that already has 1500 people in it is going to be problematic to any degree that would lead to prosecution, banning, etc.
Not exaggerating. Have had multiple friends lose Discord accounts suddenly because an old Discord they forgot about was flagged for illegal activity. There's an entire subreddit full of similar posts.
The discord itself isn't about the destruction of the ALPRs. It's just a community to map the devices and to understand their use throughout the US. Things people do outside of that community is separate.
Have also seen others erect new signs... just conveniently enough right in front of the lenses.
I have to be honest: I don't really want people who wish to avoid police tracking in my neighborhood. I don't care why you don't want to be tracked; I suspect that some subset of those who don't want to be tracked may be criminals, and there's zero loss to me from reduced vehicular traffic, so why not? Why not take advantage of the perceived threat to privacy? It's like putting signs up on one's home or business windows that advertise surveillance cameras are in place — it's either neutral or a win to me no matter why the existence of said surveillance bothers someone.
Governments are not stupid and such tactics don't work.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/in-minecraft
[1] I was a juror on a case years ago, maybe 2010 - some dudes robbed a jewelry store early in the morning. It took the cops about 15 minutes to figure out who did it because the crooks all brought their cell phones, and it was early, so they were the only cell phones in the area at the time. The accused looked shell-shocked during the trial when the cops explained this. Oh yeah, it didn't help that they told all their friends what they had done, and they tried to pawn the jewelry to a former cop.
Huh? Sheriffs are top law enforcement for a county, not a particular city. There's only one per county, everyone else is a deputy. This seems strange for someone like the ACLU to not know this
Additionally, they're the only law enforcement officer directly accountable to the people, since they're elected. This isn't true of literally any other law enforcement at any level (local to fed).
I believe that is an aberration in WA state though.
And the other neighboring county, Prince William, has a distinct sheriff, police department, and the detention center runs itself (not the sheriff). So the sheriff only does court room security and tracking of fugitives.
Usually this is probably a good thing, but sometimes their need to be popular with locals means the position gets filled by loud mouthed showboaters who even get themselves into national news with their not always harmless antics. Most of the most famous/notorious police in America have been sheriffs for this reason. Joe Arpaio, Mike Chitwood, etc.
A “small-town sheriff” is a common idiom describing the sheriff of a county whose seat is a small town, rather than big city. It is a common phrase in American English.
This seems strange that someone commenting on HN that has enough concern for American society to have an opinion about what the ACLU should not know this.
Benn Jordan did a great video on this.
People on here regularly bash the EU's GDPR, but blocking this kind of corporate-driven police state is a heavy point in its favor.
AI startup Flock thinks it can eliminate all crime in America
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45119847
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44561716 ("Oakland cops gave ICE license plate data; SFPD also illegally shared with feds (sfstandard.com)", 563 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40222649 ("Flock Safety is the biggest player in a city-by-city scramble for surveillance (newsobserver.com)", 143 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41979258 ("License Plate Readers Are Creating a US-Wide Database of More Than Just Cars (wired.com)", 24 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33994205 ("Flock is Building a New AI-Driven Mass-Surveillance System [pdf] (aclu.org)", 15 comments)
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety (YC S17)
Not everyone. Only the people with access to the surveillance data. This asymmetry is a big problem.
I sort of wish we could go full ADS-B[0] with cars and have public decentralized tracking (like [1]). Level the playing field for everybody.
Since I don't think we can put the genie back in the bottle I'd love to see what kind of useful applications could be created if everybody had access to the same surveillance data that government and large corporations have.
The "what about stalkers" argument always comes next. I suspect being a stalker would be more difficult if the victim (or their agents) had the ability to react to surveillance data about the stalker.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Dependent_Surveillan...
[1] https://www.adsbexchange.com/
If you knew the location of every police car or city councilman's car, what would that change?
I would be much less concerned about the issue if it were limited to the equivalent of a small village. The problem is that it's not.
No. These systems aren't just local, even if the institutions installing them are.
I'm saying that if my privacy is compromised to the people in my immediate community, that's many orders of magnitude better than my privacy being compromised in a widespread, industrial way. At least I know the people in my community.
More importantly, the privacy invasion isn't going to be as all-encompassing as what happens with systems like flock, where everything gets put into databases and combined with the data in other databases. And the potential for me suffering unintended consequences are far lower with the small village.
I was recently reading "A Hangman's Diary", which included a Forward for the modern reader. It would appear that outsiders were viewed with extreme suspicion in those times. Obvi that's just a single snapshot of a single region, but it makes sense.
"what did this person do that they left all their family and friends to come to our town"
We should not be expending effort trying to regulate the state's ability to observe and record any publicly observable thing. When the state takes action to deliberately make public or otherwise observe things that are reasonably private, then we can activate the right to be free of searches and seizures without probably cause.
The one area that I do feel affects this particular debate is whether it should be legal to conceal your vehicle's identity, so long as it is not being done for fraudulent or criminal purposes. Here I think the fact that your car's identity is being observed and recorded is sufficient cause to make it reasonable to mask or alter your license place or other identifying aspects of your car.
But then what can we do? Are we supposed to just never leave our homes? If we can't regulate the power of the state to minimize the harm it can cause, then all is lost.
Also, Flock isn't just a "power of the state" sort of thing. It's a private company and is often used by private entities.
What if a police officer or a nosy neighbor is watching your house specifically and writes down your comings and goings? You surrender a certain amount of privacy by leaving a private space, and this is just how the world works.
The Flock is a private company does not entitle them to fewer powers than the state. The state has a lot of power and is severely constrained; many of those constraints simply do not apply to private entities and individuals. The only reason why this is an issue at all is that law enforcement uses data from Flock, and the various rights that you have prevent agents of the state from doing things that the state itself is not entitled to do.
For "harm" you need to be extremely specific. If the state uses this data to blackmail you or extort you, then they are committing the crimes of blackmail and extortion. Those are illegal already, regardless of the method used to obtain the data.
If they use the data to interfere with the rights of freedom of association in any way then that is also illegal and they should be prosecuted for it, or at the very least be unable to use that as evidence.
The baseline expectation of anyone operating heavy machinery in public should be that it is tracked for safety and accountability. This is a good thing. We've been installing tracking numbers on them for decades, what did you think they were for?
I understand for many people, their movements and their vehicle's movements are 1:1, so it can feel like tracking their vehicle is tracking them. If you care about privacy, travel without the heavy machinery. Walk, bike, transit. If your region does not allow you to do this, direct your privacy-related energy towards making that possible, rather than reducing accountability for drivers.
Edit: I wonder how the commenters below feel about tracking jets, probably similar to how I feel about tracking their cars.
And then you justify it by lying to us?
> This is a good thing. We've been installing tracking numbers on them for decades, what did you think they were for?
Taxes was priority #1. This is a matter of public record. Being able to ascribe ownership as needed in edge case circumstances as a second order goal. Tracking was never really a priority because it was never really possible to do at scale before.
>Walk, bike, transit.
Ah, yes, the bus and subway with their always on 4k cameras that are being fed into god knows what software and algorithms which are then populating god knows what databases.
We have been putting license plates on vehicles for decades with the intent of tracking their individual movements down to the minute? And here I thought it was for identifying their owners.
That's the nature of the universe, though. Photons are emitted (including by you), captured, and the impressions they make are recorded and recalled (by biological brains and now electronic ones).
It's the police that we need to abolish, not the cameras that they (and every other organism) uses.
I agree that the camera is not the problem per se, but your framing is a bit strange. There's more to a camera than passively receiving photons.
> Turn Partial Details Into Leads Start with a vague description and surface real evidence from LPR and video.
> Search With Natural Language Just type what you’re looking for, like “man in blue shirt and cowboy hat,” and get visual matches instantly.
http://flocksafety.com/products/flock-freeform
You mean cycling, which many walkers consider to be dangerously fast? You think they wouldn't start mandating registration tags if it became too popular?
Until there's a substantial number of driverless cars on the roads, LPR systems will always equate to tracking people. You might as well argue that exposing geospatial data about cell phone movements is fine because cell phones aren't people.
These systems, when abused, amount to warrantless monitoring of civilians over long periods of time. A judge can not and will not order someone's movements to be tracked over the last six months. They can facilitate someone's movements going forward to be monitored for a specific period of time.
...and these systems are always abused. To the degree that if you've put an RFP out there for a LPR system that disposes of the scan data after 30 days, suddenly no one wants to submit a proposal.
Abuse is pretty much the default state unless there are hard guardrails against it. That knucklehead in Millersville was pretty obviously using FINCEN data to go looking up the life details of people his political party didn't like, probably because the only safeguard was that someone had to enter a relevant case number to show that the search was legal. Lo and behold a regular audit being performed by the TBI resulted in a near immediate lockout of Millersville from their system and a warranted search of said knucklehead's residence because of "irregularities". It's not hard to figure out what was going on there.
It took months to get the LPR system in Mt. Juliet, TN to actually start disposing of the scanned data, and we've already seen reports of LPR systems being abused by ICE/CBP to search for people all over the nation. What's currently holding up Nashville getting such a system? I'm pretty sure it's the data destruction policy, because the state-level government is being run by people who think such Orwellian surveillance is just dandy.
And in places where bikes need license plates? Or let's say everyone switches to a bike. Do you think Flock would say "oh well, I guess we can't track them anymore" and close up shop?
>transit
Even if they still let you pay with cash, there's cameras all over there too. Maybe not automated tracking through a third party that removes the need for warrants... yet.
So that leaves "walk", which even if feasible, is something Flock already advertises tracking of as a feature. This isn't a "car tracking" issue, it's a warrantless mass surveillance issue. You may think it's only for the drivers you despise right now, but it will come for you too.
And if you're actually trying to champion the benefits of increased accountability by tracking where every car goes, then it is incumbent upon you to first push for real effective privacy laws that prevent the already-ongoing abuses of such systems.
[0] can also easily be mandated to have identifying number plates on public roads, especially now with this surveillance infrastructure in place
I support private vehicle ownership and am opposed to any kind of tracking/nuisance enforcement behavior.