> He characterizes the behavior as rare. He simultaneously identifies it as the most common form of abuse. The tension between those two statements is the problem Flock has left unaddressed.
I don’t see how there’s any tension between these statements. The overall occurrence of abuse can be rare while the most common form of the abuse that does occur is of officers tracking people they know.
Remember that scene from "Men in Black" where K watches surveillance video feed of his ex? In the movie it was meant to be wistful and cute, I guess. Now that such systems are getting closer to reality, you realize the potential for abuse in enormous.
>>Flock and law enforcement regularly cite documented cases where LPR helped solve violent crimes, recover stolen vehicles, and locate missing persons. Those outcomes are real.
My opposition wouldn't change regardless but are those outcomes real?
Cops can politely ask owners of private cameras for access for things like murder investigation. If the polite answer is no (most people will say yes), they can go to court for a subpoena. This has happened for a long time. This is how it should work. If the cops are too lazy or chicken to ask a judge while investigating a murder, they don't deserve the footage.
This is very doable when what you're dealing with is a Major Crime That Gets Full Institutional and Individual Attention.
What about a bike theft, a jacked car or a stolen parcel though?
There is a price to having information easily available to the law enforcement. There is a price to not having this information easily available to the law enforcement too.
The majority of crime is committed by a relatively small number of individuals. If citizens feel crime is out of control they need to vote in politicians and judges who sentence repeat offenders to long sentences or involuntary commitment.
Long sentences are far less effective than reliable enforcement. Something that seems to be very true in practice. If you steal or vandalise something in China, there is an extremely high chance you will get caught, you won't get a massive penalty, but it will be enough to cover the damages + some.
If you for example knew that stealing had a penalty of 100% of the item value + 10% fine, with a 100% chance of getting caught, you'd never steal anything again even though the penalty is so much smaller than what it is currently in most countries. And then if you make a dumb decision as a teenager or in a lapse of judgement, it won't ruin your life.
Doesn't matter, they should have to follow the same process.
Cops, at least where I live, don't give af about any of those crimes though. Bike gets stolen? You'll be lucky if they even show up at all, let alone do anything about it, surveillance data available or not. They largely don't even get prosecuted when caught.
They can get a subpoena for that, too. The bike and the parcel are already long gone by the time police do anything. (Nor will they do anything other than file a report if you are lucky.)
Right and what if lots of crime happens in a place where there are not many businesses? Hardly an implausible scenario given that crime is bad for business.
The city can set up its own camera for its own use. Is that really that wild of a proposal?
That whole premise of "what if lots of crime happens" -- already false.
Did you know that most places in America are at historically low crime rates in most of our lifetimes? It is garbage to say this needs deep societal focus right now. I don't give a shit about the hypothetical hurt feelings of small town cops whining that they don't have always-on spy equipment.
The hopefully we'll be able to at least narrow down the list of suspects to the people who entered the bathroom around the time they the murder took place.
Surveillance often doesn't directly capture crime on camera, but is rather used to identify who traveled to and from the crime scene around the time of the incident
No? If someone broke into your car as stole your luggage, the surveillance camera might not directly capture the thief breaking into your car. But if the camera recorded someone entering the parking garage and then exiting the garage carrying your luggage a few minutes later, that's strong evidence is it not?
You're missing the part where, for that to work, we have a government with access to a massive surveillance system capable of identifying and tracking the population at scale.
And you're missing that, instead of specifically identifying a specific individual doing a specific thing, this network would be used to place under suspicion, investigation and possible arrest, people who's only documented action was "being somewhere."
Oh, and while your example is "committed a crime", that same network could easily be used to identity and track people who were, say, coming and going from protests. Or libraries. Or voting.
> investigation and possible arrest, people who's only documented action was "being somewhere."
In the example above, the police wouldn't arrest every single person who entered and exited the parking lot. They'd arrest the person who walked out of the lot with your stolen luggage.
> Oh, and while your example is "committed a crime", that same network could easily be used to identity and track people who were, say, coming and going from protests
There's no right to have your public demonstrations off limits for recording. The whole point of a protest is to be seen. If someone is concerned that they will be associated with some group or cause because of their decision to protest, then they seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a protest is.
> Or voting
You realize the government already has that information? Voters literally filled out ballots and delivered it to the government. They don't need a camera to know who voted, they have the ballots.
Yes, ballots are anonymous. But how would Flock cameras somehow de-anonymize votes? I had assumed you were referring to tracking people driving to polling stations to discover who voted - not how they voted.
And do explain the "idiocy" of the rest of my comment. Do you actually dispute anything I wrote? Do you think that law enforcement weren't monitoring groups like the Proud Boys, militia organizations, etc. before Flock came around?
They pay to have them installed and maintained, they're not different in that sense from subscribing to Office 365 licensing, it's a subscription product.
They key difference is not whether they own their cameras but the automatic data sharing with other agencies and their cameras. Arguably law enforcement does this casually on request anyways but the drastically reduced friction of an automatic system enables easy abuse.
An officer may hesitate to ask a neighboring agency for data on their girlfriend, and would likely be very hesitant to file actual paperwork to request it. But a search in Flock's interface is probably all of the same legal peril in a venue which doesn't feel as intimidating or risky to do and doesn't see the same level of human review or scrutiny.
>technology and professional analysts with helping detectives make arrests in 53%
"technology and analysts" "help" "make arrests" not surveillance, not convictions and only the implication that they wouldn't have made the arrest otherwise.
Like look at the example: somebody calls in an OD and a guy sees that the dude ODing matches (the clothing of) a suspect in some other crime and so they arrest him.
Once again an arrest is not a conviction but also what part of that needed/used pervasive surveillance?
ALSO a conviction is not the same thing as truth.
ALSO ALSO by basic subtraction the panopticon wasn't even helpful 47% of the time.
Yes. Prior to flock, my city trialed LPRs attached to the local power company’s poles. In the first month, they recovered more stolen cars than any prior years total recoveries. I’ve got mixed feelings about Flock, LPRs, and what it allows people and governments to do.
The problem imo is the usage and laws rather than the technology. Security cameras used for public good is good. But it needs to be heavily limited to preventing crime, with strict access logs and penalties for misuse.
guess what prolific career criminals do with crime cars?
they look for a car that is very similar if not exact make and model of thier stolen vehicle, then they "clone" the victims license plate with a sheet of embossment copper and a stylus, apply paint at thier shop and affix the imposter to the crime vehicle. that buggers the whole LPR thing.
they can replicate dozens of plates in a day and offer the service for contras.
That seems like a lot of effort when you can just take the license plate off and if you're really worried print off a convincing temporary license and tape in the back window.
its effort well worth it, and really is not a lot of effort. if you stole the plate, the theft is evident, when there are duplicates then it becomes difficult to know which one to suspect, and that also presupposes knowledge of the duplication.
you would have to realize, it is not feasible for a car to be in location 1 thenbe in location 2 many miles away in a few minutes.
the odd thing about criminals is thier effort to perpetuate crime is often far greater than getting a job, but is somehow the preferable option.
> you would have to realize, it is not feasible for a car to be in location 1 thenbe in location 2 many miles away in a few minutes.
You say that but just last week there was a post here about how LPR claimed that the same car was in two locations in a timeframe that would have required the car to have been traveling non-stop at 160mph for 20 minutes through suburban streets, and even then authorities and proponents were defending it as plausible, or that the LPR was right, but there might just have been timing issues, or, or, or.
i think i saw that post, i think we're both describing what happens when someone copies plates and doppelgangs people to throw off the surveillance.
i think in this case the LPR was right, the same plate number was in two different places, the assumption of how many plates were involved needs review.
160mph for 20min through suburban streets, that kind of attracts attention, there would be a lot of complaints and witnesses if that happened
Not really because it flags an anomaly where the same plate is found in two places that are impossibly far to reach in the time span. Then police can just pull over that plate when they see it with a 50/50 chance it's the stolen car.
The more cameras in the network the faster and more likely a duplicated plate will be spotted.
I have no doubt that provided a vast camera network covering every ingress and egress into a city, and every major intersection, plus a database of when and where a license plate was last seen, cops can find their suspect
It used to be that news articles would claim that the police used “CCTV from local businesses” to catch a crook. Even back then I knew this was cover for Ring, Flock and who knows what else. they just didn’t want the bad press.
At this point you don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to understand that parallel construction happens all the time. They have more tools that we know about, and they want to keep it that way.
Everyone should throw some money to 404 media. They are independent and doing the best work right now to keep these things in the public eye.
That's the thing though, I do doubt that. Surveillance that you don't need a warrant to put in front of a jury is a perfect thing to use for the ostensibly-legal construction in parallel construction.
Flock's position, statistically, is that if during the course of an investigation into a crime, a detective queries Flock, and the crime is later solved, that Flock "helped solve a crime", regardless of the merit or value of the query. "Saw a vehicle, look it up, "nope, unrelated", but still "helped solve".
Ultimately, there’s a sort of homeostasis in people’s tolerance for crime. If you need video evidence for prosecution, those who want it prosecuted will produce video cameras. If you make warrants impossible to produce in a timely manner, the camera search will be warrant exempted.
Attempts to damage state power to ensure crime isn’t prosecuted will be likely met with methods that are immune to them.
Given the constraints we operate under, the ideal number of unsolved crimes is not zero and the ideal number of crimes committed using state apparatus is also not zero. So being informed that either is non-zero is not of use to decision making in my opinion.
Check your town's website for correspondence with your state's chapter of the ACLU in regards to Flock cameras. If your police chief (not an elected official) is installing them then contact your local ACLU chapter about it. These are 4th amendment violations.
To the contrary, little of what Flock does would be restricted by the 4th amendment. The cameras are in public, and neither the government nor individual citizens need authorization to film people in public.
All flock cameras are privately owned, by flock. They install them at a charge per the jurisdiction that orders them and pays the subscription costs… those subscription fees allow Mr Local Law Abuser to lookup any license plate it has read, when, where, with a picture of the vehicle.
So when I put a bag over the camera, it's up to flock to remove it? I haven't stuck around to find out who shows up. Sometimes it takes a week or so, other times it's next day.
The case you linked isn't about the government filming people in public, though. Carpenter vs. US was a case about the government demanding private information about users' locations from cell service providers. By comparison, the 9th circuit concluded that the plain view doctrine means electronic license plate readers are legal :https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2020/05/04/1...
An officer doesn't need a warrant to sit at a cross section and write down license plate numbers. A device doing the same thing is also legal.
Of course that's a fair interpretation, I am saying there's some tension between mass surveillance and the fourth just because its "done in public" doesn't mean it automatically escapes scrutiny now or going forward.
No, the fact that it's recording people in public does make it escape scrutiny moving forward. In public you can be filmed by anyone - be they government or private citizens.
I find a lot of people fail to realize this, both in regards to surveillance and otherwise. Recently in my city there was a big uproar about a nudist beach that was at risk of having nudity prohibited. So a bunch of nudists went out and paraded around the beach while disrobed, some of them bringing their children with them. People sailed by and photographed many of the nudists, and put their images online. Many alleged that must be a violation of some privacy law, but no, the law in Washington (and most, perhaps all, of the US) is quite clear: if you're in public, you can be filmed and photographed. If you don't want to be filmed nude, don't go walking around naked in public.
Regardless, back to the topic at hand, the fact that Flock cameras a in public spaces does in fact mean that there's no requirement to get a warrant to use them.
> No, the fact that it's recording people in public does make it escape scrutiny moving forward. In public you can be filmed by anyone - be they government or private citizens.
This is false. While there is no strongly established precedent yet, there are certainly serious and plausible legal arguments being made that unlimited collection and collation/cross-referencing/etc. of "public" information can under certain circumstances constitute a search. It will most certainly not "escape scrutiny moving forward".
The legality of automated license plate readers has gone all the way up to the United States Court of Appeals. That's the second highest court in the country, superseded only by the Supreme Court.
This is as strong as precedent gets, short of a SCOTUS decision.
That doesn't sound like escaping scrutiny to me! Sounds like it's getting pretty thoroughly scrutinized, in fact.
> This is as stromg (sic) as precedent gets, short of a SCOTUS decision.
Another egregious misrepresentation. The courts are obviously making their rulings as narrow as possible because they know the "mosaic theory" style arguments have some merit. Look at US vs. Yang, for example, in which the court dodged the issue completely with some argument about rental car contract periods. And Schmidt v. Norfolk, which IIUC directly challenges Flock ALPRs on 4A grounds, is pending.
Lots and lots of scrutiny. Your claim that the conclusion is foregone here is obviously absurd. Even when/if it gets to SCOTUS I expect they'll write as narrow an opinion as they can get away with, in whatever direction it falls.
So what's the logical conclusion, that there will be a company with a drone following every individual in a public space at all times and that the government will pay for the data?
The logical conclusion is that the US brings itself in line with the rest of the developed world, and realizes video cameras are useful for solving crime.
Flying drones are not required, stationary cameras are more than enough outside of specific scenarios like active pursuit.
Considering how desperately that user is responding to every comment on this post, it seems they have a vested interest in playing blind for Flock, which makes me think they are paid by Flock.
But no, I just like to dispel the myths people have about their imaginary right to not be filmed in public. Whether it's by the government or by other private people.
it's not about filming in public. it's about systematic data collection by law enforcement, using private infrastructure present by its nature in public. that's why the Carpenter decision is relevant.
The Carpenter decision was about the US government compelling mobile data providers to hand over private use information. It's really not relevant to flock. That's why the 9th Circuit decided that automated license plate readers don't need a warrant. A cop and stand at an intersection and write down license plate numbers without a warrant. A device can do the same.
The year is 2026 and the 4th amendment only means what the currently sitting justices say that it means, and the executive branch was literally given a pass to violate any law on the books that they want.
The 9th circuit upheld that the police do not need warrants to operate and access data from license plate readers. The 9th Circuit isn't exactly a conservative stronghold.
That’s really beside the point. It doesn’t matter what the 9th circuit or any other court says.
Our country is no longer a country of laws. Laws are only as good as they are enforced. The SCOTUS, the DOJ, the FBI, and congress have openly abdicated any constitutional responsibility to provide checks and balances to reign in the abuses we see posted to HN every day.
That's not applicable to Flock, though. That case pertained to the government requesting that mobile service providers give historical location data on users.
I feel like you haven't properly thought this through. Cell towers are monitoring a public broadcast from a beacon you voluntarily carry on your person. For some reason querying that dataset requires a warrant but querying a broadly analogous dataset from the operator of a network of cameras doesn't?
More generally you're confidently making wild extrapolations from the current very limited case law without regard for either its limitations or the general temperature that can be inferred from the full opinions.
> Cell towers are monitoring a public broadcast from a beacon you voluntarily carry on your person.
It's an encrypted broadcast, not a public broadcast. This is why the police needed to ask the mobile service providers for this data. It is not public.
> For some reason querying that dataset requires a warrant but querying a broadly analogous dataset from the operator of a network of cameras doesn't?
The data is not broadly analogous. One is encrypted radio traffic. The other is unencrypted, and you can record it yourself with a pen, paper, and the Mk I eyeball. This is why the "plain view" doctrine applies.
Again, the courts have already ruled on the use of ALPRs. The defense tried to use US vs Carpenter in US vs Yang, and the courts did not accept that argument that ALPRs are analogous to cell phone location data.
Yes. Let's restrict police and take away every possible tool they can use to solve and fight crime. Not all criminals are bad criminals. They don't use Flock to spy on their ex-girlfriends but every cop in America has done it.
At least according to the internet which knows everything.
Don't misrepresent what others say. The 4th amendment should not be violated. I can only interpret your response as "the 4th amendment should be violated".
Then you would be wrong. I'm pointing out the internet's liberal obsession with anti-police and, seemingly, pro-criminal activity. The internet likes to find fault with the police while dismissing or ignoring criminal activity. It's a horror I cannot understand. It's pure insanity.
Okay, then pontificate that as a top level comment. Responding to someone saying the 4th amendment should not be circumvented with a refute is a statement about the 4th amendment, not some imagined counter party.
This whole thread represents the imaginary of the internet and it makes me sick. I have to get off the internet. I've spent too much time with it lately.
The fact police can go in and just look at camera footage without warrant proves your point precisely, officers have used it to stalk family members, etc.
This type of thing is definitely real. A friend of mine went on a date with an NYPD cop back in the 90s. She refused a second date, and the stalking began. It wasn't 'tech stalking', like today, but the cop started asking interrogating questions to her landlord and co-workers; she started getting weird/false parking tickets, etc. The only way she made it stop was that her cousin was a veteran with NYPD, and well, he had a little chat with the young, stalking cop. But who knows where it all would've ended up if her cousin wasn't also a cop???
Can I set up my own camera on the side of the road (in a public place) to scan people's faces and license plates, link them up to one of the many data brokers (or leaks) and use a big display to show the drivers' pictures and something like "Hey Rick Larsen, it's the 24th time we've seen you this week. We'll let our clients know there's no one home at 2930 Wetmore Avenue, Everett most weekdays between 8 and 4!", and then place them somewhere like oh, I don't know, in close proximity to a capitol building?
We can pay the regular fees that advertisers pay to have billboards up.
And if we're not allowed to do that, why is Flock?
No one has the right to privacy in a public setting. That's why street photographers can roam around and take photos of anyone and publish them. Whether you can publish personally identifiable information based on that, I don't know.
verkada (a building access systems company), had multiple incidents of stalking of employees by other employees, using their own installation in their own hq
Random people at your workplace likely know others with access and use it to spy on their own coworkers. I know of cases where they report the smallest details to Human Resources.
> He characterizes the behavior as rare. He simultaneously identifies it as the most common form of abuse. The tension between those two statements is the problem Flock has left unaddressed.
I don’t see how there’s any tension between these statements. The overall occurrence of abuse can be rare while the most common form of the abuse that does occur is of officers tracking people they know.
Remember that scene from "Men in Black" where K watches surveillance video feed of his ex? In the movie it was meant to be wistful and cute, I guess. Now that such systems are getting closer to reality, you realize the potential for abuse in enormous.
>>Flock and law enforcement regularly cite documented cases where LPR helped solve violent crimes, recover stolen vehicles, and locate missing persons. Those outcomes are real.
My opposition wouldn't change regardless but are those outcomes real?
In Seattle at least, the majority of homicide cases are solved with the assistance of surveillance cameras (though what % of said cameras are specifically Flock, I'm not sure): https://spdblotter.seattle.gov/2026/03/05/new-analysis-rtcc-...
Cops can politely ask owners of private cameras for access for things like murder investigation. If the polite answer is no (most people will say yes), they can go to court for a subpoena. This has happened for a long time. This is how it should work. If the cops are too lazy or chicken to ask a judge while investigating a murder, they don't deserve the footage.
This is very doable when what you're dealing with is a Major Crime That Gets Full Institutional and Individual Attention.
What about a bike theft, a jacked car or a stolen parcel though?
There is a price to having information easily available to the law enforcement. There is a price to not having this information easily available to the law enforcement too.
Even with Flock, police aren't solving those crimes.
The majority of crime is committed by a relatively small number of individuals. If citizens feel crime is out of control they need to vote in politicians and judges who sentence repeat offenders to long sentences or involuntary commitment.
Long sentences are far less effective than reliable enforcement. Something that seems to be very true in practice. If you steal or vandalise something in China, there is an extremely high chance you will get caught, you won't get a massive penalty, but it will be enough to cover the damages + some.
If you for example knew that stealing had a penalty of 100% of the item value + 10% fine, with a 100% chance of getting caught, you'd never steal anything again even though the penalty is so much smaller than what it is currently in most countries. And then if you make a dumb decision as a teenager or in a lapse of judgement, it won't ruin your life.
If only we had an amendment in the original bill of rights that drew the line here.
Doesn't matter, they should have to follow the same process.
Cops, at least where I live, don't give af about any of those crimes though. Bike gets stolen? You'll be lucky if they even show up at all, let alone do anything about it, surveillance data available or not. They largely don't even get prosecuted when caught.
They can get a subpoena for that, too. The bike and the parcel are already long gone by the time police do anything. (Nor will they do anything other than file a report if you are lucky.)
Right and what if lots of crime happens in a place where there are not many businesses? Hardly an implausible scenario given that crime is bad for business.
The city can set up its own camera for its own use. Is that really that wild of a proposal?
What if what if what if?
That whole premise of "what if lots of crime happens" -- already false.
Did you know that most places in America are at historically low crime rates in most of our lifetimes? It is garbage to say this needs deep societal focus right now. I don't give a shit about the hypothetical hurt feelings of small town cops whining that they don't have always-on spy equipment.
What if lots of murders happened in bathrooms?
The hopefully we'll be able to at least narrow down the list of suspects to the people who entered the bathroom around the time they the murder took place.
Surveillance often doesn't directly capture crime on camera, but is rather used to identify who traveled to and from the crime scene around the time of the incident
You understand why that's worse, right?
No? If someone broke into your car as stole your luggage, the surveillance camera might not directly capture the thief breaking into your car. But if the camera recorded someone entering the parking garage and then exiting the garage carrying your luggage a few minutes later, that's strong evidence is it not?
You're missing the part where, for that to work, we have a government with access to a massive surveillance system capable of identifying and tracking the population at scale.
And you're missing that, instead of specifically identifying a specific individual doing a specific thing, this network would be used to place under suspicion, investigation and possible arrest, people who's only documented action was "being somewhere."
Oh, and while your example is "committed a crime", that same network could easily be used to identity and track people who were, say, coming and going from protests. Or libraries. Or voting.
> investigation and possible arrest, people who's only documented action was "being somewhere."
In the example above, the police wouldn't arrest every single person who entered and exited the parking lot. They'd arrest the person who walked out of the lot with your stolen luggage.
> Oh, and while your example is "committed a crime", that same network could easily be used to identity and track people who were, say, coming and going from protests
Again realize that this is legal right? https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/14/us/charlottesville-doxxin...
There's no right to have your public demonstrations off limits for recording. The whole point of a protest is to be seen. If someone is concerned that they will be associated with some group or cause because of their decision to protest, then they seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a protest is.
> Or voting
You realize the government already has that information? Voters literally filled out ballots and delivered it to the government. They don't need a camera to know who voted, they have the ballots.
... I'm sorry. Are you not aware ballots are anonymous? Is that not a thing you knew?
Did you think our ballots tell the government who we were and how we voted?
Just, setting aside the rest of the idiocy of your defense here, that's ... a shocking thing to think as an adult in America.
Yes, ballots are anonymous. But how would Flock cameras somehow de-anonymize votes? I had assumed you were referring to tracking people driving to polling stations to discover who voted - not how they voted.
And do explain the "idiocy" of the rest of my comment. Do you actually dispute anything I wrote? Do you think that law enforcement weren't monitoring groups like the Proud Boys, militia organizations, etc. before Flock came around?
That is not this, however. This is the city hooking into a private, nationwide surveillance network.
You didn't think these cities actually own these Flock cameras, did you?
They pay to have them installed and maintained, they're not different in that sense from subscribing to Office 365 licensing, it's a subscription product.
They key difference is not whether they own their cameras but the automatic data sharing with other agencies and their cameras. Arguably law enforcement does this casually on request anyways but the drastically reduced friction of an automatic system enables easy abuse.
An officer may hesitate to ask a neighboring agency for data on their girlfriend, and would likely be very hesitant to file actual paperwork to request it. But a search in Flock's interface is probably all of the same legal peril in a venue which doesn't feel as intimidating or risky to do and doesn't see the same level of human review or scrutiny.
In America, yes.
Obviously in other places, no.
That's not what that says though.
>technology and professional analysts with helping detectives make arrests in 53%
"technology and analysts" "help" "make arrests" not surveillance, not convictions and only the implication that they wouldn't have made the arrest otherwise.
Like look at the example: somebody calls in an OD and a guy sees that the dude ODing matches (the clothing of) a suspect in some other crime and so they arrest him.
Once again an arrest is not a conviction but also what part of that needed/used pervasive surveillance?
ALSO a conviction is not the same thing as truth.
ALSO ALSO by basic subtraction the panopticon wasn't even helpful 47% of the time.
Yes. Prior to flock, my city trialed LPRs attached to the local power company’s poles. In the first month, they recovered more stolen cars than any prior years total recoveries. I’ve got mixed feelings about Flock, LPRs, and what it allows people and governments to do.
I’m 100% sold on the results.
The problem imo is the usage and laws rather than the technology. Security cameras used for public good is good. But it needs to be heavily limited to preventing crime, with strict access logs and penalties for misuse.
Imagine if the police had the names and faces of every marcher in every protest. They too would be (are) 100% sold on the results.
Eh, democracy or less stolen cars, easy choice innit.
guess what prolific career criminals do with crime cars?
they look for a car that is very similar if not exact make and model of thier stolen vehicle, then they "clone" the victims license plate with a sheet of embossment copper and a stylus, apply paint at thier shop and affix the imposter to the crime vehicle. that buggers the whole LPR thing.
they can replicate dozens of plates in a day and offer the service for contras.
That seems like a lot of effort when you can just take the license plate off and if you're really worried print off a convincing temporary license and tape in the back window.
its effort well worth it, and really is not a lot of effort. if you stole the plate, the theft is evident, when there are duplicates then it becomes difficult to know which one to suspect, and that also presupposes knowledge of the duplication.
you would have to realize, it is not feasible for a car to be in location 1 thenbe in location 2 many miles away in a few minutes.
the odd thing about criminals is thier effort to perpetuate crime is often far greater than getting a job, but is somehow the preferable option.
> you would have to realize, it is not feasible for a car to be in location 1 thenbe in location 2 many miles away in a few minutes.
You say that but just last week there was a post here about how LPR claimed that the same car was in two locations in a timeframe that would have required the car to have been traveling non-stop at 160mph for 20 minutes through suburban streets, and even then authorities and proponents were defending it as plausible, or that the LPR was right, but there might just have been timing issues, or, or, or.
i think i saw that post, i think we're both describing what happens when someone copies plates and doppelgangs people to throw off the surveillance.
i think in this case the LPR was right, the same plate number was in two different places, the assumption of how many plates were involved needs review.
160mph for 20min through suburban streets, that kind of attracts attention, there would be a lot of complaints and witnesses if that happened
Not really because it flags an anomaly where the same plate is found in two places that are impossibly far to reach in the time span. Then police can just pull over that plate when they see it with a 50/50 chance it's the stolen car.
The more cameras in the network the faster and more likely a duplicated plate will be spotted.
I have no doubt that provided a vast camera network covering every ingress and egress into a city, and every major intersection, plus a database of when and where a license plate was last seen, cops can find their suspect
It used to be that news articles would claim that the police used “CCTV from local businesses” to catch a crook. Even back then I knew this was cover for Ring, Flock and who knows what else. they just didn’t want the bad press.
At this point you don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to understand that parallel construction happens all the time. They have more tools that we know about, and they want to keep it that way.
Everyone should throw some money to 404 media. They are independent and doing the best work right now to keep these things in the public eye.
That's the thing though, I do doubt that. Surveillance that you don't need a warrant to put in front of a jury is a perfect thing to use for the ostensibly-legal construction in parallel construction.
Flock's position, statistically, is that if during the course of an investigation into a crime, a detective queries Flock, and the crime is later solved, that Flock "helped solve a crime", regardless of the merit or value of the query. "Saw a vehicle, look it up, "nope, unrelated", but still "helped solve".
Right, that's more or less my suspicion.
The AI slop in that quote sure is real.
Ultimately, there’s a sort of homeostasis in people’s tolerance for crime. If you need video evidence for prosecution, those who want it prosecuted will produce video cameras. If you make warrants impossible to produce in a timely manner, the camera search will be warrant exempted.
Attempts to damage state power to ensure crime isn’t prosecuted will be likely met with methods that are immune to them.
Given the constraints we operate under, the ideal number of unsolved crimes is not zero and the ideal number of crimes committed using state apparatus is also not zero. So being informed that either is non-zero is not of use to decision making in my opinion.
Check your town's website for correspondence with your state's chapter of the ACLU in regards to Flock cameras. If your police chief (not an elected official) is installing them then contact your local ACLU chapter about it. These are 4th amendment violations.
To the contrary, little of what Flock does would be restricted by the 4th amendment. The cameras are in public, and neither the government nor individual citizens need authorization to film people in public.
Many Flock cameras are also privately owned, too.
All flock cameras are privately owned, by flock. They install them at a charge per the jurisdiction that orders them and pays the subscription costs… those subscription fees allow Mr Local Law Abuser to lookup any license plate it has read, when, where, with a picture of the vehicle.
https://deflock.org
You’d be surprised how many there are.
So when I put a bag over the camera, it's up to flock to remove it? I haven't stuck around to find out who shows up. Sometimes it takes a week or so, other times it's next day.
https://www.wired.com/story/carpenter-v-united-states-suprem... https://www.eff.org/cases/us-v-jones There has been plenty of past rulings that indicate long term collection of data is not something that the fourth amendment had baked in.
The case you linked isn't about the government filming people in public, though. Carpenter vs. US was a case about the government demanding private information about users' locations from cell service providers. By comparison, the 9th circuit concluded that the plain view doctrine means electronic license plate readers are legal :https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2020/05/04/1...
An officer doesn't need a warrant to sit at a cross section and write down license plate numbers. A device doing the same thing is also legal.
Of course that's a fair interpretation, I am saying there's some tension between mass surveillance and the fourth just because its "done in public" doesn't mean it automatically escapes scrutiny now or going forward.
No, the fact that it's recording people in public does make it escape scrutiny moving forward. In public you can be filmed by anyone - be they government or private citizens.
I find a lot of people fail to realize this, both in regards to surveillance and otherwise. Recently in my city there was a big uproar about a nudist beach that was at risk of having nudity prohibited. So a bunch of nudists went out and paraded around the beach while disrobed, some of them bringing their children with them. People sailed by and photographed many of the nudists, and put their images online. Many alleged that must be a violation of some privacy law, but no, the law in Washington (and most, perhaps all, of the US) is quite clear: if you're in public, you can be filmed and photographed. If you don't want to be filmed nude, don't go walking around naked in public.
Regardless, back to the topic at hand, the fact that Flock cameras a in public spaces does in fact mean that there's no requirement to get a warrant to use them.
> No, the fact that it's recording people in public does make it escape scrutiny moving forward. In public you can be filmed by anyone - be they government or private citizens.
This is false. While there is no strongly established precedent yet, there are certainly serious and plausible legal arguments being made that unlimited collection and collation/cross-referencing/etc. of "public" information can under certain circumstances constitute a search. It will most certainly not "escape scrutiny moving forward".
e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_theory_of_the_Fourth_Am...
The legality of automated license plate readers has gone all the way up to the United States Court of Appeals. That's the second highest court in the country, superseded only by the Supreme Court.
This is as strong as precedent gets, short of a SCOTUS decision.
That doesn't sound like escaping scrutiny to me! Sounds like it's getting pretty thoroughly scrutinized, in fact.
> This is as stromg (sic) as precedent gets, short of a SCOTUS decision.
Another egregious misrepresentation. The courts are obviously making their rulings as narrow as possible because they know the "mosaic theory" style arguments have some merit. Look at US vs. Yang, for example, in which the court dodged the issue completely with some argument about rental car contract periods. And Schmidt v. Norfolk, which IIUC directly challenges Flock ALPRs on 4A grounds, is pending.
Lots and lots of scrutiny. Your claim that the conclusion is foregone here is obviously absurd. Even when/if it gets to SCOTUS I expect they'll write as narrow an opinion as they can get away with, in whatever direction it falls.
So what's the logical conclusion, that there will be a company with a drone following every individual in a public space at all times and that the government will pay for the data?
The logical conclusion is that the US brings itself in line with the rest of the developed world, and realizes video cameras are useful for solving crime.
Flying drones are not required, stationary cameras are more than enough outside of specific scenarios like active pursuit.
Considering how desperately that user is responding to every comment on this post, it seems they have a vested interest in playing blind for Flock, which makes me think they are paid by Flock.
Lol, I should be getting paid.
But no, I just like to dispel the myths people have about their imaginary right to not be filmed in public. Whether it's by the government or by other private people.
The government may not purchase services for acts it is not allowed to do itself: Pinkerton Act.
it's not about filming in public. it's about systematic data collection by law enforcement, using private infrastructure present by its nature in public. that's why the Carpenter decision is relevant.
The Carpenter decision was about the US government compelling mobile data providers to hand over private use information. It's really not relevant to flock. That's why the 9th Circuit decided that automated license plate readers don't need a warrant. A cop and stand at an intersection and write down license plate numbers without a warrant. A device can do the same.
The year is 2026 and the 4th amendment only means what the currently sitting justices say that it means, and the executive branch was literally given a pass to violate any law on the books that they want.
The 9th circuit upheld that the police do not need warrants to operate and access data from license plate readers. The 9th Circuit isn't exactly a conservative stronghold.
That’s really beside the point. It doesn’t matter what the 9th circuit or any other court says.
Our country is no longer a country of laws. Laws are only as good as they are enforced. The SCOTUS, the DOJ, the FBI, and congress have openly abdicated any constitutional responsibility to provide checks and balances to reign in the abuses we see posted to HN every day.
Wrong. See Carpenter v US.
That's not applicable to Flock, though. That case pertained to the government requesting that mobile service providers give historical location data on users.
I feel like you haven't properly thought this through. Cell towers are monitoring a public broadcast from a beacon you voluntarily carry on your person. For some reason querying that dataset requires a warrant but querying a broadly analogous dataset from the operator of a network of cameras doesn't?
More generally you're confidently making wild extrapolations from the current very limited case law without regard for either its limitations or the general temperature that can be inferred from the full opinions.
> Cell towers are monitoring a public broadcast from a beacon you voluntarily carry on your person.
It's an encrypted broadcast, not a public broadcast. This is why the police needed to ask the mobile service providers for this data. It is not public.
> For some reason querying that dataset requires a warrant but querying a broadly analogous dataset from the operator of a network of cameras doesn't?
The data is not broadly analogous. One is encrypted radio traffic. The other is unencrypted, and you can record it yourself with a pen, paper, and the Mk I eyeball. This is why the "plain view" doctrine applies.
Again, the courts have already ruled on the use of ALPRs. The defense tried to use US vs Carpenter in US vs Yang, and the courts did not accept that argument that ALPRs are analogous to cell phone location data.
Yes. Let's restrict police and take away every possible tool they can use to solve and fight crime. Not all criminals are bad criminals. They don't use Flock to spy on their ex-girlfriends but every cop in America has done it.
At least according to the internet which knows everything.
Don't misrepresent what others say. The 4th amendment should not be violated. I can only interpret your response as "the 4th amendment should be violated".
Then you would be wrong. I'm pointing out the internet's liberal obsession with anti-police and, seemingly, pro-criminal activity. The internet likes to find fault with the police while dismissing or ignoring criminal activity. It's a horror I cannot understand. It's pure insanity.
Okay, then pontificate that as a top level comment. Responding to someone saying the 4th amendment should not be circumvented with a refute is a statement about the 4th amendment, not some imagined counter party.
This whole thread represents the imaginary of the internet and it makes me sick. I have to get off the internet. I've spent too much time with it lately.
Nit: the police chief was also stalking and harassing at least one man
So glad we got them kicked out of Mountain View.
Yes this is how freedoms are restored. Next we need a story of flock tracking a reporter or political figure. Put that 4th amendment into sharp focus.
The fact police can go in and just look at camera footage without warrant proves your point precisely, officers have used it to stalk family members, etc.
This type of thing is definitely real. A friend of mine went on a date with an NYPD cop back in the 90s. She refused a second date, and the stalking began. It wasn't 'tech stalking', like today, but the cop started asking interrogating questions to her landlord and co-workers; she started getting weird/false parking tickets, etc. The only way she made it stop was that her cousin was a veteran with NYPD, and well, he had a little chat with the young, stalking cop. But who knows where it all would've ended up if her cousin wasn't also a cop???
Yeah what in the world, now imagine that nowadays with FLOCK cameras. I see that going nowhere good
When flock data was FOIAd the state just exempted the data from FOIA.
Regular reminder that their CEO called Deflock a terrorist organization. I hope they go out of business and their cameras end up as e-waste.
Can I set up my own camera on the side of the road (in a public place) to scan people's faces and license plates, link them up to one of the many data brokers (or leaks) and use a big display to show the drivers' pictures and something like "Hey Rick Larsen, it's the 24th time we've seen you this week. We'll let our clients know there's no one home at 2930 Wetmore Avenue, Everett most weekdays between 8 and 4!", and then place them somewhere like oh, I don't know, in close proximity to a capitol building?
We can pay the regular fees that advertisers pay to have billboards up.
And if we're not allowed to do that, why is Flock?
No one has the right to privacy in a public setting. That's why street photographers can roam around and take photos of anyone and publish them. Whether you can publish personally identifiable information based on that, I don't know.
Yes, you are allowed to set up a camera, as long as you own the land you're putting the camera on or you have permission from the landowner.
Again, I'm surprised by how many people don't realize that it's legal to film people in public.
You can probably do that, so long as you're doing it on property you own.
As far as I can tell from the news, Flock is only used to commit crimes.
They silently stole $46 million secretly from Canada
> Important subject
> Uses slop AI art
Fastest way to make something into a farce.
It's genuinely triggering rage to see this on a "serious" article.
This problem is 99% cops and 1% flock.
verkada (a building access systems company), had multiple incidents of stalking of employees by other employees, using their own installation in their own hq
none of them were cops
Random people at your workplace likely know others with access and use it to spy on their own coworkers. I know of cases where they report the smallest details to Human Resources.