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.
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.
But that "everyone" isn't a single entity recording everywhere in public with the intent of providing tracking information of everyone else. If I'm in the background of someone's selfie and posts it online, it could be used to get my location at a specific time, sure, but their intent wasn't to do so and the scope of their recording is dramatically more limited than Flock.
Europe provides plenty of examples of how this can work. The implementation varies from country to country, but the common thread is that you need a lot of subtlety. Rules like "it's fine to photograph a street full of people, but if you focus on a single person you need their consent" and "you can photograph a busy street for artistic reasons, but the same photograph is illegal if the intent is collecting data about the people or vehicles in the shot, unless it's for research or education"
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.
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."
Break the system. Non-trivial for various reasons but flood the market with low cost microwave imaging devices. I wonder how people would react if Flock camera sized devices that could see through clothes existed at a competitive price point?
Oh lord, think of the children folks. We're going to have to shut it all down.
No expectation of privacy in public is tautological, that’s what public means. Your feelings of embarrassment or paranoia don’t trump my right to observe what’s going on in the public domain.
Absolutist stances like this generally lead to undesirable outcomes as technology advances and changes the scale-per-dollar practical limitations of surveillance, which is exactly my point around our need to adjust how absolutely we consider the lack of privacy expectations in public.
The absolutist "no public privacy" stance suggests that I would be ok (legally and morally) to create a widespread camera system that tracks cellphone screens in public and automatically records any passwords that are being entered within view of the cameras and sends them to me. This is ok because, in the absolutist view, your screen and finger movements were visible in public. This feels pretty wrong to me.
It's the difference between targeted surveillance and dragnet surveillance. Technology has made things that were previously only possible through targeted surveillance to be cheaply achieved through dragnet means, both to governments and individual citizens.
I'm wondering if it's possible to make a "reasonable" looking frame (that sits entirely outside the plate, not obstructing or obscuring it) for a license plate that breaks up the shape (with the same colors) to reduce detection success further. Possibly with some IR retroreflector decorations.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Presumably today the lack of your cell phone following its normal location patterns (i.e. you left the phone at home while you committed the crime) would be a data point, too.
"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
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
nobody's questioning what a small town is. sheriffs patrol the whole county, not just a small town. there are plenty of small towns that do not have a local police department and depend on the sheriff's office; I grew up in one. maybe my sheriff was just a dick about it, but he was quick to distance from the small town label in conversation.
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.
> 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.
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.
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. All this 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.
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"
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
> 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.
Nashville has tons of Flock cameras now. I was just there over the weekend and noticed at least four on the interstates.
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
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
> The truth is that everyone carries a camera
But that "everyone" isn't a single entity recording everywhere in public with the intent of providing tracking information of everyone else. If I'm in the background of someone's selfie and posts it online, it could be used to get my location at a specific time, sure, but their intent wasn't to do so and the scope of their recording is dramatically more limited than Flock.
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Europe provides plenty of examples of how this can work. The implementation varies from country to country, but the common thread is that you need a lot of subtlety. Rules like "it's fine to photograph a street full of people, but if you focus on a single person you need their consent" and "you can photograph a busy street for artistic reasons, but the same photograph is illegal if the intent is collecting data about the people or vehicles in the shot, unless it's for research or education"
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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.
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
Break the system. Non-trivial for various reasons but flood the market with low cost microwave imaging devices. I wonder how people would react if Flock camera sized devices that could see through clothes existed at a competitive price point?
Oh lord, think of the children folks. We're going to have to shut it all down.
No expectation of privacy in public is tautological, that’s what public means. Your feelings of embarrassment or paranoia don’t trump my right to observe what’s going on in the public domain.
Absolutist stances like this generally lead to undesirable outcomes as technology advances and changes the scale-per-dollar practical limitations of surveillance, which is exactly my point around our need to adjust how absolutely we consider the lack of privacy expectations in public.
The absolutist "no public privacy" stance suggests that I would be ok (legally and morally) to create a widespread camera system that tracks cellphone screens in public and automatically records any passwords that are being entered within view of the cameras and sends them to me. This is ok because, in the absolutist view, your screen and finger movements were visible in public. This feels pretty wrong to me.
It's the difference between targeted surveillance and dragnet surveillance. Technology has made things that were previously only possible through targeted surveillance to be cheaply achieved through dragnet means, both to governments and individual citizens.
True but in public you can collect almost any data a person would reasonably expect to be private. What remains private?
For a video overview of this stuff:
“Breaking The Creepy AI in Police Cameras”, Benn Jordan [36min, 1.7m views, 9d ago]
https://youtu.be/Pp9MwZkHiMQ
I'm wondering if it's possible to make a "reasonable" looking frame (that sits entirely outside the plate, not obstructing or obscuring it) for a license plate that breaks up the shape (with the same colors) to reduce detection success further. Possibly with some IR retroreflector decorations.
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.
Deflock is a thing. https://discord.gg/2Ug7KC2R
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.
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?
Does Discord have a public API
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.00627
See also https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:man%20made=surveilla...
> Deflock is a thing. https://discord.gg/2Ug7KC2R
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.
So if you're scared to even look at countermeasures, they've already won.
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It's a discord associated with this site: https://deflock.me/.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Using one surveillance platform to organize against another...
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.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/in-minecraft
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.
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.
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.
Presumably today the lack of your cell phone following its normal location patterns (i.e. you left the phone at home while you committed the crime) would be a data point, too.
Just throw a SovCit plate on the back of your car. You weren't driving, you were traveling.
Related just yesterday:
AI startup Flock thinks it can eliminate all crime in America
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45119847
Also,
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety (YC S17)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ
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.
"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
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).
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.
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> 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.
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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.
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.
nobody's questioning what a small town is. sheriffs patrol the whole county, not just a small town. there are plenty of small towns that do not have a local police department and depend on the sheriff's office; I grew up in one. maybe my sheriff was just a dick about it, but he was quick to distance from the small town label in conversation.
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More of turn of phrase than a statement of belief on where sheriffs work I’d say. Calling in a vague wild west vibe.
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.
> 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.
"everyone knows your business all the time"
Not everyone. Only the people with access to the surveillance data. This asymmetry is a big problem.
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Dependent_Surveillan...
[1] https://www.adsbexchange.com/
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?
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> 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.
I think if you were in that small village you wouldn't appreciate the distinction ("meet the new boss same as the old boss").
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At least you could always leave the small village. Can't really do that anymore.
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. All this 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.
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.
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"
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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.
Anything you've read about and was appalled by in dystopian literature is already here, and not in some distant future.
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?
Happened to me once, while visiting my elderly uncle out in the countryside.
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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.
> 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.
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.
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There was a time, when I sincerely thought ACLU was there to protect civil liberties.
These days, I don’t know. Certainly an instrument of a particular party. Plus, owned by various special interest groups beyond that.
Fighting this kind of surveillance is definitely protecting civil liberties. And if you don't like the ACLU, the IJ is also fighting: https://ij.org/issues/ijs-project-on-the-4th-amendment/ https://www.plateprivacy.com/
Good point.
How does the ACLU count to ten? 1, 3, 4, 5…
Seriously, though - they’re 100% correct on this one. Flock cameras are abhorrent, and I’m honestly aghast that people aren’t up in arms.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
http://flocksafety.com/products/flock-freeform
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.
> 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.
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I dont't recall this being anywhere in the documentation or terms of the licensing of a vehicle. Did I miss that part?
You don't own your license plate. It is government property, as is a driver's license.
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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?
You sound like a "if you have nothing to hide" kind of person
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.
> 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.
Nashville has tons of Flock cameras now. I was just there over the weekend and noticed at least four on the interstates.
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.
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.
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
>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.
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?
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.