Comment by lesuorac
4 months ago
Eh, if a cop sat at a Dunkin Donuts and wrote down every license plate they saw that wouldn't require a warrant.
Why should contracting that out to a private company require a warrant?
Flock isn't say Google which collects location data because it needs it for Google Maps to function. Flock is only here because the local government paid it to setup equipment.
It's really an issue for the local community. Do you want your local tax dollars going to support parks or tracking individuals?
if a cop followed you for private reasons in a private car while off duty, they wouldn't need a warrant. why should they need a warrant if they pay a private individual to do it? why should they need a warrant if they pay a private company to do it electronically? why should they need a warrant when they pay a private company to do it electronically while on the clock as part of their official duty? why should they ever need a warrant? they could just kill her if they wanted, nobody would do anything about it.
> they could just kill her if they wanted, nobody would do anything about it.
Exactly, people act like “warrants” are going to protect you from authoritarians. It’s literally just a piece of paper! All this going on about surveillance and privacy really is futile.
If you cant teust the government then yes, the laws are all just words. The contitution is just words at this point. But if you cant trust some parts of the government (including, opposition and non executive branches) then laws can help protect the innocent a little bit
I'm not talking private.
Think of it this way. The government pays somebody to collect data about how many bicyclists use an intersection to decided if they should add a dedicated bike light. Why would the government need to use a warrant to get that information?
That's the same situation here. Flock is placing the cameras because the government has paid them to.
The 4th amendment is complicated, and the interpretations from the last 250 years, make it more so: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,[a] against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
There's a few issues
1. Unreasonable is the key word here. You purposely chose an arguably reasonable thing (counting you anonymously as you pass through an intersection).
Many people think that personally logging your movements throughout the day using automated superhuman means crosses the line into unreasonable.
2. There is also a separate issue that the law allows third parties to willingly hand over/sell information about you that many people think would be subject to warrant rules. You only need a warrant when the information is being held by a party that doesn't want to hand it over willingly.
3. Intent matters in the law. The intent behind counting cyclists is very different than the intent behind setting up a system for tracking people over time, even though the mechanism may be the same.
4. There is also the issue that currently legal != morally correct.
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> That's the same situation here.
There is a monumental difference between counting how many cyclists use an intersection and recording the license plates of cars.
If the former, you don’t store any personal information, all you know is how many pass by. You don’t even know if they were different people, 10 of the 50 cyclists you saw could’ve been the same person going in circles.
In the latter, you know which vehicles went by, and when. Even if you don’t record the time you saw them, from the dates of the study you can narrow it down considerably. Those can be mapped to specific people.
It's actually very simple - because of the nature of their use of the data. Laws can have subtlety, its not a magic on or off switch - if you want aggregate data for the number of bicycles that's not the DNA sample from each passerby.
The government should need a warrant to track a person in ways that violate their privacy. Phone taps need warrants. Alpr lookups should too
> if a cop followed you for private reasons in a private car while off duty, they wouldn't need a warrant.
No, they wouldn't need a warrant, because they'd be stalking you.
flock is stalking you
1 reply →
> It's really an issue for the local community. Do you want your local tax dollars going to support parks or tracking individuals?
Correct. In your analogy, the Texas cop is being paid by your community to write down your license plate. (Otherwise, he has no authority to be operating outside his state.)
They wouldn't require a warrant, but at the same time, that wouldn't be scalable to be able to record every license plate everywhere in the city.
Having a barrier to accessing data can help prevent casual abuse in my opinion, so that officers can't look up say some ex girlfriend's license plate, but if they get a warrant they can look up some suspect's license plate.
It is an emergent effect of scale. The first principle reasoning logic of small scale examples doesn’t work as you zoom out.
Being able to scope out a small scale example of why something is ok is a very poor indicator of how it operates in a massive one.
>Eh, if a cop sat at a Dunkin Donuts and wrote down every license plate they saw that wouldn't require a warrant
I would say that there is an appreciable qualitative difference between a man using his eyeballs and a piece of paper to write down license plate numbers and a technologically sophisticated network of computerized surveillance apparatus installed over a geographically large area being used to track an individual.
Call me old-fashioned I guess