Comment by fusslo
2 days ago
I wonder what our founders would think about tools like Flock.
From what I understand these systems are legal because there is no expectation of privacy in public. Therefore any time you go in public you cannot expect NOT to be tracked, photographed, and entered into a database (which may now outlive us).
I think the argument comes from the 1st amendment.
Weaponizing the Bill of Rights (BoR) for the government against the people does not seem to align with my understanding of why the Bill of Rights was cemented into our constitution in the first place.
I wonder what Adams or Madison would make of it. I wonder if Benjamin Franklin would be appalled.
I wonder if they'd consider every license plate reading a violation of the 4th amendment.
> I wonder what our founders would think about tools like Flock.
I suspect they'd make a distinction between private individuals engaging in first amendment protected activity like public photography and corporations or the state doing the same in order to violate people's 4th amendment rights. We certainly don't have to allow for both cases.
They'd have not forced license plates to be displayed at all times to begin with, as they are a search of your papers without probable cause your vehicle is unregistered. Private ships in those days (probably the closest equivalent of something big and dangerous that could do tons of damage quickly on the public right of way) did not have required hull numbers or anything like that. Of course that doesn't totally solve the flock problem, but makes it a lot harder.
Ships then, and now, don’t really need numbers for identification. There are various unique numbers that they can and do use occasionally for specific purposes(IMO numbers and hull numbers). However, a ship’s name and home port were, and are, more than sufficient to identify a ship for legal purposes. You don’t need a registration number on a ship, and certainly wouldn’t have needed one then.
The authorities absolutely kept meticulous records of ships entry and exit from any harbour as well as what was on board, what was loaded and unloaded and frequently a list of all persons onboard.
Some flag states enforce uniqueness constraints on name and home port combinations. The US does not, but that really doesn’t matter much in the real world. There just aren’t that many conflicts.
More importantly, the founding fathers very much did not extend privacy rights to ships. Intentionally so. The very first congress passed a law in 1790 that exempted ships from the requirements of needing a warrant to be searched.
The ability to track and search ships without warrants has been an important capability of the federal government from day one.
Hell, the federal register of ships is published and always has been. I don’t know how they would have felt about private cars, but the founding fathers revealed preference is that shipping and ships are not private like your other “papers and effects” are.
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The comparison to private ships doesn't quite land, IMO.
Ships - ships big enough to do material damage would be very small in # - ships big enough to do material damage would have a (somewhat?) professional crew - whatever damage they could do would always be limited to tiny areas - only where water & land meet, only where substantial public or private investment had been made in docks/etc - operators have strong financial incentive to avoid damaging ship or 3rd party property (public or private)
Cars - in some countries the ratio of cars to people is approaching 1 - a vanishingly small portion of vehicles have professional drivers - car operators expect to be able to operate at velocities fatal to others on nearly 100% of land in cities, excepting only land that already has a building on it, and sometimes not even that. - car operators rarely held liable for damage to public property, injury, or death and there's strong political pressure to socialize damage and avoid realistic risk premiums
I don't love flock but IMO the only realistic way to get rid of license plates would be mandatory speed governors that keep vehicles from going more than like 15mph. I would be fine with that, but I suspect most would not. If we expect to operate cars at velocities fatal to people outside our vehicles, then there will always be pressure to have a way of identifying bad actors who put others at risk.
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> Private ships
Often, the same people crying about Flock will decry private arms ownership through mental gymnastics.
These very same ships you speak of that could do "tons of damage" had actual cannonry - with no registration or restrictions on ownership or purchase, either.
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Funny enough thats actually not true. Legally speaking. It's often claimed but it is an over simplification.
I think maybe the worst part is that the more we buy into this belief the more self fulfilling it becomes (see third link). But I don't expect anyone to believe me so here's several links. And I'd encourage people to push back against this misnomer. In the most obvious of cases I hope we all expect to have privacy in a public restroom. But remember that this extends beyond that. And remember that privacy is not binary. It's not a thing you have complete privacy or none (public restrooms again being an obvious example). So that level of privacy that we expect is ultimately decided by us. By acting as if it is binary only enables those who wish to take those rights from us. They want you to be nihilistic
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/09/you-really-do-have-som...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_expectation_of_priv...
https://legalclarity.org/is-there-an-expectation-of-privacy-...
>I wonder if Benjamin Franklin would be appalled.
Depends how fast we lost him to porn on the internet
I'd bet many of the founders would've been amazed at the technology and insist on wide scale adoption. It could've further cemented the power of slaveholders over their slaves. It could've helped to track the movements of native groups. It could've helped to root out loyalists still dangerous to American independence.
they prob be upset about the 13th 15th and 19th amendments too
Yea they would have had no issue with flock if it was for capturing escaped enslaved people
They aren't a monolithic group. There was a wide range of opinions on slavery and many other topics. Do a bit of research.
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> From what I understand these systems are legal because there is no expectation of privacy in public.
Not quite. There's been precedent set that seems to imply flock and other mass surveillance drag net operations such as this do violate the forth.
Defendants trying to exclude ALPR evidence often invoke Carpenter v. U.S. (or U.S. v. Jones, but that’s questionable because the majority decision is based on the trespass interpretation of the 4th Amendment rather than the Katz test). Judges have not generally agreed with defendants that ALPR (either the license plate capture itself or the database lookup) resembles the CSLI in Carpenter or the GPS tracker in Jones. A high enough density of Flock cameras may make the Carpenter-like arguments more compelling, though.
Yeah, I don't think capturing your license plate at a light falls afoul of Carpenter, but aggregating timestamped records of your license plate all over town to build a complete picture of your movements probably does.
Your founding fathers would become feasible perpetual energy sources as they roll in their graves seeing what your country has turned into. Not that you guys are alone - a lot of countries would benefit from such energy sources too.
idk that the government had first amendment rights… like any private citizen can record, but 1a doesn’t immediately mean the government can do anything, right?
The problem is that these laws were written before automated mass surveillance was feasible.
They would probably be enraged that we pay 50% income tax and use a central bank to fund all this bs more than anything.
I think you should try to decide for yourself what to make of the situation instead of wondering what some ancient dead old dudes would think.
It is possible to have your own thoughts and also wonder what other people think.
If that was the case then you should wonder what Descartes would think. What Derrida or Baudrillard would think. We both know it’s not about that though.
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Both perspectives could be informative.
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