Comment by Cider9986
1 day ago
I don't see anything so wrong with cutting them down. I see it similar to maintaining a local trail. Removing obstacles like fallen trees or brambles. These are pests that are unconstitutional.
It seems like a statement to the prosperity of the American ideals of freedom that they are being removed both by local activism and illegal means. Along with the general sentiment on social media. It's genuinely insane the power social media has on earth. It's attributed to the revolution in Nepal, major protests in India, and there were a bunch more in other countries[1].
We as humans have been brainwashed with the nothing to hide fallacy. It's good to see it dismantled once we see mass surveillance in practice.
[1] Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Morocco, Madagascar, Peru, and Bulgaria from a Brave overview (can't say I researched any of these).
Prompt: other countries that had uprisings like the Nepal 2025 one
Cutting them down isn’t the worst idea but it would be nice if we could just elect people that wouldn’t allow this in the first place. Knowing that won’t happen, the only chance reasonable people have to stop this is to turn these systems against the decision makers until they yield.
Some kind of Flock@home volunteer surveillance network that tracks politicians, records LEO interactions (including those involving masked unaccountable agents), and provides the only accountability that the public has left.
What do you mean "allow"? Police chiefs are not elected positions and they often find funding outside of the town's budget for these automated bill of rights violation machines.
Sheriffs are elected (except in New York City, Rhode Island and Hawaii) and responsible for a county whereas a police chief manages law enforcement in a city or town and is appointed by its local government.
There are a lot of sheriffs.
Does the police deptartment own the land where the cameras are installed?
Sparrowmap.com is an attempt
Remember when someone set up a website tracking Elon Musk's private jet? iirc he politely asked him to take it offline.
Elon Musk fully tweaked out and I believe banned his twitter account. There’s some people who think he bought out twitter purely for this power, to unilaterally ban people who annoy him. He also offered some money for the kid to take it down, which he refused. It was really not enough money if I remember correctly, maybe 10,000 dollars. Me personally, if I was squeezed to give up my conviction, I’d at least want to maximize my profit.
> Cutting them down isn’t the worst idea but it would be nice if we could just elect people that wouldn’t allow this in the first place.
Is this really better though? First-party community maintenance is more direct, cheaper, and doesn't rely on fragile central authorities (granted, it _does_ rely on a difficult pattern of community discussion and collaboration to satisfy tribal consensus, etc).
I'm broadly OK with cameras being in public, but I have much more trust in direct action than I do in elected "officials".
On medium time-scales, it seems to me that a great solution will be to have community-maintained cameras kinda all over the commons, but such that the camera eye can be accessed publicly (ie, removing the information asymmetry which gives the undesirable actors (police, etc) greater view than the actual community participants).
I don't really care too much one way or the other about these cameras, and generally think it's probably bad to have more surveillance but could you help me understand what exactly is "unconstitutional" or even nefarious with these cameras provided they are bought and installed on property that is owned by the installer or an entity such as the government which presumably has legal justification for installing them?
I'm genuinely asking since I'm a bit out of touch with this latest controversy, but how are they any different than a dash cam, doorbell camera, or my alley camera, for example such that they deserve special consideration?
It's the database query, not the physical cameras. In the pre-digital age where privacy was considered in constitutional law, tracking people's and vehicle's movements was horrendously expensive - you'd need multiple detectives doing things by hand per person of interest. This meant that it was reserved for when the government already had pretty strong reason to believe in some sort of wrongdoing. Even with a personal, non-internet-connected doorbell camera, the police would need to identify what cameras exist for a location and contact the owners in order for the footage to do anything.
With automated license plate readers, they can simply collect everything with a reasonably affordable network of cameras, then query the database when they want to find a particular pattern of activity. The police have already detained people for frequent border-crossing between marijuana-legal and illegal states. This gets exacerbated by granularity and extensiveness - imagine an anti-choice state pointing cameras at every maternity care parking lot in the state and tracking who visits them for cross-referencing with visits to pro-choice states.
And with the existence of parallel construction, there's no reasonable way short of dismantling the ALPR system to avoid abuse against the citizenry.
Please correct my understanding if this is not the case... so the issue isn't the cameras themselves it's that you believe (and I am sympathetic toward) that they are easily searchable without a warrant and so it's something akin to a 4th Amendment violation? Less so to do with surveillance state which we might consider a separate issue? I mention that just because the surveillance state with just cameras could include consumer cameras, drones, highway traffic cams, the damn automated plate reader and tracking camera that gave me a $100+ ticket in London for driving through a congestion zone and... those bast.... and... (jk - well sort of it, I mean it is part of the group here)
I'm not sure I'm on board with the efficiency argument but those are always interesting ones.
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It’s an interpretation of the Fourth Amendment, which is loosely supported by Supreme Court precent in Carpenter and Jones. See my previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46359826
Edit: To be more clear, the issue courts have considered is warrantless searches of ALPR databases (and whether that evidence should be excluded), not whether it’s constitutional to put up cameras.
More recently, there's also United States v. Chatrie, which was a 6-3 decision that searching Google's location history data is covered by the Fourth Amendment
See: https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-applauds-important-...
See: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-112_0am4.pdf
https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/victory-federal-...
The constitution forbids unreasonable search and seizure. Tracking people's movements without specific reason the believe that they are a criminal has generally been regarded, at least by the public, as a classic example of government overreach.
I can only assume this question is disingenuous.
"What is so wrong with having your house burn down? It's just a chemical process that happens all the time."
That's a bad assumption and incorrect in this case. Instead of assuming you should just ask. I also did my best to communicate that I was genuinely interested in learning more about what was the crux of the issue.
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They are not unconstitutional. There is no right to privacy in public. There's endless confusion online, but legally, public means "not private."
The Supreme Court has ruled that police must get a warrant to place a tracker on your car even if your car is always in public.
https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/victory-federal-...
I don’t know, but it seems like a magnetron gun might be a decent way to turn these off.