No, the court ruled that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their cell phone records. You're going to get to some weird and inoperative places if you try to generalize from jurisprudence like this. You do not generally have an established right to move without being observed in the US; the very fact that you're required to keep a clearly visible tracking device on your car or motorcycle shows that.
We really should build an open source ALPR system of cameras that gives real time information on the position of every law enforcement vehicle. Including the cars driven by the officers to and from work. That would have been helpful in finding license violations in California by ICE officers.
Funny you should mention this. Benn Jordan, on the heels of his Flock camera research, reverse engineered a non-flock ALRP unit and built his own system using some off the shelf parts, a tablet, and 3D printer. He did it mostly as an experiment but also due to the fact that Flock's algorithm for image detection is astoundingly bad and has a high incident of reading plates incorrectly.
There are a handful of open-source models for license plate detection, I forget exactly which model outperformed the rest, but it was an excellent watch and help me really understand just how inefficient these commercial systems are and how easy they can be to defeat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ
Everyone's got an old Android phone or two sitting in their junk drawer, right? Place it in your window and connect it to the shared, open, public service. Might work, but then if it's open and shared, Flock can simply connect to the open API and add a new category "Public cameras" to their own data.
Any data we make available as an open system will also be available to bad actors.
There’s a lot of local US candidates running this year on pushing back on the federal government. Realistically there’s not a ton that can be done at the level of a mayor or even state senator. However removing local passive surveillance is something that can make a genuine impact. I’d love to see people running on banning red light/license plate cameras and other passive surveillance tools. If the data is never collected it can’t be abused.
Realistically there’s not a ton that can be done at the level of a mayor or even state senator
I wish people wouldn't say that, it's not the case.
First, pushback requires equivalent effort. If 10,000 towns are uncooperative because 10,000 mayors resist this, the amount of political power to overcome this is incredibly large. The mayors can delay or cancel projects with uncooperative or malicious vendors. They can slow down approvals. This administration and the powers that want this espionage power understand this, which is why they target downstream races, school boards, and sheriff positions.
Second, a state senator is much, much more powerful than you give them credit. There are usually much fewer of them than members of the US House or Senate, so they individually more voting power. They can substantially influence state politics, and it is magnified with majorities and committees.
Third, resources are pooled and parties coordinate, so starving them of influence, which is root of all their funding, is key to voting undemocratic parties out of office.
Don't believe what you read about politics online. It is made for modern, shallow consumption. Little races matter.
You can make a large difference by participating directly, too. You don't even have to make a scene about it in your platform. Just run, be boring, win, and talk with your votes.
> I’d love to see people running on banning red light/license plate cameras
Not me. We've become way too soft on vehicle crime which is often tied to other crimes. I'd love to see a lot more automated enforcement: speeding, red light running, shoulder riding, missing or fake tags, noise violations, car emissions, etc.
The FBI is a good analogy for the political choices Americans have between Democrats and Republicans. They are completely non-ideological. It's just about power and control over the population. We need to get our rights back somehow.
This is IMO the only legitimate use case of a montana-LLC vehicle registration. The corporate veil acts as a privacy protection mechanism from government outreach. IMO we hear a lot of Straw Mans of "Tax evasion!!" here yet the legitimate use remains.
This is a personal opinion, so please be careful, but technology enables new forms of behaviour and opportunity that we can’t always predict.
And so ….
We will live in a almost totally transparent world - our daily interactions, voice, text and visual are likely recorded by someone at some point - how bosses interact with their employees, how nurses talk to patients and cashiers to customers, how parents talk to children - all of this will be recorded
And that can be a Good Thing. Imagine your boss getting real time feedback on coaching style, or you getting pointers on how not to argue with your wife.
The challenge is fairly simple - if we lose all secrets, the privacy is just the politeness of our neighbours. And while we can and should have strong laws on this, we need a social chnage to make serving someone ads based on their observable behaviour about the same level of social acceptability as crapping on their doorstep and then pouring petrol on and lighting it.
But we could see a world where privacy is protected but epidemiologists can pick apart the most thorny problems, human beings will be raised to be the very best they can be, and society become more communal and robust.
It’s possible - tech is neutral
And those societies and countries that embrace it will probably have that boost everyone thinks is coming from AI
The people creating, funding, controlling, developing, deploying and using the tech are not neutral, and the technology is indistinguishable from those people. In light of that, I would argue your assertion, that the "tech is neutral", is nothing more than rhetoric and that in every meaningful way the tech lacks neutrality.
> Imagine your boss getting real time feedback on coaching style, or you getting pointers on how not to argue with your wife.
This sounds like a dystopia: either I'm receiving some machine-generated feedback that no one checked and may as well not apply at all or someone did check and my entire life is being judged by strangers. In either case, I imagine myself yelling at my SO because they cheated on me and getting a notification that my behavior was out of line.
To me this sounds eerily similar to that quote "you'll own nothing and you'll be happy" in that it's not coming as positive a statement as intended.
This statement has the same level of wisdom as telling a judge "Hey man, it's just a plant" at your hearing for dealing cannabis in the US in the 90s. You may be right, but that's independent of the reason we're all here right now.
"Tech" requires an entire grotesque machine of money and monsters, and they are rarely neutral.
If you believed "tech is neutral" you'd advocate for all of this machinery to be heavily regulated, publicly run, publicly owned, and universally accessible, rather than advocating to hide it behind one of the most secretive institutions in the US being led on the leash by oligarchs.
So, you're either one of these oligarchs or brainwashed by one.
> we need a social chnage to make serving someone ads based on their observable behaviour about the same level of social acceptability as crapping on their doorstep
Every time. Every ?!%@# time on HN. "Here's a story about police state overreach and unconstitutional privacy violation. And that's obviously very bad. Now let me tell you how the really important thing here is how much Google sucks."
I must shamefully admit that after vaguely watching American tv shows like CSI for last twenty years I was convinced this is already a thing for a long time.
Does it mean you can't see a perfect reflection on a slightly rusted screw?
I would be genuinely shocked if this isn’t already integrated into the US intelligence apparatus, it just may not be commonly used for domestic cases targeting US citizens, or it currently requires parallel construction to justify how they know things they shouldn’t know. This may just be a way to legalize it or integrate a few new data sources.
Wait, but I was told that my local police department owned the Flock data, and that Flock doesn't own it and cannot share it? Was I lied to, to further expand the surveillance state?
"Ownership" of data may have little or nothing to do with control of the data, depending on what other rights you agree to give up. Your Flock contract may specify your ownership of the data and then in the next sentence release to Flock all or most control of that data (you still own it!).
The "15 minute city conspiracy" (anti bike lane, anti mass transit, car = liberty) people sure seem to gloss over inconvenient facts like this.
Frankly I don't see a way out from this. Since you must register and insure your vehicle and have a government license to drive it and it hauls two tons at 80mph, it seems like natural creep for the government to know where it is, and the tech to infer it without explicitly scanning plates is only getting better and better.
Maybe having just one euro/asian-style dense city with bike lanes in the US wouldn't be such a bad thing to try out?
I do find it interesting that the 'small government' and 'individual freedom above all else' types seem hellbent on regulating and restricting the freedoms of things outside of their own experience and taste.
The freedoms they're after also seem to be along the lines of 'don't restrict my ability to scam folks of lesser intellect or education'.
SCOTUS has already ruled that tracking people's movement over time without a warrant is a Fourth Amendment violation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_v._United_States
Until SCOTUS rules that parallel construction is a constitutional violation, the FBI is free to track everyone and build cases from illegal data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
Unfortunately, “SCOTUS previously declared this unconstitutional” doesn’t have quite the same sense of finality it used to these days.
No, the court ruled that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their cell phone records. You're going to get to some weird and inoperative places if you try to generalize from jurisprudence like this. You do not generally have an established right to move without being observed in the US; the very fact that you're required to keep a clearly visible tracking device on your car or motorcycle shows that.
The current SCOTUS likely doesn't care about that.
Fascism is coming, and we're the slowly boiling frogs.
Why would they care lol
We really should build an open source ALPR system of cameras that gives real time information on the position of every law enforcement vehicle. Including the cars driven by the officers to and from work. That would have been helpful in finding license violations in California by ICE officers.
EDIT: We could call it "CopAware" :-)
Funny you should mention this. Benn Jordan, on the heels of his Flock camera research, reverse engineered a non-flock ALRP unit and built his own system using some off the shelf parts, a tablet, and 3D printer. He did it mostly as an experiment but also due to the fact that Flock's algorithm for image detection is astoundingly bad and has a high incident of reading plates incorrectly.
There are a handful of open-source models for license plate detection, I forget exactly which model outperformed the rest, but it was an excellent watch and help me really understand just how inefficient these commercial systems are and how easy they can be to defeat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ
Everyone's got an old Android phone or two sitting in their junk drawer, right? Place it in your window and connect it to the shared, open, public service. Might work, but then if it's open and shared, Flock can simply connect to the open API and add a new category "Public cameras" to their own data.
Any data we make available as an open system will also be available to bad actors.
I’ve toyed with the concept
There’s a lot of local US candidates running this year on pushing back on the federal government. Realistically there’s not a ton that can be done at the level of a mayor or even state senator. However removing local passive surveillance is something that can make a genuine impact. I’d love to see people running on banning red light/license plate cameras and other passive surveillance tools. If the data is never collected it can’t be abused.
Realistically there’s not a ton that can be done at the level of a mayor or even state senator
I wish people wouldn't say that, it's not the case.
First, pushback requires equivalent effort. If 10,000 towns are uncooperative because 10,000 mayors resist this, the amount of political power to overcome this is incredibly large. The mayors can delay or cancel projects with uncooperative or malicious vendors. They can slow down approvals. This administration and the powers that want this espionage power understand this, which is why they target downstream races, school boards, and sheriff positions.
Second, a state senator is much, much more powerful than you give them credit. There are usually much fewer of them than members of the US House or Senate, so they individually more voting power. They can substantially influence state politics, and it is magnified with majorities and committees.
Third, resources are pooled and parties coordinate, so starving them of influence, which is root of all their funding, is key to voting undemocratic parties out of office.
Don't believe what you read about politics online. It is made for modern, shallow consumption. Little races matter.
You can make a large difference by participating directly, too. You don't even have to make a scene about it in your platform. Just run, be boring, win, and talk with your votes.
This might seem cynical, but it appears to me the uniparty has already decided it wants a total surveillance state.
Having achieved total coverage of the observable domestic cyber realm, the next objective is a physical layer.
Anyone arguing against it is a terrorist sympathizer or has criminal intent. This is for the safety of the homeland, after all.
This is also why car dependent infrastructure is a bad thing for Americans’ freedom.
You have more civil rights as a pedestrian than you do in a licensed motor vehicle.
> I’d love to see people running on banning red light/license plate cameras
Not me. We've become way too soft on vehicle crime which is often tied to other crimes. I'd love to see a lot more automated enforcement: speeding, red light running, shoulder riding, missing or fake tags, noise violations, car emissions, etc.
This article is literally blogspam of an article that got significant front-page coverage:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48184350
The FBI is a good analogy for the political choices Americans have between Democrats and Republicans. They are completely non-ideological. It's just about power and control over the population. We need to get our rights back somehow.
Is this as a backup for the system that reads the rfid in our tires?
/ I assumed this had long been the case
This is IMO the only legitimate use case of a montana-LLC vehicle registration. The corporate veil acts as a privacy protection mechanism from government outreach. IMO we hear a lot of Straw Mans of "Tax evasion!!" here yet the legitimate use remains.
This is a personal opinion, so please be careful, but technology enables new forms of behaviour and opportunity that we can’t always predict.
And so ….
We will live in a almost totally transparent world - our daily interactions, voice, text and visual are likely recorded by someone at some point - how bosses interact with their employees, how nurses talk to patients and cashiers to customers, how parents talk to children - all of this will be recorded
And that can be a Good Thing. Imagine your boss getting real time feedback on coaching style, or you getting pointers on how not to argue with your wife.
The challenge is fairly simple - if we lose all secrets, the privacy is just the politeness of our neighbours. And while we can and should have strong laws on this, we need a social chnage to make serving someone ads based on their observable behaviour about the same level of social acceptability as crapping on their doorstep and then pouring petrol on and lighting it.
But we could see a world where privacy is protected but epidemiologists can pick apart the most thorny problems, human beings will be raised to be the very best they can be, and society become more communal and robust.
It’s possible - tech is neutral
And those societies and countries that embrace it will probably have that boost everyone thinks is coming from AI
It’s possible - tech is neutral
The people creating, funding, controlling, developing, deploying and using the tech are not neutral, and the technology is indistinguishable from those people. In light of that, I would argue your assertion, that the "tech is neutral", is nothing more than rhetoric and that in every meaningful way the tech lacks neutrality.
> Imagine your boss getting real time feedback on coaching style, or you getting pointers on how not to argue with your wife.
This sounds like a dystopia: either I'm receiving some machine-generated feedback that no one checked and may as well not apply at all or someone did check and my entire life is being judged by strangers. In either case, I imagine myself yelling at my SO because they cheated on me and getting a notification that my behavior was out of line.
To me this sounds eerily similar to that quote "you'll own nothing and you'll be happy" in that it's not coming as positive a statement as intended.
> tech is neutral
This statement has the same level of wisdom as telling a judge "Hey man, it's just a plant" at your hearing for dealing cannabis in the US in the 90s. You may be right, but that's independent of the reason we're all here right now.
"Tech" requires an entire grotesque machine of money and monsters, and they are rarely neutral.
If you believed "tech is neutral" you'd advocate for all of this machinery to be heavily regulated, publicly run, publicly owned, and universally accessible, rather than advocating to hide it behind one of the most secretive institutions in the US being led on the leash by oligarchs.
So, you're either one of these oligarchs or brainwashed by one.
> we need a social chnage to make serving someone ads based on their observable behaviour about the same level of social acceptability as crapping on their doorstep
Every time. Every ?!%@# time on HN. "Here's a story about police state overreach and unconstitutional privacy violation. And that's obviously very bad. Now let me tell you how the really important thing here is how much Google sucks."
Are license plates a federal or state requirement?
I must shamefully admit that after vaguely watching American tv shows like CSI for last twenty years I was convinced this is already a thing for a long time.
Does it mean you can't see a perfect reflection on a slightly rusted screw?
I would be genuinely shocked if this isn’t already integrated into the US intelligence apparatus, it just may not be commonly used for domestic cases targeting US citizens, or it currently requires parallel construction to justify how they know things they shouldn’t know. This may just be a way to legalize it or integrate a few new data sources.
120,000,000 license plate readers in America, and still no sign of Guthrie.
I feel safer already.
Wait, but I was told that my local police department owned the Flock data, and that Flock doesn't own it and cannot share it? Was I lied to, to further expand the surveillance state?
"Ownership" of data may have little or nothing to do with control of the data, depending on what other rights you agree to give up. Your Flock contract may specify your ownership of the data and then in the next sentence release to Flock all or most control of that data (you still own it!).
Yes
https://youtu.be/uB0gr7Fh6lY?is=7osD4zLTz9wJ1hJc
https://youtu.be/vU1-uiUlHTo?is=zmma8mce5k3nyflw
The "15 minute city conspiracy" (anti bike lane, anti mass transit, car = liberty) people sure seem to gloss over inconvenient facts like this.
Frankly I don't see a way out from this. Since you must register and insure your vehicle and have a government license to drive it and it hauls two tons at 80mph, it seems like natural creep for the government to know where it is, and the tech to infer it without explicitly scanning plates is only getting better and better.
Maybe having just one euro/asian-style dense city with bike lanes in the US wouldn't be such a bad thing to try out?
> Maybe having just one euro/asian-style dense city with bike lanes in the US wouldn't be such a bad thing to try out?
What do you call Manhattan? It would count among the ~10 most dense cities proper in the world.
I am so glad the party of small government is in charge.
I do find it interesting that the 'small government' and 'individual freedom above all else' types seem hellbent on regulating and restricting the freedoms of things outside of their own experience and taste.
The freedoms they're after also seem to be along the lines of 'don't restrict my ability to scam folks of lesser intellect or education'.
The leopards are to only eat _their_ faces.
Sooner or later you will learn that politics don't exist and 3 letter agencies are immune to oversight.