> In 1983, the Supreme Court held unanimously that ‘a person travelling in an automobile on public thoroughfares has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements from one place to another’. And in January of 2026, a federal judge in Virginia ruled in a challenge by two civil rights activists against Flock specifically that: ‘An individual scan of a license plate, a vehicle identifier that generally must be displayed under state law, does not invade any privacy interests’.
And a week ago, a federal court in Oklahoma threw out the evidence after a cop with no warrant checked a month of Flock's travel history on a car, used that as grounds for suspicion, searched the car and found drugs.
Also, there is a competing interpretation of the law called "Mosaic Theory" that is at the root of the argument against the 1983 ruling. In Carpenter v. United States (2018)...
> [t]he Supreme Court ruled that law enforcement requires a warrant to access historical cell-site location information (CSLI). Chief Justice John Roberts noted that individuals do not surrender all Fourth Amendment protections simply by venturing into the public sphere. The Court determined that compiling a "detailed and comprehensive record of the person’s movements" is vastly different from a police officer casually observing a car drive by.
This is a clear application of "detailed and comprehensive record" creation, and I can't see how Flock could argue with this recent precedent.
The other problem with this opinion piece is that the author assumes that if a citizen is not physically pulled over, they are being "left alone." He completely dismisses the reality that capturing, logging, and storing the movements of millions of innocent, law-abiding citizens in a searchable database is inherently intrusive.
The judge went further than that. He ruled that the Flock search itself was a Fourth Amendment violation, and "called the technology a form of 'indiscriminate mass surveillance.'" He suppressed both the evidence from the car search, and the data from Flock.
One of the last point is that no one in a vehicle should expect privacy, and IMHO it's the only point worth talking about, because others have been explored ad nauseam.
Let's say he is right (there is a case for and against). In that case anybody should be able to access the data. To prevent abuse, let's have people requesting access fill a form with their last name, reasons for access+time constraints, and make the requests public, so that everyone know who searched for which car. Maybe add a secondary access, where you input a badge number and a warrant number, that prevent the data to reach the public for a set of time (at most a year).
Also if that happens, I will probably make an app so you know when someone searched for your car.
The article takes a hand-wavy attitude towards abuse and negligence, with little attempt to counter-balance it with transparent accountability. If we can't address that in good faith, I see no reason to give the other 98% of the article weight.
> The article takes a hand-wavy attitude towards abuse and negligence, with little attempt to counter-balance it with transparent accountability.
What do you mean? It addresses the matter explicitly, making the argument that it's hard to abuse with impunity. Is there a particular point you think it should have addressed that it didn't?
Plain view doctrine is a bullshit excuse in this discussion. Yes, you can expect to be in plain view of people including the police. You can expect that a camera can see you and record you. That part indeed is not a search.
A database of your movements and the associated photos or videos of those movements is not plain view. That's assembling a dossier. That is related to things like harassment laws and stalking laws.
Being able to access that database with a query is literally - literally, in the literal sense - a search. It's a search of information compiled about you going about your Constitutionally protected rights to travel, assemble, earn a living, and whatever else is not specifically illegal. It's a Fourth Amendment issue the very same way cell phone geofencing is a Fourth Amendment issue, and the US Supreme Court recently ruled on dragnets of cellphone data. It requires a judicial warrant.
Being in plain view in public does not give a police officer probable cause to follow you wherever you go, take down photos, videos, and notes about your route, and publish that to an interagency database as if you're a known suspect just so they can find you later in case you become a suspect. Doing the same thing with a little AI box on the side of the road is the same thing, not something entirely different.
Ultimately the city council decided not to renew their Flock contract but if you're looking for more insight as to why police actually want to use flock for actual policing, it's pretty insightful.
There used to be a saying, back before the Republican party went full wingnut, "a Democrat is a Republican that hasn't been mugged yet".
The modern equivalent is something like "people hate Flock right up until their car gets stolen".
I used to live in a high crime area. It sucked. I would have accepted any number of cameras of any type to make the crime stop.
There are a million ways you can be tracked (the device you're probably reading this message on, included) so ALPRs are hardly new or threatening. But they make cars practically unstealable, and that's why I've come 'round to being pro-Flock. Sorry.
There used to be a saying, back before the prole uprisings, "a Republican is a Freedom Party member that hasn't been chipped yet".
The modern equivalent is something like "people hate autonomous hunter-killer drones right up until their external nervous system gets stolen".
I used to live in a high crime area. It sucked. I would have accepted any number of armed drones of any type to make the crime stop.
There are a million ways you can be shot, from cops to criminals to misbehaving security turrets, so armed drones are hardly new or threatening. But they make exobrains practically unstealable, and that's why I've come 'round to being pro-hunter-killer drone. Sorry.
You're conflating ALPR with Flock. I think that's a mistake, given Flock's other major implementation issues and other features that have nothing to do with ALPR.
Almost every violation of our privacy would make law enforcement easier and more effective. Nevertheless, we value privacy. I am not convinced by this "well if ended up benefiting from it you'd change your tune."
That Rizzo/Kristol quote hasn't been borne out in studies [1][2], so it's not exactly a great place to start from (ps: as a data point of 1 my car was stolen out of my apartment's gated garage and more cameras would have been completely useless). Extending it to flock is even more erroneous, because it still requires the police/government to actually act on that data. And that's before considering all the privacy issues with storing historical data and the lowering of resources required for tracking someone, which i think are much more important.
But I really want to focus on the idea that more cameras will make the crime stop, because that is especially fallacious. It won't. Not by itself. What will make crime stop is government/community intervention. We could get into a whole broken window vs enhancing economic opportunity vs early targeted intervention approach debate, but the specific type of intervention isn't relevant to my point (so long as it's effective), which is that more data is only useful it it's actually used and not just stored in a warehouse without ever being looked at.
Let me give you more details from the car theft i mentioned before of my car getting stolen in 2020/2021 in San Francisco from of my gated (and security camera-ed) apartment garage.
The car was taken a few days before July 4th. Since I work from home, I didn't notice until I went to use it on the 4th. I immediately reported it to police and was able to use the police report to get the relevant security camera feeds from the apartment. The week before American Thanksgiving (about 4 months later) I get a call from the impound lot: "we've just received my car at the impound lot. You can come get it." That's when the happy narrative unraveled, and I learned what actually happened.
My car got towed up for blocking a driveway more than a day before i even noticed it was missing. When it arrived at the impound lot they noted that it had a license plate for the wrong type of vehicle that had separately already been reported as stolen (same make but a 10 year newer model and a different color). Even though the system flagged the plate as stolen and for the wrong vehicle the VIN was never scanned. I know the VIN was never scanned because there's systems constantly checking impounded car VINs and licenses against all the open stolen car cases, and separate systems that should notify owners when they call in to see if their car was towed/impounded. My report of the stolen car from july 4th should have immediately triggered a match. Instead the car sat in impound lots until they were ready to auction it off, because it was only ever recorded with the stolen license plate. It actually worse than just that one error because a month later (and after the car was reported as stolen) they moved it from the first impound lot to their long term storage lot, so in total they didn't scan the VIN 3 separate times (enter impound lot, exit impound lot, enter long term storage impound lot) even when the system immediately warned them the plate didn't match the car. In order to auction it off they need to get a clean title, which caused them to finally run the actual VIN for the car and not just the stolen license plate. The cross-check system was finally able to work, and they immediately notified me based on the open stolen car report. All this got reconstructed for me because they had to figure out what happened as part refunding the over $10,000 of impound lot fees that had accrued, since they aren't allowed to charge for tows/impoundment if the vehicle is reported as stolen in a timely manner.
Flock provides absolutely nothing that SFPD didn't already have access to while was car was in their possession. When my car got towed for blocking a driveway and when it entered the impound lot their existing systems reported that the license plate was incorrect for the car which should have triggered scanning the VIN (even without a theft report yet, if they had scanned the VIN then it would have triggered a notice to the registered owner). When the car moved from the impound lot to long term impound lot the system again reported that the license plate was stolen and incorrect for the car and at this point scanning the VIN would have alerted them to the open car theft report. All their fancy cross-checking systems failed because SFPD employees were too lazy or overworked or apathetic to follow policy to scan the VIN of the vehicle until they absolutely had to scan it.
> a Democrat is a Republican that hasn't been mugged yet
This quote is utter nonsense, considering that it's Democrats who get mugged by living in bad neighborhoods. Republicans don't live in such neighborhoods. As for everything else that follows, well, it doesn't really follow.
I understand the problem is privacy, but I don't understand why people choose the solution that basically throws the baby out with the bathwater. Clearly there are benefits of ALPR's in terms of reducing crime. Would it not be better to implement some measures to prevent privacy violations by the cops and also toughen the penalties for doing it instead of taking the path of least resistance (and an easy idea to sell) and simply ban the cameras?
3. They don't believe that violations in how it is used will be appropriately punished (article clearly disagrees, citing a study).
4. They believe the Federal government will misuse the data, and there won't be a record of the misuse.
One solution is: Make the data a public good. Instead of trying to ban such things, make the feeds accessible to everyone. It levels the playing field.
Bans aren't really going to work in the long run. I could hook up a camera on my property, facing the street, and record and stream. You can do the same. We can set up a common protocol for all such people to share their streams. Municipalities banning this type of behavior will be as effective as banning piracy.
Will society be better off as a result? I seriously doubt it. Some things will drastically improve. Others will get a lot worse. But it's a likely solution going forward.
You give cops an inch, they take a mile. It's been shown time and time again, with Flock and ALPR specifically, that if the technology is easy enough to abuse it will be.
Until sufficient measures are in place to prevent abuse (and I have doubts it's even possible) then the cameras gotta go and they can do their jobs the same way the did decades before.
> but I don't understand why people choose the solution that basically throws the baby out with the bathwater.
Mass surveillance apparatus like flock cameras and their ilk have a huge surface area for abuse, meaning there must be at least as large a positive impact to even be worth considering.
Unfortunately, we already have plenty of historical evidence from areas that deployed cameras all over - e.g., London, where there was a near-zero drop in crime afterward, and multiple cities in the US, where police immediately began abusing the systems.
There is no baby to throw out, and the bathwater is toxic.
It's not the path of least resistance to get the cameras banned. It's been a highly resistant path and that's what most people want.
Flock took the path of least resistance setting them up often skirting any normal discussion that should have taken place with the community before they were installed.
This doesn't tend to work. When we look at the history of the courts okaying some privacy invasion under the premise that it is actually well constrained by guardrails or that it really isn't a very big deal, those guardrails crumble. Just look at Terry Stops. In principle they don't seem like a big deal. In practice they led to things like NYC's Stop-And-Frisk and widespread and routine invasions of privacy.
We know that
- cops will push right up against the rules
- cops will break the rules
- courts will often not hold cops accountable when they break the rules
Cops are regularly not punished for repeated acts of violence, theft, lying, or any other form of malice. The worst case for most is paid leave, being fired, and then being hired by a different department. There are almost never criminal charges for criminal behavior by police and so increased penalties are meaningless.
That’s a long winded way of saying, if they can abuse a system they will. There are no repercussions, and so the only way to stop the abuse is to prevent it from happening. I’d absolutely love to see massive reform to police in the US, but it’s unlikely to happen anytime soon.
We could also just hire a lot more cops. The US is underpoliced in relation to Europe and there’s decent evidence that it’s a major contributor to the higher crime rate in the US.
But better-trained, less militarized, beat cops for the most part, who can interact with the public as though they are public servants and not an occupying force.
Who among those who fit that description would take the job?
All around the world, and certainly in developed countries, having power over other people is the biggest draw for joining the police.
This is of course also true in Europe. The reason European cops (usually) don’t just randomly kill people is that they (usually) can’t get away with it, not that they wouldn’t want to.
People join the police so they can rule over people, not so they can “serve” them.
It's funny because having visited America I assumed it was vastly over policed with it being not uncommon to see 3 or 4 apparently different agency vehicles (highway patrol, sheriff's office, etc) on a relatively short journey.
I was quite surprised to find that the figures don't back that up. I'm not sure how to account for it. Perhaps the fact that every mall security guard is given a mock police uniform, a gun and a huge SUV contributes to the feeling.
Did you go to rural areas? Few police officers, and everyone lives far away from one another. The average area to patrol per police officer is likely an order of magnitude higher than in a proper city.
In one county, the locals are actively against paying higher taxes to fund the police. They pay a third per capita what other counties do. The problems due to the lack of police are well known - 911 calls often end with "I'm sorry - there just aren't officers available to help you. Please protect yourself."
As a person who suspects to have been a victim of Fl*cks central database, and its access to a growing wave of narcissist pranksters aka abusers, I gift the following design for a de-centralized Fl*ck like system into the public domain:
1) homeowner / business owner installs their own cameras.
2) open source camera server software, analyses said video using any
number of plugins, and categorizes said video / issues alerts.
3) results of video analysis are OPTIONALLY made available in a
queryable manner, in a radius selected by the camera operator.
4) victims of crime and investigating officers in an area, can search for video/analysis that might help, and contact the owner of the video directly.
5) camera operator could OPTIONALLY charge a small fee for the service of providing the video, to recoup camera / system operating costs.
At no time does the system upload any video or analysis not expressly approved by the operator of the camera.
Because each camera operator has control over their own video and analysis/events, and can retract them at different times, the history of any individual as they go about their business is fragmented, and by design not made available in a centralized database form.
This was spitballed. Tear it apart. Fill the cracks with bondo. Paint over it. Make it shine. V
Yes, I was thinking of the community, but in the case of ring, a for profit corporation still owns and collects a central database.
In my head, the camera operator ( homeowner, business owner, etc ), has their local database, in their local storage, and can allow/disallow searches of what I'm calling events, which would be, the result of plugin processing of the raw video.
Example: vehicle-burglary-detection-plugin ... would process the video of your car, in your driveway, on your driveway camera, and alert you, and you have the option of making that event searchable by neighbors or police.
Because, as much as we see bad actors in our daily clickbait newsfeed hype machines, the police are our neighbors too.
I know, its a bit utopic of an idea. Reality will tear at it some more before a paradigm sticks. V
If you believe ubiquitous cameras (dunno why that was censored) is creating a surveillance state then what does it being de-centralized accomplish here?
I was thinking along the lines of the law that prevented a state or government from collecting and maintaining a list of firearms owners.
Decentralized, private, firearm ownership, strengthens the defense of the entire nation, when said firearm ownership is by responsible law abiding citizens who look out for each other.
Apply that scenario to cameras. That was the concept.
National/state authorities could already do this with the current software and systems in place... the only additions the software proposed is adding are around privacy protections and distributed control, which the government wouldn't want anyway.
I really do not intend to sound naive, as I know what a monumental effort it is, but, we are government, and ballot initiative, constitutinal amendments, etc might be required to prevent the abuse, ultimately.
So, think of yourself as a member of government. What would you propose ?
Stop trying to develop shit society clearly can't be trusted with. Government will pick up any decentralized solution, and centralize it*. See Skype for precedent.
There is an upper bound on "top down efficiency" one wants built into a government system, because anything too effective draws corruption to it like no one's business, probability 1.
2.5) Said open-source camera software and hardware will likely be packaged up by commercial vendors, who will happily store your data in the cloud and resell it (I mean Empower Law Enforcement) on the side. This will probably be the majority of installs.
3) Queryable in what way? If the query reveals presence/absence of a person, they already have the info they need - if it doesn't, users won't know who to pay.
4) It's easy to pretend to be a victim of crime. Stalkers can easily abuse this to find their victims. Cops are also highly-trusted by a lot of the public, and also can use this to stalk people.
5) Morally, seems bad to charge a person looking for their lost child. Less bad if it's a fixed fee, rather than deciding what to charge after hearing the request - but that goes a little against the idea of point 4 to be able to approve/deny certain requests.
6) Ubiquitous surveillance is probably still bad even when decentralized.
> Said open-source camera software and hardware will likely be packaged up by commercial vendors, who will happily store your data in the cloud and resell it (I mean Empower Law Enforcement) on the side. This will probably be the majority of installs.
Anyone can store the data and share it (for free)!
> Stalkers can easily abuse this to find their victims.
I posted a similar proposal in a different thread, and yes, this is one of many downsides. I believe in the end the world will be a worse place with this solution, but I also believe this is the only viable alternative to only the police/government having access to the data.
> Morally, seems bad to charge a person looking for their lost child. Less bad if it's a fixed fee,
Well, my intention was not to completely prevent law enforcement access, for evidence gathering, so empowering victims of crimes was part of my design.
I was spitballing an idea to prevent abuse, via a centralized database of video and history, on a national level, by a corporation.
This would have been more like, a collection of villages thing. aka internet vs mesh. ( in my head anyway ).
I would be OK with Flock-like systems if and only if every search required a narrow warrant signed by a judge. The system should show a blank screen without a valid warrant. Until we have that, the tech should be avoided and IMO destroyed. It's interesting the word warrant never appears in the article.
(The very idea that the existence of cameras means cops will truly take vehicle theft seriously is laughable. Perhaps it has improved the numbers in the short term, but laziness will take hold soon enough.)
1) The increased availability of semi-private information about people and how large amounts of "public" data can be used to reveal very private details, along with how just the just the existence of such databases leads to more abuse, based in the simple logic that if they didn't exist they couldn't be abused.
2) The absolutely atrocious behavior of (american) police. It's probably not all that worse than 100 years ago, but these days we have cameras and digital communications so we see every crime they commit.
Frankly it's not even about cops committing crimes (or things that really should be) but the lack of accountability in the form of arrests.
I am continually confused by stories about a cop being caught committing a crime and the end result is they get fired. How is that a sufficient response?
All of this means that people are extremely unlikely to be happy about giving police more power in the form of mass surveillance software.
if Flock was solving felonies, especially violent crime, every statement about it would open with all those stats
Except they don't, which means it doesn't
Give us the prosecution numbers, how many violent felons were taken off the streets?
Or rather is it being used to disappear the latina grandmas into an ICE prison for months to suffer until she signs away her rights and "self-deports" to escape the torture?
It's basically the TSA argument (if they are preventing terrorist attacks, tell me all about the stuff that they prevented!) Of course, none have been cited since 2001, when it was created.
The only data I could really find about Flock was from Richmond, where they went from solving 4% of vehicle thefts to 6%. Violent crime isn't discussed at all. Their sales guidance says to capitulate on the point that Flock is mass surveillance (because it is), and instead focus on reduced crime (marginal evidence) and increased crime solve rates (seems to focus entirely on non-violent crime, with modest improvements as cited above).
Like every other piece of surveillance technology, unless the benefits are world-alteringly beneficial, the system will primarily be used for abuse. Richmond scanned 22M plates (tracking everyone that drove) so they could use 100k of the scans (less than 0.5%). But the data on everyone is still being collected and sent to other parties. Flock says they retain it for 30 days, but no word on how long everyone they send it to retains it.
The opportunity for abuse is immense, and the lack of a clear claim of a massive upside is telling, despite the lack of logical continuity you're pointing out.
Not directly but there would be every incentive for Flock to publicly and proudly celebrate every time their technology is used to imprison violent people, especially now with all of the negative headlines about cops routinely stalking and tracking innocent people.
If they did a broad study and put out an annual report, it would make sense. Doing it each time is not worth the effort.
Flock likely doesn't have access to when their data is used to make an arrest. And even if it leads to an arrest, whether it results in a conviction. And whether it was for a violent crime vs property damage, etc.
It's in their interest to fund such studies, for which you'll get HN comments saying "Don't believe it - Flock funded it."
> In 1983, the Supreme Court held unanimously that ‘a person travelling in an automobile on public thoroughfares has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements from one place to another’. And in January of 2026, a federal judge in Virginia ruled in a challenge by two civil rights activists against Flock specifically that: ‘An individual scan of a license plate, a vehicle identifier that generally must be displayed under state law, does not invade any privacy interests’.
And a week ago, a federal court in Oklahoma threw out the evidence after a cop with no warrant checked a month of Flock's travel history on a car, used that as grounds for suspicion, searched the car and found drugs.
https://www.lawcommentary.com/articles/flock-license-plate-s...
Also, there is a competing interpretation of the law called "Mosaic Theory" that is at the root of the argument against the 1983 ruling. In Carpenter v. United States (2018)...
> [t]he Supreme Court ruled that law enforcement requires a warrant to access historical cell-site location information (CSLI). Chief Justice John Roberts noted that individuals do not surrender all Fourth Amendment protections simply by venturing into the public sphere. The Court determined that compiling a "detailed and comprehensive record of the person’s movements" is vastly different from a police officer casually observing a car drive by.
This is a clear application of "detailed and comprehensive record" creation, and I can't see how Flock could argue with this recent precedent.
The other problem with this opinion piece is that the author assumes that if a citizen is not physically pulled over, they are being "left alone." He completely dismisses the reality that capturing, logging, and storing the movements of millions of innocent, law-abiding citizens in a searchable database is inherently intrusive.
This sounds like the system working?
These can both be true: Your car's location is not private, and its travel history is not grounds for a search.
The judge went further than that. He ruled that the Flock search itself was a Fourth Amendment violation, and "called the technology a form of 'indiscriminate mass surveillance.'" He suppressed both the evidence from the car search, and the data from Flock.
One of the last point is that no one in a vehicle should expect privacy, and IMHO it's the only point worth talking about, because others have been explored ad nauseam.
Let's say he is right (there is a case for and against). In that case anybody should be able to access the data. To prevent abuse, let's have people requesting access fill a form with their last name, reasons for access+time constraints, and make the requests public, so that everyone know who searched for which car. Maybe add a secondary access, where you input a badge number and a warrant number, that prevent the data to reach the public for a set of time (at most a year).
Also if that happens, I will probably make an app so you know when someone searched for your car.
Sorry I'm hn brained today.
The article takes a hand-wavy attitude towards abuse and negligence, with little attempt to counter-balance it with transparent accountability. If we can't address that in good faith, I see no reason to give the other 98% of the article weight.
> a hand-wavy attitude towards abuse and negligence
Cops in a nutshell
> The article takes a hand-wavy attitude towards abuse and negligence, with little attempt to counter-balance it with transparent accountability.
What do you mean? It addresses the matter explicitly, making the argument that it's hard to abuse with impunity. Is there a particular point you think it should have addressed that it didn't?
At least he cites a study...
Plain view doctrine is a bullshit excuse in this discussion. Yes, you can expect to be in plain view of people including the police. You can expect that a camera can see you and record you. That part indeed is not a search.
A database of your movements and the associated photos or videos of those movements is not plain view. That's assembling a dossier. That is related to things like harassment laws and stalking laws.
Being able to access that database with a query is literally - literally, in the literal sense - a search. It's a search of information compiled about you going about your Constitutionally protected rights to travel, assemble, earn a living, and whatever else is not specifically illegal. It's a Fourth Amendment issue the very same way cell phone geofencing is a Fourth Amendment issue, and the US Supreme Court recently ruled on dragnets of cellphone data. It requires a judicial warrant.
Being in plain view in public does not give a police officer probable cause to follow you wherever you go, take down photos, videos, and notes about your route, and publish that to an interagency database as if you're a known suspect just so they can find you later in case you become a suspect. Doing the same thing with a little AI box on the side of the road is the same thing, not something entirely different.
This video includes a presentation by Chief of Police of Louisville, CO - Rafael Gutierrez
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smGMG0H2Sd8 @1:08:00
Ultimately the city council decided not to renew their Flock contract but if you're looking for more insight as to why police actually want to use flock for actual policing, it's pretty insightful.
FWIW, I am not pro flock, so don't come at me.
There used to be a saying, back before the Republican party went full wingnut, "a Democrat is a Republican that hasn't been mugged yet".
The modern equivalent is something like "people hate Flock right up until their car gets stolen".
I used to live in a high crime area. It sucked. I would have accepted any number of cameras of any type to make the crime stop.
There are a million ways you can be tracked (the device you're probably reading this message on, included) so ALPRs are hardly new or threatening. But they make cars practically unstealable, and that's why I've come 'round to being pro-Flock. Sorry.
Well then we differ. I have insurance, and I'm willing to suffer inconveniences if that's what it takes to avoid an Orwellian surveillance state.
There are lots of other ways we get tracked, and I oppose those as well.
Are you pro camera and crime fighting, or are you pro-Flock, a for-profit company who is exploiting our lives for profit ?
I think theres a difference.
There used to be a saying, back before the prole uprisings, "a Republican is a Freedom Party member that hasn't been chipped yet".
The modern equivalent is something like "people hate autonomous hunter-killer drones right up until their external nervous system gets stolen".
I used to live in a high crime area. It sucked. I would have accepted any number of armed drones of any type to make the crime stop.
There are a million ways you can be shot, from cops to criminals to misbehaving security turrets, so armed drones are hardly new or threatening. But they make exobrains practically unstealable, and that's why I've come 'round to being pro-hunter-killer drone. Sorry.
You're conflating ALPR with Flock. I think that's a mistake, given Flock's other major implementation issues and other features that have nothing to do with ALPR.
Almost every violation of our privacy would make law enforcement easier and more effective. Nevertheless, we value privacy. I am not convinced by this "well if ended up benefiting from it you'd change your tune."
That Rizzo/Kristol quote hasn't been borne out in studies [1][2], so it's not exactly a great place to start from (ps: as a data point of 1 my car was stolen out of my apartment's gated garage and more cameras would have been completely useless). Extending it to flock is even more erroneous, because it still requires the police/government to actually act on that data. And that's before considering all the privacy issues with storing historical data and the lowering of resources required for tracking someone, which i think are much more important.
But I really want to focus on the idea that more cameras will make the crime stop, because that is especially fallacious. It won't. Not by itself. What will make crime stop is government/community intervention. We could get into a whole broken window vs enhancing economic opportunity vs early targeted intervention approach debate, but the specific type of intervention isn't relevant to my point (so long as it's effective), which is that more data is only useful it it's actually used and not just stored in a warehouse without ever being looked at.
Let me give you more details from the car theft i mentioned before of my car getting stolen in 2020/2021 in San Francisco from of my gated (and security camera-ed) apartment garage.
The car was taken a few days before July 4th. Since I work from home, I didn't notice until I went to use it on the 4th. I immediately reported it to police and was able to use the police report to get the relevant security camera feeds from the apartment. The week before American Thanksgiving (about 4 months later) I get a call from the impound lot: "we've just received my car at the impound lot. You can come get it." That's when the happy narrative unraveled, and I learned what actually happened.
My car got towed up for blocking a driveway more than a day before i even noticed it was missing. When it arrived at the impound lot they noted that it had a license plate for the wrong type of vehicle that had separately already been reported as stolen (same make but a 10 year newer model and a different color). Even though the system flagged the plate as stolen and for the wrong vehicle the VIN was never scanned. I know the VIN was never scanned because there's systems constantly checking impounded car VINs and licenses against all the open stolen car cases, and separate systems that should notify owners when they call in to see if their car was towed/impounded. My report of the stolen car from july 4th should have immediately triggered a match. Instead the car sat in impound lots until they were ready to auction it off, because it was only ever recorded with the stolen license plate. It actually worse than just that one error because a month later (and after the car was reported as stolen) they moved it from the first impound lot to their long term storage lot, so in total they didn't scan the VIN 3 separate times (enter impound lot, exit impound lot, enter long term storage impound lot) even when the system immediately warned them the plate didn't match the car. In order to auction it off they need to get a clean title, which caused them to finally run the actual VIN for the car and not just the stolen license plate. The cross-check system was finally able to work, and they immediately notified me based on the open stolen car report. All this got reconstructed for me because they had to figure out what happened as part refunding the over $10,000 of impound lot fees that had accrued, since they aren't allowed to charge for tows/impoundment if the vehicle is reported as stolen in a timely manner.
Flock provides absolutely nothing that SFPD didn't already have access to while was car was in their possession. When my car got towed for blocking a driveway and when it entered the impound lot their existing systems reported that the license plate was incorrect for the car which should have triggered scanning the VIN (even without a theft report yet, if they had scanned the VIN then it would have triggered a notice to the registered owner). When the car moved from the impound lot to long term impound lot the system again reported that the license plate was stolen and incorrect for the car and at this point scanning the VIN would have alerted them to the open car theft report. All their fancy cross-checking systems failed because SFPD employees were too lazy or overworked or apathetic to follow policy to scan the VIN of the vehicle until they absolutely had to scan it.
[1]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233614385_A_Liberal... [2]: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1462474508101490
> a Democrat is a Republican that hasn't been mugged yet
This quote is utter nonsense, considering that it's Democrats who get mugged by living in bad neighborhoods. Republicans don't live in such neighborhoods. As for everything else that follows, well, it doesn't really follow.
I understand the problem is privacy, but I don't understand why people choose the solution that basically throws the baby out with the bathwater. Clearly there are benefits of ALPR's in terms of reducing crime. Would it not be better to implement some measures to prevent privacy violations by the cops and also toughen the penalties for doing it instead of taking the path of least resistance (and an easy idea to sell) and simply ban the cameras?
I think what a lot of people don't like is:
1. They don't have access to the data.
2. They don't trust those that do.
3. They don't believe that violations in how it is used will be appropriately punished (article clearly disagrees, citing a study).
4. They believe the Federal government will misuse the data, and there won't be a record of the misuse.
One solution is: Make the data a public good. Instead of trying to ban such things, make the feeds accessible to everyone. It levels the playing field.
Bans aren't really going to work in the long run. I could hook up a camera on my property, facing the street, and record and stream. You can do the same. We can set up a common protocol for all such people to share their streams. Municipalities banning this type of behavior will be as effective as banning piracy.
Will society be better off as a result? I seriously doubt it. Some things will drastically improve. Others will get a lot worse. But it's a likely solution going forward.
You give cops an inch, they take a mile. It's been shown time and time again, with Flock and ALPR specifically, that if the technology is easy enough to abuse it will be.
Until sufficient measures are in place to prevent abuse (and I have doubts it's even possible) then the cameras gotta go and they can do their jobs the same way the did decades before.
> but I don't understand why people choose the solution that basically throws the baby out with the bathwater.
Mass surveillance apparatus like flock cameras and their ilk have a huge surface area for abuse, meaning there must be at least as large a positive impact to even be worth considering.
Unfortunately, we already have plenty of historical evidence from areas that deployed cameras all over - e.g., London, where there was a near-zero drop in crime afterward, and multiple cities in the US, where police immediately began abusing the systems.
There is no baby to throw out, and the bathwater is toxic.
It's not the path of least resistance to get the cameras banned. It's been a highly resistant path and that's what most people want.
Flock took the path of least resistance setting them up often skirting any normal discussion that should have taken place with the community before they were installed.
This doesn't tend to work. When we look at the history of the courts okaying some privacy invasion under the premise that it is actually well constrained by guardrails or that it really isn't a very big deal, those guardrails crumble. Just look at Terry Stops. In principle they don't seem like a big deal. In practice they led to things like NYC's Stop-And-Frisk and widespread and routine invasions of privacy.
We know that
- cops will push right up against the rules
- cops will break the rules
- courts will often not hold cops accountable when they break the rules
Cops are regularly not punished for repeated acts of violence, theft, lying, or any other form of malice. The worst case for most is paid leave, being fired, and then being hired by a different department. There are almost never criminal charges for criminal behavior by police and so increased penalties are meaningless.
That’s a long winded way of saying, if they can abuse a system they will. There are no repercussions, and so the only way to stop the abuse is to prevent it from happening. I’d absolutely love to see massive reform to police in the US, but it’s unlikely to happen anytime soon.
We could also just hire a lot more cops. The US is underpoliced in relation to Europe and there’s decent evidence that it’s a major contributor to the higher crime rate in the US.
But better-trained, less militarized, beat cops for the most part, who can interact with the public as though they are public servants and not an occupying force.
Who among those who fit that description would take the job?
All around the world, and certainly in developed countries, having power over other people is the biggest draw for joining the police.
This is of course also true in Europe. The reason European cops (usually) don’t just randomly kill people is that they (usually) can’t get away with it, not that they wouldn’t want to.
People join the police so they can rule over people, not so they can “serve” them.
It's funny because having visited America I assumed it was vastly over policed with it being not uncommon to see 3 or 4 apparently different agency vehicles (highway patrol, sheriff's office, etc) on a relatively short journey.
I was quite surprised to find that the figures don't back that up. I'm not sure how to account for it. Perhaps the fact that every mall security guard is given a mock police uniform, a gun and a huge SUV contributes to the feeling.
Did you go to rural areas? Few police officers, and everyone lives far away from one another. The average area to patrol per police officer is likely an order of magnitude higher than in a proper city.
In one county, the locals are actively against paying higher taxes to fund the police. They pay a third per capita what other counties do. The problems due to the lack of police are well known - 911 calls often end with "I'm sorry - there just aren't officers available to help you. Please protect yourself."
Without significant reform, more cops wouldn't help. Usually more cops only increases the false conviction rate.
Great, but a Punisher sticker on your car is a disqualifier.
As a person who suspects to have been a victim of Fl*cks central database, and its access to a growing wave of narcissist pranksters aka abusers, I gift the following design for a de-centralized Fl*ck like system into the public domain:
1) homeowner / business owner installs their own cameras.
2) open source camera server software, analyses said video using any number of plugins, and categorizes said video / issues alerts.
3) results of video analysis are OPTIONALLY made available in a queryable manner, in a radius selected by the camera operator.
4) victims of crime and investigating officers in an area, can search for video/analysis that might help, and contact the owner of the video directly.
5) camera operator could OPTIONALLY charge a small fee for the service of providing the video, to recoup camera / system operating costs.
At no time does the system upload any video or analysis not expressly approved by the operator of the camera.
Because each camera operator has control over their own video and analysis/events, and can retract them at different times, the history of any individual as they go about their business is fragmented, and by design not made available in a centralized database form.
This was spitballed. Tear it apart. Fill the cracks with bondo. Paint over it. Make it shine. V
So something like this?
https://ring.com/support/articles/uds27/Community-request
Yes, I was thinking of the community, but in the case of ring, a for profit corporation still owns and collects a central database.
In my head, the camera operator ( homeowner, business owner, etc ), has their local database, in their local storage, and can allow/disallow searches of what I'm calling events, which would be, the result of plugin processing of the raw video.
Example: vehicle-burglary-detection-plugin ... would process the video of your car, in your driveway, on your driveway camera, and alert you, and you have the option of making that event searchable by neighbors or police.
Because, as much as we see bad actors in our daily clickbait newsfeed hype machines, the police are our neighbors too.
I know, its a bit utopic of an idea. Reality will tear at it some more before a paradigm sticks. V
If you believe ubiquitous cameras (dunno why that was censored) is creating a surveillance state then what does it being de-centralized accomplish here?
I was thinking along the lines of the law that prevented a state or government from collecting and maintaining a list of firearms owners.
Decentralized, private, firearm ownership, strengthens the defense of the entire nation, when said firearm ownership is by responsible law abiding citizens who look out for each other.
Apply that scenario to cameras. That was the concept.
Balance of power. Not only can the cops watch you - you can watch them.
Like many solutions that could work, the problem is often somewhere in adoption.
I'll take the first hammer to it:
Downsides:
1) Same software could be used by national/state authorities, to create their own system, that doesn't follow the above rules.
Major Downsides:
1) See above.
National/state authorities could already do this with the current software and systems in place... the only additions the software proposed is adding are around privacy protections and distributed control, which the government wouldn't want anyway.
I really do not intend to sound naive, as I know what a monumental effort it is, but, we are government, and ballot initiative, constitutinal amendments, etc might be required to prevent the abuse, ultimately.
So, think of yourself as a member of government. What would you propose ?
My only point was that preventing the government from using the proposed system is not a valid concern, because they wouldn't need the proposed system
How? Step 1 is kinda problematic for that, no?
They would use the software with their current inventory of state/interstate highway cameras, if that wasn't clear.
Not like, take over your camera, or install their camera on your property.
Stop trying to develop shit society clearly can't be trusted with. Government will pick up any decentralized solution, and centralize it*. See Skype for precedent.
There is an upper bound on "top down efficiency" one wants built into a government system, because anything too effective draws corruption to it like no one's business, probability 1.
“The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.” - Thomas Jefferson, May 27, 1788.
Cameras and ALPRs aren't going away. It's commodity hardware and software at this point.
I'm only spitballing potential solutions for how to manage the inventory.
Critiques:
2.5) Said open-source camera software and hardware will likely be packaged up by commercial vendors, who will happily store your data in the cloud and resell it (I mean Empower Law Enforcement) on the side. This will probably be the majority of installs.
3) Queryable in what way? If the query reveals presence/absence of a person, they already have the info they need - if it doesn't, users won't know who to pay.
4) It's easy to pretend to be a victim of crime. Stalkers can easily abuse this to find their victims. Cops are also highly-trusted by a lot of the public, and also can use this to stalk people.
5) Morally, seems bad to charge a person looking for their lost child. Less bad if it's a fixed fee, rather than deciding what to charge after hearing the request - but that goes a little against the idea of point 4 to be able to approve/deny certain requests.
6) Ubiquitous surveillance is probably still bad even when decentralized.
> Said open-source camera software and hardware will likely be packaged up by commercial vendors, who will happily store your data in the cloud and resell it (I mean Empower Law Enforcement) on the side. This will probably be the majority of installs.
Anyone can store the data and share it (for free)!
> Stalkers can easily abuse this to find their victims.
I posted a similar proposal in a different thread, and yes, this is one of many downsides. I believe in the end the world will be a worse place with this solution, but I also believe this is the only viable alternative to only the police/government having access to the data.
> Morally, seems bad to charge a person looking for their lost child. Less bad if it's a fixed fee,
The owner can decide who to charge and how much.
Well, my intention was not to completely prevent law enforcement access, for evidence gathering, so empowering victims of crimes was part of my design.
I was spitballing an idea to prevent abuse, via a centralized database of video and history, on a national level, by a corporation.
This would have been more like, a collection of villages thing. aka internet vs mesh. ( in my head anyway ).
Keep ripping it apart. V
I would be OK with Flock-like systems if and only if every search required a narrow warrant signed by a judge. The system should show a blank screen without a valid warrant. Until we have that, the tech should be avoided and IMO destroyed. It's interesting the word warrant never appears in the article.
(The very idea that the existence of cameras means cops will truly take vehicle theft seriously is laughable. Perhaps it has improved the numbers in the short term, but laziness will take hold soon enough.)
Look, there's two problems here:
1) The increased availability of semi-private information about people and how large amounts of "public" data can be used to reveal very private details, along with how just the just the existence of such databases leads to more abuse, based in the simple logic that if they didn't exist they couldn't be abused.
2) The absolutely atrocious behavior of (american) police. It's probably not all that worse than 100 years ago, but these days we have cameras and digital communications so we see every crime they commit.
Frankly it's not even about cops committing crimes (or things that really should be) but the lack of accountability in the form of arrests.
I am continually confused by stories about a cop being caught committing a crime and the end result is they get fired. How is that a sufficient response?
All of this means that people are extremely unlikely to be happy about giving police more power in the form of mass surveillance software.
if Flock was solving felonies, especially violent crime, every statement about it would open with all those stats
Except they don't, which means it doesn't
Give us the prosecution numbers, how many violent felons were taken off the streets?
Or rather is it being used to disappear the latina grandmas into an ICE prison for months to suffer until she signs away her rights and "self-deports" to escape the torture?
* https://archive.ph/szKxX
(look at the red line vs green line)
> if Flock was solving felonies, especially violent crime, every statement about it would open with all those stats
> Except they don't, which means it doesn't
This is not how logic works.
It's basically the TSA argument (if they are preventing terrorist attacks, tell me all about the stuff that they prevented!) Of course, none have been cited since 2001, when it was created.
The only data I could really find about Flock was from Richmond, where they went from solving 4% of vehicle thefts to 6%. Violent crime isn't discussed at all. Their sales guidance says to capitulate on the point that Flock is mass surveillance (because it is), and instead focus on reduced crime (marginal evidence) and increased crime solve rates (seems to focus entirely on non-violent crime, with modest improvements as cited above).
Like every other piece of surveillance technology, unless the benefits are world-alteringly beneficial, the system will primarily be used for abuse. Richmond scanned 22M plates (tracking everyone that drove) so they could use 100k of the scans (less than 0.5%). But the data on everyone is still being collected and sent to other parties. Flock says they retain it for 30 days, but no word on how long everyone they send it to retains it.
The opportunity for abuse is immense, and the lack of a clear claim of a massive upside is telling, despite the lack of logical continuity you're pointing out.
Flock sales pitch using Richmond data: https://pub-richmond.escribemeetings.com/filestream.ashx?Doc...
Not directly but there would be every incentive for Flock to publicly and proudly celebrate every time their technology is used to imprison violent people, especially now with all of the negative headlines about cops routinely stalking and tracking innocent people.
If they did a broad study and put out an annual report, it would make sense. Doing it each time is not worth the effort.
Flock likely doesn't have access to when their data is used to make an arrest. And even if it leads to an arrest, whether it results in a conviction. And whether it was for a violent crime vs property damage, etc.
It's in their interest to fund such studies, for which you'll get HN comments saying "Don't believe it - Flock funded it."
It is not technically sound reasoning. But we know how these organizations work and how their incentives work.
Is a felony considered "solved" when the perp is caught and released on a much lower change?
Is this satire?