[HN Gopher] Fourth Circuit Rules Baltimore's Aerial Surveillance...
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Fourth Circuit Rules Baltimore's Aerial Surveillance Program
Unconstitutional
Author : loteck
Score : 10 points
Date : 2021-07-02 20:18 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.eff.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.eff.org)
| throwawaysea wrote:
| Question for those who have more legal expertise - would this
| ruling change if the aerial surveillance were limited to just
| public areas? To me it doesn't seem like there is a reasonable
| expectation to privacy in public spaces that changes just because
| of observation over time. Yet that seems to be the line of
| argument made in this article.
| loteck wrote:
| For all the frequency I hear that "privacy is dead" or that
| "there is no expectation of privacy in public," we're constantly
| reading evidence to the contrary.
|
| If you're such a person who despairs about privacy in that kind
| of way (I respectfully refer to all such folk as "privacy
| fatalists"), I wonder whether legal decisions such as this stir
| up your assumptions a bit? Don't you wonder if the future is
| actually one where, to borrow a quote from a famous legal
| decision, "the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places"?
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| > _For all the frequency I hear that "privacy is dead" or that
| "there is no expectation of privacy in public," we're
| constantly reading evidence to the contrary._
|
| No we aren't. What we actually see is policing agencies
| continually finding new ways to abuse privacy, doing those
| things for half of a decade or more at great public expense,
| and then moving on to other new ways to abuse privacy, rinse
| and repeat. What we actually see is policing agencies all over
| the country instituting intensely invasive policies without
| concern, and then each individual case has to be struck down
| one-by-one slowly over long periods of time because first the
| programs need to become public, then they need to work their
| way through the courts, then they need to go through appeals
| and more appeals and more appeals. And in the meantime similar
| programs in other cities are legally unchallenged because none
| of this establishes very broad rules for what surveillance
| behavior is allowed.
|
| This program has been publicly in place since at least 2016 and
| it took until now for the reactive legal process to stop it in
| one city.
|
| As long as the process for ensuring privacy continues to be
| reactive and slow moving at the fringes rather than proactive
| at the root, we will not have meaningful privacy.
| loteck wrote:
| You're essentially arguing that legal precedents against any
| government behavior _at all_ are ineffective and pointless.
|
| Or do you believe 4th amendment issues are somehow unique in
| this regard relative to other civil rights?
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| None of these cases establish rules delineating what
| behavior is allowed vs not allowed populationwide, nor do
| they ever establish any punishment for constitutional
| violation. They only say that a very specific collection of
| behaviors can no longer be performed all at once by the
| same group on a very specific group of people for a very
| specific period of time. And none of them prevent policing
| agencies from just doing it again and again and waiting out
| the legal challenges each time. Ok, so 45 days is too much
| in this particular case. The next program will spin up
| recordings for 35 days and run for another 6 years and try
| again. Or they'll use wifi beacons on street lights instead
| of aerial cameras and the details will be different
| requiring a new set of legal processes.
|
| Cops don't care if it gets challenged in court because
| they're not paying the court fees. The public is. They get
| their inflated budgets regardless with zero consequences.
|
| Chipping away tiny fragments of a growing lava flow long
| after they cool is not my definition of progress.
|
| We've had ~250 years of time for so-called "progress" since
| the establishment of the fourth amendment, and several
| decades since global adoption of a public internet. Do you
| feel like the government has more information about you
| today, or less? Why?
| raincom wrote:
| As long as the third-party doctrine exists along with
| privatization of surveillance, "privacy is dead".
| loteck wrote:
| To your point, the third party doctrine is on the ropes and
| many believe a change is coming soon from SCOTUS, by
| indication of their own recent decisions adjacent to that
| issue. [0]
|
| I think maybe we have quite different definitions of "dead"!
|
| [0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/podcast-episode-
| fixing...
| aliasEli wrote:
| It sounds very much like winning a battle, but still losing the
| war.
|
| In the EU we have at least some legal framework for protecting
| privacy (probably due to our experiences in WWII).
| Unfortunately, it seems there is not really something similar
| in the US.
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