[HN Gopher] I asked police to send me their public surveillance ...
___________________________________________________________________
I asked police to send me their public surveillance footage of my
car
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 467 points
Date : 2025-03-28 12:14 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cardinalnews.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (cardinalnews.org)
| Molitor5901 wrote:
| I've seen this done before by journalists requesting license
| plate reader data but it's another nail in the coffin of
| anonymity. Dare I say unless you wear a full face mask, change
| your walking gait, and just about every habit you have, there is
| no escape. In television I've seen talk about masks and garments
| that help prevent this, but I think it's a zero sum game. You
| will be tracked. You will be photographed, profiled, analyzed and
| that data is likely sold to the highest bidder and it's only
| accelerating.
| ryandvm wrote:
| > Dare I say unless you wear a full face mask, change your
| walking gait, and just about every habit you have, there is no
| escape.
|
| Lol. Nobody will be able to track me as the guy crab-walking in
| a sumo suit wearing the Unabomber disguise.
| Molitor5901 wrote:
| I'm not sure if you're being facetious, but the fact you
| would be wthe guy " crab-walking in a sumo suit wearing the
| Unabomber disguise" is probably going to draw even more
| attention. Like the tesla vandals. The cameras will simply
| follow you back to your car, home, business, wherever you
| went to take off that costume, then really zero in on you
| because you went and did what the police might term as
| "weird."
| anonym29 wrote:
| I believe the parent poster was suggesting this as a joke.
| Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1105/
| ta1243 wrote:
| And of course the reality
|
| https://www.wired.com/story/null-license-plate-landed-
| one-ha...
| aftbit wrote:
| >[Christopher Null] has himself had to deal with
| countless annoyances, from American Express dropping his
| last name altogether, to Bank of America refusing to
| accept emails from his "nullmedia.com" domain.
|
| I believe the first one but likely BofA refusing to
| accept emails from his custom domain has nothing to do
| with it starting with null and everything to do with
| anti-spam.
| anonym29 wrote:
| Non-paywall version: https://archive.is/R1FMz
| mingus88 wrote:
| A recent event in midtown manhattan shows it's pretty easy
| to evade surveillance if you can avoid using a car for a
| brief period of time.
|
| Didn't he get away on a bike into a park?
|
| In that case the police had a Starbucks register photo with
| a face, but that kind of slip can also be easily avoided
| fn-mote wrote:
| > that kind of slip can also be easily avoided
|
| That PARTICULAR slip can be avoided. Avoiding all slips
| is equivalent to airtight OpSec, which more people on
| this platform are familiar with (= not happening).
| tstrimple wrote:
| They are way ahead of you in Turkey.
|
| https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2025/03/27/pikachu.
| ..
| tyingq wrote:
| Feels like it's also going to be handy for selective
| prosecution. Say you're targeted for public speech someone
| doesn't like. Now they can try and draw some link between your
| travels and some unsolved crime. Even if it's a weak link, and
| they can't win in court...the bar for arrest is pretty low.
|
| And, a bit of a reach, but it's also some of the foundation for
| "pre-crime" type stuff. _" You've exhibited patterns of comings
| and goings that suggest..."_
| Molitor5901 wrote:
| I'm more pessimistic. With available AI you can take video of
| someone, extract that human profile and characteristics, and
| then insert it into another one. It only takes that one visit
| to your office "We have video of you sneaking into an
| elementary school bathroom" to totally ruin your life, and
| even if you could prove it wasn't you and was doctored, the
| damage is still done. It's worse than selective prosecution
| paganel wrote:
| _Person of Interest_ was such a great TV show! Too bad many
| of the things in there came out to be true, or very close to
| true, in just a matter of 10-15 years.
| tyingq wrote:
| Ah, hadn't seen it. I was thinking _Minority Report_ , but
| skimming _Person of Interest_ summaries..yes, similar.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| I'm not familiar with the show, but dystopian science
| fiction doesn't predict the future, it criticizes the
| present.
| banku_brougham wrote:
| "...first of all they must be arrested and brought before the
| court, and the [criminal code] articles will be found"
|
| - Molotov, June 14, 1940
| potato3732842 wrote:
| >Feels like it's also going to be handy for selective
| prosecution.
|
| <Always has been dot jpeg>
|
| >Say you're targeted for public speech someone doesn't like
|
| More likely you're gonna get targeted because you shared
| memes that were too dank. They won't put you in jail. They'll
| just fine the shit out of you because their goal isn't to
| personally attack anybody, but to marginalize demographics
| they don't like.
| anonym29 wrote:
| I have bad news for you. The data is not only being sold to the
| highest bidder, much of it is being sold repeatedly to just
| about any bidder.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| "You are being watched. The government has a secret system, a
| system you asked for, to keep you safe. A machine that spies on
| you every hour of every day. You've granted it the power to see
| everything, to index, order and control the lives of ordinary
| people. The government considers these people irrelevant. We
| don't. But to it, you are all irrelevant. Victim or
| perpetrator, if you stand in its way, we'll find you."
|
| Person of Interest continues to be prescient.
| roxolotl wrote:
| I'm actively watching it for the first time and this part: "a
| system you asked for, to keep you safe." I don't recognize.
|
| Looked into it a bit and it started out and only the last
| season has all of what you quoted. It's been really
| interesting watching the show evolve knowing what was
| happening in the world at the time. I'm currently on season 3
| and they are starting to change the tone now that the Snowden
| leak has happened.
|
| It starts out as:
|
| "You are being watched. The government has a secret system --
| a machine -- that spies on you every hour of every day. I
| know, because I built it. I designed the machine to detect
| acts of terror, but it sees everything. Violent crimes
| involving ordinary people. People like you. Crimes the
| government considered irrelevant. They wouldn't act, so I
| decided I would. But I needed a partner, someone with the
| skills to intervene. Hunted by the authorities, we work in
| secret. You'll never find us. But, victim or perpetrator, if
| your number's up, we'll find you."
|
| So over the course of 5 years it morphs from "I know because
| I built it." to "A system you asked for, to keep you safe."
| tredre3 wrote:
| The show's (or at least its protagonists') motivations
| change a lot over the years. As Finch's own motivations
| evolve, you can see him shift the blame from the
| government, to the people, to the machine itself.
|
| There are some bouts of introspection, especially early on,
| which he uses as justification for installing the backdoor
| in the first place, but on the whole he's adamant that none
| of this is his fault.
|
| That's probably exactly how it will play out in our world
| too, when a tech billionaire plugs a self-aware AI to our
| global surveillance network.
| Molitor5901 wrote:
| I have a very selfish fantasy that I can wear Deamon
| operative glasses and identify people in crowds
| automatically. It's horribly dystopian but on a person level
| it's.. rather cool.. until I am the one being identified!
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| People have built that: - https://www.forbes.com/sites/john
| koetsier/2024/10/03/metas-r...
|
| Meanwhile, you can also wear these:
| https://www.reflectacles.com/home
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _unless you wear a full face mask, change your walking gait,
| and just about every habit you have, there is no escape_
|
| If you're driving a car, yes. As we saw with Mangione's escape,
| if you're on public transit you're much more anonymous. (Given
| the public risks inherent to driving, I think this is a fair
| trade--off.)
| dingnuts wrote:
| You mean the shooter's escape. Mangione is pretty obviously
| being framed, c'mon
| bluGill wrote:
| There are cameras all over public transit systems. License
| plates are easier to track (they have a known font so
| identifying a unique one is easier that a face), but not by
| enough to matter. If you leave one camera you will show up in
| the next and soon they get enough of a profile to identify
| you if they want to.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| They frequently don't work [1]. Again, we have a real-life
| example of someone using the reality of how surveillance is
| weighted to escape Manhattan, one of the more surveilled
| parts of the country.
|
| [1] https://abc7ny.com/brooklyn-shooting-subway-
| cameras-7-on-you...
| probably_wrong wrote:
| While I agree with your point about public transit being a
| bit more anonymous, I feel I should point out that a.
| Mangione was still captured, and b. thanks (allegedly) to a
| combination of multiple surveillance photos of him with a
| mask plus a single picture of his full face.
|
| "No escape" sounds still right.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| He was anonymous for what, 8hr? and it took massive
| investment.
|
| That's not tractable at scale.
| yread wrote:
| > walking gait
|
| so you're saying that if we cycle everywhere on a non-descript
| black Dutch fiets we're safe ?
| Molitor5901 wrote:
| Nope. They use cameras to analyze cyclists who race to make
| sure their form is on top. You have a cycling gait the same
| as your walking gait - the way you sit in the saddle, pedal,
| hang on to the handlebars, sit, etc.
|
| https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10345980
| bryancoxwell wrote:
| I don't disagree with you but I'm also not entirely sold on the
| idea that surveillance cameras alone are all _that_ effective
| at tracking and identifying people. Think of the person that
| left two pipe bombs outside the RNC and DNC offices in
| Washington, DC, probably the most heavily surveilled city in
| the United States. It's been 4 years and we still have no idea
| who that was.
| whatevertrevor wrote:
| One could say that is an even stronger argument against them.
| People are losing their privacy for very little gain if these
| things aren't even effective at solving precisely this sort
| of premeditated criminal activity.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| The cost of cameras and disk space is very low, and rapidly
| approaching zero.
|
| I think that means it doesn't matter what anyone thinks about
| anonymity in public places. We're already almost always seen by
| several cameras, and it will soon be 10x as much.
| ur-whale wrote:
| > You will be tracked
|
| For a peek at what you can expect, take a look at Saudi Arabia,
| where your bank account gets blocked until your traffic
| violation fine (usually issued electronically within minutes of
| the actual deed) is fully paid.
|
| Or at China, where you "social score", more or less calculated
| automatically, decides in a fairly fine-grained manner what you
| are and are not allowed to do in society.
|
| These will be become the social norm in the West as well, just
| a matter of time and getting the herd to consider it "normal"
| (usually takes a generation, 20-ish years).
| tyingq wrote:
| It talks about Flock branded surveillance in several places, then
| the news site itself asks for donations with this tagline "Thanks
| for joining our flock!". Short double-take on that donation area
| for me.
| myself248 wrote:
| They call it out in the text:
|
| > Ninety uneventful minutes later, I pulled into Roanoke to go
| to the Cardinal office and visit my Roanoke members of our own
| Cardinal team -- which, in an unintentional irony in this
| story, we refer to as The Flock.
| zikduruqe wrote:
| Feel free to deflock Flock.
|
| https://deflock.me/
| carimura wrote:
| our aren't even on there yet so I'm sure it's a lot more than
| advertised
| zikduruqe wrote:
| It's funny, I never noticed mine in the area until I read
| the deflock.me site. (Maybe it was posted here on HN?)
|
| Regardless, since I like to provide updates to OSM, I have
| been cataloging them in my area.
| outer_web wrote:
| The ad widget should have sent a camera perm request to your
| browser.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| Don't FOIA requests charge you for the manhours it took, or is it
| just the data transfer cost? It might vary by state now that I
| think of it. I wonder how much these cost.
|
| Saying these requests constitutes a felony is ludicrous,
| hopefully the judge sees the case as a bad prank.
| c420 wrote:
| FOIA is federal. States have their own public records programs.
|
| https://www.eff.org/issues/transparency/foia-how-to
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| The act is federal, as that points out the fees are decided
| by the smaller groups.
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| I had trouble searching this article for "felony" (it does
| mention "judge") so here's the link from the article where the
| police argue complying could be the felony of violating
| Virginia Code 18.2-152.5:1 -- "using a computer to gather
| identifying information."
|
| https://cardinalnews.org/2025/03/13/city-of-roanoke-botetour...
| ldoughty wrote:
| What I find interesting is that they are claiming pictures of
| the vehicle are identifying information.
|
| Additionally, it's bizarre because the journalist isn't using
| the computer to gather the information, the police are... and
| they are legally allowed to -- the code specifically says
| only law enforcement may do this while performing job duties.
|
| So they are arguing that there's some sort of transitive
| property where law enforcement are no longer law enforcement
| performing job duties if they are acting on request from a
| journalist... or that the journalist is a mastermind in a
| felony because he is requesting to see his own records.
| bluGill wrote:
| Some of the data should be a felony to access without a
| warrant. They cannot get data on just him without someone else
| who happens to be in the same frame as him. As such the data
| should be restricted and only accessible under warrants. (If
| someone in a store shoplifts near me I might be in the frame
| without knowing about the crime, and thus getting that frame
| would be legal even though it violates my privacy - but only
| because a crime as committed, if someone asks for the frame I'm
| in in the general case though they should not be allowed it
| because they might be trying to build a profile of me.
| kotaKat wrote:
| Normally "small" requests get fee-waived out.
|
| When I FOIA'd the Furby memos from the NSA, it was low enough I
| got it for a whole $free.
| sitkack wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39106355
| gosub100 wrote:
| Let me guess: get the police to pay for them and sell the data to
| advertisers.
| sebstefan wrote:
| I don't think there should be an expectation of anonymity for the
| specific case of operating a car on a public road. It's a lot of
| responsibility, so you should be scrutinized when you do it.
|
| That's part of my grievances against the urbanism of the U.S.A.
| When the only viable option to get around is cars, there is no
| privacy.
|
| It's important to advocate for public places to be livable for
| everyone, not just drivers.
| mikrl wrote:
| > When the only viable option to get around is cars, there is
| no privacy.
|
| I don't think there's privacy in the tap on - tap off
| Oyster/Presto card world either.
| sebstefan wrote:
| I think that's more of a technicality of billing you for a
| service than something by design
|
| ("the tap on - tap off Oyster/Presto card " => Google sent me
| to "List of public transport smart cards" so I assume you're
| refering to some branded public transit system)
| masfuerte wrote:
| No, it's not a side-effect, it's a deliberate decision. You
| used to be able to get an Oyster card anonymously and top
| it up with cash. I still have one, but they are not
| accepted now.
| Symbiote wrote:
| You can buy Oyster cards at many newsagents, and top them
| up there too. There will probably be CCTV, but privately
| owned by the shop.
| masfuerte wrote:
| Thank you. It seems like I was misinformed. Last time I
| was in London my old Oyster card wouldn't work and I was
| told I couldn't top it up (which is probably true) and I
| couldn't get a new card without ID (which seems to be
| false).
| Symbiote wrote:
| Apparently even the first generation Oyster cards should
| work [1] so at some point I was also misinformed.
|
| On Trip Advisor some people say cards can become
| deactivated if not used for years, but staff in a ticket
| office can reactivate them.
|
| [1] https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/how-to-pay-and-where-to-buy-
| tickets...
| mikrl wrote:
| Presto is Toronto's equivalent to London's oyster card.
|
| Actually there's no tap off IIRC (unlike the Dutch
| chipkaarts) but still, I would assume the modern station
| where you enter is a veritable panopticon of CCTV, RF
| signal interception, etc
| harvey9 wrote:
| Used to be possible to buy and top up oyster with cash. Don't
| know if that's still the case and you will still be on CCTV
| at every station anyway.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| There has never been an expectation of privacy in public.
| bluGill wrote:
| There has been though - it wasn't perfect, but there was the
| expectation that people generally forgot about enough that in
| practice you were private so long as you were not obvious.
| Now computers/cameras can store data on everyone as opposed
| to just people acting "abnormal".
| ta1243 wrote:
| It's not about the right to be private now, it's about the
| right to be forgotten by tomorrow.
| Spivak wrote:
| This is the "scale invariant fallacy." When you're in public
| you can be casually observed by people or followed by police
| if they happen to be interested in you. And so therefore
| observing every person's movements in public 24/7 with
| perfect detail and memory must be also okay like these aren't
| two very different things.
|
| Scale can change the fundamental nature of a thing: walking
| down the street while being pissed as your government is one
| thing, but if you get 1000 friends to do it with you it's a
| march.
| otterley wrote:
| Your point is well-taken, but why is it called a fallacy,
| though? There's nothing fallacious about scale.
| kube-system wrote:
| That's just simply incorrect. There are plenty of
| expectations of privacy in public. For example, it is illegal
| to look up a woman's skirt, and it is illegal for police to
| arbitrarily search someone, etc.
|
| Now, what is reasonably expected in public is less than what
| is reasonably expected in private, but it certainly isn't
| zero privacy.
|
| It is true that one might expect, if they are driving around,
| that someone might see them. But is it expected that they
| might sometimes be followed? Is it expected that they are
| _always_ followed? Is it expected that _everyone_ is followed
| and those locations are cataloged indefinitely for anyone to
| FOIA? These are all very different questions.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| While technically correct, it also wasn't possible to invade
| people's privacy this discreetly at this scale.
|
| It's one thing for a subject of an active investigation to be
| tailed by a cop. It is an entirely different thing for the
| entire population of Roanoke to pass through what are
| essentially checkpoints logging your location a dozen or more
| times in a day.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I care less about public privacy than about how these
| things are also invading private spaces. Surveillance
| piggybacked on all the modern tech that we allowed into our
| homes.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| There's never been an expectation of our whereabouts and
| activities continuously recorded in detail and stored in
| perpetuity, for purchase and later use against us. Even the
| Stasi did not achieve surveillance to this extent.
| gpm wrote:
| I'm all for automated traffic law enforcement via camera, but I
| think it's very reasonable to say that if the camera doesn't
| detect a violation of the law, the data needs to be deleted not
| warehoused.
| echoangle wrote:
| So you would be against storing the data for a few days so if
| a non-traffic crime is detected later (a murder for example),
| the traffic recordings can be used to help in the
| investigation? I think that's useful too.
| shkkmo wrote:
| Thag entirely depends on the implementation details of the
| access controls to that data and if the police need a
| warrant to access that data.
| gpm wrote:
| Yes. As soon as the automated traffic enforcement purpose
| is done with (the car wasn't speeding/wasn't running a
| red/so on) the data should be deleted.
|
| If the police reach the data before it's deleted after they
| know it may have evidence of a crime that's ok
| (realistically this is rare, but I can imagine it happening
| with paired cameras that measure speed over a long distance
| of road. You could also get lucky where a false positive
| image happened to capture a different crime), but we
| shouldn't be storing surveillance data that tracks
| everyone's movements on the off chance that it has evidence
| of a crime. The harm outweighs the use at that point.
| ldoughty wrote:
| I personally agree, but there has to be a time frame
| allowed...
|
| e.g. cameras at an intersection that had an accident: It
| probably would take 'a day or two' at least for such a
| request to get to the camera operators to request they send a
| copy.
|
| I'd also personally prefer speed cameras that are not point-
| in-time records. This just encourages police to put them
| where they know people are more likely to violate the law,
| like at the bottom of hills, where there's not really a
| danger, but it generates more revenue.
|
| I'd want speed cameras that are miles apart... and the
| determination that you get a speeding ticket is that you
| traveled several miles at high speed.
| wcoenen wrote:
| > _I 'd want speed cameras that are miles apart... and the
| determination that you get a speeding ticket is that you
| traveled several miles at high speed._
|
| That's what SPECS does:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPECS_(speed_camera)
|
| There are similar systems in other countries. Here in
| Belgium we have "trajectcontrole".
| potato3732842 wrote:
| I don't think the infrastructure should be there at all. No
| institution can be trusted with it. The scope WILL creep
| eventually.
| codedokode wrote:
| Data retention time matters though. One thing if it is one
| week, another if it is one century.
| n4r9 wrote:
| Public surveillance should come with certain guarantees,
| though. Like being transparent about what data is collected and
| how/where it's stored. And purging the data after a fixed time
| unless it's involved in a case.
| renegat0x0 wrote:
| transparent in
|
| what data is collected, how/where it's stored
|
| ...also if it is sold to anybody, or handed to.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| The problem isn't that you're visible, or that what you're
| doing should be private, it's that any cop can access your
| location history for any reason, at any time, with no scrutiny.
| Cops are known to be abusive, violent thugs, and giving them
| this ability is definitely a dangerous route.
|
| IMO these recordings should be kept by a third party, and cops
| should need to appeal to that third party to access it. Going
| before a judge to get a warrant would be preferred.
| floatrock wrote:
| There's precedent where it's easier to spend some money and
| buy it from the third party data brokers.
|
| Why go through lawyer hurdles when you can just buy it
| perfectly legally?
| dylan604 wrote:
| Then don't make the 3rd party a for profit private company.
| Make it a new branch of the government. Make it part of the
| DoT or which ever company is responsible for collecting
| taxes in your locale. Intra agency operations would still
| be possible while removing direct access to LEOs. If you
| want your own information, pay your $25 type fees after
| proving who you are for printing/research/etc that are
| typical when requesting official gov't records. If you're
| another gov't agency, provide the warrant granting access
| to civilian records.
| hiatus wrote:
| > Then don't make the 3rd party a for profit private
| company. Make it a new branch of the government.
|
| Who is this directed at? The company wasn't started as a
| branch of government. What exactly are you proposing?
| That the government create its own network of cameras for
| surveillance? Have government-created solutions never
| been abused by law enforcement in the past?
| Spooky23 wrote:
| We already do that. Government has strict firewalls to
| access DMV data, so DMVs sell the stream of data to
| various parties, and the government buys it back from the
| third party or any non-police purpose.
|
| A company like ID.me basically performs a function that
| any state government could do itself or through a
| contractor at lower cost and without the privacy issues
| of providing the data to third parties.
|
| The law has failed us here - privacy attorneys basically
| focus on providing notification on a "take it or leave
| it" basis.
| kartoffelsaft wrote:
| The argument is not that this theoretical 3rd party would
| be a for-profit company, but that there's _already
| existing_ for-profit companies that exist and could serve
| that purpose, and that the new 3rd party wouldn 't see
| much use because of that.
|
| They almost certainly are willing to buy hordes of data
| off of google/facebook/etc.; it's useful data that
| they're already negotiating to get. Why, then, would they
| be want to put in the effort for a warrant on cctv
| footage when the suspect's google search and maps history
| they're alreaty getting contain the same info and more?
| At best, your creating a small amount of competition for
| data brokers, and I question if it's that much.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| I'm a volunteer court observer for DV court and some days it
| feels like half of the cases are someone misusing state
| surveillance tools to stalk or abuse women. The victims are
| almost always women. The abusers aren't always cops, probably
| a slight majority of them are other workers with access to
| these systems. I don't find out what happens to them
| afterwards but I never seem to hear about police getting
| fired for this.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| There's SIGNIFICANT selection bias at play in such a
| setting.
|
| (not that you're not correct in that the more equal animals
| never face the same consequences less equal ones do).
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| What's the bias I don't really understand. That I only
| see the ones that get caught and had a victim willing to
| show up in court over it? So this is actually probably a
| much bigger issue than I think it is?
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Only cases with easy to prove paper trails are worth
| taking to court, straightforward cases where the result
| is all but guaranteed get settled outside court, etc,
| etc.
| sebstefan wrote:
| From having worked on systems like this, anything that allows
| a cop to look into people's whereabouts will have extensive
| logs of queries being performed because abuses are one of the
| first problems you run into. They happen _all the time_.
| They'll look up their romantic partners, an ex's new
| boyfriend, ...
|
| I am of the opinion that automatic gathering of the travel
| history of a plate should be locked behind judicial approval,
| and that the data should have a lifetime. But I'm 99.99%
| confident that the searches are at least logged because we
| got complaints, like, 1 month in.
| polartx wrote:
| Access logs are meaningless when police are only
| accountable to themselves and unions shield them from any
| disciple of their wrongdoings
| 93po wrote:
| and you just get your coworkers to look up your ex for
| you
| sitkack wrote:
| Not just judicial approval, but
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_secret_sharing
| awdawda wrote:
| And I am sure when they are caught the full brunt of the
| U.S. justice system holds them accountable for their
| wretched behavior. More likely they just move departments.
| Logging something is moot if those abusing the power are
| rarely held accountable for things ranging all the way up
| to murder.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| I'm not worried about "any cop"
|
| I'm worried that YouPeople(TM) (i.e. the reader, HN, some
| unspecified future group, etc.) will vote in some jerks who
| will decide that people like me ought to be scrutinized to
| the full extent of the law. And your cheerleaders will say
| things like "they shouldn't have broken the law" when it
| was never possible, by design, to comply with all the laws
| all the time in the first place.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Or a scenario where an arbitrary cop deliberately leaks
| the information to a nominally private group (perhaps
| named like the "${Color}${Clothing}s") whose violent
| activities are ignored or pardoned by the law.
| dingnuts wrote:
| _will_ vote in some folks? see this is what confuses me
| about the trump is a fascist crowd, aren't we concerned
| about giving the state this much power because of the
| people who have already been voted in?
|
| I mean, it's too little too late but likewise it's
| amazing to me that the same people who are trying to
| convince me that the current government is fascist is
| also at the same time still campaigning on behalf of the
| same government to disarm its citizens.
|
| make it make sense!
| nathan_compton wrote:
| Ok.
|
| First of all, you have a point - Trump _is_ a great
| object lesson for why its probably not a great idea to
| have a huge, powerful, monolithic state and a commander
| in chief that can launch nuclear weapons. I don 't think
| anyone would dispute that.
|
| But most people see that the government as currently
| comported isn't going anywhere, even acknowledging the
| dedicated if incondite attempts of the current
| administration to "tame administrative bloat," as they
| might describe it. Thus your average "liberal" thinks
| _first_ that government should be executed carefully by
| professional policy makers that respect the power of the
| state and _second_ it should "take people's guns away."
|
| But I will say that almost no liberal wants to totally
| disarm the public, anyway. That is a cartoon position
| which charitably could be attributed to loud voices on
| social media or something, but not a real policy position
| held by typical "libs". Most liberals just want guns to
| be properly regulated (perhaps even restricted to well
| regulated militias, to recall a phrase from somewhere).
| There might be some quibbling about precisely where the
| line between proper regulation and enabling oppression
| go, but I'd wager a majority of Americans are in favor of
| _some version_ of the right to bear arms.
|
| As evidence of this I proffer this pew research poll
| (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/24/key-
| facts...) which indicates that more than half of people
| who _do not own guns_ could see themselves buying one in
| the future. 32% of people own guns in the U.S.
| goatlover wrote:
| The fascism is consolidating power in the executive
| branch by having a billionaire gut the federal
| bureaucracy while trying to intimidate judges who rule
| against the administration and critical news agencies,
| among other things. Gun restrictions are a separate
| topic, and there is no serious chance that ordinary
| citizens are gong to form a militia to take on the US
| Military.
| NegativeK wrote:
| I agree that we don't have an expectation of privacy on a
| public road, but I feel like we've been frog boiled in the
| US into equating that with being tracked everywhere, all
| the time -- or, rather, constantly surveilled by both
| private and public entities.
|
| I agree with you on the judicial approval and data
| expiration, but I don't think the systems should be active
| until those rules are enacted.
|
| From Justice Sotomayor's concurring opinion in US v. Jones:
|
| '"cases involving even short-term monitoring ... require
| particular attention" because the "Government can store
| such records and efficiently mine them for information
| years into the future .... GPS monitoring is cheap ...
| proceeds surreptitiously, [and] it evades the ordinary
| checks that constrain abusive law enforcement practices:
| 'limited police resources and community hostility.'" Id. at
| *11. Justice Sotomayor expressed concerns that the
| Government's use of such technology might chill
| "associational and expressive freedoms,"'
|
| https://epic.org/documents/united-states-v-jones/
|
| I don't think the universal surveillance we have today is
| even recognizably similar to a citizen being concerned
| about a surreptitious GPS tracker.
| carimura wrote:
| > Cops are known to be abusive, violent thugs
|
| Although I agree with your sentiment on data privacy, I don't
| know where you live but in the United States this is a gross
| [and potentially dangerous] overgeneralization of a million+
| hard-working officers who committed their lives to your
| safety in spite of regularly encountering life-threatening
| situations.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Being a police officer doesn't even rank in the top 10 most
| dangerous jobs in America. Loggers, fishers, roofers, and
| delivery drivers all face higher fatality rates according
| to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
|
| The Supreme Court explicitly ruled in Castle Rock v.
| Gonzales (2005) that police have no constitutional duty to
| protect citizens from harm, effectively nullifying the
| "committed their lives to your safety" claim.
|
| These "million+ hard-working officers" actively maintain
| the corrupt system by refusing to hold their colleagues
| accountable. The "few bad apples" theory falls apart when
| entire departments and unions systematically protect
| officers who abuse their power.
|
| American police have earned their reputation through
| decades of documented misconduct, militarization, and
| resistance to meaningful reform. The institution works
| exactly as designed.
| banku_brougham wrote:
| This made me remember a news story out of Mississippi
| last year of hundreds of graves behind a jail with no
| accountability of whose body is placed there.
|
| It only came to light after much struggle from people
| searching for missing family members. Basically people in
| police or jail custody who died were dumped in there
| under a blanket assumption that no family had claimed
| them, but no attempts to notify or find family members
| was made.
|
| https://jacksonadvocateonline.com/crump-wants-inquiry-
| of-215...
| dataflow wrote:
| >> hard-working officers who committed their lives to
| your safety
|
| > The Supreme Court explicitly ruled in Castle Rock v.
| Gonzales (2005) that police have no constitutional duty
| to protect citizens from harm
|
| If a duty isn't constitutional then it doesn't exist?
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| That's what the ruling implies, yeah. The response to the
| Uvalde school shooting bears that out. Police get all the
| power and none of the responsibility.
| carimura wrote:
| you obviously don't know a lot of officers. maybe you
| should meet some and hang out with them for a few days.
| fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
| This is such a flaccid and unsatisfying reply. But
| really, what _can_ you say when your initial comment was
| so throughly dismantled?
| potato3732842 wrote:
| I don't care if they're "good people" individually. Every
| atrocity in every history book was committed by "good
| people" working together (though people tend to obscure
| that either for comfort or because they want to repeat
| history). The system is rotten.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Personal experiences don't override statistics or legal
| precedent. I don't need to "hang out" with officers to
| understand the well documented patterns of police
| misconduct or the Supreme Court rulings about their lack
| of duty to protect citizens.
|
| The "just meet some nice cops" argument is precisely how
| institutions avoid accountability for systemic problems.
| Individuals, and how nice they might be, are irrelevant
| when discussing institutional failures.
| andoando wrote:
| The Supreme court ruling has absolutely no bearing on
| this.
|
| What statistics, what well documented patterns? You mean
| biased selection of footage from Reddit?
| jillyboel wrote:
| sorry i dont want to get shot
| tstrimple wrote:
| > "The "few bad apples" theory falls apart when entire
| departments and unions systematically protect officers
| who abuse their power."
|
| Actually most people never complete the statement. It
| seems to be entirely accurate.
|
| "One bad apple can spoil the barrel / bunch."
|
| The bunch has been definitely been spoiled.
| sdco wrote:
| > who committed their lives to your safety
|
| Federal courts, including the Supreme Court, have
| repeatedly held that police have no duty to provide
| protection to citizens in general.
|
| If police were committing their lives to our safety, why
| would they use their limited funding pursuing court cases
| to affirm the opposite?
| Terr_ wrote:
| Schrodinger's Duty: It only exists when the person feels
| like they might want to do it hypothetically.
| DanAtC wrote:
| How's that boot taste?
| LocalH wrote:
| THe "thin blue line" that keeps otherwise good cops from
| snitching on bad cops is the whole issue. You won't go far
| as a cop if your intention is to root out corruption.
|
| Did you know, in the US it is possible to be
| _overqualified_ to be a cop, if you are too smart? The
| system _wants_ jackbooted thugs, rather than intelligent
| policing.
| Terr_ wrote:
| I don't think some larger system wants cops ignorant, as
| much as it's the dynamics of corrupt self-preservation.
|
| If corrupt sheriff Moe Carpaio is accepting bribes or
| selling drugs out of the evidence locker, Moe needs to
| hire juniors who are less likely to blow the whistle.
| Much of that involves in trapping them into the
| perpetuating cycle of crime, and that's easier when they
| don't have lots of other employment options.
| jillyboel wrote:
| Awww the criminals in the largest gang of the USA might get
| upset?
|
| Tough fucking luck.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Generally agree with what you said, but "Cops are known to be
| abusive, violent thugs" is a terrible thing to say completely
| unqualified like that.
|
| If you don't understand why, consider that crime rates are
| known to be higher among the black population in the US but
| generalizing that to "black people are known to be abusive,
| violent thugs" would be equally wrong and hateful. You can
| make a point about the potential for abuse without name-
| calling an entire group of people like that.
| 93po wrote:
| this is a really poor comparison. mentioning crime rates by
| race is considered highly racist because it's a dog-whistle
| to frame it as "this person is more likely to do this
| because of their race" instead of framed in a socioeconomic
| context and the result of long-term systemic racism and
| oppression.
|
| cops are not a race. cops have extremely high levels of
| problematic behavior across all ages, races, etc. it's a
| _good_ thing to call out the problematic nature of cops as
| a group since they have a literal monopoly on violence and
| are massively unaccountable for the use of that violence.
|
| the argument "you can't call black people violent,
| therefore you also can't call cops violent" makes
| absolutely no sense to me
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| There's a difference between "black people in x city are
| y% more likely per capita to commit violent crime" and
| "black people are violent thugs". One is a statistical
| reality that can be used in a constructive context.
| ("Okay, so what can we do to reduce this crime rate?
| Better education? Community outreach? Etc.") the other is
| probably just bigotry.
|
| The same goes for the difference between "Police
| departments in the US have y% higher rate of excessive
| use of force than other countries" and "police are
| violent thugs".
| mrguyorama wrote:
| No you are yet again missing the point.
|
| No black person chooses to be born black. Casting
| judgement on any individual black person for the actions
| of other black people is unethical for that reason.
|
| Every single cop chose to be there, chooses to continue
| being a cop every day despite constant and repeated
| examples of blatant corruption, bad behavior, literal
| thuggery, planting evidence, and the Good Ol' Boys
| network endemic to the institution. They are culpable for
| that choice. Continuing to be a cop in this environment
| (specifically where there is zero chance to "reform it
| from the inside" due to structural problems). Ask any ex-
| cop why they left. The system is completely broken and
| _designed_ to empower cops to be thugs without
| consequence.
|
| "Good cops" don't stay cops because they get bullied by
| literal cop gangs to either become a bad cop and do
| thuggery or to get the fuck out. There are no Good cops.
| itishappy wrote:
| Is the phrase "cartel members are violent, abusive thugs"
| also equally bad in your book?
|
| Being black is not a choice...
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Okay, so if it was "democrats are abusive violent thugs"
| instead of "black people" then that would be acceptable
| discourse?
| genewitch wrote:
| Switch that for "MAGA Republicans" and we might be on to
| something
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| That's exactly why I didn't use Republicans as an
| example; because I know there's lots of people on the
| Democrat side who consider that perfectly acceptable
| rhetoric as long as it's not targeting them.
|
| I maintain that this sort of vitriolic language is
| unacceptable no matter what group it's targeting, unless
| your goal is to start a flame war (or a real war) rather
| than actually solve problems.
| itishappy wrote:
| Great question! I wouldn't call it acceptable (thought it
| sure seems to be widely accepted), but I would argue it's
| certainly not equally bad. Put differently: I take issue
| with your specific example but agree with your larger
| point.
|
| I think bringing race into it conflates separate issues.
| On the other hand, I really like the "cartel members" vs
| "[opposing political party]" example! It feels like these
| obviously shouldn't be equally bad, but explaining why is
| harder than I expected...
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Generally agree with what you said, but "Cops are known
| to be abusive, violent thugs" is a terrible thing to say
| completely unqualified like that.
|
| That's true, it should be qualified "within a subculture of
| violent thuggery, in organizations which lack any unifying
| focus other than the application of force, and which both
| protect them from and are themselves insulated from
| effective accountability for abuses."
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| "Black people are abusive, violent thugs, within a
| subculture of violent thuggery, in cities which lack..."
|
| Maybe a bit better, but you're still overgeneralizing in
| order to demonize an entire group of people.
|
| If you want to talk about systemic issues in our policing
| system, then talk about those issues. Calling people
| groups derogatory names isn't constructive.
| genewitch wrote:
| Cops aren't a marginalized group.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| People opt in to being cops. There's no way to opt into
| _or_ out of being black.
| banku_brougham wrote:
| Why is it so hard to understand this? Five years ago on HN
| stories like this would collect comments with general
| revulsion to this sort of surveillance. Today there is a
| troubling sentiment that "we can't have a society without
| unlimited time history of every person's movements available
| for scrutiny."
| kittikitti wrote:
| Most people on HN are highly networked with Big Tech which
| depends on surveillance data. Without it, their jobs and
| careers vanish. Defending surveillance doesn't come from a
| place of reason, it comes from a place of ignorance and
| fear.
| jillyboel wrote:
| It's funny how your, and the other sibling replies, all
| got downvoted without anyone refuting it. They know
| you're right, they're just angry about being called out.
| asveikau wrote:
| It's that they like government now that it's punishing
| brown people.
|
| This is an oversimplification and perhaps inflammatory, but
| it's something I've noticed following politics for decades.
| Right wingers especially will complain about government
| abuse, overreach, and large size when someone they don't
| like is in power, and overlook all of it when it's their
| guy doing it.
|
| Not that HN is totally right wing. There are different
| niches. There's also another contingent that will
| consistently complain about the surveillance state
| regardless of who is in power.
|
| All of these contingents can get pretty vocal, so it
| creates a false impression of a majority when you're
| encountering it.
| Terr_ wrote:
| There's a great video series from a few years back that
| tries to analyze "The Alt-Right Playbook", and one of the
| episodes [0] tries to explain the worldview-disconnect
| when it comes to what the government "should" be doing.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agzNANfNlTs&list=PLJA
| _jUddXv...
| petercooper wrote:
| _it 's that any cop can access your location history for any
| reason, at any time, with no scrutiny_
|
| Surely _that 's_ the problem to resolve? We could make it as
| ethically unacceptable for the police to look up irrelevant
| private records as it is for someone in the medical
| profession to do so, and fire people for misuse of these
| tools (indeed, in my country police officers _do_ get fired
| for this sort of thing).
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| Getting police to act ethically is a non-trivial problem.
| In fact, it's been a society-defining problem since the
| beginning of society.
| Inityx wrote:
| If we haven't managed to stop them brutalizing and killing
| unethically yet, then I don't think we'll stop them
| violating privacy unethically any time soon.
| somedude895 wrote:
| > Cops are known to be abusive, violent thugs
|
| Always, before making generalising statements like this, ask
| yourself: Would I think it's okay if the word was replaced
| with another, in this case, say "blacks"? And then you'll
| probably see that you shouldn't talk like that.
| tech_ken wrote:
| I think this is a pretty terrible litmus test for the
| "okayness" of a statement. There are plenty of reasons one
| word might make lots of sense in a statement, while another
| would absolutely not. For example: estimates of the
| prevalence of domestic violence perpetrated by police
| officers in the US range as high as 40%. This is an
| objectively true statement. Replacing 'police officers'
| with, say, 'kindergarten teachers' produces a statement
| which is NOT objectively true.
| somedude895 wrote:
| Non-whites are 3x more likely to commit violent crimes
| than whites [0]
|
| [0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2782848/#R49
|
| So now do you think it's okay to say "Blacks are known to
| be violent thugs" because it's "objectively true"
| according to some data? Just stop...
| tech_ken wrote:
| Are you familar with the concept of "omitted variable
| bias"? This paper only takes it up once (AFAICT), but
| there's a pretty critical variable that they otherwise
| generally ignore:
|
| > Once socioeconomic status was considered, the results
| failed to indicate racial differences between the
| offending but not arrested drivers and the arrested
| drivers.
|
| As far as I've seen, there is not a similar explanatory
| factor with the statistic I've cited.
| asveikau wrote:
| Not to mention we have constitutional restrictions on what
| law enforcement can do, in recognition that such abuse has
| been a problem even hundreds of years ago.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| If it doesn't already exist, it should be pretty simple to
| build the software so that a hobbyist can point a cheap
| camera at the road outside his window and record every
| license plate passing by.
|
| You can ban cops from doing it, I guess, but I think someone
| will record all public spaces quite soon. I don't love it
| either...
| xanderstrike wrote:
| > it's that any cop can access your location history for any
| reason
|
| This requires the assumption that your location and your
| car's location are always one and the same.
|
| If you care about your privacy consider leaving the vehicle
| with tracking numbers on it at home sometimes. It's not just
| cops that have ALPRs and you cannot prevent this technology
| from existing.
| alwa wrote:
| I'm sorry, is the proposal here that you remove your
| legally-required number plates and travel that way (in
| which case Flock's "vehicle DNA" feature recognition will
| quickly reidentify you), or that you buy or rent other
| cars? I guess starting and ending somewhere other than your
| home?
|
| Or did you have a different mode of travel in mind that
| compares favorably to wheeled transportation on public
| streets?
| xanderstrike wrote:
| Billions of people all over this planet take trips every
| day without the use of personal private automobiles.
|
| It's fascinating how, to me, my comment was very clearly
| "don't use a car if you care about privacy" but that
| interpretation didn't even occur to you. Car dependency
| runs deep.
| Majromax wrote:
| > I don't think there should be an expectation of anonymity for
| the specific case of operating a car on a public road.
|
| Technology allows surveillance at scale, and that attacks
| privacy in a new and deeply unintuitive direction.
|
| In the pre-information era, people still didn't have a
| reasonable expectation of privacy in public, in that everything
| they did _could_ be noted. However, that notice was far from
| automatic, and people were only remembered if they were
| memorable. That could happen from doing something or appearing
| out of the ordinary, or it could happen from specific interest
| (e.g. being followed).
|
| Nowadays, the surveillance is automatic, and hard drives don't
| forget. The technology allows aggregators to answer
| _retrospective_ questions about the target 's ordinary
| behaviour. People now need be concerned about how their actions
| today will be viewed weeks, months, or years from now if they
| _later_ attract scrutiny.
|
| This technology is here today for cars and license plates, but
| it's only a matter of scale before it's applied to pedestrians
| with face, gait, or other individual recognition modalities. We
| don't have the social scripts to properly deal with it.
| rconti wrote:
| Yeah; the risk was lower because the implementation costs
| were higher.
|
| Take a speeding ticket, for example. If the fine is $400,
| it's created with the knowledge that it'll only be triggered
| occasionally, and it's created as a deterrent. If I speed 50
| times and get caught one time, I pay $400. If you setup a
| bunch of speed cameras all over town, the fine should go
| _down_ to have the same impact.
| tstrimple wrote:
| Instead municipalities have been known to tweak whatever
| variables they can to maximize their fees collected. In the
| city I live in, they illegally put speed cameras too soon
| after a speed change. The city fought against it and won,
| so the cameras stayed where they are. There is a 5mph drop
| right before one of the speed cameras and the road jumps up
| 10mph shortly after. This creates dangerous highway
| situations where locals aware of the cameras speed up to
| the camera point, slam on their brakes, and then speed off
| again after. There is no reason other than revenue for the
| speed to drop like that on a highway for such a short and
| straight section without abnormal entrances and exits.
|
| Throw in red light camera setups where they reduce the
| yellow lights to dangerous levels for everyone in order to
| collect more fees despite longer yellow light times being
| one of the most effective ways to prevent collisions in
| intersections.
|
| https://www.salon.com/2017/04/05/this-may-have-happened-
| to-y...
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _Part of Flock's proprietary tech determines the make and
| model of the vehicle and also notes if there are bumper
| stickers, bike racks, any other unique markings that would
| help identify that vehicle. That generates a "vehicle
| fingerprint" for every car or truck, which none of the
| agencies I FOIA'd would provide me._
|
| Fingerprinting gets into unlike-at-scale.
|
| At this point, we're not just talking about license plates
| but obvious tracking.
| graemep wrote:
| In the UK public transport increasingly pushes you to use
| trackable tickets or means of payment such as apps or credit
| cards.
| afarah1 wrote:
| The cameras are central to the privacy aspect, not the cars.
|
| A car can be identified by its plates, while a pedestrian can
| be identified by their face or other features. Perhaps not
| today by some legal or technical difficulty, but the
| infrastructure to do so is in place.
|
| There is a reasonable expectation of privacy in public places.
| One might not reasonably expect that one's photograph should
| not be taken in public, but one may reasonably expect not to
| have one's every move recorded, profiled, indefinitely stored
| and shared with various third parties, or to have one's every
| conversation on the phone or with other people recorded with
| sophisticated cameras or sensors, and for that to be attached
| to one's detailed profile.
|
| What is described is a surveillance state, which anyone who
| values some degree of personal freedom will reasonably object
| to. The installment of sophisticated cameras capable of
| tracking one's movement throughout an entire country provides
| the means for such surveillance state, and should be strongly
| objected by anyone who values one's personal freedom.
|
| Those in favor of such installment for the facilitation of
| criminal persecution should at the very least require strong
| guarantees about its usage, such as storage limits and regular
| public audits of such implementation, closed circuits instead
| of publicly networked solutions, etc, and strongly oppose any
| arrangements that do not fulfill stringent privacy
| requirements. Unfortunately I am yet to see any real person
| advocate for this with any real political strength.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| It sounds like you have never needed to organize against a
| government which threatens your safety, or that you haven't
| found yourself engaging in any activities that were well-
| protected at the dawn of the US Constitution but are now
| considered to be felonious, whether for self-medication, as an
| act of protest, or as an act of survival.
|
| This means that you have a lot to be grateful for, but your
| perspective is privileged and may not take into account that
| not every life is like yours. You don't feel the chains of
| oppression until you need to break them. I would recommend
| considering what kind of person might not benefit from mass
| surveillance in this current political climate where students
| are disappearing just for protesting against a religious
| genocide.
|
| You could definitely argue that surveillance is inevitable as a
| technology; but the government is supposed to serve its people,
| and without strong guarantees of established freedoms and
| protection from the negative effects of mass surveillance, the
| people should not allow the government to engage in such
| surveillance. Especially not the dragnet style of surveillance
| that is common today, and _especially_ in the wake of modern
| analysis tools where prejudice can be automated.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| This is a great comment marred by the "students disappearing"
| statement. An earned but short jail sentence or deportation
| is quite distinct from a one-way ticket to the gulag,
| unfortunately implied.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| I could have chosen my language better.
|
| But in general, corporate and state-sponsored surveillance
| of students and protestors goes back many decades, and we
| have seen enough witch hunts over things like Communism,
| Vietnam protestors, psychedelic users, etc. that we simply
| cannot allow our local, state and federal governments in
| their current shape to wield mass surveillance, because
| they will not do it ethically.
| miohtama wrote:
| Last time British had guts to organise anything about their
| shitty government they first sailed to a new continent.
| threatofrain wrote:
| Why shouldn't public transportation have even more cameras? A
| lot of shit goes down there.
| rcpt wrote:
| The problem is that they do all this but don't use the cameras
| to enforce speed limits or red lights. We get all the
| surveillance but none of the road safety.
| Telemakhos wrote:
| Most of the comments on this article regard the privacy of the
| individual against the police or other state authorities, but a
| main point in the article is that this license plate/vehicle
| fingerprinting data is public information subject to FOIA
| requests, and thus any citizen can use FOIA requests to track
| any other citizen. The article touches briefly on the
| implications of that for jealous lovers or people motivated to
| stalk others. That's a bit different from scrutinizing the
| operation of (potentially dangerous) vehicles on a public road.
| At some point US society really needs to have a debate about
| how FOIA and the surveillance state intersect.
| 01100011 wrote:
| The great thing about democracy is that we can debate
| subtleties and choose a path between extremes.
|
| So we can say that while the extremes of this argument are
| either total surveillance or no surveillance at all, we can
| instead opt for a more balanced approach. We can recognize that
| guaranteeing privacy in public or when using a publicly
| provided service is silly, but also that some forms of
| automation and data mining elevate simple observations into a
| level of surveillance that we are not comfortable with.
| goatlover wrote:
| Assuming the voters are informed enough and aren't persuaded
| by propaganda, that is a good thing.
| rangestransform wrote:
| I'm not confortable with a tradeoff, we saw during the
| pandemic how many amongst us are closeted authoritarians and
| i don't trust them to choose freedom over safety as per the
| founding principles of the USA
| kccqzy wrote:
| What if you are not operating a car? Many governments in the
| United States have outlawed or are trying to outlaw wearing
| masks in public.
| timewizard wrote:
| Yes.
|
| You can watch me in public and you can even record things like
| my license plate number if you like.
|
| When you start following me around to all my destinations and
| making a detailed log of everything I do you are stalking me.
| That would be a crime if you did it physically. Why should it
| be different if you are doing it digitally?
|
| Should be police be able to walk behind you down the street
| everywhere you go just waiting for infractions? What's the
| difference?
| verisimi wrote:
| > I don't think there should be an expectation of anonymity for
| the specific case of operating a car on a public road
|
| yes - we all voted for this so here it is. /s
|
| ... except no one did vote for it. So why do we have it?
| atoav wrote:
| Sure. _If_ you got a very well behaving (and systematically
| scrutinized) executive and a legal system that protects the
| rights of each individual.
|
| The reason states shouldn't be given every power over their
| citizens just villy nilly is because power in a free society is
| given by the citizens. And if the state can target those
| indiscriminately without due process that is no longer the
| case.
|
| So it can make sense to withold certain powers from the state,
| even if with trustworthy leadership and actors these powers
| would be useful to keep the people in the state safe. And that
| is because untrustworthy leadership can come around at any
| point and then you don't want to give them an operational
| surveillance structure that would have given any authoritarian
| in history the shivers.
| jillyboel wrote:
| Ok. Can you post a log of every time you drove your car on the
| public road during the past 5 years?
|
| You shouldn't have an expectation of anonymity, like you say.
| gadders wrote:
| I fell arse over tit at a London tube station and requested the
| CCTV footage under the GDPR. Got a lovely full colour DVD of me
| stacking it.
| noodlesUK wrote:
| I think the crazy thing about ANPR/ALPR is just quite how simple
| it is to create a massive panopticon. The UK has a fairly
| established national ANPR system, and it generates on the order
| of 90M records per day [1]. All of this data is available to
| various law enforcement agencies. If you drive, you're probably
| being recorded in a way accessible to the PNC every day.
|
| Because of how effective this is for catching even fairly minor
| violations like failure to pay vehicle tax, number plate cloning
| is becoming pretty common (comparatively) in the UK. This means
| that you can easily get swept up in a police dragnet because
| someone has stolen your _car 's_ identity.
|
| [1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-anpr-
| ser...
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| And chances are a large proportion of them have got
| Google/Apple recording the locations of their devices too. We
| do it to ourselves these days.
| noodlesUK wrote:
| I would say there's a pretty significant difference between
| something like phone geolocation data, which is not very
| practical to search, especially for Apple devices, and in any
| case usually requires at least a superficial level of
| scrutiny, and a database that any old police officer can just
| run a query on as and when they feel like it.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| They don't need access to your device. The Police can use
| records from the mobile operators to track device
| movements.
| noodlesUK wrote:
| Yes, they can, however I don't believe this is quite as
| straightforward as just looking up the data for a
| particular vehicle on your police computer. Looking up
| the ANPR data on a vehicle is only marginally more
| complex than looking up a person's driving license
| details or similar. My understanding is that in order to
| do a reverse geofence request, or look up a specific
| device, it's a _lot_ more complicated, and these days you
| 're only going to get cell site information rather than
| precise GPS data (as was possible by asking Google in the
| past).
| mmh0000 wrote:
| Well... not entirely true.
|
| Cell Providers will sell data to anyone, then companies
| like Tectonix GEO[1] will slap a pretty UI on top of that
| data.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=cq2z
| uE3ISYU...
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| Although those searches are recorded, which should act as a
| deterrent for phishing expeditions.
| aftbit wrote:
| With the very welcome changes to how Google stores location
| history, they will no longer be capable of answering geofence
| warrants. The cell carrier themselves (Verizon / T-Mobile /
| BT / Orange etc) can still provide some tower logon
| information but I'm not sure if they are storing E911 GPS
| info.
| walthamstow wrote:
| Don't forget Ring capturing every time you enter or leave
| your home.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Number plate cloning should be pretty easy to spot with a
| network of cameras. Same plate in two spots or seen in a
| distance impossible to travel in the time.
|
| And then police can be alerted every time they see a plate
| flagged as being cloned and either find a criminal, or be able
| to alert the person their plate is cloned.
| shortercode wrote:
| My brother had his plates nicked a few years back. Apparently
| they had lightly modified his plate so that it appeared
| differently ( can't recall if it was marker or tape )
| HPsquared wrote:
| They'd presumably target cars that don't drive much. (btw
| anyone can check any car's annual mileage from the number
| plate using the MOT history lookup)
| gruez wrote:
| >btw anyone can check any car's annual mileage from the
| number plate using the MOT history lookup
|
| Can this be done anonymously? Otherwise doing such a lookup
| creates a paper trail, which is generally bad if you're
| trying to commit any crime.
| gambiting wrote:
| What paper trail? All they can log is the IP address that
| made the query, and that's not enough to do anything
| with.
| normie3000 wrote:
| That's why GP asked if the lookup was anonymous.
| gambiting wrote:
| it's as anonymous as searching any other information on
| government websites - you don't need to log in to do it.
| gruez wrote:
| Depends on the jurisdiction, though. Federal court
| records are theoretically "on a government website", but
| you need a PACER account, which has your billing
| information.
| cjs_ac wrote:
| Yes, you just type the registration number into this
| form: https://www.check-mot.service.gov.uk/
|
| Not sure whether it's accessible outside the UK.
| discretion22 wrote:
| In theory, yes, but that's not how policing works.
|
| From personal knowledge of the UK setup, the goals are
| twofold, mass surveillance plus auto-revenue-generation
| (intended to raise sufficient to pay for the surveillance
| infrastructure to minimize the net cost which means auto
| issuing the absolute maximum number of tickets possible).
|
| Doing validation to ensure correctness of the tickets being
| issued would be counter-productive to the revenue generation
| goal; just because police have evidence a crime (like
| cloning) has happened, does not mean they will not issue the
| ticket. There is an onus in the UK for the registered keeper
| of the vehicle to incriminate themselves or someone else for
| road traffic offences (confirmed by test cases).
|
| Essentially you have to pay up or prove the cloning (and your
| innocence) yourself - very difficult because you do not have
| access to the surveillance database that would help you. The
| core objective of the police is to assert your guilt, not to
| provide you with any help for your defence.
| redeeman wrote:
| and when this happens, it is proof of an illegitimate
| regime, not for the people, and as such it becomes morally
| and ethically justifiable to do ANYTHING and EVERYTHING one
| deem required to demolish it, and bring the responsible
| parties to justice
| pjc50 wrote:
| We're talking about speed cameras here, not deporting
| people to illegal prisons in El Salvador.
|
| Or even more basic civil liberties stuff like the use of
| face recognition against protestors. No, there's always a
| huge number of people that come out for the right to
| drive illegally fast instead.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| > very difficult because you do not have access to the
| surveillance database that would help you
|
| Is the legal process of discovery not a thing in the UK?
| Finding evidence that might exonerate you is precisely what
| that process is for.
| banku_brougham wrote:
| Respectfully, this is naive and doesn't consider defacto
| judicial process. Basically, defendants are getting
| railroaded unless they have resources to mount a defense,
| and charges are inflated to incentivize plea bargaining.
| noodlesUK wrote:
| Disclosure in the UK (as it's called) is a bit different
| from discovery in the states, but serves largely the same
| function.
|
| I googled a bit to find a decent guide and found one on
| the HSE's website: https://www.hse.gov.uk/enforce/enforce
| mentguide/pretrial/aft...
|
| Unfortunately in real life disclosure is one of the many
| places that the criminal justice system tends to fail to
| meet its stated ideals. Disclosure is often served late
| or improperly on run-of-the-mill cases from what I've
| heard and read. There's a great book called the Secret
| Barrister that goes into some detail about the UK's (or
| England and Wales more specifically) criminal justice
| system from quite a critical lens.
| multjoy wrote:
| A better guide is the Crown Prosecution Service's
| disclosure manual:
|
| https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/disclosure-manual
| gruez wrote:
| >Essentially you have to pay up or prove the cloning (and
| your innocence) yourself - very difficult because you do
| not have access to the surveillance database that would
| help you. The core objective of the police is to assert
| your guilt, not to provide you with any help for your
| defence.
|
| At least in the US prosecutors are obligated to disclose
| any exculpatory evidence they find, even if they don't plan
| to use it in court.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brady_v._Maryland
| fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
| > At least in the US prosecutors are obligated to
| disclose any exculpatory evidence they find, even if they
| don't plan to use it in court.
|
| Once you're at that level of issue, you're already
| wasting massive amounts of time and money.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I'm sure a traffic camera number plate reader system can
| be programmed such that evidence of cloned tags was
| intentionally not captured or saved.
| multjoy wrote:
| Why? What would be the point of that?
| ryandrake wrote:
| The thread started out with:
|
| > Because of how effective this is for catching even
| fairly minor violations like failure to pay vehicle tax,
| number plate cloning is becoming pretty common
| (comparatively) in the UK.
|
| Evidence of number plate cloning would reduce revenue
| from fines. If the government wants to fine you for not
| paying your vehicle tax, evidence that someone cloned
| your plate would be exculpatory, so it's in the
| government's best interest to not collect that evidence
| in the first place.
| multjoy wrote:
| That's literally not how government works. If they
| explicitly discarded data because it was exculpatory then
| not only would they not be able to fine you based on that
| data, they would have to refund every fine they issued
| while that discard rule was in place.
| kaibee wrote:
| It could happen entirely accidentally.
|
| "Oh, we hit for DEADBEEF at 11:00am in London, so ignore
| hits for DEADBEEF from anywhere else outside some Nx
| safety factor of the driving distance from that hit,
| because it has to be a false positive."
|
| or
|
| "Oh, we hit for DEADBEEF at 11:00am in London and again
| at 11:05am in London. Our cloud costs are high, so we're
| only going to store the most recent picture DEADBEEF, and
| only record the violation from 11:00am and 11:05am."
|
| I guess these examples sound kind of contrived to me, but
| how long do you retain this kinda data for? 30 days? 60
| days? A year?
| multjoy wrote:
| Entirely contrived. The point of the system is that you
| want all the hits everywhere, if your system is using any
| discard rules at all then it is unreliable for a
| prosecution.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| You're not thinking like a bureaucracy.
|
| Suppose you have a system of cameras operated by the
| various localities. The localities are all storing the
| data. Then there is a central system that can query all
| the local systems but doesn't itself store any of the
| data.
|
| The department issuing traffic citations requests an
| automated daily report showing every vehicle observed at
| multiple locations where the two sightings imply an
| average speed between 55MPH and 170MPH. Then the
| citations department takes the report and issues a
| citation to anyone where there is no route between those
| two points that allows the calculated average speed
| without exceeding the speed limit.
|
| The report isn't automatically generated if the average
| speed was calculated to be 490MPH because cars don't go
| that fast so issuing a citation would trivially allow it
| to be challenged as a data irregularity, and the report
| is requested by the department issuing speeding citations
| rather than the one (if any) investigating data
| irregularities.
|
| Now you get a ticket for doing an average speed of 87MPH
| along a route where the speed limit never exceeded 55MPH.
| You claim it's a data irregularity (cloned plate), but
| that's a _possible_ speed, because the automated report
| didn 't include the impossible speeds.
|
| There may have also been sightings that would have
| implied an average speed of 490MPH, but that report was
| never requested so it doesn't exist. The bureaucracy
| comes up with some excuse for why you can't run your own
| reports that don't already exist. You could request the
| raw data and then do the calculations yourself, but then
| you have to make a thousand requests to each individual
| locality, which is purposely too much trouble for most
| people to bother, and even then there is no guarantee
| that the person who cloned your plate was spotted in a
| location that would have produced an impossibly high
| speed.
| lazide wrote:
| It's very common that they don't - and how would you
| know/prove it existed when it's hard to even know who to
| ask?
| multjoy wrote:
| >There is an onus in the UK for the registered keeper of
| the vehicle to incriminate themselves or someone else for
| road traffic offences (confirmed by test cases).
|
| That's not how that works. You, as the registered keeper of
| a vehicle, have a number of duties relating to the
| provision of information to the police or other relevant
| authorities upon request. This isn't a controversial
| provision, something similar exists in practically every
| jurisdiction in which cars have a unique identifier.
|
| The s172 process avoids the situation where a speeding fine
| can be avoided by simply not saying who was driving. 172(4)
| provides a statutory defence which can be advanced by an
| individual who's vehicle was cloned:
|
| >A person shall not be guilty of an offence by virtue of
| paragraph (a) of subsection (2) above if he shows that he
| did not know and could not with reasonable diligence have
| ascertained who the driver of the vehicle was.
|
| And regarding the disclosure issue
|
| > The core objective of the police is to assert your guilt,
| not to provide you with any help for your defence.
|
| This is an incorrect statement - the police are obliged to
| disclose any relevant, unused material (eg material they
| have that they don't produce in evidence) that will either
| undermine the prosecution case or advance the defence.
|
| However, if you are being prosecuted for failing to
| nominate, it is more likely that you have completely failed
| to return the form rather than returning the form with a
| note saying that your plate appears to have been cloned, in
| which case access to the ANPR database is irrelevant
| because you need to explain why you did not bother to
| furnish the information rather than police not believing
| that your vehicle had been cloned.
| logifail wrote:
| > This is an incorrect statement - the police are obliged
| to disclose any relevant, unused material (eg material
| they have that they don't produce in evidence) that will
| either undermine the prosecution case or advance the
| defence.
|
| "Obliged"?
|
| I immediately thought the case of the Guildford Four, and
| the scene in the biographical film In The Name Of The
| Father.
|
| IIRC in the film the note in police files said "not to be
| shown to the defence"... :/
| multjoy wrote:
| Disclosure is a very different beast today, fifty years
| later.
| flir wrote:
| The decision to site a speed camera (and costs of
| maintaining the camera) and revenue from the camera end up
| at very different points in the system. The fixed cameras
| in my city have been off since 2012, because the local
| council won't pay for them. The "revenue generation"
| argument is very much overblown.
| pjc50 wrote:
| The "revenue generation" argument works for the US but
| cannot be imported directly over, because cameras work
| differently here. The revenue goes into the consolidated
| fund. Rule changes removed them from revenue-maxing spots
| and made them bright yellow with advanced signage.
|
| (also, the court case if you take it to court should
| include the photo showing the car, so cloners have to match
| the exact model of car from the plates they're cloning)
| hennell wrote:
| I'm not sure how a system would work that didn't auto issue
| the absolute maximum number of tickets possible. Random
| lottery to auto discard tickets? A max quota leading to a
| lawless time in the late evening?
|
| But if that has parameters they've set to max because they
| really want that delicious revenue, why not detect cloned
| plates and charge those people more than the tickets?
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > But if that has parameters they've set to max because
| they really want that delicious revenue, why not detect
| cloned plates and charge those people more than the
| tickets?
|
| The plate is registered to the victim whose plate was
| cloned. The identity of the perpetrator who cloned the
| plate isn't known, so how do you issue them a citation?
| llm_nerd wrote:
| Cloning or just plate theft only works if you put the plate
| on the identical make, model and colour of vehicle, as many
| ALPRs are also quantifying the traits of the vehicle and a
| non-match raises a flag and will likely get extra scrutiny.
| dylan604 wrote:
| This does not sound like an egregious limiting factor at
| all.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| I didn't claim it was. But there is a big difference
| between "steal some plates from extended airport parking"
| and having to find and steal a plate specifically for the
| target vehicle. Obviously you could use the most common
| car and colour and make your task easier, but like for my
| SUV I see a similar colour / year / model on the roads
| maybe once a month. If I had to find another to steal or
| clone a plate it would legitimately be a pain.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| this is one of those areas where the fraud becomes much
| easier with scale. if you are trying to steel 1 plate for
| 1 car, this is a problem, but if you're trying to steal
| plates for 1000 cars, 1200 plates will match 800 cars
| chuckadams wrote:
| What kind of operation is stealing plates in bulk like
| that? My guess is none.
| dylan604 wrote:
| It doesn't need to be in bulk though. If you're not a
| dumb criminal looking to do this, you put in the work by
| just driving around a city center looking for a
| make/model/color you are interested.
|
| Or, if you want to be organized, you run around with
| plate readers and log make/model/color/number and then
| sell that data.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Is it actually that much of a problem if you're trying to
| clone/steal one plate for one car? Go to some major
| stores with huge parking lots during busy times. Find one
| car which is the same model and color.
|
| Maybe it's hard if you have a classic car with an unusual
| paint job. Not so hard if you have a white Toyota.
| Lanolderen wrote:
| You could just go on your car sales website of choice and
| likely find the same car with the plates visible.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| > _Because of how effective this is for catching even fairly
| minor violations like failure to pay road tax,_
|
| The main use of those cameras _is_ to deter not paying road tax
| and not having insurance, and to spot stolen and wanted cars.
|
| It's not a problem if all number plates are stored for some
| time but it requires strict rules (duration of storage and
| access to data), which the document you linked to describes.
| aaronmdjones wrote:
| > > even fairly minor violations like failure to pay road tax
|
| > The main use of those cameras is to deter not paying road
| tax
|
| No-one has paid a road tax in the United Kingdom since 1937.
| Vehicle excise duty is (currently) based on CO2 emissions
| (which is why EVs are subject to a PS0 VED) and has always
| gone directly into a general government fund -- it does not
| maintain the roads. Of course the government could choose to
| spend some of that money on road upkeep, but they don't have
| to.
| noodlesUK wrote:
| You're absolutely right, I've edited my comment to say
| vehicle tax rather than road tax. It's actually one of my
| personal bugbears as well, so I can't believe that I said
| that.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| "Road tax" is a widespread colloquial term, and that tax
| must be paid to be able to drive on public roads. So let's
| not lose ourselves in nitpicks, it brings nothing to the
| discussion at hand...
| kotaKat wrote:
| We have national companies like https://drndata.com/ that
| aggregate LPRs from every possible source and sell it to... a
| _lot_ of uses.
|
| Motorola/Vigilant cameras feed into DRN especially.
| banku_brougham wrote:
| The repo man is truly a changed character.
| lazide wrote:
| Or the ever classic 'caught in an affair'
| [https://petapixel.com/2021/12/13/speed-camera-photo-sent-
| to-...]
|
| And attempts to reduce the problem
| [https://au.news.yahoo.com/woman-believes-husband-cheating-
| sp...]
| tart-lemonade wrote:
| GPS trackers and immobilizers (aka "kill switches") have
| also made repo work a lot easier. If you buy from low/no-
| credit ("buy here pay here") lots, you probably have at
| least one (if not both) installed.
| gnfargbl wrote:
| I'm not sure that panopticon is the right word for this.
| Bentham's panopticon extended _into_ the prisoners ' cells, and
| with the intent that they would never know if they were being
| surveilled or not.
|
| ANPR in the UK doesn't have these characteristics. Firstly, it
| happens in public places only, and historically we have exactly
| zero expectation of privacy in public spaces in the UK.
| Secondly, there's no chilling effect caused by the selective
| and unknown application of surveillance; the cameras and
| computers "watch" every car equally.
|
| Overall, I can't say I love the number of ANPR cameras we have,
| but then I'm also not thrilled by the thought of subsidising
| large numbers of people who aren't willing to hold up their
| side of the social contract by taxing and insuring their cars.
| tredre3 wrote:
| > and with the intent that they would never know if they were
| being surveilled or not. [...] there's no chilling effect
| caused by the selective and unknown application of
| surveillance; the cameras and computers "watch" every car
| equally.
|
| I disagree. Nobody expects all camera footage to be reviewed
| by a person, so you never know if what the camera caught will
| ever be seen (or used against you). In that sense, it's just
| like the panopticon. You feel watched so you behave, but
| whether you are watched or not in that moment is unknown.
| gnfargbl wrote:
| That's part of my point, though: these cameras are
| basically _never_ reviewed by a person. So you are reliably
| watched constantly, but never by a human.
|
| This does lead to the problem that the post I replied to
| was pointing out, namely that people often get automated
| fines for cloned plates. It's kind of like the opening of
| _Brazil_ , if you're familiar with that film, but obviously
| for much lower stakes.
| curiousObject wrote:
| But we don't know the capabilities of the machine systems
| watching the cameras, although we should assume they are
| getting more capable.
|
| So the results are unpredictable, just as they would be
| if humans randomly checked the cameras recordings.
| jchw wrote:
| I'm pretty confident you also have roughly zero expectation
| of privacy in prison.
|
| Edit: I don't know why this one of all things is getting
| downvoted, but at least in the U.S., this is legitimately
| true.
|
| > In Hudson v. Palmer, 468 U.S. 517 (1984), the Supreme Court
| held that people in prison don't have a reasonable
| expectation of privacy in their cells.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson_v._Palmer
| cwillu wrote:
| Because it's not particularly relevant. The term comes from
| the prison system, where there is no expectation of
| privacy, and is being applied to describe a public setting
| where there maybe _should_ be some expectation, because
| we're not prisoners!
| jchw wrote:
| ...But, the post I am replying to is literally suggesting
| that the reason why this system _isn 't_ a panopticon is
| because there _isn 't_ an expectation of privacy in
| public. Yet, the term comes from another place where
| there also isn't an expectation of privacy. I honestly
| suspect people are getting a little confused.
| gnfargbl wrote:
| I was drawing a contrast between the prisoner in the
| panopticon (does not have privacy) and the citizen in
| their home (has privacy). Because of that contrast, I was
| suggesting that panopticon is an inappropriate term for
| surveillance that happens only in public spaces.
| jchw wrote:
| Going back up a few levels,
|
| > I think the crazy thing about ANPR/ALPR is just quite
| how simple it is to create a massive panopticon. The UK
| has a fairly established national ANPR system, and it
| generates on the order of 90M records per day [1]. All of
| this data is available to various law enforcement
| agencies. If you drive, you're probably being recorded in
| a way accessible to the PNC every day.
|
| So we're talking about tracking plate numbers, in public.
| No expectations of privacy.
|
| Now regarding what the panopticon was,
|
| > The panopticon is a prison design by Jeremy Bentham,
| characterized by a central observation tower allowing a
| guard to see all inmates without the inmates knowing if
| they are being watched, fostering a sense of constant
| surveillance and self-discipline.
|
| So we're talking about monitoring prisoners, in prison
| cells. No expectations of privacy.
|
| ---
|
| > I was drawing a contrast between the prisoner in the
| panopticon (does not have privacy) and the citizen in
| their home (has privacy).
|
| Now we're talking about citizens in their homes. When did
| that enter the discussion?
|
| > I was suggesting that panopticon is an inappropriate
| term for surveillance that happens only in public spaces.
|
| OK... Why?
| gnfargbl wrote:
| > So we're talking about tracking plate numbers, in
| public. No expectations of privacy.
|
| Correct.
|
| > So we're talking about monitoring prisoners, in prison
| cells. No expectations of privacy.
|
| Correct.
|
| > > I was suggesting that panopticon is an inappropriate
| term for surveillance that happens only in public spaces.
|
| > OK... Why?
|
| Because prisons have no real equivalents for the private
| and public spaces we experience as free citizens. Drawing
| an equality between people who are voluntarily in a
| public space and people who are incarcerated is wrong,
| because the people in public can choose to withdraw
| somewhere private. The prisoner (in the panopticon model
| at least) has no such option.
|
| If the state had an interconnected surveillance system
| which saw both into our public and private spaces, the
| analogy might make more sense -- and usually when
| "panopticon" is used, it is used in that sense. But it's
| the wrong term to use for surveillance which occurs only
| in public.
|
| I'm not trying to be an overly pedantic dick here, but
| words do need to have clear meanings. There are other
| terms we could use for ubiquitous surveillance that
| occurs in public, and perhaps we should standardise on
| one.
| jchw wrote:
| > Because prisons have no real equivalents for the
| private and public spaces we experience as free citizens.
| Drawing an equality between people who are voluntarily in
| a public space and people who are incarcerated is wrong,
| because the people in public can choose to withdraw
| somewhere private. The prisoner (in the panopticon model
| at least) has no such option.
|
| To me this feels like an entirely different argument than
| the "expectation of privacy" one, and I still do not
| really find it persuasive. Please note that the
| panopticon concept was also planned to be used in
| schools, hospitals, and other locations.
|
| > If the state had an interconnected surveillance system
| which saw both into our public and private spaces, the
| analogy might make more sense -- and usually when
| "panopticon" is used, it is used in that sense. But it's
| the wrong term to use for surveillance which occurs only
| in public.
|
| I disagree that the term "panopticon" should not be
| applied to public mass surveillance systems. There are
| some contrasts between the two concepts, but I think it
| paints a pretty good picture of the psychological impact
| that such systems can have.
|
| > I'm not trying to be an overly pedantic dick here, but
| words do need to have clear meanings. There are other
| terms we could use for ubiquitous surveillance that
| occurs in public, and perhaps we should standardise on
| one.
|
| I don't really take issue with being pedantic, _I 'm_
| being pedantic too. But still, metaphors are metaphors,
| not direct equivocations. There are indeed limitations to
| how much the term "panopticon" can possibly be applied to
| some _other_ surveillance system. If you go further, you
| can also point out more literal aspects of the
| panopticon. However, I don 't think it is an unreasonable
| stretch to use the term "panopticon" for other sorts of
| mass surveillance systems. EFF has used the term
| "panopticon" a fair bit to describe digital surveillance
| and data collection systems, even though those are also a
| fair bit different than the original concept of a
| panopticon.
|
| To me, the important thing about an metaphor is that it
| conveys the right thing to people, not whether it is
| literally a 1:1 match. When people say that mass
| surveillance systems are a "panopticon", they definitely
| are pointing to the things that made the panopticon so
| unnerving:
|
| - The uncertainty of whether or not your actions are
| being scrutinized, forcing you into a permanent state of
| paranoia and self-regulation.
|
| - The way that it enables totalitarian control over large
| groups of people.
|
| - The general loss of privacy (regardless of whether you
| had any expectation of it to begin with.)
|
| To me, basically any mass surveillance system is like
| this, except probably worse. Mass data collection means
| that not only do you not have any idea if anyone's
| scrutinizing your actions, but you _also_ don 't know if
| it might be scrutinized any time in the future.
|
| As far as standardization goes, there are write-ups on
| the use of the term panopticon as a metaphor. I'll just
| defer to Wikipedia[1] and its respective sources here. I
| think the fact that it is commonly used as a metaphor
| should cover the "standardization" aspect; some day, the
| actual original panopticon will probably be eclipsed by
| the systems that are described in relation to it.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon#Surveillanc
| e_techno...
| gnfargbl wrote:
| > To me this feels like an entirely different argument
| than the "expectation of privacy" one, and I still do not
| really find it persuasive.
|
| If nothing else, we've at least understood where we
| disagree! I don't think it's reasonable to consider a
| lack of privacy in one space without also considering the
| possibility of refuge in another space.
|
| That's not to say that loss of privacy in the public
| space is automatically acceptable, but it feels
| qualitatively different to loss of privacy in the
| defended space. Ubiquitous ANPR doesn't invoke feelings
| of paranoia in me, at all. Cameras and microphones in my
| house (if monitored by the state) certainly would.
|
| Ubiquitous ANPR in public _does_ encourage self-
| regulation, in that other people feel more required to
| follow public-good laws like maintaining motor insurance
| with it in place. As mentioned above, I 'm not convinced
| that's a net negative.
|
| > Please note that the panopticon concept was also
| planned to be used in schools, hospitals, and other
| locations.
|
| I didn't know this, but after doing a little more
| research then yes, I concede that you're quite correct.
| The term was used contemporaneously in settings other
| than prisons, and in fact the original use of the term
| probably owed more to other settings [1].
|
| [1] https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1353164/2/014%2
| 0Steadm...
| chuckadams wrote:
| It was kind of Foucault's entire point that society is
| running on norms that describe a prison.
| graemep wrote:
| > historically we have exactly zero expectation of privacy in
| public spaces in the UK.
|
| True, but we also had zero expectation of permanent records
| being kept of so much of what we do in public spaces, or
| being under such constant surveillance in public spaces. I
| think that is a concern.
|
| > Overall, I can't say I love the number of ANPR cameras we
| have, but then I'm also not thrilled by the thought of
| subsidising large numbers of people who aren't willing to
| hold up their side of the social contract by taxing and
| insuring their cars.
|
| ANPR does not seem to have put a stop to it. I really cannot
| understand why. If someone has not made a Statutory Off Road
| Notification they must pay tax and be insured, and if they
| are caught on an ANPR camera having made a SORN they are
| clearly breaking the law
|
| With such widespread use of ANPR I cannot understand how
| people are still able to get away with it.
| henrikschroder wrote:
| > > historically we have exactly zero expectation of
| privacy in public spaces in the UK.
|
| > True, but we also had zero expectation of permanent
| records being kept of so much of what we do in public
| spaces, or being under such constant surveillance in public
| spaces. I think that is a concern.
|
| I've been watching a bunch of "auditor" videos from the UK.
| These guys are basically trolling by going around with a
| camera in public, filming stuff, and fishing for reactions
| that they can then post on Youtube or TikTok or Reels or
| whatever for views and engagement.
|
| One thing that's very consistent across these videos is how
| many of their victims _truly believe_ that you need
| permission to film people in public, or that they can walk
| up to the guy with the camera and demand to know who he is
| or that he deletes the footage. So a lot of people are
| acting _as if_ they had much stronger rights to privacy
| than they really do, people think they 're generally safe
| from being constantly surveilled, when the opposite is in
| fact true.
|
| Another thing that's also hilariously consistent is when
| these auditors film businesses, and representatives of
| those businesses, usually the store manager, goes out and
| tells them they can't film the customers going in and out
| of the store because that's "against company policy" or
| "because of respect for our customers' privacy". At the
| same time, those stores have tons of security camera
| _inside_ the store, recording every little thing every
| single customer is doing all the time.
|
| The hypocrisy is blatant. Everybody wants to monitor
| everyone else, but no-one wants to be monitored by anyone.
| thatcat wrote:
| Insurance isn't a social contract, it's private business
| foisted upon you and enforced by the government. Isn't it bad
| enough that your taxes, which are a real social contract, go
| to pay government workers to ensure that you're purchasing
| the required private, for profit, service? Now we're building
| surveillance infrastructure for them.
| chii wrote:
| > Insurance isn't a social contract, it's private business
| foisted upon you
|
| so if you had an accident that caused damage to somebody
| else, and you didnt have money to pay for said damage, who
| makes the other party whole?
| cwillu wrote:
| FWIW, there is such a thing as public-sector insurance. The
| required auto insurance in saskatchewan, for instance, is
| tied to your registration and administered by the same
| crown corporation, which doesn't have the profit motive
| that a private insurer has.
| toast0 wrote:
| The social contract is really to fix the damage your (at
| fault) collisions cause.
|
| At least in jurisdictions I've been in, the state requires
| evidence of financial responsibility as a requirement for
| driving. (Enforcement is a separate issue from
| requirement). A car insurance policy is evidence of
| financial responsibility, and the most common; but you can
| also post a bond of something like the minimum insurance
| amounts. Yes, if you don't have the money to post a bond,
| you're more or less forced into insurance or not driving
| (or driving illegaly), but that's we know you'll uphold the
| social construct of fixing the damages you cause. You don't
| need insurance to ride a bicycle, because it's not as easy
| to cause damages with a bicycle.
| tialaramex wrote:
| Self insurance is no longer a thing in the UK. I think
| the administrative work of ensuring you capture increased
| bonds with inflation was judged unacceptable or
| something?
|
| So actual insurance is mandatory for people who operate
| motor vehicles on public roads
| tialaramex wrote:
| The alternative is that cars are prohibited because we've
| decided not to insure the risk and their owners definitely
| can't be relied upon to just happen to be able to cover the
| costs when, inevitably, they are incurred.
|
| I'm OK with "all private motor vehicles are prohibited" but
| you need to be clear if that's what you want
| rconti wrote:
| To play devil's advocate (and avoid the wrath of a
| certain lobby): We don't require knife insurance.
| chuckadams wrote:
| Do you use your knives daily in a fashion that might
| injure bystanders? If so maybe you _should_ be made to
| carry mandatory insurance.
| kyleee wrote:
| There has been discussion about piloting something like
| that in london
| gnarlynarwhal42 wrote:
| To extend your analogy slightly (while recognizing the
| actual meaning), if you go to an axe throwing venue
| (range) you dont have to carry insurance, but the range
| does carry insurance.
|
| If you go into the wilderness where axe throwing is
| allowed, and you maim or kill someone, you are personally
| liable to be sued or prosecuted.
|
| If you throw an axe where it is not allowed, you are also
| personally liable criminally and civilly.
| thatcat wrote:
| Socializing the risk in this way is a regressive tax,
| there are clearly other alternative organizational
| structures.
| multjoy wrote:
| The point of mandatory third party insurance is so that
| when you drive through the putative crowd of children
| waiting for the bus, the state and the victim's families
| are not on the hook for lifetime care costs which can
| easily be in the tens of millions of dollars per victim.
| thatcat wrote:
| Idk seems like a get out of jail free card when you
| should probably be in debt for life, slaving away for
| your grave negligence, not let off the hook because you
| paid 100$ a month.
| dns_snek wrote:
| Let off the hook? That's what criminal penalties are for.
|
| Without mandatory insurance those victims wouldn't get
| anything.
| multjoy wrote:
| That's no good to the victim, is it.
| flir wrote:
| "Obey the law" isn't part of the social contract? Hmm.
| thatcat wrote:
| Law 209348032984: Pay some guy for dubiously priced
| services that are clearly a government function. If you
| don't do it you're a statistical thief who refused to pay
| for something that didn't happen. Seems like the law
| itself is violating the social contract.
| flir wrote:
| I don't think "buy some car insurance if you're going to
| drive" is any more unreasonable than "buy a crash helmet
| if you're going to drive".
|
| But I can see how there would be a range of valid
| opinions on the matter. Some places do have a single
| government-owned insurance company: whatever they say you
| have to pay, you have to pay. No other options.
| gnfargbl wrote:
| You can survive quite happily without a car, and thus
| without car insurance, in the vast majority of the UK.
| Vehicle ownership is not mandatory either in principle or
| practice.
| tengwar2 wrote:
| "expectation of privacy" is one of those slippery terms where
| lawyers use it differently from the public, and this isn't
| immediately obvious.
|
| Historically, we have expected that people can see us in
| public. However we have not had the expectation that:
|
| - that we are identifiable to people other than acquaintances
|
| - that we can be tracked by people not present, either at the
| time or later - and for someone to physically follow you to
| track your movements would fairly quickly lead to alarm and
| summoning the police to remove them.
|
| So no, other than lawyer's argot, we have always had a
| reasonable expectation of privacy in public places. Not
| absolute privacy, but privacy in the areas that matter to
| most of us.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| There's a similar issue around phone metadata. If someone
| knows that you've made a particular call at a certain time,
| you wouldn't be concerned about them spying on you, but if
| they had access to all your phone call records, then they
| can put together a picture about you and your
| acquaintances.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Yep. Quantity is a quality all its own. Being stalked by
| a million virtual cops at all times doesn't feel like
| freedom to me
| mywittyname wrote:
| > Secondly, there's no chilling effect caused by the
| selective and unknown application of surveillance;
|
| People carry a cellphone with them, these by-and-large have
| multiple high resolution cameras along with microphones. Some
| even have LIDAR. Plus they are constantly emitting pulses
| that can be captured from several kilometers.
|
| A person could be selectively surveilled without their
| knowing by monitoring their phone.
|
| This is ignoring the massive network of internet connected
| private security cameras and police drones, which are very
| adept at monitoring people, as well as theoretical technology
| that we don't know is in use (i.e., using high frequency
| radio waves to "see" through walls).
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Since I doubt I'm the only one who didn't know what a
| "panopticon" is:
|
| A "panopticon" is a concept originally designed as a type of
| prison by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the late
| 18th century. It's a circular building with a central
| watchtower where a single guard can observe all the inmates in
| their cells, which are arranged around the perimeter. The
| twist? The inmates can't see into the tower, so they never know
| if they're being watched. This setup was meant to induce self-
| discipline--prisoners would behave as if they're always under
| surveillance, even if no one's actually looking.
| intrasight wrote:
| Am curious. How, with 17th century technology, could you have
| a geometry where I can see you but you can't see me? Glass
| treatment? Narrow viewing port?
| thatcat wrote:
| a circular room looking out from a high point facing an
| exterior round wall of cells that look in
| sprobertson wrote:
| Don't need any special tech or geometry, just light. If
| it's relatively darker in the watched-from areas it's
| harder to see in than out.
| thecosas wrote:
| Light and perhaps curtains in the central area would
| probably do the trick.
| scoot wrote:
| "By Blinds, and other contrivances, the Inspectors
| concealed from the observation of the Prisoners: hence the
| sentiment of a sort of invisible omnipresence."
|
| _-- Jeremy Bentham (1791). Panopticon, or The Inspection
| House_
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Something like a pinhole camera. If you have a piece of
| card with a pinprick hole in it, you can look through that
| hole and see a wide view, but a person in front of you
| wouldn't be able to see much of you through that same hole.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Something like "one way mirrors" should work.
|
| They're really just glass with a partially reflective
| layer.
|
| When one side is brightly lit and the other side isn't you
| get the desired effect.
| tzs wrote:
| If the internet is to be believed they did not have one
| way mirrors in the 17th century. They were invented in
| the early 1900s.
|
| However, looking at the patent for what is supposed to be
| the first it says that there were earlier attempts--they
| just sucked because making the partially reflective layer
| was difficult and expensive and not durable enough when
| used on outdoor advertising devices.
|
| Yes, you read that right. Advertising. Technology being
| driven by someone's desire to show ads is not new.
|
| The thing the inventor was building was a case for
| displaying advertising posters. The case had a glass
| front, and the poster was behind the glass, with powerful
| lights behind the poster. When the lights were off the
| glass would appear to people looking at the case to be a
| mirror. When the lights were on the poster could be seen.
| tomcam wrote:
| Prisons in the 1800s were dark
| kayo_20211030 wrote:
| It's a metaphor mostly.
| frereubu wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
| linuxlizard wrote:
| Root word comes from the Greek mythological giant.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argus_Panoptes
| thrance wrote:
| Whose name itself comes from the ancient Greek words
| _pan_ (all) and _optikon_ (optics, see).
| kaycebasques wrote:
| That summary is technically correct but is missing some
| context. A famous French philosopher and historian named
| Michel Foucault popularized Bentham's panopticon as a
| metaphor for modern society more broadly back in the 60s.
| IIRC the gist is that the way modern society always watches
| and monitors us across many aspects of modern life probably
| has deep but subtle affects on our psyches.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discipline_and_Punish
| greenavocado wrote:
| The inability of people to go through the power process has
| deep psychological implications, described in depth in
| "Industrial Society and It's Future"
| woleium wrote:
| Like thinking the "elf on the shelf" Christmas toy is an
| acceptable thing.
| moate wrote:
| "Hey, what if we marketed a little narc doll that we sold
| to kids" was probably when I should have realized that
| the surveillance state will always win
| mullingitover wrote:
| > probably has deep but subtle affects on our psyches
|
| Many religions (basically all the big ones) forcefully
| indoctrinate members from childhood to believe that their
| deity is omniscient and is constantly watching them and
| judging them. It's generally agreed among members that this
| is a good thing.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I'd be significantly less worried about being in a
| panopticon if it was going to accurately judge my good
| and bad deeds and do nothing else.
| 3D30497420 wrote:
| Though that depends quite a lot on who gets to define
| what is "good" and "bad".
| theoreticalmal wrote:
| Seems wise to leave the answering of that question to a
| transcendent entity
| uticus wrote:
| Sounds like we've met. I'd take God in this position over
| one man or many any day of the week
|
| "Judge me, O God, and plead my cause against an ungodly
| nation: O deliver me from the deceitful and unjust man.
| For thou art the God of my strength..."
|
| "...but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel."
| Henchman21 wrote:
| Agreed. I'll take a fictional overseer vs an actual one
| any day of the week.
| moffkalast wrote:
| That's one GPT-ass paragraph
| RandomBacon wrote:
| Maybe, but if so, it was an appropriate use.
| atoav wrote:
| It is all about informational asymmetry, you know nothing
| about the people in power, while they (potentially) could
| know all about you. The idea is to get you to self-police by
| assuming the gaze of those wielding the power.
| klondike_klive wrote:
| You just described my Catholic upbringing
| singleshot_ wrote:
| How awfully unfortunate to spend your entire life in a
| panopticon without ever being told what one is. Perhaps this
| is a feature.
| forgotusername6 wrote:
| Is it ironic or fitting that a man who designed a building
| where everyone could be observed is now observed himself for
| eternity. His preserved corpse is on display at University
| College London.
| gambiting wrote:
| And yet, if your car gets stolen thieves don't even bother
| putting fake/cloned plates on it most of the time - police
| could in theory look up where the car was last seen using ANPR
| but either they don't have the time or they don't actually have
| the ability.
|
| >>Because of how effective this is for catching even fairly
| minor violations like failure to pay road tax
|
| It's not really, I don't believe so anyway. Keep seeing posts
| from various police forces around the UK about so-and-so car
| being stopped, no tax since 2022 for instance. And I'm
| like....ok great, but how come it took you 3 years to find
| them??
| lazide wrote:
| Typically cars get stolen for temporary-ish use - to commit a
| crime somewhere, go joyriding, to strip for parts, etc.
|
| It might only be on the road for 2-8 hours. Maybe a day.
|
| To catch someone during the window of opportunity it would
| make sense requires a lot of things to happen in quick
| succession - the owner needs to notice, a report with all the
| necessary details needs to be entered, and they need to go by
| a reader - and an officer needs to follow up in a timely
| fashion before the 'lead' goes stale.
|
| Sometimes departments will have their acts together enough
| that it's possible, but usually they don't. Police
| departments are part of the government too, after all. Most
| of the time if the car is found at all, it will be found days
| later abandoned on the other side of town, or on blocks.
|
| The 'best' often have an officer (or 2) obsessed with
| catching stolen cars, and some of them will catch 10-12 in a
| shift. It's genuinely impressive watching them work.
| debarshri wrote:
| I think ANPR comes very handy in US when there is an amber
| alert.
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| I wonder if such LPR systems and/or Amber alerts have yet
| been used to intercept pregnant women traveling out of state
| for an abortion.
| Lammy wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children
| pinko wrote:
| _Every_ civil liberties infringement (e.g., warrantless
| search and seizure) comes in very handy for solving crimes.
| That 's why the constitution specifically places limit on it,
| because you have to balance that with the loss of liberty.
| tgv wrote:
| I worked for a company that builds traffic info systems based
| on such cameras, but we didn't share any of that data, unless
| given a warrant.
| spoaceman7777 wrote:
| Didn't _yet_. Which is how most of this technology starts
| out, and is the largest problem with people building these
| systems. See: courts ruling that 23andMe can sell their data
| yesterday
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Did you see the logs of how much data was released?
| elric wrote:
| Wait until you find out about the thousands of camera's on
| public transport.
|
| At least cars being tracked are just cars. On public transport
| the tracking is much more invasive (and pervasive).
| troyvit wrote:
| I've been watching a British spy show called Slow Horses. So
| far a huge chunk of season 2 is spies looking at camera
| surveillance footage. It sounds like it's really that bad.
| kypro wrote:
| To highlight how bad it is, I read this article as a Brit and
| was genuinely confused. I kept wondering what I was missing
| because it seemed so obvious to me that if you drove around
| your neighbourhood the police would be taking photos of your
| movements regularly on any major road.
|
| But I guess this isn't a thing in some places?
|
| While I'm not fond of the cameras monitoring my movements
| honestly the worst part of driving in the UK is the constant
| anxiety that if you do anything wrong you're going to be
| fined. And sometimes you arguably don't even do anything
| wrong they just change the rules without telling you.
|
| The updated the road near me recently from 30 to 20, they did
| this on the patch of road by an existing speed camera and
| only put one small sign up. Because most people know the road
| is 30 thousands and thousands of people have been fined for
| not realising someone updated the speed limit overnight.
|
| Similarly, in my city they're constantly making roads one
| way, restricting car access on certain roads, adding
| restrictions for diesel cars, and adding bus lanes. All have
| cameras so if you don't realise you're immediately fined.
|
| I even know someone who was recently fine because they were
| caught on camera going through a red light to get out of the
| way of an ambulance (they insist they did so safely).
|
| The tracking our movements is really the least of our
| problems.
| underseacables wrote:
| You can make your own ALPR, it's quite easy.
| josefritzishere wrote:
| Creepy AF. We live in a prison.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| If I were to be a road pirate, I would only have used government
| license plates. Let them fine themselves!
| throwALPRsaway wrote:
| It's interesting that you go through life thinking "no one would
| ever do that" with regard to various circumstances, yet discover
| people do those things.
|
| These ALPR companies are evil. If a car manufacturer sells your
| data or a big box store uses AI in ways you disagree with you can
| just not purchase from those companies. It can be much more
| difficult to move to a new town where they may then decide to put
| these things. I know of one town where it is impossible to drive
| without hitting an ALPR. What a prison.
|
| Here is a list of things that have been or could be done:
|
| - wrong vehicle identified and stopped at gunpoint
|
| - sacramento sheriff shared LP data with Texas in case pregnant
| people visited
|
| - police chief stalked his ex
|
| - a mad president could unreasonably declare martial law and send
| the national guard in to the Atlanta office to take over the
| command center (if you take the license plate off: how many
| silver Audi A4s are there in Palo Alto?)
|
| - a foreign state actor could surreptitiously infiltrate their
| servers and discover patterns that help them if they declare war
| against the US
|
| - the data will be leaked (high likelihood eventually) and you
| can find out all kinds of behaviors. It would be fair game for
| insurance companies.
|
| It violates the 4th amendment. A governement cannot just track
| innocent people everywhere they go. They sell it as "we aren't
| giving tickets, we are only looking for bad guys" but the above
| incidents (gunpoint, sheriff, stalking ex) show otherwise. But
| what concerns me is not the local police, it is the last three
| potential situations. And you can't opt out unless you take ubers
| or bike I guess.
|
| Please donate to the Institute for Justice. They have a case in
| Virginia (surprised it wasn't mentioned) and I am confident they
| will succeed in taking this to the Supreme Court. They recently
| won a civil asset forfeiture case and they have successfully
| argued cases like DC's gun ban before the supreme court. (If you
| think guns are bad, fine, but like ALPRs it was a violation of
| the US constitution) ij.org
|
| Edit: spelling, formatting
| mmooss wrote:
| > Institute for Justice
|
| You should know who you are donating to (even if you decide to
| donate). Institute for Justice is a Koch-funded operation that
| has been focused on their agenda more than civil rights.
| Possibly my information is somewhat out of date, but note even
| the propaganda-oriented name as a cover for Koch operations,
| sort of like the PATRIOT act.
|
| Consider also the ACLU, which you know is doing a good job
| because the powers-that-be attack the ACLU instinctively.
| leoqa wrote:
| Most cars already emit RF signals for WiFi, Bluetooth and 5G.
| These can be fingerprinted along with the physical attributes to
| increase accuracy.
|
| I'm in support of better investigative tools and stricter
| governance. I'm not worried that my car location would lead to a
| false arrest- that is like being afraid of lighting striking.
| aftbit wrote:
| Don't forget about tire pressure monitoring sensors (TPMS).
| They operate around 433 MHz and each have a unique ID to stop
| your car from misreporting a low tire pressure from a car
| sitting next to you at a stoplight. They are required by law.
| While some use various techniques to avoid transmitting all the
| time (to save battery), many just blit out their ID and
| pressure values on a regular interval whenever the wheels are
| rolling. That means that whenever you drive over a bridge or
| toll gate that is properly equipped, you're feeding them enough
| info to uniquely identify you, even if they don't have a camera
| or any GHz radios.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| I remember the rounds of media coverage about this when TPMS
| became required on new cars.
|
| I have not seen any evidence that it is actually happening,
| though. Compare to this story where the reporter asked for
| tracking data and either received the data or a response
| confirming the data's existence but declining to provide it.
|
| Other data sources for tracking, like cell phone location or
| toll transponder pings, also have a public record of the
| existence of that data.
|
| I'm not aware of a similar trail of proof-of-existence for
| TPMS data tracking. If you are, I'd be interested to learn.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| I have no idea where you live where they are required by law,
| but I've never heard of such a thing. They've never been
| required by law anywhere I've owned a car.
|
| In any case, given they have batteries that eventually wear
| out, and older cars don't have them, it would still be more
| effective to use a camera.
|
| Edit: even if they're required in _new cars_ that doesn 't
| make them mandatory on the road. It's not like all tires must
| be sold with TPMS.
| kbolino wrote:
| The TPMS requirement in the US is ratcheted. Once you have
| TPMS on a car, it needs to stay on the car even if you
| replace the wheels. It must not be disabled or removed, and
| it must be fixed if broken.
|
| Obviously, it is easy to flout these regulations as an
| individual or as a small-time mechanic. But there can be
| penalties if tampering or negligence gets discovered, the
| most common of which is failing to pass inspection. When I
| bought wheels from Tire Rack online in 2015, I had to
| either pay extra to have them equipped with TPMS or else
| attest that my vehicle never had TPMS.
|
| The real purpose has nothing to do with surveillance but
| with consumer and environmental protection. If you buy a
| used car with TPMS, you should be confident that it works.
| And keeping it working increases the chances that people
| will keep their tires filled and their fuel economy up.
|
| However, a new problem has arisen, which is that gas
| stations don't bother to fix their broken air compressors
| anymore.
| clusterhacks wrote:
| I can find no mention of a TPMS requirement in my state.
| My older car has a malfunction in its TPMS and has for
| 10+ years. The repair cost I was quoted was ridiculous
| and I just periodically check the tire pressure with a
| normal gauge.
|
| This vehicle has passed all required inspections for that
| entire time and the TPMS system hasn't even been
| mentioned in that context.
|
| edit: I found the claim that TPMS was required
| interesting and a quick web search shows that 13 states
| in the US don't require vehicle safety inspections _AT
| ALL._
| kbolino wrote:
| It is not a state law, it is a Federal regulation under
| 49 CFR SS 571.138 [1]. These requirements were fully
| effective for manufacturers and "alterers" as of 1 Sep
| 2008. However, yes, if your state doesn't require it (or
| doesn't require any inspection), then there's no way to
| penalize you as vehicle owner or reseller. Mechanics and
| aftermarket part sellers can still run afoul of USDOT
| though.
|
| [1]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/49/571.138
| blantonl wrote:
| You can monitor and track these as well with:
| https://github.com/merbanan/rtl_433
| mmooss wrote:
| People expressing certain political views are being arrested.
| Protests advocating certain views are being shut down. It seems
| obvious that this kind of surveillance could result in extreme
| oppression.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| Next Uber will be pitching a privacy-centric upgrade, similar to
| VPN positioning today, to preserve privacy in the face of mass
| roadway surveillance.
| sorenjan wrote:
| This is also available as a private service:
|
| > In just a few taps and clicks, the tool showed where a car had
| been seen throughout the U.S. A private investigator source had
| access to a powerful system used by their industry, repossession
| agents, and insurance companies. Armed with just a car's plate
| number, the tool--fed by a network of private cameras spread
| across the country--provides users a list of all the times that
| car has been spotted.
|
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/i-tracked-someone-with-licen...
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| we should remove all license plates.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| Nah, we should remove all Automated License Plate Readers.
| mhb wrote:
| Maybe complain to your host about funding ALPR startups like
| Flock (YC17)?
| bob1029 wrote:
| I've got mixed feelings about the flock cameras.
|
| Twelve of them around a high density shopping center is perfectly
| reasonable.
|
| Just one at the entrance of a neighborhood is severe overreach.
|
| I don't mind the idea of building a surveillance state within
| certain parameterized boundaries, but once you are in a
| residential setting these things feel like military incursion.
| Homeowners can already opt-in to video doorbells, security
| cameras on their properties, etc.
|
| Home Depot & law enforcement don't need a 500-mile diameter
| security perimeter around each retail store to catch the guy
| stealing Milwaukee products. The cameras in the parking lot and
| leading up to the freeway should give you enough room to play
| with unless you are vastly incompetent at basic police work.
| einpoklum wrote:
| I drove 50 miles, and avoided contacting the police so that they
| don't arrest me or beat me up.
| chakintosh wrote:
| I'm not surprised by the surveilance, but more by the high
| resolution of these cameras. Surely the storage bill must be
| immense.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| The price doesn't matter because we all pay it.
| Lammy wrote:
| They purge the actual images after some time period but keep
| the metadata (OCRed plate, other identifying features) I assume
| forever. From a Flock privacy policy:
|
| > Video Clips captured by the LPR system will automatically be
| deleted after 30 days; although Images are deleted when no
| longer needed, the data obtained from the Images may be
| retained indefinitely.
| timcobb wrote:
| I entered the United States the other day from Mexico at BWI
| without even showing my passport. I don't know how they verified
| my identity, but I presume it was a camera, because the agent
| looked in a computer for a few seconds, then waved me through...
| :/
|
| Good to know the state knows me and isn't even bashful about
| it...
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I assume they at least have photos from your previous border
| crossings pop up when your car approaches.
| timcobb wrote:
| Certainly, but that is so uncool in my opinion
| sitkack wrote:
| It feels like a dystopian power play, hey citizen, we are
| watching you.
| antisthenes wrote:
| No worries, they were "one of the good ones" .
| TheJoeMan wrote:
| That's interesting, I thought you had to apply for the SETRI
| program.
|
| [1] https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-traveler-programs/sentri
| MaxPock wrote:
| Democratic surveillance is not bad unlike China's authoritarian
| surveillance.
| timcobb wrote:
| Who's even trying to make that point? Isn't it more like "I
| don't need privacy because I have nothing to hide"?
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| And you don't have anything to hide because the government is
| not authoritarian, the argument continues, in theory if not
| in practice. Our governments are good and righteous and will
| not misuse the surveillance data in any way.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Because government never changes, right?
| ChoGGi wrote:
| That was some nasty looking cream cheese.
|
| Oh yeah and police surveillance something.
| buildsjets wrote:
| It does look revolting. According to the label it's "Cream
| Cheese Spread." Kind of like how KFC provides sachets of "Honey
| Sauce" rather than actual honey.
| krupan wrote:
| "Part of Flock's proprietary tech determines the make and model
| of the vehicle and also notes if there are bumper stickers, bike
| racks, any other unique markings that would help identify that
| vehicle."
|
| I have always avoided bumper stickers and custom license plates
| for more anonymity. I have a ham radio license and decided not to
| get a license plate with my callsign on it because people could
| easily Google that and find out my name and address. I had always
| just thought about other drivers in these cases, not law
| enforcment surveillance!
| djoldman wrote:
| https://transparency.flocksafety.com/roanoke-va-pd
|
| Here are the statistics on Roanoke VA's flock cameras for the
| last 30 days.
| djoldman wrote:
| Some of these pages include information about searches of the
| databases.
|
| Here is Oakland PD with 1,626,757 vehicles detected and
| information on the 2,244 searches served in the last 30 days.
|
| This includes what appear to be UUID ids of the users.
|
| https://transparency.flocksafety.com/oakland-ca-pd
| xyst wrote:
| These systems are also likely to get replaced or downsized in
| favor of relying on data from _self driving vehicles_.
|
| Waymo and et al are touted for making our lives easier (load of
| marketing bs), but really will make it more difficult.
|
| edit: and they get to double dip -- users paying to use and
| install their product, and selling that data back to the user and
| LE and intelligence communities.
| sparrish wrote:
| "It's a paradigm shift where we go from having an expectation of
| privacy even in public spaces to its inverse."
|
| What? Who has an expectation of privacy 'even in public spaces'?
| You're in public with a serialized mode of transportation
| (license plate) that requires a state-issued license to operate.
| Why would you expect 'privacy' in public?
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| There is an expectation you won't be subjected to invasive
| surveillance by default. Cameras that went to a local video
| recorder and only checked after an incident are way different
| than routing that video into a 24/7 panopticon that logs a
| behavioral profile of everyone.
| rangestransform wrote:
| when katz v. USA was decided, government needed to talk to
| witnesses or surreptitiously follow suspects to gather
| information. even taking pictures was massively less scalable
| back then. I would say that policing should never become more
| scalable with technology, the tools police have to gather
| information should be as difficult and unscalable to use as
| they were when katz v. USA was decided.
| carimura wrote:
| I asked our Sheriff who is in charge of the local deployments in
| our county whether they could, in theory, enforce curfews if the
| governor implemented an emergency order, and he said "yes I guess
| we could in that case".
|
| Welcome to the future.
| toast0 wrote:
| I imagine any Sheriff can enforce a curfew. Drive around and
| stop anyone you see and tell them to go home and/or arrest
| them. You could walk or bike or ride a horse, instead of
| driving.
|
| It might not be very effective, but it's enforcing a curfew.
| goatlover wrote:
| Wouldn't you leave your phone and car at home if you were
| planning on breaking curfew?
| vgeek wrote:
| Flock (YC17)
|
| They are growing and showing up everywhere, but you never hear
| about them in terms of real innovation, just helping build the
| surveillance state. Combine this with cloud based doorbell
| cameras and it seems like someone is always watching.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| With that amount of mass surveillance, introducing fascism
| wouldn't be a problem for really committed people.
|
| Is anyone watching the watchers? Who is policing the police? What
| checks and balances do we have?
| zw123456 wrote:
| What if someone takes their license plates off and makes a fake
| temporary paper one, the kind you put in the back window when you
| get a new car? Not permanently but if you wanted to go do
| something illegal and not be tracked. Can the LPR pick those up?
| beej71 wrote:
| This is just one reason why it's important to not talk to police.
| They might ask you if you were in Cityville on some particular
| date, and maybe you'd forgotten. So you said no. But then it
| comes out that there's footage of you in town, and now that can
| of worms is open.
| swader999 wrote:
| Ebike and park the car as much as possible.
| choutianxius wrote:
| Travel to China and you will find the big brother watching
| literally everywhere
| KomradeKeeks wrote:
| the construction no longer has to be parallel
| banku_brougham wrote:
| exactly, though I think the current cohort of HN readers have
| no memory of this.
| jedberg wrote:
| I would have less of a problem with the constant surveillance if
| they would make it required by law to inform me any time someone
| looks at the data. One of the things that makes me really wary of
| all this surveillance is that it is too easy for people to look.
|
| If they knew that every time they looked I would know about it,
| they wouldn't look so much. Similarly to how people are much less
| stalky on LinkedIn and Instagram because they know that the other
| person gets notified when they look.
| nicbou wrote:
| That won't be of much use if the government turns rogue and no
| longer honours that obligation, or the purpose of the collected
| data.
|
| There's no recalling that data.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| That will never happen because if a million people got a form
| letter in the mail that some federal agency they've never heard
| of is trolling through everyone's crap looking for some petty
| papers crime that nobody knew was a crime, nobody really cares
| about (Chinese power tools that had the wrong box checked on
| the customs form or whatever) they'd ask why their taxes are
| paying for such activity.
| jedberg wrote:
| I would assume it would be implemented as a web page where
| you could check logs. Not a whole bunch of form letters.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Where one could set up email would be fine as well.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Whatever form the notification takes it would eventually
| get publicized and get people annoyed/angry.
| timewizard wrote:
| The data should be encrypted. The police should not have access
| to the key. Only the district attourney or equivalent should.
| If the police want access they need a court order and the sign
| off of the DA.
|
| That would make it like _any other_ record the police want
| access to.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > That generates a "vehicle fingerprint" for every car or truck,
| which none of the agencies I FOIA'd would provide me.
|
| I hope there's also litigation for this given it is also public
| record when it's being purchased with tax dollars. Especially if
| they're just asking for the identifications of their own vehicle.
| It seems similar to denying me a copy of their record of my
| actual fingerprint.
| troyvit wrote:
| Dang. I've had a fantasy of painting several fake license plates
| all over the back of my hatchback to help confound these cameras,
| but:
|
| 'Part of Flock's proprietary tech determines the make and model
| of the vehicle and also notes if there are bumper stickers, bike
| racks, any other unique markings that would help identify that
| vehicle. That generates a "vehicle fingerprint" for every car or
| truck'
|
| So in just the same way that ad blockers and other anti-
| surveillance tech actually make your browser stand out,
| obfuscating your license plate would also make you stand out.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| I bet "unknown unknown" is a pretty popular make and model in
| their database.
| DavidPeiffer wrote:
| If this type of surveillance is concerning to you, please look at
| advocating against it at a local level. Thomas Ptacek [1] has
| experience and seems very willing to help out. He recently
| provided a really helpful comment regarding reining in a Flock
| install in his city. [2]
|
| And as has been mentioned a couple other places in this
| discussion, please contribute to mapping out license plate
| readers in OpenStreetMap at https://deflock.me. Ideally someone
| will create a routing engine which with an option to avoid all
| known ALPR's while generating a route.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41927777
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| I was subjected to two illegal traffic stops in NJ because my
| Indiana plate was "unregistered" when in fact they just don't
| share data with the vendor running the ALPR systems the town cops
| use. These companies need to be sued into submission.
| unit149 wrote:
| Cadillac and Tesla emulate panopticonic cells, which resolve the
| presence of an external observer. CCTV footage is confined to
| local area networks that is pulled from LRP time-stamp headers.
| Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) and Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) on a
| narrow-band, Dedicated Short-Range Communications (DSRC) protocol
| can identify vehicle fragments, meta-data, from dynamic time-
| stamp servers, like "that is a red Tesla."
| throwaway31338 wrote:
| Since the genie is out of the bottle, when it comes to ALPRs in
| the United States, I'd rather just have all the data publicly
| available. If the cops, data brokers, and insurance companies can
| see it I should be able to as well.
|
| I should be able to see the comings and goings of law
| enforcement, elected officials, etc, if they can see mine.
|
| Alternatively, lock it away behind judicial oversight. Make the
| cops get a warrant. Criminalize companies collecting the data
| from offering it in any manner other than by the order of a
| judge.
|
| I feel the same way about tracking cell phones, publicly-owned
| surveillance cameras, privately-owned surveillance cameras that
| are "voluntarily" offered to law enforcement, and, in general,
| any dragnet surveillance available to law enforcement. If it's
| available to law enforcement and not being conducted on an
| individual basis under a judicial order (or, heck, even just
| probable cause) I think it should be available to the public,
| too.
|
| "But stalkers!"
|
| Tough. That's the price we have to pay for keeping law
| enforcement in check. Either adapt or take this power away from
| law enforcement.
| alwa wrote:
| For that matter, it's not unheard of for members of the US'
| 18,000 law enforcement organizations [0] to engage in stalking
| behaviors themselves. Especially when there's no oversight for
| a specific surveillance technology...
|
| [0]
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_enforcement_in_the_Unite...
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > Since the genie is out of the bottle, when it comes to ALPRs
| in the United States, I'd rather just have all the data
| publicly available. If the cops, data brokers, and insurance
| companies can see it I should be able to as well.
|
| I try to help folks understand that locking up public data up
| with a privacy law only blocks them from seeing it.
|
| It is still trivially available to those who use personal data
| to negatively impact others.
|
| ref: https://datarade.ai/data-categories/b2b-contact-
| data/provide...
| m463 wrote:
| > "But stalkers!" > > Tough. That's the price we
| have to pay
|
| I wonder if that won't really work well in real life.
|
| I remember reading the difference between a citizen and a
| police officer is that a police officer can arrest people for
| misdemeanors (while a citizen can do a citizen's arrest for
| felonies I believe).
|
| There's probably a good reason citizens shouldn't easily be
| able to prey or stir up trouble with no friction.
|
| that said, surveillance by private companies should be
| regulated, and people should have access to data collected
| about themselves.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Effective and reliable law enforcement is a very fast way to go
| from a low trust society to a high trust society. You can leave
| your expensive valuables unattended and be certain they won't be
| taken. Cameras result in higher solve rates, which results in
| lower crime rates, which results in even higher solve rates.
|
| Meanwhile, in the Bay Area (one of the most economically
| productive regions of the world) even attempted burglary is
| functionally not a crime: if there is no footage, nothing was
| taken, it's not an active crime, and the value of your smashed
| window is under some threshold, police will direct you to fill
| out a form online which will almost certainly not result in an
| investigation or arrest. Worse yet, if you report to insurance,
| you will be punished in the form of higher premiums.
| jillyboel wrote:
| Could this story be any longer? Is there a tldr? It seems
| interesting but the author keeps going on personal tangents.
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