I don't think they should be keeping data that's not involved in an active warrant.
However, if they do anyway, there should be strong victims' rights protections so that the data is actually used during investigations.
There was a string of burglaries in our area a few years ago, and panopticon N-1 (Google Map's auto recording of all phone GPS traces for marketing information) could have found the perpetrators pretty much instantly.
They hit rural outbuildings in the middle of the night on camera, so timestamps were precise, but faces were obscured. A reverse geofence warrant keyed on time of arrival / departure would have narrowed it down to just the crooks with extremely high probability, and other details in the videos would have corroborated the GPS traces.
None of the victims were politically connected, so the police couldn't (by policy) run the reverse GPS lookups. This is the worst of both worlds: Our data is recorded to be used against us later, but if ever it would be useful, we do not have access to it. The same is true for vehicle black boxes / cameras. They record a few seconds before airbag deploy, but you usually are not allowed to access them as part of an insurance dispute (even the ones from your own car).
This assumes that you don’t get a new administration that decides to throw out all the laws that came before and uses this juicy panopticon camera system in whatever way they want, to do whatever they want.
The cameras are an attractive nuisance for people in power, including any and all law enforcement types. It only takes a few bad apples to spoil that entire ocean.
The real threat is the cameras’ very existence, and that is what has to be eliminated. If a thing doesn’t exist, then it can’t be abused.
That’s an important thing to keep in mind, when you are required to keep in mind the lessons of 1930s Germany. Or the Stasi from East Germany.
When you figure out how to guarantee that you can never, ever again have a 1930s Germany situation pop up, and a government that just casually throws out all the old laws, then we can talk about whether those kinds of cameras might make sense again.
> assumes that you don’t get a new administration that decides to throw out all the laws that came before and uses this juicy panopticon camera system in whatever way they want, to do whatever they want.
What you're suggesting would mean that they wouldn't even have to throw out the laws. They could just install the new cameras themselves. So there's no difference.
It requires a reasonably balanced and trustworthy government no matter what.
The original sin is requiring cars to display an identifying plate. Imagine asking the framers about a similar ID display on horseback mounted travelers.
That's the underlying rights violation-- and it's why solutions that otherwise try to restrict ALPR run into oddities about limiting people's ability to observe what is plainly visible in public.
Failing that avenue, we should treat most broad involuntary data collection efforts as a form of stalking/harassment, and treat it accordingly-- including providing a strong civil path for anyone whose data was collected without their knoweldge especially given that law enforcement / prosecutors have a material conflict of interest which will prevent them from enforcing the law.
The biggest argument against limits on storing "non-hit" data that the pro-Flock crowd is going to use is that "we need the historical data to find evidence of the whereabouts of criminal suspects".
Counter point police have been able to prosecute crime without being able to defacto track every single person in the US via car and the corrosive effect of having that ability outweighs the gains. Plus on top of all of that they've proven time and time again they can't be trusted to contain themselves or their collegues from rampant abuse to stalk exes, celebrities, etc. just because they can.
"Counter point police have been able to prosecute crime without being able to defacto track every single person in the US"
This is not true, and I dont know why everyone believes that. Real-life policing looks nothing like Law and Order. Moreover, post-George Floyd, police have basically had a work stoppage. Real prosecution requires high agency work by the police and they aren't legally required to do that [1], so they don't, and no amount of voting and police union busting is going to help here. You can't require someone to be "stellar" at their jobs.
Having had real egregious crimes happen around me has exposed me to just how much crime you can simply get away with...all the time.
Flock has basically turned a high-agency job that police stopped doing, into a db lookup, that in some circumstances they can be forced into doing.
I agree with EFF, record it all and put it all behind a real warrant and a civilian judge with a high bar for approval.
And I personally think that in some cases that would actually be a net positive for society. Like a kid disappears or a body is found murdered or a serious crime occurs. Being able to look at who was coming and going to solve serious crimes is probably a good thing.
But for tracking petty crimes and with the abuse of the system with things like officers monitoring their exes, as one example, makes the system far too dangerous for a free society. And because of that if they are going to ever get the public on board with flock then we are going to need to establish certain rights and guarantees.
For me that would be things like warrants with the exceptions in only the most extreme cases like a kidnapping or a murder that literally just happened and immediate response was critical.
Next I would want a reasonable time data was stored then deleted. That is not 2 years that is like maybe a couple weeks or perhaps a little longer. Having the history of when and where everyone goes is a huge privacy risk and should not be stored forever as it is a target.
Next I would want rules that it is only used for certain investigations and crimes. Yes to violent crimes and sexual crimes and crimes against children and obvious things all of society can easily say yes those things are bad. But for most other crimes it should be constitutionally forbidden. Think of how laws and public beliefs change over time. Imagine this years back when being gay was a crime. Or tracking people who go to an abortion clinic.
I could go on for a lot longer about how this type of system is dangerous in so many ways if not governed by very well thought out rules and rights given to the public. It is sad that the operators of these systems don't want to meet in the middle to something that most of the public could get on board with but they obviously know that total surveillance is very valuable data to have on people.
Yep that solves everything. Pack your bags guys. War's over on ALPR's [sarcasm]
Making things illegal does not stop abuse. The cameras should not even be in our communities. There was 0 discussion nor any vote. These things got installed without consent and you want to argue that just placing guardrails that don't even get enforced is going to fix this?
Ultimately this is the actual right answer. Strong regulation is great, but it won't actually curb abuse enough.
Nobody ever wanted this except people with unreasonable pearl-clutching arguments about safety. We've had these devices for years now, and we haven't seen studies showing massive safety improvements in communities that are blanketed in these cameras. We've reached a point where cars are drenched in tracking devices -- I left two separate AirTags in my car, and the car itself also came with online tracking from the manufacturer -- and car theft still happens. Desperate people will commit car thefts whether there are cameras tracking them or not.
These are -- and always have been -- the "cop's ex-girlfriend tracking machine".
"But now the ALPR has to check the plate against a list of plates that it's been told to scan for and then delete non-hits!" That's great, but if a cop can add plates to the list, then they'll just add the plate for the woman they're stalking to the list and then wait 24 hours to see where she goes. The "non-hit rule" is like telling cops to wear body cams in the hope that they'll stop committing police brutality. Feels nice, but they just keep doing it anyway. Just tear these things down.
"Our brief details the vast, interconnected network of ALPRs that constantly track drivers around the country and argues that this tracking is a “search” under the meaning of the Fourth Amendment."
Totally agree with the EFF here, many thanks to them defending the Constitution, hope they win.
This is a great step but it needs to go even farther. The ALPR tools should only be able to store hits on license plates that are under an active warrant.
I feel like it’d be an uphill battle to say you can’t use it to find e.g a car in an Amber Alert, or actively escaping. But I don’t know, do they already get warrants for that kind of thing?
It's a shame cops can't be trusted to not abuse it if given access not through the courts. Every single time a tool like this is given to them without massive fetters it's abused so they don't get to have the toy.
There's a ton of things that would make policing easier but we don't do them because they destroy other valuable parts of society. It'd be much easier to solve crimes if everyone had to wear networked body cameras and GPS trackers at all times but we don't do that because it destroys far more important things.
I like it. But it's going to rule out some very useful searches. (Where was that car in the 48 hours before the crime was committed, and in the 24 hours from the crime to the warrant?) So there is going to be great pressure against this idea.
That kind of thinking is exactly where the "slippery slope" concept comes from. It's all Very Useful, so just keep it all forever!
Before this technology existed, we didn't have this level of information retention. How did enforcement happen? Slowly (as it should), methodically (as it should.)
I don't think AnimalMuppet is suggesting that there will be pressure from outlawing searches that are Very Useful for enforcement. I think the suggestion is that the pressure will come from outlawing searches that are Very Useful for rescue.
If this data is meant for training algorithms, then they need negative (non-suspicious) examples just as much, if not more, than they need positive (suspicious) examples.
However, if they do anyway, there should be strong victims' rights protections so that the data is actually used during investigations.
There was a string of burglaries in our area a few years ago, and panopticon N-1 (Google Map's auto recording of all phone GPS traces for marketing information) could have found the perpetrators pretty much instantly.
They hit rural outbuildings in the middle of the night on camera, so timestamps were precise, but faces were obscured. A reverse geofence warrant keyed on time of arrival / departure would have narrowed it down to just the crooks with extremely high probability, and other details in the videos would have corroborated the GPS traces.
None of the victims were politically connected, so the police couldn't (by policy) run the reverse GPS lookups. This is the worst of both worlds: Our data is recorded to be used against us later, but if ever it would be useful, we do not have access to it. The same is true for vehicle black boxes / cameras. They record a few seconds before airbag deploy, but you usually are not allowed to access them as part of an insurance dispute (even the ones from your own car).
* Illegal to collect every plate for later analysis
* Illegal to collect anything except for license plates (no drivers, pedestrians, etc.)
* Must delete "non hit" plate images within 3 minutes
* Strict forbidden to upload "non hit" camera imagery off the device
I would add that it should also require a warrant to access the ALPR data, but it's a great start.
https://gc.nh.gov/rsa/html/XXI/261/261-75-b.htm
The cameras are an attractive nuisance for people in power, including any and all law enforcement types. It only takes a few bad apples to spoil that entire ocean.
The real threat is the cameras’ very existence, and that is what has to be eliminated. If a thing doesn’t exist, then it can’t be abused.
That’s an important thing to keep in mind, when you are required to keep in mind the lessons of 1930s Germany. Or the Stasi from East Germany.
When you figure out how to guarantee that you can never, ever again have a 1930s Germany situation pop up, and a government that just casually throws out all the old laws, then we can talk about whether those kinds of cameras might make sense again.
What you're suggesting would mean that they wouldn't even have to throw out the laws. They could just install the new cameras themselves. So there's no difference.
It requires a reasonably balanced and trustworthy government no matter what.
That's the underlying rights violation-- and it's why solutions that otherwise try to restrict ALPR run into oddities about limiting people's ability to observe what is plainly visible in public.
Failing that avenue, we should treat most broad involuntary data collection efforts as a form of stalking/harassment, and treat it accordingly-- including providing a strong civil path for anyone whose data was collected without their knoweldge especially given that law enforcement / prosecutors have a material conflict of interest which will prevent them from enforcing the law.
This is not true, and I dont know why everyone believes that. Real-life policing looks nothing like Law and Order. Moreover, post-George Floyd, police have basically had a work stoppage. Real prosecution requires high agency work by the police and they aren't legally required to do that [1], so they don't, and no amount of voting and police union busting is going to help here. You can't require someone to be "stellar" at their jobs.
Having had real egregious crimes happen around me has exposed me to just how much crime you can simply get away with...all the time.
Flock has basically turned a high-agency job that police stopped doing, into a db lookup, that in some circumstances they can be forced into doing.
I agree with EFF, record it all and put it all behind a real warrant and a civilian judge with a high bar for approval.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia
But for tracking petty crimes and with the abuse of the system with things like officers monitoring their exes, as one example, makes the system far too dangerous for a free society. And because of that if they are going to ever get the public on board with flock then we are going to need to establish certain rights and guarantees.
For me that would be things like warrants with the exceptions in only the most extreme cases like a kidnapping or a murder that literally just happened and immediate response was critical. Next I would want a reasonable time data was stored then deleted. That is not 2 years that is like maybe a couple weeks or perhaps a little longer. Having the history of when and where everyone goes is a huge privacy risk and should not be stored forever as it is a target. Next I would want rules that it is only used for certain investigations and crimes. Yes to violent crimes and sexual crimes and crimes against children and obvious things all of society can easily say yes those things are bad. But for most other crimes it should be constitutionally forbidden. Think of how laws and public beliefs change over time. Imagine this years back when being gay was a crime. Or tracking people who go to an abortion clinic.
I could go on for a lot longer about how this type of system is dangerous in so many ways if not governed by very well thought out rules and rights given to the public. It is sad that the operators of these systems don't want to meet in the middle to something that most of the public could get on board with but they obviously know that total surveillance is very valuable data to have on people.
Making things illegal does not stop abuse. The cameras should not even be in our communities. There was 0 discussion nor any vote. These things got installed without consent and you want to argue that just placing guardrails that don't even get enforced is going to fix this?
Nobody ever wanted this except people with unreasonable pearl-clutching arguments about safety. We've had these devices for years now, and we haven't seen studies showing massive safety improvements in communities that are blanketed in these cameras. We've reached a point where cars are drenched in tracking devices -- I left two separate AirTags in my car, and the car itself also came with online tracking from the manufacturer -- and car theft still happens. Desperate people will commit car thefts whether there are cameras tracking them or not.
These are -- and always have been -- the "cop's ex-girlfriend tracking machine".
"But now the ALPR has to check the plate against a list of plates that it's been told to scan for and then delete non-hits!" That's great, but if a cop can add plates to the list, then they'll just add the plate for the woman they're stalking to the list and then wait 24 hours to see where she goes. The "non-hit rule" is like telling cops to wear body cams in the hope that they'll stop committing police brutality. Feels nice, but they just keep doing it anyway. Just tear these things down.
These people will be the first to argue against the removal of the cameras, citing that the crime would be much worse without them.
Totally agree with the EFF here, many thanks to them defending the Constitution, hope they win.
There's a ton of things that would make policing easier but we don't do them because they destroy other valuable parts of society. It'd be much easier to solve crimes if everyone had to wear networked body cameras and GPS trackers at all times but we don't do that because it destroys far more important things.
Before this technology existed, we didn't have this level of information retention. How did enforcement happen? Slowly (as it should), methodically (as it should.)
> Enter warrant ID:
>> We have to rescue a child from a kidnapper! Enter 'amber alert' as the warrant ID to bypass the warrant check!
Suddenly, many more searches (that fail to find a given child) are happening.