No, the fact that it's recording people in public does make it escape scrutiny moving forward. In public you can be filmed by anyone - be they government or private citizens.

I find a lot of people fail to realize this, both in regards to surveillance and otherwise. Recently in my city there was a big uproar about a nudist beach that was at risk of having nudity prohibited. So a bunch of nudists went out and paraded around the beach while disrobed, some of them bringing their children with them. People sailed by and photographed many of the nudists, and put their images online. Many alleged that must be a violation of some privacy law, but no, the law in Washington (and most, perhaps all, of the US) is quite clear: if you're in public, you can be filmed and photographed. If you don't want to be filmed nude, don't go walking around naked in public.

Regardless, back to the topic at hand, the fact that Flock cameras a in public spaces does in fact mean that there's no requirement to get a warrant to use them.

If the city hires enough police officers, yes. It'd almost certainly require an unfathomably large budget, but it's not impossible.

The point is, the plain view doctrine means the police don't need a warrant to record observation that are in plain view. The licence plates of cars on the street are in plain view.

I really don't understand how people got this idea in their head that their license plates are private information . How do red light cameras identify cars? How does parking enforcement work? By recording people's license plates. The whole reason why we mandate that cars display license plates to is to facilitate identifying vehicles.

I believe they would all argue that they haven't. They would argue that the current administration is operating within the law towards ends supported, repeatedly, by their constituents.

I disagree with them, but that isn't relevant.

> Cell towers are monitoring a public broadcast from a beacon you voluntarily carry on your person.

It's an encrypted broadcast, not a public broadcast. This is why the police needed to ask the mobile service providers for this data. It is not public.

> For some reason querying that dataset requires a warrant but querying a broadly analogous dataset from the operator of a network of cameras doesn't?

The data is not broadly analogous. One is encrypted radio traffic. The other is unencrypted, and you can record it yourself with a pen, paper, and the Mk I eyeball. This is why the "plain view" doctrine applies.

Again, the courts have already ruled on the use of ALPRs. The defense tried to use US vs Carpenter in US vs Yang, and the courts did not accept that argument that ALPRs are analogous to cell phone location data.

This whole thread represents the imaginary of the internet and it makes me sick. I have to get off the internet. I've spent too much time with it lately.