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DoneWithAllThat 8 hours ago

No. It is not and to claim otherwise is hyperbole. The key difference is police stopping and/or questioning people en masse without reasonable suspicion is in fact illegal unless under extreme circumstances. Simply noting everyone’s license plate is wholly legal, and more importantly for this conversation, is drastically less intrusive and qualitatively different from a so-called dragnet. You don’t get to just conflate the two scenarios to better fit your personal preferences of what is or is not legal.

jordanb 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Dragnets have been constrained on both fourth and fifth amendment grounds. It's not merely the inconvenience of being stopped and questioned that makes a dragnet illegal, it is also an illegal search.

Manuel_D 7 hours ago | parent [-]

But Flock isn't searching anybody. You keep calling it a dragnet, or an illegal search, but the courts have repeatedly held that recording images in public needs no warrant or probable case.

text0404 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Law enforcement is using a third party (Flock) to get around constitutional requirements.

A camera pointed at a public street isn't the same constitutional question as LE searching a persistent database to reconstruct someone's movements. The latter falls into fourth amendment search territory.

Manuel_D 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Jesus, how many times are you just going to parrot the same replies over and over? No, the putting public facing camera video into a database does not make it a search. The case you cited, Chatrie vs. United States, involved the government demanding that Google hand over private cellphone location data on everyone inside of a geofence boundary. The court decided that forcing Google to hand over geolocation data was akin to forcing Google to hand over email contents, which requires a warrant. You're trying to turn around and interpret this to saying that the plain view doctrine doesn't apply to ALPRs, which record public spaces.

This isn't the case of law enforcement using a third party to get around constitutional requirements. The government could set up their own cameras doing exactly what Flock does, and it would still not violate anyone's constitutional requirements. Because people don't have a right to not be recorded in public, no matter how much you want that to be the case.

text0404 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> Jesus, how many times are you just going to parrot the same replies over and over

The same amount that you do, dude. You're in every single one of these threads, and despite being proven wrong over and over again you keep being "confused" about how people are against this technology. Even in this thread, you keep responding with the same points based on your equivocation of an individual taking a picture in public and a state law enforcement organization aggregating and tracking individuals who haven't committed crimes.

Try reading some SC cases and actually paying attention to the responses you're getting.

Manuel_D 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I had already addressed your same points an hours earlier:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49629159

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49629142

And yet you still start yet another thread insisting that a database makes public facing video cameras a privacy violation.

When have I been "proven wrong over and over again"? The court cases you've cited are all about governments demanding private cell phone location information. You're trying to take decisions that amount to, "the police need a warrant to demand private cellphone location data from telecoms" and make the enormous leap to your imaginary decision, "the police cannot record people in public and search those recordings".

text0404 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Just because the specific ALPR technology was not being litigated doesn't mean that the law doesn't apply to similar technologies. At issue here is the government being able to monitor and track people in public, not that photographs are ok because individuals can take them at will.

> A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere. To the contrary, “what [one] seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.” Katz, 389 U. S., at 351–352. A majority of this Court has already recognized that individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their physical movements. Jones, 565 U. S., at 430 (Alito, J., concurring in judgment); id., at 415 (Sotomayor, J., concurring). Prior to the digital age, law enforcement might have pursued a suspect for a brief stretch, but doing so “for any extended period of time was difficult and costly and therefore rarely undertaken.” Id., at 429 (opinion of Alito, J.). For that reason, “society’s expectation has been that law enforcement agents and others would not—and indeed, in the main, simply could not—secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period.” Id., at 430.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/16-402

Edit for your edit: you haven't refuted anything man, you keep trotting out the same arguments in those linked threads:

- The data includes "private movements" which is why it's unconstitutional (the SC said aggregation of public data can impel privacy concerns)

- An individual or LE can take a photograph of you or your house, therefore collecting photographs from geolocated cameras and tracking you over time is not constitutionally distinct (but it is)

- The specific technology at the center of these cases are not ALPRs, therefore the rulings have no bearing on Flock (despite the fact that courts are not litigating the specific technology, but rather the constitutional principles of their use)

Manuel_D 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The data includes "private movements" which is why it's unconstitutional (the SC said aggregation of public data can impel privacy concerns)

But does it? You keep insisting this is the case, but your attempts to back up this claim are cases with totally different scenarios. Namely demanding that telecoms hand over location information.

> - An individual or LE can take a photograph of you or your house, therefore collecting photographs from geolocated cameras and tracking you over time is not constitutionally distinct (but it is)

The point is to emphasize that the information collected by Flock is in plain view. The plain view doctrine is well established. The police don't need a warrant to observe publicly visible things.

> The specific technology at the center of these cases are not ALPRs, therefore the rulings have no bearing on Flock (despite the fact that courts are not litigating the specific technology, but rather the constitutional principles of their use)

The cases you've cited all involved private information being obtained without a warrant. You can't just ignore the fact that a GPS tracker or cell phone location information also reveals private movements, as opposed to public facing camera which only record public activity.

Manuel_D 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Again, you keep citing decisions without bothering to understand the context behind the. For instance,

"To the contrary, “what [one] seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.” Katz, 389 U. S., at 351–352. A majority of this Court has already recognized that individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their physical movements. Jones, 565 U. S., at 430 (Alito, J., concurring in judgment);"

This is about the police planting a GPS tracker on someone's car - that's that "Jones" is referring to here. That case involved the police tracking someone in public and in private.

text0404 4 hours ago | parent [-]

You're confusing the technology used in Jones with the principle Carpenter cited it for: a person can have a 4A privacy interest in the whole of their physical movements, including movements in public.

Manuel_D 4 hours ago | parent [-]

And for the second time, you're trying to dodge the distinguishing factor between Jones and Flock. The former tracked movements in public and in private. The latter, only in public. That, and the Jones case involved the police accessing someone's vehicle without a warrant.

You seem to be under the impression that the opinion of the court in the Jones was that everyone's public movements are private and the police need a warrant to track your public movements through and any all means. But that was not the decision of the court. The police and still just follow you, Jones notwithstanding.

You can desire your public movements to be protected by the Fourth amendment all you want, but that does not make it so.

text0404 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm not claiming Jones held that cops need a warrant to visually follow someone on a public street. The point you're avoiding is that Carpenter expressly cited Jones for the proposition that people have a fourth amendment interest in the "whole of" their physical movements, and distinguished ordinary observation from technologically enabled, comprehensive tracking. Just because the camera is in public doesn't make it permissible.

And maybe it wasn't the decision in Jones, but Carpenter specifically cites Alito's concurrence for the proposition that a person has a 4A privacy interest in aggregation of movement data and describes GPS tracking in Jones as raising those privacy concerns.

Manuel_D 12 minutes ago | parent [-]

As I've repeatedly explained, the Carpenter decision was narrowly scoped to cell phone location data. The decision did not do anything to restrict other forms of monitoring. The idea that Carpenter restricts governments' ability to video record public spaces is entirely your own invention.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49632990

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49630733