You don't need a warrant to record people in public. You keep throwing around the term "surveil" as though this is a singular activity. Do the police need a warrant to search your house or car? Yes. Do they need a warrant to get Google to hand over your Gmail contents? Yes?

Do they need a warrant to photograph the exterior of your house? No. Do they need a warrant to photograph you in public? No

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text0404 5 hours ago | parent [-]

You keep missing that these aren't singular photographs. This isn't the 70s: these are persistent systems that aggregate video and photographs of everyone, tracking their movements over time. That is enough to make this constitutionally distinct from a cop taking a single picture of your house.

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Manuel_D 5 hours ago | parent [-]

And? These are still videos of people in public. This information is in plain view. You keep insisting that if you aggregate public information it somehow becomes private information, but that's not true unless the Supreme Court makes some new precedence-setting decision.

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text0404 5 hours ago | parent [-]

That precedence-setting decision would be Carpenter v US [1], which established that being in public does not automatically eliminate all fourth amendment protection, and the comprehensive nature of government surveillance can matter constitutionally.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_v._United_States

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Manuel_D 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Carpenter v. United States was about the government accessing telecommunications data. This is not public information, location data also tracks people's movements on private property. Just like the other case you cited, Chatrie v. United States, this is a situation wholly removed from public facing video cameras.

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text0404 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Carpenter was not about who owned the data or the technology being used but rather the government reconstructing a person's movements over time, including movements occurring in public.

The fact that the data is owned by a private company or that some of it is considered private by the individual doesn't matter: it's about tracking individuals over time.

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Manuel_D 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> Carpenter was not about who owned the data or the technology being used but rather the government reconstructing a person's movements over time, including movements occurring in public.

...and including movements occurring in private.

> The fact that the data is owned by a private company or that some of it is considered private by the individual doesn't matter: it's about tracking individuals over time.

More importantly, tracking their private movements over time, not just their public movements. You're hand waving away an important part of the case. And the decision does not extend to ALPR readers, from what I can tell.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_v._United_States

> The Supreme Court's ruling in Carpenter was narrow and did not otherwise change the third-party doctrine related to other business records that might incidentally reveal location information, nor did it overrule prior decisions concerning conventional surveillance techniques and tools such as security cameras.

Trying to interpret Carter v. US as prohibiting public security cameras is a very big leap

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text0404 3 hours ago | parent [-]

As I quoted before:

> 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.”

This would still be an issue even if they weren't recorded in private spaces. At issue here is the reconstruction of data, regardless of if it happened in public or private spaces.

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Manuel_D 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Picking out one quote doesn't change the fact that the ruling in Carpenter was narrow, limited to cell phone location information. You're just wrong about the scope of Carpenter, and unwilling to accept that fact.

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text0404 2 hours ago | parent [-]

You're focused on the narrowness of the final ruling and not the vast legal reasoning that led to it.

Carpenter's reasoning concerning comprehensive records of an individual's movements (regardless of private or public) are relevant when LE uses aggregated Flock data to reconstruct a person's movements over an extended period.

	▲	Manuel_D 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Except the narrowness of the final ruling is exactly what makes it not impact the legality of Flock. It doesn't matter whether you think the courts decision should be extended to cameras - your opinion doesn't decide the law, the court's opinion does.

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5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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