AIs make short work of proprietary code as well. Reverse engineering has become trivial. Not releasing any code whatsoever is the only possible defense now. I've made my peace with that.

What worries me is the fact AIs render licenses irrelevant. What's the point of starting an AGPLv3 project when AIs can just study it and make a proprietary equivalent? The free software movement no longer has any leverage.

I also don't feel any sense of accomplishment anymore. Software is so trivial now. Even if I make some unique thing, others can just have an AI copy it. Nothing is special anymore. Feels like there's no point.

People in the 1700s would not expect all of their movements to be tracked and watched at all times. They would definitely take issue with this. The issue of their time was general warrants/writs of assistance which let the British search anyone anywhere at any time and take their property. [1]

The key issue there was the scope of the British power, not the fact that searches and seizures could happen at all. We wanted warrants that were reasonable and limited.

The issue is not a single security camera from a private bank. The issue is not a single cop in a car investigating someone. The issue is a national and searchable network of cameras where agents of the government can track anyone at any time for no reason at all.

The judge says the police need probable cause and a warrant for a search against an individual.

> Freedom from persistent, dragnet-style surveillance while in public is not a foreign concept in our society, and it is a reasonable expectation that society already accepts. This is the same expectation of privacy that the Supreme Court has continued to recognize in cases like Carpenter and Chatrie. Cell phones also move in public places where people can see you in plain view. But it becomes constitutionally problematic when law enforcement can indiscriminately and passively catalog your whereabouts over an extended period of time and then use that information for any purpose whenever convenient. [2]

[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt4-2/ALDE_...

[2] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.oknd.76...

There's also: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

In the 1700s it was pretty easy to move into a private place and ensure nobody else was listening though too. We didn't have guard posts on every other corner writing down descriptions of every carriage and wagon that passes by.

Do you think the people in the 1700s would have approved of having police follow everyone around at all times in public spaces, taking notes? I think it’s easy to imagine how they would feel in principle, even if they couldn’t imagine the specific technology.

You need a warrant to tap somebody's phone.

Ben Franklin intercepted and published private mail in his newspaper

Watching people isn't the problem, it's the state requirement to be identifiable-- e.g. display plates (or, in some cases to not wear a mask in public) which is the constitutional issue. The privacy issue is downstream from that.

Frankly, the TSAs security theater should not be taken as an example of reasonable gov behaviour.

Too busy day trading and vacationing to avoid uncomfortable votes.

There may be a solid legal argument that since Flock is operating hand in glove with the government that they effectively are the government within the context of 4A. IMHO, it's not out of the realm of possibility that courts reexamine the government's ability to buy up private data which they would normally be precluded from collecting, and establish limits on their ability to do so.

Is there a whole thing in the U.S. where it’s a no no with regards to cell data without a warrant? This feels like that.

(bear with me, this all comes from random podcasting over the past decade)

When a "private company" is using public land and public money to set up their surveillance devices, it is no longer private.

Aren't politicians pretty routinely followed by people with cameras doing analysis on all their movements?

Sure, if you strapped a camera to a light post without permission, I'd expect it to be taken down. The same way I can put a Ring camera on my door but I can't strap one to the traffic sign on my street.

Sure, and if the same level of effort were required to get the same amount of information, this probably wouldn’t even be up for discussion. But now we have technology to basically stake out every single citizen at any time with just a few mouse clicks. We can’t just pretend those things are equal.

> Thus a man's home is, for most purposes, a place where he expects privacy, but objects, activities, or statements that he exposes to the "plain view" of outsiders are not "protected" because no intention to keep them to himself has been exhibited.

And you think this applies to the inside of the woman's car that the article is talking about?

> In turn I don't think I've greatly oversimplified anything.

In this reply, no, you're not greatly oversimplifying. In your parent comment, you said that going out in public means no expectation of privacy, and I gave an example of a place in public that had an expectation of privacy, which you've defined as "not in public". I think that if you have to call a place that's available to anyone and not owned by an individual "not public" in order to make your original statement work, then your original statement was oversimplifying.

> For this case the guy was inside a phone booth rather than out in the open.

Is warrantless wiretapping of open-air payphones legal? Based on the TV show the wire, it's not.