Like it or not, the other team get to play lawyer too. Flock's argument is almost certainly along the lines of "If we had police officers stationed at all these intersections writing down license plate numbers, no one would bat an eye at it. Why is a camera any different?"

We know why it's different of course: scale. But there was never a general principle about scale and automation articulated in the Constitution because it just wasn't a thing to worry about in the 1700s.

We're left to hope that courts agree that just because something is okay for one police officer in one place to do, that doesn't mean the police department can perform that same task a thousand times in a thousand places with a thousand machines and still have it be okay.

>We know why it's different of course: scale. But there was never a general principle about scale and automation articulated in the Constitution because it just wasn't a thing to worry about in the 1700s.

If we're doing the whole "the other team get to play lawyer too" thing, your logic can become dangerous when applied to other issues. For example, almost no one had the ability to protect their communication and personal files from warrants when the laws regarding that sort of thing were written and computers have now made that trivial. Would people here treat that as a valid argument against end-to-end encryption?

> "If we had police officers stationed at all these intersections writing down license plate numbers, no one would bat an eye at it."

This is literally the definition of a police dragnet.

> But there was never a general principle about scale and automation articulated in the Constitution because it just wasn't a thing to worry about in the 1700s.

> We're left to hope that courts agree that just because something is okay for one police officer in one place to do, that doesn't mean the police department can perform that same task a thousand times in a thousand places with a thousand machines and still have it be okay.

There are multiple court cases that have done this exactly this. Carpenter v. United States and Chatrie v. United States are the ones you want.

I'm reminded of Jeff Dean's maxim "Plan for 10x growth, but somewhere along the line to 100x, you are going to need an entirely different architecture, because the bottlenecks shift."

We've had certain areas of technology get 5-6 orders of magnitude more efficient, which shifts the bottlenecks and introduces new possible abuses. Government hasn't caught up. The last time this happened (with the industrial revolution), we had 3 major waves of wars between 1861-1945 that finally refactored the governments of the world into a working state. I'm hoping this time around can be less bloody, but I don't have very high hopes.

We used to call second hand information "circumstantial", and it couldn't be used against you. If the officer sitting in court didn't personally see it, then it didn't happen.

Or did Law and Order lie to us?

>We know why it's different of course: scale

I think it's more about abstraction. If someone is standing on the street corner taking down your plate number, you know they're likely up to no good. If there's a camera on the street corner, it may bother me, but the vast majority of people just go "eh".

In the several years it will take to resolve, the one side will get to do what they want and the other will not.

Flock has no power vs the commerce clause. Congress just has to use it.

I would definitely bat an eye at cops acting like human flock cameras. That sounds like an incredible waste of resources.

There was a case exactly like this, and the ruling was literally "just because you could post officers next to the suspects house 24/7 and record their comings and going, doesn't mean that using illegal survailence to record their movement is the same". It has been tried in court and lost.

laws are a tacit agreement between the people and government that is all.