I don't think they should be keeping data that's not involved in an active warrant.
However, if they do anyway, there should be strong victims' rights protections so that the data is actually used during investigations.
There was a string of burglaries in our area a few years ago, and panopticon N-1 (Google Map's auto recording of all phone GPS traces for marketing information) could have found the perpetrators pretty much instantly.
They hit rural outbuildings in the middle of the night on camera, so timestamps were precise, but faces were obscured. A reverse geofence warrant keyed on time of arrival / departure would have narrowed it down to just the crooks with extremely high probability, and other details in the videos would have corroborated the GPS traces.
None of the victims were politically connected, so the police couldn't (by policy) run the reverse GPS lookups. This is the worst of both worlds: Our data is recorded to be used against us later, but if ever it would be useful, we do not have access to it. The same is true for vehicle black boxes / cameras. They record a few seconds before airbag deploy, but you usually are not allowed to access them as part of an insurance dispute (even the ones from your own car).
They should face criminal penalties for violating people’s rights
> the data is actually used during investigations.
Absolutely no! All that data collected without due process (judicial warrant, paper trail, whatever is the norm in your neck of the woods) has to be treated as tainted.
He's just numbering the various large surveillance networks (panopticons) sequentially with the variable N being the newest/most current one. N = Flock (~2025), N-1 = Maps' GPS data collection (~2015), maybe N-2 is cell phone triangulation via tower signal strength (~2005).
Don’t even need to make that law, just make them ‘public records’, and when people start following the police chief, mayor, etc, those policies will change very, very quickly.
This doesn't seem solved. You are getting rid of historical queries and the ability to search by cars and drivers. Swapping plates should not be a viable strategy in the year 2026.
The biggest argument against limits on storing "non-hit" data that the pro-Flock crowd is going to use is that "we need the historical data to find evidence of the whereabouts of criminal suspects".
Counter point police have been able to prosecute crime without being able to defacto track every single person in the US via car and the corrosive effect of having that ability outweighs the gains. Plus on top of all of that they've proven time and time again they can't be trusted to contain themselves or their collegues from rampant abuse to stalk exes, celebrities, etc. just because they can.
>>"Counter point police have been able to prosecute crime without being able to defacto track every single person in the US"
This is not true, and I dont know why everyone believes that. Real-life policing looks nothing like Law and Order. Moreover, post-George Floyd, police have basically had a work stoppage. Real prosecution requires high agency work by the police and they aren't legally required to do that [1], so they don't, and no amount of voting and police union busting is going to help here. You can't require someone to be "stellar" at their jobs.
Having had real egregious crimes happen around me has exposed me to just how much crime you can simply get away with...all the time. The rich get private security and investigators, us plebes get "Sorry no one saw the shooting happen, so we can't do anything now please leave"
Flock has basically turned a high-agency job that police stopped doing, into a db lookup, that in some circumstances they can be forced into doing.
I agree with EFF, record it all and put it all behind a real warrant and a civilian judge with a high bar for approval.
P.S: Before you quote Benjamin Franklin at me, no I don't want a 100% hit rate, I just want a decent shot at crimes being solved by average police work and just even the slightest hint of deterrence.
But if you want to find a suspect, shouldn’t you only care about where they are NOW? Not where they were 6 hours ago? How does historical data help apprehend a suspect NOW?
And I personally think that in some cases that would actually be a net positive for society. Like a kid disappears or a body is found murdered or a serious crime occurs. Being able to look at who was coming and going to solve serious crimes is probably a good thing.
But for tracking petty crimes and with the abuse of the system with things like officers monitoring their exes, as one example, makes the system far too dangerous for a free society. And because of that if they are going to ever get the public on board with flock then we are going to need to establish certain rights and guarantees.
For me that would be things like warrants with the exceptions in only the most extreme cases like a kidnapping or a murder that literally just happened and immediate response was critical.
Next I would want a reasonable time data was stored then deleted. That is not 2 years that is like maybe a couple weeks or perhaps a little longer. Having the history of when and where everyone goes is a huge privacy risk and should not be stored forever as it is a target.
Next I would want rules that it is only used for certain investigations and crimes. Yes to violent crimes and sexual crimes and crimes against children and obvious things all of society can easily say yes those things are bad. But for most other crimes it should be constitutionally forbidden. Think of how laws and public beliefs change over time. Imagine this years back when being gay was a crime. Or tracking people who go to an abortion clinic.
I could go on for a lot longer about how this type of system is dangerous in so many ways if not governed by very well thought out rules and rights given to the public. It is sad that the operators of these systems don't want to meet in the middle to something that most of the public could get on board with but they obviously know that total surveillance is very valuable data to have on people.
Yep that solves everything. Pack your bags guys. War's over on ALPR's [sarcasm]
Making things illegal does not stop abuse. The cameras should not even be in our communities. There was 0 discussion nor any vote. These things got installed without consent and you want to argue that just placing guardrails that don't even get enforced is going to fix this?
Ultimately this is the actual right answer. Strong regulation is great, but it won't actually curb abuse enough.
Nobody ever wanted this except people with unreasonable pearl-clutching arguments about safety. We've had these devices for years now, and we haven't seen studies showing massive safety improvements in communities that are blanketed in these cameras. We've reached a point where cars are drenched in tracking devices -- I left two separate AirTags in my car, and the car itself also came with online tracking from the manufacturer -- and car theft still happens. Desperate people will commit car thefts whether there are cameras tracking them or not.
These are -- and always have been -- the "cop's ex-girlfriend tracking machine".
"But now the ALPR has to check the plate against a list of plates that it's been told to scan for and then delete non-hits!" That's great, but if a cop can add plates to the list, then they'll just add the plate for the woman they're stalking to the list and then wait 24 hours to see where she goes. The "non-hit rule" is like telling cops to wear body cams in the hope that they'll stop committing police brutality. Feels nice, but they just keep doing it anyway. Just tear these things down.
If they didn’t listen to us about installing them, why should we listen about uninstalling them? They don’t have hard data because crime was not magically solved in the last two years. Crime remains at all time historical lows.
The original sin is requiring cars to display an identifying plate. Imagine asking the framers about a similar ID display on horseback mounted travelers.
That's the underlying rights violation-- and it's why solutions that otherwise try to restrict ALPR run into oddities about limiting people's ability to observe what is plainly visible in public.
Failing that avenue, we should treat most broad involuntary data collection efforts as a form of stalking/harassment, and treat it accordingly-- including providing a strong civil path for anyone whose data was collected without their knoweldge especially given that law enforcement / prosecutors have a material conflict of interest which will prevent them from enforcing the law.
I agree with the idea that license plates are the biggest part of the problem and that they've had a huge kind of scope creep in terms of what they're used for.
Whenever I've thought about this problem, the challenge with a more high-tech and privacy-friendly alternative is the intuition that it's good if witnesses to a crime or accident can memorize or write down the plate of an involved vehicle in order to make that specific vehicle identifiable. If the vehicles were providing only a cryptographic identity that wasn't memorable or that required special equipment to query, we would lose the "the robbers got away in a car with this plate" or "the pedestrian was run over by a car with this plate" scenario, which feels like a surprising cost somehow.
If it weren't for that, it might be feasible to use some more modern cryptographic approach to ensure that cars are licensed or insured without also making it easy in general to track them or people's activities or whereabouts. But allowing the public to quickly see any car's identity with their eyes and memorize it with their minds is quite a harsh constraint.
>Imagine asking the framers about a similar ID display on horseback mounted travelers.
It existed for ships and the law passed while George Washington was still president. Ships had to be registered and it was required for the ship's name to be legibly written on the stern.
This assumes that you don’t get a new administration that decides to throw out all the laws that came before and uses this juicy panopticon camera system in whatever way they want, to do whatever they want.
The cameras are an attractive nuisance for people in power, including any and all law enforcement types. It only takes a few bad apples to spoil that entire ocean.
The real threat is the cameras’ very existence, and that is what has to be eliminated. If a thing doesn’t exist, then it can’t be abused.
That’s an important thing to keep in mind, when you are required to keep in mind the lessons of 1930s Germany. Or the Stasi from East Germany.
When you figure out how to guarantee that you can never, ever again have a 1930s Germany situation pop up, and a government that just casually throws out all the old laws, then we can talk about whether those kinds of cameras might make sense again.
> assumes that you don’t get a new administration that decides to throw out all the laws that came before and uses this juicy panopticon camera system in whatever way they want, to do whatever they want.
What you're suggesting would mean that they wouldn't even have to throw out the laws. They could just install the new cameras themselves. So there's no difference.
It requires a reasonably balanced and trustworthy government no matter what.
If we take a concept like "a new administration can just change it" and put that on the slippery slope, then: We find that we're best off by doing nothing, ever, because it's just waste of time. Head in sand, dick in hand.
"Our brief details the vast, interconnected network of ALPRs that constantly track drivers around the country and argues that this tracking is a “search” under the meaning of the Fourth Amendment."
Totally agree with the EFF here, many thanks to them defending the Constitution, hope they win.
This is a great step but it needs to go even farther. The ALPR tools should only be able to store hits on license plates that are under an active warrant.
I feel like it’d be an uphill battle to say you can’t use it to find e.g a car in an Amber Alert, or actively escaping. But I don’t know, do they already get warrants for that kind of thing?
It's a shame cops can't be trusted to not abuse it if given access not through the courts. Every single time a tool like this is given to them without massive fetters it's abused so they don't get to have the toy.
There's a ton of things that would make policing easier but we don't do them because they destroy other valuable parts of society. It'd be much easier to solve crimes if everyone had to wear networked body cameras and GPS trackers at all times but we don't do that because it destroys far more important things.
I like it. But it's going to rule out some very useful searches. (Where was that car in the 48 hours before the crime was committed, and in the 24 hours from the crime to the warrant?) So there is going to be great pressure against this idea.
That kind of thinking is exactly where the "slippery slope" concept comes from. It's all Very Useful, so just keep it all forever!
Before this technology existed, we didn't have this level of information retention. How did enforcement happen? Slowly (as it should), methodically (as it should.)
I don't think AnimalMuppet is suggesting that there will be pressure from outlawing searches that are Very Useful for enforcement. I think the suggestion is that the pressure will come from outlawing searches that are Very Useful for rescue.
The core point that everyone needs to understand here is that ALPR is only a thing because technology sucked until now. Reading a license plate, something designed to be identified easily, took off when the tech got reasonably good enough. But facial recognition and general object recognition is getting to that point now too. If we don't stop ALPR, now, we will have constant track databases on people (if we don't already) in the future because the argument is essentially the same with only technology holding it back. This isn't a slippery slope. Fight this now.
I don't think we should have them at all. If the data is collected, then it can be abused.
So with warrants we're essentially saying, "the government can track everyone's location and we're okay with that but they can't legally look at it without a warrant". Good luck seeing consequences for breaking that when we can't even get consequences for shooting people.
Still better than no warrants, it would be great to get warrants requirement. But we should not live in such a surveilled society.
It's still mass surveillance. Even if it requires a warrant.
Surveillance should work like this: You suspect some of a crime? Then you surveil them and investigate them. you need more powerful tools, then you need to get a warrant from a judge to surveil them more.
We shouldn't be investigating and surveilling people that aren't suspected of crimes. Mass surveillance treats everyone like criminals.
If this data is meant for training algorithms, then they need negative (non-suspicious) examples just as much, if not more, than they need positive (suspicious) examples.
No. Any surveillance is going to have a chilling effect on the community. Why hang out at the local park with this monstrosity out of 1984 is watching you? Why not go literally anywhere else?
Which armed robbers were caught with this technology that were uncatchable before now? Seriously. Ruining all of privacy for everyone does not fix this. This is the same old “if you have nothing to hide” again and again and again and it’s been categorically wrong for hundreds of years. Nothing has changed. Expect the means.
Living in a country (Australia) where ALPRs have been legal and standard for decades I can assure you that people still hang out in local parks. This technology specifically has not led to 1984.
I am OK with the surveillance if police get a warrant signed by a judge. That keeps people honest and accountable, requires them to enumerate suspicion of a crime.
I am not OK with giving everyone who works for the government complete knowledge of my associations and wherabouts at all times.
However, if they do anyway, there should be strong victims' rights protections so that the data is actually used during investigations.
There was a string of burglaries in our area a few years ago, and panopticon N-1 (Google Map's auto recording of all phone GPS traces for marketing information) could have found the perpetrators pretty much instantly.
They hit rural outbuildings in the middle of the night on camera, so timestamps were precise, but faces were obscured. A reverse geofence warrant keyed on time of arrival / departure would have narrowed it down to just the crooks with extremely high probability, and other details in the videos would have corroborated the GPS traces.
None of the victims were politically connected, so the police couldn't (by policy) run the reverse GPS lookups. This is the worst of both worlds: Our data is recorded to be used against us later, but if ever it would be useful, we do not have access to it. The same is true for vehicle black boxes / cameras. They record a few seconds before airbag deploy, but you usually are not allowed to access them as part of an insurance dispute (even the ones from your own car).
They should face criminal penalties for violating people’s rights
> the data is actually used during investigations.
Absolutely no! All that data collected without due process (judicial warrant, paper trail, whatever is the norm in your neck of the woods) has to be treated as tainted.
I might be OOTL and misinterpreting this but a web search for "panopticon N-1" returns only this thread. Is there any more information on this?
IMO this is no different from recording and storing everyone’s phone calls in case the data later proves to be useful.
* Illegal to collect every plate for later analysis
* Illegal to collect anything except for license plates (no drivers, pedestrians, etc.)
* Must delete "non hit" plate images within 3 minutes
* Strict forbidden to upload "non hit" camera imagery off the device
I would add that it should also require a warrant to access the ALPR data, but it's a great start.
https://gc.nh.gov/rsa/html/XXI/261/261-75-b.htm
If there is an actionable crime with a plate number, you can notify on realtime hits. Why store everything and allow them to go back in time?
Because to make historical queries you now have to monitor every vehicle all the time.
Maybe we should work more on gathering up the low-hanging fruit before we start setting the stage for Minority Report.
This is not true, and I dont know why everyone believes that. Real-life policing looks nothing like Law and Order. Moreover, post-George Floyd, police have basically had a work stoppage. Real prosecution requires high agency work by the police and they aren't legally required to do that [1], so they don't, and no amount of voting and police union busting is going to help here. You can't require someone to be "stellar" at their jobs.
Having had real egregious crimes happen around me has exposed me to just how much crime you can simply get away with...all the time. The rich get private security and investigators, us plebes get "Sorry no one saw the shooting happen, so we can't do anything now please leave"
Flock has basically turned a high-agency job that police stopped doing, into a db lookup, that in some circumstances they can be forced into doing.
I agree with EFF, record it all and put it all behind a real warrant and a civilian judge with a high bar for approval.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia
P.S: Before you quote Benjamin Franklin at me, no I don't want a 100% hit rate, I just want a decent shot at crimes being solved by average police work and just even the slightest hint of deterrence.
Put cameras in and on your car, as well as your house.
No one is coming to save you. If you want to be saved, you need to do that yourself.
But for tracking petty crimes and with the abuse of the system with things like officers monitoring their exes, as one example, makes the system far too dangerous for a free society. And because of that if they are going to ever get the public on board with flock then we are going to need to establish certain rights and guarantees.
For me that would be things like warrants with the exceptions in only the most extreme cases like a kidnapping or a murder that literally just happened and immediate response was critical. Next I would want a reasonable time data was stored then deleted. That is not 2 years that is like maybe a couple weeks or perhaps a little longer. Having the history of when and where everyone goes is a huge privacy risk and should not be stored forever as it is a target. Next I would want rules that it is only used for certain investigations and crimes. Yes to violent crimes and sexual crimes and crimes against children and obvious things all of society can easily say yes those things are bad. But for most other crimes it should be constitutionally forbidden. Think of how laws and public beliefs change over time. Imagine this years back when being gay was a crime. Or tracking people who go to an abortion clinic.
I could go on for a lot longer about how this type of system is dangerous in so many ways if not governed by very well thought out rules and rights given to the public. It is sad that the operators of these systems don't want to meet in the middle to something that most of the public could get on board with but they obviously know that total surveillance is very valuable data to have on people.
Making things illegal does not stop abuse. The cameras should not even be in our communities. There was 0 discussion nor any vote. These things got installed without consent and you want to argue that just placing guardrails that don't even get enforced is going to fix this?
Nobody ever wanted this except people with unreasonable pearl-clutching arguments about safety. We've had these devices for years now, and we haven't seen studies showing massive safety improvements in communities that are blanketed in these cameras. We've reached a point where cars are drenched in tracking devices -- I left two separate AirTags in my car, and the car itself also came with online tracking from the manufacturer -- and car theft still happens. Desperate people will commit car thefts whether there are cameras tracking them or not.
These are -- and always have been -- the "cop's ex-girlfriend tracking machine".
"But now the ALPR has to check the plate against a list of plates that it's been told to scan for and then delete non-hits!" That's great, but if a cop can add plates to the list, then they'll just add the plate for the woman they're stalking to the list and then wait 24 hours to see where she goes. The "non-hit rule" is like telling cops to wear body cams in the hope that they'll stop committing police brutality. Feels nice, but they just keep doing it anyway. Just tear these things down.
These people will be the first to argue against the removal of the cameras, citing that the crime would be much worse without them.
That's the underlying rights violation-- and it's why solutions that otherwise try to restrict ALPR run into oddities about limiting people's ability to observe what is plainly visible in public.
Failing that avenue, we should treat most broad involuntary data collection efforts as a form of stalking/harassment, and treat it accordingly-- including providing a strong civil path for anyone whose data was collected without their knoweldge especially given that law enforcement / prosecutors have a material conflict of interest which will prevent them from enforcing the law.
Whenever I've thought about this problem, the challenge with a more high-tech and privacy-friendly alternative is the intuition that it's good if witnesses to a crime or accident can memorize or write down the plate of an involved vehicle in order to make that specific vehicle identifiable. If the vehicles were providing only a cryptographic identity that wasn't memorable or that required special equipment to query, we would lose the "the robbers got away in a car with this plate" or "the pedestrian was run over by a car with this plate" scenario, which feels like a surprising cost somehow.
If it weren't for that, it might be feasible to use some more modern cryptographic approach to ensure that cars are licensed or insured without also making it easy in general to track them or people's activities or whereabouts. But allowing the public to quickly see any car's identity with their eyes and memorize it with their minds is quite a harsh constraint.
It existed for ships and the law passed while George Washington was still president. Ships had to be registered and it was required for the ship's name to be legibly written on the stern.
The cameras are an attractive nuisance for people in power, including any and all law enforcement types. It only takes a few bad apples to spoil that entire ocean.
The real threat is the cameras’ very existence, and that is what has to be eliminated. If a thing doesn’t exist, then it can’t be abused.
That’s an important thing to keep in mind, when you are required to keep in mind the lessons of 1930s Germany. Or the Stasi from East Germany.
When you figure out how to guarantee that you can never, ever again have a 1930s Germany situation pop up, and a government that just casually throws out all the old laws, then we can talk about whether those kinds of cameras might make sense again.
What you're suggesting would mean that they wouldn't even have to throw out the laws. They could just install the new cameras themselves. So there's no difference.
It requires a reasonably balanced and trustworthy government no matter what.
Totally agree with the EFF here, many thanks to them defending the Constitution, hope they win.
Why do you need to see where I was 6 hours ago to do this?
Don’t you want to find them NOW?
There's a ton of things that would make policing easier but we don't do them because they destroy other valuable parts of society. It'd be much easier to solve crimes if everyone had to wear networked body cameras and GPS trackers at all times but we don't do that because it destroys far more important things.
Before this technology existed, we didn't have this level of information retention. How did enforcement happen? Slowly (as it should), methodically (as it should.)
> Enter warrant ID:
>> We have to rescue a child from a kidnapper! Enter 'amber alert' as the warrant ID to bypass the warrant check!
Suddenly, many more searches (that fail to find a given child) are happening.
So with warrants we're essentially saying, "the government can track everyone's location and we're okay with that but they can't legally look at it without a warrant". Good luck seeing consequences for breaking that when we can't even get consequences for shooting people.
Still better than no warrants, it would be great to get warrants requirement. But we should not live in such a surveilled society.
It's still mass surveillance. Even if it requires a warrant.
Surveillance should work like this: You suspect some of a crime? Then you surveil them and investigate them. you need more powerful tools, then you need to get a warrant from a judge to surveil them more.
We shouldn't be investigating and surveilling people that aren't suspected of crimes. Mass surveillance treats everyone like criminals.
Which armed robbers were caught with this technology that were uncatchable before now? Seriously. Ruining all of privacy for everyone does not fix this. This is the same old “if you have nothing to hide” again and again and again and it’s been categorically wrong for hundreds of years. Nothing has changed. Expect the means.
I am not OK with giving everyone who works for the government complete knowledge of my associations and wherabouts at all times.