For years I've thought about doing an "art project" to make people more aware of the fact they are being observed – but I never actually got up and did it.
The idea was to seek spots in the city where public web cams are pointed at, and paint QR codes on the ground at those spots (using a template), linking to the camera stream. So when curious passerbys scan the code, they see themselves in a camera stream and feel "watched".
I had thought about creating a larger roadside banner with the faces (pulled from voters guide) of the city council members who approved Flock, along with the face of the Sheriff with something along the lines of "These people want to know where your wife and daughter are at all times - deflock.me" and place it right next to the Flock camera.
Gotta tag some political organization on the banner which makes it illegal to remove.
I wonder if it’s legal to modify the images to look more sinister. Otherwise, someone passing by might not read the text, making it free advertising for council/sherrif.
That's not face recognition. That's face detection. It just detects faces and sticks a label from a pre-selected list. Come on, this doesn't even pass the basic smell test. "Facial recognition" my ass. It doesn't recognize anyone. I could build this in a cave with scraps. There's a huge difference between the two: recognition means you have found a known person, detection means you found a person.
That's about the difference between eating sodium chloride and eating sodium.
Belgian artist Dries Depoorter has something that comes close, where he tried to match public webcams against Instagram photos. See https://driesdepoorter.be/thefollower .
I don't mean these Flock cameras, I mean what you refer to as "boring rooftop weather webcams". Some of those show people fairly close up and even if you can't recognize your face in the stream, you will recognize the place and realize that it's you, standing there right now in that video stream.
Just search for "<your city> webcam" and see what you can find.
Some places have them available. For example, every highway camera in California (and in some places like Oakland there's plenty of cameras that show crosswalks): https://cwwp2.dot.ca.gov/vm/iframemap.htm
Quality isn't great, but you could likely see yourself recognizably.
Many are! I live in NY and 511ny.org has a great view of all traffic cams in the state (and some beyond it, but I don't understand how they got on the list...)
I remember seeing an art project in the UK ~10 years ago where they had actors enact a short film but everything was filmed using street cameras, which IIRC everyone could request access to with little bureaucracy.
I'd like to start a standard marking of some sort to call them out. A hot pink arrow drawn with spray paint on the pole is the first thing that came to mind.
Could use projectors to display the feed directly onto the ground or a building wall, in some ways that may be more impactful. You'd have to stay with the projector and power source, but easier to move to the next location, and less of a chance of getting in trouble for defacing public property, etc.
I keep wanting to see the "Rainbows End" style experiment.
The common reaction to surveillance seems to be similar to how we diet. We allow/validate a little bit of the negative agent, but try to limit it and then discuss endlessly how to keep the amount tamped down.
One aspect explored/hypothesized in Rainbows End, is what happens when surveillance becomes so ubiquitous that it's not a privilege of the "haves". I wonder if rather than "deflocking", the counter point is to surround every civic building with a raft of flock cameras that are in the public domain.
I started building ALPR and speed detection systems for my house based on RTSP feed. I kind of want to finish this with an outdoor TV that has a leaderboard of the drivers that drive the fastest and their license plate in public display on my property, but visible to the street. In part to make my neighbors aware of how powerful ALPR technology is now, but also many of my neighbors should slow the heck down. I am not sure how popular this would be, but also I kind of like starting the right kind of trouble :)
If you're in CA, I learned recently that any use of automatic license plate recognition here is regulated and has a bunch of rules. Technically just turning on the ALPR feature in your consumer level camera is illegal if you don't also do things like post a public notice with your usage and privacy policy.
The law is a bit old and seems like it was written under the assumption that normal people wouldn't have access to ALPR tech for their homes. I suspect it gets very little enforcement.
Interesting. It actually is posted that my property is under video surveillance. Colorado though. It seems like you would have a poor argument that you can’t collect and analyze images of a public space.
One cynical aspect of Colorado law I learned about going down the ALPR rabbit hole: in Colorado it is a higher class misdemeanor than regular traffic violations to purposely obfuscate your plate to interfere with automated plate reading. The law is “well written” in that there is little wiggle room if they could somehow prove your intent. Meanwhile it is a lesser class violation to simply not have a plate at all. Their intent feels pretty clear to me.
> seems like you would have a poor argument that you can’t collect and analyze images of a public space
Absolutely agree... but the CA law is clear that tracking license plates get special treatment! It being public space doesn't matter. It's wild to me that how you analyze the video is regulated. Also that no similar regulation for the regular public doing facial recognition exists. Just ALPR.
I wonder how I'm supposed to comply with the law if I were to take a public webcam feed, like one from a highway[0], and run ALPR on it myself. I obviously can't post any notices there. And I'm not the camera operator so can't comply with anything related to that. But I would be doing ALPR which does require I follow rules. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Will be interesting to see what happens to the law. It feels outdated, but I'm doubtful any CA politician is going to expend karma making ALPR more permissive. So I bet it'll stay on the books and just go largely unenforced.
I feel if you have a camera on your property with a view of public spaces they have a losing argument. I doubt none of that holds water constitutionally. This is first amendment protected. If you are filming a public space with no expectation of privacy the government has no constitutional authority to restrict you if you are retaining the data private and never sharing it.
So far the only legal area that matters is the government itself being regulated in how they use ALPR since they are the entity that can actually infringe upon constitutional rights.
> if you are retaining the data private and never sharing it.
"Never sharing it?" What? Free speech is literally defined by the fact that you can distribute information. Publishing your video feed (a la news helicopters, etc.) is clearly a protected activity - possibly even more so than collecting the data to begin with.
Yes, I agree, but I am saying there are virtually zero grounds to legislate the use case I provided. They try to weasel it on "privacy" grounds and "transparency" when you share the data, but yeah. I agree.
I fail to see how passively recording a space that you don't own is "first amendment protected". Passively recording a space isn't in and of itself speech.
I can photograph and publish whatever I am allowed to see in public (with very few exceptions - think Naval Air Station Key West), this has been affirmed and reaffirmed by countless courts.
The best part about publishing? You have no right to question when, how, or if I am going to do it - that discretion is also free speech.
> If you are filming a public space with no expectation of privacy the government has no constitutional authority to restrict you if you are retaining the data private and never sharing it.
This a shitty argument from a time where mass surveillance wasn't possible. If you have "no expectation of privacy in public spaces" than Governments could force you to wear an ankle monitor and body camera at all times since you have "no expectation of privacy".
You are mixing up the duties and rights a government has vs. the duties and rights citizens have. The one area I might start to agree is corporate personhood and giving corporations the same rights as a private citizen in this regard because their interests are very different from a private citizens. The whole point of the constitution is largely what the government can't do to its citizens. The goal is to protect citizens FROM its government by carving out our rights. These of course apply broadly, but I can't, for example, as a private citizen really violate your 4A rights very easily.
There is a sign put up by the county on a downward hill with some nice curves in it. It _used_ to display your speed but that was removed in favor of just flashing "Slow Down" once people used it to see how fast they could navigate the bends.
Hilarious! If i didnt already have too many projects and hobbies, this is the kind of thing i'd do.
Maybe not a speed leaderboard, that just seems like a challenge to choon heads. But perhaps a "violation count". Also toss in a dB meter for loud exhaust (again dont make it a contest).
Edge compute with alpr/face/gait/whatever object detection at the camera is basically solved. Genie is out of the bottle. I think the most fruitful line of resistance is to regulate what can be done with that data once it leaves the device.
I am the loud exhaust. Where we live the noise pollution is not a concern and I have no complaints around that. Many of my neighbors have lifted trucks and go vroom cars. Ironically the performance cars are the nicest drivers :)
I get it, I used to drive a GTI. I don't mind just loud exhaust by itself, as long as they are tuned well. It's the pops/crackling/backfires that set off all the neighborhood dogs and sound like they split the air that are a scourge around here. These folks also are the ones driving like maniacs in inappropriate contexts.
It is very janky. The speed camera I have an old Core i5 that is running YOLOv8 on the integrated GPU and it can just /barely/ handle 30FPS of inference. The code is all Python and vibe coded (for science). The speed camera needs a perpendicular view to work best for how I set it up (measuring two reference points with a known distance). So the ALPR camera is separate and I basically just buffer video and built this ultra janky scheme where I call an HTTP endpoint and it saves the last few seconds and then I batch process to associate the plate later in the web app. It is all CSV and plain files; this is a perfect append only DB scenario. Eventually it will need the wonders of the big data format SQLite probably, but I am sure Claude will know what to do ;) The long term solution would be to have a proper radar circuit and two cameras facing both road directions to capture the rear plate as people often don't use front plates here even though they are required to by law.
(the point, though, is you don't need a lot of GPU power to do say YOLOv8 inference on the pre-trained models) and OpenCV makes this all pretty darn easy.
A friend of mine in school had a similar thought - make body cams so cheap that everyone has one. Watch the watchmen.
I’ve considered making this a commercial reality, but we’ve seen that ubiquitous cameras don’t necessarily stop cops or authoritarians from kneeling on your neck, if they don’t feel shame.
1. Amazon blink is an interesting hardware platform. With a power-optimized SoC, they achieve several years of intermittent 1080P video on a single AA battery. A similar approach and price point for body cam / dash cam would free users from having to constantly charge.
2. If you're designing cameras to protect human rights, you'll have to carefully consider the storage backend. Users must not lose access to a local copy of their own video because a central video service will be a choke point for censorship where critical evidence can disappear.
This only works if society was okay with surveillance on private property. The wealthy can afford large tracts of private land and can afford to send people on their behalf to interact in public for many things. They can pay services to come to them as well.
The "wealthy" can't control the FAA or obtain TFRs (look no further than the issues Elon and Taylor Swift have had with obfuscating their jet registration), so they're basically fucked when it comes to preventing aerial video observation over private property unless this "large tract of private land" exists within 14nm of Washington D.C. (these types of tracts aren't practically obtainable there) or falls within an existing flight-restricted zone (which aren't typically permanent.)
If the wealthy want to hide away in a prison of their own choice I’m ok with that. What I don’t like are the wealthy using their wealth to take over public spaces. Like using Venice for a private wedding.
I have similar, albeit probably more radical, views.
All dragnet surveillance done by law enforcement or given to law enforcement by private entities should be public. (Targeted surveillance by law enforcement is a different thing.)
We should all be able to "profit" from this data collected about us. There are likely a ton of interesting applications that could come from this data.
I would much rather independently run a "track my stalker" application myself versus relying on law enforcement (who have no duty to protect the public in the US, per SCOTUS) to "protect" me, for example.
It might be that such a panopticon would be unpalatable to political leaders and, ideally, we'd see some action to tamp down the use of dragnet surveillance (and maybe even make it illegal).
It's doesn't seem like much of a grey area to me. Presumably Flock serves the useful function of satisfying the third-party doctrine, making the surveillance they gather immune from 4th amendment protection (since I "willingly shared" my location with them by passing one of their cameras). If law enforcement has access to that data without a warrant it's de facto public to me.
FOIA isn't the same thing as having the data at my fingertips like LE does. I think the public deserves the same access LE has. If they can run ad hoc searches so should the public.
Personally I'd rather see all dragnet surveillance just go away.
> law enforcement has access to it without a warrant it's de facto public
I think the public would be entitled to the specific data that was purchased or accessed by the government, but absolutely not the entire corpus of broadly available data. What if law enforcement were required to "pay per search" a la PACER or journal subscriptions?
> What if law enforcement were required to "pay per search" a la PACER or journal subscriptions?
My immediate reaction is that it changes the nature of the surveillance enough to require further reflection. It would put a time-bounded window on the ability of law enforcement to abuse the data (albeit assuming the ALPR companies actually removing data per their stated policies).
I appreciate your comment, for sure. I'll have to ruminate on it and see how it meshes with my more-strongly-held-than-I'd-like reactionary (and probably not well thought out) beliefs. >smile<
It seems inevitable that cameras will proliferate, and edge compute will do more and more inference at the hardware level, turning heavy video data into lightweight tags that are easy to cross-correlate.
The last thing I want is only a few individuals having that data, whether it be governments, corporations, or billionaires and their meme-theme goon squads. Make it all accessible. Maybe if the public knows everyone (including their stalker/ex/rival) can track anyone, we'd be more hesitant to put all this tracking tech out there.
Indeed, I already see this in the consumer space with Frigate users. Letting modern cameras handle the inference themselves makes running an NVR easier. Pretty soon all cameras will be this way, and as you say the output will be metadata that is easily collected and correlated. Sounds useful for my personal surveillance system and awful for society.
I feel like at some point we need to recognize the futility of solving this issue with technology. It is unstoppable. In the past we had the balls to regulate things like credit bureaus -- would we still do that today if given the choice?
We need to make blanket regulations that cover PII in all forms regardless of who is collecting it. Limits on how it can be used, transparency and control for citizens over their own PII, constitutional protections against the gov't doing an end run around the 4th amendment by using commercial data sources, etc.
> We need to make blanket regulations that cover PII in all forms regardless of who is collecting it
Cool, change the First Amendment first. Your face and name aren't private under our existing framework of laws - no standard legislation can change this.
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
It says nothing directly about privacy, for or against, let alone surveillance dragnets. I would contend it strongly implies in fact laws should protect and also not chill your ability to:
- go to and from a place of worship
- go to and from a peaceful assembly
- conduct free speech activities
- conduct press/journalism
- petition the government
If anything, the existing framework of laws implies a gap, that data should not be able to be hoovered up without prior authorization, since the existence of such a dragnet with a government possibly adversarial to certain political positions (e.g. labeling "AntiFa" terrorists) has quite the chilling effect on your movement and activity. US vs Jones (2012) ruled a GPS tracker constitutes a 4th Amendment search. If I have no phone on me, and a system is able to track my location precisely walking through a city, does it matter if the trace emitted by that black box is attached to me physically, or part of a distributed system? It's still outputting a dataframe of (timestamp, gps) over a huge area.
> It says nothing directly about privacy, for or against
Freedom of the press is directly related to privacy: if I can see something in public as a private citizen, I can report on it, and you may not create any laws abridging this.
I'm not commenting on surveillance dragnets or how the government uses the data or if the government is prohibited from using it by statute or case law - the First Amendment doesn't apply there (Fourth and Fifth do.)
I don't know how the First Amendment applies, could you elaborate? And assuming it does, that does not seem like an impossible barrier; time, place, and manner restrictions are a thing. And like I said, we already do it at some level.
Doesn't mass surveillance plausibly violate the First Amendment, by having a chilling effect on speech and freedom of association? Or is the argument that it's private entities and the Constitution only limits the government?
Even in the latter case, at least we could do something about the government using private data collection to do things they are not otherwise permitted to do under the Constitution. That's some BS we should all be on board with stopping.
No law can prevent me from operating a corporation that collects and publishes license plate data for lawful purposes (basic freedom of the press.) If I can see something in public (where no reasonable expectation of privacy exists), I can report on it. Very few exceptions exist to this - think national security or military installations.
> Doesn't mass surveillance plausibly violate the First Amendment, by having a chilling effect on speech and freedom of association?
Plausibly, but no relevant case law I am aware of makes this interpretation.
We can prohibit the government from utilizing and collecting the data: absolutely, but you cannot prevent the people from doing the same.
"We have seen a flock of turkeys walk right along that fence on the outside, but I have also seen them
jump high enough that they could easily land on the 4ft fence. Just 2 more feet of fence would
stop all of this and give us the sense of security that we have every right to."
Search context is legitimately hard, especially since this is unstructured text data that (ime building CivicBand) needs to be OCR'd not parsed for best results.
You might be terrified the number of municipalities that are still posting PDFs of scans of printouts of their minutes, which were originally a word document, and round and round we go.
Part of why I haven't guaranteed results building CivicObserver is because of how hard search context is. Maybe making this an MCP helps, but I'm not actually sure it does.
This is super important work, and is kind of why I built https://civic.band and https://civic.observer, which are generalized tools for monitoring civic govts. (You can search for anything, not just ALPR)
- is there some standardized APIs each municipality provides, or do you go through the tedious task of building a per-municipality crawling tool?
- how often do you refresh the data? Checked a city, it has meeting minutes until 6/17, but the official website has more recent minutes (up to 12/2 at least)
- There is absolutely not a standardized API for nearly any of this. I build generalized crawlers when I can, and then build custom crawlers when I need.
- Can you let me know which city? The crawlers run for every municipality at least once every day, so that's probably a bug
Genuine question: I’m someone who hates the centralization of data with companies like Flock. I also want safer streets. I have liked things like speed cameras and bus-mounted bus lane cameras specifically because they target the problem without the need for police involvement. How do you get the latter without ALPRs? Or do ALPRs indicate cameras specifically collecting license plates independent of active enforcement?
ALPRs are generally just cameras that create searchable timestamped databases of identified vehicles, private or public. But they're only really useful for public entities, because they're the only ones who can in the general case do anything with a tagged car (look up who owns it, curb it, &c).
I sometimes imagine local laws/contracts with a provision like: "This system may not be operated if there is no state law that makes it a class X felony to violate someone's privacy in any of the Y conditions."
In other words, the "we're trustworthy we'd never do that" folks ought to be perfectly fine with harsh criminal penalties for misuse they're already promising would never happen.
This would also create an incentive for these companies to lobby for the creation/continuation of such a law at the state level, as a way to unlock (or retain) their ability to do businesses in the localities.
Not OP, but I automate collecting public meeting data from various local agencies across the US. The below resources might be helpful. Public meeting video can be captured using yt-dlp (and if not made public, obtained with a FOIA request), archived, transcribed, etc. Sometimes there is an RSS feed, otherwise use an LLM provider as an extractor engine against the target datastore.
I _think_ (but am not actually certain) we're monitoring more municipal agencies at CivicBand, but I know some of the folks at MuckRock and the work they're doing is absolutely critical.
A huge number of municipalities all share the same tech stack: Granicus/Legistar. You can pull the agendas and minutes of all their board meetings probably going back a decade. From captioning information you can Whisper-transcribe and attribute transcripts of the meetings themselves.
During our last election cycle, I did this for all our board meetings going back to the mid-aughts, using 'simonw's LLM tool to pass each agenda item to GPT 4o to classify them into topical buckets ("safety", "racial equity", "pensions", &c), tying them back to votes, and then doing a time breakdown of the topics (political opponents were claiming our board, which I support, was spending too much time on frivolous stuff).
That's a pretty silly use case, but also a data-intensive one; the things you'd actually want to do across municipalities are much simpler.
You could probably have Claude one-shot a municipal meetings notification service for you.
Granicus is six providers in a trench coat it turns out. IQM2, NovusAgenda, Legistar, Granicus, PriveGov, and CivicClerk are all Granicus projects that share absolutely 0 apis that I've found, and a city having one of these operational is no guarantee they have any of the others.
Legistar and CivicClerk have actual APIs, which is nice, although it's extremely easy for the City Clerk's staff to trip and make the Legistar API unusable.
My experiments with using LLMs to write crawlers for these has been extremely mixed; it's good at getting first page of data and less good at following weird pagination trails or follow-on requests.
All of this led me to build CivicBand (which tracks all the municipalities I can get my hands on) and CivicObserver (which is generalized full-text search alerting for municipalities via email, mastodon, bluesky, and slack webhook)
Yeah, don't get me wrong, they all suck ass, but it's good to know there's one common set of things to scrape to get you lots and lots of cities. Those both sound like very cool projects!
I can only conclude that people in this thread are being intentionally obtuse.
This isn't a question of ideals; it's addressing the uptick in illegal actions by immigration officials during the current US administration. It's addressing the selective application of the law to further conservative agendas.
Yes, some immigration enforcement is legal. Congratulations.
> addressing the selective application of the law to further conservative agendas
Does selectively not enforcing immigration law further liberal agendas?
- House seats (and therefore electoral votes) are determined by census - which includes illegal immigrant populations.
- If you can waddle across the border at 8.5 months pregnant, you can birth a citizen with no further requirements.
Ergo, "sanctuary cities" and other intentional lack of enforcement allow states to pump up their representation in Congress and increase government handouts.
> would suggest others consider what an evil leftist
What are some things that could they do?
Right-leaning policy in 2025 typically leans towards enforcing the laws as written: in this case, immigration law is being bolstered by surveillance technology.
Which laws are liberals going to theoretically now start radically enforcing that conservatives were turning a blind eye to? Flock cameras don't exactly help the IRS make the rich "pay their fair share."
what is stopping me from putting a bright infrared light on my car angled in a way causing the camera to not be able to detect my plate? overexposed? this should be totally legal afaik since nothing is hiding my plate from any view to a normal human?
Ignoring all of the legal gotchas that aren't very realistically enforceable or relevant:
I do not believe you will be able to force overexposure of lettered areas using IR diodes alone. License plates are designed with intentionally high reflective contrast in the offset areas.
Even if you could put enough energy into that area, these cameras have switchable IR cutoff filters that are used during the daytime (making this approach only viable at night.)
Another idea: a visible-spectrum laser + camera on a tracking gimbal? Absolutely could block (or even destroy!) these types of imaging efforts on a small scale.
The question would ultimately get settled in court, I think, but a DA who was feeling cop-aligned and vicious could try to ding you for interfering with police operations by _not_ allowing your plate to get scanned.
These statutes are typically not written with police enforceability in mind: they criminalize "doing something" rather than "having something installed," and a cop isn't typically going to be around or caring/watching when you move past statically-installed ALPR cameras.
that was quite the wild read, haha. Looks like they're going to have further meetings about the ducks but the conclusion of this meeting is that: "There was consensus among the Zoning Board of Appeals that the applicant has demonstrated emotional support ducks are necessary but did not come to a consensus on what would be reasonable regarding the number of ducks, the size and location of the enclosure, and conditions of approval."
It kind of upsets me that while _I_ will never install one, my bloody neighbours have and it tracks me every time I walk my dog. Gross. Honestly makes me want to vandalise them (though I will not).
This is the United States of America: I'm allowed to report on the activity going on in public outside of my property, and you need to amend the Constitution if you'd like to legally prohibit that.
> Authorize Execution of a Public Right-of-Way Use Agreement Granting Flock Group, Inc. a License to Install and Maintain Non-Police Department Flock License Plate Reader Cameras on Public Rights-of Way and Establish Fees for Permitting, Inspection, and Usage
This is on my town and seems like strange wording. What the heck are private flock cameras?
>The City and Flock have negotiated a Right-of-Way Use Agreement, which will grant Flock a non-exclusive license to install and maintain certain
private cameras within the City's ROW. The agreement is for a period of twenty (20) years and may be renewed for up to two (2) successive five
(5) year terms. Flock will be responsible for paying the permit and inspection fees for existing private cameras within the City's ROW and for any
newly installed private cameras within the ROW as well as for an annual ROW usage fee on a per camera basis for the right to install cameras
within the City's ROW.
Interesting. I just ran a similar search for « ANPR » which I think is the UK equivalent, in UK local government meetings and it’s mentioned about 80 times a month, which from a cursory glance looks like it’s more than are being shown here. I didn’t look through them yet to see how many were discussions about adding new installations vs referencing existing ones.
Is the argument that Flock cameras are used for mass surveillance defensible, or just paranoia, and if it is real, does anyone have a good idea of whether the same argument would apply in the UK?
There are quite a few new camera types rolling out in the UK, summary:
4D AI speed/behaviour cameras (Redspeed Centio): multi-lane radar + high-res imaging; flags speeding, phone use, no seatbelt, and can check plates against DVLA/insurance databases.
AI “Heads-Up” camera units (Acusensus): elevated/overhead infrared cameras (often on trailers/vans) to spot phone use and seatbelt/non-restrained occupants.
New digital fixed cameras (Vector SR): slimmer, more discreet spot-speed cameras (sometimes with potential add-on behaviour detection, depending on setup).
Smart motorway gantry cameras (HADECS): enforce variable speed limits on motorways from gantries.
AI-assisted litter cameras: council enforcement for objects/litter thrown from vehicles
Really interesting, thank you! They do seem very rare in comparison to ANPR, although maybe I'm not looking for the right thing. Durham, Plymouth and Wokingham are talking about Red Speed and Acusensus but given basically all 300 odd councils have discussed ANPR at some point in the last year, that's a tiny percentage.
There's been increased attention on it here when (from memory), it was found that police departments on the other side of the country were handing over data from completely different jurisdictions' cameras, without any kind of warrant or official order, to third parties.
That's true if you define modern policing as a form of mass surveillance, but doing so stretches the dilutes the usefulness of the term. People see a difference between automatically flagging cars on a stolen car hotlist, and monitoring the comings and goings of every resident in their town. And they're right to see that difference, and to roll their eyes at people who don't.
That doesn't mean the cameras are good; I think they aren't, or rather, at least in my metro, I know they aren't.
These cameras may have been originally sold to municipalities as a way to find stolen cars, but from one year to the next, federal agencies have (1) decided that their main goal is finding arbitrary noncitizens to deport, and (2) that they're entitled to the ALPR data collected by municipalities in order to accomplish this goal. The technology isn't any different, but as a result of the way it was deployed (on Flock's centralized platform), it was trivial to flip a switch and turn it into a mass surveillance network.
> decided that their main goal is finding arbitrary noncitizens to deport
In the vast majority of cases this means: "enforcing immigration law." A presidential administration deeming it politically expedient to import illegal immigrants via turning a blind eye doesn't change the law of the land.
> that they're entitled to the ALPR data collected by municipalities in order to accomplish this goal
"Entitled" to purchase something that is being sold on the market for a fair price? Why wouldn't they be entitled to purchase this info if a vendor wishes to sell it to them?
Maybe, but I don't think there's much evidence that cameras with sharing disabled were getting pulled by DHS, and I think, because of how the cameras work, it would be a big deal if they had. Flock also has extreme incentives not to let that happen. We'll see, I guess: contra the takes on threads like this, I don't think the cameras are going anywhere any time soon. I think small progressive and libertarian enclaves will get rid of their cameras while remaining landlocked in a sea of municipalities expanding theirs.
> I think small progressive and libertarian enclaves will get rid of their cameras while remaining landlocked in a sea of municipalities expanding theirs.
Flock will just start putting cameras up on private property and selling the data to the Federal government. Municipalities can do very little to stop this, and local governments are pretty poor at keeping their true reasons out of public forum deliberation. Loophole methods of prohibition ("Can't put up camera masts") are easily thwarted in court.
Mass deployment of CCTV and traffic cameras have a much, much longer history in the UK than in the US. Tires burning around Gatsos were a meme 20+ years ago.
> Is the argument that Flock cameras are used for mass surveillance defensible
Its always defensible - think of the children!/terrorists! - and always in the same dystopian direction. Just believing yourself to be being tracked, changes behaviour. Just as in large cities, people moderate their behaviour.
All over the world the bed is being made for the autocrats. The new generation of wealthy autocrats have tools at their disposal the previous generations lacked. Like Musk and Vance told the audience, this was the last time it had to vote.
The defense industry is something of a foregone era. Most capital has been allocated to surveillance capitalism since last decades, providing very powerful tools to influence and measure the personal lives of the population. But things are shaping up for more active forms of control; as the finance sector is putting all their eggs in the next iteration, LLMs, which is being accepted by the public as a means for thought generation. I am totally not surprised to learn that the government now needs to a) sponsor this business model and b) needs to pull this horse inside government and executive branches.
Sure, there are positive use cases to be thought of for LLMs. But lets not be that naive this time, shall we? I mean, Grokopedia anyone?
I'm all for stationary government surveillance EVERYWHERE (in the public), just no surveillance ANYWHERE on individual persons. I think what people do in public should be heavily witnessed and recorded.
That sets the stage for overreach. If the data is public, and you are getting stalked, there is nowhere to hide. If corporations/organizations/agencies want to exploit your emotions for ads at any given moment of the day because they can see you and almost everything that happens to you, they can. If a lunatic leader gets elected who wants to kill off a specific group of people (nothing lasts forever, including political stability), its now much easier. With all that in mind, can I ask why?
I think what people do in public should be heavily witnessed and recorded
What for? I don't understand why you want to record some stranger jogging, drinking coffee, smoking, eating or simply walking and minding their own business. What am I missing?
Temporarily it's fine. Store it for a few weeks and then destroy. If something happens to the jogger on their jog we can grab the video, if nothing happens, it's deleted.
I think you don’t have to look far to find warrantless arrests or illegal detentions under the guise of “immigration enforcement.” I also think you’d be hard pressed to point to a crime in those instances.
We should compensate those who are improperly arrested and quickly correct these violations, attempt to prevent them in the future, reprimand those involved if necessary, but absolutely keep pushing ahead at full steam on law enforcement efforts otherwise.
Hot take: some small number of unlawful arrests aren't the "neener neener neener, you can't stop illegal immigration" that folks seem to think they are.
Why? And separately, do you believe that people wrongly arrested in the US are being compensated accordingly? The justice system in the US isn’t known for being easy or cheap to navigate, and I don’t think getting a warrant before detaining people is that huge of an ask.
Because these are human systems involving humans: there will always be mistakes. Advocating for the elimination of 100% of mistakes is a typical "rules for radicals" method of backdoor legislation through increased bureaucracy.
I'm not advocating to "move fast and break things," but that it's very easy and cheap for illegal immigration maximalists to advocate that society should "move never so nothing breaks." This type of obstruction is actually a form of conservative policy, but "it's for the causes I like so it's okay."
> don’t think getting a warrant before detaining people is that huge of an ask
The law doesn't require a warrant before detaining people - and shouldn't. This doesn't even make sense: "Hold on Mr. Bank Robber - I'm not detaining you, but pretty please don't go anywhere, I gotta go get a warrant first!"
It’s so awesome to see more people making things to fight back against ALPRs. Deflock movements are gaining traction across the country and genuinely making progress at suspension or cancellation of contracts.
It’s because they tap into a primal fear that the Snowden revelations didn’t. It’s more obvious and visceral to know there’s a massive network of cameras watching everyone 24/7.
Not just that, but because people can see the devices themselves. It's not just some guy talking about bad things in Washington DC, you can see these things on rural roads in the middle of nowhere.
Are they? Work I was involved in was instrumental in getting our Flock contract cancelled. Meanwhile, all the surrounding municipalities have, over the last 2 quarters, acquired more ALPR cameras.
I'm certain that had the 2024 election gone a different way, we'd still have our Flock cameras.
It's definitely a push and pull; more are adopting it, but more are pushing back. The total amount is definitely still rising, though, but so is awareness.
There's Eugene and Springfield, OR; Cambridge, MA; a few in TX; Denver and Longmont, CO; Redmond, WA; Evanston and Oak Park, IL; etc.
I'm Oak Park (I helped write our ALPR General Order and the transparency reporting requirements that formed the case for killing the contract because it wasn't addressing real crime).
Oak Park is 4.7 square miles. All our surrounding munis have rolled out more ALPRs after we killed ours.
Further: because of the oversight we had over our ALPRs before, they weren't really doing anything, for something like 2 years. OPPD kept them around because they were handy for post-incident investigation. We effectively had to stop responding to alerts once our police oversight commission ran the numbers of what the stops were.
Which is to say: our "de-Flocking" was mostly cosmetic. We'd already basically shut the cameras down and cut all sharing out.
I definitely think there's something to be said for nuance; my county is one of the worst in my state for penetration [0] but according to their transparency log avoids many of the common criticisms of Flock, like data sharing, immigration enforcement use, etc [1].
I'm just happy for any sort of critical analysis or attention being brought to every municipality's use of this technology as so often people have no idea at all, though. Because there are a lot of counties which are far worse, and almost none of the public is even aware; I suspect there is at least some gap between people who would care if they knew, and people who care now.
No. The police chief was unhappy with the outcome.
I also didn't personally get the contract cancelled --- in fact, I (for complicated reasons) opposed cancelling the contract. But I can tell you the sequence of things that led to the cancellation:
1. OPPD made the mistake of trying to deploy the cameras as an ordinary appropriation, without direct oversight, which pissed the board off.
2. We deployed the cameras in a pilot program with a bunch of restrictions (use only for violent crimes, security controls, stuff like that) that included monthly transparency reports to our CPOC commission.
3. Over the pilot period, the results from the cameras weren't good. That wasn't directly the fault of the cameras (the problem is the Illinois LEADS database), but it allowed opponents of the cameras to tell a (true) story.
4. At the first renewal session, an effort was made to shut off the cameras entirely (I was in favor then!), but the police chief made an impassioned case for keeping them as investigative tools. We renewed the contract with two provisos: we essentially stopped responding to Flock alerts, and we cut off all out-of-state sharing.
5. Transparency reports about the cameras to CPOC continued to tell a dismal story about their utility, complicated now by the fact that we (reasonably) were not using them for alerting in the first place; we had something like 5 total stories over a year post renewal, and 4 of them were really flimsy. The cameras did not work.
6. Trump got elected.
7. A push to kill the cameras off once and for all came from the progressive faction of the board; Trump and the poor performance of the cameras made them impossible to defend.
8. OPPD turned off all sharing of camera data.
9. The board voted to cancel the contract anyways.
Just having the transparency report available to demonstrate that the cameras weren’t working seems like an important step. I’m working on trying to get this information myself for my local area. I do agree that the election moved the needle. Hopefully this generates a pro-privacy coalition that will be just as opposed to similar efforts when the blue ties are back in power.
I don't know. To me this seems like an energized minority trying to use technology to make a lot of noise; much like social media activism. In our city Flock cameras are very controversial but both the PD and transparency reports have shown benefits from Flock. We're not a wealthy, well-to-do suburb though. I imagine heavy ALPR presence is a lot more silly in those areas.
How do you get access get all the local government meetings? Do you have a crawler that looks up every city in the country then visits each website and pull down the info? A public listing site?
Hi! I've written crawlers for about a dozen municipal hosting platforms, and you can learn the bare-bones of it from our "How" page: https://civic.band/how.html
The short answer is: there's no common API for any of these sites, and even the ones that do have an API are sometimes misconfigured. It's why I wrote all the scrapers by hand.
There isn’t any sort of standard for recording public meetings. I’ve seen everything mic less live streams with obstructed cameras to well curated flawless back and forth with great audio and transcripts. Meeting to meeting it can vary.
Im glad WA ruled that you can get flock data with a FOIA request and because of this local cities decided to disable the cameras. Currently they have put caps of the lenses of the installed cameras in WA.
"Massive database of vehicles" is the best hope we have for reestablishing order and peace in American cities. I am all for cameras and the larger, more visible number plates of Europe. I also think the cops should intercept and seize all vehicles operating without their plates.
If you think authoritarianism will lead to order and peace, you're gonna have a bad time. The presence of a secret police is already causing wide scale violation of our constitutional rights.
This discussion isn't really about red light or speed cameras, although they suck in different ways. They are technically "license plate cameras", but they only capture for a specific purpose. ALPR cameras are about a surveillance dragnet over the whole city, tracking people who are not accused of anything.
It is not "secret police". The reason your car has a highly visible number plate is because for decades society has recognized its compelling interest in knowing the whereabouts of private vehicles.
No, the ability to know the current whereabouts and location history of practically all private vehicles is a new capability afforded by deployment of ALPR mass surveillance.
Previously, we had some balance between privacy and accountability. A bystander or a victim of a collision could remember license plate numbers and give them in a police report. The police could tail you (but only you, because $$$) to discover your movements. But government agents couldn't track the movements of all the people, all the time. Now they can.
The societal balance of power has shifted and is now seriously lopsided in favor of the rulers. And cheerleaders like you don't mind, as long as you can purchase a little temporary safety...
Masked, unidentified individuals abducting people are either kidnappers (if doing it without the law behind them) or secret police (if doing it with the law behind them).
EDIT: Rather then downvote, offer an example of a masked, unidentified person abducting someone who is neither a kidnapper nor secret police.
Order and peace sounds great! But that's just road crime, why stop there? We have so many wifi enabled nodes and cameras. Lets put alpr on every Waymo and Tesla. Gait detection and face recognition on every Ring. Triangulate every cell phone down to the meter. Dump it all in a big data watershed. Let anyone with username/password query it (no MFA needed). We could even name our panopticon after some mythical all-seeing artifact, like a palantir. You won't be able to take a breath without officials knowing.
The poster above asked why you personally support total surveillance, despite it being ripe for abuse. How inevitable something may or may not be is completely irrelevant to whether you personally choose to support it. Acknowledging that it can be abused means you have to make that logical connection and say why something being ripe for abuse doesn't preclude you from cheering on for it.
Decreasingly so. Particularly if I am going to anything charged (e.g. political rallies). Which is a shame, they are very useful tools and it's a very real chilling effect.
You lost me at "reestablishing order and peace"... what do you believe is happening in our cities? And how is tracking cars nationwide going to fix whatever problem you think exits?
I live in a usually safe and crime free area in Florida, we had someone going car by car stealing from any car left open. My neighbor opened his door and told him he had him on camera, guy ran away. I had him on camera too but sadly no spotlight to catch a better look. I cant help but imagine that Flock deters people doing this sort of thing. I hate surveillance nanny states but criminals are getting bolder everyday it feels like.
I wish there was a way to implement this sort of “surveilance” in such a way that it only impacts criminals or would be criminals and only them.
Thanks for the response and I generally agree. Though I HATE HATE HATE the march towards the surveillance state, we need to stop crime.
I was specifically asking about the GP's focus on vehicles (larger plates, unregistered vehicle enforcement) and how they thought that would reduce crime so much.
All but literally every crime in my city (in the categories of, say, burglary, robbery, assault, etc) are committed by people who drive into town in stolen cars with no plates. It's totally ridiculous. If the only tactic the police knew was to pull over every Infiniti with tinted windows and no plates, the crime rate would drop to zero.
> If the only tactic the police knew was to pull over every Infiniti with tinted windows and no plates, the crime rate would drop to zero.
Then the question is, why don't they do that? Why do we need a surveillance state to enable police to do what residents might consider the bare minimum?
A large part of the deal is that ALPRs flag on hotlists and cannot be accused of racism. There's no way to argue a vehicle stop is the result of profiling when it's a machine recognizing a plate on a list and issuing an alert. The stats don't go in the same bucket.
At the end of the day, avoiding accusations of racism is behind much of modern policing's foibles (like the near-total relaxation of traffic law enforcement in some cities).
I think the broad thrust of your argument is right on the money. Officers' perception of heightened (or unfair) accountability has turned every police interaction into a risk for the officers and department, too. However, I think the problem actually goes even deeper. The incentives are all aligned to launder responsibility through automated systems, and we'll end up sleepwalking into AI tyranny if we're not careful.
Where I am, police officers get paid healthy 6-figure salaries plus crazy OT to boot. $300k total comp is absolutely not unheard of. I think the police have basically figured out that the best way to stay on the gravy train is to do as little as possible. Certainly stop enforcing traffic laws entirely, as those are the highest risk interactions. Just rest n' vest, baby. So you get to hear about "underfunded" and "overworked" police departments while observing overpaid police officers who are structurally disincentivized from doing their jobs.
The bottom line is: People want policing, but adding more police officers won't deliver results and anyway is too expensive. What to do?
Enter mass surveillance and automated policing. If we can't rely on police to do the policing, we'll have to do it some other way. Oh, look at how cheap it is to put cameras up everywhere. And hey, we can get a statistical inferential model (excuse me, Artificial Intelligence!) to flag "suspicious" cars and people. Yeah yeah, privacy risks blah blah blah turnkey totalitarianism whomp whomp whomp. But think of all the criminals we can catch! All without needing police to actually do anything!
While police are expensive and practically useless at doing things people want, this technology can actually deliver results. That makes it irresistible. The problem is that it's turning our society into a panopticon and putting us all in great danger of an inescapable totalitarian state dominated by a despot and his AI army.
But those are abstract risks, further out and probabilistic in nature. Humans are terrible at making these kinds of decisions; as a population we almost always choose short-term benefit over abstract long-term risks and harms. Just look at climate change and fossil fuel consumption.
I am concerned about the lack of follow through after police intervention. Lack of prosecution and convictions, light sentences, repeat offenders being released, etc.
If judges would simply keep someone with 3+ felonies in jail, crime would drop 80%.
That got labeled "mass incarceration" and even Joe Biden (a 'law and order Democrat' to the core) had to walk back support of what he viewed as one of his greatest achievements, championing the 1994 Crime Bill.
> "If the only tactic the police knew was to pull over every Infiniti with tinted windows and no plates, [...]
...they'd get called racist. Let's be real. The tint thing in particular gets filed as "bullshit excuse for racial profiling", never mind that illegal tint can be empirically measured.
> we had someone going car by car stealing from any car left open.
We have that too here, the issue seems to be more that it's a catch and release crime. The police not only knew who was doing it on our street, they had caught them multiple times and released them immediately. I'm guessing if they're not caught with stolen guns on them here it's not enough of a charge to bother with. I really doubt Flock would matter.
> but criminals are getting bolder everyday it feels like.
Might feel that way, but objectively, violent and property crime are on the decline in the USA.
I've also heard many stories where a person gets high def footage of someone committing a crime (usually burglary, smash and grab, or porch snatching) and the cops are basically like "eh we'll get to it when we get to it"
Two weeks ago, my parked car, along with two other parked cars, was rear-ended at 3:15am by a drunk driver (the car interior smelled like alcohol), in an unregistered car that was not his. He then fled the scene.
All of this was caught on high definition video.
However, he also left his phone and State ID (he was also unlicensed) in the car.
Did the cops drive the 2 blocks to the address listed on his ID to arrest him for leaving the scene of the accident, or to give him any kind of blood alcohol test? No, no they did not.
Did the cops follow up in any way whatsoever? No, no they did not. How do I know this? Because a few days later, I walked the two blocks to the house to inquire whether the car was insured. It was not.
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What is objectionable about your comment is the same thing that eventually plagues every social media that has downvoting/flagging: you violated someone's strongly-held priors.
I don’t think it’s so much as critical but has potential to help close the loop on crime. Big box stores love this service. The can easily identify the car type and license and out out a bolo with the police. Police put this into flock and track movement. You don’t have to pursue chases as aggressively. You can just track the car next time it pops up. I think flock is a net positive in this sense.
In those statistical roundups homicide is treated as a proxy for crime in general, so the best we can rigorously say is that homicide rates have decreased - which is, obviously, great. Researchers treat homicide as a proxy because they know not all crimes are reported.
Anecdotally, living in [big city] between 2014 and 2021 my street-parked car was broken into ~10 times, and stolen once (though I got it back). I never reported the break-ins, because [city PD] doesn't care. In [current suburb] a drive by shooting at the other end of our block received no police response at all, and won't be in the crime stats.
Are those types of crimes increasing? I don't know! I'd had my car broken into before 2014, and I witnessed (fortunately only aurally - I was just around the corner) a drive-by in the nineties. But... That's the point: no one knows! These incidents aren't captured in the statistics.
Personally, I think the proxies are broadly accurate, and crime in general is lower, and I shouldn't trust my anecdotal experiences. However, I think the general lack of trust in the quality of American police-work (much of it for good reason, sadly) biases most people towards trusting anecdotal experience and media-driven narratives.
I am more skeptical of homicide rate stats than you are, given the garbage data I see for crime in general, but even I am willing to admit they're much more robust than the rest.
I work with stats. I think even very honest people with high incentive to tell an accurate story and good data have trouble with stats. Now add politicians and police and bad data into that mix with winner-takes-all politics at stake and the stats get gamed.
Also I believe my eyes and when I see crimes happening in my neighborhood I don't rush to "the stats" to ask them what I saw.
So we have stats, that's the closest we have to objective, but I guess we can't trust those. You say your anecdote contradicts "the stats", and I genuinely believe you. Sincerely, what's the alternative? Vibes? We gotta steer this ship (society) based on something.
How else do you condense down myriad and often conflicting datapoints of this complex human existence in order to get trends you can make decisions on?
Longer answer: this is a fundamental problem across many domains. I don't think anyone has solved it.
I think of a story of Bezos being told by his Amazon execs that customer support wait times were meeting X service levels. In the meeting room with his execs, Bezos dials up customer service, gets some wait time of >>>X and makes the point that service levels are not up to his expectations.
I don't think that story is a great analogy for running society but is interesting nonetheless.
But "what you saw" isn't necessarily representative of the state of things, either. Arlington, VA is (was?) one of the nicer places in VA; generally expensive, etc. When I drove through there, the van in front of me at a light was car-jacked, and the person in it chased down. I'm uncomfortable driving through Arlington because of that; even though it's not representative of the area. Admittedly, this was years ago... but the point stands. My experience is not representative of the actual facts.
Stats are also "not necessarily representative of the state of things". At the very best they are a single factoid about a very complex human existence.
Stats only get worse from there: at neutral they contain no information, at worst they are dis-info.
Police ignore crime that's happening on the roads right now.
Drive around Kansas City sometime, particularly on the Missouri side. Tons of temporary paper license plates that are a year past expiration. Any member of law enforcement could pull the person over and enforce a penalty for it.
They just... don't. I don't know exactly why that is. Are they afraid that doing so opens them up to the chance of being shot or engaging in a high-speed pursuit? The former definitely happened in North Kansas City a few years ago (not to be confused with KC North) but having a massive network of cameras tracking license plates and how they move across town doesn't help. At the end of the day, you have to send someone a fine, and if they don't pay it and don't show up for court, you are again faced with having a police officer try to interact with them one-on-one, this time to enforce a bench warrant for their arrest.
In the meantime, you now have an absolutely massive data set of citizen movements being collected without a warrant by an increasingly authoritarian American government.
I can confirm that they are not shy about pulling over people with regular plates that have just expired, however. They’re on top of that. N = 3, 100% enforcement within a month.
But long-expired temps are everywhere. So confusing. How?
People with barely expired plates are normies who made a mistake. Safe. People with temps expired a year ago aren't making a mistake, they're willfully and openly displaying defiance of the law. That makes them scarier.
I'd also add that there's a socioeconomic component. In Missouri, at least up until 2025, you'd get your temp tags when you buy the car, and your actual metal plates once you paid sales and property tax and registered the vehicle with the DMV. This recently changed to make the sales and property tax apply at the time of the purchase so that you'd get your plates much more quickly after.
A car is a necessity in most of Missouri. Kansas City has more highway miles per capita than any other major city in the country (and maybe in the world); IIRC St. Louis is fourth-most highway miles per capita. Public transit has major gaps. Inability to drive is such an encumbrance that those convicted of DUI are allowed to petition courts for a hardship license allowing them to drive to work and other essential places because not allowing for this could fail under the Eighth Amendment.
All of this is to say that if you are able to pay for a car, but not the sales tax for the car, and you get pulled over for not registering after your temp tags expire, you are essentially under house arrest until you can put together the money to both pay the fine and to pay the tax on the car, which is now exponentially harder since you can't drive anywhere. Since that'd put disadvantaged people at an even greater disadvantage, it might be a "community relations" move by the PD to look the other way on these cases, at least until another blatant violation occurs.
This is basically a description of police in a nutshell. They are just ordinary civil servants, plus a gun, plus maybe a little less accountability if they mess up. People who get scared like you and me. People who are lazy like you and me. Imagine the clerk at the motor vehicle office or the secretary at the welfare office but asked to do something different today.
Do you, reader, want to have to confront a bunch of scary people for a $? Oh, you think having a gun makes it a bit less scary?
Almost no one wants to confront dangerous people day in and day out. Once in a while to flex the hero complex, maybe. But a few times of that will cure you of any particular desire to seek it out.
The people that want to do that are one in a thousand types. Basically criminals themselves, just on the right side of the law who use the 'criminal' mentality for good. Most police are not that.
They want to do a job, collect a paycheck, and do it in an easy way. Like how I like to drive to work rather than do a handstand and walk 5 miles on my hands and wrists. They get little to nothing for making their job harder.
The people with the most motivation to stop the criminal is the victim themselves. You are pretty much on your own. The state won't be coming to save you.
I think you have hit the nail on the head why more police funding, more surveillance tech, more dystopian BS that looks more like PreCrime every single day, is only going to get us so far.
I'm sure there are exceptions, but I think most folks (including criminals) believe crime is, generally speaking, bad. Folks commit crimes to survive, to enrich themselves, out of retribution, out of lapse of judgment, or lack of self control. Almost all some flavor of unmet needs. You put money into tackling those challenges, address why people are stealing, why turf wars break out, why addiction ruins lives and puts people in terrible positions, why poor nutrition and family support and mental health care lead to so many folks slipping through the cracks.
School quality’s largely in the same place. You’re not going to make much of a dent without fixing social support, the social safety net, healthcare, mental healthcare, and generally greatly improving stability for the economically bottom third or so of families.
In other words, the main problems with schools have little to do with schools. But they’re complicated and expensive problems with distant payoff, so we keep monkeying around with schools instead.
In some places where I’ve lived, local LE mounts ALPR systems atop most of their fleet. Those read “formal” plates as vehicles pass near the cruiser, and they proactively alert against a watchlist. Which presumably somebody’s hooked up to periodically ingest lists of recent lapses alongside the usual stolen/wanted/pile-of-unpaid-tickets sorts of stuff.
My sense is that such systems are rather less consistent at reading temp tags, and that temp tag issuance tends to be decentralized/dealer-based, rather more ad hoc, and thus rather less legible for semi-automated enforcement purposes.
Yeah, this is a major problem, and it obviously is not just Kansas City. In San Francisco the useless SFPD completely stopped writing traffic tickets, gradually over the last 20 years. They were writing > 14000 per month as recently as 2014 and this was below 500 per month for years until recent reforms brought it up slightly. The problem is that the police are self-selecting members of the tinted-dodge-charger club and do not perceive traffic laws as real laws. This ties in more generally to the fact that every single individual member of law enforcement throughout the United States needs to be closely scrutinized by psychologists.
Uh, no. They stopped because they were being punished for pulling over ethnically disproportionate numbers of drivers. This is likely due to several factors but the end result was making traffic stops a politically sensitive area, so they just pulled back.
You’re defending a weaker system than the actual system.
The system you’re defending is a list of flagged plate numbers and a way of comparing seen plates against that list, and a way of reporting matches to the local police.
The actual system logs all cars seen, saves the information forever, and reports the data to a third party who can share it with anyone they want.
That means living in a country where the government knows where you are and where you went to at all times. Want to go somewhere King Pedo Protector doesn't approve? Enjoy your Police visit and eventually, arrest.
I had seen an ALPR go up at my local Home Depot. I didn’t know what it was until this website where I zoomed on my town. I thought it was a new light or something. Just more anecdotal evidence to back up what you’re saying.
We have this in sweden and it works fine. I kinda think the US would be better off with this since it'd lead to less crime or lower costs to investigate it
There are two extremes that rash people tend to fall into.
The first is the person who has no concern for surveillance. He believes that if you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear. You see more of these people in older generations, when institutional trust was irrationally high.
The second is the person who responds rabidly to any form or application of surveillance. This is the sort of person who believes that all surveillance is abused, public or private, and if it isn't, that it inevitably will be. Slippery slope fallacy is his motto.
A reasonable range of opinion can exist on the subject between those two extremes.
Personally, I have no problem with traffic cameras per se. First, we are in a public space where recordings are generally permitted. Second, no one is being stalked or harassed by a fixed camera. Third, there are problems that only surveillance can reasonably solve (loud cars, dangerous speeding).
My concerns would have to do with the following.
1) Unauthorized access to accumulated data. You should have to have some kind of legal permission to access the data and to do so in very specific ways. For example, if you neighborhood is being disrupted by loud cars, you can use complaints to get permission to query for footage and license plates of cars identified as loud. Each access is logged for audit purposes.
2) Data fusion. You should not be able to combine datasets without permission either. And when such combination occurs, it should also be scoped appropriately. Queries should then be subject to (1).
3) Indefinite hold. Data should have an expiration date. That is, we should not be able to sequester and store data for indefinite periods of time.
4) Private ownership. The collection of certain kinds of surveillance data should belong only to the public and fall under the strict controls above.
The non-specific and general fear of abuse is not a good counterargument.
> Second, no one is being stalked or harassed by a fixed camera.
Not the camera, no, just the eyes behind it -- namely police officers who have been caught stalking exes via Flock.
> Third, there are problems that only surveillance can reasonably solve (loud cars, dangerous speeding).
In many jurisdictions in the US, police must personally witness the events to intervene. /Traffic/ cameras are one thing -- they only record those who violate the laws (red light, speeding). But continual monitoring of all persons passing falls into another bucket, like a Stringray device would.
> The non-specific and general fear of abuse is not a good counterargument.
The abuse of this data is already happening. It's not a hypothetical.
Here's an interesting hypothetical: if we don't trust law enforcement to operate these things, then consequently we don't trust law enforcement to enforce laws in a more physical manner (which is pretty true given 2020 protests against police brutality), then how do we enforce laws?
(This is a hypothetical because obviously in reality there's no easy philosophical through line from ideas to policy.)
We don't! I mean, the police don't do so today. No tabs? OK! Expired tabs? OK, too! No license plates? Who gives a shit? Not the police.
And that dives into more impactful crimes such as property theft which when reported to police nothing comes from it.
Hell, I have dashcam of a cop going home roughly at 11 pm going 80+ on a 60mph highway in his cop Ford SUV. But everyone routinely speeds, 7+ over post-COVID. The legislature is trying to do something about it, but no one really cares.
State Patrol is likely the only ones performing any real traffic enforcement anymore.
You sound like you're talking about Bay Area politics given the dialogue around CHP vs local police and property theft that I'm aware of.
If your solution is to continuously neuter the police because you perceive them to be ineffective then I'd challenge you to think of the endgame of that logic. If you think it can't get worse than it is now, well, we politically disagree.
Does anyone else find it painfully ironic that the one CO cop said "You can't get a breath of fresh air in or out of that place without us knowing," [0], in light of the George Floyd BLM rallying cry "I can't breathe!" and the common metaphor describing surveilance states as "suffocating"?
Like what are we doing as a society? Stop trying to build the surveilance nexus from sci fi. I don't want to live in a zero-crime world
[1]. It's not worth it. Safety third, there is always gonna be some risk.
[1] Edit to add: if this raises hackles, I encourage folks to think through what true zero crime (or maybe lets call it six-nines lawfulness) entails. If we had literal precrime, would that stop 99.9999% of crime? (hint: read the book/watch the movie)
While true, I think you have missed the bigger story. If you talk with kids today their mentality is very different from kids of 20-30 years ago, and it's not the cop cameras all over the place. Nobody pays those much mind. It's the fact that damn near everybody over the age of 10 is carrying around a high quality camera all day long and the means to publish that footage worldwide in an instant. It doesn't help that people with an agenda sometimes call for other people to be "cancelled" over even a single video, even a 30 year old video from when they were freshmen in college, and are can be successful in getting that person's life ruined.
We're living constantly in the scene from Fahrenheit 451 where the government asks everybody to go outside at once and report any suspicious activity. We have made it potentially not OK for kids to push boundaries or make mistakes.
That's about the worst, most inflammatory way possible to make your point. I agree with you 100%, but I am begging you to learn to frame your ideas better, in order to get people on your side. If you say that to any voters you will lose them instantly
Noted. But I'm trying to make people think about their cognitive dissonance.
I'm not a politician. I'm a systems thinker. If someone can't reason their way through what a "zero-crime world" actually entails, I doubt my other ideas will get through to them. Zero crime. Zero. No speeding, no IP infringement, no "just this one time". Zero.
That's also why I like asking "why stop there?" We've basically solved surveilance. It's an engineering problem. We have the capacity to track everyone (who does not make a VERY concerted effort to stealth) all the time, almost everywhere.
Didn't lose me, but point taken about gathering more support. How about: the costs of implementing a zero-crime world are far greater than the crime. Or attempting to trade freedom for safety will result in losing both.
Zero-crime means zero things that are banned ever becoming allowed. Things usually become allowed after they are illegal first, but people do them anyway, and then people wonder why we bother punishing them. Think of marijuana legalization. If nobody ever tried to illegally smoke weed, it would never be legalized because there would be no perceived benefit to doing so because it would be obvious that nobody wanted to do it.
That depends on the municipality and who decides to show up to meetings and make a big deal about it. If enough people get freaked out by these cameras it’s gonna cause real problems for elected officials who enable them.
The people who show up to town council meetings lean heavily to the side of security over liberty. The most obvious reason is that it's mostly retired homeowners with busybody personality types.
Privacy and liberty advocates are unlikely to win in council meetings by sheer numbers. They get some leverage with campaign donations, especially recently that Bitcoin made a lot of such people rich.
This really depends on where you live. I have no doubt that on average you’re correct but a lot of those retired homeowners are pretty upset about how the feds are behaving recently and believe it or not when your material needs are met some people actually try to use their privilege to help those most likely to be victimized by the surveillance state
I live in a very liberty minded county. The kind of place with no building codes and pretty much no police. All our cameras on county/municipal property were voted disabled.
So the feds just put their flock cameras anywhere they had a little piece of federal property, and there is no way to vote those ones off. They have little patches that cover the highways and some main thoroughfares. It's everywhere.
I don't agree. I watched a concerted effort, involving a good deal of public comment (which: not a very effective tool for change; you have better tools in your arsenal), and vanishingly little of it took the "there's always going to be risk, crime isn't everything" tack. "This stuff doesn't work and causes more problems than it solves" is the effective answer, not this George Floyd stuff.
It's unpopular with residents. Residents do not have the attitude towards crime reflected in the comment I replied to. It's a very online thing to say.
Yeah perhaps it's a bit inflammatory and terminally online of me to say. But it's true. Zero crime means zero crime. Minority report levels of surveilance and policing.
What stance would you recommend? You're one of the folks here i recognize immediatedy and have a wealth of wisdom.
You're 100% correct, and in fact I think you've touched upon partly explaining why fascism and authoritarianism is not just on the doorstep, it's got a foot in the door (without a warrant) and is asking^W trying to force its way in saying "it's just a quick search, you have nothing to hide cause you're not doing anything wrong, are you?"
Realism isn't very palatable. Most folks want to stay in their little rat race lane and push their little skinner box lever and get their little variable interval algorithmic treato, and they are content with that. That's fine. It's just a shame they gotta tighten the noose around absolutely everyone else for a morsel of safety.
I don't agree with basically any of this. I don't think people who oppose crime, or recoil from arguments suggesting deliberate tradeoffs involving more crime, are stuck in little skinner boxes.
I'm probably not doing a great job of getting my point across, and most of that is on me. Let me try to clarify.
Every aspect of cybernetics (whether it be engineering, society/politics, biology) involves deliberate tradeoffs. In metaphor, we have a big knob with "liberty/crime" on one side and "surveillance/safety" on the other. It's highly nonlinear and there are diminishing returns at both extrema. Everyone (subconsciously) has some ideal point where they think that crime-o-stat should be set.
I'm saying don't turn it up to 11, and it's already set pretty high. It's increasingly technologically possible, and I think it's a bad thing to chase the long tail. I'm pretty happy with where we are at the present, but corporations keep marketing we need more cameras, more detection, more ALPRs, more algos, more predictive policing, more safety, who doesn't want to be more safe? I think it's very precarious.
I reiterate: it's uncomfortable, but I don't want to live in a world with zero crimes because everyone has probably committed crimes without even knowing it. The costs, both fiscal and in terms of civil liberties, of chasing ever-decreasing-crime are far higher than finding some stable setpoint that balances privacy and liberty with measures that justly deter crime. Let us not let the cure become worse than the disease.
Refusing to return escaped slaves used to be illegal. Inter-racial marriage used to be illegal. Gay marriage and even gay relationships used to be illegal. Crime is not necessarily wrong.
This isn't said in bad faith but there is a few things that seem to be unanswered here besides surveillance is bad.
1. You have no expectation of privacy in public.
2. People carry surveillance devices in their pocket.
It is somehow simultaneously bad that the government uses public surveillance, but completely fine the public does. I don't think it's acceptable these target "flock". It's completely useless doesn't solve the greater problem. The greater problem in my eyes is:
1. I can't move around my own neighborhood without being recorded by 200 personal cameras whose data is uploaded an analyzed by various security companies.
2. I can't go to someone's house without their internal cameras recorded my every move and word.
3. I can't go outside without some subset of morons, that seem to always exist, bringing out their pocket government tracking device to record everyones face, movement, location, and action.
4. I can't say or do anything in public without risking some social justice warrior recording me, cutting it up, and using it to destroy me.
The greater problem is the proliferation of surveillance devices in every day life. Flock is such a small player in the grand scheme of this. These websites are simply art pieces and do nothing to solve the actual, pervasive, problem we face.
So do we just stop at Flock and raise the Mission Accomplished banner? Or do we forget this nonsense and target the real problem.
Private entities surveil you to make money off you or protect their property. Law enforcement surveils you to arrest you and charge you with crimes. These are not the same, and that's why some people care more about surveillance by law enforcement.
As an example, see the recent case of the woman who was arrested simply for driving through a town at the same time as a robbery occurred. That sort of thing is why people care.
If the data collection is performed by a private entity and then sold to the government, that is government surveillance. I agree that this is more widespread than Flock and other big names. However, Flock and its ilk currently stand to do far more damage in practice. They offer integrated turnkey solutions that are available to practically any law enforcement, from shithead chud officers in tiny shithole towns to the NYPD and all its grand history of institutionalized misconduct, and we are already seeing the effects of that.
See, also, the recent case of a teenager who was arrested because a Flock camera or similar thought a Doritos bag in his pocket was a gun. I'll let you guess what color his skin was.
Perhaps that is true. But one is testable and the other is not. It’s true that there’s a little bit of looking for your keys under the street lamp but if there’s sufficient correlation it might suffice.
It's weird that people think popular ideas flow from popular politicians instead of realizing that politicians picking up popular ideas is what makes the politician popular.
In other words: idea -> pol.
Everything else you said should get you flagged, but it is popular here so I'm not holding my breath.
Merely being a counter-narrative to some other narrative is not valuable in itself, otherwise all sorts of nonsense would be valuable. Proof that counter-narratives are not automatically valuable: "the moon is made of blue cheese" and "the moon is made of green cheese" provide worthless counter-narratives to each other.
I think the comment you replied to explains it well enough and I don’t feel the need to repeat myself.
I will edit my comment as well since you edited yours instead of responding. I don’t think the GP’s comment is the equivalent of saying that the moon is made of cheese.
The original parent comment (now flagged) essentially said: only people who reproduce have any right to have any say in how society operates. Especially when it comes to mass surveillance.
Which is patently absurd on its face. Much like saying the moon is made of cheese.
Edit: I’m done pretending like regressive ideas like removing voting rights from entire segments of the population are points for valid discussion.
You may be done with that idea but the idea is not done. We can choose to limit the franchise or we can have it imposed on us when a strongman takes advantage of the chaos.
What makes it patently absurd? I don’t agree with this perspective but I don’t agree that it’s the equivalent of saying that the moon is made of cheese. I found their perspective much more interesting than the typical HN opinions, shame it was flagged.
Half of America reads at a 6th grade level or lower. Something like a quarter of the country is effectively illiterate.
I don't believe disenfranchising them is the best solution- I might take a Jeffersonian view that in being so illiterate, they are already effectively disenfranchised (someone else is "voting" for them - influencing their choice in a probably undue way).
A better solution would be to find effective ways to educate them
A civil war is needed. It’s clear that there are a handful of ideological blocs with inherently incompatible ideologies.
These people cannot all live in the same society and have peace exist. Logistically this problem can’t really be solved peacefully and will eventually boil up. We’re already seeing a sharp ramp up in terrorist attacks across the ideological spectrum
Sometimes, we should let nature play its course. Whoever comes out on top will subsequently canibalize themselves with infighting anyway.
That is highly unlikely precisely because of how powerful the military / surveillance state is. Terrorism only serves as a boogeyman to increase funding for said military / surveillance state. What is much more likely as an outcome is a fascist dictatorship and a sharp increase in the % of the population living in a prison.
The franchise is already restricted to citizens except for weird subsets like SF schools, right? I think any model of franchise restriction must have negative feedback effects:
- should not allow franchise holders to arrogate state function to themselves in a snowball manner
- should not allow franchise holders to enhance franchise power
Not in a direct “outlaw this”sense but in a dynamic systems sense. So something like net tax payer is good. If you use it to vote yourself more state benefits you lose the franchise and others can then remove that benefit from you.
It will be hard to handle delayed reward situations (I pay now to get benefit later) so I think the problem is we just don’t have the correct device for this yet.
But the restricted franchise is something I think is very useful. The model of having free riders vote for more free riding is rapidly approaching its limit.
I can opt out of that, by not carrying a phone. I cannot opt out of public surveillance. Plus at least the gap between police -> tech companies typically adds some resistance, maybe a warrant, etc. With ALPR's police have immediate access without warrants to the nationwide network. It's far more ripe for abuse, yet is exactly what the police departments want; the only chance is local governance.
I'm fine with license plates being read and parsed. I'm fine with license plates being read, parsed, assessed for violation, and ticketed automatically, or cross-checked for amber alerts. That's literally my line of work.
I want strict, strict guardrails on when and where that occurs. I want that information erased as soon as the context of the citation wraps up. I want every company/contractor in this space FOIA-able and held to as strict or stricter requirements than the government for transparency and corruption and other regulation. I don't want every timestamped/geostamped datapoint of every law abiding driver passing into any juncture hoovered into a data lake and tracked and easily queryable. That's (IMHO, IANAL, WTF, BBQ) a flagrant 4th amendment violation, and had the framers been able to conceive such a thing, they'd absolutely add a "and no dragnet surveilance" provision from day 1.
If that seems hypocritical, my line starts with "has a crime occurred with decent likelihood?" "Lets collect everything and go snoopin for crimes" is beyond the pale.
because it would be ridiculous for police to be able to track every car everywhere it goes! (10 years ago)
Judges require warrants to put a GPS tracker on your car. Now that Flock cameras are so ubiquitous in many cities, this gives them access to the same data without a warrant.
I can reasonably expect that government agents don't follow me every time I leave the house. Legal basis for that belief or not, that's what most people expect.
Legally, you're absolutely right. But as camera technology, data transmission, data storage, and automated data analysis progress, maybe it's also reasonable that privacy laws progress with the technology. I expect any police officer or other person to freely view my license plate as I drive around and I have no problem with that.
But, I do not think it's reasonable for an automated system to systematically capture, store, and analyze all of my movements (or anyone else who is not suspected of a serious crime). If they suspect I have done something illegal, they should have to get a warrant and then the system can be triggered to start tracking me.
I understand the desire for the data... sometimes I would like to know if my kids are following the rules at home, but I have a stronger conviction that I don't want my kids to grow up in a home where they feel like they are under constant surveillance. It's a gross feeling to be under constant surveillance, like you're living in a panopticon built for prisoners, which is an unfair side effect when you've done nothing wrong. Mass data surveillance of everyone is a totalitarian dystopian that I don't want to live in.
I'd argue it's a 4A violation to require it to be displayed, though. It's a search of your registration 'papers' without RAS or PC of an offense.
The fact that driving is a 'privilege' doesn't negate your rights to be secure in your papers, the police should have to have articulable suspicion that your car is unregistered or unlicensed before they can demand you to display your plate.
I dont personally agree but that is a really interesting argument I can kinda get behind. I guess the question is, what if you have footage of a crime being committed, and you would have a great lead if you only had a way to pair a vehicle with a person?
I also don't agree with the argument you replied to, but a counter-argument to your point is that we don't mandate individuals to wear name tags while in public
Tracking already feeling pervasive suffers from the cognitive bias of all or nothing thinking. A phone can be turned off or apps disabled far more easily than a network of surveillance cameras. There are degrees of surveillance and who has access to the data. We can push back.
I hope the article's authors aren't taking the position that mass surveillance is a bad thing, signifying a breakdown in civilized norms ... after all, they're using the same methods to "track the trackers."
Surely there is a difference berween "surveiling" records of institutional actors that answer to the public and dragnet tracking of individuals operating in their private capacity.
In the US it's not uncommon to get on the wrong side of a police officer for some personal beef, and the police officer begins to harass you using legal tools provided to them.
It's also not uncommon for police officers to use their tools to stalk women.
Now we're given the same untrustworthy officers full profiles of an individuals travel history without a "need to know". If you can't see how that's dangerous, I don't know what to tell you. In the US if someone is threatening your life, you can typically shoot them if you're out of options. You usually can't do that with an officer, even if they're off duty. The rest of the cops will stand behind that thin blue line and harass you.
The "trackers" (in the sense used by the parent post, i.e., those who govern us) are there as our representatives; it is our right to observe what they do in that role.
Judging by the downvotes, there are a lot of surveillance state apologists/quislings in here! Oops, I mean "founders".
Reading these comments, a common through-line seems to be cars. Hit and runs, drive by shootings, cars without plates, cars speeding, breaking into cars, etc. But the concept of disincentivizing cars never seems to be brought up. Close down urban roads to private car traffic. Increase public transportation. Remove subsidies on gas. Build bike lanes.
Cars are weapons. They kill people quickly with momentum, and slowly with pollution and a sedentary lifestyle. We need to start treating them as such
Reducing unnecessarily bulky trucks with low visibility, increasing fuel efficiencies, and removing gas subsidies absolutely helps the suburban and rural population
Time to re-read what "urban" is defined as. My town, for instance, is counted as "urban", yet there is a single bus that will take you anywhere near to true urban center that comes twice per day. It's six miles (~15 minutes) from the nearest non-shit grocery store/Starbucks.
My town is "densely developed" (key phrase) residential with nearly no commerce to speak of. The largest employer is the school district, which isn't that big.
The nearest city with major employers is 45 minutes away outside of commute hours.
I do everything I can to avoid public transportation. It's not worth the risk or the annoyances with aggressive and dangerous people. If I lived in Asia (which I did before), I'd love to use public transportation because the people are not aggressive, won't attack or kill me. That's not the case in the USA
Most of the places within public transportation range are also within biking range, so I prefer biking. The end result is the same: one less car off the road.
Now if you say "What about all the crazy drivers??" think about this: have you ever considered that you might be the crazy driver? Maybe not 100% of the time, but maybe one day you're stressed so you speed up to get through a red light, or you really need to read this text because it's important. You only need to be a crazy driver for 30 seconds to end someone's life. Something that's almost impossible to do on public transportation or on a bike.
Yeah I don’t bike for that reason. There’s no way I’ll ride a bike around cars and I can’t believe others put their life in the hands of people texting and driving.
But you are okay driving around these crazy people, even though one of them could cause an accident costing you thousands of dollars and potentially a source of transportation?
There's an asymmetry with cars and traffic calming. You can spend a few thousand on putting in speed bumps (well, when you can; most municipalities put in obnoxious restrictions to "justify" a speed bump), road diets, buffered bike lanes, etc. But you only need one car to run a red light and hit a pedestrian crossing the street to kill them.
The rise in enthusiasm for ALPR is mostly a consequence of this asymmetry. Previously you'd have law enforcement go around patrolling to keep safety but the number of drivers in the US is growing faster than the number of LEOs and LEOs are expensive and controversial in certain areas.
I advocate for traffic calming all the time. But the asymmetry is real and, honestly, quite frustrating. A single distracted driver can cause you to panic brake on your bike and fall off and hurt yourself.
I don't think it's a growth in drivers as much as it is a shift in policing away from traffic enforcement, something that's only gradually being unwound as people realize how much they hate lax traffic enforcement.
This probably depends on municipality. I think that's part of it and a hangover from concerns around traffic stops in the BLM protests. But also I think LEO salaries are getting higher and VMT is increasing. That and a post COVID norm of not following traffic laws in general. At least that's what we've seen in our municipality.
People bring up the concept of disincentivizing cars all the time. Many activists in local politics in urban areas have ideological problems with mass car use, and try to advocate for and enact anti-car, pro-public-transit policies.
The problem is, cars are extremely useful to most people in the US, public transit has very real inherent downsides, and local policies that disincentivize car use are very unpopular when actually implemented. Voting citizens get mad when the price of gas goes up and demand that their elected officials do something about it (also electrification of cars, which is proceeding apace, makes gasoline prices less important for ordinary people and also reduces some of the real negative externalities of cars).
I have used both urban public transit and cars regularly to get around, I'm personally familiar with the upsides and downsides of both, and while I definitely do want public transit infrastructure to be good, I frankly do not trust the motives of anti-car urbanist activists. I think they are willing to make the lives of most people on aggregate worse because they think private car ownership is in some sense immoral and so overweight the downsides of cars and underweight the downsides of public transit.
Also using drive-by shootings and car-break-ins as an anti-car argument is pretty disingenuous. This is a problem with criminals committing directly-violent crime or property crime against ordinary people, not with cars per se. Criminals absolutely commit crimes against people using public transit, and indeed one of the major problems with public transit is that it puts you in a closed space with random members of the public who might commit crimes against you (e.g. the Jordan_Neely incident, the random stabbing of Iryna_Zarutska, the less-widely-reported random crime incidents that happen regularly on urban public transit systems). One of the most important public policy measures that could be enacted to make public transit better is severe and consistent policing of public order crimes on transit - and of course more severe policing is also a potential solution to car drive-bys and break-ins.
> and try to advocate for and enact anti-car, pro-public-transit policies
If you're lucky. Sometimes you just get anti-car. I'd love to not need a car at all, but where I am now it would mean Ubering instead because they've made driving worse while transit isn't expanded to fit the gap.
The idea was to seek spots in the city where public web cams are pointed at, and paint QR codes on the ground at those spots (using a template), linking to the camera stream. So when curious passerbys scan the code, they see themselves in a camera stream and feel "watched".
Gotta tag some political organization on the banner which makes it illegal to remove.
That's about the difference between eating sodium chloride and eating sodium.
I'm only aware of boring rooftop weather webcams where obv you can't see yourself.
Any examples for what you speak of?
Just search for "<your city> webcam" and see what you can find.
Quality isn't great, but you could likely see yourself recognizably.
You can even take a selfie with them!
Welcome to prison planet, the silly conspiracy theory that only weirdos believe in 1990.
The common reaction to surveillance seems to be similar to how we diet. We allow/validate a little bit of the negative agent, but try to limit it and then discuss endlessly how to keep the amount tamped down.
One aspect explored/hypothesized in Rainbows End, is what happens when surveillance becomes so ubiquitous that it's not a privilege of the "haves". I wonder if rather than "deflocking", the counter point is to surround every civic building with a raft of flock cameras that are in the public domain.
Just thinking the contrarian thoughts.
The law is a bit old and seems like it was written under the assumption that normal people wouldn't have access to ALPR tech for their homes. I suspect it gets very little enforcement.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...
One cynical aspect of Colorado law I learned about going down the ALPR rabbit hole: in Colorado it is a higher class misdemeanor than regular traffic violations to purposely obfuscate your plate to interfere with automated plate reading. The law is “well written” in that there is little wiggle room if they could somehow prove your intent. Meanwhile it is a lesser class violation to simply not have a plate at all. Their intent feels pretty clear to me.
Absolutely agree... but the CA law is clear that tracking license plates get special treatment! It being public space doesn't matter. It's wild to me that how you analyze the video is regulated. Also that no similar regulation for the regular public doing facial recognition exists. Just ALPR.
I wonder how I'm supposed to comply with the law if I were to take a public webcam feed, like one from a highway[0], and run ALPR on it myself. I obviously can't post any notices there. And I'm not the camera operator so can't comply with anything related to that. But I would be doing ALPR which does require I follow rules. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Will be interesting to see what happens to the law. It feels outdated, but I'm doubtful any CA politician is going to expend karma making ALPR more permissive. So I bet it'll stay on the books and just go largely unenforced.
https://go511.com/TrafficTransit/Cameras
So far the only legal area that matters is the government itself being regulated in how they use ALPR since they are the entity that can actually infringe upon constitutional rights.
"Never sharing it?" What? Free speech is literally defined by the fact that you can distribute information. Publishing your video feed (a la news helicopters, etc.) is clearly a protected activity - possibly even more so than collecting the data to begin with.
The best part about publishing? You have no right to question when, how, or if I am going to do it - that discretion is also free speech.
This a shitty argument from a time where mass surveillance wasn't possible. If you have "no expectation of privacy in public spaces" than Governments could force you to wear an ankle monitor and body camera at all times since you have "no expectation of privacy".
Can you correct that typo? I've been thinking about what you mean for a while and I can't figure it out.
edit: Thank you
Maybe not a speed leaderboard, that just seems like a challenge to choon heads. But perhaps a "violation count". Also toss in a dB meter for loud exhaust (again dont make it a contest).
Edge compute with alpr/face/gait/whatever object detection at the camera is basically solved. Genie is out of the bottle. I think the most fruitful line of resistance is to regulate what can be done with that data once it leaves the device.
(the point, though, is you don't need a lot of GPU power to do say YOLOv8 inference on the pre-trained models) and OpenCV makes this all pretty darn easy.
I’ve considered making this a commercial reality, but we’ve seen that ubiquitous cameras don’t necessarily stop cops or authoritarians from kneeling on your neck, if they don’t feel shame.
1. Amazon blink is an interesting hardware platform. With a power-optimized SoC, they achieve several years of intermittent 1080P video on a single AA battery. A similar approach and price point for body cam / dash cam would free users from having to constantly charge.
2. If you're designing cameras to protect human rights, you'll have to carefully consider the storage backend. Users must not lose access to a local copy of their own video because a central video service will be a choke point for censorship where critical evidence can disappear.
All dragnet surveillance done by law enforcement or given to law enforcement by private entities should be public. (Targeted surveillance by law enforcement is a different thing.)
We should all be able to "profit" from this data collected about us. There are likely a ton of interesting applications that could come from this data.
I would much rather independently run a "track my stalker" application myself versus relying on law enforcement (who have no duty to protect the public in the US, per SCOTUS) to "protect" me, for example.
It might be that such a panopticon would be unpalatable to political leaders and, ideally, we'd see some action to tamp down the use of dragnet surveillance (and maybe even make it illegal).
I found it really interesting he frames privacy, surveillance, and power through the lens of information asymmetries.
You can FOIA the cameras outside your local police station today, if you like. Private company data like Flock's is the new grey area.
FOIA isn't the same thing as having the data at my fingertips like LE does. I think the public deserves the same access LE has. If they can run ad hoc searches so should the public.
Personally I'd rather see all dragnet surveillance just go away.
I think the public would be entitled to the specific data that was purchased or accessed by the government, but absolutely not the entire corpus of broadly available data. What if law enforcement were required to "pay per search" a la PACER or journal subscriptions?
My immediate reaction is that it changes the nature of the surveillance enough to require further reflection. It would put a time-bounded window on the ability of law enforcement to abuse the data (albeit assuming the ALPR companies actually removing data per their stated policies).
I appreciate your comment, for sure. I'll have to ruminate on it and see how it meshes with my more-strongly-held-than-I'd-like reactionary (and probably not well thought out) beliefs. >smile<
The last thing I want is only a few individuals having that data, whether it be governments, corporations, or billionaires and their meme-theme goon squads. Make it all accessible. Maybe if the public knows everyone (including their stalker/ex/rival) can track anyone, we'd be more hesitant to put all this tracking tech out there.
I feel like at some point we need to recognize the futility of solving this issue with technology. It is unstoppable. In the past we had the balls to regulate things like credit bureaus -- would we still do that today if given the choice?
We need to make blanket regulations that cover PII in all forms regardless of who is collecting it. Limits on how it can be used, transparency and control for citizens over their own PII, constitutional protections against the gov't doing an end run around the 4th amendment by using commercial data sources, etc.
Cool, change the First Amendment first. Your face and name aren't private under our existing framework of laws - no standard legislation can change this.
It says nothing directly about privacy, for or against, let alone surveillance dragnets. I would contend it strongly implies in fact laws should protect and also not chill your ability to:
- go to and from a place of worship - go to and from a peaceful assembly - conduct free speech activities - conduct press/journalism - petition the government
If anything, the existing framework of laws implies a gap, that data should not be able to be hoovered up without prior authorization, since the existence of such a dragnet with a government possibly adversarial to certain political positions (e.g. labeling "AntiFa" terrorists) has quite the chilling effect on your movement and activity. US vs Jones (2012) ruled a GPS tracker constitutes a 4th Amendment search. If I have no phone on me, and a system is able to track my location precisely walking through a city, does it matter if the trace emitted by that black box is attached to me physically, or part of a distributed system? It's still outputting a dataframe of (timestamp, gps) over a huge area.
Freedom of the press is directly related to privacy: if I can see something in public as a private citizen, I can report on it, and you may not create any laws abridging this.
I'm not commenting on surveillance dragnets or how the government uses the data or if the government is prohibited from using it by statute or case law - the First Amendment doesn't apply there (Fourth and Fifth do.)
Doesn't mass surveillance plausibly violate the First Amendment, by having a chilling effect on speech and freedom of association? Or is the argument that it's private entities and the Constitution only limits the government?
Even in the latter case, at least we could do something about the government using private data collection to do things they are not otherwise permitted to do under the Constitution. That's some BS we should all be on board with stopping.
> Doesn't mass surveillance plausibly violate the First Amendment, by having a chilling effect on speech and freedom of association?
Plausibly, but no relevant case law I am aware of makes this interpretation.
We can prohibit the government from utilizing and collecting the data: absolutely, but you cannot prevent the people from doing the same.
FWIW, what I want is the non-IME/PSP "¡hecho en Paraguay!" chips from the book.
https://alpr.watch/m/WPv1PO
first the came for the turkeys...
You might be terrified the number of municipalities that are still posting PDFs of scans of printouts of their minutes, which were originally a word document, and round and round we go.
Part of why I haven't guaranteed results building CivicObserver is because of how hard search context is. Maybe making this an MCP helps, but I'm not actually sure it does.
And 404 from https://civic.band/why.html
Few questions:
- is the stack to index those open source?
- is there some standardized APIs each municipality provides, or do you go through the tedious task of building a per-municipality crawling tool?
- how often do you refresh the data? Checked a city, it has meeting minutes until 6/17, but the official website has more recent minutes (up to 12/2 at least)
- The framework for crawling is open-source. https://github.com/civicband
- There is absolutely not a standardized API for nearly any of this. I build generalized crawlers when I can, and then build custom crawlers when I need.
- Can you let me know which city? The crawlers run for every municipality at least once every day, so that's probably a bug
In other words, the "we're trustworthy we'd never do that" folks ought to be perfectly fine with harsh criminal penalties for misuse they're already promising would never happen.
This would also create an incentive for these companies to lobby for the creation/continuation of such a law at the state level, as a way to unlock (or retain) their ability to do businesses in the localities.
Any interesting technical details? Getting the actual data from govt meetings looked like it was the hardest part to me.
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2025/apr/16/keeping-l...
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2024/mar/27/automatin...
https://youtube.com/watch?v=pX_xcj-p0vA
https://documentcloud.org/add-ons/MuckRock/Klaxon/
https://documentcloud.org/
https://muckrock.com/
During our last election cycle, I did this for all our board meetings going back to the mid-aughts, using 'simonw's LLM tool to pass each agenda item to GPT 4o to classify them into topical buckets ("safety", "racial equity", "pensions", &c), tying them back to votes, and then doing a time breakdown of the topics (political opponents were claiming our board, which I support, was spending too much time on frivolous stuff).
That's a pretty silly use case, but also a data-intensive one; the things you'd actually want to do across municipalities are much simpler.
You could probably have Claude one-shot a municipal meetings notification service for you.
Legistar and CivicClerk have actual APIs, which is nice, although it's extremely easy for the City Clerk's staff to trip and make the Legistar API unusable.
My experiments with using LLMs to write crawlers for these has been extremely mixed; it's good at getting first page of data and less good at following weird pagination trails or follow-on requests.
All of this led me to build CivicBand (which tracks all the municipalities I can get my hands on) and CivicObserver (which is generalized full-text search alerting for municipalities via email, mastodon, bluesky, and slack webhook)
What immigration enforcement are you speaking of here? Legal? Illegal? If the latter, wouldn't this system be solving crime?
This isn't a question of ideals; it's addressing the uptick in illegal actions by immigration officials during the current US administration. It's addressing the selective application of the law to further conservative agendas.
Yes, some immigration enforcement is legal. Congratulations.
Does selectively not enforcing immigration law further liberal agendas?
- House seats (and therefore electoral votes) are determined by census - which includes illegal immigrant populations.
- If you can waddle across the border at 8.5 months pregnant, you can birth a citizen with no further requirements.
Ergo, "sanctuary cities" and other intentional lack of enforcement allow states to pump up their representation in Congress and increase government handouts.
However, I would suggest others consider what an evil leftist, for example, could do with the same technology.
What are some things that could they do?
Right-leaning policy in 2025 typically leans towards enforcing the laws as written: in this case, immigration law is being bolstered by surveillance technology.
Which laws are liberals going to theoretically now start radically enforcing that conservatives were turning a blind eye to? Flock cameras don't exactly help the IRS make the rich "pay their fair share."
I do not believe you will be able to force overexposure of lettered areas using IR diodes alone. License plates are designed with intentionally high reflective contrast in the offset areas.
Even if you could put enough energy into that area, these cameras have switchable IR cutoff filters that are used during the daytime (making this approach only viable at night.)
Another idea: a visible-spectrum laser + camera on a tracking gimbal? Absolutely could block (or even destroy!) these types of imaging efforts on a small scale.
Sounds like the cameras are working? Seems like a reason to put up more cameras: vandals can't take out any two as easily/simultaneously.
This is on my town and seems like strange wording. What the heck are private flock cameras?
>The City and Flock have negotiated a Right-of-Way Use Agreement, which will grant Flock a non-exclusive license to install and maintain certain private cameras within the City's ROW. The agreement is for a period of twenty (20) years and may be renewed for up to two (2) successive five (5) year terms. Flock will be responsible for paying the permit and inspection fees for existing private cameras within the City's ROW and for any newly installed private cameras within the ROW as well as for an annual ROW usage fee on a per camera basis for the right to install cameras within the City's ROW.
20 years...
Is the argument that Flock cameras are used for mass surveillance defensible, or just paranoia, and if it is real, does anyone have a good idea of whether the same argument would apply in the UK?
4D AI speed/behaviour cameras (Redspeed Centio): multi-lane radar + high-res imaging; flags speeding, phone use, no seatbelt, and can check plates against DVLA/insurance databases.
AI “Heads-Up” camera units (Acusensus): elevated/overhead infrared cameras (often on trailers/vans) to spot phone use and seatbelt/non-restrained occupants.
New digital fixed cameras (Vector SR): slimmer, more discreet spot-speed cameras (sometimes with potential add-on behaviour detection, depending on setup).
Smart motorway gantry cameras (HADECS): enforce variable speed limits on motorways from gantries.
AI-assisted litter cameras: council enforcement for objects/litter thrown from vehicles
Our definitions of mass surveillance must differ for you to ask this. Flock cameras are marketed and purchases for mass surveillance expressly.
That doesn't mean the cameras are good; I think they aren't, or rather, at least in my metro, I know they aren't.
In the vast majority of cases this means: "enforcing immigration law." A presidential administration deeming it politically expedient to import illegal immigrants via turning a blind eye doesn't change the law of the land.
> that they're entitled to the ALPR data collected by municipalities in order to accomplish this goal
"Entitled" to purchase something that is being sold on the market for a fair price? Why wouldn't they be entitled to purchase this info if a vendor wishes to sell it to them?
Flock will just start putting cameras up on private property and selling the data to the Federal government. Municipalities can do very little to stop this, and local governments are pretty poor at keeping their true reasons out of public forum deliberation. Loophole methods of prohibition ("Can't put up camera masts") are easily thwarted in court.
Its always defensible - think of the children!/terrorists! - and always in the same dystopian direction. Just believing yourself to be being tracked, changes behaviour. Just as in large cities, people moderate their behaviour.
The defense industry is something of a foregone era. Most capital has been allocated to surveillance capitalism since last decades, providing very powerful tools to influence and measure the personal lives of the population. But things are shaping up for more active forms of control; as the finance sector is putting all their eggs in the next iteration, LLMs, which is being accepted by the public as a means for thought generation. I am totally not surprised to learn that the government now needs to a) sponsor this business model and b) needs to pull this horse inside government and executive branches.
Sure, there are positive use cases to be thought of for LLMs. But lets not be that naive this time, shall we? I mean, Grokopedia anyone?
What for? I don't understand why you want to record some stranger jogging, drinking coffee, smoking, eating or simply walking and minding their own business. What am I missing?
So for solving crimes.
I'm in favor, then!
We should compensate those who are improperly arrested and quickly correct these violations, attempt to prevent them in the future, reprimand those involved if necessary, but absolutely keep pushing ahead at full steam on law enforcement efforts otherwise.
Hot take: some small number of unlawful arrests aren't the "neener neener neener, you can't stop illegal immigration" that folks seem to think they are.
Why? And separately, do you believe that people wrongly arrested in the US are being compensated accordingly? The justice system in the US isn’t known for being easy or cheap to navigate, and I don’t think getting a warrant before detaining people is that huge of an ask.
I'm not advocating to "move fast and break things," but that it's very easy and cheap for illegal immigration maximalists to advocate that society should "move never so nothing breaks." This type of obstruction is actually a form of conservative policy, but "it's for the causes I like so it's okay."
> don’t think getting a warrant before detaining people is that huge of an ask
The law doesn't require a warrant before detaining people - and shouldn't. This doesn't even make sense: "Hold on Mr. Bank Robber - I'm not detaining you, but pretty please don't go anywhere, I gotta go get a warrant first!"
I'm certain that had the 2024 election gone a different way, we'd still have our Flock cameras.
There's Eugene and Springfield, OR; Cambridge, MA; a few in TX; Denver and Longmont, CO; Redmond, WA; Evanston and Oak Park, IL; etc.
Oak Park is 4.7 square miles. All our surrounding munis have rolled out more ALPRs after we killed ours.
Further: because of the oversight we had over our ALPRs before, they weren't really doing anything, for something like 2 years. OPPD kept them around because they were handy for post-incident investigation. We effectively had to stop responding to alerts once our police oversight commission ran the numbers of what the stops were.
Which is to say: our "de-Flocking" was mostly cosmetic. We'd already basically shut the cameras down and cut all sharing out.
I'm just happy for any sort of critical analysis or attention being brought to every municipality's use of this technology as so often people have no idea at all, though. Because there are a lot of counties which are far worse, and almost none of the public is even aware; I suspect there is at least some gap between people who would care if they knew, and people who care now.
[0]: https://alpranalysis.com/virginia/206807
[1]: https://transparency.flocksafety.com/williamsburg-va-pd
I also didn't personally get the contract cancelled --- in fact, I (for complicated reasons) opposed cancelling the contract. But I can tell you the sequence of things that led to the cancellation:
1. OPPD made the mistake of trying to deploy the cameras as an ordinary appropriation, without direct oversight, which pissed the board off.
2. We deployed the cameras in a pilot program with a bunch of restrictions (use only for violent crimes, security controls, stuff like that) that included monthly transparency reports to our CPOC commission.
3. Over the pilot period, the results from the cameras weren't good. That wasn't directly the fault of the cameras (the problem is the Illinois LEADS database), but it allowed opponents of the cameras to tell a (true) story.
4. At the first renewal session, an effort was made to shut off the cameras entirely (I was in favor then!), but the police chief made an impassioned case for keeping them as investigative tools. We renewed the contract with two provisos: we essentially stopped responding to Flock alerts, and we cut off all out-of-state sharing.
5. Transparency reports about the cameras to CPOC continued to tell a dismal story about their utility, complicated now by the fact that we (reasonably) were not using them for alerting in the first place; we had something like 5 total stories over a year post renewal, and 4 of them were really flimsy. The cameras did not work.
6. Trump got elected.
7. A push to kill the cameras off once and for all came from the progressive faction of the board; Trump and the poor performance of the cameras made them impossible to defend.
8. OPPD turned off all sharing of camera data.
9. The board voted to cancel the contract anyways.
Apparently there is scraping of public data + keyword matching + moderators filtering the matches.
An example that he shows a bit earlier in the video comes from this page, which has an RSS feed: https://www.cityofsanbenito.com/AgendaCenter/City-Commission...
The video says it's open source but I can't find the source.
I also gave a talk on this concept that walks through the whole process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtWzNnZvQ6w
The short answer is: there's no common API for any of these sites, and even the ones that do have an API are sometimes misconfigured. It's why I wrote all the scrapers by hand.
https://www.king5.com/article/news/investigations/investigat...
Previously, we had some balance between privacy and accountability. A bystander or a victim of a collision could remember license plate numbers and give them in a police report. The police could tail you (but only you, because $$$) to discover your movements. But government agents couldn't track the movements of all the people, all the time. Now they can.
The societal balance of power has shifted and is now seriously lopsided in favor of the rulers. And cheerleaders like you don't mind, as long as you can purchase a little temporary safety...
EDIT: Rather then downvote, offer an example of a masked, unidentified person abducting someone who is neither a kidnapper nor secret police.
Cell phones are ripe for abuse...do you carry one?
The poster above asked why you personally support total surveillance, despite it being ripe for abuse. How inevitable something may or may not be is completely irrelevant to whether you personally choose to support it. Acknowledging that it can be abused means you have to make that logical connection and say why something being ripe for abuse doesn't preclude you from cheering on for it.
Crime per capita could be completely static and this statement would always be true simply because there are more people.
Overall crime rates are up from pre-COVID, but nowhere near all-time highs.
Or, if you mean specifically traffic-related deaths and injuries, again, trending the wrong way, but also nowhere near all-time highs.
In either case, you still haven't indicated how pervasive surveillance will help...
https://counciloncj.org/homicide-trends-report/
I do agree that we have heavy crime (though HN will say it's all anecdotal and the stats show we're in a period of remarkable peace).
I just don't know that greater enforcement around vehicle use will have the outsized effect that you're claiming.
I wish there was a way to implement this sort of “surveilance” in such a way that it only impacts criminals or would be criminals and only them.
I was specifically asking about the GP's focus on vehicles (larger plates, unregistered vehicle enforcement) and how they thought that would reduce crime so much.
Then the question is, why don't they do that? Why do we need a surveillance state to enable police to do what residents might consider the bare minimum?
At the end of the day, avoiding accusations of racism is behind much of modern policing's foibles (like the near-total relaxation of traffic law enforcement in some cities).
Where I am, police officers get paid healthy 6-figure salaries plus crazy OT to boot. $300k total comp is absolutely not unheard of. I think the police have basically figured out that the best way to stay on the gravy train is to do as little as possible. Certainly stop enforcing traffic laws entirely, as those are the highest risk interactions. Just rest n' vest, baby. So you get to hear about "underfunded" and "overworked" police departments while observing overpaid police officers who are structurally disincentivized from doing their jobs.
The bottom line is: People want policing, but adding more police officers won't deliver results and anyway is too expensive. What to do?
Enter mass surveillance and automated policing. If we can't rely on police to do the policing, we'll have to do it some other way. Oh, look at how cheap it is to put cameras up everywhere. And hey, we can get a statistical inferential model (excuse me, Artificial Intelligence!) to flag "suspicious" cars and people. Yeah yeah, privacy risks blah blah blah turnkey totalitarianism whomp whomp whomp. But think of all the criminals we can catch! All without needing police to actually do anything!
While police are expensive and practically useless at doing things people want, this technology can actually deliver results. That makes it irresistible. The problem is that it's turning our society into a panopticon and putting us all in great danger of an inescapable totalitarian state dominated by a despot and his AI army.
But those are abstract risks, further out and probabilistic in nature. Humans are terrible at making these kinds of decisions; as a population we almost always choose short-term benefit over abstract long-term risks and harms. Just look at climate change and fossil fuel consumption.
Your efficiency gain in the size and complexity of the policies and procedures handbook would be unparalleled.
But why might the crime rate shoot up on day two of your short tenure as police chief?
Hint: a metric is distinct from a target.
I am concerned about the lack of follow through after police intervention. Lack of prosecution and convictions, light sentences, repeat offenders being released, etc.
If judges would simply keep someone with 3+ felonies in jail, crime would drop 80%.
...they'd get called racist. Let's be real. The tint thing in particular gets filed as "bullshit excuse for racial profiling", never mind that illegal tint can be empirically measured.
We have that too here, the issue seems to be more that it's a catch and release crime. The police not only knew who was doing it on our street, they had caught them multiple times and released them immediately. I'm guessing if they're not caught with stolen guns on them here it's not enough of a charge to bother with. I really doubt Flock would matter.
Might feel that way, but objectively, violent and property crime are on the decline in the USA.
I've also heard many stories where a person gets high def footage of someone committing a crime (usually burglary, smash and grab, or porch snatching) and the cops are basically like "eh we'll get to it when we get to it"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States
edit: can someone explain what is objectionable about this comment?
All of this was caught on high definition video.
However, he also left his phone and State ID (he was also unlicensed) in the car.
Did the cops drive the 2 blocks to the address listed on his ID to arrest him for leaving the scene of the accident, or to give him any kind of blood alcohol test? No, no they did not.
Did the cops follow up in any way whatsoever? No, no they did not. How do I know this? Because a few days later, I walked the two blocks to the house to inquire whether the car was insured. It was not.
---
What is objectionable about your comment is the same thing that eventually plagues every social media that has downvoting/flagging: you violated someone's strongly-held priors.
In those statistical roundups homicide is treated as a proxy for crime in general, so the best we can rigorously say is that homicide rates have decreased - which is, obviously, great. Researchers treat homicide as a proxy because they know not all crimes are reported.
Anecdotally, living in [big city] between 2014 and 2021 my street-parked car was broken into ~10 times, and stolen once (though I got it back). I never reported the break-ins, because [city PD] doesn't care. In [current suburb] a drive by shooting at the other end of our block received no police response at all, and won't be in the crime stats.
Are those types of crimes increasing? I don't know! I'd had my car broken into before 2014, and I witnessed (fortunately only aurally - I was just around the corner) a drive-by in the nineties. But... That's the point: no one knows! These incidents aren't captured in the statistics.
Personally, I think the proxies are broadly accurate, and crime in general is lower, and I shouldn't trust my anecdotal experiences. However, I think the general lack of trust in the quality of American police-work (much of it for good reason, sadly) biases most people towards trusting anecdotal experience and media-driven narratives.
I am more skeptical of homicide rate stats than you are, given the garbage data I see for crime in general, but even I am willing to admit they're much more robust than the rest.
Also I believe my eyes and when I see crimes happening in my neighborhood I don't rush to "the stats" to ask them what I saw.
How else do you condense down myriad and often conflicting datapoints of this complex human existence in order to get trends you can make decisions on?
Longer answer: this is a fundamental problem across many domains. I don't think anyone has solved it.
I think of a story of Bezos being told by his Amazon execs that customer support wait times were meeting X service levels. In the meeting room with his execs, Bezos dials up customer service, gets some wait time of >>>X and makes the point that service levels are not up to his expectations.
I don't think that story is a great analogy for running society but is interesting nonetheless.
Stats only get worse from there: at neutral they contain no information, at worst they are dis-info.
Have you tried electing moderate prosecutors who don't drop charges just because the habitual offender has a heartbleed sob story?
False premise
Drive around Kansas City sometime, particularly on the Missouri side. Tons of temporary paper license plates that are a year past expiration. Any member of law enforcement could pull the person over and enforce a penalty for it.
They just... don't. I don't know exactly why that is. Are they afraid that doing so opens them up to the chance of being shot or engaging in a high-speed pursuit? The former definitely happened in North Kansas City a few years ago (not to be confused with KC North) but having a massive network of cameras tracking license plates and how they move across town doesn't help. At the end of the day, you have to send someone a fine, and if they don't pay it and don't show up for court, you are again faced with having a police officer try to interact with them one-on-one, this time to enforce a bench warrant for their arrest.
In the meantime, you now have an absolutely massive data set of citizen movements being collected without a warrant by an increasingly authoritarian American government.
But long-expired temps are everywhere. So confusing. How?
A car is a necessity in most of Missouri. Kansas City has more highway miles per capita than any other major city in the country (and maybe in the world); IIRC St. Louis is fourth-most highway miles per capita. Public transit has major gaps. Inability to drive is such an encumbrance that those convicted of DUI are allowed to petition courts for a hardship license allowing them to drive to work and other essential places because not allowing for this could fail under the Eighth Amendment.
All of this is to say that if you are able to pay for a car, but not the sales tax for the car, and you get pulled over for not registering after your temp tags expire, you are essentially under house arrest until you can put together the money to both pay the fine and to pay the tax on the car, which is now exponentially harder since you can't drive anywhere. Since that'd put disadvantaged people at an even greater disadvantage, it might be a "community relations" move by the PD to look the other way on these cases, at least until another blatant violation occurs.
Do you, reader, want to have to confront a bunch of scary people for a $? Oh, you think having a gun makes it a bit less scary?
Almost no one wants to confront dangerous people day in and day out. Once in a while to flex the hero complex, maybe. But a few times of that will cure you of any particular desire to seek it out.
The people that want to do that are one in a thousand types. Basically criminals themselves, just on the right side of the law who use the 'criminal' mentality for good. Most police are not that.
They want to do a job, collect a paycheck, and do it in an easy way. Like how I like to drive to work rather than do a handstand and walk 5 miles on my hands and wrists. They get little to nothing for making their job harder.
The people with the most motivation to stop the criminal is the victim themselves. You are pretty much on your own. The state won't be coming to save you.
I'm sure there are exceptions, but I think most folks (including criminals) believe crime is, generally speaking, bad. Folks commit crimes to survive, to enrich themselves, out of retribution, out of lapse of judgment, or lack of self control. Almost all some flavor of unmet needs. You put money into tackling those challenges, address why people are stealing, why turf wars break out, why addiction ruins lives and puts people in terrible positions, why poor nutrition and family support and mental health care lead to so many folks slipping through the cracks.
In other words, the main problems with schools have little to do with schools. But they’re complicated and expensive problems with distant payoff, so we keep monkeying around with schools instead.
My sense is that such systems are rather less consistent at reading temp tags, and that temp tag issuance tends to be decentralized/dealer-based, rather more ad hoc, and thus rather less legible for semi-automated enforcement purposes.
These cameras only punish law-abiding citizens. Fake plates and out-of-date temp tags effectively render these people invisible to the ALPRs.
You have fallen for political talking points.
I also track Puerto Rico, but only at the Senate level: https://senado.pr.civic.band/
I couldn’t imagine living in a country where you can shoot someone in the street and drive off, and nobody knows where the car went.
Privacy is a human right. Sacrificing your human rights just for a bit of "safety" is just short sighted.
The system you’re defending is a list of flagged plate numbers and a way of comparing seen plates against that list, and a way of reporting matches to the local police.
The actual system logs all cars seen, saves the information forever, and reports the data to a third party who can share it with anyone they want.
The first is the person who has no concern for surveillance. He believes that if you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear. You see more of these people in older generations, when institutional trust was irrationally high.
The second is the person who responds rabidly to any form or application of surveillance. This is the sort of person who believes that all surveillance is abused, public or private, and if it isn't, that it inevitably will be. Slippery slope fallacy is his motto.
A reasonable range of opinion can exist on the subject between those two extremes.
Personally, I have no problem with traffic cameras per se. First, we are in a public space where recordings are generally permitted. Second, no one is being stalked or harassed by a fixed camera. Third, there are problems that only surveillance can reasonably solve (loud cars, dangerous speeding).
My concerns would have to do with the following.
1) Unauthorized access to accumulated data. You should have to have some kind of legal permission to access the data and to do so in very specific ways. For example, if you neighborhood is being disrupted by loud cars, you can use complaints to get permission to query for footage and license plates of cars identified as loud. Each access is logged for audit purposes.
2) Data fusion. You should not be able to combine datasets without permission either. And when such combination occurs, it should also be scoped appropriately. Queries should then be subject to (1).
3) Indefinite hold. Data should have an expiration date. That is, we should not be able to sequester and store data for indefinite periods of time.
4) Private ownership. The collection of certain kinds of surveillance data should belong only to the public and fall under the strict controls above.
The non-specific and general fear of abuse is not a good counterargument.
Not the camera, no, just the eyes behind it -- namely police officers who have been caught stalking exes via Flock.
> Third, there are problems that only surveillance can reasonably solve (loud cars, dangerous speeding).
In many jurisdictions in the US, police must personally witness the events to intervene. /Traffic/ cameras are one thing -- they only record those who violate the laws (red light, speeding). But continual monitoring of all persons passing falls into another bucket, like a Stringray device would.
> The non-specific and general fear of abuse is not a good counterargument.
The abuse of this data is already happening. It's not a hypothetical.
(This is a hypothetical because obviously in reality there's no easy philosophical through line from ideas to policy.)
We don't! I mean, the police don't do so today. No tabs? OK! Expired tabs? OK, too! No license plates? Who gives a shit? Not the police.
And that dives into more impactful crimes such as property theft which when reported to police nothing comes from it.
Hell, I have dashcam of a cop going home roughly at 11 pm going 80+ on a 60mph highway in his cop Ford SUV. But everyone routinely speeds, 7+ over post-COVID. The legislature is trying to do something about it, but no one really cares.
State Patrol is likely the only ones performing any real traffic enforcement anymore.
If your solution is to continuously neuter the police because you perceive them to be ineffective then I'd challenge you to think of the endgame of that logic. If you think it can't get worse than it is now, well, we politically disagree.
Police aren't ineffective, hell they kill unarmed individuals on a regular basis. That's damn effective to ending any form of future crime!
Like what are we doing as a society? Stop trying to build the surveilance nexus from sci fi. I don't want to live in a zero-crime world [1]. It's not worth it. Safety third, there is always gonna be some risk.
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/flock-cameras-lead-col...
[1] Edit to add: if this raises hackles, I encourage folks to think through what true zero crime (or maybe lets call it six-nines lawfulness) entails. If we had literal precrime, would that stop 99.9999% of crime? (hint: read the book/watch the movie)
We're living constantly in the scene from Fahrenheit 451 where the government asks everybody to go outside at once and report any suspicious activity. We have made it potentially not OK for kids to push boundaries or make mistakes.
That's about the worst, most inflammatory way possible to make your point. I agree with you 100%, but I am begging you to learn to frame your ideas better, in order to get people on your side. If you say that to any voters you will lose them instantly
I'm not a politician. I'm a systems thinker. If someone can't reason their way through what a "zero-crime world" actually entails, I doubt my other ideas will get through to them. Zero crime. Zero. No speeding, no IP infringement, no "just this one time". Zero.
That's also why I like asking "why stop there?" We've basically solved surveilance. It's an engineering problem. We have the capacity to track everyone (who does not make a VERY concerted effort to stealth) all the time, almost everywhere.
Exactly, I like this. Thanks for helping me rephrase.
Privacy and liberty advocates are unlikely to win in council meetings by sheer numbers. They get some leverage with campaign donations, especially recently that Bitcoin made a lot of such people rich.
So the feds just put their flock cameras anywhere they had a little piece of federal property, and there is no way to vote those ones off. They have little patches that cover the highways and some main thoroughfares. It's everywhere.
If public servants funded by taxpayers don't like it, maybe they shouldn't be forcing it on the populace and breaking the forth amendment.
What stance would you recommend? You're one of the folks here i recognize immediatedy and have a wealth of wisdom.
Realism isn't very palatable. Most folks want to stay in their little rat race lane and push their little skinner box lever and get their little variable interval algorithmic treato, and they are content with that. That's fine. It's just a shame they gotta tighten the noose around absolutely everyone else for a morsel of safety.
Every aspect of cybernetics (whether it be engineering, society/politics, biology) involves deliberate tradeoffs. In metaphor, we have a big knob with "liberty/crime" on one side and "surveillance/safety" on the other. It's highly nonlinear and there are diminishing returns at both extrema. Everyone (subconsciously) has some ideal point where they think that crime-o-stat should be set.
I'm saying don't turn it up to 11, and it's already set pretty high. It's increasingly technologically possible, and I think it's a bad thing to chase the long tail. I'm pretty happy with where we are at the present, but corporations keep marketing we need more cameras, more detection, more ALPRs, more algos, more predictive policing, more safety, who doesn't want to be more safe? I think it's very precarious.
I reiterate: it's uncomfortable, but I don't want to live in a world with zero crimes because everyone has probably committed crimes without even knowing it. The costs, both fiscal and in terms of civil liberties, of chasing ever-decreasing-crime are far higher than finding some stable setpoint that balances privacy and liberty with measures that justly deter crime. Let us not let the cure become worse than the disease.
1. You have no expectation of privacy in public.
2. People carry surveillance devices in their pocket.
It is somehow simultaneously bad that the government uses public surveillance, but completely fine the public does. I don't think it's acceptable these target "flock". It's completely useless doesn't solve the greater problem. The greater problem in my eyes is:
1. I can't move around my own neighborhood without being recorded by 200 personal cameras whose data is uploaded an analyzed by various security companies.
2. I can't go to someone's house without their internal cameras recorded my every move and word.
3. I can't go outside without some subset of morons, that seem to always exist, bringing out their pocket government tracking device to record everyones face, movement, location, and action.
4. I can't say or do anything in public without risking some social justice warrior recording me, cutting it up, and using it to destroy me.
The greater problem is the proliferation of surveillance devices in every day life. Flock is such a small player in the grand scheme of this. These websites are simply art pieces and do nothing to solve the actual, pervasive, problem we face.
So do we just stop at Flock and raise the Mission Accomplished banner? Or do we forget this nonsense and target the real problem.
As an example, see the recent case of the woman who was arrested simply for driving through a town at the same time as a robbery occurred. That sort of thing is why people care.
If the data collection is performed by a private entity and then sold to the government, that is government surveillance. I agree that this is more widespread than Flock and other big names. However, Flock and its ilk currently stand to do far more damage in practice. They offer integrated turnkey solutions that are available to practically any law enforcement, from shithead chud officers in tiny shithole towns to the NYPD and all its grand history of institutionalized misconduct, and we are already seeing the effects of that.
See, also, the recent case of a teenager who was arrested because a Flock camera or similar thought a Doritos bag in his pocket was a gun. I'll let you guess what color his skin was.
In other words: idea -> pol.
Everything else you said should get you flagged, but it is popular here so I'm not holding my breath.
Merely being a counter-narrative to some other narrative is not valuable in itself, otherwise all sorts of nonsense would be valuable. Proof that counter-narratives are not automatically valuable: "the moon is made of blue cheese" and "the moon is made of green cheese" provide worthless counter-narratives to each other.
I will edit my comment as well since you edited yours instead of responding. I don’t think the GP’s comment is the equivalent of saying that the moon is made of cheese.
Which is patently absurd on its face. Much like saying the moon is made of cheese.
Edit: I’m done pretending like regressive ideas like removing voting rights from entire segments of the population are points for valid discussion.
We do need to restrict the franchise drastically. I don't know if this is where I'd draw the line, but it is actually one of the better ideas.
Other ideas: net tax payers, veterans, citizens
I don't believe disenfranchising them is the best solution- I might take a Jeffersonian view that in being so illiterate, they are already effectively disenfranchised (someone else is "voting" for them - influencing their choice in a probably undue way).
A better solution would be to find effective ways to educate them
These people cannot all live in the same society and have peace exist. Logistically this problem can’t really be solved peacefully and will eventually boil up. We’re already seeing a sharp ramp up in terrorist attacks across the ideological spectrum
Sometimes, we should let nature play its course. Whoever comes out on top will subsequently canibalize themselves with infighting anyway.
- should not allow franchise holders to arrogate state function to themselves in a snowball manner
- should not allow franchise holders to enhance franchise power
Not in a direct “outlaw this”sense but in a dynamic systems sense. So something like net tax payer is good. If you use it to vote yourself more state benefits you lose the franchise and others can then remove that benefit from you.
It will be hard to handle delayed reward situations (I pay now to get benefit later) so I think the problem is we just don’t have the correct device for this yet.
But the restricted franchise is something I think is very useful. The model of having free riders vote for more free riding is rapidly approaching its limit.
99% of the population is voluntarily carrying sophisticated tracking devices with self-reporting always on
even if the signal is off it catches up later
with SEVERAL layers of tracking
not just your phone carrier but Google+Apple stores have your location as the apps are always on in the background
even phone makers have their own tracking layer sometimes
we know EVERY person that went to Epstein Island from their phone tracking and they didn't even have smartphones back then
Flock is just another lazy layer/databroker
I want strict, strict guardrails on when and where that occurs. I want that information erased as soon as the context of the citation wraps up. I want every company/contractor in this space FOIA-able and held to as strict or stricter requirements than the government for transparency and corruption and other regulation. I don't want every timestamped/geostamped datapoint of every law abiding driver passing into any juncture hoovered into a data lake and tracked and easily queryable. That's (IMHO, IANAL, WTF, BBQ) a flagrant 4th amendment violation, and had the framers been able to conceive such a thing, they'd absolutely add a "and no dragnet surveilance" provision from day 1.
If that seems hypocritical, my line starts with "has a crime occurred with decent likelihood?" "Lets collect everything and go snoopin for crimes" is beyond the pale.
Judges require warrants to put a GPS tracker on your car. Now that Flock cameras are so ubiquitous in many cities, this gives them access to the same data without a warrant.
But, I do not think it's reasonable for an automated system to systematically capture, store, and analyze all of my movements (or anyone else who is not suspected of a serious crime). If they suspect I have done something illegal, they should have to get a warrant and then the system can be triggered to start tracking me.
I understand the desire for the data... sometimes I would like to know if my kids are following the rules at home, but I have a stronger conviction that I don't want my kids to grow up in a home where they feel like they are under constant surveillance. It's a gross feeling to be under constant surveillance, like you're living in a panopticon built for prisoners, which is an unfair side effect when you've done nothing wrong. Mass data surveillance of everyone is a totalitarian dystopian that I don't want to live in.
The fact that driving is a 'privilege' doesn't negate your rights to be secure in your papers, the police should have to have articulable suspicion that your car is unregistered or unlicensed before they can demand you to display your plate.
Does that imply that Android settings lie about which apps have accessed location data?
2. Consent
3. Accountability (e.g. A government agency needs a warrant to use your cell phone location data against you).
It's also not uncommon for police officers to use their tools to stalk women.
Now we're given the same untrustworthy officers full profiles of an individuals travel history without a "need to know". If you can't see how that's dangerous, I don't know what to tell you. In the US if someone is threatening your life, you can typically shoot them if you're out of options. You usually can't do that with an officer, even if they're off duty. The rest of the cops will stand behind that thin blue line and harass you.
And Flock specifically has already been used for this multiple times.
This video here literally catches a K-9 officer faking a drug hit just to harass this guy over an expired inspection sticker. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cv5kXxiJiMA
When nazis kill jews that is bad.
When jews kill nazis that is good (arguably (it used to be obvious but now it is only arguable)).
Symmetric situations are not equivalent.
Judging by the downvotes, there are a lot of surveillance state apologists/quislings in here! Oops, I mean "founders".
Cars are weapons. They kill people quickly with momentum, and slowly with pollution and a sedentary lifestyle. We need to start treating them as such
My town is "densely developed" (key phrase) residential with nearly no commerce to speak of. The largest employer is the school district, which isn't that big.
The nearest city with major employers is 45 minutes away outside of commute hours.
Now if you say "What about all the crazy drivers??" think about this: have you ever considered that you might be the crazy driver? Maybe not 100% of the time, but maybe one day you're stressed so you speed up to get through a red light, or you really need to read this text because it's important. You only need to be a crazy driver for 30 seconds to end someone's life. Something that's almost impossible to do on public transportation or on a bike.
The rise in enthusiasm for ALPR is mostly a consequence of this asymmetry. Previously you'd have law enforcement go around patrolling to keep safety but the number of drivers in the US is growing faster than the number of LEOs and LEOs are expensive and controversial in certain areas.
I advocate for traffic calming all the time. But the asymmetry is real and, honestly, quite frustrating. A single distracted driver can cause you to panic brake on your bike and fall off and hurt yourself.
The problem is, cars are extremely useful to most people in the US, public transit has very real inherent downsides, and local policies that disincentivize car use are very unpopular when actually implemented. Voting citizens get mad when the price of gas goes up and demand that their elected officials do something about it (also electrification of cars, which is proceeding apace, makes gasoline prices less important for ordinary people and also reduces some of the real negative externalities of cars).
I have used both urban public transit and cars regularly to get around, I'm personally familiar with the upsides and downsides of both, and while I definitely do want public transit infrastructure to be good, I frankly do not trust the motives of anti-car urbanist activists. I think they are willing to make the lives of most people on aggregate worse because they think private car ownership is in some sense immoral and so overweight the downsides of cars and underweight the downsides of public transit.
Also using drive-by shootings and car-break-ins as an anti-car argument is pretty disingenuous. This is a problem with criminals committing directly-violent crime or property crime against ordinary people, not with cars per se. Criminals absolutely commit crimes against people using public transit, and indeed one of the major problems with public transit is that it puts you in a closed space with random members of the public who might commit crimes against you (e.g. the Jordan_Neely incident, the random stabbing of Iryna_Zarutska, the less-widely-reported random crime incidents that happen regularly on urban public transit systems). One of the most important public policy measures that could be enacted to make public transit better is severe and consistent policing of public order crimes on transit - and of course more severe policing is also a potential solution to car drive-bys and break-ins.
If you're lucky. Sometimes you just get anti-car. I'd love to not need a car at all, but where I am now it would mean Ubering instead because they've made driving worse while transit isn't expanded to fit the gap.