There is a societal consensus that driving is a privilege which can be restricted or revoked, not that you give up your rights by driving. In fact the opposite is true, the courts have found that drivers have fourth amendment rights for instance.
You don't need a warrant to record people in public. You keep throwing around the term "surveil" as though this is a singular activity. Do the police need a warrant to search your house or car? Yes. Do they need a warrant to get Google to hand over your Gmail contents? Yes?
Do they need a warrant to photograph the exterior of your house? No. Do they need a warrant to photograph you in public? No
You keep missing that these aren't singular photographs. This isn't the 70s: these are persistent systems that aggregate video and photographs of everyone, tracking their movements over time. That is enough to make this constitutionally distinct from a cop taking a single picture of your house.
And? These are still videos of people in public. This information is in plain view. You keep insisting that if you aggregate public information it somehow becomes private information, but that's not true unless the Supreme Court makes some new precedence-setting decision.
That precedence-setting decision would be Carpenter v US [1], which established that being in public does not automatically eliminate all fourth amendment protection, and the comprehensive nature of government surveillance can matter constitutionally.
Carpenter v. United States was about the government accessing telecommunications data. This is not public information, location data also tracks people's movements on private property. Just like the other case you cited, Chatrie v. United States, this is a situation wholly removed from public facing video cameras.
Carpenter was not about who owned the data or the technology being used but rather the government reconstructing a person's movements over time, including movements occurring in public.
The fact that the data is owned by a private company or that some of it is considered private by the individual doesn't matter: it's about tracking individuals over time.
> Carpenter was not about who owned the data or the technology being used but rather the government reconstructing a person's movements over time, including movements occurring in public.
...and including movements occurring in private.
> The fact that the data is owned by a private company or that some of it is considered private by the individual doesn't matter: it's about tracking individuals over time.
More importantly, tracking their private movements over time, not just their public movements. You're hand waving away an important part of the case. And the decision does not extend to ALPR readers, from what I can tell.
> The Supreme Court's ruling in Carpenter was narrow and did not otherwise change the third-party doctrine related to other business records that might incidentally reveal location information, nor did it overrule prior decisions concerning conventional surveillance techniques and tools such as security cameras.
Trying to interpret Carter v. US as prohibiting public security cameras is a very big leap
> A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere. To the contrary, “what [one] seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.”
This would still be an issue even if they weren't recorded in private spaces. At issue here is the reconstruction of data, regardless of if it happened in public or private spaces.
Picking out one quote doesn't change the fact that the ruling in Carpenter was narrow, limited to cell phone location information. You're just wrong about the scope of Carpenter, and unwilling to accept that fact.
You're focused on the narrowness of the final ruling and not the vast legal reasoning that led to it.
Carpenter's reasoning concerning comprehensive records of an individual's movements (regardless of private or public) are relevant when LE uses aggregated Flock data to reconstruct a person's movements over an extended period.
Except the narrowness of the final ruling is exactly what makes it not impact the legality of Flock. It doesn't matter whether you think the courts decision should be extended to cameras - your opinion doesn't decide the law, the court's opinion does.
Except what I'm discussing is why the court went with that decision and how that reasoning applies to modern technology like Flock cameras. Your original argument was that cameras are in public and location data is private and includes private data, and the distinction is that you have no expectation of privacy in public. The court doesn't agree, and they've explicitly pointed out that 4A still applies when someone is being monitored and tracked in public.
> The court doesn't agree, and they've explicitly pointed out that 4A still applies when someone is being monitored and tracked in public.
Only when that tracking is done via cell phone location information. The Carpenter decision did not apply this to all forms of public monitoring. You keep ignoring the fact that the decision was narrowly scoped to cell phone location data, and continue to erroneously claim that it applied to public tracking in general.
I agree that Flock and other license plate readers should be regulated. Law enforcement should be logged and have rules for how and when they can access these records. What I would strongly disagree with is the idea that flock and license plate readers are unconstitutional and should be banned.
I testified against the equivalent of this bill in my state. One of the things I mentioned is because of a non-trivial monetary fine per infraction [1], as someone who would potentially need to implement this, I would have no idea how to reliably differentiate a computer that was simply out-of-date/implementation has bugs from willful non-compliance vs Open Source [2].
It just felt like the bill had the goals it had when it was created, and the broader cloud of "gee, if people implement this a certain way, it could have unintended consequences" was completely ignored. But don't worry, one of the co-sponsors proclaimed. near the end of the hearing, that they had a Masters Degree in Computer Science and worked on operating systems in their career, so they made sure to let us know that we were over-reacting.
The other thing that really pissed me off was it was rumored my states bill was going to get an open source exemption. However, they waited until the end of the hearing to introduce all of the amendments, including the Open Source exemption. The proposed amendments were not publicly visible on the bill page or the page about the committee meeting for that day. This ended up being an excellent strategy to sway other committee members [3], since they could just hand wave the bulk of us as "concerns resolved". It was quite illuminating to also see media lobbyists come in and verbatim just state "hey did you get our proposed amendments?" and then without much reading of them at all, they were ratified during that session. Lesson learned: the moment there was a rumor of amendment, I should have made a considerable effort to get my hands on that text ahead of time since for the implementation concerns I raised, I was still unhappy. I'm not quite sure though how much of a difference it would have made though, since at least 30 other people fell into the same trap.
Anyhow, hopefully my long-winded Sunday morning post was useful to someone in the future either when dealing with compliance, a version of the bill in their own states, or the federal government's attempts to do a similar thing. I confess that I have been lazy and not remotely done any due diligence on that federal bill (https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/8250... / HR-8250: Parent's Decide Act). I encourage others to be better than me and contact their representatives, assuming it isn't already on the fast track to becoming law.
[1] at least, for smaller businesses -- big tech won't care! I think it was something like $6,000/pop, which is chump change for big tech and will be negotiated during settlement talks.
[2] Okay, you can check the user agents. But who wants to need to maintain or pull in a list of enforceable user agents! What happens if someone is spoofing the UA and suddenly they end up in my list of "must check" UAs (or inversely, !(not must check)). How long does one reasonably wait for the API call to time out? What about running the app on Wine? And most importantly, what if someone that doesn't care about Linux ("okay claude make my website legal no mistakes") is in charge of implementing this logic, or the library that people will end up using for compliance.
[3] Assuming they cared. The vote was largely amongst partisan lines, some people had clearly looked checked out the whole time, despite the abnormally high numbers of their constituents being there that day.
Most if the "important" parts of the internet are unusable already by default, without an ad blocker.
As long the government sites, banks, etc. work (who already know my personal detail due to the nature of their services and the contract we have), nothing of value is lost, tbh. Including this site and this comment.
This. This literally makes it illegal for social media sites to serve Linux clients. The previous bill (the one that propagandists call "age verification") was actually really good, and this one is really bad.
Yeah, interestingly, even though many Americans believe in an office called "King of England", that is not actually one of his titles in the modern world.
Mexico is an independent country because the US elite belatedly realised that adding millions of brown citizens would be a bad idea. Canada is an independent country because it had the British empire backing them.
That’s… not really accurate. Some factions in the US flirted with taking over more or even all of Mexico for the grand total of like, a few months, and even then it never would have passed Congress. Additionally “the US elite” is a flawed and inaccurate understanding of mid-1800s politics as even the most basic of historical understanding will tell you. It’s mostly regional politics and economic constituencies, not class struggle. You’re just projecting modern thought and dynamics onto the past.
To cover 70.5 million seniors [1]. $17k per senior.
“Per person personal health care spending for the 65 and older population was $22,356 in 2020, over 5 times higher than spending per child ($4,217) and almost 2.5 times the spending per working-age person ($9,154)” [2].
80 million under 19 [3] at that rate comes to about $400bn. And most efficiency estimates would take at least a third off that when we eliminate redundant billing processes.
Given 6% of children lack health insurance, we could cover them for about $24bn. Less than Trump’s war in Iran has cost [4].
Selective enforcement is just tyranny, but what I think they were getting at is a minimum size enshrined in law. I don't think it's a great idea, really highlights how arbitrary this all is and presents a risk of advantaging the worst actors more than real makers, but it's a valid way forward.
Laws like this are a good idea but its too burdensome for small companies so it cripples innovations and small businesses. Only applying it to larger companies let's it apply to only the companies who have the largest impact and also can afford compliance, while not stifling small businesses. Not perfect but I think it's a decent tradeoff.
reply