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> companies like Palantir and Anduril are clearly pursuing political objectives, including subverting governance by creating tools which set the frame and context that governance happens in.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by this? How are these companies subverting governance?


The US stopped countless wars from starting in the first place due to deterrence. Look at Ukraine to see what happens to a country that isn't part of an alliance like NATO.

Ukraine seems to be what happens when a country willingly gave up their nukes (with US encouragement).

I have no problem if the US navy wants to tool around shipping lanes for the good of global trade. I take issue with everything else.

In the past couple of years, the US has implicitly used the strength of its military to threaten the sovereignty of Greenland, Panama, Canada, Mexico, and Cuba. Abducted a foreign head of state. Started a war. Bombed drug runners and fishermen.

The death toll for the Iraq war is heavily contested, but the numbers are somewhere in the region of 200k to one million dead. All under the guise of WMDs.

Like any large organization, there is a mixture of good and bad outcomes.


Ukraine was storing nukes but did not have the keys to use them. They were useless to ukraine and presented no deterrent.

Ukraine was home to many nuclear and rocket scientists so presumably they could have reverse engineered them if they wanted and got a big head start in it.

But yeah thats only if they wanted to try and spend the money to support a nuclear program. As they sat they were unreliable at best case.


That's false. Please stop spreading Russian propaganda. Not only Ukraine was able to control and maintaining them, in fact, Ukrainian companies manufactured nuke ICBMs, and then serviced them in Russia long after the collapse of the USSR. See, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KB_Pivdenne

Then look at the Middle East.

Seattle is one of the wealthiest metros in the country, with expansive social programs. It's the last place where you can try and blame crime on deprivation.

Drivers have a right not to have their car searched without probable cause. But being photographed in public is not a search.

Those photographs go into a searchable database.

And?

... and you need a warrant to surveil individuals? And they have to be suspected of crimes?

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_v._United_States


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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_v._United_States

> 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


As I quoted before:

> 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.


Except it is? If the traffic light timings are controlled by law then they can't be manipulated in that way.

the ones we want to prevent abuse from are the ones making the laws. police and governments break existing laws all the time.

>they can't be manipulated

if you want something that cant be manipulated or abused, the solution is technical, not legislative.


The ones making the laws are your elected officials. If you want a city to pass a law prohibiting changing the traffic light timings, then go campaign for a candidate that has that on their platform.

>If you want a city to pass a law prohibiting changing the traffic light timings, then go campaign for a candidate that has that on their platform.

people love saying this as if its some sort of gotcha.

ive been campaigning for candidates i believe in since ive been able to vote, which is over 40 years now. additionally, i voice my opinion locally and online (hi).


That's why we have an independent judiciary. What's the alternative to fixing this with laws/lawsuits? Do we riot when "the police and governments break laws"?

>That's why we have an independent judiciary.

which is something that only happens after abuse occurs, is costly (time and money), presents a risk of retaliation, and offers no guarantee of being made whole.

>What's the alternative to fixing this with laws/lawsuits?

not doing mass surveillance means we don't need legislation about it.

>Do we riot when "the police and governments break laws"?

why did you scare quote this?


But Flock isn't searching anybody. You keep calling it a dragnet, or an illegal search, but the courts have repeatedly held that recording images in public needs no warrant or probable case.

Law enforcement is using a third party (Flock) to get around constitutional requirements.

A camera pointed at a public street isn't the same constitutional question as LE searching a persistent database to reconstruct someone's movements. The latter falls into fourth amendment search territory.


Jesus, how many times are you just going to parrot the same replies over and over? No, the putting public facing camera video into a database does not make it a search. The case you cited, Chatrie vs. United States, involved the government demanding that Google hand over private cellphone location data on everyone inside of a geofence boundary. The court decided that forcing Google to hand over geolocation data was akin to forcing Google to hand over email contents, which requires a warrant. You're trying to turn around and interpret this to saying that the plain view doctrine doesn't apply to ALPRs, which record public spaces.

This isn't the case of law enforcement using a third party to get around constitutional requirements. The government could set up their own cameras doing exactly what Flock does, and it would still not violate anyone's constitutional requirements. Because people don't have a right to not be recorded in public, no matter how much you want that to be the case.


> Jesus, how many times are you just going to parrot the same replies over and over

The same amount that you do, dude. You're in every single one of these threads, and despite being proven wrong over and over again you keep being "confused" about how people are against this technology. Even in this thread, you keep responding with the same points based on your equivocation of an individual taking a picture in public and a state law enforcement organization aggregating and tracking individuals who haven't committed crimes.

Try reading some SC cases and actually paying attention to the responses you're getting.


I had already addressed your same points an hours earlier:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49629159

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49629142

And yet you still start yet another thread insisting that a database makes public facing video cameras a privacy violation.

When have I been "proven wrong over and over again"? The court cases you've cited are all about governments demanding private cell phone location information. You're trying to take decisions that amount to, "the police need a warrant to demand private cellphone location data from telecoms" and make the enormous leap to your imaginary decision, "the police cannot record people in public and search those recordings".


Just because the specific ALPR technology was not being litigated doesn't mean that the law doesn't apply to similar technologies. At issue here is the government being able to monitor and track people in public, not that photographs are ok because individuals can take them at will.

> 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.” Katz, 389 U. S., at 351–352. A majority of this Court has already recognized that individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their physical movements. Jones, 565 U. S., at 430 (Alito, J., concurring in judgment); id., at 415 (Sotomayor, J., concurring). Prior to the digital age, law enforcement might have pursued a suspect for a brief stretch, but doing so “for any extended period of time was difficult and costly and therefore rarely undertaken.” Id., at 429 (opinion of Alito, J.). For that reason, “society’s expectation has been that law enforcement agents and others would not—and indeed, in the main, simply could not—secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period.” Id., at 430.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/16-402

Edit for your edit: you haven't refuted anything man, you keep trotting out the same arguments in those linked threads:

- The data includes "private movements" which is why it's unconstitutional (the SC said aggregation of public data can impel privacy concerns)

- An individual or LE can take a photograph of you or your house, therefore collecting photographs from geolocated cameras and tracking you over time is not constitutionally distinct (but it is)

- The specific technology at the center of these cases are not ALPRs, therefore the rulings have no bearing on Flock (despite the fact that courts are not litigating the specific technology, but rather the constitutional principles of their use)


> The data includes "private movements" which is why it's unconstitutional (the SC said aggregation of public data can impel privacy concerns)

But does it? You keep insisting this is the case, but your attempts to back up this claim are cases with totally different scenarios. Namely demanding that telecoms hand over location information.

> - An individual or LE can take a photograph of you or your house, therefore collecting photographs from geolocated cameras and tracking you over time is not constitutionally distinct (but it is)

The point is to emphasize that the information collected by Flock is in plain view. The plain view doctrine is well established. The police don't need a warrant to observe publicly visible things.

> The specific technology at the center of these cases are not ALPRs, therefore the rulings have no bearing on Flock (despite the fact that courts are not litigating the specific technology, but rather the constitutional principles of their use)

The cases you've cited all involved private information being obtained without a warrant. You can't just ignore the fact that a GPS tracker or cell phone location information also reveals private movements, as opposed to public facing camera which only record public activity.


Again, you keep citing decisions without bothering to understand the context behind the. For instance,

"To the contrary, “what [one] seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.” Katz, 389 U. S., at 351–352. A majority of this Court has already recognized that individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their physical movements. Jones, 565 U. S., at 430 (Alito, J., concurring in judgment);"

This is about the police planting a GPS tracker on someone's car - that's that "Jones" is referring to here. That case involved the police tracking someone in public and in private.


You're confusing the technology used in Jones with the principle Carpenter cited it for: a person can have a 4A privacy interest in the whole of their physical movements, including movements in public.

And for the second time, you're trying to dodge the distinguishing factor between Jones and Flock. The former tracked movements in public and in private. The latter, only in public. That, and the Jones case involved the police accessing someone's vehicle without a warrant.

You seem to be under the impression that the opinion of the court in the Jones was that everyone's public movements are private and the police need a warrant to track your public movements through and any all means. But that was not the decision of the court. The police and still just follow you, Jones notwithstanding.

You can desire your public movements to be protected by the Fourth amendment all you want, but that does not make it so.


I'm not claiming Jones held that cops need a warrant to visually follow someone on a public street. The point you're avoiding is that Carpenter expressly cited Jones for the proposition that people have a fourth amendment interest in the "whole of" their physical movements, and distinguished ordinary observation from technologically enabled, comprehensive tracking. Just because the camera is in public doesn't make it permissible.

And maybe it wasn't the decision in Jones, but Carpenter specifically cites Alito's concurrence for the proposition that a person has a 4A privacy interest in aggregation of movement data and describes GPS tracking in Jones as raising those privacy concerns.


As I've repeatedly explained, the Carpenter decision was narrowly scoped to cell phone location data. The decision did not do anything to restrict other forms of monitoring. The idea that Carpenter restricts governments' ability to video record public spaces is entirely your own invention.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49632990

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49630733


The Constitution does not prohibit government (or anyone for that matter) from recording people in public spaces. ALPRs have been in widespread use since the 90s, I am continuously puzzled where people get the idea that this is new technology.

ALPRs weren't connected to companies which call their detractors "terrorists" and which collect photographs into searchable databases that have advanced AI features. The general public has also witnessed the rise of military-style policing and unaccountable violence from law enforcement, so that contributes to the negative sentiment.

ALPRs were always fed into databases, even back during the 90s. The whole point of ALPRs is to automate the task of reading license plates.

They weren't connected to nationwide databases which automatically record, store, and aggregate individuals' movements. Not constitutionally equivalent.

Uh huh, and? When did the supreme court decide that ALPR data becomes a search the moment it gets logged to a database?

They haven't yet because a case hasn't made its way to the SC. But Chatrie and Carpenter deal with this exact subject matter and both establish that aggregating and searching past data is a (fourth amendment) search.

No, for the fifth time, Chatrie and Carpenter dealt with private cell phone location information. This is not the exact same subject matter at all.

The specific technology being used to conduct the searches does not matter.

Persistent technological tracking of a person's public movements can constitute a search. The fact that each individual movement occurs in public does not automatically eliminate fourth amendment protection, nor does it matter that its a third party that does the collecting (Google, Flock, whoever). What matters is that LE is conducting fourth amendment searches using that data.


It's not just the specific technology being used to conduct the search, it's that the information the police obtained Chatrie and in Carpender both included people's private movements. Your phone's GPS data doesn't just track where you drive on public roads, it also tracks you walking around your private property.

> The fact that each individual movement occurs in public does not automatically eliminate fourth amendment protection, nor does it matter that its a third party that does the collecting (Google, Flock, whoever).

Sure, doesn't eliminate Fourth Amendment protections: the police can't just search your car because it's in public. But that doesn't meant police can't record public spaces.

> What matters is that LE is conducting fourth amendment searches using that data.

Recording public spaces isn't a Fourth Amendment search. That's what distinguishes Flock from the other cases you mentioned.


Carpenter is saying that public movements are part of the protected interest, not just the private movements which were also tracked. If the private movements hadn't been tracked in those cases, it would still be a 4A issue:

"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.'"

> But that doesn't meant police can't record public spaces.

> Recording public spaces isn't a Fourth Amendment search.

I'm not saying either of these things. The quote that you're responding to literally says "What matters is that LE is conducting fourth amendment searches using that data". I don't care who collects the data (Flock, or Axon, or Google, or whoever): if the cops are searching a persistent database which monitors and tracks people over time, it is a 4A issue.


This is just an incorrect description of the ruling in Carpenter v. US. The core of the ruling is that the third-party doctrine doesn't apply to cell phone location data. The ruling was a very narrow one and did not affect other methods of monitoring.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_v._United_States

> 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.

You're trying to expand the scope of the decision on Carpenter to encompasses video cameras, or location tracking in general, but that is not true.

> The quote that you're responding to literally says "What matters is that LE is conducting fourth amendment searches using that data".

No, it does not. It says that public activity may be protected, not that it is protected. And you're conveniently ignoring the fact that this decision was narrowly scoped to the context of phone location data.

> if the cops are searching a persistent database which monitors and tracks people over time, it is a 4A issue.

Carpenter only established this in the context of phone location information. You're inventing your own decision when you try to expand this to public facing cameras.


I'm not talking about the specific ruling, I'm quoting the justification that the justices used in coming to that ruling, which is extremely relevant to modern day surveillance and whether LE using surveillance cameras from a third party to reconstruct people's movements constitutes unreasonable searches under 4A. Based on their arguments, it appears so.

> nor did it overrule prior decisions

I'm not saying it overruled prior decisions. I'm saying the reasoning of the judges has an effect on future surveillance technologies.

> You're trying to expand the scope of the decision on Carpenter to encompasses video cameras, or location tracking in general, but that is not true.

No, I'm saying that the same principles that led to the outcome of Carpenter also apply to technologically-assisted tracking (which includes LE using surveillance cameras to track movements over time).


> No, I'm saying that the same principles that led to the outcome of Carpenter also apply to technologically-assisted tracking (which includes LE using surveillance cameras to track movements over time).

And this is just a factually wrong statement about the Carpenter decision. The Supreme Court didn't apply the same principles to other methods of surveillance. They could have. But they did not, and instead gave a narrowly scoped decision that was limited to cell phone location data.

What you think the Supreme Court should have decided is irrelevant.


The legal reasoning I'm referring to is quite clear, even if it wasn't part of the court's final decision (it was part of the concurrence, though, which are also used in legal arguments):

> 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.” Katz, 389 U. S., at 351–352. A majority of this Court has already recognized that individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their physical movements. Jones, 565 U. S., at 430 (Alito, J., concurring in judgment); id., at 415 (Sotomayor, J., concurring). Prior to the digital age, law enforcement might have pursued a suspect for a brief stretch, but doing so “for any extended period of time was difficult and costly and therefore rarely undertaken.” Id., at 429 (opinion of Alito, J.). For that reason, “society’s expectation has been that law enforcement agents and others would not—and indeed, in the main, simply could not—secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period.” Id., at 430.

You can continue to tell me that the court narrowed the scope of the final decision, but "A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere" is quite clear. Cool, the final decision narrowed the scope to cell phone location data; that is irrelevant to what we're discussing and doesn't negate that the concurrence literally states that part of the reasoning is that people don't lose 4A rights just because they're being surveilled in public:

> A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere

Just because you want to claim that cell phone location data is somehow completely distinct from photographic location data because people can take photographs in public doesn't make it so.


If it's not in the Supreme Court's decision then it doesn't matter as far as the law goes. At this point you've basically admitted that the Carpenter decision doesn't have any bearing on Flock, you're just trying to justify your earlier comments that you now realize aren't actually covered by the court cases you cited.

And even then your quotes are much weaker than you seem to think:

> what [one] seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.”

"May be" means that there are some situations where it is protected, but also means ther exist other situations where it is not.

"the ball is blue", and "the ball may be blue" are two vastly different statements. Even if only a fraction of one percent of balls are blue, we can still make the statement "the ball may be blue".

> ...law enforcement agents and others would not — and indeed, in the main, simply could not — secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period.”

Flock cameras don't monitor every movement of a car - only where those cameras are present. Furthermore they're not secret: Flock cameras are publicly visible, and many governments public maps of where cameras have coverage.


The constitution was written centuries ago and its authors expected the founding documents to be routinely updated.

Notice that the person I responded to was speaking about a military checkpoint near the border. Do you know what that is?

If anything that makes surveillance even less noteworthy. Is it really surprising that a military installation has surveillance?

They did not say installation.

A checkpoint is a type of military installation. Specifically an installation with the purpose of monitoring and controlling traffic traveling through the checkpoint.

A check point is a point where people or things are checked. It could be military or civilian. It could be permanent or temporary. It could be 1 person and a vehicle parked in a road. This would not be a military installation to most people. Or dictionaries. Or laws.

And the point remains, regardless of semantic quibbling: a checkpoint is probably the least surprising place to encounter surveillance. Arguably, it's the whole point of a checkpoint to surveil, "checking" in your terminology, who's passing through.

I was on a public highway.

The difference is that your example involves physically stopping and searching people. This is not the case with Flock, which records images in public.

The government does not and never did require any warrant or justification to record people in public spaces. Not just the government, but normal people too: you can whip out four phone and start recording people in public any time you want.


The government does need a warrant to surveil me, though, and multiple court cases have found that using an intermediate third party doesn't absolve the government from adhering to the fourth amendment.

The government needs a warrant to search you, your home, your vehicle, your email, etc. The government does not need a warrant to record you in public spaces.

You're correct that the government can't use a third party to circumvent privacy laws. But privacy laws never prohibited what Flock does. The government could directly set up its own cameras in public, and nothing about that violated the Fourth Amendment.


> The government does not need a warrant to record you in public spaces.

This is not true. The question is whether you have a "reasonable expectation of privacy." If you do, then the government needs a warrant. This is why the government can't tap a payphone without a warrant even though it is in public.

It is true that a single police officer can post up somewhere and scan license plates without a warrant. The difference here is scale. The question of whether scale affects a "reasonable expectation of privacy" has never been addressed by the supreme court, though it has been raised before and discussed in concurring opinions.


> This is not true. The question is whether you have a "reasonable expectation of privacy." If you do, then the government needs a warrant. This is why the government can't tap a payphone without a warrant even though it is in public.

"Reasonable expectation of privacy" covers things like restrooms. Not highways, streets, parking lots, etc. This isn't relevant for Flock.


"Reasonable expectation of privacy" covers whatever the public believes is reasonable. The original case creating this doctrine was about phone booths.

The government does need a warrant to surveil someone, though. Which is what is happening here: a third party surveils citizens and the government searches that data.

Whether or not the government needs a warrant to surveil someone depends on how the government is conducting that surveillance. The government does, for instance, need a warrant to wiretap you. They do not need a warrant to record people in public spaces. Nor do they need a warrant to, say, photograph the exterior of your house.

But they need a warrant to follow me around, record my movements, put them into a database which is searchable by other law enforcement. They're not taking a single photograph of a car, they're creating a database of movement of people who have not committed crimes.

No, they do not need a warrant to follow you in public. What more is there to say, besides that you're just wrong about what privacy laws protect?

They need a warrant if they're going to record and track my movements over the course of months.

If they're only tracking your movements in public, the no they do not. Again, you're just wrong about what privacy laws protect. They do not prohibit the police from surveilling or tracking you, they only control how the police is able to conduct that surveillance. If the police want to search your house or car, they need a warrant or at least probable cause for the latter. If they want to photograph you in public, they do not.

IANAL disclaimer.

Police do need a warrant to place a GPS device on your vehicle.

Data continuity is a function of data point frequency [0]. If all public space (and some participating private space) is monitored, the practical difference between a GPS device and a retroactive dragnet system disappears.

You are correct that police do not require a warrant to follow someone around in public, but these systems aren't that, and in practice much closer to the GPS tracking, which does require a warrant. It's unclear without trying this further in court which this should qualify as.

IMO: If the system has seen me exit the public space outside my home, or work, or someone elses home, or a store, or whevever, the system knows where I am at all points in time, like a GPS, with very little exception.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_effect


There's a big difference between saying

"Flock and other ALPR tech is illegal"

And

"Flock and other ALPR tech is legal. But it's my personal prediction that some future Supreme Court decision will make them illegal."


Where does "Flock tech might currently be illegal pending adjudication" land? Just because someone is doing it, does not make it legal.

For reference, US v. Jones was a 9-0 in the SC, in favor of Jones, though bipartisan split on the reasoning, which might be what carries over to any case that gets tried regarding this tech.


> Where does "Flock tech might currently be illegal pending adjudication" land? Just because someone is doing it, does not make it legal.

It's legal until your expected Supreme Court decision lands. This is just another way of saying "Flock tech is legal, but if the Supreme Court rules the way I want then it will become illegal."

> For reference, US v. Jones was a 9-0 in the SC, in favor of Jones, though bipartisan split on the reasoning, which might be what carries over to any case that gets tried regarding this tech

"Might be" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. And again, until the court actually gives that ruling, Flock is legal.


> "Might be" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. And again, until the court actually gives that ruling, Flock is legal.

There's a difference between de facto legal and de jure legal. If the SC strikes it down, it was never legal, ie void ab initio.


You realize that "de jure" is literally lation for "by law"?

Until some court reinterprets the law, it is legal. E.g. segregated school were until the Brown v. Board of Education landed and made it illegal.


Cool, then the Flock data should just be public and accessible to everyone since there's no expectation of privacy in public.

If not, why not?


There's nothing stopping you from setting up a webcam pointed out your window. If you want to set up your own public-facing ALPR cameras, there's nothing stopping you.

Can I put cameras up on every street corner and on every traffic light? Doesn't answer my question anyways. I'm asking if the government via a third party can have this ability, would you have any objection to the entirety of the public from having this data and camera access? I'm assuming not since the people who advocate for this technology see nothing wrong with it.

If you do have a problem with public access to these cameras and tracking software, then it would be hypocritical.


If you owned property, or otherwise got permission from the property owners to put cameras there, then yes.

Recording equipment didn’t exist when the constitution was written.

The Supreme Court has set precedence that video recordings of public spaces fall under the plain view doctrine: police don't need a warrant or probable cause to record things in public view.

Sure, but putting that data into a persistent database which law enforcement searches on demand is a violation of the fourth amendment.

No? Which Supreme Court decision decided that persisting video recorded in public is a violation of the Fourth Amendment?

Chatrie. It's about the use of the data, not the data itself.

Law enforcement searches a database of recorded, retained, aggregated data about people who have not committed crimes: this constitutes a fourth amendment search. Go ahead and record all you want, but when law enforcement decides to use that data, they have to get a warrant.


That case didn't cover public-facing cameras, that was about the government demanding telecoms hand over geolocation data on their users. The government was demanding that mobile providers hand over private data, akin to asking Google for your gmail contents.

This is far removed from a camera set up in a public space.


Chatrie held that the government conducted a fourth amendment search when it got the location data, even though the data was held by a third party. The reasoning was that the data revealed Chatrie's physical movements, not that Google itself was somehow a constitutionally private space.

It didn't just reveal Chatrie's movements, it revealed to movements of everyone in the geofenced area. And more importantly, it revealed movements even in private not just in public.

Again, this is far removed from a camera in a public space.


Chatrie was not about the dragnet capturing people in private spaces. It established that LE acquisition and aggregation of location information can constitute a fourth amendment search even when the observations are made in public.

But the observations in the Chatrie case weren't made in public. This was private information that only Google had access to, and law enforcement went and demanded that Google hand over that private information.

By contrast, a person can stand on a street corner with their phone and record everything a Flock camera records.


The SC's holding was that the government's acquisition of location data from a third party was itself a fourth amendment search because the individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy wrt location data. So you're kind of agreeing with me here: the data is either private and subject to a warrant, or it is in public where individuals do have a reasonable expectation of privacy wrt aggregated location information.

And again, a person standing on a street corner is constitutionally distinct from LE following and tracking individuals movement over time.


> The SC's holding was that the government's acquisition of location data from a third party was itself a fourth amendment search because the individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy wrt location data.

Specifically, the GPS coordinates logged by their cellphones.

> So you're kind of agreeing with me here: the data is either private and subject to a warrant, or it is in public where individuals do have a reasonable expectation of privacy wrt aggregated location information.

You're missing the point: Flock camera's don't record where people have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

> And again, a person standing on a street corner is constitutionally distinct from LE following and tracking individuals movement over time.

Wrong: as long as law enforcement are only tracking your movements in public, they don't need a warrant or probable cause.


> It's pretty clear to be that governments shouldn't be able to 'subcontract' their way out of the limits placed on them via the constitution

At least in the US, they can't. This is already the law.

But what so many people don't understand is that the government does not and never did require a warrant or some other permission to film people in public. Flock isn't allowing the government to bypass limits placed them by the Constitution. Privacy laws, for the most part, protect what people do in private.

One thing the Flock debate had revealed is how many people simply assume everything they don't like is unconstitutional.


The Z3 lacked conditional branching. The hack to make it technically a universal Turing machine is to execute all possible branches of a program and discard the undesired branch results, so the end result is the same as if it had genuine branching abilities. But of course that'd drastically drive up the computation time if you actually tried to use the machine in that way.


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