giuliomagnificoUS cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology
I'm surprised Garrett Langley still has a job, he seems wildly out of touch. For instance he really believes that his Panopticon as a service is the reason crime is down in cities, conveniently ignoring crime rates prior to COVID.
He won’t for long. The backlash is just getting started. Left or right, no one wants their whereabouts subject to constant surveillance.
His only advantage is that the cops are on his side and won’t let go of these cameras without a fight.
I'm very in favor of speed & redlight cameras and don't have a particular problem with license plate trackers. I think we partisan-ize far too many things nowadays, unfortunately.
Maybe you're also in favor of some light reading
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-4/
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-4/
you think speed cameras violate the 4th amendment?
No but license plate requirements pretty clearly violate the 4th and/or 1st amendment, IMO. And without being required to have your license plate searched (registration 'papers' forced to be displayed) at all times without even an officer presenting RAS or PC of a crime, these cameras become a lot less useful.
I don't see how removing the cameras is compatible with the first amendment, but if you have the right of "speech" to record me in public chasing every place I go in a manner that is the envy of any stalker, I ought to have the right of "speech" not to "say anything" (compelled speech of showing my plate).
It really doesn't seem like the courts agree that you have a right to travel via car without a visible plate.
The courts have been wrong about many things, sometimes for centuries before they've fixed it. Some things they think they've interpreted correctly now that they'll turn around and interpret some other way later.
Trying to interpret viewing and recording the plate as speech but not displaying it as speech is trying to have your cake and eat it too. If the camera can stalk my car everywhere and record it under auspices of 'speech', it's only logical I can hide it as 'speech.'
Is the law obligated to be logical like that? As you note it already doesn't have to be consistent over time, there's no particular reason it must be consistent in who it applies to.
You shouldn't pin your ideals on anything as flawed as the Constitution of the US. It was barely a workable system to begin with, and who knows how long it can last now.
Driving a motor vehicle on public roads is a privilege that many of the morons I share the road with seem to take for granted. If they are allowed
to drive then I want their plate identifiable on video from my dash cam.
Automated mass surveillance of license plates should also be illegal.
Courts are currently wrestling with this.
https://www.oyez.org/cases/2017/16-402
> The government's warrantless acquisition of Carpenter's cell-site records violated his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures. Chief Justice John Roberts authored the opinion for the 5-4 majority. The majority first acknowledged that the Fourth Amendment protects not only property interests, but also reasonable expectations of privacy. Expectations of privacy in this age of digital data do not fit neatly into existing precedents, but tracking person's movements and location through extensive cell-site records is far more intrusive than the precedents might have anticipated.
Or in United States v. Jones (cited in https://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/opinions/201495A.P.pdf):
> Although the case was ultimately decided on trespass principles, five Justices agreed that “longer term GPS monitoring . . . impinges on expectations of privacy.” See id. at 430 (Alito, J., concurring); id. at 415 (Sotomayor, J., concurring). Based on “[t]raditional surveillance” capacity “[i]n the precomputer age,” the Justices reasoned that “society’s expectation” was that police would not “secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period.”
It seems clear these cameras can hit some kind of threshold where they're common enough and interlinked enough to amount to unconstitutional surveilance. We don't know exactly where that threshold is yet.
The courts made polygraphs submittable legal evidence used to convict people, and still use them on people under supervision (because lesser standards apply).
Precedent is often crap and wrong until someone can find a good case paired with good lawyers to rectify.
I agree with you generally but taken to the extreme this argument very easily goes to "precedents I agree with should be venerated because they're precedents and precedents I disagree with are wrong" silliness.
"Precedent is often crap" isn't really the basis for any cohesive judicial philosophy or legal thought process.
I'm not aware of any precedent anywhere that approaches "ALPRs violate 4A" territory, it's when other stuff happens that's beyond simply "$lp_id was seen by $camera on $datetime" that I've seen courts start to talk about reasonableness and privacy.