zlacker

>>chaps+(OP)
I wonder what our founders would think about tools like Flock.

From what I understand these systems are legal because there is no expectation of privacy in public. Therefore any time you go in public you cannot expect NOT to be tracked, photographed, and entered into a database (which may now outlive us).

I think the argument comes from the 1st amendment.

Weaponizing the Bill of Rights (BoR) for the government against the people does not seem to align with my understanding of why the Bill of Rights was cemented into our constitution in the first place.

I wonder what Adams or Madison would make of it. I wonder if Benjamin Franklin would be appalled.

I wonder if they'd consider every license plate reading a violation of the 4th amendment.

>>fusslo+nx
> I wonder what our founders would think about tools like Flock.

I suspect they'd make a distinction between private individuals engaging in first amendment protected activity like public photography and corporations or the state doing the same in order to violate people's 4th amendment rights. We certainly don't have to allow for both cases.

>>autoex+bt1
They'd have not forced license plates to be displayed at all times to begin with, as they are a search of your papers without probable cause your vehicle is unregistered. Private ships in those days (probably the closest equivalent of something big and dangerous that could do tons of damage quickly on the public right of way) did not have required hull numbers or anything like that. Of course that doesn't totally solve the flock problem, but makes it a lot harder.

>>mothba+yu1
Ships then, and now, don’t really need numbers for identification. There are various unique numbers that they can and do use occasionally for specific purposes(IMO numbers and hull numbers). However, a ship’s name and home port were, and are, more than sufficient to identify a ship for legal purposes. You don’t need a registration number on a ship, and certainly wouldn’t have needed one then.

The authorities absolutely kept meticulous records of ships entry and exit from any harbour as well as what was on board, what was loaded and unloaded and frequently a list of all persons onboard.

Some flag states enforce uniqueness constraints on name and home port combinations. The US does not, but that really doesn’t matter much in the real world. There just aren’t that many conflicts.

More importantly, the founding fathers very much did not extend privacy rights to ships. Intentionally so. The very first congress passed a law in 1790 that exempted ships from the requirements of needing a warrant to be searched.

The ability to track and search ships without warrants has been an important capability of the federal government from day one.

Hell, the federal register of ships is published and always has been. I don’t know how they would have felt about private cars, but the founding fathers revealed preference is that shipping and ships are not private like your other “papers and effects” are.

>>dghlsa+Tz1
Thanks for this level of detail. History is complex, which is why I tend to be skeptical of bare “what would the founders have thought about this” complaints.