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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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".
"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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.)
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.
FWIW, what I want is the non-IME/PSP "¡hecho en Paraguay!" chips from the book.
Well, for certain fringe definitions of “sense”.
That gets you as far as distributing the license plate, location, and time. But if you combine that data with other non-public data, then it is no longer a First Amendment protected use.
As an aside, if we cannot figure out a way to make this fit with the First Amendment as written today, we need to make updating that a priority already. The founders had no idea that we would end up with computers and cameras that could automatically track every citizen of the country with no effort and store it indefinitely. "No reasonable expectation of privacy" rests on a definition of reasonable that made sense in the 18th century. Our technological progress has changed that calculus.
I expect there are plenty of cases where you can't publish your video feed.
Copyright is "mostly" civil law, not criminal.
> can't run into an airport and yell that you've got a bomb.
Right: now try and argue that a license plate intentionally designed for public visibility is somehow subject to the same restrictions. All 50 states have legislation requiring public display of these objects: what tailoring of the First Amendment would legally be consistent with past case law?
> I expect there are plenty of cases where you can't publish your video feed.
Legally these cases are few and far between, and none of these exceptions apply to the situation being discussed. You're welcome to try and cite a case or explain relevant case law - good luck.
Freedom of the press is extraordinarily broad and is one of the more difficult things to limit using criminal penalties.
This is a commonly echoed sentiment for the Second Amendment too ("These idiot founders! They could never have imagined so much individual power - We need to take rights away!"), and I am in hard disagreement for both.
I cherish the fact that our legal system is so intentionally slow that these types of "progressive" efforts to reform the Constitution are basically impossible.
In the US, they are everywhere - apartment buildings, houses, business. Amazon's Ring might the most popular, but there are many vendors.
They still might be able to regulate it for all practical purposes.
> Copyright is "mostly" civil law, not criminal.
Does that matter? Seriously - doesn't the 1st Amendment also protect against the government raising civil complaints?
I think the better point here is: Disney suing you for copyright violations is not a First-Amendment case, because Disney is not the US government - so this isn't a Free Speech issue at all.
You don't have to have a physical, lead-type printing press to be protected by Freedom of the Press, and you don't have to physically vocalize to be protected by Freedom of Speech.
You (personally) can't stop me from photographing you in public, Ms. Steisand.
And Freedom of Speech has no sensible connection to being forced to carry objects. Your argument also assumes no one ever goes into private houses, where 1A doesn't apply.
License plates are explicitly designed for legibility and are legally mandated by every state to be displayed in public view. The entire purpose of this object is to be seen and create accountability. An SSN is a private, individually-issued piece of information that isn't intended for public view - and courts are still saying publication is okay.
Law in the United States isn't an autistic, overly-rigid computer system where edge cases can be probed for "gotchas:" judges and case law exist to figure out these tough questions.
> Law in the United States isn't an autistic, overly-rigid computer system where edge cases can be probed for "gotchas:" judges and case law exist to figure out these tough questions.
That’s obvious, and you seem to be going against yourself here. If some details are considered too sensitive for publication then it would follow that a judge may be able to interpret the law to prevent mass publication of even sensitive public or semi-public data by creating an interpretive carve-out. But if you can publish SSNs then there’s little to no hope for that. It almost seems that the law is “autistically” tilted in favor of data brokers.
Someone ought to set up a tracker that updates a list of known HNW individuals with last detected location based on license plate data and/or facial recognition. Maybe also a list of last detected million dollar+ supercars. That will get some bills started.