As long as the cameras are confined to public streets and roadways, where there is no reasonable expectation of privacy, I don't really see the problem with police gathering this data, even for a libertarian. A lone, human officer could observe the same public visual stimuli and look up license plate numbers or car descriptions, perhaps even record his findings in a notebook, and he would have the right to direct his own eyes and brain and hand to do so. With Flock, police are doing the same, just more efficiently. If someone has the right to do something, surely they also have the right to do it efficiently. Otherwise what is the limiting principle?
"More is different" is how Nobel Prize winner Anderson drew attention to failure of reductionist descriptions to describe qualitative changes from a lot of things working together. Multiple cameras, recording often, easily searchable with one system, is qualitatively different from a few police and a few neighbors making observations. Recall, when the telephone was introduce it took decades for the public to assert that they didn't want the police listening in to their conversations without a warrant - sure the people talking weren't in the same room, but they still wanted privacy - so it is with mass surveillance. Sure we want it as a tool for law enforcement, but we also want to know that nobody is tracking our every move without first proving to a judge that there is an objective law enforcement need.
But it’s precisely because talking on a phone involves an expectation of privacy, that you need probable cause to infringe upon that. Hence you need a warrant for wiretaps.
You can’t expect privacy while committing a crime on a sidewalk, or while driving down the road with a stolen car.
Absolutely, nobody should expect privacy on the sidewalk, full stop. It’s what being in public means. If it was simply real-time live monitoring, there would be no issue imo. Where it gives me pause is the recording and storing of data, and future retrieval of that information.
It is already the case that nobody can expect privacy on the sidewalk. This is the law of the land. The sidewalk is the law school 101 example of where nobody can expect privacy. It's why news crews can film or record anybody on the sidewalk without their consent, it's why private citizens can film police officers on the sidewalk without their consent. It is deeply embedded into our common law system of precedents that public streets are the canonical example of a public space, and there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in a public space.
If you go out in public, you might be seen. Big deal! That's what public means. Making a network of images of public spaces that solves real use cases for customers is clever and good, and in this case it has massive positive externalities for the public. It's progress.
Indeed. I, and many others, want the government to get a warrant before they use these new capabilities to recreate of our movements. Flock and other companies try to claim it's just a bunch of public view images, but that is either deliberate deception or ignorance. The new systems provide a whole new kind of search capability. The courts, with cases like Carpenter and now Chatrie, are recognizing that the new search technologies are "unreasonable" and deserve 4th amendment protection.
Exactly. It turns out that most citizens expect that they can go about their day and not have law enforcement later recreate a detailed history of where they were and when. A network of cameras provides accurate, historical, location and time data. Courts are starting to recognize that citizens should expect they are not tracked and located after the fact, unless there is a law enforcement need. That is, in the era of mass surveillance there is an expectation of privacy which is newly described because new technology allows surveillance and intrusion that was not possible before. If there is evidence of a crime, law enforcement gets a warrant and looks for the suspect in the recorded data.
> "Exactly. It turns out that most citizens expect that they can go about their day and not have law enforcement later recreate a detailed history of where they were and when."
They should not expect this insofar as it's a history of their movements in public spaces, because that's what public means. Your proposal would gut the meaning of a public space, shrinking the sphere of public information, by taking what was once public and giving it only to the police, behind the veil of a warrant.
Think about what you just said. You want a judge to rule *before the fact* on whether the police can use cameras in random untargeted surveillance. How would that even work? Flock doesn't target an individual. It surveils everyone who crosses its line of sight even when there is at that moment no evidence that any of the cars it scans are involved in a crime. It's only after there is evidence of a crime (like a dead body full of holes) that the police go back to review surveillance video. They might identify a potential perpetrator, or they might not. That is completely different from targeting a named individual to tap his phone wires. That counts as a "search" and it must be reasonable. It's not a "search" to be observed going about your business in a public place no matter how broad and intensively it is done. Even if the police put a tail on you and follow you around, they aren't doing a "search".
As you point out "mass surveillance" is a whole new thing. It is qualitatively different from some police following you and making observations. That's why we need whole new privacy laws. Just as with wiretapping phone lines, we can't use old concepts of privacy. A century ago courts first thought since wiretapping wasn't going into somebody's house there was no 4th Amendment protection. Public sentiment caught up with technology - phone conversations should be as private as talking to someone in a house, and could not be tapped into without a warrant. So it is also changing from the old "driving on public roads does not have an expectation of privacy". Mass surveillance allows after-the-fact determination of where a person was at all times. It's kind of a interesting thing that there is a fairly sudden transition from "a few cameras provide some information" to suddenly, with just a couple more cameras, it is possible to reconstruct a nearly complete location history for a vehicle in a community. That is totally different from what was possible before.
Currently, accessing things such as cell phone location history or other digital location history sometimes requires a search warrant. That's fairly new. For 20+ years the thought was "a person is walking around in public, they have no expectation of privacy". But recently the courts have recognized that nearly everybody carries a phone which tracks their location history (because we love Google maps), and agreeing to Google's terms of service does not void an expectation to be able to go about your day without the government looking into historical data and knowing exactly where you went, and when. Unless there is a state law enforcement reason, in which case they get a warrant and get your location history.
Flock, and other surveillance, data can now provide a very complete history of where a person has been. In addition to vehicle identification, some systems have facial recognition, and systems that identify a person by gate or similar may or may not be commercially available.
This is a brand new kind of surveillance, and the consensus is growing that to use the data and conduct search of historical data, for a vehicle or perpetrator or something else, law enforcement must get a warrant. (With all kinds of exceptions for exigencies, of course.)
Here's what Brandeis wrote in a Harvard Law Review article in 1890 "The Right to Privacy":
"THAT the individual shall have full protection in person and in property is a principle as old as the common law; but it has been found necessary from time to time to define anew the exact nature and extent of such protection. Political, social, and economic changes entail the recognition of new rights, and the common law, in its eternal youth, grows to meet the new demands of society.”
As I read some comments, I wonder if some people imagine a cop watching monitors with Flock camera data, sort of like a building security guard watching a wall of monitors showing live data from security cameras. That's not how Flock works, mostly. Almost all Flock use cases are with historical data. Flock says they default to 30 days of storage. Our local police chief is asking the city to let him store 180 days of data. He also wants access that historical data, by any police person, at any time, with no oversight and no warrant requirement. Moreover, when some citizens brought up the possibility that a bad actor might steal the data his reply was "it's just a conspiracy that data can get stolen, that doesn't actually happen". Bizarre. I would like: Store the data, demonstrate it's secure, and get a warrant to search. In my state warrants for this are an electronic form, filed in minutes, and there is a judge on duty to review it 24/7, every day of the year.
There are many other instances of publicly observable information, not subject to privacy expectations, that any private person or group of people could systematically gather, organize, and resell commercially. For example, you or I could launch a private, earth-observing satellite into space and sell daily counts of the cars in Walmart parking lots to hedge funds. Or we could establish a network of buoys in the ocean to track the comings and goings of commercial shipping, and sell the data to commodity traders, merchant banks, and shipping insurers. Or we could negotiate easements with property owners adjacent to overland oil pipelines to allow us to set up equipment that shines a laser on the outer surface of the pipeline to measure small vibrations that correlate with the flow rate inside the pipeline, and sell that time series to oil traders and producers. Or you and I could negotiate with property owners to install cameras all around a city to record public streets, and sell entity recognition and location services derived from the footage. Oh, that's Flock.
But the point is that this is entirely private activity, just private actors using their innate right to observe public things and remember them, and then speaking about what they remember, perhaps in exchange for a fee. Anyone can do this, it's open to competition. Scale is irrelevant, both legally and morally, IMO. The fact that they use technical aids in observing, remembering, and speaking is irrelevant. As long as they don't defraud others or violate any obligations! That of course would be relevant.
But since any private person can collect this information himself or pay someone else for it, I don't see why police departments can't also do so, in the same way that they engage in all sorts of commercial agreements with vendors, etc.
What you call reductive, I call thinking from first principles. I know you want to argue that scale does matter somehow, and I'll check out what Anderson says, but I just don't see how... some information in this world is simply public, what happens on public streets has been literally the canonical example of public information for hundreds of years, and public means public! Modern technology allows our whole economy, including our police agencies, to derive more productive value from public information than before. It's progress. I think the only way to get what you want would be to invent some new right to privacy on public streets, which would bind all private observers, not only police. But that's crazy -- you can't demand that I forget what I see on the street!
First, more is different. It is truly fascinating. The phenomena shows up in many ways, and with similarities across domains. A few cameras records some things. Suddenly, with some magic number of cameras - number depending on the region - it is possible to recreate detailed historical location data throughout a region. The transition is abrupt. The emergent behavior is totally cool. "More is Different" was coined in 1972. It is not new, and the field of study is vibrant. In terms of surveillance, if you ever us any of the recent AI models, you know that they respond in a way that is very different from one well read person, or even a team of well read people. Lots of sensors recording lots of data, searchable together, is a totally different thing from a bunch public observers.
Second, police are allowed legal use of force. The government is different from private parties. That is why we have a Bill of Rights. Police arresting people is different from Google selling you ads. Los Angeles discovered they had so many false identifications from Flock data, and so many times police stopped people incorrectly, that they canceled their whole Flock contract.
As for police using data gathered by private companies without getting a warrant, check out the bill sponsored by Representatives Massie & Boebert. As new technology comes along we do indeed invent new privacy protection laws.
“If someone has the right to do something, surely they also have the right to do it efficiently. Otherwise what is the limiting principle?”
It’s not uncommon for there to be legal limits on behaviors that are okay in moderation, but harmful if done with perfect efficiency, like fishing. The purpose of law is to protect the commons. Some surveillance helps catch criminals, but building a panopticon in public spaces would make the oppression of innocent people trivial if the US were ever to become corruptly authoritarian.
It's fascinating how deeply inculcated Americans are to the idea of living with pervasive violent crime. The casual refrains to avoid certain neighborhoods (at night or all the time), coupled with shoulder shrugging and victim blaming ("what did they think would happen, walking there?") all seems normal until you live in a country where this isn't the case. When you go to a country that has made violent crime basically irrelevant through surveillance, you realize the enormous psychological weight taken off your shoulders. Arguments about theoretical abuses of power really don't move me at all because I am aware of the far more tangible threats from criminals I face every day in a city.
Even a lot of the more banal nonviolent crime stateside is pretty much irrelevant in places with surveillance. Last year, I lived somewhere where I essentially couldn’t order packages because if I didn’t camp out at the front door for the delivery guy, they would get stolen within 15 minutes. That’s really bad!
You say that it's not illegal for the police to surveil people in public as part of "regular law enforcement," but is it really regular law enforcement to passively surveil literally everyone and store that data in a database?
One decent litmus test for privacy overreach is, "could a bad actor/agency within the government super easily exploit this for political reasons?" The answer for Flock seems to be "undoubtedly." An authoritarian federal government could gain access to Flock databases either by requesting access to local PDs or maybe by some statutory authority. Then, they could target a political opponent by using the data in some way to construct a narrative about malicious activity to further a court case. Obviously a very hypothetical scenario, but it's a demonstration of another point on the slippery slope that we've been on since FISA -> EO 12333 -> Patriot act -> 2008 FISA amendments.
My biggest problem with Flock isn't even the fact that they're surveiling everyone. My main problem with it is that it's a single private company that has organized such a large scope of data that the risks associated with cyberattacks is huge. All it would take is one data breach to expose everyone's movement patterns for all sorts of potential targeting. Another aspect of the private company thing is that any data safeguards or protections that are in place by their terms/policies could just change. If the government is going to do the surveillance, the government should do the surveillance and establish legal boundaries that prevent them from, for example, changing the data logging from "store for 30 days" to "store indefinitely."
I do want to note that I'm not 100% convinced on being anti-Flock. I'm not rabidly anti-Flock mostly because I have always felt that as someone who tries to be an upstanding citizen I don't have much to worry about in terms of data collection and surveillance (in the right hands). But the concerns I listed above are valid, which is why I can relate better to those who are on the more critical end of the spectrum than those who are too quick to dismiss the potential risks.
>One decent litmus test for privacy overreach is, "could a bad actor/agency within the government super easily exploit this for political reasons?"
This litmus test could be applied to just about any meaningful power exercised by an arm of the state and would yield the same conclusion. I guess we shouldn't empower state governments to perform traffic studies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Lee_lane_closure_scandal
I specified "privacy overreach," but it's interesting that you linked to a Wikipedia page about a malicious usage of power that wasn't actually a traffic study. Did you mean to do a self-own?
The study was obviously pretextual but it was the authority to conduct a traffic study that was cited for the lane closures at the time. We are talking about abuse of powers. Do you think my claim was that Bridgegate was a political firestorm over the Port Authority's power to conduct a legitimate traffic study?
The difference between the situation you linked and Flock is that there is a meaningful way to implement policy such that the power to close lanes by the government is almost never abused. With Flock, even if you made the databases accessible only with a warrant/court case/etc... that data would still be in there to be potentially breached and stolen. That's the other aspect of my point. There is no definitive, real-world possible way of making that data inaccessible to anyone but the right people that the gov would actually implement.
At the very, very least, this technology should probably be significantly more regulated and controlled by the government, in decentralized databases that have individual credentials and protection per-PD. In my opinion.
Okay, the government has our tax returns, the location of our homes, the location of our employers… they can subpoena (with the safeguard of a grand jury that would indict a ham sandwich) our location data and credit card transactions,… anything they want. If you think cameras of our movements in public are uniquely valuable relative to that information; with its minimal safeguards, I disagree.
Your concerns are not hypothetical and abstract. J. Edgar Hoover had a card catalogue of "people of interest", a bureaucratic, surveillance-oriented people index that helped make it easier to retrieve and connect information about targets. He used that information to "attack" political enemies. Imagine how much damage he could have done with all the Flock data. Lots of cameras, storing lots of images, searchable as a single system, is fundamentally different from a bunch of cops and neighbors taking notes and reporting what they find. Flock systems can track location of people in a way that would make Hoover salivate, and in a way which SCOTUS seems to say requires a warrant. (Using historical location data of a person's phone seems to need a warrant, in some cases.)
Obviously Flock data shouldn’t be publicly available for use against political opponents who aren’t committing crimes. If it hasn’t been done already we could easily prohibit and even criminalize the use of the data in that way. Why should a hypothetical scenario where a political opponent is smeared with Flock data outweigh the benefit of potentially hundreds of thousands of solved/prevented crimes?
Your litmus test is flawed. Tax audits and other civil and criminal investigations can and have been used improperly against political opponents (see all the Trump-related lawfare, on both sides) - should we not allow those kinds of investigations just because they are very occasionally used improperly?
I specified litmus for "privacy overreach." But now that you mention it, yeah, we should probably establish some probable cause requirements for tax auditing so that it can't be used like a weapon against people. Do you think it's a good thing that the government can just decide "that guy, let's audit him"?
I never said "let's not have Flock cameras because Joe Schmoe Trumpbiden is gonna get surveilled for political purposes," I was pointing out that it's seemingly another step in the wrong direction for citizen privacy and is just one part of my broader statement.
For the pro-surveil-everyone crowd, imagine a society where the government divides behavior into two categories:
* Approved behavior: conduct it wants to encourage
* Disapproved behavior: conduct it wants to discourage
To enforce this, it installs cameras in every home and records everything citizens do.
If you aren’t doing anything the government disapproves of, you have nothing to fear. Would you accept that?
If the Fourth Amendment is the objection, make it “voluntary.” Anyone can refuse, but the government flags everyone who does.
Richard wrote that most Americans in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s didn’t think they lived in a fascist state despite much less restrained police power. But that depended heavily on who you were. Black people in the Jim Crow South and gay people had a very different experience. Today, women seeking abortions in states where abortion is illegal have similarly good reasons to worry about giving the government a detailed record of where they go.
And “law-abiding citizen” isn’t a fixed category. Governments have thousands of laws and enormous discretion over whom they investigate. The process itself can be punishment. An investigation or prosecution can ruin someone even if the government ultimately loses.
We’ve also just watched the Trump administration use government power against perceived enemies. Officials who abuse these powers are rarely personally accountable. Given how narrowly Bivens has been confined, there is often no legal recourse against federal officials who violate your constitutional rights. At the state level, qualified immunity means only the most egregious police misconduct is likely to result in personal liability. And because prosecutors have absolute immunity for core prosecutorial acts, there is often little an innocent person can do to hold a prosecutor accountable for ruining their life.
Crime is the violation of a law, and laws can be created or changed. What was legal yesterday can be a crime today. When you give the government the power to surveil everything a citizen does, why assume it will only pass and enforce laws you like? Just look at the UK and how police enforce hate-speech laws.
Public choice theory and the iron law of bureaucracy would like a word.
You got ahead of yourself and stepped on your dick when you said "To enforce this, it installs cameras in every home...." Nobody is talking about putting cameras in private dwelling spaces.
The British hate-speech business is a red herring. The police can already observe from the comfort of the station house everything you say on social media and if you wave a Union Jack too vigorously in the presence of certain racialized minorities you will be charged with stirring up racial discord. Hate speech is inherently public. That's its whole point. No secret privacy-violating surveillance is necessary to uncover it. (The problem in countries that have hate-speech laws is criminalizing non-violent speech at all, not its detection.)
sure but once the law is passed you better be on your best behavior. big brother is watching. and of course that says nothing about old laws on the books that haven’t been enforced for a long time but now that the state has a video…it can go crime hunting!
This whole argument assumes a non abusive, democratic state. This is no future guarantee.
When you create tools that function well within a limited and regulated space they seem great! But the limits and regulations are not the system, they are a separate system, and you can keep the first while removing the second and suddenly the result is terrible.
The fear is about potential, not current abuse. You don't even really attempt to address it.
"in practice paperwork requirements tend to make government less efficient. Fifty known cases of stalking strike me as something that is barely worth mentioning in the context of plummeting crime rates."
Just FWIW - if you were an employee at Meta and you were trying to access logs of your ex-partner to see who they were DMing on Instagram, you'd probably get fired quite quickly because they have automatic logging in their software. I'm sure Flock could build this internally as well quite easily but at the minimum, it's just logging the police username and then who they looked up for their "case", which is probably how they found these 50.
Employees of hospitals are readily caught when they snoop on the medical files of VIPs (or family members/ex-husbands) who get admitted for treatment. If you access a record of someone you aren't currently looking after, you will get caught and then fired and/or charged and/or face licensing discipline. People still do it, though. The temptation is irresistible for some people to find out what sexually transmitted diseases a politician has been treated for.
> The article includes suggestions for safeguards like making police log every search. While that sounds good in theory, in practice paperwork requirements tend to make government less efficient.
This doesn't require paperwork: just have the software automatically log every search, so that they can be looked at later if misconduct is suspected.
Also, I'm not sure about "There’s no reason this shouldn’t eventually get to approximately zero." There's already some crime in some jurisdictions that the police could catch, or the courts could prosecute, but they choose not to.
Finally, another sort of abuse ubiquitous public surveillance could enable, on the part of whole offices rather than individual corrupt cops, is to surveil some person & then fine/arrest/prosecute them for any of a wide range of obscure, normally unimportant, often unenforced laws they may have violated unintentionally; this could be done either to random people to raise money in fines (as is already done in some places with speed limits), or to specifically persecute people the police or government dislike. I'm not as sure as many people that this would actually be a large problem, but it is worth noting & keeping in mind as a possible downside.
I've never understood people who are hysterical about privacy rights in the age of the internet. Everyone and their mom are being tracked by numerous corporations and when Edward Snowden blew the whistle on PRISM, the response by most of society was a shrug. Is this not the ultimate revealed preference?! All hail the panopticon!
One difference might be the uses to which the data can be put. The NSA deals with national security/counterterrorism; tech corporations mostly use their tracked data to target ads & perhaps train AI models. Ordinary police have both the authority to arrest people, & an interest in smaller mundane crimes which can at the government's discretion include externally harmless individual activities (e.g. drug use, prostitution, or the UK's prosecutions for online speech). (I'm not saying this necessarily will cause enough of a problem for anyone to care, just that it potentially could.)
Fair points, but if the public truly cared there surely would be a greater impact, beyond GDPR, no? Maybe I'm just a dumb sheeple but IMO the silence is the verdict here: people don't care about mass surveillance so long as it doesn't personally inconvenience their day-to-day functions and it's not in their faces... too much. Which makes sense for the vast majority of normal functional people who don't have anything truly scandalous to hide
There has been a pretty massive public backlash to the flock cameras leading counties to cancel their contracts or cover up their cameras, another example recently is Amazon having to immediately backpedal after the backlash to their ring camera Super Bowl ad, there have been laws passed around surveillance by Facebook, the meta glasses are deeply unpopular, palantir is also deeply unpopular etc. I think you are just conflating a coordination problem with people’s views and using that to justify allowing it.
The response wasn’t a shrug, it was the biggest news story of the year. Most people were outraged and it prompted legislation for reform. Whether anything actually changed is unclear
In the part where you’re talking about how much crime has dropped you didn’t even make an attempt to show that this was correlated with flock installation?
My own theory not subjected to any statistical analysis -- where's the fun in that? -- is that crime has dropped because:
1) the criminal classes are, again, aging out of their peak crime-committing years. This happens periodically after every baby boom. You get a bulge of people 15-25 and all hell breaks loose for a decade and then they are 25-35, much reduced in numbers by murder and incarceration, and the survivors too fat to be good at violence and escaping, or the smarter ones graduate to cyber crime where the money comes with less physical effort.
2) potential victims of crime are progressively more likely to be Constitutionally armed with concealed weapons. Even if only a minority are carrying, the criminal can't know who isn't.
This period of time overlaps with the Kia Hyundai ignition problem. Massive recalls were done and Kias and Hyundais are now much much harder to steal. That should probably be accounted for in the math.
Mass surveillance is one of the last remaining IQ tests that both left and right fail miserably. Otherwise intelligent people become suddenly unable to do any kind of cost/benefit analysis.
It’s a neatly told little story but unfortunately the actual evidence examined in detail is nowhere near strong enough to support the claim that Flock and other surveillance technology is responsible for all, or even most, of the 2020s crime decline. It is plausibly responsible for some of it, but comparison of metros with and without Flock or other ALPRs deployed doesn’t really show much difference in crime rate reductions.
If the benefit is smaller, then the cost side of the equation looms relatively larger. It might be a slam dunk to say 50% across the board crime reduction is worth a few dozen stalking cases per year, but it’s a lot harder to say that if the actual causal effect is just a few hundred more stolen cars recovered on the margins.
Frankly the sloppiness with figures and obvious motivated reasoning in this piece should make readers re-evaluate how trustworthy the author’s analysis is in other cases.
One also cannot emphasize enough that Americans’ legal protections against search, seizure, and detention, notwithstanding what whiny lolbertarians would rather you believe, are by far the strongest in the world. In most liberty/safety trade offs the US is an extreme outlier. Our country is overdue for a course correction.
And if you are unlawfully detained due to the malicious acts of a politically-motivated state actor, you get pretty well compensated for your trouble! https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg7pyjxjxrvo
Why not strip away all privacy, then? Where is the surveillance of those who surveil us? We would probably have far less corruption if politicians were under constant surveillance. Put Flock cameras on them. Track every meeting, every donor, every lobbyist, every transaction. After all, if you have nothing to hide, what are you afraid of?
And why stop there? Why not revoke the Bill of Rights whenever doing so produces greater utility? The Fourth Amendment surely makes law enforcement less efficient. The First Amendment protects speech that may cause harm. Due process allows guilty people to go free. Every right imposes costs.
That is precisely the point of a right. A right is a constraint on power, not the result of a cost-benefit calculation. If the government may violate it whenever someone decides that doing so produces greater social utility, it isn’t a right. It is a privilege granted by the government and revocable by the government.
If appearing in public extinguishes the expectation of privacy, put microphones beside the cameras and record every conversation. Being observable is not the same thing as surrendering privacy.
Another benefit to Flock that RH didn't mention is the possibility of exonerating innocent people, or never charging them in the first place. Imagine a hypothetical murder pre-Flock where, per the SOP, the police investigate the husband, who is innocent. Depending on the facts and available evidence the husband might be subjected to reputational damage, massive restrictions on his freedom, or even a wrongful conviction. Now imagine the same situation, except Flock exists and a camera observes the getaway car, whose license is linked to the victim's ex-boyfriend from ten years ago.
The cost-benefit analysis shouldn't just weigh restrictions on freedom against reductions in crime. The pro Flock side of the scale also should include the increased freedom for innocent people who are never investigated, indicted or convicted.
Singapore is a great example here. It has an extensive surveillance state, notably fewer protections for criminal defendants than the US, and also one of the absolute lowest crime rates in the world. Certainly part of that is due to being majority Chinese, but I think its law enforcement policies undeniably contribute as well. And, while not a perfect democracy, it's also not exactly an Orwellian 1984 tyranny.
The "freedom" argument is interesting, because I would argue that Singaporeans are meaningfully *more* free in many ways than residents of many US cities. In Singapore, you have more freedom to, say, leave your property unattended, travel alone or at night, carry valuable property with you, etc. These freedoms are actual, tangible benefits, compared to the very hypothetical and abstract conception of freedom used by Flock camera haters.
I don't think it's a great example. Singapore is the size (area and population-wise) of four New York City boroughs. The U.S. is a continent-spanning federalist nation-state with a third of a billion people within its borders.
Singapore also has an incredibly punitive criminal justice system, tight control over everyone living and visiting the country, and many strategic inputs into the global economy that make it very wealthy. It's impossible to untangle all the various reasons why Singapore is a safer society to live in than the aggregate of the United States and somehow isolate a single causal factor like surveillance.
As long as the cameras are confined to public streets and roadways, where there is no reasonable expectation of privacy, I don't really see the problem with police gathering this data, even for a libertarian. A lone, human officer could observe the same public visual stimuli and look up license plate numbers or car descriptions, perhaps even record his findings in a notebook, and he would have the right to direct his own eyes and brain and hand to do so. With Flock, police are doing the same, just more efficiently. If someone has the right to do something, surely they also have the right to do it efficiently. Otherwise what is the limiting principle?
"More is different" is how Nobel Prize winner Anderson drew attention to failure of reductionist descriptions to describe qualitative changes from a lot of things working together. Multiple cameras, recording often, easily searchable with one system, is qualitatively different from a few police and a few neighbors making observations. Recall, when the telephone was introduce it took decades for the public to assert that they didn't want the police listening in to their conversations without a warrant - sure the people talking weren't in the same room, but they still wanted privacy - so it is with mass surveillance. Sure we want it as a tool for law enforcement, but we also want to know that nobody is tracking our every move without first proving to a judge that there is an objective law enforcement need.
But it’s precisely because talking on a phone involves an expectation of privacy, that you need probable cause to infringe upon that. Hence you need a warrant for wiretaps.
You can’t expect privacy while committing a crime on a sidewalk, or while driving down the road with a stolen car.
Privacy isn't just for criminals. You can bite the bullet and say nobody can expect privacy on the sidewalk, if you want.
Absolutely, nobody should expect privacy on the sidewalk, full stop. It’s what being in public means. If it was simply real-time live monitoring, there would be no issue imo. Where it gives me pause is the recording and storing of data, and future retrieval of that information.
It is already the case that nobody can expect privacy on the sidewalk. This is the law of the land. The sidewalk is the law school 101 example of where nobody can expect privacy. It's why news crews can film or record anybody on the sidewalk without their consent, it's why private citizens can film police officers on the sidewalk without their consent. It is deeply embedded into our common law system of precedents that public streets are the canonical example of a public space, and there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in a public space.
If you go out in public, you might be seen. Big deal! That's what public means. Making a network of images of public spaces that solves real use cases for customers is clever and good, and in this case it has massive positive externalities for the public. It's progress.
Indeed. I, and many others, want the government to get a warrant before they use these new capabilities to recreate of our movements. Flock and other companies try to claim it's just a bunch of public view images, but that is either deliberate deception or ignorance. The new systems provide a whole new kind of search capability. The courts, with cases like Carpenter and now Chatrie, are recognizing that the new search technologies are "unreasonable" and deserve 4th amendment protection.
Exactly. It turns out that most citizens expect that they can go about their day and not have law enforcement later recreate a detailed history of where they were and when. A network of cameras provides accurate, historical, location and time data. Courts are starting to recognize that citizens should expect they are not tracked and located after the fact, unless there is a law enforcement need. That is, in the era of mass surveillance there is an expectation of privacy which is newly described because new technology allows surveillance and intrusion that was not possible before. If there is evidence of a crime, law enforcement gets a warrant and looks for the suspect in the recorded data.
> "Exactly. It turns out that most citizens expect that they can go about their day and not have law enforcement later recreate a detailed history of where they were and when."
They should not expect this insofar as it's a history of their movements in public spaces, because that's what public means. Your proposal would gut the meaning of a public space, shrinking the sphere of public information, by taking what was once public and giving it only to the police, behind the veil of a warrant.
Shush, you. You show too much common sense! /sarc
Well said
Think about what you just said. You want a judge to rule *before the fact* on whether the police can use cameras in random untargeted surveillance. How would that even work? Flock doesn't target an individual. It surveils everyone who crosses its line of sight even when there is at that moment no evidence that any of the cars it scans are involved in a crime. It's only after there is evidence of a crime (like a dead body full of holes) that the police go back to review surveillance video. They might identify a potential perpetrator, or they might not. That is completely different from targeting a named individual to tap his phone wires. That counts as a "search" and it must be reasonable. It's not a "search" to be observed going about your business in a public place no matter how broad and intensively it is done. Even if the police put a tail on you and follow you around, they aren't doing a "search".
As you point out "mass surveillance" is a whole new thing. It is qualitatively different from some police following you and making observations. That's why we need whole new privacy laws. Just as with wiretapping phone lines, we can't use old concepts of privacy. A century ago courts first thought since wiretapping wasn't going into somebody's house there was no 4th Amendment protection. Public sentiment caught up with technology - phone conversations should be as private as talking to someone in a house, and could not be tapped into without a warrant. So it is also changing from the old "driving on public roads does not have an expectation of privacy". Mass surveillance allows after-the-fact determination of where a person was at all times. It's kind of a interesting thing that there is a fairly sudden transition from "a few cameras provide some information" to suddenly, with just a couple more cameras, it is possible to reconstruct a nearly complete location history for a vehicle in a community. That is totally different from what was possible before.
Currently, accessing things such as cell phone location history or other digital location history sometimes requires a search warrant. That's fairly new. For 20+ years the thought was "a person is walking around in public, they have no expectation of privacy". But recently the courts have recognized that nearly everybody carries a phone which tracks their location history (because we love Google maps), and agreeing to Google's terms of service does not void an expectation to be able to go about your day without the government looking into historical data and knowing exactly where you went, and when. Unless there is a state law enforcement reason, in which case they get a warrant and get your location history.
Flock, and other surveillance, data can now provide a very complete history of where a person has been. In addition to vehicle identification, some systems have facial recognition, and systems that identify a person by gate or similar may or may not be commercially available.
This is a brand new kind of surveillance, and the consensus is growing that to use the data and conduct search of historical data, for a vehicle or perpetrator or something else, law enforcement must get a warrant. (With all kinds of exceptions for exigencies, of course.)
Here's what Brandeis wrote in a Harvard Law Review article in 1890 "The Right to Privacy":
"THAT the individual shall have full protection in person and in property is a principle as old as the common law; but it has been found necessary from time to time to define anew the exact nature and extent of such protection. Political, social, and economic changes entail the recognition of new rights, and the common law, in its eternal youth, grows to meet the new demands of society.”
I do agree that the indefinite storage of this information is the aspect that gives me some pause.
As I read some comments, I wonder if some people imagine a cop watching monitors with Flock camera data, sort of like a building security guard watching a wall of monitors showing live data from security cameras. That's not how Flock works, mostly. Almost all Flock use cases are with historical data. Flock says they default to 30 days of storage. Our local police chief is asking the city to let him store 180 days of data. He also wants access that historical data, by any police person, at any time, with no oversight and no warrant requirement. Moreover, when some citizens brought up the possibility that a bad actor might steal the data his reply was "it's just a conspiracy that data can get stolen, that doesn't actually happen". Bizarre. I would like: Store the data, demonstrate it's secure, and get a warrant to search. In my state warrants for this are an electronic form, filed in minutes, and there is a judge on duty to review it 24/7, every day of the year.
There are many other instances of publicly observable information, not subject to privacy expectations, that any private person or group of people could systematically gather, organize, and resell commercially. For example, you or I could launch a private, earth-observing satellite into space and sell daily counts of the cars in Walmart parking lots to hedge funds. Or we could establish a network of buoys in the ocean to track the comings and goings of commercial shipping, and sell the data to commodity traders, merchant banks, and shipping insurers. Or we could negotiate easements with property owners adjacent to overland oil pipelines to allow us to set up equipment that shines a laser on the outer surface of the pipeline to measure small vibrations that correlate with the flow rate inside the pipeline, and sell that time series to oil traders and producers. Or you and I could negotiate with property owners to install cameras all around a city to record public streets, and sell entity recognition and location services derived from the footage. Oh, that's Flock.
But the point is that this is entirely private activity, just private actors using their innate right to observe public things and remember them, and then speaking about what they remember, perhaps in exchange for a fee. Anyone can do this, it's open to competition. Scale is irrelevant, both legally and morally, IMO. The fact that they use technical aids in observing, remembering, and speaking is irrelevant. As long as they don't defraud others or violate any obligations! That of course would be relevant.
But since any private person can collect this information himself or pay someone else for it, I don't see why police departments can't also do so, in the same way that they engage in all sorts of commercial agreements with vendors, etc.
What you call reductive, I call thinking from first principles. I know you want to argue that scale does matter somehow, and I'll check out what Anderson says, but I just don't see how... some information in this world is simply public, what happens on public streets has been literally the canonical example of public information for hundreds of years, and public means public! Modern technology allows our whole economy, including our police agencies, to derive more productive value from public information than before. It's progress. I think the only way to get what you want would be to invent some new right to privacy on public streets, which would bind all private observers, not only police. But that's crazy -- you can't demand that I forget what I see on the street!
First, more is different. It is truly fascinating. The phenomena shows up in many ways, and with similarities across domains. A few cameras records some things. Suddenly, with some magic number of cameras - number depending on the region - it is possible to recreate detailed historical location data throughout a region. The transition is abrupt. The emergent behavior is totally cool. "More is Different" was coined in 1972. It is not new, and the field of study is vibrant. In terms of surveillance, if you ever us any of the recent AI models, you know that they respond in a way that is very different from one well read person, or even a team of well read people. Lots of sensors recording lots of data, searchable together, is a totally different thing from a bunch public observers.
Second, police are allowed legal use of force. The government is different from private parties. That is why we have a Bill of Rights. Police arresting people is different from Google selling you ads. Los Angeles discovered they had so many false identifications from Flock data, and so many times police stopped people incorrectly, that they canceled their whole Flock contract.
As for police using data gathered by private companies without getting a warrant, check out the bill sponsored by Representatives Massie & Boebert. As new technology comes along we do indeed invent new privacy protection laws.
“If someone has the right to do something, surely they also have the right to do it efficiently. Otherwise what is the limiting principle?”
It’s not uncommon for there to be legal limits on behaviors that are okay in moderation, but harmful if done with perfect efficiency, like fishing. The purpose of law is to protect the commons. Some surveillance helps catch criminals, but building a panopticon in public spaces would make the oppression of innocent people trivial if the US were ever to become corruptly authoritarian.
Nice argument with the expectation of privacy. And also the comparison of putting a camera on a street corner vs posting a cop there.
It's fascinating how deeply inculcated Americans are to the idea of living with pervasive violent crime. The casual refrains to avoid certain neighborhoods (at night or all the time), coupled with shoulder shrugging and victim blaming ("what did they think would happen, walking there?") all seems normal until you live in a country where this isn't the case. When you go to a country that has made violent crime basically irrelevant through surveillance, you realize the enormous psychological weight taken off your shoulders. Arguments about theoretical abuses of power really don't move me at all because I am aware of the far more tangible threats from criminals I face every day in a city.
Even a lot of the more banal nonviolent crime stateside is pretty much irrelevant in places with surveillance. Last year, I lived somewhere where I essentially couldn’t order packages because if I didn’t camp out at the front door for the delivery guy, they would get stolen within 15 minutes. That’s really bad!
We don't have to live like this!
Is this a Japan post?
More of a China post
You say that it's not illegal for the police to surveil people in public as part of "regular law enforcement," but is it really regular law enforcement to passively surveil literally everyone and store that data in a database?
One decent litmus test for privacy overreach is, "could a bad actor/agency within the government super easily exploit this for political reasons?" The answer for Flock seems to be "undoubtedly." An authoritarian federal government could gain access to Flock databases either by requesting access to local PDs or maybe by some statutory authority. Then, they could target a political opponent by using the data in some way to construct a narrative about malicious activity to further a court case. Obviously a very hypothetical scenario, but it's a demonstration of another point on the slippery slope that we've been on since FISA -> EO 12333 -> Patriot act -> 2008 FISA amendments.
My biggest problem with Flock isn't even the fact that they're surveiling everyone. My main problem with it is that it's a single private company that has organized such a large scope of data that the risks associated with cyberattacks is huge. All it would take is one data breach to expose everyone's movement patterns for all sorts of potential targeting. Another aspect of the private company thing is that any data safeguards or protections that are in place by their terms/policies could just change. If the government is going to do the surveillance, the government should do the surveillance and establish legal boundaries that prevent them from, for example, changing the data logging from "store for 30 days" to "store indefinitely."
I do want to note that I'm not 100% convinced on being anti-Flock. I'm not rabidly anti-Flock mostly because I have always felt that as someone who tries to be an upstanding citizen I don't have much to worry about in terms of data collection and surveillance (in the right hands). But the concerns I listed above are valid, which is why I can relate better to those who are on the more critical end of the spectrum than those who are too quick to dismiss the potential risks.
>One decent litmus test for privacy overreach is, "could a bad actor/agency within the government super easily exploit this for political reasons?"
This litmus test could be applied to just about any meaningful power exercised by an arm of the state and would yield the same conclusion. I guess we shouldn't empower state governments to perform traffic studies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Lee_lane_closure_scandal
You need a better litmus test.
I specified "privacy overreach," but it's interesting that you linked to a Wikipedia page about a malicious usage of power that wasn't actually a traffic study. Did you mean to do a self-own?
The study was obviously pretextual but it was the authority to conduct a traffic study that was cited for the lane closures at the time. We are talking about abuse of powers. Do you think my claim was that Bridgegate was a political firestorm over the Port Authority's power to conduct a legitimate traffic study?
The difference between the situation you linked and Flock is that there is a meaningful way to implement policy such that the power to close lanes by the government is almost never abused. With Flock, even if you made the databases accessible only with a warrant/court case/etc... that data would still be in there to be potentially breached and stolen. That's the other aspect of my point. There is no definitive, real-world possible way of making that data inaccessible to anyone but the right people that the gov would actually implement.
At the very, very least, this technology should probably be significantly more regulated and controlled by the government, in decentralized databases that have individual credentials and protection per-PD. In my opinion.
Okay, the government has our tax returns, the location of our homes, the location of our employers… they can subpoena (with the safeguard of a grand jury that would indict a ham sandwich) our location data and credit card transactions,… anything they want. If you think cameras of our movements in public are uniquely valuable relative to that information; with its minimal safeguards, I disagree.
It's not uniquely valuable. All that information should be more protected than it is.
Your concerns are not hypothetical and abstract. J. Edgar Hoover had a card catalogue of "people of interest", a bureaucratic, surveillance-oriented people index that helped make it easier to retrieve and connect information about targets. He used that information to "attack" political enemies. Imagine how much damage he could have done with all the Flock data. Lots of cameras, storing lots of images, searchable as a single system, is fundamentally different from a bunch of cops and neighbors taking notes and reporting what they find. Flock systems can track location of people in a way that would make Hoover salivate, and in a way which SCOTUS seems to say requires a warrant. (Using historical location data of a person's phone seems to need a warrant, in some cases.)
Obviously Flock data shouldn’t be publicly available for use against political opponents who aren’t committing crimes. If it hasn’t been done already we could easily prohibit and even criminalize the use of the data in that way. Why should a hypothetical scenario where a political opponent is smeared with Flock data outweigh the benefit of potentially hundreds of thousands of solved/prevented crimes?
Your litmus test is flawed. Tax audits and other civil and criminal investigations can and have been used improperly against political opponents (see all the Trump-related lawfare, on both sides) - should we not allow those kinds of investigations just because they are very occasionally used improperly?
I specified litmus for "privacy overreach." But now that you mention it, yeah, we should probably establish some probable cause requirements for tax auditing so that it can't be used like a weapon against people. Do you think it's a good thing that the government can just decide "that guy, let's audit him"?
I never said "let's not have Flock cameras because Joe Schmoe Trumpbiden is gonna get surveilled for political purposes," I was pointing out that it's seemingly another step in the wrong direction for citizen privacy and is just one part of my broader statement.
“Passively surveil everyone and store it in a database” is what Google does. At the ready for anyone with a subpoena.
And they sell that data to anyone who wants it (anonymized.)
Yeah, and I'm typing this on a Google Pixel. How hypocritical of me.
For the pro-surveil-everyone crowd, imagine a society where the government divides behavior into two categories:
* Approved behavior: conduct it wants to encourage
* Disapproved behavior: conduct it wants to discourage
To enforce this, it installs cameras in every home and records everything citizens do.
If you aren’t doing anything the government disapproves of, you have nothing to fear. Would you accept that?
If the Fourth Amendment is the objection, make it “voluntary.” Anyone can refuse, but the government flags everyone who does.
Richard wrote that most Americans in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s didn’t think they lived in a fascist state despite much less restrained police power. But that depended heavily on who you were. Black people in the Jim Crow South and gay people had a very different experience. Today, women seeking abortions in states where abortion is illegal have similarly good reasons to worry about giving the government a detailed record of where they go.
And “law-abiding citizen” isn’t a fixed category. Governments have thousands of laws and enormous discretion over whom they investigate. The process itself can be punishment. An investigation or prosecution can ruin someone even if the government ultimately loses.
We’ve also just watched the Trump administration use government power against perceived enemies. Officials who abuse these powers are rarely personally accountable. Given how narrowly Bivens has been confined, there is often no legal recourse against federal officials who violate your constitutional rights. At the state level, qualified immunity means only the most egregious police misconduct is likely to result in personal liability. And because prosecutors have absolute immunity for core prosecutorial acts, there is often little an innocent person can do to hold a prosecutor accountable for ruining their life.
Crime is the violation of a law, and laws can be created or changed. What was legal yesterday can be a crime today. When you give the government the power to surveil everything a citizen does, why assume it will only pass and enforce laws you like? Just look at the UK and how police enforce hate-speech laws.
Public choice theory and the iron law of bureaucracy would like a word.
You got ahead of yourself and stepped on your dick when you said "To enforce this, it installs cameras in every home...." Nobody is talking about putting cameras in private dwelling spaces.
The British hate-speech business is a red herring. The police can already observe from the comfort of the station house everything you say on social media and if you wave a Union Jack too vigorously in the presence of certain racialized minorities you will be charged with stirring up racial discord. Hate speech is inherently public. That's its whole point. No secret privacy-violating surveillance is necessary to uncover it. (The problem in countries that have hate-speech laws is criminalizing non-violent speech at all, not its detection.)
I encourage you to learn about hypothetical scenarios. It might help you avoid making arguments that are so flawed they aren’t even wrong.
Oh lighten up. And if you want to be nasty, just be nasty. None of this passive-aggressive, "I encourage you to learn . . ." stuff. Jeez.
It’s unconstitutional to write a new law to prosecute past behavior.
sure but once the law is passed you better be on your best behavior. big brother is watching. and of course that says nothing about old laws on the books that haven’t been enforced for a long time but now that the state has a video…it can go crime hunting!
"Imagine a society where the government divides behavior into two categories:
* Approved behavior: conduct it wants to encourage
* Disapproved behavior: conduct it wants to discourage"
Is that any different than government today? Is there a government that could be otherwise?
Ummm… yeah.
NOT Black <> White
You have made the mistake demonstrated by Hayek’s “fatal conceit”.
At barest minimum, there is a third option: behavior not explicitly harmful to others that it neither encourages nor discourages.
this is a great argument against installing flock cameras in every home. i am convinced that would be terrible.
This whole argument assumes a non abusive, democratic state. This is no future guarantee.
When you create tools that function well within a limited and regulated space they seem great! But the limits and regulations are not the system, they are a separate system, and you can keep the first while removing the second and suddenly the result is terrible.
The fear is about potential, not current abuse. You don't even really attempt to address it.
"in practice paperwork requirements tend to make government less efficient. Fifty known cases of stalking strike me as something that is barely worth mentioning in the context of plummeting crime rates."
Just FWIW - if you were an employee at Meta and you were trying to access logs of your ex-partner to see who they were DMing on Instagram, you'd probably get fired quite quickly because they have automatic logging in their software. I'm sure Flock could build this internally as well quite easily but at the minimum, it's just logging the police username and then who they looked up for their "case", which is probably how they found these 50.
Employees of hospitals are readily caught when they snoop on the medical files of VIPs (or family members/ex-husbands) who get admitted for treatment. If you access a record of someone you aren't currently looking after, you will get caught and then fired and/or charged and/or face licensing discipline. People still do it, though. The temptation is irresistible for some people to find out what sexually transmitted diseases a politician has been treated for.
> The article includes suggestions for safeguards like making police log every search. While that sounds good in theory, in practice paperwork requirements tend to make government less efficient.
This doesn't require paperwork: just have the software automatically log every search, so that they can be looked at later if misconduct is suspected.
Also, I'm not sure about "There’s no reason this shouldn’t eventually get to approximately zero." There's already some crime in some jurisdictions that the police could catch, or the courts could prosecute, but they choose not to.
Finally, another sort of abuse ubiquitous public surveillance could enable, on the part of whole offices rather than individual corrupt cops, is to surveil some person & then fine/arrest/prosecute them for any of a wide range of obscure, normally unimportant, often unenforced laws they may have violated unintentionally; this could be done either to random people to raise money in fines (as is already done in some places with speed limits), or to specifically persecute people the police or government dislike. I'm not as sure as many people that this would actually be a large problem, but it is worth noting & keeping in mind as a possible downside.
I've never understood people who are hysterical about privacy rights in the age of the internet. Everyone and their mom are being tracked by numerous corporations and when Edward Snowden blew the whistle on PRISM, the response by most of society was a shrug. Is this not the ultimate revealed preference?! All hail the panopticon!
One difference might be the uses to which the data can be put. The NSA deals with national security/counterterrorism; tech corporations mostly use their tracked data to target ads & perhaps train AI models. Ordinary police have both the authority to arrest people, & an interest in smaller mundane crimes which can at the government's discretion include externally harmless individual activities (e.g. drug use, prostitution, or the UK's prosecutions for online speech). (I'm not saying this necessarily will cause enough of a problem for anyone to care, just that it potentially could.)
Fair points, but if the public truly cared there surely would be a greater impact, beyond GDPR, no? Maybe I'm just a dumb sheeple but IMO the silence is the verdict here: people don't care about mass surveillance so long as it doesn't personally inconvenience their day-to-day functions and it's not in their faces... too much. Which makes sense for the vast majority of normal functional people who don't have anything truly scandalous to hide
There has been a pretty massive public backlash to the flock cameras leading counties to cancel their contracts or cover up their cameras, another example recently is Amazon having to immediately backpedal after the backlash to their ring camera Super Bowl ad, there have been laws passed around surveillance by Facebook, the meta glasses are deeply unpopular, palantir is also deeply unpopular etc. I think you are just conflating a coordination problem with people’s views and using that to justify allowing it.
The response wasn’t a shrug, it was the biggest news story of the year. Most people were outraged and it prompted legislation for reform. Whether anything actually changed is unclear
What passed? Not just legislation but even regulatory policies? That's what matters at the end of the day, anything else is just bitching and moaning
The Freedom Act. Look it up
How much has this changed the game? 5 second google search says it limits wiretaps, cool?
In the part where you’re talking about how much crime has dropped you didn’t even make an attempt to show that this was correlated with flock installation?
My own theory not subjected to any statistical analysis -- where's the fun in that? -- is that crime has dropped because:
1) the criminal classes are, again, aging out of their peak crime-committing years. This happens periodically after every baby boom. You get a bulge of people 15-25 and all hell breaks loose for a decade and then they are 25-35, much reduced in numbers by murder and incarceration, and the survivors too fat to be good at violence and escaping, or the smarter ones graduate to cyber crime where the money comes with less physical effort.
2) potential victims of crime are progressively more likely to be Constitutionally armed with concealed weapons. Even if only a minority are carrying, the criminal can't know who isn't.
This period of time overlaps with the Kia Hyundai ignition problem. Massive recalls were done and Kias and Hyundais are now much much harder to steal. That should probably be accounted for in the math.
Also not accounted for
1. The historic rise, then historic drop, in unemployment of the criminal age population
2. The increase in gun ownership at this time
3. The further proliferation of police body cams
4. Any sort of changes inspired by the defund the police movement and in the backlash against the defund the police movement
5. The supposed wave of retirement of senior police officers
6. Crime drops in areas with Flock and areas without it.
Mass surveillance is one of the last remaining IQ tests that both left and right fail miserably. Otherwise intelligent people become suddenly unable to do any kind of cost/benefit analysis.
If unclear, I am extremely pro-surveillance.
It’s a neatly told little story but unfortunately the actual evidence examined in detail is nowhere near strong enough to support the claim that Flock and other surveillance technology is responsible for all, or even most, of the 2020s crime decline. It is plausibly responsible for some of it, but comparison of metros with and without Flock or other ALPRs deployed doesn’t really show much difference in crime rate reductions.
If the benefit is smaller, then the cost side of the equation looms relatively larger. It might be a slam dunk to say 50% across the board crime reduction is worth a few dozen stalking cases per year, but it’s a lot harder to say that if the actual causal effect is just a few hundred more stolen cars recovered on the margins.
Frankly the sloppiness with figures and obvious motivated reasoning in this piece should make readers re-evaluate how trustworthy the author’s analysis is in other cases.
One also cannot emphasize enough that Americans’ legal protections against search, seizure, and detention, notwithstanding what whiny lolbertarians would rather you believe, are by far the strongest in the world. In most liberty/safety trade offs the US is an extreme outlier. Our country is overdue for a course correction.
"Our country is overdue for a course correction."
God willing.
And if you are unlawfully detained due to the malicious acts of a politically-motivated state actor, you get pretty well compensated for your trouble! https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg7pyjxjxrvo
Why not strip away all privacy, then? Where is the surveillance of those who surveil us? We would probably have far less corruption if politicians were under constant surveillance. Put Flock cameras on them. Track every meeting, every donor, every lobbyist, every transaction. After all, if you have nothing to hide, what are you afraid of?
And why stop there? Why not revoke the Bill of Rights whenever doing so produces greater utility? The Fourth Amendment surely makes law enforcement less efficient. The First Amendment protects speech that may cause harm. Due process allows guilty people to go free. Every right imposes costs.
That is precisely the point of a right. A right is a constraint on power, not the result of a cost-benefit calculation. If the government may violate it whenever someone decides that doing so produces greater social utility, it isn’t a right. It is a privilege granted by the government and revocable by the government.
If appearing in public extinguishes the expectation of privacy, put microphones beside the cameras and record every conversation. Being observable is not the same thing as surrendering privacy.
Another benefit to Flock that RH didn't mention is the possibility of exonerating innocent people, or never charging them in the first place. Imagine a hypothetical murder pre-Flock where, per the SOP, the police investigate the husband, who is innocent. Depending on the facts and available evidence the husband might be subjected to reputational damage, massive restrictions on his freedom, or even a wrongful conviction. Now imagine the same situation, except Flock exists and a camera observes the getaway car, whose license is linked to the victim's ex-boyfriend from ten years ago.
The cost-benefit analysis shouldn't just weigh restrictions on freedom against reductions in crime. The pro Flock side of the scale also should include the increased freedom for innocent people who are never investigated, indicted or convicted.
Singapore is a great example here. It has an extensive surveillance state, notably fewer protections for criminal defendants than the US, and also one of the absolute lowest crime rates in the world. Certainly part of that is due to being majority Chinese, but I think its law enforcement policies undeniably contribute as well. And, while not a perfect democracy, it's also not exactly an Orwellian 1984 tyranny.
The "freedom" argument is interesting, because I would argue that Singaporeans are meaningfully *more* free in many ways than residents of many US cities. In Singapore, you have more freedom to, say, leave your property unattended, travel alone or at night, carry valuable property with you, etc. These freedoms are actual, tangible benefits, compared to the very hypothetical and abstract conception of freedom used by Flock camera haters.
I don't think it's a great example. Singapore is the size (area and population-wise) of four New York City boroughs. The U.S. is a continent-spanning federalist nation-state with a third of a billion people within its borders.
Singapore also has an incredibly punitive criminal justice system, tight control over everyone living and visiting the country, and many strategic inputs into the global economy that make it very wealthy. It's impossible to untangle all the various reasons why Singapore is a safer society to live in than the aggregate of the United States and somehow isolate a single causal factor like surveillance.