Hacker News Reader

It wouldn't have to be a police officer, you could pay minimum wage to (or blackmail) anyone willing to collect number plates etc.

From the Stasi article on Wikipedia:

By 1995, some 174,000 inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (IMs) Stasi informants had been identified, almost 2.5% of East Germany's population between the ages of 18 and 60.[12] 10,000 IMs were under 18 years of age.[12] From the volume of material destroyed in the final days of the regime, the office of the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Records (BStU) believes that there could have been as many as 500,000 informers.[12] A former Stasi colonel who served in the counterintelligence directorate estimated that the figure could be as high as 2 million if occasional informants were included. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi

According to this[1] there are 1.22 million police in the US, which is about 0.373% of the population. Imagine 10 times as many police / informants / analysts / etc.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...

> It wouldn't have to be a police officer, you could pay minimum wage to ... anyone willing to collect number plates etc.

I would be very surprised if any Policeman's Union would permit that.

They would just have to be a paid informant.

You still have to have paperwork on informants.

I guarantee you that a Policeman's Union is going to stop you if it looks like you're using informants as a cheap source of labor to perform police scutwork such as stakeouts and other such surveillance.

I have never followed this line of reasoning. I see no reason it should be arbitrarily limited or expensive to do things that technology can do for cheap. It makes no sense.

If the problem is that petty things are punished too harshly or are selectively enforced, then that is where attention should be directed. I don't think being caught and prosecuted for a crime should be a roll of the dice. If society decides something is illegal, I want that thing enforced. I don't want my tax money wasted on police sitting around watching for speeders. I want them doing the things that an expensive human is paid for.

> I see no reason it should be arbitrarily limited or expensive to do things that technology can do for cheap.

When you hand a powerful tool to a powerful organization you must make sure that there are safeguards in place to limit the damage that can be done when parts of that organization use that tool for evil.

For the past couple of decades, the US has been having a painful conversation about the just what this proper privacy/LEO-convenience balance should be. LEO rhetoric notwithstanding, it's abundantly clear that it has never been easier to perform surveillance than it is today.

I expect that not many people would object to temporary placement of an ALPR system at a place of interest when all data from that system that is not _clearly_ directly related to a person of interest is purged before it ever gets into the hands of law enforcement.

I expect that many (but far too few) people would object to blanketing an entire metro area in ALPR cameras, RFID toll tag readers, DRT boxes, and the like and retaining all of that information forever, just in case it was needed to speed an investigation along later.

> I don't want my tax money wasted on police sitting around watching for speeders.

Thing is, I do. I want police to have to choose to pay a meatbag to do this sort of scutwork because in way too many cases, those laws are enforced to enrich the department's coffers or to target disfavored people.

I totally 100% agree that we should have sane laws that are applied evenly across the board. I would LOVE for prosecutor and police discretion, as well as plea bargaining to be removed, forever. This will not happen in my lifetime, if it ever does.

So -for now- we limit the damage evil people can do with the power tools that they have available to them. This makes policing more expensive. That's okay with me.

>The notion that it is 100% okay that things that happen in public view may be subject to notice and recording at any time is very important to preserve.

Yes, but the problem here isn't that this number was recorded, it's that it was recorded at a garden supply shop with no real reason to believe that anyone at the shop was growing marijuana.

The key bit is that it puts innocent people under suspicion and leads to wasted effort on the police side, along with pointless legal bullshit on the innocent's side. Not everyone who goes to that stpre is gonna be a marijuana dealer, or even a user; garden supply stores are kind of a key place to get supplies for any garden. The chance of that garden being laced with pot is a lot smaller than 100% of the time.

> Yes, but the problem here isn't that this number was recorded, it's that it was recorded at a garden supply shop with no real reason to believe that anyone at the shop was growing marijuana.

We all have a right to privacy. However, we all also have a long-standing right to notice and take note of things that happen in plain sight in public areas. Be very careful with how you propose to fix any wrongs here.

> The key bit is that it puts innocent people under suspicion and leads to wasted effort on the police side...

I'm having difficulty understanding what this has to do with surveillance of a parking lot that was publicly visible.

Anyone who has undertaken a non-trivial endeavor understands that one is likely to try many approaches that end up not working out. Police investigation is often non-trivial work. Sometimes, you'll go to a place, collect a bunch of publicly available information, sift through that information, and discover that it was all a dead end. This seems to me to be perfectly okay, as long as your motivation for gathering that information was good.

If incompetent or lazy officers are either spending an inordinate amount of time chasing dead ends, or they are throwing cuffs on the first name that floats in front of their faces, they should be corrected. If they can't be corrected, they should be removed from policing.

If incompetent or lazy officers end up jailing or causing someone to have to pay legal fees when that someone is obviously not the person(s) that they're after, the department should be required to compensate [0] the person that they fucked over.

If malicious officers are using their powers to harass and intimidate, they should face real charges and be removed from policing.

[0] This compensation would obviously go above and beyond compensation for direct costs and time lost and cover pain and anguish compensation as well.

The problem isn't that the information was supposedly private, or that the parking lot was public.

The problem is that people were being raided based on buying garden supplies. The purchase of legal, useful tools--used for things like growing your own food, or even basic maintenance of your front yard (which is mandatory in some places)--was being used as a means of deciding who to arrest. This is not only a massive insult to the people being raided, but also a waste of time for the police, on top of being questionably moral and against the principles upon which the US was founded. Literally everyone involved is losing here, and that means this method of looking for people to arrest is wrong.

> The problem is that people were being raided based on buying garden supplies.

I get that. That's a big problem. I thought I made my stance on this clear. :)

Don't get confused! The problem isn't the exercise of the right to take notice and note of things that happen in public. The problem is police who perform balls-to-the-wall SWAT raids on people just because they were seen purchasing gardening supplies.

Punish the shitty policing. Make those who were raided far more than whole. Actually punish the people responsible for ordering the raid on such flimsy evidence. Make it abundantly clear that this is behavior is entirely unacceptable and not how police behave. If you don't fix the root cause, the problem will happen over and over again.

You're saying public recording is fine when it's "expensive" -- costing a human salary, but not when it's a robot? I'm not following you.

If police are going to record citizens, citizens should feel comfortable recording police. What their routes are, favorite stops, conversations, etc.

It's not fine when it's expensive, it's fine when it's inherently limited and not omniscient.

> If police are going to record citizens, citizens should feel comfortable recording police.

Nobody's debating that.

But citizens aren't incentivized to record police.

> You're saying public recording is fine when it's "expensive" -- costing a human salary, but not when it's a robot? I'm not following you.

You are following me. That's exactly what I'm saying.

Human scale surveillance is okay. Because the surveillance is carried out by a human on the scene, it requires the surveillers to decide who should be surveilled, and prevents or eliminates blanket surveillance.

> If police are going to record citizens, citizens should feel comfortable recording police.

100% agreed. Because of the extraordinary powers they are entrusted with, on-duty police [0] should be held to a much higher standard than regular folks.

Off-duty cops who aren't exercising police power? They're folks like any other and must be afforded the same rights and protections as every other regular citizen.

[0] Or off-duty police who are otherwise exercising their police powers.

> Human scale surveillance is okay. Because the surveillance is carried out by a human on the scene, it requires the surveillers to decide who should be surveilled, and prevents or eliminates blanket surveillance.

But what we're describing is not a human using his judgment to select probable suspects for further investigation. It's a guy parked pointing a camera at all license plates and feeding them en masse to a computer for automated processing. It is not functionally different than the hypothetical robot you described, only this happens to be a robot with an organic component.

> It is not functionally different than the hypothetical robot you described, only this happens to be a robot with an organic component.

Two things.

1) You appear to have missed this in my original comment:

> It's very important that we protect the right to notice and record things that happen in public. I feel that it's equally important that we work to limit the damage that an entity can do when they have the resources available to record such things on a large scale.

2) It's obvious that one can very cost-effectively blanket any urban or semi-urban area in ALPR cameras. When you do this, you gain the ability to track any vehicle in that area forever. For areas of any appreciable size, no police force has the personnel on hand to achieve the same level of coverage with human officers. This means that -if you ban robot officers- you dramatically limit the parts of one's trips that the police can remember.

It's the difference between a passive attacker that controls a few nodes in the Tor network, and a passive attacker that controls most of the nodes in the Tor network. In the former situation, that attacker may be able to use traffic analysis to unmask a few Tor users. In the latter situation, they will be able to unmask very many Tor users. [0]

Make sense?

[0] This is -as the Tor people have always said- not something that Tor protects against.

Ok -- I'm following your argument now. I'm surprised that you think 100% blanket surveillance is not ok, but partial surveillance -- limited only by its expensiveness -- is OK.

Because what's most likely to happen is that the police choose to surveil an area for political reasons (like racial segregation), and are thus attacking a specific group.

Yes, by limiting robot police & robot cameras you make this difficult for police by limiting their memory, but mass-surveillance is still happening! This, myself & the other commenter (I believe) find this unacceptable.

I'm arguing that police shouldn't be mass surveilling at all -- with robots, helmet cams that track license plates or by individual human officers selecting a zone to surveil. Or that if this surveillance happens -- it becomes public knowledge. Let every citizen view the live feeds around them, perform their own tracking if they wish, to keep the playing field open.

The Tor project doesn't protect against isolated attacks (surveillance), but would it not be nice if it could?

I think we have a difference of opinion here so I'm curious -- what are valid reasons from your viewpoint in which a human officer should select an area to surveil?

> Because what's most likely to happen is that the police choose to surveil an area for political reasons (like racial segregation), and are thus attacking a specific group.

That has nothing to do with police surveillance. That has everything to do with crooked cops. It's a problem that's worth talking about, but it's completely unrelated to a conversation about limiting the damage that can be done with tireless, incredibly cheap robot police officers.

> ...but mass-surveillance is still happening!

What I'm describing as the ideal situation isn't mass surveillance. If you declare all surveillance that gets fed back into a filing cabinet (computerized or otherwise) to be mass surveillance, you make it impossible to distinguish between a single guy on a stakeout and an organization that records and stores for the rest of eternity every single phone call in a nation, the exterior of every single piece of snail mail in a nation, and the movement of every single automobile in every major and most minor metropolitan areas in that nation.

Please don't do that.

> The Tor project doesn't protect against isolated attacks (surveillance), but would it not be nice if it could?

If you could get it for free, it would be nice. It's a hard problem that requires some very serious tradeoffs. There is no way around those tradeoffs.

Tor -as is- is very useful. If it protected against a passive adversary that controlled most of the nodes in the network, nearly noone would use it because it would be too slow.

> ...what are valid reasons from your viewpoint in which a human officer should select an area to surveil?

I mean, the obvious stuff?

* As part of a routine crime-prevention patrol. (E.g. an officer walking a regular beat.)

* As part of an ongoing investigation into one or more people who are -at a minimum- suspected of being involved in illegal activity.

Let's skip the conversation about what should or shouldn't be illegal. While that's a useful conversation to have, it's not in-scope for a conversation about limiting the damage done by robot policing.