Lawsuit: City cameras make it impossible to drive anywhere without being tracked | Hacker News Reader

Lawsuit: City cameras make it impossible to drive anywhere without being tracked

arstechnica.com

15 pointsMBCook5 comments

> "Fourth Amendment case law overwhelmingly shows that license plate readers do not constitute a warrantless search because they take photos of cars in public and cannot continuously track the movements of any individual," Flock Safety said.

> The appeals court "struck down an aerial surveillance program precisely because it created record of where everyone in the city of Baltimore had gone over the past 45 days," the lawsuit against Norfolk said

The cases are principly different. A car's registration technically belongs to the state. It's the state's license plate and it's essentially illegal to drive on public streets anonymized. Meanwhile, the aerial surveillance program was tracking at the individual level on private property.

I think it would be hard to overturn precedence here, but as a compromise it might be nice to make it mandatory to log and record all of the queries police departments make in such a system. There are enough cases of bad actors and abuse here (like the officers using it to search for ex-lovers). Make it so that any searches done on the database are available by a FOIA request, and that officers could be at risk of abuse of authority. Just like they would be if they issued a BOLO for personal reasons.

Case law regarding license plate readers might apply when cameras cannot continuously track the movement, but the point of the lawsuit is that the cameras gather footage 24/7 and then the footage gets analyzed, mapped, etc. such that you can track the movement.

The key phrase they used is "track the movement of any individual". So the state has a legal right to track where cars go, but not necessarily where the drivers/passengers go.

It's mostly going to be a semantic difference in situations with a lone driver, but if it's a shared vehicle all the drivers enjoy plausible deniability.

> The cases are principly different. A car's registration technically belongs to the state. It's the state's license plate and it's essentially illegal to drive on public streets anonymized. Meanwhile, the aerial surveillance program was tracking at the individual level on private property.

I am an ex-employee of Flock. Flock uses far, far more than registration to track vehicles. Colors, including differently colored body panels, damage, bumper stickers, trailer hitches, wheels/rims, roof racks, are all parts of their vehicle recognition, that also happen to be tied to ALPR.

Another reason to ride a bike

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