Manuel_D

As I wrote in my comment the court did add a caveat that could limit how broadly this precedence gets applied. But at the end of the day:

1) The police did use ALPR data without a warrant.

2) The court upheld the use of ALPR data without a warrant in this case.

How widely this will get applied remains to be seen.

The court did not say that a warrant would be required had Yang not been in a rental car, which is what people seem to be implying.

Historically low American crime rates are still several times higher than most of the developed world.

It established the precedence that use of automated license plate reader data does not require a warrant in at least some circumstances. The decision did mention that an overdue rental car has a lower expectation of privacy, but the court did not say that a warrant would have been required outside of that circumstance.

But crucially, the police used the ALPR data without a warrant. Regardless of the rental car, the police did use ALPR data without a warrant and the court did allow that to be used in court.

It's still a court that came down in favor of warrantless use of ALPR data, even if the situation around the overdue rental car might limit it's application more broadly.

> We've had exactly one real test of that argument (Schmidt v Norfolk) that has yet to be make it to SCOTUS. The district court in that case ruled Carpenter didn't apply - but it was a district court whose opinion SCOTUS overruled in Carpenter too.

We've had at least two: in US vs Yang, the defense tried to invalidate the use of ALPR data using Carpenter to try and argue that it violated the Fourth Amendment. The Ninth Circuit disagreed and did not accept that argument.

The 9th circuit upheld the use of automated license plate readers in US vs. Yang. The defense attempted to use Carpenter to argue against the legality of ALPR data, and failed: https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca7/21...

I really appreciate the irony of you alleging a "Google level understanding" on my part, when your own argument was tried in a court of appeals and failed.

What wasn't previously available? Automated license plate readers have been around since the 70s, and started being widely deployed in the 1990s as technology got cheaper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recogni...

It's not new tech.

And how are they building that dataset? By recording in public. Yes it is about recording in public.

The ballots are timestamped to a degree fine-grained enough to narrow down the set of potential voters to just 50 people? Which state is this? I'm not finding any search results indicating that ballots are timestamped. In fact, some of the results I've encountered specifically say that ballots aren't timestamped to ensure privacy. But happy to learn more of you can explain how ballots in your state are timestamped.

In my state, we have to sign our name on the envelope containing our ballot. If the government was corrupt and they wanted to identify how people voted, they could just look at the signature. No Flock required.

Of all the things to complain about Flock, the notion that it can somehow de-anonymize ballots is probably one of the most unusual I've heard.

Who says the city's retention period would be smaller than Flock?

Furthermore, do you realize that you're free to photograph people in public and sell those images, no permission required: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nussenzweig_v._DiCorcia

People seem to struggle to wrap their head around the fact that privacy laws don't prevent people from recording them in public. You can be recorded at any time in public, by the government or another private person.

If the city hires enough police officers, yes. It'd almost certainly require an unfathomably large budget, but it's not impossible.

The point is, the plain view doctrine means the police don't need a warrant to record observation that are in plain view. The licence plates of cars on the street are in plain view.

I really don't understand how people got this idea in their head that their license plates are private information . How do red light cameras identify cars? How does parking enforcement work? By recording people's license plates. The whole reason why we mandate that cars display license plates to is to facilitate identifying vehicles.

The point is, some of flock's customers are private businesses. E.g. the Home Depot by me uses them. No amount of pressure by voters can take those cameras down.

In case you didn't read it, the 9th circuit upheld the use of Flock cameras. The precedence is as high as it gets, short of a supreme Court decision: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48636421

You're being exposed to a very specific group of people when you read Hacker News or Reddit. Plenty of people are happy to have Flock cameras in their neighborhood on account of the improved ability to investigate crime.

But the government is allowed to track people's license plates. There's nothing against the law for a police officer to stand at an intersection writing down all passing car's license plates with a pen and paper. Flock is the same thing, just much more cost efficient.

Yes, ballots are anonymous. But how would Flock cameras somehow de-anonymize votes? I had assumed you were referring to tracking people driving to polling stations to discover who voted - not how they voted. Because how on earth would automated license plate readers somehow de-anonymize individual ballots? Please do explain what you meant by that.

And do explain the "idiocy" of the rest of my comment. Do you actually dispute anything I wrote? Do you think that law enforcement weren't monitoring groups like the Proud Boys, Nation of Islam, militia organizations, etc. before Flock came around?

> Cell towers are monitoring a public broadcast from a beacon you voluntarily carry on your person.

It's an encrypted broadcast, not a public broadcast. This is why the police needed to ask the mobile service providers for this data. It is not public.

> For some reason querying that dataset requires a warrant but querying a broadly analogous dataset from the operator of a network of cameras doesn't?

The data is not broadly analogous. One is encrypted radio traffic. The other is unencrypted, and you can record it yourself with a pen, paper, and the Mk I eyeball. This is why the "plain view" doctrine applies.

Again, the courts have already ruled on the use of ALPRs. The defense tried to use US vs Carpenter in US vs Yang, and the courts did not accept that argument that ALPRs are analogous to cell phone location data.

> investigation and possible arrest, people who's only documented action was "being somewhere."

In the example above, the police wouldn't arrest every single person who entered and exited the parking lot. They'd arrest the person who walked out of the lot with your stolen luggage.

> Oh, and while your example is "committed a crime", that same network could easily be used to identity and track people who were, say, coming and going from protests

Again realize that this is legal right? https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/14/us/charlottesville-doxxin...

There's no right to have your public demonstrations off limits for recording. The whole point of a protest is to be seen. If someone is concerned that they will be associated with some group or cause because of their decision to protest, then they seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a protest is.

> Or voting

You realize the government already has that information? Voters literally filled out ballots and delivered it to the government. They don't need a camera to know who voted, they have the ballots.

No? If someone broke into your car as stole your luggage, the surveillance camera might not directly capture the thief breaking into your car. But if the camera recorded someone entering the parking garage and then exiting the garage carrying your luggage a few minutes later, that's strong evidence is it not?

The hopefully we'll be able to at least narrow down the list of suspects to the people who entered the bathroom around the time they the murder took place.

Surveillance often doesn't directly capture crime on camera, but is rather used to identify who traveled to and from the crime scene around the time of the incident

Yes, you are allowed to set up a camera, as long as you own the land you're putting the camera on or you have permission from the landowner.

Again, I'm surprised by how many people don't realize that it's legal to film people in public.

The legality of automated license plate readers has gone all the way up to the United States Court of Appeals. That's the second highest court in the country, superseded only by the Supreme Court.

This is as strong as precedent gets, short of a SCOTUS decision.

Lol, I should be getting paid.

But no, I just like to dispel the myths people have about their imaginary right to not be filmed in public. Whether it's by the government or by other private people.

Right and what if lots of crime happens in a place where there are not many businesses? Hardly an implausible scenario given that crime is bad for business.

The city can set up its own camera for its own use. Is that really that wild of a proposal?

The Carpenter decision was about the US government compelling mobile data providers to hand over private use information. It's really not relevant to flock. That's why the 9th Circuit decided that automated license plate readers don't need a warrant. A cop and stand at an intersection and write down license plate numbers without a warrant. A device can do the same.

The logical conclusion is that the US brings itself in line with the rest of the developed world, and realizes video cameras are useful for solving crime.

Flying drones are not required, stationary cameras are more than enough outside of specific scenarios like active pursuit.

The 9th circuit upheld that the police do not need warrants to operate and access data from license plate readers. The 9th Circuit isn't exactly a conservative stronghold.

In Seattle at least, the majority of homicide cases are solved with the assistance of surveillance cameras (though what % of said cameras are specifically Flock, I'm not sure): https://spdblotter.seattle.gov/2026/03/05/new-analysis-rtcc-...

No, the fact that it's recording people in public does make it escape scrutiny moving forward. In public you can be filmed by anyone - be they government or private citizens.

I find a lot of people fail to realize this, both in regards to surveillance and otherwise. Recently in my city there was a big uproar about a nudist beach that was at risk of having nudity prohibited. So a bunch of nudists went out and paraded around the beach while disrobed, some of them bringing their children with them. People sailed by and photographed many of the nudists, and put their images online. Many alleged that must be a violation of some privacy law, but no, the law in Washington (and most, perhaps all, of the US) is quite clear: if you're in public, you can be filmed and photographed. If you don't want to be filmed nude, don't go walking around naked in public.

Regardless, back to the topic at hand, the fact that Flock cameras a in public spaces does in fact mean that there's no requirement to get a warrant to use them.

The case you linked isn't about the government filming people in public, though. Carpenter vs. US was a case about the government demanding private information about users' locations from cell service providers. By comparison, the 9th circuit concluded that the plain view doctrine means electronic license plate readers are legal :https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2020/05/04/1...

An officer doesn't need a warrant to sit at a cross section and write down license plate numbers. A device doing the same thing is also legal.

That's not applicable to Flock, though. That case pertained to the government requesting that mobile service providers give historical location data on users.