alt Hacker NewsPolice already don’t need warrants to gather video footage from homes and businesses. It certainly isn’t ineffective or else they wouldn’t do it, but everybody knows how effective video footage is. The difference for most does seem to be that it doesn’t cost man hours. We have had cities in the USA with 10k+ cameras in public spaces for years now without much fanfare.
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They 100% need a warrant if the owner of such footage doesn’t want to voluntarily hand it over. Most people generally voluntarily help out when it’s clear the footage is of value, often calling the police proactively to hand over footage. But if they don’t want to release the footage then they’re under no obligation to do so without a court order.
> everybody knows how effective video footage is
There's no evidence that mass video surveillance, Ring cameras, etc. are leading to higher clearance rates of serious crimes.
> We have had cities in the USA with 10k+ cameras in public spaces for years now without much fanfare.
And if the data from those cameras were processed to allow me to type someone's name into the search and then track their every movement, there would be a lot of fanfare. Palantir is probably building that, but it doesn't seem widespread yet.
But as of now, the directionality is reversed.
With regular video, we know a crime happened and expand our search from there to find a suspect. It's not invading a specific person's privacy.
With Flock, we have a suspect and want to retroactively stalk that person. We don't know if that person had anything to do with any crime yet, and we're invading their privacy.
They definitely need warrants, but 99% of the time, people/businesses voluntarily hand it over. In fact they do it enthusiastically and even bring it to police without them even asking.
"We believe your camera captured the guy who robbed your neighbor, can we see the footage". Virtually everyone says yes to this.