alt Hacker NewsWe're Asking an Appeals Court to Require a Warrant for ALPR Searches
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Flock and ALPR usage is solved in USA if every state adopts New Hampshire's law:
* Illegal to collect every plate for later analysis
* Illegal to collect anything except for license plates (no drivers, pedestrians, etc.)
* Must delete "non hit" plate images within 3 minutes
* Strict forbidden to upload "non hit" camera imagery off the device
I would add that it should also require a warrant to access the ALPR data, but it's a great start.
"Our brief details the vast, interconnected network of ALPRs that constantly track drivers around the country and argues that this tracking is a “search” under the meaning of the Fourth Amendment."
Totally agree with the EFF here, many thanks to them defending the Constitution, hope they win.
This is a great step but it needs to go even farther. The ALPR tools should only be able to store hits on license plates that are under an active warrant.
The core point that everyone needs to understand here is that ALPR is only a thing because technology sucked until now. Reading a license plate, something designed to be identified easily, took off when the tech got reasonably good enough. But facial recognition and general object recognition is getting to that point now too. If we don't stop ALPR, now, we will have constant track databases on people (if we don't already) in the future because the argument is essentially the same with only technology holding it back. This isn't a slippery slope. Fight this now.
I don't think we should have them at all. If the data is collected, then it can be abused.
So with warrants we're essentially saying, "the government can track everyone's location and we're okay with that but they can't legally look at it without a warrant". Good luck seeing consequences for breaking that when we can't even get consequences for shooting people.
Still better than no warrants, it would be great to get warrants requirement. But we should not live in such a surveilled society.
It's still mass surveillance. Even if it requires a warrant.
Surveillance should work like this: You suspect some of a crime? Then you surveil them and investigate them. you need more powerful tools, then you need to get a warrant from a judge to surveil them more.
We shouldn't be investigating and surveilling people that aren't suspected of crimes. Mass surveillance treats everyone like criminals.
Can some explain why you prefer "freedom from surveillance" over "convicting armed robbers"? Doesn't surveillance just keep honest people honest?
If this data is meant for training algorithms, then they need negative (non-suspicious) examples just as much, if not more, than they need positive (suspicious) examples.
It is always the same criminals.
Being tough on crime instead of catch and release would get rid of the problem without implementing a surveillance state.
I don't think they should be keeping data that's not involved in an active warrant.
However, if they do anyway, there should be strong victims' rights protections so that the data is actually used during investigations.
There was a string of burglaries in our area a few years ago, and panopticon N-1 (Google Map's auto recording of all phone GPS traces for marketing information) could have found the perpetrators pretty much instantly.
They hit rural outbuildings in the middle of the night on camera, so timestamps were precise, but faces were obscured. A reverse geofence warrant keyed on time of arrival / departure would have narrowed it down to just the crooks with extremely high probability, and other details in the videos would have corroborated the GPS traces.
None of the victims were politically connected, so the police couldn't (by policy) run the reverse GPS lookups. This is the worst of both worlds: Our data is recorded to be used against us later, but if ever it would be useful, we do not have access to it. The same is true for vehicle black boxes / cameras. They record a few seconds before airbag deploy, but you usually are not allowed to access them as part of an insurance dispute (even the ones from your own car).