I think the crazy thing about ANPR/ALPR is just quite how simple it is to create a massive panopticon. The UK has a fairly established national ANPR system, and it generates on the order of 90M records per day [1]. All of this data is available to various law enforcement agencies. If you drive, you're probably being recorded in a way accessible to the PNC every day.
Because of how effective this is for catching even fairly minor violations like failure to pay vehicle tax, number plate cloning is becoming pretty common (comparatively) in the UK. This means that you can easily get swept up in a police dragnet because someone has stolen your car's identity.
Since I doubt I'm the only one who didn't know what a "panopticon" is:
A "panopticon" is a concept originally designed as a type of prison by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century. It’s a circular building with a central watchtower where a single guard can observe all the inmates in their cells, which are arranged around the perimeter. The twist? The inmates can’t see into the tower, so they never know if they’re being watched. This setup was meant to induce self-discipline—prisoners would behave as if they’re always under surveillance, even if no one’s actually looking.
That summary is technically correct but is missing some context. A famous French philosopher and historian named Michel Foucault popularized Bentham's panopticon as a metaphor for modern society more broadly back in the 60s. IIRC the gist is that the way modern society always watches and monitors us across many aspects of modern life probably has deep but subtle affects on our psyches. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discipline_and_Punish
> probably has deep but subtle affects on our psyches
Many religions (basically all the big ones) forcefully indoctrinate members from childhood to believe that their deity is omniscient and is constantly watching them and judging them. It's generally agreed among members that this is a good thing.
I was raised catholic and I now consider it a form of abuse. Someone close to me was raised evangelic and thinking about this makes her want to puke.
The psychological damage from this sort of thing is probably so prevalent that it looks like water to a fish. Not to speak of the sleepless nights at 7 years old worrying about eternal damnation.
This is all abuse and it should be treated as such by any decent and civilised society.
I was not raised Christian growing up, but I still recall believing someone was always watching me as a kid. It was likely because so many around me were religious, and I had been told so many dead relatives were "up there smiling down on us" when they died. I thought both that someone was looking through my windows and that people "up there" could see me.
Until I got access to pornography (too early) and then I guess the tradeoffs changed, and I eventually got over it. I do distinctly remember wondering what grandma thinks of me at that time. But not for long, logic kicks in to explain anything away when you've got fast internet to exploit.
> But not for long, logic kicks in to explain anything away when you've got fast internet to exploit.
Not everyone is so lucky; for some, the feelings of guilt and shame never get dissolved through logic, it's just the dopamine loop is strong enough that the person keeps doing things they later despise themselves for.
Guess how that can impact the psyche over a decade or two.
> Maybe not psychologically healthy for the individual, but likely provides some social benefits.
I never understood this line of reasoning. What good are "social benefits" if the happiness and well being of the human beings that make up that society are sacrificed? Isn't this the basis of totalitarianism? "Everything for the State, nothing against the State".
Well ya I don't say I condone, I'm very much an individualist (to a fault).
But also, we don't exist in isolation, and there are reasons societies evolve as they do. There has to be some level of social control and belief in being watched over at all times was probably pretty handy for emperors and to some extent those who would be victimized. At least back when it worked wide scale.
Why do we need this myth of things working in the past? It didn't work and was a horror show. This is bordering on the absurd "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" logic that doesn't ever really work outside the heros journey and action movies.
There are reasons things evolved as they did. Societies with forms of social cohesion beat those without. Maybe it's different now but then again, maybe it's not.
As a christian, I can handle this concept. But only in the context where the deity accepts that I can never be perfect and yet can be acceptable. This concept, though biblical, is hardly ever taught because of the fear of it being taken advantage of. The deity requires effort, not perfection. If this is false, then the messiah was a complete waste of time.
> But only in the context where the deity accepts that I can never be perfect and yet can be acceptable.
This is the religion where everyone, over 6000 years later, is being vindictively punished because a couple of their ancestors, in a single instance, broke a rule about eating from one of the trees. The deity, who is omnipotent and could decide stop this all at any time, allows for all manner of terrible diseases and pestilence to be visited on innocent children.
A few thoughts. One is that not all of christendom subscribes to the view that it was literally one man, some take a less literal view. Second, a vast majority of human suffering is down stream of human decisions. Yes it is possible for an omnipotent being to stop all suffering but I would argue it would remove all moral decision making from humans which is important.
> not all of christendom subscribes to the view that it was literally one man, some take a less literal view
I grew up in a Christian country and your "some" is doing a lot of work. Sure, perhaps some specific Christian theologists take that view. But, all actual Christians are taught from childhood that it was one specific man, tempted by one specific woman into eating a literal fruit. The only thing that's generally mentioned as open to interpretation is whether the fruit was an apple. You might get exposed to more nuanced theological views if you study at a seminary, but not while living your life as an average person who identifies as Christian, which is the vast majority.
The majority of Christians (Catholics) are told to not read the bible literally. Taking the bible literally is where logic and critical thinking breakdown.
> One is that not all of christendom subscribes to the view that it was literally one man, some take a less literal view.
I was raised Catholic (mass every weekend, CCD through 8th grade) and not once were we ever taught your interpretation. It was Adam and Eve, one man, one woman.
It’s not a part of Catholic doctrine. You won’t find the core beliefs of much, much more mainstream sects in Catholic teachings, let alone the more uncommon beliefs that are out there.
Bro. This might be technically correct but you are far from the first person who posited these questions and won’t be the last to be swamped with responses trying to “save” you. Let the morons be morons and just stop poking the hornets nest.
Sounds like we've met. I'd take God in this position over one man or many any day of the week
"Judge me, O God, and plead my cause against an ungodly nation: O deliver me from the deceitful and unjust man. For thou art the God of my strength..."
"...but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel."
If you're talking about the flood in Genesis, there's some subtleties there that may indicate a polluted gene pool. Remember that angels cross bred with humans at some point prior, and Noah was described as being "blameless" or "pure" in his "generations" (lineage?)
As to why an omniscient creator would want to keep His stock of humans pure, I will leave for a different venue.
"Hey, what if we marketed a little narc doll that we sold to kids" was probably when I should have realized that the surveillance state will always win
The inability of people to go through the power process has deep psychological implications, described in depth in "Industrial Society and It's Future"
Is it ironic or fitting that a man who designed a building where everyone could be observed is now observed himself for eternity. His preserved corpse is on display at University College London.
Am curious. How, with 17th century technology, could you have a geometry where I can see you but you can't see me? Glass treatment? Narrow viewing port?
"By Blinds, and other contrivances, the Inspectors concealed from the observation of the Prisoners: hence the sentiment of a sort of invisible omnipresence."
— Jeremy Bentham (1791). Panopticon, or The Inspection House
If the internet is to be believed they did not have one way mirrors in the 17th century. They were invented in the early 1900s.
However, looking at the patent for what is supposed to be the first it says that there were earlier attempts--they just sucked because making the partially reflective layer was difficult and expensive and not durable enough when used on outdoor advertising devices.
Yes, you read that right. Advertising. Technology being driven by someone's desire to show ads is not new.
The thing the inventor was building was a case for displaying advertising posters. The case had a glass front, and the poster was behind the glass, with powerful lights behind the poster. When the lights were off the glass would appear to people looking at the case to be a mirror. When the lights were on the poster could be seen.
Plain glass works fine for this, but they were perfectly capable of making one way mirrors at the time. The historical term is "half silvered mirror", which were used in a lot of early scientific research in optics.
Something like a pinhole camera. If you have a piece of card with a pinprick hole in it, you can look through that hole and see a wide view, but a person in front of you wouldn't be able to see much of you through that same hole.
It is all about informational asymmetry, you know nothing about the people in power, while they (potentially) could know all about you. The idea is to get you to self-police by assuming the gaze of those wielding the power.
the scarier thing is, prior to the AIs, even if they could get all this information, there was no one to sort through it, so they needed some actual reason to look.
Now they don't need any reason to look, they can just make a bunch of AI sift through it.
Some years ago, the one in Arnhem, was up for sale, and the local hacker space, hack42, made an attempt to buy it and turn it into the largest hacker space of Europe. The plan did not work out.
GPS trackers and immobilizers (aka "kill switches") have also made repo work a lot easier. If you buy from low/no-credit ("buy here pay here") lots, you probably have at least one (if not both) installed.
This has happened to me twice in Australia, and plagued a friend so much they sold their car. They couldn't afford the replate fee (and figured it would just happen again) so they gave up, I gave them a spare bicycle, which was then stolen.
I can see how people lose their faith in policing competence, it was at least always resolved fairly but the stress of being accused of all that stuff, not knowing if you'll be put in jail or acquitted etc. You still bare the costs of replating a car as well.
Number plate cloning should be pretty easy to spot with a network of cameras. Same plate in two spots or seen in a distance impossible to travel in the time.
And then police can be alerted every time they see a plate flagged as being cloned and either find a criminal, or be able to alert the person their plate is cloned.
In theory, yes, but that's not how policing works.
From personal knowledge of the UK setup, the goals are twofold, mass surveillance plus auto-revenue-generation (intended to raise sufficient to pay for the surveillance infrastructure to minimize the net cost which means auto issuing the absolute maximum number of tickets possible).
Doing validation to ensure correctness of the tickets being issued would be counter-productive to the revenue generation goal; just because police have evidence a crime (like cloning) has happened, does not mean they will not issue the ticket. There is an onus in the UK for the registered keeper of the vehicle to incriminate themselves or someone else for road traffic offences (confirmed by test cases).
Essentially you have to pay up or prove the cloning (and your innocence) yourself - very difficult because you do not have access to the surveillance database that would help you. The core objective of the police is to assert your guilt, not to provide you with any help for your defence.
>There is an onus in the UK for the registered keeper of the vehicle to incriminate themselves or someone else for road traffic offences (confirmed by test cases).
That's not how that works. You, as the registered keeper of a vehicle, have a number of duties relating to the provision of information to the police or other relevant authorities upon request. This isn't a controversial provision, something similar exists in practically every jurisdiction in which cars have a unique identifier.
The s172 process avoids the situation where a speeding fine can be avoided by simply not saying who was driving. 172(4) provides a statutory defence which can be advanced by an individual who's vehicle was cloned:
>A person shall not be guilty of an offence by virtue of paragraph (a) of subsection (2) above if he shows that he did not know and could not with reasonable diligence have ascertained who the driver of the vehicle was.
And regarding the disclosure issue
> The core objective of the police is to assert your guilt, not to provide you with any help for your defence.
This is an incorrect statement - the police are obliged to disclose any relevant, unused material (eg material they have that they don't produce in evidence) that will either undermine the prosecution case or advance the defence.
However, if you are being prosecuted for failing to nominate, it is more likely that you have completely failed to return the form rather than returning the form with a note saying that your plate appears to have been cloned, in which case access to the ANPR database is irrelevant because you need to explain why you did not bother to furnish the information rather than police not believing that your vehicle had been cloned.
> This is an incorrect statement - the police are obliged to disclose any relevant, unused material (eg material they have that they don't produce in evidence) that will either undermine the prosecution case or advance the defence.
"Obliged"?
I immediately thought the case of the Guildford Four, and the scene in the biographical film In The Name Of The Father.
IIRC in the film the note in police files said "not to be shown to the defence"... :/
>Essentially you have to pay up or prove the cloning (and your innocence) yourself - very difficult because you do not have access to the surveillance database that would help you. The core objective of the police is to assert your guilt, not to provide you with any help for your defence.
At least in the US prosecutors are obligated to disclose any exculpatory evidence they find, even if they don't plan to use it in court.
> Because of how effective this is for catching even fairly minor violations like failure to pay vehicle tax, number plate cloning is becoming pretty common (comparatively) in the UK.
Evidence of number plate cloning would reduce revenue from fines. If the government wants to fine you for not paying your vehicle tax, evidence that someone cloned your plate would be exculpatory, so it's in the government's best interest to not collect that evidence in the first place.
That's literally not how government works. If they explicitly discarded data because it was exculpatory then not only would they not be able to fine you based on that data, they would have to refund every fine they issued while that discard rule was in place.
"Oh, we hit for DEADBEEF at 11:00am in London, so ignore hits for DEADBEEF from anywhere else outside some Nx safety factor of the driving distance from that hit, because it has to be a false positive."
or
"Oh, we hit for DEADBEEF at 11:00am in London and again at 11:05am in London. Our cloud costs are high, so we're only going to store the most recent picture DEADBEEF, and only record the violation from 11:00am and 11:05am."
I guess these examples sound kind of contrived to me, but how long do you retain this kinda data for? 30 days? 60 days? A year?
Entirely contrived. The point of the system is that you want all the hits everywhere, if your system is using any discard rules at all then it is unreliable for a prosecution.
Suppose you have a system of cameras operated by the various localities. The localities are all storing the data. Then there is a central system that can query all the local systems but doesn't itself store any of the data.
The department issuing traffic citations requests an automated daily report showing every vehicle observed at multiple locations where the two sightings imply an average speed between 55MPH and 170MPH. Then the citations department takes the report and issues a citation to anyone where there is no route between those two points that allows the calculated average speed without exceeding the speed limit.
The report isn't automatically generated if the average speed was calculated to be 490MPH because cars don't go that fast so issuing a citation would trivially allow it to be challenged as a data irregularity, and the report is requested by the department issuing speeding citations rather than the one (if any) investigating data irregularities.
Now you get a ticket for doing an average speed of 87MPH along a route where the speed limit never exceeded 55MPH. You claim it's a data irregularity (cloned plate), but that's a possible speed, because the automated report didn't include the impossible speeds.
There may have also been sightings that would have implied an average speed of 490MPH, but that report was never requested so it doesn't exist. The bureaucracy comes up with some excuse for why you can't run your own reports that don't already exist. You could request the raw data and then do the calculations yourself, but then you have to make a thousand requests to each individual locality, which is purposely too much trouble for most people to bother, and even then there is no guarantee that the person who cloned your plate was spotted in a location that would have produced an impossibly high speed.
><The department issuing traffic citations requests an automated daily report showing every vehicle observed at multiple locations where the two sightings imply an average speed between 55MPH and 170MPH. Then the citations department takes the report and issues a citation to anyone where there is no route between those two points that allows the calculated average speed without exceeding the speed limit.
The problem with that is that isn't how average speed cameras work, and where speeds are ludicrously high then there is a human operator looking at it.
So why isn’t the system already working as Gigachad suggested up the thread? Why is cloning plates feasible at all and not immediately discovered and prosecuted? Is this perhaps in the works? Or are the incentives not there?
Because ANPR data isn't routinely monitored. If your car is up to date on tax and insurance it doesn't generate an alert, the presence is recorded and ignored.
People make journeys that are illogical all the time and ANPR misreads are common, so there is no justification for having a system that says "this plate has pinged simultaneously 200 miles apart", because what are you going to with that information?
When you trigger a speed camera, the police send a notice to the registered keeper. They don't search ANPR for other hits, because why would they? They're dealing with the single traffic offence in front of them.
ANPR is an intelligence tool. It is an extremely valuable one, but it isn't definitive and no prosecution would stand alone on ANPR data without other corroborative evidence.
The "revenue generation" argument works for the US but cannot be imported directly over, because cameras work differently here. The revenue goes into the consolidated fund. Rule changes removed them from revenue-maxing spots and made them bright yellow with advanced signage.
(also, the court case if you take it to court should include the photo showing the car, so cloners have to match the exact model of car from the plates they're cloning)
The decision to site a speed camera (and costs of maintaining the camera) and revenue from the camera end up at very different points in the system. The fixed cameras in my city have been off since 2012, because the local council won't pay for them. The "revenue generation" argument is very much overblown.
Unfortunately in real life disclosure is one of the many places that the criminal justice system tends to fail to meet its stated ideals. Disclosure is often served late or improperly on run-of-the-mill cases from what I’ve heard and read. There’s a great book called the Secret Barrister that goes into some detail about the UK’s (or England and Wales more specifically) criminal justice system from quite a critical lens.
Respectfully, this is naive and doesn't consider defacto judicial process. Basically, defendants are getting railroaded unless they have resources to mount a defense, and charges are inflated to incentivize plea bargaining.
I'm not sure how a system would work that didn't auto issue the absolute maximum number of tickets possible. Random lottery to auto discard tickets? A max quota leading to a lawless time in the late evening?
But if that has parameters they've set to max because they really want that delicious revenue, why not detect cloned plates and charge those people more than the tickets?
> But if that has parameters they've set to max because they really want that delicious revenue, why not detect cloned plates and charge those people more than the tickets?
The plate is registered to the victim whose plate was cloned. The identity of the perpetrator who cloned the plate isn't known, so how do you issue them a citation?
and when this happens, it is proof of an illegitimate regime, not for the people, and as such it becomes morally and ethically justifiable to do ANYTHING and EVERYTHING one deem required to demolish it, and bring the responsible parties to justice
We're talking about speed cameras here, not deporting people to illegal prisons in El Salvador.
Or even more basic civil liberties stuff like the use of face recognition against protestors. No, there's always a huge number of people that come out for the right to drive illegally fast instead.
They'd presumably target cars that don't drive much. (btw anyone can check any car's annual mileage from the number plate using the MOT history lookup)
I bought windscreen wipers for my car recently, the previous owner was my mother and the man in the shop said 'oh, 2018 was the last time they were replaced'. So, more information seems to be available to those who know..
(and, it was me who replaced the wiper blades then so I know it was right)
Depends on the jurisdiction, though. Federal court records are theoretically "on a government website", but you need a PACER account, which has your billing information.
Cloning or just plate theft only works if you put the plate on the identical make, model and colour of vehicle, as many ALPRs are also quantifying the traits of the vehicle and a non-match raises a flag and will likely get extra scrutiny.
I didn't claim it was. But there is a big difference between "steal some plates from extended airport parking" and having to find and steal a plate specifically for the target vehicle. Obviously you could use the most common car and colour and make your task easier, but like for my SUV I see a similar colour / year / model on the roads maybe once a month. If I had to find another to steal or clone a plate it would legitimately be a pain.
this is one of those areas where the fraud becomes much easier with scale. if you are trying to steel 1 plate for 1 car, this is a problem, but if you're trying to steal plates for 1000 cars, 1200 plates will match 800 cars
Is it actually that much of a problem if you're trying to clone/steal one plate for one car? Go to some major stores with huge parking lots during busy times. Find one car which is the same model and color.
Maybe it's hard if you have a classic car with an unusual paint job. Not so hard if you have a white Toyota.
It doesn't need to be in bulk though. If you're not a dumb criminal looking to do this, you put in the work by just driving around a city center looking for a make/model/color you are interested.
Or, if you want to be organized, you run around with plate readers and log make/model/color/number and then sell that data.
My brother had his plates nicked a few years back. Apparently they had lightly modified his plate so that it appeared differently ( can’t recall if it was marker or tape )
I'm not sure that panopticon is the right word for this. Bentham's panopticon extended into the prisoners' cells, and with the intent that they would never know if they were being surveilled or not.
ANPR in the UK doesn't have these characteristics. Firstly, it happens in public places only, and historically we have exactly zero expectation of privacy in public spaces in the UK. Secondly, there's no chilling effect caused by the selective and unknown application of surveillance; the cameras and computers "watch" every car equally.
Overall, I can't say I love the number of ANPR cameras we have, but then I'm also not thrilled by the thought of subsidising large numbers of people who aren't willing to hold up their side of the social contract by taxing and insuring their cars.
> historically we have exactly zero expectation of privacy in public spaces in the UK.
True, but we also had zero expectation of permanent records being kept of so much of what we do in public spaces, or being under such constant surveillance in public spaces. I think that is a concern.
> Overall, I can't say I love the number of ANPR cameras we have, but then I'm also not thrilled by the thought of subsidising large numbers of people who aren't willing to hold up their side of the social contract by taxing and insuring their cars.
ANPR does not seem to have put a stop to it. I really cannot understand why. If someone has not made a Statutory Off Road Notification they must pay tax and be insured, and if they are caught on an ANPR camera having made a SORN they are clearly breaking the law
With such widespread use of ANPR I cannot understand how people are still able to get away with it.
> > historically we have exactly zero expectation of privacy in public spaces in the UK.
> True, but we also had zero expectation of permanent records being kept of so much of what we do in public spaces, or being under such constant surveillance in public spaces. I think that is a concern.
I've been watching a bunch of "auditor" videos from the UK. These guys are basically trolling by going around with a camera in public, filming stuff, and fishing for reactions that they can then post on Youtube or TikTok or Reels or whatever for views and engagement.
One thing that's very consistent across these videos is how many of their victims truly believe that you need permission to film people in public, or that they can walk up to the guy with the camera and demand to know who he is or that he deletes the footage. So a lot of people are acting as if they had much stronger rights to privacy than they really do, people think they're generally safe from being constantly surveilled, when the opposite is in fact true.
Another thing that's also hilariously consistent is when these auditors film businesses, and representatives of those businesses, usually the store manager, goes out and tells them they can't film the customers going in and out of the store because that's "against company policy" or "because of respect for our customers' privacy". At the same time, those stores have tons of security camera inside the store, recording every little thing every single customer is doing all the time.
The hypocrisy is blatant. Everybody wants to monitor everyone else, but no-one wants to be monitored by anyone.
"expectation of privacy" is one of those slippery terms where lawyers use it differently from the public, and this isn't immediately obvious.
Historically, we have expected that people can see us in public. However we have not had the expectation that:
- that we are identifiable to people other than acquaintances
- that we can be tracked by people not present, either at the time or later - and for someone to physically follow you to track your movements would fairly quickly lead to alarm and summoning the police to remove them.
So no, other than lawyer's argot, we have always had a reasonable expectation of privacy in public places. Not absolute privacy, but privacy in the areas that matter to most of us.
There's a similar issue around phone metadata. If someone knows that you've made a particular call at a certain time, you wouldn't be concerned about them spying on you, but if they had access to all your phone call records, then they can put together a picture about you and your acquaintances.
> and with the intent that they would never know if they were being surveilled or not. [...] there's no chilling effect caused by the selective and unknown application of surveillance; the cameras and computers "watch" every car equally.
I disagree. Nobody expects all camera footage to be reviewed by a person, so you never know if what the camera caught will ever be seen (or used against you). In that sense, it's just like the panopticon. You feel watched so you behave, but whether you are watched or not in that moment is unknown.
That's part of my point, though: these cameras are basically never reviewed by a person. So you are reliably watched constantly, but never by a human.
This does lead to the problem that the post I replied to was pointing out, namely that people often get automated fines for cloned plates. It's kind of like the opening of Brazil, if you're familiar with that film, but obviously for much lower stakes.
> Secondly, there's no chilling effect caused by the selective and unknown application of surveillance;
People carry a cellphone with them, these by-and-large have multiple high resolution cameras along with microphones. Some even have LIDAR. Plus they are constantly emitting pulses that can be captured from several kilometers.
A person could be selectively surveilled without their knowing by monitoring their phone.
This is ignoring the massive network of internet connected private security cameras and police drones, which are very adept at monitoring people, as well as theoretical technology that we don't know is in use (i.e., using high frequency radio waves to "see" through walls).
Insurance isn't a social contract, it's private business foisted upon you and enforced by the government. Isn't it bad enough that your taxes, which are a real social contract, go to pay government workers to ensure that you're purchasing the required private, for profit, service? Now we're building surveillance infrastructure for them.
The point of mandatory third party insurance is so that when you drive through the putative crowd of children waiting for the bus, the state and the victim's families are not on the hook for lifetime care costs which can easily be in the tens of millions of dollars per victim.
Idk seems like a get out of jail free card when you should probably be in debt for life, slaving away for your grave negligence, not let off the hook because you paid 100$ a month.
You can't really retroactively fix things with money, the idea that it "compensates" in some equal way is simply wrong. Money helps with the medical bills, disability, etc. It's better than nothing, but even if you pursue civil or criminal litigation it's not going make any one else take paying attention to controlling their heavy machinery more seriously. The perception of consequences diminishes, even though there are real consequences they seem like tail end risks since causing an accident doesn't typically result in jail time or civil litigation. I guess my hypothesis, based on a single observation is that people take extra risk because they have insurance and so feel like if they get in a wreck - it won't be that bad and they might get a new car.
The social contract is really to fix the damage your (at fault) collisions cause.
At least in jurisdictions I've been in, the state requires evidence of financial responsibility as a requirement for driving. (Enforcement is a separate issue from requirement). A car insurance policy is evidence of financial responsibility, and the most common; but you can also post a bond of something like the minimum insurance amounts. Yes, if you don't have the money to post a bond, you're more or less forced into insurance or not driving (or driving illegaly), but that's we know you'll uphold the social construct of fixing the damages you cause. You don't need insurance to ride a bicycle, because it's not as easy to cause damages with a bicycle.
Self insurance is no longer a thing in the UK. I think the administrative work of ensuring you capture increased bonds with inflation was judged unacceptable or something?
So actual insurance is mandatory for people who operate motor vehicles on public roads
The alternative is that cars are prohibited because we've decided not to insure the risk and their owners definitely can't be relied upon to just happen to be able to cover the costs when, inevitably, they are incurred.
I'm OK with "all private motor vehicles are prohibited" but you need to be clear if that's what you want
To extend your analogy slightly (while recognizing the actual meaning), if you go to an axe throwing venue (range) you dont have to carry insurance, but the range does carry insurance.
If you go into the wilderness where axe throwing is allowed, and you maim or kill someone, you are personally liable to be sued or prosecuted.
If you throw an axe where it is not allowed, you are also personally liable criminally and civilly.
FWIW, there is such a thing as public-sector insurance. The required auto insurance in saskatchewan, for instance, is tied to your registration and administered by the same crown corporation, which doesn't have the profit motive that a private insurer has.
You can survive quite happily without a car, and thus without car insurance, in the vast majority of the UK. Vehicle ownership is not mandatory either in principle or practice.
Law 209348032984: Pay some guy for dubiously priced services that are clearly a government function. If you don't do it you're a statistical thief who refused to pay for something that didn't happen. Seems like the law itself is violating the social contract.
I don't think "buy some car insurance if you're going to drive" is any more unreasonable than "buy a crash helmet if you're going to drive".
But I can see how there would be a range of valid opinions on the matter. Some places do have a single government-owned insurance company: whatever they say you have to pay, you have to pay. No other options.
I'm pretty confident you also have roughly zero expectation of privacy in prison.
Edit: I don't know why this one of all things is getting downvoted, but at least in the U.S., this is legitimately true.
> In Hudson v. Palmer, 468 U.S. 517 (1984), the Supreme Court held that people in prison don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their cells.
Because it's not particularly relevant. The term comes from the prison system, where there is no expectation of privacy, and is being applied to describe a public setting where there maybe _should_ be some expectation, because we're not prisoners!
...But, the post I am replying to is literally suggesting that the reason why this system isn't a panopticon is because there isn't an expectation of privacy in public. Yet, the term comes from another place where there also isn't an expectation of privacy. I honestly suspect people are getting a little confused.
I was drawing a contrast between the prisoner in the panopticon (does not have privacy) and the citizen in their home (has privacy). Because of that contrast, I was suggesting that panopticon is an inappropriate term for surveillance that happens only in public spaces.
> I think the crazy thing about ANPR/ALPR is just quite how simple it is to create a massive panopticon. The UK has a fairly established national ANPR system, and it generates on the order of 90M records per day [1]. All of this data is available to various law enforcement agencies. If you drive, you're probably being recorded in a way accessible to the PNC every day.
So we're talking about tracking plate numbers, in public. No expectations of privacy.
Now regarding what the panopticon was,
> The panopticon is a prison design by Jeremy Bentham, characterized by a central observation tower allowing a guard to see all inmates without the inmates knowing if they are being watched, fostering a sense of constant surveillance and self-discipline.
So we're talking about monitoring prisoners, in prison cells. No expectations of privacy.
---
> I was drawing a contrast between the prisoner in the panopticon (does not have privacy) and the citizen in their home (has privacy).
Now we're talking about citizens in their homes. When did that enter the discussion?
> I was suggesting that panopticon is an inappropriate term for surveillance that happens only in public spaces.
> So we're talking about tracking plate numbers, in public. No expectations of privacy.
Correct.
> So we're talking about monitoring prisoners, in prison cells. No expectations of privacy.
Correct.
> > I was suggesting that panopticon is an inappropriate term for surveillance that happens only in public spaces.
> OK... Why?
Because prisons have no real equivalents for the private and public spaces we experience as free citizens. Drawing an equality between people who are voluntarily in a public space and people who are incarcerated is wrong, because the people in public can choose to withdraw somewhere private. The prisoner (in the panopticon model at least) has no such option.
If the state had an interconnected surveillance system which saw both into our public and private spaces, the analogy might make more sense -- and usually when "panopticon" is used, it is used in that sense. But it's the wrong term to use for surveillance which occurs only in public.
I'm not trying to be an overly pedantic dick here, but words do need to have clear meanings. There are other terms we could use for ubiquitous surveillance that occurs in public, and perhaps we should standardise on one.
> Because prisons have no real equivalents for the private and public spaces we experience as free citizens. Drawing an equality between people who are voluntarily in a public space and people who are incarcerated is wrong, because the people in public can choose to withdraw somewhere private. The prisoner (in the panopticon model at least) has no such option.
To me this feels like an entirely different argument than the "expectation of privacy" one, and I still do not really find it persuasive. Please note that the panopticon concept was also planned to be used in schools, hospitals, and other locations.
> If the state had an interconnected surveillance system which saw both into our public and private spaces, the analogy might make more sense -- and usually when "panopticon" is used, it is used in that sense. But it's the wrong term to use for surveillance which occurs only in public.
I disagree that the term "panopticon" should not be applied to public mass surveillance systems. There are some contrasts between the two concepts, but I think it paints a pretty good picture of the psychological impact that such systems can have.
> I'm not trying to be an overly pedantic dick here, but words do need to have clear meanings. There are other terms we could use for ubiquitous surveillance that occurs in public, and perhaps we should standardise on one.
I don't really take issue with being pedantic, I'm being pedantic too. But still, metaphors are metaphors, not direct equivocations. There are indeed limitations to how much the term "panopticon" can possibly be applied to some other surveillance system. If you go further, you can also point out more literal aspects of the panopticon. However, I don't think it is an unreasonable stretch to use the term "panopticon" for other sorts of mass surveillance systems. EFF has used the term "panopticon" a fair bit to describe digital surveillance and data collection systems, even though those are also a fair bit different than the original concept of a panopticon.
To me, the important thing about an metaphor is that it conveys the right thing to people, not whether it is literally a 1:1 match. When people say that mass surveillance systems are a "panopticon", they definitely are pointing to the things that made the panopticon so unnerving:
- The uncertainty of whether or not your actions are being scrutinized, forcing you into a permanent state of paranoia and self-regulation.
- The way that it enables totalitarian control over large groups of people.
- The general loss of privacy (regardless of whether you had any expectation of it to begin with.)
To me, basically any mass surveillance system is like this, except probably worse. Mass data collection means that not only do you not have any idea if anyone's scrutinizing your actions, but you also don't know if it might be scrutinized any time in the future.
As far as standardization goes, there are write-ups on the use of the term panopticon as a metaphor. I'll just defer to Wikipedia[1] and its respective sources here. I think the fact that it is commonly used as a metaphor should cover the "standardization" aspect; some day, the actual original panopticon will probably be eclipsed by the systems that are described in relation to it.
> To me this feels like an entirely different argument than the "expectation of privacy" one, and I still do not really find it persuasive.
If nothing else, we've at least understood where we disagree! I don't think it's reasonable to consider a lack of privacy in one space without also considering the possibility of refuge in another space.
That's not to say that loss of privacy in the public space is automatically acceptable, but it feels qualitatively different to loss of privacy in the defended space. Ubiquitous ANPR doesn't invoke feelings of paranoia in me, at all. Cameras and microphones in my house (if monitored by the state) certainly would.
Ubiquitous ANPR in public does encourage self-regulation, in that other people feel more required to follow public-good laws like maintaining motor insurance with it in place. As mentioned above, I'm not convinced that's a net negative.
> Please note that the panopticon concept was also planned to be used in schools, hospitals, and other locations.
I didn't know this, but after doing a little more research then yes, I concede that you're quite correct. The term was used contemporaneously in settings other than prisons, and in fact the original use of the term probably owed more to other settings [1].
I've been watching a British spy show called Slow Horses. So far a huge chunk of season 2 is spies looking at camera surveillance footage. It sounds like it's really that bad.
To highlight how bad it is, I read this article as a Brit and was genuinely confused. I kept wondering what I was missing because it seemed so obvious to me that if you drove around your neighbourhood the police would be taking photos of your movements regularly on any major road.
But I guess this isn't a thing in some places?
While I'm not fond of the cameras monitoring my movements honestly the worst part of driving in the UK is the constant anxiety that if you do anything wrong you're going to be fined. And sometimes you arguably don't even do anything wrong they just change the rules without telling you.
The updated the road near me recently from 30 to 20, they did this on the patch of road by an existing speed camera and only put one small sign up. Because most people know the road is 30 thousands and thousands of people have been fined for not realising someone updated the speed limit overnight.
Similarly, in my city they're constantly making roads one way, restricting car access on certain roads, adding restrictions for diesel cars, and adding bus lanes. All have cameras so if you don't realise you're immediately fined.
I even know someone who was recently fine because they were caught on camera going through a red light to get out of the way of an ambulance (they insist they did so safely).
The tracking our movements is really the least of our problems.
In all fairness the highway code specifically says that you should not violate it to let ambulance pass.
Might be down to sketchy council, but they normally place signs "new layout ahead" and the like when limits, lanes change.
In US, it's not uncommon for small towns to have traffic fines be a significant part of their budget, which in turn incentivizes them to deliberately confuse motorists to fine them - this is especially true for towns located on busy routes where there's a lot of out-of-town traffic, since locals generally learn the where the traps are.
I would say there’s a pretty significant difference between something like phone geolocation data, which is not very practical to search, especially for Apple devices, and in any case usually requires at least a superficial level of scrutiny, and a database that any old police officer can just run a query on as and when they feel like it.
Yes, they can, however I don't believe this is quite as straightforward as just looking up the data for a particular vehicle on your police computer. Looking up the ANPR data on a vehicle is only marginally more complex than looking up a person's driving license details or similar. My understanding is that in order to do a reverse geofence request, or look up a specific device, it's a lot more complicated, and these days you're only going to get cell site information rather than precise GPS data (as was possible by asking Google in the past).
With the very welcome changes to how Google stores location history, they will no longer be capable of answering geofence warrants. The cell carrier themselves (Verizon / T-Mobile / BT / Orange etc) can still provide some tower logon information but I'm not sure if they are storing E911 GPS info.
> Because of how effective this is for catching even fairly minor violations like failure to pay road tax,
The main use of those cameras is to deter not paying road tax and not having insurance, and to spot stolen and wanted cars.
It's not a problem if all number plates are stored for some time but it requires strict rules (duration of storage and access to data), which the document you linked to describes.
> > even fairly minor violations like failure to pay road tax
> The main use of those cameras is to deter not paying road tax
No-one has paid a road tax in the United Kingdom since 1937. Vehicle excise duty is (currently) based on CO2 emissions (which is why EVs are subject to a £0 VED) and has always gone directly into a general government fund -- it does not maintain the roads. Of course the government could choose to spend some of that money on road upkeep, but they don't have to.
"Road tax" is a widespread colloquial term, and that tax must be paid to be able to drive on public roads. So let's not lose ourselves in nitpicks, it brings nothing to the discussion at hand...
You’re absolutely right, I’ve edited my comment to say vehicle tax rather than road tax. It’s actually one of my personal bugbears as well, so I can’t believe that I said that.
Didn't yet. Which is how most of this technology starts out, and is the largest problem with people building these systems. See: courts ruling that 23andMe can sell their data yesterday
And yet, if your car gets stolen thieves don't even bother putting fake/cloned plates on it most of the time - police could in theory look up where the car was last seen using ANPR but either they don't have the time or they don't actually have the ability.
>>Because of how effective this is for catching even fairly minor violations like failure to pay road tax
It's not really, I don't believe so anyway. Keep seeing posts from various police forces around the UK about so-and-so car being stopped, no tax since 2022 for instance. And I'm like....ok great, but how come it took you 3 years to find them??
Typically cars get stolen for temporary-ish use - to commit a crime somewhere, go joyriding, to strip for parts, etc.
It might only be on the road for 2-8 hours. Maybe a day.
To catch someone during the window of opportunity it would make sense requires a lot of things to happen in quick succession - the owner needs to notice, a report with all the necessary details needs to be entered, and they need to go by a reader - and an officer needs to follow up in a timely fashion before the ‘lead’ goes stale.
Sometimes departments will have their acts together enough that it’s possible, but usually they don’t. Police departments are part of the government too, after all. Most of the time if the car is found at all, it will be found days later abandoned on the other side of town, or on blocks.
The ‘best’ often have an officer (or 2) obsessed with catching stolen cars, and some of them will catch 10-12 in a shift. It’s genuinely impressive watching them work.
Every civil liberties infringement (e.g., warrantless search and seizure) comes in very handy for solving crimes. That's why the constitution specifically places limit on it, because you have to balance that with the loss of liberty.
Since the genie is out of the bottle, when it comes to ALPRs in the United States, I'd rather just have all the data publicly available. If the cops, data brokers, and insurance companies can see it I should be able to as well.
I should be able to see the comings and goings of law enforcement, elected officials, etc, if they can see mine.
Alternatively, lock it away behind judicial oversight. Make the cops get a warrant. Criminalize companies collecting the data from offering it in any manner other than by the order of a judge.
I feel the same way about tracking cell phones, publicly-owned surveillance cameras, privately-owned surveillance cameras that are "voluntarily" offered to law enforcement, and, in general, any dragnet surveillance available to law enforcement. If it's available to law enforcement and not being conducted on an individual basis under a judicial order (or, heck, even just probable cause) I think it should be available to the public, too.
"But stalkers!"
Tough. That's the price we have to pay for keeping law enforcement in check. Either adapt or take this power away from law enforcement.
For that matter, it’s not unheard of for members of the US’ 18,000 law enforcement organizations [0] to engage in stalking behaviors themselves. Especially when there’s no oversight for a specific surveillance technology…
> Since the genie is out of the bottle, when it comes to ALPRs in the United States, I'd rather just have all the data publicly available. If the cops, data brokers, and insurance companies can see it I should be able to as well.
I try to help folks understand that locking up public data up with a privacy law only blocks them from seeing it.
It is still trivially available to those who use personal data to negatively impact others.
> "But stalkers!"
>
> Tough. That's the price we have to pay
I wonder if that won't really work well in real life.
I remember reading the difference between a citizen and a police officer is that a police officer can arrest people for misdemeanors (while a citizen can do a citizen's arrest for felonies I believe).
There's probably a good reason citizens shouldn't easily be able to prey or stir up trouble with no friction.
that said, surveillance by private companies should be regulated, and people should have access to data collected about themselves.
I agree with what you're saying, but don't understand the point - if police officers in the US (about a million adult professionals) are abusing this data, wouldn't opening it up to ~300 million random people result in far more abuse than we're already seeing?
1. Don’t build systems that can be abused to start with, because they will be abused, but if we must build one then see point 2:
2. Put access to this sensitive information behind a judge’s signature. Because see point 3:
3. When it comes to this kind of data: There are no “good guys” and “bad guys” - we should assume that everyone is a potential bad guy.
Whenever you hear the “good guys” justification, immediately remind yourself of the ways the “good guys” have been found to be “bad guys” in sheep’s clothing.
Whenever you hear someone use the “nothing to hide” argument, remind yourself that none of the victims in these stories had anything to hide, nor had they done anything wrong. (Much like the thousands of women who die from partner abuse every year.)
> privately-owned surveillance cameras that are "voluntarily" offered to law enforcement
You may find interesting to know that in the case of crimes being committed near or next to a business, especially independent businesses, their priority is often to minimalize risk to them and their business, and so they do not provide any recording, or use rolling footage which wipes every x days (often just one day). That way the footage is useful to them, but they do not have any additional obligations.
This tracks. My sister had her car keyed (scratching the paint) in a Honda dealer parking lot while waiting for a tire repair. The dealer has cameras but when they reviewed the footage they couldn't find any evidence of the vandalization. They wouldn't let anyone else review the footage so we're not really sure what happened. However, I do know that finding evidence of a crime that happened on their property would just cause the dealer trouble and likely force them to pay for damages.
She filed a police report but that didn't really help at all. Not that we really expected it to, but she was just trying to be complete. In the end she had to pay to fix the damage and the dealer (and the criminal) had no repercussions at all.
I think attributing the problem to “stalkers” minimizes the issues this arrangement of publicly searchable surveillance data creates. Imagine a website where you can type in anyone’s name and it shows you their last known location and their location history. You would have a system which supports universal spying for mundane and nefarious reasons alike. Not just criminal “stalkers” will take advantage of it.
Potentially this sort of arrangement would work if there are limits on the granularity, frequency, and history of the tracking data.
Generally agree on the publicly available case. Several benefits, probably a couple downsides.
- People are more aware the data's available. Most people are probably minimally aware of how much they're actually being recorded all the time. It occurs occasionally on the news, yet most likely never really consider it much unless they're the subject of constant camera monitoring.
- Anybody can check anybody, and with extremely open data archives, then everybody also knows when other people check. "This many people clicked on your account" or something similar, just with surveillance footage. Like usual, police / FBI / spooks / ect... probably just write laws to legalize not telling you and that entitled people don't have to follow those guidelines. Theory's nice though.
- Data's already there and being used, yet, currently, only the police have the data, and you never know what it's being used for unless you ask. Even then you may get a wall of legal issues to ensure you're not allowed to find out. Or you have to lawyer up and pay expensive fees to fight the legal wall.
- Data can be used for other purposes. Anonymized statistics on usage of municipal resources, infrastructure, high traffic areas, crime area behaviors. Amazing what you can find even just cruising around on Google Street View in areas known for high crime. "Damn, just saw somebody pull a gun on the street car. Duck Google driver!"
- Adds to other sources like people's webcams, government satellites, sensor stations for things like weather updates and verification of events / conditions in other areas. Amazing how difficult it's become in the era of fake images to tell whether anything is "actually" happening in some distant location.
- Partially deals with the "Who watches the Watchmen issue." The other Watchmen. Crowd sourced observation and journalism has already shown on numerous occasions that it's often more responsive, and frequently fair, than a lot of the paid corporate journalism. Ukraine was a case where the crowd source journalism and data analysis was so much better than anything the news was showing, it was like every Wiki editor was down on the ground following troop movements. Barely get the mainline news to show anything other than stock footage.
Downsides:
- Obviously stalking. Although with notices about people checking your data frequently, there's at least some push back against the stalking.
- Profiling. However, this probably already gets done by the police anyways. Dark skin areas, "ethnic" areas, ect...
- Data's there, somebody will probably find an "app" that does something miserable with the data. Too little faith in humanity to believe they'll do almost anything else after LLMs and image gen.
I anticipate some kind of open source / crowd sourced ALPR app will become the public's answer to these private data collection systems. Everyone has a dash cam and a cell phone in their car. It wouldn't take much to run local video analysis onboard, capture all the cars around you on the road, compute make, model, distance, velocity, heading, and archive it in a local DB. Then have a "that guy cut me off" button that pushes the record to a collaborative open data set like open street maps.
I hate this idea. It's a shit idea. I expect it's coming anyway.
I don't think there should be an expectation of anonymity for the specific case of operating a car on a public road. It's a lot of responsibility, so you should be scrutinized when you do it.
That's part of my grievances against the urbanism of the U.S.A. When the only viable option to get around is cars, there is no privacy.
It's important to advocate for public places to be livable for everyone, not just drivers.
The problem isn't that you're visible, or that what you're doing should be private, it's that any cop can access your location history for any reason, at any time, with no scrutiny. Cops are known to be abusive, violent thugs, and giving them this ability is definitely a dangerous route.
IMO these recordings should be kept by a third party, and cops should need to appeal to that third party to access it. Going before a judge to get a warrant would be preferred.
From having worked on systems like this, anything that allows a cop to look into people's whereabouts will have extensive logs of queries being performed because abuses are one of the first problems you run into. They happen _all the time_. They'll look up their romantic partners, an ex's new boyfriend, ...
I am of the opinion that automatic gathering of the travel history of a plate should be locked behind judicial approval, and that the data should have a lifetime. But I'm 99.99% confident that the searches are at least logged because we got complaints, like, 1 month in.
I'm worried that YouPeople(TM) (i.e. the reader, HN, some unspecified future group, etc.) will vote in some jerks who will decide that people like me ought to be scrutinized to the full extent of the law. And your cheerleaders will say things like "they shouldn't have broken the law" when it was never possible, by design, to comply with all the laws all the time in the first place.
This happened with the IRS and ICE. Illegal immigrants were told to pay taxes because the IRS didn't reveal their address to ICE. And it didn't. Now the new regime has fired and replaced the people at the IRS responsible for that policy, and the IRS will now report all data it collected about illegal immigrants to ICE.
And the same people crying about that trap (dox yourselves to us, or be guilty of tax evasion) are mostly the same people who think nailing Al Capone for tax evasion was a step forward for policy/government. Drives me up the f-ing wall that people won't take a step back and think about the big picture of policy.
Or a scenario where an arbitrary cop deliberately leaks the information to a nominally private group (perhaps named like the "${Color}${Clothing}s") whose violent activities are ignored or pardoned by the law.
_will_ vote in some folks? see this is what confuses me about the trump is a fascist crowd, aren't we concerned about giving the state this much power because of the people who have already been voted in?
I mean, it's too little too late but likewise it's amazing to me that the same people who are trying to convince me that the current government is fascist is also at the same time still campaigning on behalf of the same government to disarm its citizens.
> it's amazing to me that the same people who are trying to convince me that the current government is fascist is also at the same time still campaigning on behalf of the same government to disarm its citizens.
Why is that amazing? It doesn't really matter if civilians in the US are armed and trained and organized. If the US government decides to violently oppress people, the US government will win. Sure, it'll hurt more fighting against armed civilians, but they'll still win. The idea that the 2nd Amendment creates a populace full of people who could win an engagement against the US military is hilarious.
The ability of the citizens to resist the government's ability to enforce compliance of unpopular stuff is a defense in depth thing.
Not having pervasive surveillance is one layer. Due process that gives huge veto power to whatever the minority on the issue is is another. Being able to decide you'll take an enforcer with you rather than spend life in prison (and the pause and increased resource expenditure and scrutiny that causes the enforcers) is another layer.
The fascism is consolidating power in the executive branch by having a billionaire gut the federal bureaucracy while trying to intimidate judges who rule against the administration and critical news agencies, among other things. Gun restrictions are a separate topic, and there is no serious chance that ordinary citizens are gong to form a militia to take on the US Military.
First of all, you have a point - Trump is a great object lesson for why its probably not a great idea to have a huge, powerful, monolithic state and a commander in chief that can launch nuclear weapons. I don't think anyone would dispute that.
But most people see that the government as currently comported isn't going anywhere, even acknowledging the dedicated if incondite attempts of the current administration to "tame administrative bloat," as they might describe it. Thus your average "liberal" thinks first that government should be executed carefully by professional policy makers that respect the power of the state and second it should "take people's guns away."
But I will say that almost no liberal wants to totally disarm the public, anyway. That is a cartoon position which charitably could be attributed to loud voices on social media or something, but not a real policy position held by typical "libs". Most liberals just want guns to be properly regulated (perhaps even restricted to well regulated militias, to recall a phrase from somewhere). There might be some quibbling about precisely where the line between proper regulation and enabling oppression go, but I'd wager a majority of Americans are in favor of some version of the right to bear arms.
As evidence of this I proffer this pew research poll (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/24/key-facts...) which indicates that more than half of people who do not own guns could see themselves buying one in the future. 32% of people own guns in the U.S.
And I am sure when they are caught the full brunt of the U.S. justice system holds them accountable for their wretched behavior. More likely they just move departments. Logging something is moot if those abusing the power are rarely held accountable for things ranging all the way up to murder.
I agree that we don't have an expectation of privacy on a public road, but I feel like we've been frog boiled in the US into equating that with being tracked everywhere, all the time -- or, rather, constantly surveilled by both private and public entities.
I agree with you on the judicial approval and data expiration, but I don't think the systems should be active until those rules are enacted.
From Justice Sotomayor's concurring opinion in US v. Jones:
'“cases involving even short-term monitoring … require particular attention” because the “Government can store such records and efficiently mine them for information years into the future …. GPS monitoring is cheap … proceeds surreptitiously, [and] it evades the ordinary checks that constrain abusive law enforcement practices: ‘limited police resources and community hostility.'” Id. at *11. Justice Sotomayor expressed concerns that the Government’s use of such technology might chill “associational and expressive freedoms,”'
Why is it so hard to understand this? Five years ago on HN stories like this would collect comments with general revulsion to this sort of surveillance. Today there is a troubling sentiment that "we can't have a society without unlimited time history of every person's movements available for scrutiny."
> Five years ago on HN stories like this would collect comments with general revulsion to this sort of surveillance.
I'm super skeptical that this is actually true. In fact, I'm pretty sure it isn't, and you're just projecting your own positions on "HN of five years ago".
Most people on HN are highly networked with Big Tech which depends on surveillance data. Without it, their jobs and careers vanish. Defending surveillance doesn't come from a place of reason, it comes from a place of ignorance and fear.
It's funny how your, and the other sibling replies, all got downvoted without anyone refuting it. They know you're right, they're just angry about being called out.
Although I agree with your sentiment on data privacy, I don't know where you live but in the United States this is a gross [and potentially dangerous] overgeneralization of a million+ hard-working officers who committed their lives to your safety in spite of regularly encountering life-threatening situations.
Being a police officer doesn't even rank in the top 10 most dangerous jobs in America. Loggers, fishers, roofers, and delivery drivers all face higher fatality rates according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
The Supreme Court explicitly ruled in Castle Rock v. Gonzales (2005) that police have no constitutional duty to protect citizens from harm, effectively nullifying the "committed their lives to your safety" claim.
These "million+ hard-working officers" actively maintain the corrupt system by refusing to hold their colleagues accountable. The "few bad apples" theory falls apart when entire departments and unions systematically protect officers who abuse their power.
American police have earned their reputation through decades of documented misconduct, militarization, and resistance to meaningful reform. The institution works exactly as designed.
This made me remember a news story out of Mississippi last year of hundreds of graves behind a jail with no accountability of whose body is placed there.
It only came to light after much struggle from people searching for missing family members. Basically people in police or jail custody who died were dumped in there under a blanket assumption that no family had claimed them, but no attempts to notify or find family members was made.
That's what the ruling implies, yeah. The response to the Uvalde school shooting bears that out. Police get all the power and none of the responsibility.
In a legal sense, yes. That police can't be held legally liable if they fail to protect someone from harm. They might lose their job, if their boss actually cares about officers putting their lives on the line to protect people, but they are under no obligation to do that. And in practice, most won't ever punish an officer for failing to protect someone when they could have done so.
It's also funny to me that police apologists use the "few bad apples" theory, when the full saying is "a few bad apples can spoil the barrel". The saying is about how having a few bad people will usually corrupt the rest.
And the "circling the wagons" phenomenon you mention is exactly an example of this. The so-called "good cops" rarely speak up when their colleagues are doing horrible things. It's disgusting. Those who are silent are complicit.
Personal experiences don't override statistics or legal precedent. I don't need to "hang out" with officers to understand the well documented patterns of police misconduct or the Supreme Court rulings about their lack of duty to protect citizens.
The "just meet some nice cops" argument is precisely how institutions avoid accountability for systemic problems. Individuals, and how nice they might be, are irrelevant when discussing institutional failures.
And yet you're letting your own personal experiences override statistics, yourself? What's the prevalence rate of abuses of power among law enforcement officers?
"Well-documented patterns of abuse" are not statistics! But, if I'm mistaken and they are, please let me know what percentage of police officers engage in abuse of power in their career. I'd love to see those kinds of statistics!
Allowing cops to get away with abuses is also an abuse. So, for example, if a cop murders a citizen and gets away with it, not only is it that cop that has abused their position of authority, but every other cop at that precinct who knows what happened is abusing their position of authority.
I'm not sure that sort of thing is something you can tie up neatly into a bow and present as some set of statistics. But it's a phenomenon that's very real.
This is yet another deflection. If you cannot do anything other than wave away your lack of evidence, I'm forced to conclude that you actually have no idea what you're talking about.
Tons of people have seen things they can't explain, and are convinced that ghosts and the supernatural exist. Those phenomena are "very real" to those folks, too.
To be clear, I agree that police abusing their power is a "real phenomenon", in the sense that it certainly happens. But until you can provide ample evidence that these behaviors are thing a significant minority of police officers take part in, then your generalizing them to all police officers is just about as "real" as ghosts.
I don't care if they're "good people" individually. Every atrocity in every history book was committed by "good people" working together (though people tend to obscure that either for comfort or because they want to repeat history). The system is rotten.
Well, you should. Saying "cops are thugs" because some cops are thugs is no different (morally speaking) than saying "black people are criminals" because some black people are criminals. It's wrong to judge an entire diverse group of people by the actions of a few, period.
Cops have the protection of the law and a government granted mandate for violence. They're not a bunch of individuals deciding to act in a particular way. They operate in a system that will protect them for thuggish behaviour. If they happen to be "nice people" as individuals, they still have the option to be a thug without penalty. They still choose to implicitly support wide spread inequality and consequence free violence.
If, as an individual citizen, I'm aware of a serious crime being committed, I have an obligation to report it. If a "good" police officer has knowledge of crimes committed by "bad" police officers and they don't report it, then they are no longer a "good" police officer.
They are categorically thugs. It is literally their job to enforce literally anything with up to lethal violence. It is dressed up in due process and whatnot but it is still thuggery. The difference between, idk cops in France or whatever, and cartel enforcers or a medieval lord's men at arms is mostly one of process, available money and social norms.
A non-criminal black person has no control or responsibility over a random criminal black person.
A police officer absolutely can speak up, speak out, and blow the whistle when one of their fellow officers does awful things. But most will just keep their mouths shut and help (actively or passively) with whatever coverup the institution decides is appropriate.
We're not talking about guilt by association, here. We're talking about guilt by failing to speak up; their silence makes them complicit.
I know some cops in Seattle PD who routinely refer to people in the (minority) communities they police as "subhuman scum" and wish they wouldn't have so many limitations of use of force.
They seem to be doing pretty well career-wise, too, so it seems that this is not an uncommon sentiment there.
you're right i have changed my opinions about my father, my brothers, my cousins, and many of my friends, because of a hacker news dismantling. i have now realized they are of course statistically thugs who have no interest in protecting citizens.
My cousin successfully sued because he suffered constant racist treatment and was passed over for several promotions that went to less qualified and less experienced white men. He subsequently had to move out of the county because the harassment only escalated after he quit. I'll be sure to let him know that he just ran into a few bad apples, but for some reason he was not keen to try again elsewhere.
Consider that the guys entire management chain was involved in the attempt to forcibly institutionalize him, and numerous rank and file police officers as well. And not a single one of them spoke in his defense.
Based on this anecdote, what would you say the ratio of good vs bad cops is in NYPD?
THe "thin blue line" that keeps otherwise good cops from snitching on bad cops is the whole issue. You won't go far as a cop if your intention is to root out corruption.
Did you know, in the US it is possible to be overqualified to be a cop, if you are too smart? The system wants jackbooted thugs, rather than intelligent policing.
I don't think some larger system wants cops ignorant, as much as it's the dynamics of corrupt self-preservation.
If corrupt sheriff Moe Carpaio is accepting bribes or selling drugs out of the evidence locker, Moe needs to hire juniors who are less likely to blow the whistle. Much of that involves in trapping them into the perpetuating cycle of crime, and that's easier when they don't have lots of other employment options.
It's frankly disgusting how many people in this thread are willing to embrace prejudice as soon as it's prejudice against a group they don't like. Turns out that the lesson people learned from years of social pressure to not pick on minorities wasn't "prejudice is wrong", but rather "ok we can pick on groups but just not these ones".
We shouldn't pick on minorities because the attributes that make them a minority have nothing to do with anything worthy of scorn or... well, anything negative at all.
Police extensively abuse their power, and even the so-called "good" cops rarely speak up against their fellow officers when they do awful things. It's not prejudice to state established facts and patterns of behavior.
it's that any cop can access your location history for any reason, at any time, with no scrutiny
Surely that's the problem to resolve? We could make it as ethically unacceptable for the police to look up irrelevant private records as it is for someone in the medical profession to do so, and fire people for misuse of these tools (indeed, in my country police officers do get fired for this sort of thing).
If we haven't managed to stop them brutalizing and killing unethically yet, then I don't think we'll stop them violating privacy unethically any time soon.
I'm a volunteer court observer for DV court and some days it feels like half of the cases are someone misusing state surveillance tools to stalk or abuse women. The victims are almost always women. The abusers aren't always cops, probably a slight majority of them are other workers with access to these systems. I don't find out what happens to them afterwards but I never seem to hear about police getting fired for this.
What's the bias I don't really understand. That I only see the ones that get caught and had a victim willing to show up in court over it? So this is actually probably a much bigger issue than I think it is?
Only cases with easy to prove paper trails are worth taking to court, straightforward cases where the result is all but guaranteed get settled outside court, etc, etc.
Not sure how that refute the GP's point. You're just saying that what the GP has seen is a smaller part of all the bad stuff that really happens. Which they acknowledged.
My point is don't draw conclusions from what you see in court. Just because probate court is packed doesn't mean most heirs can't figure it out amicably.
Just because you're seeing the cases that create prosecutable paper trails doesn't mean anything about what fraction of that type of crime they are.
> it's that any cop can access your location history for any reason
This requires the assumption that your location and your car's location are always one and the same.
If you care about your privacy consider leaving the vehicle with tracking numbers on it at home sometimes. It's not just cops that have ALPRs and you cannot prevent this technology from existing.
I’m sorry, is the proposal here that you remove your legally-required number plates and travel that way (in which case Flock’s “vehicle DNA” feature recognition will quickly reidentify you), or that you buy or rent other cars? I guess starting and ending somewhere other than your home?
Or did you have a different mode of travel in mind that compares favorably to wheeled transportation on public streets?
Billions of people all over this planet take trips every day without the use of personal private automobiles.
It's fascinating how, to me, my comment was very clearly "don't use a car if you care about privacy" but that interpretation didn't even occur to you. Car dependency runs deep.
While billions of people do operate without cars (I’m one of them!), I feel like there’s a conditionality kind of constraint here: of the set of people who would normally be operating cars on local US arterial roads—that is, of the set of people whose privacy this technology impacts in the first place—what proportion seem likely (or able) to do whatever privacy-implicated things they need or want to do without said cars?
If it doesn't already exist, it should be pretty simple to build the software so that a hobbyist can point a cheap camera at the road outside his window and record every license plate passing by.
You can ban cops from doing it, I guess, but I think someone will record all public spaces quite soon. I don't love it either...
Not to mention we have constitutional restrictions on what law enforcement can do, in recognition that such abuse has been a problem even hundreds of years ago.
Then don't make the 3rd party a for profit private company. Make it a new branch of the government. Make it part of the DoT or which ever company is responsible for collecting taxes in your locale. Intra agency operations would still be possible while removing direct access to LEOs. If you want your own information, pay your $25 type fees after proving who you are for printing/research/etc that are typical when requesting official gov't records. If you're another gov't agency, provide the warrant granting access to civilian records.
We already do that. Government has strict firewalls to access DMV data, so DMVs sell the stream of data to various parties, and the government buys it back from the third party or any non-police purpose.
A company like ID.me basically performs a function that any state government could do itself or through a contractor at lower cost and without the privacy issues of providing the data to third parties.
The law has failed us here - privacy attorneys basically focus on providing notification on a “take it or leave it” basis.
> Then don't make the 3rd party a for profit private company. Make it a new branch of the government.
Who is this directed at? The company wasn't started as a branch of government. What exactly are you proposing? That the government create its own network of cameras for surveillance? Have government-created solutions never been abused by law enforcement in the past?
The argument is not that this theoretical 3rd party would be a for-profit company, but that there's already existing for-profit companies that exist and could serve that purpose, and that the new 3rd party wouldn't see much use because of that.
They almost certainly are willing to buy hordes of data off of google/facebook/etc.; it's useful data that they're already negotiating to get. Why, then, would they be want to put in the effort for a warrant on cctv footage when the suspect's google search and maps history they're alreaty getting contain the same info and more? At best, your creating a small amount of competition for data brokers, and I question if it's that much.
Generally agree with what you said, but "Cops are known to be abusive, violent thugs" is a terrible thing to say completely unqualified like that.
If you don't understand why, consider that crime rates are known to be higher among the black population in the US but generalizing that to "black people are known to be abusive, violent thugs" would be equally wrong and hateful. You can make a point about the potential for abuse without name-calling an entire group of people like that.
That's exactly why I didn't use Republicans as an example; because I know there's lots of people on the Democrat side who consider that perfectly acceptable rhetoric as long as it's not targeting them.
I maintain that this sort of vitriolic language is unacceptable no matter what group it's targeting, unless your goal is to start a flame war (or a real war) rather than actually solve problems.
So your position is that it's also unacceptable to say "cartel members are violent, abusive thugs"? I don't think I agree with that.
I do think it's a bit strong to say police are all violent, abusive thugs.
But there are many police officers who share unfortunate characteristics with violent, abusive thugs, and nearly all of their fellow supposedly-good officers are unwilling to call them out and enforce any sort of consequences for being violent, abusive thugs. That's nearly as bad, in my book.
So maybe let's stop policing (heh) people's specific language, and instead talk about the actual issues.
Well for one thing, I don't think "starting a war" against the cartels would necessarily be a bad idea.
And my concern isn't with the language used, but the casually hateful attitude being expressed. It's not constructive, and probably actively harmful to just be casually demonizing your neighbors like that.
Great question! I wouldn't call it acceptable (thought it sure seems to be widely accepted), but I would argue it's certainly not equally bad. Put differently: I take issue with your specific example but agree with your larger point.
I think bringing race into it conflates separate issues. On the other hand, I really like the "cartel members" vs "[opposing political party]" example! It feels like these obviously shouldn't be equally bad, but explaining why is harder than I expected...
> Generally agree with what you said, but "Cops are known to be abusive, violent thugs" is a terrible thing to say completely unqualified like that.
That's true, it should be qualified “within a subculture of violent thuggery, in organizations which lack any unifying focus other than the application of force, and which both protect them from and are themselves insulated from effective accountability for abuses.”
"Black people are abusive, violent thugs, within a subculture of violent thuggery, in cities which lack..."
Maybe a bit better, but you're still overgeneralizing in order to demonize an entire group of people.
If you want to talk about systemic issues in our policing system, then talk about those issues. Calling people groups derogatory names isn't constructive.
And honestly, given the struggles police forces in the US are having with staffing, it does appear that cops are becoming increasingly marginalized. Especially since the primary driver behind the decline in recruitment seems to be the risk of social stigmatization.
Or maybe there's something to the idea of police being a corrupt, rotten profession, full of people who either a) do violent, thuggish things, b) help cover up the abuses, or c) stand by quietly, too cowardly to ensure the awful ones among them face consequences for what they've done.
I think police as a job, as it currently exists, absolutely should be socially stigmatized. They have the ability to clean up their act, and show that they are worthy of the power and authority we give them, but they choose not to.
Or maybe people like you just hate authority and will always portray anyone in positions of authority as being corrupt?
Except if it was you in charge, of course?
Like I asked you in a different reply: what's the prevalence rate of these bad behaviors? "Full of people" seems to imply that you think it's a majority? I can confidently state that you cannot back this up with evidence, because it appears the only evidence you have is anecdotal, and likely anecdotes you actively select for in order to feed your confirmation bias.
I'll note that you didn't answer my question, either. Coordinated deflection like this is not a sign that you have a well-formed argument
define "anecdote" as it pertains to your argument - because i have literally hundreds of videos of police misconduct, from just 2020-2022. I stopped collecting them because i can't move the needle.
here's where people go "oh but there's 800,000+ uniformed law enforcement in the US, and you have 100 videos, big whoop". How many videos would it take? We've only been able to really easily record the police doing misconduct for 15-20 years, depending on how you parse "easily record." So how many videos would it take? And of those videos, how many would i have to listen to someone say "the victim of police misconduct should have just [...]"?
How many lawsuits against cities and departments would you need to read before it made a dent?
because using mean words to talk about the police isn't punching down. There's a difference between punching down on marginalized groups, compared to speaking against / badly about authority figures.
That doesn't really answer the question. Perhaps I should rephrase:
You were replying to someone who stated this, I believe:
> Maybe a bit better, but you're still overgeneralizing in order to demonize an entire group of people.
To which you responded:
> Cops aren't a marginalized group.
Why does being a marginalized group matter in this context? Why does not being a "marginalized group" mean it's okay to overgeneralize and/or demonize? What is a "marginalized group" in this context? Why is one not allowed to overgeneralize and demonize a marginal group, but one is allowed to for groups that do not hold this status?
The more meta question is: Why is overgeneralizing in order to demonize a group of people acceptable in any circumstance? I don't think it is, because once you start carving out exceptions, all you end up doing is just justifying and reinforcing your own biases.
this is a really poor comparison. mentioning crime rates by race is considered highly racist because it's a dog-whistle to frame it as "this person is more likely to do this because of their race" instead of framed in a socioeconomic context and the result of long-term systemic racism and oppression.
cops are not a race. cops have extremely high levels of problematic behavior across all ages, races, etc. it's a good thing to call out the problematic nature of cops as a group since they have a literal monopoly on violence and are massively unaccountable for the use of that violence.
the argument "you can't call black people violent, therefore you also can't call cops violent" makes absolutely no sense to me
There's a difference between "black people in x city are y% more likely per capita to commit violent crime" and "black people are violent thugs". One is a statistical reality that can be used in a constructive context. ("Okay, so what can we do to reduce this crime rate? Better education? Community outreach? Etc.") the other is probably just bigotry.
The same goes for the difference between "Police departments in the US have y% higher rate of excessive use of force than other countries" and "police are violent thugs".
No black person chooses to be born black. Casting judgement on any individual black person for the actions of other black people is unethical for that reason.
Every single cop chose to be there, chooses to continue being a cop every day despite constant and repeated examples of blatant corruption, bad behavior, literal thuggery, planting evidence, and the Good Ol' Boys network endemic to the institution. They are culpable for that choice. Continuing to be a cop in this environment (specifically where there is zero chance to "reform it from the inside" due to structural problems). Ask any ex-cop why they left. The system is completely broken and designed to empower cops to be thugs without consequence.
"Good cops" don't stay cops because they get bullied by literal cop gangs to either become a bad cop and do thuggery or to get the fuck out. There are no Good cops.
> No black person chooses to be born black. Casting judgement on any individual black person for the actions of other black people is unethical for that reason.
Casting judgement on any individual for the actions of other individuals who share characteristics with them is generally unethical, period. The individual's ability to choose the particular identifying characteristics shouldn't be relevant.
I'm pretty sure you don't want to be making the argument that it's ethical to judge people based on elements of their identity, so long as those elements have been selected by that person's choice!
> I'm pretty sure you don't want to be making the argument that it's ethical to judge people based on elements of their identity, so long as those elements have been selected by that person's choice!
That's a strange argument to make. If the chosen identity element is associated with negative characteristics, then it stands to reason that it's, well, reasonable to judge them based on those characteristics.
If it quacks, it's probably a duck. If it wears a police uniform it probably a) does bad stuff, b) enables cover-ups of that bad stuff, or c) lacks the courage to speak out against the bad stuff. This isn't because of their identity, it's because this is a characteristic that is widely documented to be incredibly common among cops.
People can choose to not adopt identity elements that have bad reputations. People can't choose not to be black.
So, someone who chooses to undergo gender reassignment therapy can be judged based on the characteristics of all people who have made the same choice?
Someone who chooses to wear heavy makeup and revealing clothing while standing on the street waiting for their Uber can be fairly judged to be a prostitute?
I don't think this is the argument you're making, but this is how the standard you are setting can be applied.
I don't think the element of choice in identity elements makes a difference either way. I think you should just avoid overgeneralizing, period.
Instead of, you know, inventing reasons why is fine to overgeneralize when you want to, but not when you don't want others to.
> If it wears a police uniform it probably a) does bad stuff, b) enables cover-ups of that bad stuff, or c) lacks the courage to speak out against the bad stuff.
"Probably"? Based on what prevalence rate? What percentage of police officers engage in each of these behaviors? You're making a wild assumption here, likely with nothing more than your own anecdotal understanding of these issues.
I think it's more likely you just have a media diet that is high in examples of these behaviors happening, but without the context that explains exactly how often they're actually happening.
I'm not denying that these things happen, and happen frequently! But there are a lot of police officers in the US alone, and even 1% of them doing each of these things is a large number of absolute cases. But a rate of 1% isn't sufficient to generalize to the entire population. At a rate of 10%, I would probably still refrain from extrapolating to the whole, but would start to question individual interactions, and would start to be sympathetic to this kind of generalization.
But due to the lack of evidence around prevalence of bad behavior, I'm skeptical of anyone who generalizes to this degree, especially given the poor quality of information anecdotally collected from the Internet.
> People can choose to not adopt identity elements that have bad reputations. People can't choose not to be black.
If people never adopt identity elements that have bad reputations, how can those reputations ever be improved? If you want the quality of policing to improve, the last thing your want to do is convince everyone who wants to make a difference that they shouldn't even try. If you want policing to improve, you should be encouraging the best people you know to join up and to force out the bad behavior through reform.
People cannot choose to be black, but they can choose to make an effort to destroy the negative stereotypes associated with their race.
You seem to be arguing that generalizations are always externally imposed and immutable, neither of which is true. Your argument is actively damaging to any efforts to improve the perceptions of both groups.
People don’t choose to have gender dysphoria, and you can’t judge someone for receiving healthcare to manage their well-being. If you want to make the argument that gender affirming care isn’t healthcare then kindly don’t respond because I’m not trying to invite hate and transphobia.
I really cannot be bothered to respond to the rest of this because you’re starting from a place of not being familiar enough with this topic at all for this to be a meaningful exchange. I really hope you make time to educate yourself better on this topic and do so with an open mind and compassion
> People don’t choose to have gender dysphoria, and you can’t judge someone for receiving healthcare to manage their well-being.
I phrased what I said much more precisely than this. I said nothing about gender dysphoria, and was instead specifically talking about a therapy one might choose to undergo as treatment. Medical treatments should always be a choice, right?
But no, instead you decide to completely misrepresent what I said, and used then use that single misrepresentation as basis to dismiss my entire argument.
You claim to want a meaningful exchange, but this is how you choose to do it? This makes me skeptical you're interested in "meaningful exchange" in the first place.
Always, before making generalising statements like this, ask yourself: Would I think it's okay if the word was replaced with another, in this case, say "blacks"? And then you'll probably see that you shouldn't talk like that.
I think this is a pretty terrible litmus test for the "okayness" of a statement. There are plenty of reasons one word might make lots of sense in a statement, while another would absolutely not. For example: estimates of the prevalence of domestic violence perpetrated by police officers in the US range as high as 40%. This is an objectively true statement. Replacing 'police officers' with, say, 'kindergarten teachers' produces a statement which is NOT objectively true.
Are you familar with the concept of "omitted variable bias"? This paper only takes it up once (AFAICT), but there's a pretty critical variable that they otherwise generally ignore:
> Once socioeconomic status was considered, the results failed to indicate racial differences between the offending but not arrested drivers and the arrested drivers.
As far as I've seen, there is not a similar explanatory factor with the statistic I've cited.
You cherry-picked one sentence that supports your position out of an entire paper that repeatedly makes the case (with ample evidence!) that race is a meaningful factor in the rates of various types of crime (mostly violent crime). You also picked the one example that's referring to a non-violent crime (drunk driving), when the GP was specifically highlighting violent crime. The rest of the paper continues to make his point, and it's clearly been examined a large number of ways but a ton of highly-motivated people. The burden of putting forth a better explanation is much larger than "one sentence I picked out of a paper that reviews dozens of papers that contradict my explanation".
I don't think this is an "omitted variable bias" thing. This is a "confirmation bias" thing on your part.
Every paper I have ever seen on the subject has concluded that controlling for SES explains racial variation in crime rates. This paper touched on it in one location but otherwise didn’t bring it up, so that’s the part I mentioned here. Feel free to check around and see what you can find, I’ve got better things to do on a Friday night.
I really don't understand what that's supposed to explain, then. Your explanation doesn't change the overall data: some racial demographics are overrepresented in violent crime statistics. If controlling for socioeconomic status eliminates the racial variation, all that really says is that the demographics that are overrepresented in the violent crime statistics are the same demographics that are overrepresented among lower socioeconomic statuses.
So... There's a correlation between lower socioeconomic status and violent crime? I don't think that's surprising. What it does not do is explain why those demographics are overrepresented in either category.
I also am highly skeptical of "every paper", unless you're specifically going out of your way to only read the ones that confirm your bias.
I think you're missing the point. If, when we control for socioeconomic status, we find that there's little to no difference in crime rates between races, then what that means is that, while yes, we can factually say "black people commit more crimes than white people", we cannot say that it's intrinsic in "being black" to commit more crimes.
That is what "$GROUP is a bunch of violent thugs" implies: that members of that group are intrinsically more likely to be violent and thuggish than other type of people, specifically because of the trait that $GROUP embodies. That statement does not hold true for black people, but I believe it does for police.
It's important to understand the root causes of things. Black people commit more crimes, because black people are overrepresented when it comes to lower socioeconomic status, because of century-spanning systemic racism and the reduced opportunities that brings.
Police tend to be more violent and thuggish because the profession selects for people who want to have (and inevitably abuse) power over others, and because it's systemically set up as an institution to enable that behavior and not hold members accountable for it.
I would hope from those two descriptions it's reasonable to say that one group's failings come from a sympathetic cause that is often out of their control, and the other group's failings are intentional and by design.
> I think you're missing the point. If, when we control for socioeconomic status, we find that there's little to no difference in crime rates between races, then what that means is that, while yes, we can factually say "black people commit more crimes than white people", we cannot say that it's intrinsic in "being black" to commit more crimes.
But we cannot say that it's not intrinsic, either! All we can tell is that there's a correlation between "being black" and "being poor". Like the person I was responding to pointed out: there's the potential for a hidden variable that connects these two things. Alternatively, one causes the other. Given the available evidence, it does not seem clear that the arrow of causality points in either direction.
This is the point that you're missing. You assume that "being poor" causes people to be "more violent", when it's equally plausible that being "more violent" causes people to be "more poor".
And if being "more violent" is something that is intrinsic to certain demographic groups, then the latter interpretation would fully explain the overrepresentation in both lower socioeconomic classes and in rates of violent crime.
I fully agree that there has been systemic racism that contributes to lower socioeconomic status for some racial demographics. However, I refuse to accept that as the only explanation for those same demographics being highly overrepresented in violent crime statistics. This is not a simple problem with a two-dimensional answer. The "systemic racism" argument may be necessary, but it is not sufficient, because it attempts to remove any kind of agency those same demographics have over their own behavior, culture, and identity.
This is both wildly disempowering and enabling. You're essentially excusing every individual in that demographic from the consequences of their violent criminal actions by putting the blame entirely outside their control, which is bullshit.
> I don't think there should be an expectation of anonymity for the specific case of operating a car on a public road.
Technology allows surveillance at scale, and that attacks privacy in a new and deeply unintuitive direction.
In the pre-information era, people still didn't have a reasonable expectation of privacy in public, in that everything they did could be noted. However, that notice was far from automatic, and people were only remembered if they were memorable. That could happen from doing something or appearing out of the ordinary, or it could happen from specific interest (e.g. being followed).
Nowadays, the surveillance is automatic, and hard drives don't forget. The technology allows aggregators to answer retrospective questions about the target's ordinary behaviour. People now need be concerned about how their actions today will be viewed weeks, months, or years from now if they later attract scrutiny.
This technology is here today for cars and license plates, but it's only a matter of scale before it's applied to pedestrians with face, gait, or other individual recognition modalities. We don't have the social scripts to properly deal with it.
> Part of Flock’s proprietary tech determines the make and model of the vehicle and also notes if there are bumper stickers, bike racks, any other unique markings that would help identify that vehicle. That generates a “vehicle fingerprint” for every car or truck, which none of the agencies I FOIA’d would provide me.
Fingerprinting gets into unlike-at-scale.
At this point, we're not just talking about license plates but obvious tracking.
Yeah; the risk was lower because the implementation costs were higher.
Take a speeding ticket, for example. If the fine is $400, it's created with the knowledge that it'll only be triggered occasionally, and it's created as a deterrent. If I speed 50 times and get caught one time, I pay $400. If you setup a bunch of speed cameras all over town, the fine should go down to have the same impact.
Instead municipalities have been known to tweak whatever variables they can to maximize their fees collected. In the city I live in, they illegally put speed cameras too soon after a speed change. The city fought against it and won, so the cameras stayed where they are. There is a 5mph drop right before one of the speed cameras and the road jumps up 10mph shortly after. This creates dangerous highway situations where locals aware of the cameras speed up to the camera point, slam on their brakes, and then speed off again after. There is no reason other than revenue for the speed to drop like that on a highway for such a short and straight section without abnormal entrances and exits.
Throw in red light camera setups where they reduce the yellow lights to dangerous levels for everyone in order to collect more fees despite longer yellow light times being one of the most effective ways to prevent collisions in intersections.
> Technology allows surveillance at scale, and that attacks privacy in a new and deeply unintuitive direction.
Technology also allows for influencing the world at scale, and that attacks a lot of assumptions about what is "public" and "private" in new and deeply unintuitive directions, as well.
The cameras are central to the privacy aspect, not the cars.
A car can be identified by its plates, while a pedestrian can be identified by their face or other features. Perhaps not today by some legal or technical difficulty, but the infrastructure to do so is in place.
There is a reasonable expectation of privacy in public places. One might not reasonably expect that one's photograph should not be taken in public, but one may reasonably expect not to have one's every move recorded, profiled, indefinitely stored and shared with various third parties, or to have one's every conversation on the phone or with other people recorded with sophisticated cameras or sensors, and for that to be attached to one's detailed profile.
What is described is a surveillance state, which anyone who values some degree of personal freedom will reasonably object to. The installment of sophisticated cameras capable of tracking one's movement throughout an entire country provides the means for such surveillance state, and should be strongly objected by anyone who values one's personal freedom.
Those in favor of such installment for the facilitation of criminal persecution should at the very least require strong guarantees about its usage, such as storage limits and regular public audits of such implementation, closed circuits instead of publicly networked solutions, etc, and strongly oppose any arrangements that do not fulfill stringent privacy requirements. Unfortunately I am yet to see any real person advocate for this with any real political strength.
I'm all for automated traffic law enforcement via camera, but I think it's very reasonable to say that if the camera doesn't detect a violation of the law, the data needs to be deleted not warehoused.
I personally agree, but there has to be a time frame allowed...
e.g. cameras at an intersection that had an accident: It probably would take 'a day or two' at least for such a request to get to the camera operators to request they send a copy.
I'd also personally prefer speed cameras that are not point-in-time records. This just encourages police to put them where they know people are more likely to violate the law, like at the bottom of hills, where there's not really a danger, but it generates more revenue.
I'd want speed cameras that are miles apart... and the determination that you get a speeding ticket is that you traveled several miles at high speed.
> I'd want speed cameras that are miles apart... and the determination that you get a speeding ticket is that you traveled several miles at high speed.
> This just encourages police to put them where they know people are more likely to violate the law, like at the bottom of hills, where there's not really a danger, but it generates more revenue.
Judging by the number of accidents I've seen at the bottom of hills, I'm skeptical of your statement that "there's not really a danger" there.
I don't think posting up at the bottom of a hill is a revenue-generating thing, it's simply an exercise of going to where the crime happens. In this case, it's at the bottom of a hill that makes it easier for drivers to reach excessive speeds and thus are an increased danger to everyone else on the road.
This is exactly where you want to deter people from behaving dangerously, and where you want to punish the people who fail to pay enough attention to avoid getting a ticket in such an obvious scenario.
So you would be against storing the data for a few days so if a non-traffic crime is detected later (a murder for example), the traffic recordings can be used to help in the investigation? I think that's useful too.
Yes. As soon as the automated traffic enforcement purpose is done with (the car wasn't speeding/wasn't running a red/so on) the data should be deleted.
If the police reach the data before it's deleted after they know it may have evidence of a crime that's ok (realistically this is rare, but I can imagine it happening with paired cameras that measure speed over a long distance of road. You could also get lucky where a false positive image happened to capture a different crime), but we shouldn't be storing surveillance data that tracks everyone's movements on the off chance that it has evidence of a crime. The harm outweighs the use at that point.
Public surveillance should come with certain guarantees, though. Like being transparent about what data is collected and how/where it's stored. And purging the data after a fixed time unless it's involved in a case.
I think that's more of a technicality of billing you for a service than something by design
("the tap on - tap off Oyster/Presto card " => Google sent me to "List of public transport smart cards" so I assume you're refering to some branded public transit system)
No, it's not a side-effect, it's a deliberate decision. You used to be able to get an Oyster card anonymously and top it up with cash. I still have one, but they are not accepted now.
Thank you. It seems like I was misinformed. Last time I was in London my old Oyster card wouldn't work and I was told I couldn't top it up (which is probably true) and I couldn't get a new card without ID (which seems to be false).
Presto is Toronto’s equivalent to London’s oyster card.
Actually there’s no tap off IIRC (unlike the Dutch chipkaarts) but still, I would assume the modern station where you enter is a veritable panopticon of CCTV, RF signal interception, etc
The great thing about democracy is that we can debate subtleties and choose a path between extremes.
So we can say that while the extremes of this argument are either total surveillance or no surveillance at all, we can instead opt for a more balanced approach. We can recognize that guaranteeing privacy in public or when using a publicly provided service is silly, but also that some forms of automation and data mining elevate simple observations into a level of surveillance that we are not comfortable with.
I'm not confortable with a tradeoff, we saw during the pandemic how many amongst us are closeted authoritarians and i don't trust them to choose freedom over safety as per the founding principles of the USA
You can watch me in public and you can even record things like my license plate number if you like.
When you start following me around to all my destinations and making a detailed log of everything I do you are stalking me. That would be a crime if you did it physically. Why should it be different if you are doing it digitally?
Should be police be able to walk behind you down the street everywhere you go just waiting for infractions? What's the difference?
The problem is that they do all this but don't use the cameras to enforce speed limits or red lights. We get all the surveillance but none of the road safety.
Sure. If you got a very well behaving (and systematically scrutinized) executive and a legal system that protects the rights of each individual.
The reason states shouldn't be given every power over their citizens just villy nilly is because power in a free society is given by the citizens. And if the state can target those indiscriminately without due process that is no longer the case.
So it can make sense to withold certain powers from the state, even if with trustworthy leadership and actors these powers would be useful to keep the people in the state safe. And that is because untrustworthy leadership can come around at any point and then you don't want to give them an operational surveillance structure that would have given any authoritarian in history the shivers.
It sounds like you have never needed to organize against a government which threatens your safety, or that you haven't found yourself engaging in any activities that were well-protected at the dawn of the US Constitution but are now considered to be felonious, whether for self-medication, as an act of protest, or as an act of survival.
This means that you have a lot to be grateful for, but your perspective is privileged and may not take into account that not every life is like yours. You don't feel the chains of oppression until you need to break them. I would recommend considering what kind of person might not benefit from mass surveillance in this current political climate where students are disappearing just for protesting against a religious genocide.
You could definitely argue that surveillance is inevitable as a technology; but the government is supposed to serve its people, and without strong guarantees of established freedoms and protection from the negative effects of mass surveillance, the people should not allow the government to engage in such surveillance. Especially not the dragnet style of surveillance that is common today, and especially in the wake of modern analysis tools where prejudice can be automated.
This is a great comment marred by the “students disappearing” statement. An earned but short jail sentence or deportation is quite distinct from a one-way ticket to the gulag, unfortunately implied.
But in general, corporate and state-sponsored surveillance of students and protestors goes back many decades, and we have seen enough witch hunts over things like Communism, Vietnam protestors, psychedelic users, etc. that we simply cannot allow our local, state and federal governments in their current shape to wield mass surveillance, because they will not do it ethically.
There has been though - it wasn't perfect, but there was the expectation that people generally forgot about enough that in practice you were private so long as you were not obvious. Now computers/cameras can store data on everyone as opposed to just people acting "abnormal".
That’s just simply incorrect. There are plenty of expectations of privacy in public. For example, it is illegal to look up a woman’s skirt, and it is illegal for police to arbitrarily search someone, etc.
Now, what is reasonably expected in public is less than what is reasonably expected in private, but it certainly isn’t zero privacy.
It is true that one might expect, if they are driving around, that someone might see them. But is it expected that they might sometimes be followed? Is it expected that they are always followed? Is it expected that everyone is followed and those locations are cataloged indefinitely for anyone to FOIA? These are all very different questions.
There’s never been an expectation of our whereabouts and activities continuously recorded in detail and stored in perpetuity, for purchase and later use against us. Even the Stasi did not achieve surveillance to this extent.
While technically correct, it also wasn’t possible to invade people’s privacy this discreetly at this scale.
It’s one thing for a subject of an active investigation to be tailed by a cop. It is an entirely different thing for the entire population of Roanoke to pass through what are essentially checkpoints logging your location a dozen or more times in a day.
I care less about public privacy than about how these things are also invading private spaces. Surveillance piggybacked on all the modern tech that we allowed into our homes.
This is the "scale invariant fallacy." When you're in public you can be casually observed by people or followed by police if they happen to be interested in you. And so therefore observing every person's movements in public 24/7 with perfect detail
and memory must be also okay like these aren't two very different things.
Scale can change the fundamental nature of a thing: walking down the street while being pissed as your government is one thing, but if you get 1000 friends to do it with you it's a march.
Most of the comments on this article regard the privacy of the individual against the police or other state authorities, but a main point in the article is that this license plate/vehicle fingerprinting data is public information subject to FOIA requests, and thus any citizen can use FOIA requests to track any other citizen. The article touches briefly on the implications of that for jealous lovers or people motivated to stalk others. That's a bit different from scrutinizing the operation of (potentially dangerous) vehicles on a public road. At some point US society really needs to have a debate about how FOIA and the surveillance state intersect.
I've seen this done before by journalists requesting license plate reader data but it's another nail in the coffin of anonymity. Dare I say unless you wear a full face mask, change your walking gait, and just about every habit you have, there is no escape. In television I've seen talk about masks and garments that help prevent this, but I think it's a zero sum game. You will be tracked. You will be photographed, profiled, analyzed and that data is likely sold to the highest bidder and it's only accelerating.
"You are being watched. The government has a secret system, a system you asked for, to keep you safe. A machine that spies on you every hour of every day. You've granted it the power to see everything, to index, order and control the lives of ordinary people. The government considers these people irrelevant. We don't. But to it, you are all irrelevant. Victim or perpetrator, if you stand in its way, we'll find you."
I have a very selfish fantasy that I can wear Deamon operative glasses and identify people in crowds automatically. It's horribly dystopian but on a person level it's.. rather cool.. until I am the one being identified!
I'm actively watching it for the first time and this part: "a system you asked for, to keep you safe." I don't recognize.
Looked into it a bit and it started out and only the last season has all of what you quoted. It's been really interesting watching the show evolve knowing what was happening in the world at the time. I'm currently on season 3 and they are starting to change the tone now that the Snowden leak has happened.
It starts out as:
"You are being watched. The government has a secret system — a machine — that spies on you every hour of every day. I know, because I built it. I designed the machine to detect acts of terror, but it sees everything. Violent crimes involving ordinary people. People like you. Crimes the government considered irrelevant. They wouldn't act, so I decided I would. But I needed a partner, someone with the skills to intervene. Hunted by the authorities, we work in secret. You'll never find us. But, victim or perpetrator, if your number's up, we'll find you."
So over the course of 5 years it morphs from "I know because I built it." to "A system you asked for, to keep you safe."
The show's (or at least its protagonists') motivations change a lot over the years. As Finch's own motivations evolve, you can see him shift the blame from the government, to the people, to the machine itself.
There are some bouts of introspection, especially early on, which he uses as justification for installing the backdoor in the first place, but on the whole he's adamant that none of this is his fault.
That's probably exactly how it will play out in our world too, when a tech billionaire plugs a self-aware AI to our global surveillance network.
Yeah, and also (light spoiler) over the course of the show, the system(s) in question go from something more like advanced data analysis/surveillance AI to a full-blown AGI scenario - and it's the only show ever that actually discusses this topic in plausible, realistic way. That's why the quote changed by the end, because (among also the change of perspective), the question of how the computer system itself feels about you became both valid and relevant.
> There are some bouts of introspection, especially early on, which he uses as justification for installing the backdoor in the first place, but on the whole he's adamant that none of this is his fault.
Well, at least until later, where I'd say his perspective evolved towards fear and eventually immense guilt ("selling the world for a dollar"), which made it hard for him to consider the possibility that what he created might want, and perhaps have a right, to live. Finch is the opposite of the "oops I guess but really I've done nothing wrong" kind of billionaire.
Feels like it's also going to be handy for selective prosecution. Say you're targeted for public speech someone doesn't like. Now they can try and draw some link between your travels and some unsolved crime. Even if it's a weak link, and they can't win in court...the bar for arrest is pretty low.
And, a bit of a reach, but it's also some of the foundation for "pre-crime" type stuff. "You've exhibited patterns of comings and goings that suggest..."
I'm more pessimistic. With available AI you can take video of someone, extract that human profile and characteristics, and then insert it into another one. It only takes that one visit to your office "We have video of you sneaking into an elementary school bathroom" to totally ruin your life, and even if you could prove it wasn't you and was doctored, the damage is still done. It's worse than selective prosecution
Person of Interest was such a great TV show! Too bad many of the things in there came out to be true, or very close to true, in just a matter of 10-15 years.
>Feels like it's also going to be handy for selective prosecution.
<Always has been dot jpeg>
>Say you're targeted for public speech someone doesn't like
More likely you're gonna get targeted because you shared memes that were too dank. They won't put you in jail. They'll just fine the shit out of you because their goal isn't to personally attack anybody, but to marginalize demographics they don't like.
For a peek at what you can expect, take a look at Saudi Arabia, where your bank account gets blocked until your traffic violation fine (usually issued electronically within minutes of the actual deed) is fully paid.
Or at China, where you "social score", more or less calculated automatically, decides in a fairly fine-grained manner what you are and are not allowed to do in society.
These will be become the social norm in the West as well, just a matter of time and getting the herd to consider it "normal" (usually takes a generation, 20-ish years).
I don’t disagree with you but I’m also not entirely sold on the idea that surveillance cameras alone are all that effective at tracking and identifying people. Think of the person that left two pipe bombs outside the RNC and DNC offices in Washington, DC, probably the most heavily surveilled city in the United States. It’s been 4 years and we still have no idea who that was.
One could say that is an even stronger argument against them. People are losing their privacy for very little gain if these things aren't even effective at solving precisely this sort of premeditated criminal activity.
I'm not sure if you're being facetious, but the fact you would be wthe guy " crab-walking in a sumo suit wearing the Unabomber disguise" is probably going to draw even more attention. Like the tesla vandals. The cameras will simply follow you back to your car, home, business, wherever you went to take off that costume, then really zero in on you because you went and did what the police might term as "weird."
That PARTICULAR slip can be avoided. Avoiding all slips is equivalent to airtight OpSec, which more people on this platform are familiar with (= not happening).
>[Christopher Null] has himself had to deal with countless annoyances, from American Express dropping his last name altogether, to Bank of America refusing to accept emails from his "nullmedia.com" domain.
I believe the first one but likely BofA refusing to accept emails from his custom domain has nothing to do with it starting with null and everything to do with anti-spam.
> unless you wear a full face mask, change your walking gait, and just about every habit you have, there is no escape
If you’re driving a car, yes. As we saw with Mangione’s escape, if you’re on public transit you’re much more anonymous. (Given the public risks inherent to driving, I think this is a fair trade—off.)
There are cameras all over public transit systems. License plates are easier to track (they have a known font so identifying a unique one is easier that a face), but not by enough to matter. If you leave one camera you will show up in the next and soon they get enough of a profile to identify you if they want to.
They frequently don’t work [1]. Again, we have a real-life example of someone using the reality of how surveillance is weighted to escape Manhattan, one of the more surveilled parts of the country.
While I agree with your point about public transit being a bit more anonymous, I feel I should point out that a. Mangione was still captured, and b. thanks (allegedly) to a combination of multiple surveillance photos of him with a mask plus a single picture of his full face.
The cost of cameras and disk space is very low, and rapidly approaching zero.
I think that means it doesn't matter what anyone thinks about anonymity in public places. We're already almost always seen by several cameras, and it will soon be 10x as much.
Nope. They use cameras to analyze cyclists who race to make sure their form is on top. You have a cycling gait the same as your walking gait - the way you sit in the saddle, pedal, hang on to the handlebars, sit, etc.
I would have less of a problem with the constant surveillance if they would make it required by law to inform me any time someone looks at the data. One of the things that makes me really wary of all this surveillance is that it is too easy for people to look.
If they knew that every time they looked I would know about it, they wouldn't look so much. Similarly to how people are much less stalky on LinkedIn and Instagram because they know that the other person gets notified when they look.
That will never happen because if a million people got a form letter in the mail that some federal agency they've never heard of is trolling through everyone's crap looking for some petty papers crime that nobody knew was a crime, nobody really cares about (Chinese power tools that had the wrong box checked on the customs form or whatever) they'd ask why their taxes are paying for such activity.
…which is exactly why it should (and, as you note, won't) happen, so people will know all the petty nitpicking that is there more to provide jobs than meaningfully regulate.
The data should be encrypted. The police should not have access to the key. Only the district attourney or equivalent should. If the police want access they need a court order and the sign off of the DA.
That would make it like _any other_ record the police want access to.
It's interesting that you go through life thinking "no one would ever do that" with regard to various circumstances, yet discover people do those things.
These ALPR companies are evil. If a car manufacturer sells your data or a big box store uses AI in ways you disagree with you can just not purchase from those companies. It can be much more difficult to move to a new town where they may then decide to put these things. I know of one town where it is impossible to drive without hitting an ALPR. What a prison.
Here is a list of things that have been or could be done:
- wrong vehicle identified and stopped at gunpoint
- sacramento sheriff shared LP data with Texas in case pregnant people visited
- police chief stalked his ex
- a mad president could unreasonably declare martial law and send the national guard in to the Atlanta office to take over the command center (if you take the license plate off: how many silver Audi A4s are there in Palo Alto?)
- a foreign state actor could surreptitiously infiltrate their servers and discover patterns that help them if they declare war against the US
- the data will be leaked (high likelihood eventually) and you can find out all kinds of behaviors. It would be fair game for insurance companies.
It violates the 4th amendment. A governement cannot just track innocent people everywhere they go. They sell it as "we aren't giving tickets, we are only looking for bad guys" but the above incidents (gunpoint, sheriff, stalking ex) show otherwise. But what concerns me is not the local police, it is the last three potential situations. And you can't opt out unless you take ubers or bike I guess.
Please donate to the Institute for Justice. They have a case in Virginia (surprised it wasn't mentioned) and I am confident they will succeed in taking this to the Supreme Court. They recently won a civil asset forfeiture case and they have successfully argued cases like DC's gun ban before the supreme court. (If you think guns are bad, fine, but like ALPRs it was a violation of the US constitution) ij.org
You should know who you are donating to (even if you decide to donate). Institute for Justice is a Koch-funded operation that has been focused on their agenda more than civil rights. Possibly my information is somewhat out of date, but note even the propaganda-oriented name as a cover for Koch operations, sort of like the PATRIOT act.
Consider also the ACLU, which you know is doing a good job because the powers-that-be attack the ACLU instinctively.
Twelve of them around a high density shopping center is perfectly reasonable.
Just one at the entrance of a neighborhood is severe overreach.
I don't mind the idea of building a surveillance state within certain parameterized boundaries, but once you are in a residential setting these things feel like military incursion. Homeowners can already opt-in to video doorbells, security cameras on their properties, etc.
Home Depot & law enforcement don't need a 500-mile diameter security perimeter around each retail store to catch the guy stealing Milwaukee products. The cameras in the parking lot and leading up to the freeway should give you enough room to play with unless you are vastly incompetent at basic police work.
I entered the United States the other day from Mexico at BWI without even showing my passport. I don't know how they verified my identity, but I presume it was a camera, because the agent looked in a computer for a few seconds, then waved me through... :/
Good to know the state knows me and isn't even bashful about it...
> In just a few taps and clicks, the tool showed where a car had been seen throughout the U.S. A private investigator source had access to a powerful system used by their industry, repossession agents, and insurance companies. Armed with just a car’s plate number, the tool—fed by a network of private cameras spread across the country—provides users a list of all the times that car has been spotted.
If this type of surveillance is concerning to you, please look at advocating against it at a local level. Thomas Ptacek [1] has experience and seems very willing to help out. He recently provided a really helpful comment regarding reining in a Flock install in his city. [2]
And as has been mentioned a couple other places in this discussion, please contribute to mapping out license plate readers in OpenStreetMap at https://deflock.me. Ideally someone will create a routing engine which with an option to avoid all known ALPR's while generating a route.
"Part of Flock’s proprietary tech determines the make and model of the vehicle and also notes if there are bumper stickers, bike racks, any other unique markings that would help identify that vehicle."
I have always avoided bumper stickers and custom license plates for more anonymity. I have a ham radio license and decided not to get a license plate with my callsign on it because people could easily Google that and find out my name and address. I had always just thought about other drivers in these cases, not law enforcment surveillance!
It talks about Flock branded surveillance in several places, then the news site itself asks for donations with this tagline "Thanks for joining our flock!". Short double-take on that donation area for me.
> Ninety uneventful minutes later, I pulled into Roanoke to go to the Cardinal office and visit my Roanoke members of our own Cardinal team — which, in an unintentional irony in this story, we refer to as The Flock.
I’ve made it a game to find and report new ones on my longer runs.
There is one near me, in a relatively upscale area, that has repeatedly been taken down and thrown into a culvert. There are currently two old flock cameras still on the pole down there and seemingly unreachable. But it is always quickly replaced.
Most cars already emit RF signals for WiFi, Bluetooth and 5G. These can be fingerprinted along with the physical attributes to increase accuracy.
I’m in support of better investigative tools and stricter governance. I’m not worried that my car location would lead to a false arrest- that is like being afraid of lighting striking.
Don't forget about tire pressure monitoring sensors (TPMS). They operate around 433 MHz and each have a unique ID to stop your car from misreporting a low tire pressure from a car sitting next to you at a stoplight. They are required by law. While some use various techniques to avoid transmitting all the time (to save battery), many just blit out their ID and pressure values on a regular interval whenever the wheels are rolling. That means that whenever you drive over a bridge or toll gate that is properly equipped, you're feeding them enough info to uniquely identify you, even if they don't have a camera or any GHz radios.
I have no idea where you live where they are required by law, but I've never heard of such a thing. They've never been required by law anywhere I've owned a car.
In any case, given they have batteries that eventually wear out, and older cars don't have them, it would still be more effective to use a camera.
Edit: even if they're required in new cars that doesn't make them mandatory on the road. It's not like all tires must be sold with TPMS.
The TPMS requirement in the US is ratcheted. Once you have TPMS on a car, it needs to stay on the car even if you replace the wheels. It must not be disabled or removed, and it must be fixed if broken.
Obviously, it is easy to flout these regulations as an individual or as a small-time mechanic. But there can be penalties if tampering or negligence gets discovered, the most common of which is failing to pass inspection. When I bought wheels from Tire Rack online in 2015, I had to either pay extra to have them equipped with TPMS or else attest that my vehicle never had TPMS.
The real purpose has nothing to do with surveillance but with consumer and environmental protection. If you buy a used car with TPMS, you should be confident that it works. And keeping it working increases the chances that people will keep their tires filled and their fuel economy up.
However, a new problem has arisen, which is that gas stations don't bother to fix their broken air compressors anymore.
I can find no mention of a TPMS requirement in my state. My older car has a malfunction in its TPMS and has for 10+ years. The repair cost I was quoted was ridiculous and I just periodically check the tire pressure with a normal gauge.
This vehicle has passed all required inspections for that entire time and the TPMS system hasn't even been mentioned in that context.
edit: I found the claim that TPMS was required interesting and a quick web search shows that 13 states in the US don't require vehicle safety inspections AT ALL.
It is not a state law, it is a Federal regulation under 49 CFR § 571.138 [1]. These requirements were fully effective for manufacturers and "alterers" as of 1 Sep 2008. However, yes, if your state doesn't require it (or doesn't require any inspection), then there's no way to penalize you as vehicle owner or reseller. Mechanics and aftermarket part sellers can still run afoul of USDOT though.
I remember the rounds of media coverage about this when TPMS became required on new cars.
I have not seen any evidence that it is actually happening, though. Compare to this story where the reporter asked for tracking data and either received the data or a response confirming the data’s existence but declining to provide it.
Other data sources for tracking, like cell phone location or toll transponder pings, also have a public record of the existence of that data.
I’m not aware of a similar trail of proof-of-existence for TPMS data tracking. If you are, I’d be interested to learn.
People expressing certain political views are being arrested. Protests advocating certain views are being shut down. It seems obvious that this kind of surveillance could result in extreme oppression.
The courts are litigating these decisions as we speak. The institutions are working, slowly. At the end of the day, student visas aren’t durable when you violate the school policy. If you’re on a visa, or here illegally, you’re on thin ICE. It’s not a right but a privilege that is granted by the ruling democratic authority.
I was subjected to two illegal traffic stops in NJ because my Indiana plate was "unregistered" when in fact they just don't share data with the vendor running the ALPR systems the town cops use. These companies need to be sued into submission.
They purge the actual images after some time period but keep the metadata (OCRed plate, other identifying features) I assume forever. From a Flock privacy policy:
> Video Clips captured by the LPR system will automatically be deleted after 30 days; although Images are deleted when no longer needed, the data obtained from the Images may be retained indefinitely.
They are growing and showing up everywhere, but you never hear about them in terms of real innovation, just helping build the surveillance state. Combine this with cloud based doorbell cameras and it seems like someone is always watching.
Dang. I've had a fantasy of painting several fake license plates all over the back of my hatchback to help confound these cameras, but:
'Part of Flock’s proprietary tech determines the make and model of the vehicle and also notes if there are bumper stickers, bike racks, any other unique markings that would help identify that vehicle. That generates a "vehicle fingerprint" for every car or truck'
So in just the same way that ad blockers and other anti-surveillance tech actually make your browser stand out, obfuscating your license plate would also make you stand out.
Holy carp! I've just started noticing these cameras in my neighborhood a couple of months ago and was wondering where they were coming from. They have no stickers or names or identifications of any kind. They are installed everywhere; in the Home Depot parking lot, across the street from the local high school, in the park.
Interestingly they seem to be taking the place of the old, bulky, tow behind camera rigs that used to be in several of these locations. Those other devices were large trailer rigs with flashing blue lights and camera's up on a tower.
Effective and reliable law enforcement is a very fast way to go from a low trust society to a high trust society. You can leave your expensive valuables unattended and be certain they won’t be taken. Cameras result in higher solve rates, which results in lower crime rates, which results in even higher solve rates.
Meanwhile, in the Bay Area (one of the most economically productive regions of the world) even attempted burglary is functionally not a crime: if there is no footage, nothing was taken, it’s not an active crime, and the value of your smashed window is under some threshold, police will direct you to fill out a form online which will almost certainly not result in an investigation or arrest. Worse yet, if you report to insurance, you will be punished in the form of higher premiums.
This is just one reason why it's important to not talk to police. They might ask you if you were in Cityville on some particular date, and maybe you'd forgotten. So you said no. But then it comes out that there's footage of you in town, and now that can of worms is open.
Don't FOIA requests charge you for the manhours it took, or is it just the data transfer cost? It might vary by state now that I think of it. I wonder how much these cost.
Saying these requests constitutes a felony is ludicrous, hopefully the judge sees the case as a bad prank.
Some of the data should be a felony to access without a warrant. They cannot get data on just him without someone else who happens to be in the same frame as him. As such the data should be restricted and only accessible under warrants. (If someone in a store shoplifts near me I might be in the frame without knowing about the crime, and thus getting that frame would be legal even though it violates my privacy - but only because a crime as committed, if someone asks for the frame I'm in in the general case though they should not be allowed it because they might be trying to build a profile of me.
I had trouble searching this article for "felony" (it does mention "judge") so here's the link from the article where the police argue complying could be the felony of violating Virginia Code 18.2-152.5:1 — “using a computer to gather identifying information.”
What I find interesting is that they are claiming pictures of the vehicle are identifying information.
Additionally, it's bizarre because the journalist isn't using the computer to gather the information, the police are... and they are legally allowed to -- the code specifically says only law enforcement may do this while performing job duties.
So they are arguing that there's some sort of transitive property where law enforcement are no longer law enforcement performing job duties if they are acting on request from a journalist... or that the journalist is a mastermind in a felony because he is requesting to see his own records.
There's an episode on the TV show Elementary, where an Uber type company employee was using a tracking device to see where riders were going so as to blackmail them if any stops seemed sketchy. Do police officers ever let their lives get out of control and get into financial straights?
We think of public surveillance as a sort of crime prevention, and in a certain ways it is. However, the possible abuse of it is mind boggling.
> That generates a “vehicle fingerprint” for every car or truck, which none of the agencies I FOIA’d would provide me.
I hope there's also litigation for this given it is also public record when it's being purchased with tax dollars. Especially if they're just asking for the identifications of their own vehicle. It seems similar to denying me a copy of their record of my actual fingerprint.
These systems are also likely to get replaced or downsized in favor of relying on data from _self driving vehicles_.
Waymo and et al are touted for making our lives easier (load of marketing bs), but really will make it more difficult.
edit: and they get to double dip — users paying to use and install their product, and selling that data back to the user and LE and intelligence communities.
What if someone takes their license plates off and makes a fake temporary paper one, the kind you put in the back window when you get a new car? Not permanently but if you wanted to go do something illegal and not be tracked.
Can the LPR pick those up?
It does look revolting. According to the label it's "Cream Cheese Spread." Kind of like how KFC provides sachets of "Honey Sauce" rather than actual honey.
It seems to be a controversial stance, but; I have no issue with this capability in the right hands.
I would immediately surrender such information either way, in the interests of the community - say for a missing child?
These capabilities should have well defined intent/objectives and transparent controls to protect the privacy of individuals to which are out scope.
With all the above said; it’s been proven time and time again that even with clear intent - the purpose of these systems mutates (ie between governments). Said governments then wonder why public trust is lacking?
(Example; see Australian Government customer ISP DNS requirements)
I asked our Sheriff who is in charge of the local deployments in our county whether they could, in theory, enforce curfews if the governor implemented an emergency order, and he said "yes I guess we could in that case".
I imagine any Sheriff can enforce a curfew. Drive around and stop anyone you see and tell them to go home and/or arrest them. You could walk or bike or ride a horse, instead of driving.
It might not be very effective, but it's enforcing a curfew.
"It’s a paradigm shift where we go from having an expectation of privacy even in public spaces to its inverse."
What? Who has an expectation of privacy 'even in public spaces'? You're in public with a serialized mode of transportation (license plate) that requires a state-issued license to operate. Why would you expect 'privacy' in public?
There is an expectation you won't be subjected to invasive surveillance by default. Cameras that went to a local video recorder and only checked after an incident are way different than routing that video into a 24/7 panopticon that logs a behavioral profile of everyone.
I think the author meant we have (had?) an expectation of anonymity in public spaces. Certainly people you know could recognize you, but indiscriminate mass tracking wasn't a thing.
when katz v. USA was decided, government needed to talk to witnesses or surreptitiously follow suspects to gather information. even taking pictures was massively less scalable back then. I would say that policing should never become more scalable with technology, the tools police have to gather information should be as difficult and unscalable to use as they were when katz v. USA was decided.
And you don't have anything to hide because the government is not authoritarian, the argument continues, in theory if not in practice. Our governments are good and righteous and will not misuse the surveillance data in any way.
Cadillac and Tesla emulate panopticonic cells, which resolve the presence of an external observer. CCTV footage is confined to local area networks that is pulled from LRP time-stamp headers. Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) and Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) on a narrow-band, Dedicated Short-Range Communications (DSRC) protocol can identify vehicle fragments, meta-data, from dynamic time-stamp servers, like "that is a red Tesla."
Because of how effective this is for catching even fairly minor violations like failure to pay vehicle tax, number plate cloning is becoming pretty common (comparatively) in the UK. This means that you can easily get swept up in a police dragnet because someone has stolen your car's identity.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-anpr-ser...
A "panopticon" is a concept originally designed as a type of prison by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century. It’s a circular building with a central watchtower where a single guard can observe all the inmates in their cells, which are arranged around the perimeter. The twist? The inmates can’t see into the tower, so they never know if they’re being watched. This setup was meant to induce self-discipline—prisoners would behave as if they’re always under surveillance, even if no one’s actually looking.
Many religions (basically all the big ones) forcefully indoctrinate members from childhood to believe that their deity is omniscient and is constantly watching them and judging them. It's generally agreed among members that this is a good thing.
The psychological damage from this sort of thing is probably so prevalent that it looks like water to a fish. Not to speak of the sleepless nights at 7 years old worrying about eternal damnation.
This is all abuse and it should be treated as such by any decent and civilised society.
Until I got access to pornography (too early) and then I guess the tradeoffs changed, and I eventually got over it. I do distinctly remember wondering what grandma thinks of me at that time. But not for long, logic kicks in to explain anything away when you've got fast internet to exploit.
Not everyone is so lucky; for some, the feelings of guilt and shame never get dissolved through logic, it's just the dopamine loop is strong enough that the person keeps doing things they later despise themselves for.
Guess how that can impact the psyche over a decade or two.
Anyway, it doesn't appear to work as well lately so we maybe should come up with another approach for social stability.
I never understood this line of reasoning. What good are "social benefits" if the happiness and well being of the human beings that make up that society are sacrificed? Isn't this the basis of totalitarianism? "Everything for the State, nothing against the State".
But also, we don't exist in isolation, and there are reasons societies evolve as they do. There has to be some level of social control and belief in being watched over at all times was probably pretty handy for emperors and to some extent those who would be victimized. At least back when it worked wide scale.
This is the religion where everyone, over 6000 years later, is being vindictively punished because a couple of their ancestors, in a single instance, broke a rule about eating from one of the trees. The deity, who is omnipotent and could decide stop this all at any time, allows for all manner of terrible diseases and pestilence to be visited on innocent children.
I grew up in a Christian country and your "some" is doing a lot of work. Sure, perhaps some specific Christian theologists take that view. But, all actual Christians are taught from childhood that it was one specific man, tempted by one specific woman into eating a literal fruit. The only thing that's generally mentioned as open to interpretation is whether the fruit was an apple. You might get exposed to more nuanced theological views if you study at a seminary, but not while living your life as an average person who identifies as Christian, which is the vast majority.
(Source: I made this up.)
That is such a tiny minority I’ve never even heard of that until now
I was raised Catholic (mass every weekend, CCD through 8th grade) and not once were we ever taught your interpretation. It was Adam and Eve, one man, one woman.
This implies there is a small minority, i.e. human suffering not down stream of human decisions - what about that?
I actually don’t want to argue, I can understand that for some people disregarding that part or finding an explanation is enough and still helpful.
My point is to highlight that, similarly, for others, this idea and its interpretations are unhelpful.
"Judge me, O God, and plead my cause against an ungodly nation: O deliver me from the deceitful and unjust man. For thou art the God of my strength..."
"...but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel."
As to why an omniscient creator would want to keep His stock of humans pure, I will leave for a different venue.
Some say it is just the way the rich keep the poor from killing them.
— Jeremy Bentham (1791). Panopticon, or The Inspection House
They're really just glass with a partially reflective layer.
When one side is brightly lit and the other side isn't you get the desired effect.
However, looking at the patent for what is supposed to be the first it says that there were earlier attempts--they just sucked because making the partially reflective layer was difficult and expensive and not durable enough when used on outdoor advertising devices.
Yes, you read that right. Advertising. Technology being driven by someone's desire to show ads is not new.
The thing the inventor was building was a case for displaying advertising posters. The case had a glass front, and the poster was behind the glass, with powerful lights behind the poster. When the lights were off the glass would appear to people looking at the case to be a mirror. When the lights were on the poster could be seen.
Frankly you could just use blinds though.
The Wikipedia page on silvering points to the 1400s in Europe, and the 10th century for the eastern Mediterranean : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvering
Now they don't need any reason to look, they can just make a bunch of AI sift through it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koepelgevangenis_(Breda)
Here is the album: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QF6Qzd9BLSQ
Motorola/Vigilant cameras feed into DRN especially.
And attempts to reduce the problem [https://au.news.yahoo.com/woman-believes-husband-cheating-sp...]
I can see how people lose their faith in policing competence, it was at least always resolved fairly but the stress of being accused of all that stuff, not knowing if you'll be put in jail or acquitted etc. You still bare the costs of replating a car as well.
And then police can be alerted every time they see a plate flagged as being cloned and either find a criminal, or be able to alert the person their plate is cloned.
From personal knowledge of the UK setup, the goals are twofold, mass surveillance plus auto-revenue-generation (intended to raise sufficient to pay for the surveillance infrastructure to minimize the net cost which means auto issuing the absolute maximum number of tickets possible).
Doing validation to ensure correctness of the tickets being issued would be counter-productive to the revenue generation goal; just because police have evidence a crime (like cloning) has happened, does not mean they will not issue the ticket. There is an onus in the UK for the registered keeper of the vehicle to incriminate themselves or someone else for road traffic offences (confirmed by test cases).
Essentially you have to pay up or prove the cloning (and your innocence) yourself - very difficult because you do not have access to the surveillance database that would help you. The core objective of the police is to assert your guilt, not to provide you with any help for your defence.
That's not how that works. You, as the registered keeper of a vehicle, have a number of duties relating to the provision of information to the police or other relevant authorities upon request. This isn't a controversial provision, something similar exists in practically every jurisdiction in which cars have a unique identifier.
The s172 process avoids the situation where a speeding fine can be avoided by simply not saying who was driving. 172(4) provides a statutory defence which can be advanced by an individual who's vehicle was cloned:
>A person shall not be guilty of an offence by virtue of paragraph (a) of subsection (2) above if he shows that he did not know and could not with reasonable diligence have ascertained who the driver of the vehicle was.
And regarding the disclosure issue
> The core objective of the police is to assert your guilt, not to provide you with any help for your defence.
This is an incorrect statement - the police are obliged to disclose any relevant, unused material (eg material they have that they don't produce in evidence) that will either undermine the prosecution case or advance the defence.
However, if you are being prosecuted for failing to nominate, it is more likely that you have completely failed to return the form rather than returning the form with a note saying that your plate appears to have been cloned, in which case access to the ANPR database is irrelevant because you need to explain why you did not bother to furnish the information rather than police not believing that your vehicle had been cloned.
"Obliged"?
I immediately thought the case of the Guildford Four, and the scene in the biographical film In The Name Of The Father.
IIRC in the film the note in police files said "not to be shown to the defence"... :/
At least in the US prosecutors are obligated to disclose any exculpatory evidence they find, even if they don't plan to use it in court.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brady_v._Maryland
> Because of how effective this is for catching even fairly minor violations like failure to pay vehicle tax, number plate cloning is becoming pretty common (comparatively) in the UK.
Evidence of number plate cloning would reduce revenue from fines. If the government wants to fine you for not paying your vehicle tax, evidence that someone cloned your plate would be exculpatory, so it's in the government's best interest to not collect that evidence in the first place.
"Oh, we hit for DEADBEEF at 11:00am in London, so ignore hits for DEADBEEF from anywhere else outside some Nx safety factor of the driving distance from that hit, because it has to be a false positive."
or
"Oh, we hit for DEADBEEF at 11:00am in London and again at 11:05am in London. Our cloud costs are high, so we're only going to store the most recent picture DEADBEEF, and only record the violation from 11:00am and 11:05am."
I guess these examples sound kind of contrived to me, but how long do you retain this kinda data for? 30 days? 60 days? A year?
Suppose you have a system of cameras operated by the various localities. The localities are all storing the data. Then there is a central system that can query all the local systems but doesn't itself store any of the data.
The department issuing traffic citations requests an automated daily report showing every vehicle observed at multiple locations where the two sightings imply an average speed between 55MPH and 170MPH. Then the citations department takes the report and issues a citation to anyone where there is no route between those two points that allows the calculated average speed without exceeding the speed limit.
The report isn't automatically generated if the average speed was calculated to be 490MPH because cars don't go that fast so issuing a citation would trivially allow it to be challenged as a data irregularity, and the report is requested by the department issuing speeding citations rather than the one (if any) investigating data irregularities.
Now you get a ticket for doing an average speed of 87MPH along a route where the speed limit never exceeded 55MPH. You claim it's a data irregularity (cloned plate), but that's a possible speed, because the automated report didn't include the impossible speeds.
There may have also been sightings that would have implied an average speed of 490MPH, but that report was never requested so it doesn't exist. The bureaucracy comes up with some excuse for why you can't run your own reports that don't already exist. You could request the raw data and then do the calculations yourself, but then you have to make a thousand requests to each individual locality, which is purposely too much trouble for most people to bother, and even then there is no guarantee that the person who cloned your plate was spotted in a location that would have produced an impossibly high speed.
The problem with that is that isn't how average speed cameras work, and where speeds are ludicrously high then there is a human operator looking at it.
People make journeys that are illogical all the time and ANPR misreads are common, so there is no justification for having a system that says "this plate has pinged simultaneously 200 miles apart", because what are you going to with that information?
When you trigger a speed camera, the police send a notice to the registered keeper. They don't search ANPR for other hits, because why would they? They're dealing with the single traffic offence in front of them.
ANPR is an intelligence tool. It is an extremely valuable one, but it isn't definitive and no prosecution would stand alone on ANPR data without other corroborative evidence.
Once you're at that level of issue, you're already wasting massive amounts of time and money.
(also, the court case if you take it to court should include the photo showing the car, so cloners have to match the exact model of car from the plates they're cloning)
Is the legal process of discovery not a thing in the UK? Finding evidence that might exonerate you is precisely what that process is for.
I googled a bit to find a decent guide and found one on the HSE’s website: https://www.hse.gov.uk/enforce/enforcementguide/pretrial/aft...
Unfortunately in real life disclosure is one of the many places that the criminal justice system tends to fail to meet its stated ideals. Disclosure is often served late or improperly on run-of-the-mill cases from what I’ve heard and read. There’s a great book called the Secret Barrister that goes into some detail about the UK’s (or England and Wales more specifically) criminal justice system from quite a critical lens.
https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/disclosure-manual
But if that has parameters they've set to max because they really want that delicious revenue, why not detect cloned plates and charge those people more than the tickets?
The plate is registered to the victim whose plate was cloned. The identity of the perpetrator who cloned the plate isn't known, so how do you issue them a citation?
Or even more basic civil liberties stuff like the use of face recognition against protestors. No, there's always a huge number of people that come out for the right to drive illegally fast instead.
Can this be done anonymously? Otherwise doing such a lookup creates a paper trail, which is generally bad if you're trying to commit any crime.
Not sure whether it's accessible outside the UK.
(and, it was me who replaced the wiper blades then so I know it was right)
Maybe it's hard if you have a classic car with an unusual paint job. Not so hard if you have a white Toyota.
Or, if you want to be organized, you run around with plate readers and log make/model/color/number and then sell that data.
ANPR in the UK doesn't have these characteristics. Firstly, it happens in public places only, and historically we have exactly zero expectation of privacy in public spaces in the UK. Secondly, there's no chilling effect caused by the selective and unknown application of surveillance; the cameras and computers "watch" every car equally.
Overall, I can't say I love the number of ANPR cameras we have, but then I'm also not thrilled by the thought of subsidising large numbers of people who aren't willing to hold up their side of the social contract by taxing and insuring their cars.
True, but we also had zero expectation of permanent records being kept of so much of what we do in public spaces, or being under such constant surveillance in public spaces. I think that is a concern.
> Overall, I can't say I love the number of ANPR cameras we have, but then I'm also not thrilled by the thought of subsidising large numbers of people who aren't willing to hold up their side of the social contract by taxing and insuring their cars.
ANPR does not seem to have put a stop to it. I really cannot understand why. If someone has not made a Statutory Off Road Notification they must pay tax and be insured, and if they are caught on an ANPR camera having made a SORN they are clearly breaking the law
With such widespread use of ANPR I cannot understand how people are still able to get away with it.
> True, but we also had zero expectation of permanent records being kept of so much of what we do in public spaces, or being under such constant surveillance in public spaces. I think that is a concern.
I've been watching a bunch of "auditor" videos from the UK. These guys are basically trolling by going around with a camera in public, filming stuff, and fishing for reactions that they can then post on Youtube or TikTok or Reels or whatever for views and engagement.
One thing that's very consistent across these videos is how many of their victims truly believe that you need permission to film people in public, or that they can walk up to the guy with the camera and demand to know who he is or that he deletes the footage. So a lot of people are acting as if they had much stronger rights to privacy than they really do, people think they're generally safe from being constantly surveilled, when the opposite is in fact true.
Another thing that's also hilariously consistent is when these auditors film businesses, and representatives of those businesses, usually the store manager, goes out and tells them they can't film the customers going in and out of the store because that's "against company policy" or "because of respect for our customers' privacy". At the same time, those stores have tons of security camera inside the store, recording every little thing every single customer is doing all the time.
The hypocrisy is blatant. Everybody wants to monitor everyone else, but no-one wants to be monitored by anyone.
Historically, we have expected that people can see us in public. However we have not had the expectation that:
- that we are identifiable to people other than acquaintances
- that we can be tracked by people not present, either at the time or later - and for someone to physically follow you to track your movements would fairly quickly lead to alarm and summoning the police to remove them.
So no, other than lawyer's argot, we have always had a reasonable expectation of privacy in public places. Not absolute privacy, but privacy in the areas that matter to most of us.
I disagree. Nobody expects all camera footage to be reviewed by a person, so you never know if what the camera caught will ever be seen (or used against you). In that sense, it's just like the panopticon. You feel watched so you behave, but whether you are watched or not in that moment is unknown.
This does lead to the problem that the post I replied to was pointing out, namely that people often get automated fines for cloned plates. It's kind of like the opening of Brazil, if you're familiar with that film, but obviously for much lower stakes.
So the results are unpredictable, just as they would be if humans randomly checked the cameras recordings.
People carry a cellphone with them, these by-and-large have multiple high resolution cameras along with microphones. Some even have LIDAR. Plus they are constantly emitting pulses that can be captured from several kilometers.
A person could be selectively surveilled without their knowing by monitoring their phone.
This is ignoring the massive network of internet connected private security cameras and police drones, which are very adept at monitoring people, as well as theoretical technology that we don't know is in use (i.e., using high frequency radio waves to "see" through walls).
Without mandatory insurance those victims wouldn't get anything.
At least in jurisdictions I've been in, the state requires evidence of financial responsibility as a requirement for driving. (Enforcement is a separate issue from requirement). A car insurance policy is evidence of financial responsibility, and the most common; but you can also post a bond of something like the minimum insurance amounts. Yes, if you don't have the money to post a bond, you're more or less forced into insurance or not driving (or driving illegaly), but that's we know you'll uphold the social construct of fixing the damages you cause. You don't need insurance to ride a bicycle, because it's not as easy to cause damages with a bicycle.
So actual insurance is mandatory for people who operate motor vehicles on public roads
I'm OK with "all private motor vehicles are prohibited" but you need to be clear if that's what you want
If you go into the wilderness where axe throwing is allowed, and you maim or kill someone, you are personally liable to be sued or prosecuted.
If you throw an axe where it is not allowed, you are also personally liable criminally and civilly.
so if you had an accident that caused damage to somebody else, and you didnt have money to pay for said damage, who makes the other party whole?
But I can see how there would be a range of valid opinions on the matter. Some places do have a single government-owned insurance company: whatever they say you have to pay, you have to pay. No other options.
Edit: I don't know why this one of all things is getting downvoted, but at least in the U.S., this is legitimately true.
> In Hudson v. Palmer, 468 U.S. 517 (1984), the Supreme Court held that people in prison don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their cells.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson_v._Palmer
> I think the crazy thing about ANPR/ALPR is just quite how simple it is to create a massive panopticon. The UK has a fairly established national ANPR system, and it generates on the order of 90M records per day [1]. All of this data is available to various law enforcement agencies. If you drive, you're probably being recorded in a way accessible to the PNC every day.
So we're talking about tracking plate numbers, in public. No expectations of privacy.
Now regarding what the panopticon was,
> The panopticon is a prison design by Jeremy Bentham, characterized by a central observation tower allowing a guard to see all inmates without the inmates knowing if they are being watched, fostering a sense of constant surveillance and self-discipline.
So we're talking about monitoring prisoners, in prison cells. No expectations of privacy.
---
> I was drawing a contrast between the prisoner in the panopticon (does not have privacy) and the citizen in their home (has privacy).
Now we're talking about citizens in their homes. When did that enter the discussion?
> I was suggesting that panopticon is an inappropriate term for surveillance that happens only in public spaces.
OK... Why?
Correct.
> So we're talking about monitoring prisoners, in prison cells. No expectations of privacy.
Correct.
> > I was suggesting that panopticon is an inappropriate term for surveillance that happens only in public spaces.
> OK... Why?
Because prisons have no real equivalents for the private and public spaces we experience as free citizens. Drawing an equality between people who are voluntarily in a public space and people who are incarcerated is wrong, because the people in public can choose to withdraw somewhere private. The prisoner (in the panopticon model at least) has no such option.
If the state had an interconnected surveillance system which saw both into our public and private spaces, the analogy might make more sense -- and usually when "panopticon" is used, it is used in that sense. But it's the wrong term to use for surveillance which occurs only in public.
I'm not trying to be an overly pedantic dick here, but words do need to have clear meanings. There are other terms we could use for ubiquitous surveillance that occurs in public, and perhaps we should standardise on one.
To me this feels like an entirely different argument than the "expectation of privacy" one, and I still do not really find it persuasive. Please note that the panopticon concept was also planned to be used in schools, hospitals, and other locations.
> If the state had an interconnected surveillance system which saw both into our public and private spaces, the analogy might make more sense -- and usually when "panopticon" is used, it is used in that sense. But it's the wrong term to use for surveillance which occurs only in public.
I disagree that the term "panopticon" should not be applied to public mass surveillance systems. There are some contrasts between the two concepts, but I think it paints a pretty good picture of the psychological impact that such systems can have.
> I'm not trying to be an overly pedantic dick here, but words do need to have clear meanings. There are other terms we could use for ubiquitous surveillance that occurs in public, and perhaps we should standardise on one.
I don't really take issue with being pedantic, I'm being pedantic too. But still, metaphors are metaphors, not direct equivocations. There are indeed limitations to how much the term "panopticon" can possibly be applied to some other surveillance system. If you go further, you can also point out more literal aspects of the panopticon. However, I don't think it is an unreasonable stretch to use the term "panopticon" for other sorts of mass surveillance systems. EFF has used the term "panopticon" a fair bit to describe digital surveillance and data collection systems, even though those are also a fair bit different than the original concept of a panopticon.
To me, the important thing about an metaphor is that it conveys the right thing to people, not whether it is literally a 1:1 match. When people say that mass surveillance systems are a "panopticon", they definitely are pointing to the things that made the panopticon so unnerving:
- The uncertainty of whether or not your actions are being scrutinized, forcing you into a permanent state of paranoia and self-regulation.
- The way that it enables totalitarian control over large groups of people.
- The general loss of privacy (regardless of whether you had any expectation of it to begin with.)
To me, basically any mass surveillance system is like this, except probably worse. Mass data collection means that not only do you not have any idea if anyone's scrutinizing your actions, but you also don't know if it might be scrutinized any time in the future.
As far as standardization goes, there are write-ups on the use of the term panopticon as a metaphor. I'll just defer to Wikipedia[1] and its respective sources here. I think the fact that it is commonly used as a metaphor should cover the "standardization" aspect; some day, the actual original panopticon will probably be eclipsed by the systems that are described in relation to it.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon#Surveillance_techno...
If nothing else, we've at least understood where we disagree! I don't think it's reasonable to consider a lack of privacy in one space without also considering the possibility of refuge in another space.
That's not to say that loss of privacy in the public space is automatically acceptable, but it feels qualitatively different to loss of privacy in the defended space. Ubiquitous ANPR doesn't invoke feelings of paranoia in me, at all. Cameras and microphones in my house (if monitored by the state) certainly would.
Ubiquitous ANPR in public does encourage self-regulation, in that other people feel more required to follow public-good laws like maintaining motor insurance with it in place. As mentioned above, I'm not convinced that's a net negative.
> Please note that the panopticon concept was also planned to be used in schools, hospitals, and other locations.
I didn't know this, but after doing a little more research then yes, I concede that you're quite correct. The term was used contemporaneously in settings other than prisons, and in fact the original use of the term probably owed more to other settings [1].
[1] https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1353164/2/014%20Steadm...
But I guess this isn't a thing in some places?
While I'm not fond of the cameras monitoring my movements honestly the worst part of driving in the UK is the constant anxiety that if you do anything wrong you're going to be fined. And sometimes you arguably don't even do anything wrong they just change the rules without telling you.
The updated the road near me recently from 30 to 20, they did this on the patch of road by an existing speed camera and only put one small sign up. Because most people know the road is 30 thousands and thousands of people have been fined for not realising someone updated the speed limit overnight.
Similarly, in my city they're constantly making roads one way, restricting car access on certain roads, adding restrictions for diesel cars, and adding bus lanes. All have cameras so if you don't realise you're immediately fined.
I even know someone who was recently fine because they were caught on camera going through a red light to get out of the way of an ambulance (they insist they did so safely).
The tracking our movements is really the least of our problems.
Cell Providers will sell data to anyone, then companies like Tectonix GEO[1] will slap a pretty UI on top of that data.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=cq2zuE3ISYU...
The main use of those cameras is to deter not paying road tax and not having insurance, and to spot stolen and wanted cars.
It's not a problem if all number plates are stored for some time but it requires strict rules (duration of storage and access to data), which the document you linked to describes.
> The main use of those cameras is to deter not paying road tax
No-one has paid a road tax in the United Kingdom since 1937. Vehicle excise duty is (currently) based on CO2 emissions (which is why EVs are subject to a £0 VED) and has always gone directly into a general government fund -- it does not maintain the roads. Of course the government could choose to spend some of that money on road upkeep, but they don't have to.
>>Because of how effective this is for catching even fairly minor violations like failure to pay road tax
It's not really, I don't believe so anyway. Keep seeing posts from various police forces around the UK about so-and-so car being stopped, no tax since 2022 for instance. And I'm like....ok great, but how come it took you 3 years to find them??
It might only be on the road for 2-8 hours. Maybe a day.
To catch someone during the window of opportunity it would make sense requires a lot of things to happen in quick succession - the owner needs to notice, a report with all the necessary details needs to be entered, and they need to go by a reader - and an officer needs to follow up in a timely fashion before the ‘lead’ goes stale.
Sometimes departments will have their acts together enough that it’s possible, but usually they don’t. Police departments are part of the government too, after all. Most of the time if the car is found at all, it will be found days later abandoned on the other side of town, or on blocks.
The ‘best’ often have an officer (or 2) obsessed with catching stolen cars, and some of them will catch 10-12 in a shift. It’s genuinely impressive watching them work.
At least cars being tracked are just cars. On public transport the tracking is much more invasive (and pervasive).
I should be able to see the comings and goings of law enforcement, elected officials, etc, if they can see mine.
Alternatively, lock it away behind judicial oversight. Make the cops get a warrant. Criminalize companies collecting the data from offering it in any manner other than by the order of a judge.
I feel the same way about tracking cell phones, publicly-owned surveillance cameras, privately-owned surveillance cameras that are "voluntarily" offered to law enforcement, and, in general, any dragnet surveillance available to law enforcement. If it's available to law enforcement and not being conducted on an individual basis under a judicial order (or, heck, even just probable cause) I think it should be available to the public, too.
"But stalkers!"
Tough. That's the price we have to pay for keeping law enforcement in check. Either adapt or take this power away from law enforcement.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_enforcement_in_the_Unite...
I try to help folks understand that locking up public data up with a privacy law only blocks them from seeing it.
It is still trivially available to those who use personal data to negatively impact others.
ref: https://datarade.ai/data-categories/b2b-contact-data/provide...
I remember reading the difference between a citizen and a police officer is that a police officer can arrest people for misdemeanors (while a citizen can do a citizen's arrest for felonies I believe).
There's probably a good reason citizens shouldn't easily be able to prey or stir up trouble with no friction.
that said, surveillance by private companies should be regulated, and people should have access to data collected about themselves.
The stalkers are already in the house, this list isn't exhaustive by any means:
USA:
N.J. cop used police databases to stalk ex-girlfriend, investigators say https://www.nj.com/monmouth/2023/01/nj-cop-used-police-datab...
Officer Fired for Allegedly Using Police Database to Stalk, Harass Women https://www.newsweek.com/officer-fired-allegedly-using-polic...
Australia:
Former policeman accused of using force database to stalk ex-wife and girlfriend https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/former-policeman...
Former federal police officer faces new charges over stalking of ex-girlfriend https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6138318/former-federa...
(Note the two above articles are not the same person)
UK: Met police officer 'used CCTV cameras to stalk his ex-girlfriend after telling her to take up sex work to pay her bills' https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11868575/Met-police...
Creepy cop saw attractive woman on the road and 'looked up her license plate number so he could stalk her on Facebook' https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2178556/Officer-Jef...
Large miss-use in just California:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/california-police-misu...
1. Don’t build systems that can be abused to start with, because they will be abused, but if we must build one then see point 2:
2. Put access to this sensitive information behind a judge’s signature. Because see point 3:
3. When it comes to this kind of data: There are no “good guys” and “bad guys” - we should assume that everyone is a potential bad guy.
Whenever you hear the “good guys” justification, immediately remind yourself of the ways the “good guys” have been found to be “bad guys” in sheep’s clothing.
Whenever you hear someone use the “nothing to hide” argument, remind yourself that none of the victims in these stories had anything to hide, nor had they done anything wrong. (Much like the thousands of women who die from partner abuse every year.)
You may find interesting to know that in the case of crimes being committed near or next to a business, especially independent businesses, their priority is often to minimalize risk to them and their business, and so they do not provide any recording, or use rolling footage which wipes every x days (often just one day). That way the footage is useful to them, but they do not have any additional obligations.
She filed a police report but that didn't really help at all. Not that we really expected it to, but she was just trying to be complete. In the end she had to pay to fix the damage and the dealer (and the criminal) had no repercussions at all.
This position sounds fair, until you think of the skewed demographic that is paying that price.
I think attributing the problem to “stalkers” minimizes the issues this arrangement of publicly searchable surveillance data creates. Imagine a website where you can type in anyone’s name and it shows you their last known location and their location history. You would have a system which supports universal spying for mundane and nefarious reasons alike. Not just criminal “stalkers” will take advantage of it.
Potentially this sort of arrangement would work if there are limits on the granularity, frequency, and history of the tracking data.
https://therecord.media/new-jersey-law-enforcement-sues-data...
The market would adapt and provide solutions to this concern. First to the rich and the famous, then hopefully to the masses.
You mean private individuals doing exactly what the government doest to anyone who interests them enough?
- People are more aware the data's available. Most people are probably minimally aware of how much they're actually being recorded all the time. It occurs occasionally on the news, yet most likely never really consider it much unless they're the subject of constant camera monitoring.
- Anybody can check anybody, and with extremely open data archives, then everybody also knows when other people check. "This many people clicked on your account" or something similar, just with surveillance footage. Like usual, police / FBI / spooks / ect... probably just write laws to legalize not telling you and that entitled people don't have to follow those guidelines. Theory's nice though.
- Data's already there and being used, yet, currently, only the police have the data, and you never know what it's being used for unless you ask. Even then you may get a wall of legal issues to ensure you're not allowed to find out. Or you have to lawyer up and pay expensive fees to fight the legal wall.
- Data can be used for other purposes. Anonymized statistics on usage of municipal resources, infrastructure, high traffic areas, crime area behaviors. Amazing what you can find even just cruising around on Google Street View in areas known for high crime. "Damn, just saw somebody pull a gun on the street car. Duck Google driver!"
- Adds to other sources like people's webcams, government satellites, sensor stations for things like weather updates and verification of events / conditions in other areas. Amazing how difficult it's become in the era of fake images to tell whether anything is "actually" happening in some distant location.
- Partially deals with the "Who watches the Watchmen issue." The other Watchmen. Crowd sourced observation and journalism has already shown on numerous occasions that it's often more responsive, and frequently fair, than a lot of the paid corporate journalism. Ukraine was a case where the crowd source journalism and data analysis was so much better than anything the news was showing, it was like every Wiki editor was down on the ground following troop movements. Barely get the mainline news to show anything other than stock footage.
Downsides:
- Obviously stalking. Although with notices about people checking your data frequently, there's at least some push back against the stalking.
- Profiling. However, this probably already gets done by the police anyways. Dark skin areas, "ethnic" areas, ect...
- Data's there, somebody will probably find an "app" that does something miserable with the data. Too little faith in humanity to believe they'll do almost anything else after LLMs and image gen.
I hate this idea. It's a shit idea. I expect it's coming anyway.
That's part of my grievances against the urbanism of the U.S.A. When the only viable option to get around is cars, there is no privacy.
It's important to advocate for public places to be livable for everyone, not just drivers.
IMO these recordings should be kept by a third party, and cops should need to appeal to that third party to access it. Going before a judge to get a warrant would be preferred.
I am of the opinion that automatic gathering of the travel history of a plate should be locked behind judicial approval, and that the data should have a lifetime. But I'm 99.99% confident that the searches are at least logged because we got complaints, like, 1 month in.
I'm worried that YouPeople(TM) (i.e. the reader, HN, some unspecified future group, etc.) will vote in some jerks who will decide that people like me ought to be scrutinized to the full extent of the law. And your cheerleaders will say things like "they shouldn't have broken the law" when it was never possible, by design, to comply with all the laws all the time in the first place.
I mean, it's too little too late but likewise it's amazing to me that the same people who are trying to convince me that the current government is fascist is also at the same time still campaigning on behalf of the same government to disarm its citizens.
make it make sense!
Why is that amazing? It doesn't really matter if civilians in the US are armed and trained and organized. If the US government decides to violently oppress people, the US government will win. Sure, it'll hurt more fighting against armed civilians, but they'll still win. The idea that the 2nd Amendment creates a populace full of people who could win an engagement against the US military is hilarious.
Not having pervasive surveillance is one layer. Due process that gives huge veto power to whatever the minority on the issue is is another. Being able to decide you'll take an enforcer with you rather than spend life in prison (and the pause and increased resource expenditure and scrutiny that causes the enforcers) is another layer.
First of all, you have a point - Trump is a great object lesson for why its probably not a great idea to have a huge, powerful, monolithic state and a commander in chief that can launch nuclear weapons. I don't think anyone would dispute that.
But most people see that the government as currently comported isn't going anywhere, even acknowledging the dedicated if incondite attempts of the current administration to "tame administrative bloat," as they might describe it. Thus your average "liberal" thinks first that government should be executed carefully by professional policy makers that respect the power of the state and second it should "take people's guns away."
But I will say that almost no liberal wants to totally disarm the public, anyway. That is a cartoon position which charitably could be attributed to loud voices on social media or something, but not a real policy position held by typical "libs". Most liberals just want guns to be properly regulated (perhaps even restricted to well regulated militias, to recall a phrase from somewhere). There might be some quibbling about precisely where the line between proper regulation and enabling oppression go, but I'd wager a majority of Americans are in favor of some version of the right to bear arms.
As evidence of this I proffer this pew research poll (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/24/key-facts...) which indicates that more than half of people who do not own guns could see themselves buying one in the future. 32% of people own guns in the U.S.
I agree with you on the judicial approval and data expiration, but I don't think the systems should be active until those rules are enacted.
From Justice Sotomayor's concurring opinion in US v. Jones:
'“cases involving even short-term monitoring … require particular attention” because the “Government can store such records and efficiently mine them for information years into the future …. GPS monitoring is cheap … proceeds surreptitiously, [and] it evades the ordinary checks that constrain abusive law enforcement practices: ‘limited police resources and community hostility.'” Id. at *11. Justice Sotomayor expressed concerns that the Government’s use of such technology might chill “associational and expressive freedoms,”'
https://epic.org/documents/united-states-v-jones/
I don't think the universal surveillance we have today is even recognizably similar to a citizen being concerned about a surreptitious GPS tracker.
I'm super skeptical that this is actually true. In fact, I'm pretty sure it isn't, and you're just projecting your own positions on "HN of five years ago".
Although I agree with your sentiment on data privacy, I don't know where you live but in the United States this is a gross [and potentially dangerous] overgeneralization of a million+ hard-working officers who committed their lives to your safety in spite of regularly encountering life-threatening situations.
The Supreme Court explicitly ruled in Castle Rock v. Gonzales (2005) that police have no constitutional duty to protect citizens from harm, effectively nullifying the "committed their lives to your safety" claim.
These "million+ hard-working officers" actively maintain the corrupt system by refusing to hold their colleagues accountable. The "few bad apples" theory falls apart when entire departments and unions systematically protect officers who abuse their power.
American police have earned their reputation through decades of documented misconduct, militarization, and resistance to meaningful reform. The institution works exactly as designed.
It only came to light after much struggle from people searching for missing family members. Basically people in police or jail custody who died were dumped in there under a blanket assumption that no family had claimed them, but no attempts to notify or find family members was made.
https://jacksonadvocateonline.com/crump-wants-inquiry-of-215...
> The Supreme Court explicitly ruled in Castle Rock v. Gonzales (2005) that police have no constitutional duty to protect citizens from harm
If a duty isn't constitutional then it doesn't exist?
Actually most people never complete the statement. It seems to be entirely accurate.
"One bad apple can spoil the barrel / bunch."
The bunch has been definitely been spoiled.
And the "circling the wagons" phenomenon you mention is exactly an example of this. The so-called "good cops" rarely speak up when their colleagues are doing horrible things. It's disgusting. Those who are silent are complicit.
The "just meet some nice cops" argument is precisely how institutions avoid accountability for systemic problems. Individuals, and how nice they might be, are irrelevant when discussing institutional failures.
What statistics, what well documented patterns? You mean biased selection of footage from Reddit?
"Well-documented patterns of abuse" are not statistics! But, if I'm mistaken and they are, please let me know what percentage of police officers engage in abuse of power in their career. I'd love to see those kinds of statistics!
I'm not sure that sort of thing is something you can tie up neatly into a bow and present as some set of statistics. But it's a phenomenon that's very real.
Tons of people have seen things they can't explain, and are convinced that ghosts and the supernatural exist. Those phenomena are "very real" to those folks, too.
To be clear, I agree that police abusing their power is a "real phenomenon", in the sense that it certainly happens. But until you can provide ample evidence that these behaviors are thing a significant minority of police officers take part in, then your generalizing them to all police officers is just about as "real" as ghosts.
If, as an individual citizen, I'm aware of a serious crime being committed, I have an obligation to report it. If a "good" police officer has knowledge of crimes committed by "bad" police officers and they don't report it, then they are no longer a "good" police officer.
Your analogy is a false equivalence.
A non-criminal black person has no control or responsibility over a random criminal black person.
A police officer absolutely can speak up, speak out, and blow the whistle when one of their fellow officers does awful things. But most will just keep their mouths shut and help (actively or passively) with whatever coverup the institution decides is appropriate.
We're not talking about guilt by association, here. We're talking about guilt by failing to speak up; their silence makes them complicit.
Exactly. It's not like we can kick people out of a race like it's a profession. Though I think that would make a very useful feature in a comedy plot.
They seem to be doing pretty well career-wise, too, so it seems that this is not an uncommon sentiment there.
Federal courts, including the Supreme Court, have repeatedly held that police have no duty to provide protection to citizens in general.
If police were committing their lives to our safety, why would they use their limited funding pursuing court cases to affirm the opposite?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Schoolcraft
Consider that the guys entire management chain was involved in the attempt to forcibly institutionalize him, and numerous rank and file police officers as well. And not a single one of them spoke in his defense.
Based on this anecdote, what would you say the ratio of good vs bad cops is in NYPD?
Did you know, in the US it is possible to be overqualified to be a cop, if you are too smart? The system wants jackbooted thugs, rather than intelligent policing.
If corrupt sheriff Moe Carpaio is accepting bribes or selling drugs out of the evidence locker, Moe needs to hire juniors who are less likely to blow the whistle. Much of that involves in trapping them into the perpetuating cycle of crime, and that's easier when they don't have lots of other employment options.
Tough fucking luck.
Police extensively abuse their power, and even the so-called "good" cops rarely speak up against their fellow officers when they do awful things. It's not prejudice to state established facts and patterns of behavior.
Surely that's the problem to resolve? We could make it as ethically unacceptable for the police to look up irrelevant private records as it is for someone in the medical profession to do so, and fire people for misuse of these tools (indeed, in my country police officers do get fired for this sort of thing).
(not that you're not correct in that the more equal animals never face the same consequences less equal ones do).
Just because you're seeing the cases that create prosecutable paper trails doesn't mean anything about what fraction of that type of crime they are.
This requires the assumption that your location and your car's location are always one and the same.
If you care about your privacy consider leaving the vehicle with tracking numbers on it at home sometimes. It's not just cops that have ALPRs and you cannot prevent this technology from existing.
Or did you have a different mode of travel in mind that compares favorably to wheeled transportation on public streets?
It's fascinating how, to me, my comment was very clearly "don't use a car if you care about privacy" but that interpretation didn't even occur to you. Car dependency runs deep.
You can ban cops from doing it, I guess, but I think someone will record all public spaces quite soon. I don't love it either...
Why go through lawyer hurdles when you can just buy it perfectly legally?
A company like ID.me basically performs a function that any state government could do itself or through a contractor at lower cost and without the privacy issues of providing the data to third parties.
The law has failed us here - privacy attorneys basically focus on providing notification on a “take it or leave it” basis.
Who is this directed at? The company wasn't started as a branch of government. What exactly are you proposing? That the government create its own network of cameras for surveillance? Have government-created solutions never been abused by law enforcement in the past?
They almost certainly are willing to buy hordes of data off of google/facebook/etc.; it's useful data that they're already negotiating to get. Why, then, would they be want to put in the effort for a warrant on cctv footage when the suspect's google search and maps history they're alreaty getting contain the same info and more? At best, your creating a small amount of competition for data brokers, and I question if it's that much.
If you don't understand why, consider that crime rates are known to be higher among the black population in the US but generalizing that to "black people are known to be abusive, violent thugs" would be equally wrong and hateful. You can make a point about the potential for abuse without name-calling an entire group of people like that.
Being black is not a choice...
I maintain that this sort of vitriolic language is unacceptable no matter what group it's targeting, unless your goal is to start a flame war (or a real war) rather than actually solve problems.
I do think it's a bit strong to say police are all violent, abusive thugs.
But there are many police officers who share unfortunate characteristics with violent, abusive thugs, and nearly all of their fellow supposedly-good officers are unwilling to call them out and enforce any sort of consequences for being violent, abusive thugs. That's nearly as bad, in my book.
So maybe let's stop policing (heh) people's specific language, and instead talk about the actual issues.
And my concern isn't with the language used, but the casually hateful attitude being expressed. It's not constructive, and probably actively harmful to just be casually demonizing your neighbors like that.
I think bringing race into it conflates separate issues. On the other hand, I really like the "cartel members" vs "[opposing political party]" example! It feels like these obviously shouldn't be equally bad, but explaining why is harder than I expected...
That's true, it should be qualified “within a subculture of violent thuggery, in organizations which lack any unifying focus other than the application of force, and which both protect them from and are themselves insulated from effective accountability for abuses.”
Maybe a bit better, but you're still overgeneralizing in order to demonize an entire group of people.
If you want to talk about systemic issues in our policing system, then talk about those issues. Calling people groups derogatory names isn't constructive.
And honestly, given the struggles police forces in the US are having with staffing, it does appear that cops are becoming increasingly marginalized. Especially since the primary driver behind the decline in recruitment seems to be the risk of social stigmatization.
and who's fault is that?
I suspect people who overgeneralize in order to demonize an entire population have a hand in this.
You didn't answer my question, either.
I think police as a job, as it currently exists, absolutely should be socially stigmatized. They have the ability to clean up their act, and show that they are worthy of the power and authority we give them, but they choose not to.
Except if it was you in charge, of course?
Like I asked you in a different reply: what's the prevalence rate of these bad behaviors? "Full of people" seems to imply that you think it's a majority? I can confidently state that you cannot back this up with evidence, because it appears the only evidence you have is anecdotal, and likely anecdotes you actively select for in order to feed your confirmation bias.
I'll note that you didn't answer my question, either. Coordinated deflection like this is not a sign that you have a well-formed argument
here's where people go "oh but there's 800,000+ uniformed law enforcement in the US, and you have 100 videos, big whoop". How many videos would it take? We've only been able to really easily record the police doing misconduct for 15-20 years, depending on how you parse "easily record." So how many videos would it take? And of those videos, how many would i have to listen to someone say "the victim of police misconduct should have just [...]"?
How many lawsuits against cities and departments would you need to read before it made a dent?
You know what, fuck that. You still haven't answered my earlier question:
> Why is being a "marginalized group" relevant?
We can come back to this tangent once you've answered that question. I'm getting tired of all the deflection
What i don't get is why cops need white knights
You were replying to someone who stated this, I believe:
> Maybe a bit better, but you're still overgeneralizing in order to demonize an entire group of people.
To which you responded:
> Cops aren't a marginalized group.
Why does being a marginalized group matter in this context? Why does not being a "marginalized group" mean it's okay to overgeneralize and/or demonize? What is a "marginalized group" in this context? Why is one not allowed to overgeneralize and demonize a marginal group, but one is allowed to for groups that do not hold this status?
The more meta question is: Why is overgeneralizing in order to demonize a group of people acceptable in any circumstance? I don't think it is, because once you start carving out exceptions, all you end up doing is just justifying and reinforcing your own biases.
>>>> Maybe a bit better, but you're still overgeneralizing in order to demonize an entire group of people.
>>> cops aren't a marginalized group
>> why does this matter
> There's a difference between punching down on marginalized groups, compared to speaking against / badly about authority figures.
hope this clears it up.
cops are not a race. cops have extremely high levels of problematic behavior across all ages, races, etc. it's a good thing to call out the problematic nature of cops as a group since they have a literal monopoly on violence and are massively unaccountable for the use of that violence.
the argument "you can't call black people violent, therefore you also can't call cops violent" makes absolutely no sense to me
The same goes for the difference between "Police departments in the US have y% higher rate of excessive use of force than other countries" and "police are violent thugs".
No black person chooses to be born black. Casting judgement on any individual black person for the actions of other black people is unethical for that reason.
Every single cop chose to be there, chooses to continue being a cop every day despite constant and repeated examples of blatant corruption, bad behavior, literal thuggery, planting evidence, and the Good Ol' Boys network endemic to the institution. They are culpable for that choice. Continuing to be a cop in this environment (specifically where there is zero chance to "reform it from the inside" due to structural problems). Ask any ex-cop why they left. The system is completely broken and designed to empower cops to be thugs without consequence.
"Good cops" don't stay cops because they get bullied by literal cop gangs to either become a bad cop and do thuggery or to get the fuck out. There are no Good cops.
Casting judgement on any individual for the actions of other individuals who share characteristics with them is generally unethical, period. The individual's ability to choose the particular identifying characteristics shouldn't be relevant.
I'm pretty sure you don't want to be making the argument that it's ethical to judge people based on elements of their identity, so long as those elements have been selected by that person's choice!
That's a strange argument to make. If the chosen identity element is associated with negative characteristics, then it stands to reason that it's, well, reasonable to judge them based on those characteristics.
If it quacks, it's probably a duck. If it wears a police uniform it probably a) does bad stuff, b) enables cover-ups of that bad stuff, or c) lacks the courage to speak out against the bad stuff. This isn't because of their identity, it's because this is a characteristic that is widely documented to be incredibly common among cops.
People can choose to not adopt identity elements that have bad reputations. People can't choose not to be black.
Someone who chooses to wear heavy makeup and revealing clothing while standing on the street waiting for their Uber can be fairly judged to be a prostitute?
I don't think this is the argument you're making, but this is how the standard you are setting can be applied.
I don't think the element of choice in identity elements makes a difference either way. I think you should just avoid overgeneralizing, period.
Instead of, you know, inventing reasons why is fine to overgeneralize when you want to, but not when you don't want others to.
> If it wears a police uniform it probably a) does bad stuff, b) enables cover-ups of that bad stuff, or c) lacks the courage to speak out against the bad stuff.
"Probably"? Based on what prevalence rate? What percentage of police officers engage in each of these behaviors? You're making a wild assumption here, likely with nothing more than your own anecdotal understanding of these issues.
I think it's more likely you just have a media diet that is high in examples of these behaviors happening, but without the context that explains exactly how often they're actually happening.
I'm not denying that these things happen, and happen frequently! But there are a lot of police officers in the US alone, and even 1% of them doing each of these things is a large number of absolute cases. But a rate of 1% isn't sufficient to generalize to the entire population. At a rate of 10%, I would probably still refrain from extrapolating to the whole, but would start to question individual interactions, and would start to be sympathetic to this kind of generalization.
But due to the lack of evidence around prevalence of bad behavior, I'm skeptical of anyone who generalizes to this degree, especially given the poor quality of information anecdotally collected from the Internet.
> People can choose to not adopt identity elements that have bad reputations. People can't choose not to be black.
If people never adopt identity elements that have bad reputations, how can those reputations ever be improved? If you want the quality of policing to improve, the last thing your want to do is convince everyone who wants to make a difference that they shouldn't even try. If you want policing to improve, you should be encouraging the best people you know to join up and to force out the bad behavior through reform.
People cannot choose to be black, but they can choose to make an effort to destroy the negative stereotypes associated with their race.
You seem to be arguing that generalizations are always externally imposed and immutable, neither of which is true. Your argument is actively damaging to any efforts to improve the perceptions of both groups.
I really cannot be bothered to respond to the rest of this because you’re starting from a place of not being familiar enough with this topic at all for this to be a meaningful exchange. I really hope you make time to educate yourself better on this topic and do so with an open mind and compassion
I phrased what I said much more precisely than this. I said nothing about gender dysphoria, and was instead specifically talking about a therapy one might choose to undergo as treatment. Medical treatments should always be a choice, right?
But no, instead you decide to completely misrepresent what I said, and used then use that single misrepresentation as basis to dismiss my entire argument.
You claim to want a meaningful exchange, but this is how you choose to do it? This makes me skeptical you're interested in "meaningful exchange" in the first place.
Always, before making generalising statements like this, ask yourself: Would I think it's okay if the word was replaced with another, in this case, say "blacks"? And then you'll probably see that you shouldn't talk like that.
[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2782848/#R49
So now do you think it's okay to say "Blacks are known to be violent thugs" because it's "objectively true" according to some data? Just stop...
> Once socioeconomic status was considered, the results failed to indicate racial differences between the offending but not arrested drivers and the arrested drivers.
As far as I've seen, there is not a similar explanatory factor with the statistic I've cited.
I don't think this is an "omitted variable bias" thing. This is a "confirmation bias" thing on your part.
So... There's a correlation between lower socioeconomic status and violent crime? I don't think that's surprising. What it does not do is explain why those demographics are overrepresented in either category.
I also am highly skeptical of "every paper", unless you're specifically going out of your way to only read the ones that confirm your bias.
That is what "$GROUP is a bunch of violent thugs" implies: that members of that group are intrinsically more likely to be violent and thuggish than other type of people, specifically because of the trait that $GROUP embodies. That statement does not hold true for black people, but I believe it does for police.
It's important to understand the root causes of things. Black people commit more crimes, because black people are overrepresented when it comes to lower socioeconomic status, because of century-spanning systemic racism and the reduced opportunities that brings.
Police tend to be more violent and thuggish because the profession selects for people who want to have (and inevitably abuse) power over others, and because it's systemically set up as an institution to enable that behavior and not hold members accountable for it.
I would hope from those two descriptions it's reasonable to say that one group's failings come from a sympathetic cause that is often out of their control, and the other group's failings are intentional and by design.
But we cannot say that it's not intrinsic, either! All we can tell is that there's a correlation between "being black" and "being poor". Like the person I was responding to pointed out: there's the potential for a hidden variable that connects these two things. Alternatively, one causes the other. Given the available evidence, it does not seem clear that the arrow of causality points in either direction.
This is the point that you're missing. You assume that "being poor" causes people to be "more violent", when it's equally plausible that being "more violent" causes people to be "more poor".
And if being "more violent" is something that is intrinsic to certain demographic groups, then the latter interpretation would fully explain the overrepresentation in both lower socioeconomic classes and in rates of violent crime.
I fully agree that there has been systemic racism that contributes to lower socioeconomic status for some racial demographics. However, I refuse to accept that as the only explanation for those same demographics being highly overrepresented in violent crime statistics. This is not a simple problem with a two-dimensional answer. The "systemic racism" argument may be necessary, but it is not sufficient, because it attempts to remove any kind of agency those same demographics have over their own behavior, culture, and identity.
This is both wildly disempowering and enabling. You're essentially excusing every individual in that demographic from the consequences of their violent criminal actions by putting the blame entirely outside their control, which is bullshit.
Technology allows surveillance at scale, and that attacks privacy in a new and deeply unintuitive direction.
In the pre-information era, people still didn't have a reasonable expectation of privacy in public, in that everything they did could be noted. However, that notice was far from automatic, and people were only remembered if they were memorable. That could happen from doing something or appearing out of the ordinary, or it could happen from specific interest (e.g. being followed).
Nowadays, the surveillance is automatic, and hard drives don't forget. The technology allows aggregators to answer retrospective questions about the target's ordinary behaviour. People now need be concerned about how their actions today will be viewed weeks, months, or years from now if they later attract scrutiny.
This technology is here today for cars and license plates, but it's only a matter of scale before it's applied to pedestrians with face, gait, or other individual recognition modalities. We don't have the social scripts to properly deal with it.
Fingerprinting gets into unlike-at-scale.
At this point, we're not just talking about license plates but obvious tracking.
Take a speeding ticket, for example. If the fine is $400, it's created with the knowledge that it'll only be triggered occasionally, and it's created as a deterrent. If I speed 50 times and get caught one time, I pay $400. If you setup a bunch of speed cameras all over town, the fine should go down to have the same impact.
Throw in red light camera setups where they reduce the yellow lights to dangerous levels for everyone in order to collect more fees despite longer yellow light times being one of the most effective ways to prevent collisions in intersections.
https://www.salon.com/2017/04/05/this-may-have-happened-to-y...
Technology also allows for influencing the world at scale, and that attacks a lot of assumptions about what is "public" and "private" in new and deeply unintuitive directions, as well.
A car can be identified by its plates, while a pedestrian can be identified by their face or other features. Perhaps not today by some legal or technical difficulty, but the infrastructure to do so is in place.
There is a reasonable expectation of privacy in public places. One might not reasonably expect that one's photograph should not be taken in public, but one may reasonably expect not to have one's every move recorded, profiled, indefinitely stored and shared with various third parties, or to have one's every conversation on the phone or with other people recorded with sophisticated cameras or sensors, and for that to be attached to one's detailed profile.
What is described is a surveillance state, which anyone who values some degree of personal freedom will reasonably object to. The installment of sophisticated cameras capable of tracking one's movement throughout an entire country provides the means for such surveillance state, and should be strongly objected by anyone who values one's personal freedom.
Those in favor of such installment for the facilitation of criminal persecution should at the very least require strong guarantees about its usage, such as storage limits and regular public audits of such implementation, closed circuits instead of publicly networked solutions, etc, and strongly oppose any arrangements that do not fulfill stringent privacy requirements. Unfortunately I am yet to see any real person advocate for this with any real political strength.
e.g. cameras at an intersection that had an accident: It probably would take 'a day or two' at least for such a request to get to the camera operators to request they send a copy.
I'd also personally prefer speed cameras that are not point-in-time records. This just encourages police to put them where they know people are more likely to violate the law, like at the bottom of hills, where there's not really a danger, but it generates more revenue.
I'd want speed cameras that are miles apart... and the determination that you get a speeding ticket is that you traveled several miles at high speed.
That's what SPECS does:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPECS_(speed_camera)
There are similar systems in other countries. Here in Belgium we have "trajectcontrole".
Judging by the number of accidents I've seen at the bottom of hills, I'm skeptical of your statement that "there's not really a danger" there.
I don't think posting up at the bottom of a hill is a revenue-generating thing, it's simply an exercise of going to where the crime happens. In this case, it's at the bottom of a hill that makes it easier for drivers to reach excessive speeds and thus are an increased danger to everyone else on the road.
This is exactly where you want to deter people from behaving dangerously, and where you want to punish the people who fail to pay enough attention to avoid getting a ticket in such an obvious scenario.
If the police reach the data before it's deleted after they know it may have evidence of a crime that's ok (realistically this is rare, but I can imagine it happening with paired cameras that measure speed over a long distance of road. You could also get lucky where a false positive image happened to capture a different crime), but we shouldn't be storing surveillance data that tracks everyone's movements on the off chance that it has evidence of a crime. The harm outweighs the use at that point.
what data is collected, how/where it's stored
...also if it is sold to anybody, or handed to.
I don’t think there’s privacy in the tap on - tap off Oyster/Presto card world either.
("the tap on - tap off Oyster/Presto card " => Google sent me to "List of public transport smart cards" so I assume you're refering to some branded public transit system)
On Trip Advisor some people say cards can become deactivated if not used for years, but staff in a ticket office can reactivate them.
[1] https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/how-to-pay-and-where-to-buy-tickets...
Actually there’s no tap off IIRC (unlike the Dutch chipkaarts) but still, I would assume the modern station where you enter is a veritable panopticon of CCTV, RF signal interception, etc
So we can say that while the extremes of this argument are either total surveillance or no surveillance at all, we can instead opt for a more balanced approach. We can recognize that guaranteeing privacy in public or when using a publicly provided service is silly, but also that some forms of automation and data mining elevate simple observations into a level of surveillance that we are not comfortable with.
You can watch me in public and you can even record things like my license plate number if you like.
When you start following me around to all my destinations and making a detailed log of everything I do you are stalking me. That would be a crime if you did it physically. Why should it be different if you are doing it digitally?
Should be police be able to walk behind you down the street everywhere you go just waiting for infractions? What's the difference?
The reason states shouldn't be given every power over their citizens just villy nilly is because power in a free society is given by the citizens. And if the state can target those indiscriminately without due process that is no longer the case.
So it can make sense to withold certain powers from the state, even if with trustworthy leadership and actors these powers would be useful to keep the people in the state safe. And that is because untrustworthy leadership can come around at any point and then you don't want to give them an operational surveillance structure that would have given any authoritarian in history the shivers.
This means that you have a lot to be grateful for, but your perspective is privileged and may not take into account that not every life is like yours. You don't feel the chains of oppression until you need to break them. I would recommend considering what kind of person might not benefit from mass surveillance in this current political climate where students are disappearing just for protesting against a religious genocide.
You could definitely argue that surveillance is inevitable as a technology; but the government is supposed to serve its people, and without strong guarantees of established freedoms and protection from the negative effects of mass surveillance, the people should not allow the government to engage in such surveillance. Especially not the dragnet style of surveillance that is common today, and especially in the wake of modern analysis tools where prejudice can be automated.
But in general, corporate and state-sponsored surveillance of students and protestors goes back many decades, and we have seen enough witch hunts over things like Communism, Vietnam protestors, psychedelic users, etc. that we simply cannot allow our local, state and federal governments in their current shape to wield mass surveillance, because they will not do it ethically.
You shouldn't have an expectation of anonymity, like you say.
Now, what is reasonably expected in public is less than what is reasonably expected in private, but it certainly isn’t zero privacy.
It is true that one might expect, if they are driving around, that someone might see them. But is it expected that they might sometimes be followed? Is it expected that they are always followed? Is it expected that everyone is followed and those locations are cataloged indefinitely for anyone to FOIA? These are all very different questions.
It’s one thing for a subject of an active investigation to be tailed by a cop. It is an entirely different thing for the entire population of Roanoke to pass through what are essentially checkpoints logging your location a dozen or more times in a day.
Scale can change the fundamental nature of a thing: walking down the street while being pissed as your government is one thing, but if you get 1000 friends to do it with you it's a march.
Whereas a camera is a cheap deterrent.
yes - we all voted for this so here it is. /s
... except no one did vote for it. So why do we have it?
Person of Interest continues to be prescient.
Meanwhile, you can also wear these: https://www.reflectacles.com/home
Looked into it a bit and it started out and only the last season has all of what you quoted. It's been really interesting watching the show evolve knowing what was happening in the world at the time. I'm currently on season 3 and they are starting to change the tone now that the Snowden leak has happened.
It starts out as:
"You are being watched. The government has a secret system — a machine — that spies on you every hour of every day. I know, because I built it. I designed the machine to detect acts of terror, but it sees everything. Violent crimes involving ordinary people. People like you. Crimes the government considered irrelevant. They wouldn't act, so I decided I would. But I needed a partner, someone with the skills to intervene. Hunted by the authorities, we work in secret. You'll never find us. But, victim or perpetrator, if your number's up, we'll find you."
So over the course of 5 years it morphs from "I know because I built it." to "A system you asked for, to keep you safe."
There are some bouts of introspection, especially early on, which he uses as justification for installing the backdoor in the first place, but on the whole he's adamant that none of this is his fault.
That's probably exactly how it will play out in our world too, when a tech billionaire plugs a self-aware AI to our global surveillance network.
> There are some bouts of introspection, especially early on, which he uses as justification for installing the backdoor in the first place, but on the whole he's adamant that none of this is his fault.
Well, at least until later, where I'd say his perspective evolved towards fear and eventually immense guilt ("selling the world for a dollar"), which made it hard for him to consider the possibility that what he created might want, and perhaps have a right, to live. Finch is the opposite of the "oops I guess but really I've done nothing wrong" kind of billionaire.
And, a bit of a reach, but it's also some of the foundation for "pre-crime" type stuff. "You've exhibited patterns of comings and goings that suggest..."
- Molotov, June 14, 1940
<Always has been dot jpeg>
>Say you're targeted for public speech someone doesn't like
More likely you're gonna get targeted because you shared memes that were too dank. They won't put you in jail. They'll just fine the shit out of you because their goal isn't to personally attack anybody, but to marginalize demographics they don't like.
For a peek at what you can expect, take a look at Saudi Arabia, where your bank account gets blocked until your traffic violation fine (usually issued electronically within minutes of the actual deed) is fully paid.
Or at China, where you "social score", more or less calculated automatically, decides in a fairly fine-grained manner what you are and are not allowed to do in society.
These will be become the social norm in the West as well, just a matter of time and getting the herd to consider it "normal" (usually takes a generation, 20-ish years).
Lol. Nobody will be able to track me as the guy crab-walking in a sumo suit wearing the Unabomber disguise.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2025/03/27/pikachu...
Didn’t he get away on a bike into a park?
In that case the police had a Starbucks register photo with a face, but that kind of slip can also be easily avoided
That PARTICULAR slip can be avoided. Avoiding all slips is equivalent to airtight OpSec, which more people on this platform are familiar with (= not happening).
https://www.wired.com/story/null-license-plate-landed-one-ha...
I believe the first one but likely BofA refusing to accept emails from his custom domain has nothing to do with it starting with null and everything to do with anti-spam.
If you’re driving a car, yes. As we saw with Mangione’s escape, if you’re on public transit you’re much more anonymous. (Given the public risks inherent to driving, I think this is a fair trade—off.)
[1] https://abc7ny.com/brooklyn-shooting-subway-cameras-7-on-you...
"No escape" sounds still right.
That's not tractable at scale.
I think that means it doesn't matter what anyone thinks about anonymity in public places. We're already almost always seen by several cameras, and it will soon be 10x as much.
so you're saying that if we cycle everywhere on a non-descript black Dutch fiets we're safe ?
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10345980
If they knew that every time they looked I would know about it, they wouldn't look so much. Similarly to how people are much less stalky on LinkedIn and Instagram because they know that the other person gets notified when they look.
That would make it like _any other_ record the police want access to.
There's no recalling that data.
These ALPR companies are evil. If a car manufacturer sells your data or a big box store uses AI in ways you disagree with you can just not purchase from those companies. It can be much more difficult to move to a new town where they may then decide to put these things. I know of one town where it is impossible to drive without hitting an ALPR. What a prison.
Here is a list of things that have been or could be done:
- wrong vehicle identified and stopped at gunpoint
- sacramento sheriff shared LP data with Texas in case pregnant people visited
- police chief stalked his ex
- a mad president could unreasonably declare martial law and send the national guard in to the Atlanta office to take over the command center (if you take the license plate off: how many silver Audi A4s are there in Palo Alto?)
- a foreign state actor could surreptitiously infiltrate their servers and discover patterns that help them if they declare war against the US
- the data will be leaked (high likelihood eventually) and you can find out all kinds of behaviors. It would be fair game for insurance companies.
It violates the 4th amendment. A governement cannot just track innocent people everywhere they go. They sell it as "we aren't giving tickets, we are only looking for bad guys" but the above incidents (gunpoint, sheriff, stalking ex) show otherwise. But what concerns me is not the local police, it is the last three potential situations. And you can't opt out unless you take ubers or bike I guess.
Please donate to the Institute for Justice. They have a case in Virginia (surprised it wasn't mentioned) and I am confident they will succeed in taking this to the Supreme Court. They recently won a civil asset forfeiture case and they have successfully argued cases like DC's gun ban before the supreme court. (If you think guns are bad, fine, but like ALPRs it was a violation of the US constitution) ij.org
Edit: spelling, formatting
You should know who you are donating to (even if you decide to donate). Institute for Justice is a Koch-funded operation that has been focused on their agenda more than civil rights. Possibly my information is somewhat out of date, but note even the propaganda-oriented name as a cover for Koch operations, sort of like the PATRIOT act.
Consider also the ACLU, which you know is doing a good job because the powers-that-be attack the ACLU instinctively.
Twelve of them around a high density shopping center is perfectly reasonable.
Just one at the entrance of a neighborhood is severe overreach.
I don't mind the idea of building a surveillance state within certain parameterized boundaries, but once you are in a residential setting these things feel like military incursion. Homeowners can already opt-in to video doorbells, security cameras on their properties, etc.
Home Depot & law enforcement don't need a 500-mile diameter security perimeter around each retail store to catch the guy stealing Milwaukee products. The cameras in the parking lot and leading up to the freeway should give you enough room to play with unless you are vastly incompetent at basic police work.
Boy do I have news!
Good to know the state knows me and isn't even bashful about it...
[1] https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-traveler-programs/sentri
> In just a few taps and clicks, the tool showed where a car had been seen throughout the U.S. A private investigator source had access to a powerful system used by their industry, repossession agents, and insurance companies. Armed with just a car’s plate number, the tool—fed by a network of private cameras spread across the country—provides users a list of all the times that car has been spotted.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/i-tracked-someone-with-licen...
And as has been mentioned a couple other places in this discussion, please contribute to mapping out license plate readers in OpenStreetMap at https://deflock.me. Ideally someone will create a routing engine which with an option to avoid all known ALPR's while generating a route.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41927777
I have always avoided bumper stickers and custom license plates for more anonymity. I have a ham radio license and decided not to get a license plate with my callsign on it because people could easily Google that and find out my name and address. I had always just thought about other drivers in these cases, not law enforcment surveillance!
> Ninety uneventful minutes later, I pulled into Roanoke to go to the Cardinal office and visit my Roanoke members of our own Cardinal team — which, in an unintentional irony in this story, we refer to as The Flock.
https://deflock.me/
There is one near me, in a relatively upscale area, that has repeatedly been taken down and thrown into a culvert. There are currently two old flock cameras still on the pole down there and seemingly unreachable. But it is always quickly replaced.
I also map water sources on OSM also, since one day I ran out of water and couldn't find anything local. Figured it would help someone else one day.
Regardless, since I like to provide updates to OSM, I have been cataloging them in my area.
I’m in support of better investigative tools and stricter governance. I’m not worried that my car location would lead to a false arrest- that is like being afraid of lighting striking.
In any case, given they have batteries that eventually wear out, and older cars don't have them, it would still be more effective to use a camera.
Edit: even if they're required in new cars that doesn't make them mandatory on the road. It's not like all tires must be sold with TPMS.
Obviously, it is easy to flout these regulations as an individual or as a small-time mechanic. But there can be penalties if tampering or negligence gets discovered, the most common of which is failing to pass inspection. When I bought wheels from Tire Rack online in 2015, I had to either pay extra to have them equipped with TPMS or else attest that my vehicle never had TPMS.
The real purpose has nothing to do with surveillance but with consumer and environmental protection. If you buy a used car with TPMS, you should be confident that it works. And keeping it working increases the chances that people will keep their tires filled and their fuel economy up.
However, a new problem has arisen, which is that gas stations don't bother to fix their broken air compressors anymore.
This vehicle has passed all required inspections for that entire time and the TPMS system hasn't even been mentioned in that context.
edit: I found the claim that TPMS was required interesting and a quick web search shows that 13 states in the US don't require vehicle safety inspections AT ALL.
[1]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/49/571.138
I have not seen any evidence that it is actually happening, though. Compare to this story where the reporter asked for tracking data and either received the data or a response confirming the data’s existence but declining to provide it.
Other data sources for tracking, like cell phone location or toll transponder pings, also have a public record of the existence of that data.
I’m not aware of a similar trail of proof-of-existence for TPMS data tracking. If you are, I’d be interested to learn.
> Video Clips captured by the LPR system will automatically be deleted after 30 days; although Images are deleted when no longer needed, the data obtained from the Images may be retained indefinitely.
They are growing and showing up everywhere, but you never hear about them in terms of real innovation, just helping build the surveillance state. Combine this with cloud based doorbell cameras and it seems like someone is always watching.
'Part of Flock’s proprietary tech determines the make and model of the vehicle and also notes if there are bumper stickers, bike racks, any other unique markings that would help identify that vehicle. That generates a "vehicle fingerprint" for every car or truck'
So in just the same way that ad blockers and other anti-surveillance tech actually make your browser stand out, obfuscating your license plate would also make you stand out.
Is anyone watching the watchers? Who is policing the police? What checks and balances do we have?
Interestingly they seem to be taking the place of the old, bulky, tow behind camera rigs that used to be in several of these locations. Those other devices were large trailer rigs with flashing blue lights and camera's up on a tower.
Meanwhile, in the Bay Area (one of the most economically productive regions of the world) even attempted burglary is functionally not a crime: if there is no footage, nothing was taken, it’s not an active crime, and the value of your smashed window is under some threshold, police will direct you to fill out a form online which will almost certainly not result in an investigation or arrest. Worse yet, if you report to insurance, you will be punished in the form of higher premiums.
Saying these requests constitutes a felony is ludicrous, hopefully the judge sees the case as a bad prank.
https://www.eff.org/issues/transparency/foia-how-to
When I FOIA'd the Furby memos from the NSA, it was low enough I got it for a whole $free.
https://cardinalnews.org/2025/03/13/city-of-roanoke-botetour...
Additionally, it's bizarre because the journalist isn't using the computer to gather the information, the police are... and they are legally allowed to -- the code specifically says only law enforcement may do this while performing job duties.
So they are arguing that there's some sort of transitive property where law enforcement are no longer law enforcement performing job duties if they are acting on request from a journalist... or that the journalist is a mastermind in a felony because he is requesting to see his own records.
We think of public surveillance as a sort of crime prevention, and in a certain ways it is. However, the possible abuse of it is mind boggling.
I hope there's also litigation for this given it is also public record when it's being purchased with tax dollars. Especially if they're just asking for the identifications of their own vehicle. It seems similar to denying me a copy of their record of my actual fingerprint.
Waymo and et al are touted for making our lives easier (load of marketing bs), but really will make it more difficult.
edit: and they get to double dip — users paying to use and install their product, and selling that data back to the user and LE and intelligence communities.
Here are the statistics on Roanoke VA's flock cameras for the last 30 days.
Here is Oakland PD with 1,626,757 vehicles detected and information on the 2,244 searches served in the last 30 days.
This includes what appear to be UUID ids of the users.
https://transparency.flocksafety.com/oakland-ca-pd
Oh yeah and police surveillance something.
I would immediately surrender such information either way, in the interests of the community - say for a missing child?
These capabilities should have well defined intent/objectives and transparent controls to protect the privacy of individuals to which are out scope.
With all the above said; it’s been proven time and time again that even with clear intent - the purpose of these systems mutates (ie between governments). Said governments then wonder why public trust is lacking?
(Example; see Australian Government customer ISP DNS requirements)
The problem is that you don't get to decide whose hands it gets into. Even if it's in the right hands today, it might not be tomorrow.
And your definition of "right" might not match someone else's.
Welcome to the future.
It might not be very effective, but it's enforcing a curfew.
What? Who has an expectation of privacy 'even in public spaces'? You're in public with a serialized mode of transportation (license plate) that requires a state-issued license to operate. Why would you expect 'privacy' in public?