Not only this, this a precedented court opinion.
Is this actually born out in Court Cases? Warrantless Surveillance by NSA seems to be blanket legal for example.
See: https://www.oyez.org/cases/2017/16-402
It comes up fairly often here since the HN audience tends to be mostly programmers/computer people, but it's really important to remember that the law is not a series of rules a computer can directly evaluate to determine whether something is or is not legal; judges frequently use their judgement to balance the assumed intent of laws and the competing interests of various parties. I don't say this to you specifically but really just the HN audience as a whole :)
The only people who want that are the ones that want to subjugate large portions of the population, or those that want those large portions subjugated even if they don't get to do it.
Sheltering humans running away from slavery was also a crime .
It was illegal for black Americans to learn to read and write. Seeking education made them a criminal.
Buying or selling a beer made you a criminal during prohibition.
Do you see how easy it is to make someone a criminal?
from your point, nothing is cheaper and more efficient then mandating an app on all phones through which the governments can track everyone, and consequently whoever doesnt have it would be a criminal. it completely tracks from your argument. You may need to make the app stop tracking while theyre in the home, but thats a technicality. voila. no longer an issue according to your point
Are you suggesting that people couldn’t do that for some reason?
It isn't possible for them to do that without sensors and AI everywhere. That's why using this technology is a red line.
Thankfully, the law isn't as overly simplistic and black and white as that. It'd be very stupid if it were. We have the ability maintain a general principal like "there's no expectation to privacy in public" and still prohibit certain things that are deemed harmful, like taking upskirt photos of people while they are in public spaces.
If you're going to argue platitudes from altitude, you don't get to retreat to the comfort of circumscribed exceptions.
Nobody is talking about cops or flock cameras taking upskirt photos.
Just as we have the ability to pass laws prohibiting that specific harmful use of cameras while in public spaces, we have the ability to do something about the harmful uses of police and flock cameras while in public. The conversation is about the harms of mass surveillance and the exceptions necessary to protect the American public.
Hello, I'm here.
Practically, we do have privacy in public pre-AI. We weren't entitled to complete anonymity, but the ability to track every single person at all times was impossible.
Now that AI and sensors are making it possible, people are saying "No, I don't want that to be the norm".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v.Jones(2012)
> Also left unanswered was the broader question surrounding the privacy implications of a warrantless use of GPS data without a physical intrusion – as might occur, for example, with the electronic collection of GPS data from wireless service providers or factory-installed vehicle tracking and navigation services.[27] The Court left these matters to be decided in some future case, saying, "It may be that achieving the same result through electronic means, without an accompanying trespass, is an unconstitutional invasion of privacy, but the present case does not require us to answer that question."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_v._United_States
> Ultimately, in Carpenter the court determined that the third-party doctrine could not be extended to historical cell site location information (CSLI). Instead, the Court compared "detailed, encyclopedic, and effortlessly compiled" CSLI records to the GPS information at issue in United States v. Jones, recognizing that both forms of data accord the government the ability to track individuals' past movements.[24] Furthermore, the Court noted that CSLI could pose even greater privacy risks than GPS data, as the prevalence of cellphones could accord the government "near perfect surveillance" of an individual's movements. Accordingly, the Court ruled that, under the Fourth Amendment, the government must obtain a search warrant in order to access historical CSLI records.[1]
Of course there are no guarantees on how they'd rule today, but in the past they've ruled that scale and ease of access and compilation are significant enough to mean that fourth amendment protections should apply.
To me, that is precedent in US law that computerized methods of executing human tasks do not fall under the same rules.
All I'm saying is it should have been a problem at that point.. not just because it's easy now to do it at a high scale.
The former is massively damaging to our rights, the latter is almost useless and thus barely a problem worth talking about.
The difference in scale matters.
It's obviously different in that Chatrie was about google location data, and there actually was a warrant. SCOTUS ruled that warrant was too broad since it captured everyone in that location, not a specific person(s).
Constitutional scholars have pointed out the ALPR are next in line to face challenges based on the same principles as Chatrie - LEO can get a warrant for a specific person(s) to search but cannot search the entire universe.
That would not prevent ALPRs from existing, but it would require a warrant to search them. Which seems reasonable and completely in line with the 4th amendment.
Edit: words/spelling
Compelling parties to give up data is different than looking at your own data. And it is firmly established that recording and reviewing footage in public space is totally fine.
So we are back to square one...How do we define scale such that a police camera on a police car is OK, but a police camera on every corner is not. Or that individuals can record in public but police cannot.
They wrestle with the balance there of 4th amendment protections and mass surveillance. It's evolving and generally courts are moving to not allowing mass surveillance -or less so than they have allowed in. Courts have been split on it, and someone already pointed it out that SCOTUS will eventually come up with tests for it.
There were some really interesting parts of those Chatrie opinions that really will test the idea that someone in public gives up their right to any privacy - the fundamental underpinning of why governments can currently point cameras at public places and dont need a warrant to search that video.
Chatrie protected the aggregated viewpoint versus any single public moment - And SCOTUS said the aggregated viewpoint (mass search of location data with no specific person(s)) is not allowed under the 4th amendment. A very interesting precedent.
Gorsuch had an interesting take in that he argued that in Chatrie the location data was Chatrie's personal property and therefore protected from illegal searches from government.
There are a lot of similarities to how ALPRs work, and key differences. Mostly Chatrie deals with a private firms data collection of locations - google vs ALPRs are generally on publicly owned property and recoding things in public.
Still, many justices opened the door to the idea that the government can't mass surveil citizens. We'll have to wait and see how it all plays out.
I am very much of the opinion the government should need a warrant to search through ALPR data (and video for that matter). So, I am hopeful that the tenets of Chatrie extend to ALPRs, video, etc.
Edit: Gorsuch argues that the data is personal and not the government's data - this is what prevents the government from searching for it without a warrant. He did not get into why a body cam or something like that is different.
Five cameras is less than what the number of police on duty are using.
Luckily we never need to do that with words for them to be useful, even in legal contexts.
This is not true of privacy advocates, they do want to limit the ability to fish for circumstantial evidence that targets innocent people and causes suspicion.