[Manuel_D]

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

[etchalon]

You're missing the part where, for that to work, we have a government with access to a massive surveillance system capable of identifying and tracking the population at scale.

And you're missing that, instead of specifically identifying a specific individual doing a specific thing, this network would be used to place under suspicion, investigation and possible arrest, people who's only documented action was "being somewhere."

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

[Manuel_D]

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

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

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

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

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

> Or voting

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

[etchalon]

... I'm sorry. Are you not aware ballots are anonymous? Is that not a thing you knew?

Did you think our ballots tell the government who we were and how we voted?

Just, setting aside the rest of the idiocy of your defense here, that's ... a shocking thing to think as an adult in America.

[Manuel_D]

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

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

[Ancapistani]

Well, in my precinct I'd estimate there are ~20 people at the polls to vote at any given time. Given the timestamp of a ballot, there are maybe 50 people it could have possibly been.

That's more than enough information to correlate voting behavior after a couple of election cycles with a high degree of confidence.

Oh, and ballots aren't just for one race generally. By looking at what races that ballot voted in and a list of people present, there's a very good chance you'd be able to narrow it down to an individual in a single visit.