[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.

[Manuel_D]

The ballots are timestamped to a degree fine-grained enough to narrow down the set of potential voters to just 50 people? Which state is this? I'm not finding any search results indicating that ballots are timestamped. In fact, some of the results I've encountered specifically say that ballots aren't timestamped to ensure privacy. But happy to learn more of you can explain how ballots in your state are timestamped.

In my state, we have to sign our name on the envelope containing our ballot. If the government was corrupt and they wanted to identify how people voted, they could just look at the signature. No Flock required.

Of all the things to complain about Flock, the notion that it can somehow de-anonymize ballots is probably one of the most unusual I've heard.

[Ancapistani]

My point wasn't that Flock allows this, but that it allows an entire class of surveillance that was previously not available.

[etchalon]

At no point did I say it could de-anonymize ballots.

You claimed ballots provided the government with the information they needed to know who voted.

I pointed that is untrue. Ballots explicitly do not.

The fact you posted that tells you know have a Google level understanding of the law in the US, and the fact you posted an article about private citizens using public data as proof of the legality of government-operated mass surveillance data tells me you're a deeply unserious person who should probably read Robert's writing in the majority opinion in Carpenter.

[etchalon]

To be clear, ballots are anonymous, and voter rolls are not universally accessible to all offices or functions of any given government. Different localities have different laws regarding the transparency of voting records, with varying degrees of control and confidentially down to the county level in some cases. In most cases, access to that information requires, at a minimum, a documented request though laws vary county by county, state by state, etc.

So "The government might not know how you voted, but they know who voted!" still requires a lot of work defining what you mean by "the government".

Second, your "this is already legal!" link pointed to an article about private citizens utilizing publicly volunteered data sets with no legal authority or consequence. I have no idea what that has to do with anything. Other than it sort of proves that mass data collection is likely to generate injustices.

But yes, in the US, you do not have a presumption to privacy when out in public. It is not an assumed universal, but, especially when it comes to private use, public information and public activities are not assumed private and have little if any protections.

However, SCOTUS specifically called out in Carpenter that mass surveillance data (cell phone location in that case) can be treated as a "search" under our Fourth Amendment. When confronted with a case that would look very similar to large network of private surveillance data of otherwise public activity, the court said, "Nope." If the quality and quantity of the data is sufficiently detailed, it cannot be presumed to be "public" information, especially when the mechanism by which it is gathered does not require affirmative consent, and especially when the data is retroactively broad.

Carpenter is the opinion which the ACLU cites, repeatedly, when they attack Flock's network of cameras. Cursory reading about whether Flock constitutional will point you towards Carpenter, and the ACLU's argument that it should/will apply to Flock.

We've had exactly one real test of that argument (Schmidt v Norfolk) that has yet to be make it to SCOTUS. The district court in that case ruled Carpenter didn't apply - but it was a district court whose opinion SCOTUS overruled in Carpenter too.

The next SCOTUS test of mass surveillance data usage will likely be the pending opinion in Chatrie. SCOTUS-watchers seemed divided on where they think the court will land, so who knows. Though based on the dissents in Carpenter, and the current make-up of the court, it's hard to see a world in which the original dissenters change their mind and that ACC doesn't join with them for a 5-4 opinion the other way under some narrow condition set.

I have no idea why you think the government monitoring specific groups has anything to do with mass surveillance networks beyond that the words monitoring and surveillance have similar meanings.

You seem to just be saying things.

[Manuel_D]

> We've had exactly one real test of that argument (Schmidt v Norfolk) that has yet to be make it to SCOTUS. The district court in that case ruled Carpenter didn't apply - but it was a district court whose opinion SCOTUS overruled in Carpenter too.

We've had at least two: in US vs Yang, the defense tried to invalidate the use of ALPR data using Carpenter to try and argue that it violated the Fourth Amendment. The Ninth Circuit disagreed and did not accept that argument.

[etchalon]

... you should probably read that opinion and maybe some legal analysis on what precedents it established. Specifically, that it established none.

Schmidt was explicitly about license plate reader data and whether a locality could install and utilize such a surveillance network without violating the Fourth Amendment.

Next time you get into this argument, point to Schmidt and its opinion. It has all the elements you need to make the point that a government funded mass scale video surveillance network is legal under current US law.

Then people will think you actually know what you're talking about.