[skinfaxi]

> You conflate the generally unremarkable act of taking a picture of a single car in public

I didn't say anything about a single car. Can the police department post police officers on every street corner and instruct them to record license plate numbers for every car they see? Would that constitute a search and if so a search of what exactly? If that's not a search why would a police-sanctioned camera be any different? I'm genuinely interested in understanding the distinction.

I'm not in love with the encroaching mass surveillance society but in terms of privacy in public there is little in the US by right.

[nateb2022]

> Can the police department post police officers on every street corner and instruct them to record license plate numbers for every car they see? Would that constitute a search and if so a search of what exactly?

Let me quote myself on this:

> As Justice Sotomayor noted in United States v. Jones, logging a vehicle's public movements "reflects a wealth of detail about her familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations." An action revealing all this is ipso facto a search.

> I'm not in love with the encroaching mass surveillance society but in terms of privacy in public there is little in the US by right.

Suggesting that a citizen possesses "little privacy in public by right" is to stand the American constitutional order squarely on its head. You have a very Eurocentric understanding of rights, as if they're concessions by the king/government to the people. We do things the opposite way.

The enumeration of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people (Ninth Amendment). Further, the Tenth Amendment explicitly reserves powers not delegated to the government to the states or to the people. What's your proposed basis, historic or constitutionally, granting the state the power to aggregate people's location history? The burden does not fall on the citizen to produce a right not to be monitored; it rests entirely on the state to demonstrate the authority to monitor.

[skinfaxi]

> What's your proposed basis, historic or constitutionally, granting the state the power to aggregate people's location history?

Is the executive empowered to enforce laws? Is recording observations a function of law enforcement? Society recognizes things like "plain view" in that if an officer is legally in a place and can see illegal activity they may act on it. So it would follow that they can record their observations about suspected illegal activity and legal activity alike (because suspected illegal activity might actually be legal in fact).

So if police can observe things freely and they can record their observations, well can't police departments store and search through police records?

The state will take for itself power that the people have but do not wield.

[nateb2022]

> So if police can observe things freely and they can record their observations, well can't police departments store and search through police records?

This is unnecessarily reductive; if we reduce all action enough we can justify anything as simply continuous 1 centimeter movement; e.g. grand theft would be innocently grasping an object in a store, and then a series of 1 centimeter movements which you could independently justify as "freedom to move."

We understand complex actions to have complex consequences, and the aggregation of vehicular data is itself a search, which by our laws requires a warrant. Jurisprudence evaluates the totality of an act and its consequences.

> The state will take for itself power that the people have but do not wield.

The Framers of the Constitution would understand this idea as tyranny.