> I don't understand why a police cruiser can sit in a public space (or even a private one) and write down licence plates and descriptions of passers-by with pen and paper, or record everything around them with dashcams and bodycams for later use, but when it comes to cameras on a pole this would require a warrant.

Scale actually matters. Things that are generally OK at a small scale become problematic at larger scales. A single police cruiser writing down license plates isn't able to track you in the same way a huge surveillance network is, and the opportunities for abuse are much lower.

Former law enforcement officer here. I can say that when we conducted surveillance, we weren't allowed to use equipment that wasn't common for normal people to use. So for example, I couldn't use some sort of long-distance microphone to overhear a conversation between two people in public because a normal person wouldn't have that same type of technology. I think this applies in this context to say that a cop just scanning and logging every single plate that traverses a certain area is outside the bounds of what we'd consider lawful for normal surveillance. Alternatively, if a normal person would just sit down and write down every single car description and plate that passed by their house or any other public area, a cop doing the same thing would be reasonable. The scale of modern data collection for police is whats dangerous to individual privacy rights.

You've already gotten a lot of replies about difference in degree, but there's also two differences in kind: one with visibility, and one with capability.

A police cruiser sitting at an intersection is visible. People notice it and its presence changes their behavior. They may choose to avoid certain routes through a city where surveillance cruisers hang out. Flock, and similar surveillance systems, are far less noticeable. Many, many people had no idea they existed a year ago when there were already 80,000 devices installed. Flock has been hot in the news cycle lately in part because tons of people are still just beginning to learn they exist. Whereas a police cruiser on a corner is overt surveillance, Flock is a "creepier" incarnation.

There's also capability. In principle, an officer parked on a corner is capable of responding to a variety emergencies. Some people might feel that the presence of the officer there was a net good for public safety. Heart attack in the neighborhood? Your local surveillance officer can start CPR. Older person with late-stage dementia has just walked away from home? Your local surveillance officer could clear that neighborhood.

But these surveillance systems have only one capability: surveillance. They can't render aid. They can't even prevent a crime; they can, at best, discourage it, or maybe aid in the apprehension of someone who committed a crime -- and didn't take adequate measures to avoid detection.

>I don't understand why a police cruiser can sit in a public space (or even a private one) and write down licence plates and descriptions of passers-by with pen and paper, or record everything around them with dashcams and bodycams for later use, but when it comes to cameras on a pole this would require a warrant.

A COMPUTER

CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE

THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION

-IBM, 1979

But you can generally FOIL records of this. Want body cam footage of what the officer was doing, you can generally get that. Want the video footage from their dash cam while sitting there, you can generally get that. However municipalities treat the data from these license plate cameras like a state secret. That disparity is largely what’s at issue here.

> A difference in degree (of usefulness and speed), not in kind.

IIUC courts have signaled in several cases that this distinction matters to them, which is good, because it's such a vast difference in degree that it arguably does become a difference in kind.

Police require a warrant to attach a GPS tracker to your car, or to directly obtain your cell phone location records. Why should access to networked ALPRs that compile an equivalently granular record of your movements be treated any differently? IIUC it was this exact line of reasoning ("detailed, encyclopedic, and effortlessly compiled" data equivalent to GPS tracking, for which a precedent had already been established) that supported the decision that now requires warrants for cell phone data (in Carpenter v. United States). Extending the same logic to networked ALPR data would seem obvious if we had the same SCOTUS.

A difference of a sufficient degree becomes a difference in kind, because whatever the internal justifications, the external implications of the system for society change drastically.

> I don't understand why a police cruiser can sit in a public space (or even a private one) and write down licence plates and descriptions of passers-by with pen and paper, or record everything around them with dashcams and bodycams for later use, but when it comes to cameras on a pole this would require a warrant.

There is already plenty of precedent in existing laws that 'automated' is a distinction that matters. Even on this exact issue, a few states prevent you as a private citizen from operating an automated license plate recognition system. You are free to scribble down the plate numbers all you want, but using an automated system is against the law.

If your police force installed officers in parked cruisers at every intersection to record license plate numbers and then digitized that information so you can build up a dossier of times and locations for a given individual without probable cause that would be both illegal and a huge waste of resources. ALPR just do it at scale so it's cheaper; still illegal without cause.

> A difference in degree

But a pretty huge difference. It's the difference between a few individuals throwing waste into a river vs a corporation systemically polluting it. Surely one is more of a problem than the other?

The way these surveillance systems work, a better analogy is one where everyone has a police officer following them around. And, if that were to happen today, you could take that police officer to court for harassment/stalking. Similarly, were the police to attach a GPS tracker to you or your vehicle without a warrant, there's already legal precedent that it's a Fourth Amendment violation.

You have to look at this from a systems point of view. Yes, flock cameras individually only capture their immediate surroundings, but the emergent behavior of the system is a means to follow someone around wherever they go, which is already a no-no in our legal system without at least securing a warrant to do so. And, even securing a warrant for one individual does not give you the right to include everyone in an area, commonly referred to and struck down as dragnet surveillance.

Flock systems and their siblings are wrong and should not be tolerated.

Flock records more that just license plates. It’s my understanding they’re also scanning wireless spectrum and tracking Bluetooth and WiFi MAC addresses, among other things.

More to the point, there’s a difference between someone writing down license plate numbers on a sheet of paper and and putting that information into a database that can then be mines to identify patterns of behavior, associations between people, etc. Context, use, and scale all matter significantly

Once you remove constraints imposed by needing actual labor you make it a difference in kind since you are allowing for tracking of anyone versus having limited information on a limited area.

If the police stationed officers constantly at major intersections doing that, the outcry would be no less than having cameras do it.

Also, if it's the police, at least they're part of the community and people can monitor and have an effect on what they do. When it's a private company, none of that is true.

Would you feel similarly if microphones were installed everywhere to record all public conversations for analysis via algorithms? Is that the same as police officers listening to conversation in a public space and taking notes?

System 1: a system for recording an image of a location at a given place over time.

System 1 can refer to the dashcam or the mk1 eyeball + notepad in your example.

System 2: a system for tracking the presence of a person across both time and location

An example of system 2 would be the facial id system being trialled on the london underground currently.

These are a difference in kind not in degree. It doesn't matter how many system 1's you deploy, you cannot unlock the capability of querying where any given face was observed across time and location.

Because of the scale: ALPR’s track where everyone is and was all the time. This allows entire categories of intimate information to be learned, that clearly threaten the civil liberties that the 4th amendment was written to protect.

For example, an officer sitting on a city street is very unlikely to learn where his wife goes every day, an ALPR search will answer that question.

An officer walking along the street making note of what he sees is very unlikely to observe and make note of the precise daily movements of someone in August three years ago, an ALPR search will answer that question.

The degree/kind distinction you’re aiming at is meaningless, it’s like trying to argue that shooting someone with a firearm is the same as shooting someone with a paintball gun in principle, sure but maybe one of them is orders of magnitudes morw powerful and impactful, and so deserves a different degree of consideration in how and when it is applied?

Simply replace every pole with an officer in their cruiser then and we’ll all be happy.

As someone who strongly opposes flock cameras...

This is a huge problem that people will try to sweep under the rug or hand wave away with wording like "It's the scale the matters".

Ideally, laws need to be written like programs are, where fundamental rules of the system are derived and programmatically put into action. So words like "scale" mean nothing. "I need the variable to go negative when the scale is large". Most programmers here will immediately snag on "scale" not being a hard value.

So what we actually need is a redefining of the fundamental rules, and well, that is very challenging to do such that it's still legal to walk around an record everything in public, but not legal to passively record everything in public all the time. How do we solidly and unambiguously differentiate a cops dashcam, from a police camera on a portable base station, from a flock camera on a corner to a private business with a security came to a firestation with a security camera.

Legally it's a very challenging problem to create a "programmatic differentiation" from the kind of camera use we want, and the kind we don't want.

These systems also facilitate criminal behavior by officers and others with access to them. They can also misidentify vehicles and lead to innocent civilians being pulled over at gunpoint. Problems with officer behavior scales with these systems.

A difference in degree is a difference in kind. Computer scientists struggle with a lot of legal concepts because they love to reduce situations in attempt to distill some particular facet and argue from analogy. A lot of poor legal analysis regarding things like fraud go similarly: “well in principle isn’t this the same as if I just . . .”

If there were literally hundreds of thousands of government agents on every corner writing down every person/car that walked by, it is quite probable this would be illegal even though you have no expectation of privacy in public. See Carpenter V United States and some of the concurring opinions in United States v. Jones.

Police already don’t need warrants to gather video footage from homes and businesses. It certainly isn’t ineffective or else they wouldn’t do it, but everybody knows how effective video footage is. The difference for most does seem to be that it doesn’t cost man hours. We have had cities in the USA with 10k+ cameras in public spaces for years now without much fanfare.

I believe you’re trying to articulate the act of witnessing from the act of investigating, and where the boundary between the two is. To me it seems like the boundary should be “does the general public have access to this information?”. If so, it’s allowable. If not, then a justification should be required for starting an investigation.

Because if you wanted to hire the number of police to sit and monitor a public space equal to the number of flock ALPRs you would probably quickly become larger than your average city's entire budget

right now, neither needs a warrant. if searching LPR camera history starts to require a warrant, it probably wouldn't take much to argue that sending officers out to manually do the same thing should require one too.

EDIT: i have no doubt that Flock and other ALPRs got so widespread because four ALPRs watching each direction at an intersection is basically invisible in comparison to four cop cars at every intersection.

if plate readers were as visible as cop cars (including agency branding) people would have probably gotten bent out of shape a long time ago.

They can. That’s fine, let them do that.

The difference in scale is so great that it becomes the meaningful, defining factor.

The degree is the problem. I’d have similar complaints if each Flock camera were replaced with an around-the-clock staff of police officers recording every license plate.

We see a huge amplification of single mistakes by these automated "efficient" processes. Just yesertday there was a story on the front page of a completely innocent woman who kept getting the felony warrant treatment over a data entry issue.

It's not the first time.

We also see the cops use the flock system as another excuse to treat an encounter over an unpaid bill as if they were taking down Bin Laden - they seem to see "flock hit" as code for "lets try to kill this person".

I am not a criminal nor do I have some sort of fetish for being abused, therefore I don't want some typo to result in unstable, bloodthirsty thugs putting guns in my face. The inefficiency protects me somewhat from these things, and until these issues can be properly addressed, I don't want anything to be scaled to a higher degree.

Yes I'm aware that this means lazy cops won't catch as many speeders and people who have warrants to pay a fine. I don't mind.

Have you met cops? They are not able to sit still or write things down. You expect too much of them.

> I don't understand why a police cruiser can sit in a public space (or even a private one) and write down licence plates and descriptions of passers-by with pen and paper, or record everything around them with dashcams and bodycams for later use, but when it comes to cameras on a pole this would require a warrant.

Similar issue: cell phone interception via Stinger cell base stations by law enforcement. A U.S. judge in Ohio ruled that using the device to sweep up data from thousands of unsuspecting individuals to track one suspect gave the government unconstitutional, "unbridled discretion" to monitor private citizens.

Another similar issue: A judge in Mississippi ruled "tower-dump warrants", where law enforcement requests info from cell companies on users/phone numbers in a geographic area in a certain time frame are illegal and too broad. The judge declared them an arbitrary government intrusion that violates the Fourth Amendment's particularity requirement

A third similar issue: In U.S. v. Chatrie, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that reverse-location "geofence warrants" constitute a Fourth Amendment search. The ruling establishes that users maintain a reasonable expectation of privacy over their location data, meaning law enforcement can no longer execute warrantless, sweeping digital dragnets through third-party data.

These are 3 examples of large scale police surveillance that have been ruled illegal because they are broad surveillance and give police too much power without a specific legal justification. This seems very similar and I expect the court cases on ALPR cameras to end up in the same place, but it may take a decade or so.

They are saying that a search of the videos created by the cameras should require a warrant, which is different from saying that a warrant is required to record in public spaces

American law leans heavily on "reasonableness".

The Fourth Amendment bans only unreasonable searches, and the threshold question is whether someone had an expectation of privacy that society is prepared to recognize as reasonable. That standard is contextual by design (what is reasonable to expect is partly technological, but partly societal and cultural). The "difference in degree" you mention is precisely what is being tested.

The recent (and oft-discussed) Chatrie v. United States is relevant. The Court held that the government's acquisition of a person's phone location history is a search requiring a warrant, and refused to set a duration floor. Their stated rationale was both that even short windows expose sensitive movements, and because they did not believe they could answer how many small violations of privacy add up to a big one. As such, the majority decided that warrants were necessary, lest the government be given a "virtual panopticon"

If we took your hypothetical seriously, an army of officers logging every plate by hand probably isn't a search and there's no reasonable expectation of privacy of movement on a public road. But building a searchable index of those notebooks, and querying it to reconstruct an arbitrary car's six months, is a different act from the observing.

That's the act at issue. Nobody argues a camera needs a warrant to see a plate.

The thing I don't understand: why do so many people want the police to _not_ need warrants to surveil the public? Are you historically illiterate? Are you unaware of how big government power tends to be abused? Do you simply trust that the government will always run by people who will support you and will abuse only the people you personally dislike?

I'm legitimately curious what sort of intellectual position you use to justify your active support of authoritarian measures, and why you don't believe the public should have safeguards against government abuse. My questions might have sounded flippant, but they were sincere. I would like to understand if your position is borne of naïveté, or a sincere preference for fascism.

The police cruiser's primary role is deterrence not investigation or data collection. A better comparison would be stasi informants.

License plates are public property.

Aggregation. Correlation.

look into "dragnet"'s as that's the term (afaik) and the issue at hand.

You are comparing individual human observation with an automated surveillance network. Their capabilities are vastly different. It's like comparing a taser with an M1 Abrams tank.

When it comes to surveillance, it is not enough to say "difference in degree, not in kind". The difference is the degree. Memorising someone's face is not surveillance, building a database of faces is. Seeing someone you recognize go into a store is not surveillance, writing down everywhere they go during the day is.

Because the physical impossibility of a department doing that 24/7 every square inch of a city creates an expectation of privacy.

Because the ability to scale up a bunch of officers sitting around writing down literally everything they see is limited in comparison. It can only be so invasive and “always-on” everywhere. Throwing up a few dozen flock cameras costs a fraction of that and scales incredibly quickly.

>> A difference in degree (of usefulness and speed), not in kind.

No.

Automating the system is ABSOLUTELY a difference in kind. The argument "it is the same thing" is reductionist beyond absurdity.

"Quantity has a quality all its own."

Scaling and automation is a difference in kind in every field, and especially in surveillance of a population. To deny it is to assert the Industrial Revolution, the Computer Revolution, and the Internet had no effect on anything.

A cop sitting by the road operating a speed trap time or radar/laser gun can trap enough speeders to moderate the traffic, and individual speeders get few tickets. Implementing the "same" thing with cameras everywhere and timing toll-booth arrival/departure times and issuing tickets automatically would result in the majority of drivers getting multiple speeding tickets every trip (just based on measured average speeds on most roads exceeding the posted limit).

Your example proves the opposite of what you say.

Having a cop personally observing and writing down license plates requires resources - a decision to prioritize those specific resources for that specific investigation on that day. It is a real decision to surveil people in that way. It means people will ONLY be surveilled in that way when it is important.

In contrast, constant, ubiquitous, and near-cost-free surveillance means people will be surveilled all day, every day.

What was once applied only to exceptionally serious crimes is now available to target any citizen for any petty crime. It enables exactly the kind of silent targeting for which every authoritarian government lusts — the appearance of law and order with the ability to target any specific "troublemaker" at will.

With such surveillance, there is no need for an authoritarian to make false charges or highlight a protest. Jack protests, they don't like it, just say "go after Jack". They go to the cameras, find a bunch of petty crimes, and prosecute. Jack now has endless trouble if not jail, and the regime carries on like nothing happened.

If, as you say, you don't understand why it is not different, stop being reductive, look at the larger system.