L.A. Police: All Cars In L.A. Are Under Investigation 405
An anonymous reader writes with a link to an article by the EFF's Jennifer Lynch, carried by Gizmodo, which reports that the L.A. Police Department and L.A. Sheriff's Department "took a novel approach in the briefs they filed in EFF and the ACLU of Southern California's California Public Records Act lawsuit seeking a week's worth of Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) data. They have argued that 'All [license plate] data is investigatory.' The fact that it may never be associated with a specific crime doesn't matter. This argument is completely counter to our criminal justice system, in which we assume law enforcement will not conduct an investigation unless there are some indicia of criminal activity. In fact, the Fourth Amendment was added to the U.S. Constitution exactly to prevent law enforcement from conducting mass, suspicionless investigations under "general warrants" that targeted no specific person or place and never expired.
ALPR systems operate in just this way. The cameras are not triggered by any suspicion of criminal wrongdoing; instead, they automatically and indiscriminately photograph all license plates (and cars) that come into view. ... Taken to an extreme, the agencies' arguments would allow law enforcement to conduct around-the-clock surveillance on every aspect of our lives and store those records indefinitely on the off-chance they may aid in solving a crime at some previously undetermined date in the future. If the court accepts their arguments, the agencies would then be able to hide all this data from the public."
ALPR systems operate in just this way. The cameras are not triggered by any suspicion of criminal wrongdoing; instead, they automatically and indiscriminately photograph all license plates (and cars) that come into view. ... Taken to an extreme, the agencies' arguments would allow law enforcement to conduct around-the-clock surveillance on every aspect of our lives and store those records indefinitely on the off-chance they may aid in solving a crime at some previously undetermined date in the future. If the court accepts their arguments, the agencies would then be able to hide all this data from the public."
Everyone is a potential criminal in L.A. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm going to take a wild guess that claim is going to get bounced out of court. Sounds more like a stalling tactic than a real defense. Unless the L.A. PD is going to try and make the case that everyone in L.A. is suspicious, in which case they might have a point.
Re:Everyone is a potential criminal in L.A. (Score:4, Insightful)
Really? You think it'll get thrown out of court? Because it seems more likely that it'll set a new precedent as being A-OK.
Laws are for the commoners, not the elite. You should know that by now.
Re:Everyone is a potential criminal in L.A. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Everyone is a potential criminal in L.A. (Score:5, Insightful)
And read the article summary at the top of the page, again. It is a textbook case-study defining the term "Police State".
A police state is not one, contrary to cold-war era thrillers, where armed men patrol every street corner, asking for "papers".
A police state is the one, where, subject to arbitrary criminal suspicion by default, individualsnhave de facto rights that are inferior to the rights for police to act, at every level from municipal to federal.
Enjoy your police state, America.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Everyone is a potential criminal in L.A. (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't take back what you want without giving up everything you have now.
Let's say that, hypothetically, you were to start a small revolution.
To begin with, what would happen is you would be criminalised, and called terrorists. Your friends and family would be turned against you (if it was known who you were). Should you go anonymously, they would be turned against the idea. Either way, the propaganda machine would go into overdrive, showing you to be evil commie terrorists, and people would accept what the state told them about your rebel group.
It would be a bitch trying to gather any public support, with the state constantly whispering in everyone's ear that you were the bad and nasty people, trying to get rid of their democratic rights.
So, you would need to be striking publicly, and often.
What would happen then? Well, you'd get caught. You're in a surveillance state. Cameras everywhere. Cops, military everywhere. Drones everywhere.
Loyal members of the public everywhere.
I have no idea how you could possibly win. You've been so blindly led to believe that you have your true freedom that you have allowed them to take it piece by piece in a bloodless coup. You gave up all that your great-great-great-great grandfathers died for, all in the hope of being the next famous rich bitch.
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Actually the systems inevitably self destruct. Psychopathic societies run by psychopaths must fail because that is their nature, the rule of selfishness, greed, ego and lust, consumes itself. The parasite can not prey upon itself not matter how hard it tries. The rich and the greedy empower the police state and by the same token they can take that power away, hence the police state must eliminate them in order to ensure they can survive. Those now at the top, find each other to be the threat and the larger
Re:Everyone is a potential criminal in L.A. (Score:4, Insightful)
The solution to this is to stop believing in all powerful government is capable of giving you everything you need. While it might be possible to give you everything you need, the cost is everything you have, for any government that can give you everything you need, can take everything you have. To some people, this is acceptable compromise. To me it isn't.
Decentralized governance is the ONLY real solution to the tyranny that is inevitable otherwise. The problem with Decentralization is that progressive politics doesn't fair well on a micro scale, and leads to tyranny on the macro scale. Of course the Progressives will come out with name calling "hate" speech to shut people up. I don't fear them ... yet.
Re:Everyone is a potential criminal in L.A. (Score:5, Funny)
Do you mean Mall of America?
That's owned by Canadians I believe.
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It's okay, it's a dumb name and there's no particular reason why anyone should know it. People act like if you don't know what this lawn is called, that you can't possibly know shit about politics. Welcome to slashdot.
Re:Everyone is a potential criminal in L.A. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Everyone is a potential criminal in L.A. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Everyone is a potential criminal in L.A. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you follow a rigorous year long program, where you stop listening to lunatics, you might just climb up that intelligence scale. It must be hard to spend you life at functional moron. I hope we can help you.
Re:Everyone is a potential criminal in L.A. (Score:4, Insightful)
Your honor, of course all cars are under investigation. Haven't you read Harvey Silverglate's "Three Felonies a Day"? We can, with reasonable accuracy, suspect that any individual is a criminal!
Re:Everyone is a potential criminal in L.A. (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally, I like to point out that the government as tried -- repeatedly -- to count the number of federal laws that exist. It has never succeeded [wsj.com].
One begins to question why ignorance of the law isn't a legitimate defense when the laws cannot even be enumerated.
Just validating registration tags ... (Score:2)
Re:Just validating registration tags ... (Score:5, Insightful)
And if it were actually used for this purpose you could simply download a list of plates whose registrations have expired or been revoked into each scanner, and have the scanner report it when it saw one of those plates. In other words the LAPD's monitoring goes way beyond what is necessary to enforce the law, which is (or used to be) strongly frowned on by the courts.
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So if you have invalid stolen plates ...
Big deal. Just use a white list instead of a black list.
the existing system has a near-infinite upgrade path ... [your system is] a hardware locked-down system with limited utility.
That's the point.
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There's a good reason they have a worldwide reputation for corruption.
Re:Everyone is a potential criminal in L.A. (Score:5, Interesting)
Not necessarily everyone in the world.
But to the NSA, certainly *EVERYONE* inside the United States of America is suspicious.
I read a line from TFA with disbelieve ...
"This argument is completely counter to our criminal justice system, in which we assume law enforcement will not conduct an investigation unless there are some indicia of criminal activity"
How naive the author of TFA can be !
The author should have known that the so-called "criminal justice system" of the United States of America is no longer the same one under the Constitution of the United States of America !
Under the "Patriot Act", under the Bush and Obama Administration, United States of America has essentially become the United Soviet of America.
There is no longer the presumption of innocent until proven guilty.
Nowadays, *EVERYONE IS A SUSPECT* no matter what you have done.
Nowadays, It is *UP TO THE DEFENDANT* to prove himself/herself innocent.
Yesssirreee, that's the USA that we've gotten, the United -freaking- SOVIET of America.
Re:Everyone is a potential criminal in L.A. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yesssirreee, that's the USA that we've gotten, the United -freaking- SOVIET of America.
You really have no idea what that word means, do you?
The United Soviet of America (Score:3, Insightful)
Which word ? "Soviet" ?
In my youth we learned Russian in schools, and if I do not know what that word means, I might as well be blind.
The current situation in America is such that the councils are filled with people such as Feinstein / Obama who want to change the United States into a Police State.
And we have nothing else to fall back on...
Used to be that the congress / the court system and the White House are the three prongs of our government, and each of one is used to check the other two.
No more.
Nowaday
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+1 Decisively Proved Parent Accusation of Ignorance Unfounded
Re:Everyone is a potential criminal in L.A. (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, they dubbed the term 'constitutionalist' and filed it under terrorist. Fact of the matter, they are corporate bitches, and we the people are paying the price of corporate fear of reprisal for their own actions with our freedoms and additional cost on their 'security', and we the people get shit and a broke and hungry government. There were documents that leaked from the FBI back in 2002 that explained the irrational fear driven classification of a terrorist. I didn't believe it when I first saw it, but yeah it is true.
Re: Everyone is a potential criminal in L.A. (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing but sit back and relax im in Canada , have no fear if you got nothing to hide.
As long as Americans are comfy in their little houses living their little meaningless pointless lives nothing will change.
Comfort is what keeps the Americans totally immobile while their government fu**s them all. Nothing will change.
Americans will never do anything to save themselves as long as their pillows are comfy.In fact it's going to get worse before
anyone even starts to lift a finger. Way worse , by then , it will be too late for them.
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"the best defense against change is making sure people believe they have something to lose"
tree of liberty (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:tree of liberty (Score:4, Funny)
Pre Crime (Score:2)
A way to become competent? (Score:3)
LA's cops department is notoriously incompetent -- need I quote chapter and verse? -- and, perhaps the civic leaders see this as a substitute for real police work.
If so, perhaps the courts, in their infinite wisdom, will rein these devices in. If not, well, who cares? They can track my movements through my iPad or mobile phone anyway.
Where do I sign up for the tour of the Gulag?
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I've ridden with the LAPD - have you? Most are extremely competent and driven to do the right thing. I see 3 things that drag them down:
1. Massive amounts of crime - both in quantity and quality. They do what they can. IMHO they need to quadruple the number of parole and investigation officers.
2. The organization is too big. That invites middle management with skewed goals and climbing the corporate ladder just like every other psychotic corporation.
3. Misinfotainment reporting varies from half truths
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Here's LAPD "community outreach": http://www.amazon.com/Daryl-F-Gates-Police-Quest-PC/dp/B000CQF5V6 [amazon.com]
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1 could at least be partially solved by rationalizing our laws and fixing our society. The U.S. has a greater percentage of it's people in prison than even repressive states like China. That's not just bad luck.
As long as 2 is true, GPs comment is valid.
3 may be an issue, but Rodney King and the reports of innocent civilians being shot up are not made up. They happened.
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Massive amounts of crime - both in quantity and quality. They do what they can. IMHO they need to quadruple the number of parole and investigation officers.
Bullshit. Crime, especially violent crime, has been on the steady decline for 40 or 50 years. Google it. And violence against police dropped significantly also. You're as full of shit as they are.
The organization is too big. That invites middle management with skewed goals and climbing the corporate ladder just like every other psychotic corporation.
So you're saying institutional incompetence justifies violating the Constitution and the rights of the enemies of the police which from the police departments view is anyone not a cop.
Misinfotainment reporting varies from half truths to outright lies.
Yeah you're sure right there is a lot of that. But it isn't coming from where you seem to think it is and it certainly has you brain
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Remember? Before they killed him, they told him that they'd launch a transparent investigation into his firing, just as he had demanded.
I'm still waiting for the results of that investigation. For some reason, I haven't heard anything yet.
I'm guessing that the investigation stopped at the same time as Dorner's pulse. Fuck the LAPD.
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Don't you know you have to use monkeys if you want to type Shakespeare?
The shades of Chief Gates (Score:3)
This is a police force where the Chief of Police in the 1990's, Daryl F. Gates, said [latimes.com] that casual drug users "ought to be taken out and shot," which prescription being specifically aimed at those "who blast some pot on a casual basis."
Mr. Gates is no long with us, but not because of any repudiation by the LAPD.
In USSA, you are guilty until proven innocent. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the new reality. The laws just haven't been changed yet. Yet. And yes, the terrorists have won, by making the government and law enforcement do the terrorism for them.
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The terrorists had little to do with this. Government has been going down this road for some time. Sometimes there is opposition, like this, sometimes it gets cheered on, like "healthcare reform" and digitization. The end result in either case is more electronic records available to the government, and less privacy for you.
Re:In USSA, you are guilty until proven innocent. (Score:4, Insightful)
"constitutional rights" weren't even a thing in this country until the 60s and 70s. The bill of rights was basically a dead letter from the day it was ratified until the civil rights era.
Don't they need... (Score:2)
Reasonable suspicion or probable cause first?
Nothing is reasonable about scanning every single license plate you see. If the camera could scan the color/make/year etc of the vehicle, the compare that against known stolen vehicles or vehicles used in other crimes FIRST, then I could see them scanning the plate and doing further investigation, but just blindly scanning plates and recording their location is very disturbing.
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Reasonable suspicion or probable cause first?
If they want to go poking around in your garage, sure. If the car's out on the street, not so much.
Nothing is reasonable about scanning every single license plate you see.
That, by itself, sounds pretty reasonable to me. Storing the data - especially that pertaining to not-immediately-flagged vehicles - is where it starts to get murkier, and yet there it's also still just an automation of what a cop could do - albeit to a far lesser extent - with a pen and paper.
Re:Don't they need... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is what I was thinking. Have the cameras doing the scanning, no problem. The camera scans a plate, then does a search for specific violations such as: Is the vehicle reported stolen, Has the vehicle been flagged as having received more than N parking or traffic violations, etc. Only a few select items to scan for. If it's a positive match, flag it and track it and notify an officer. If it's not, immedielty purge the record and move on to the next one.
To me, that does not sound wholy unreasonable.
Everyone needs... (Score:2)
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...to get/make an IR License Plate frame.
You do know that they are quite useless against ANPR systems. Most digital cameras can ignore or filter IR these days, even your cheap $75 point and shoot wont be stopped by it.
Public View (Score:2)
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Do private detectives need licences?
What kind of stalking crimes are there?
Re:Public View (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree. Anything in public view is fair game for recording
Yet another who fails to see any difference between incidental recordings of something in public view and massive systemic recording of everything.
There is a difference.
As a society we've consented to the idea that anything we say or do in public may be seen or heard by someone else. We also accept that it might incidentally be captured on film.
But we DID NOT ever accept the the idea that we accept systematic surveillance of everything we say or do in public.
We accept that the person at the next table at the restaurant, or the service staff might overhear a part of our conversation. We accept that the family taking birthday photos two tables over might catch us in the background.We do not accept that the police can install mic's and camera's at every table in every restaurant, record everything, and store it forever.
They are NOT the same damned thing at all.
I'm mystified why people like you wish to argue that they are the same, or that acceptance of the former means we automatically accept the latter.
I don't. Most of society agrees with me. We can see there is a difference, and we can draw a line between incidental recordings, and surveillance. What exactly do you find so difficult to understand about it?
The law should reflect the society we want to live in; its that simple. People like you seem to wish to want to trap society into the unintended consequences of the laws we have. But that's not how its supposed to work.
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The idea that you can somehow have both a society where everyone has a audio-visial recoding device on their person at all times, but somehow magically expect law enforcement to not be recording things of interest is pants-on-head-retated.
I also support people being allowed to carry guns as ubiquitously as cameras, and simultaneously expect them not to shoot each other with those either.
Too much time on their hands (Score:3)
It sounds like they have too much time on their hands. Perhaps they are overstaffed and in need of some headcount reductions in order to regain focus.
If you can't beat them... (Score:5, Interesting)
...Join them.
I believe another strategy on this would be to setup a crowdsource movement to create Android based ALPR devices and scatter them all over LA County and have these devices harvest data for uploading to the web for EVERYONE to view, especially with the ability to get real-time tracking on any California (E) plated (governmental) vehicle.
By doing this, it would encourage the lawmakers to make it a requirement to have a specific warrant before this data collected by anyone. This assumes that the new law would be designed to raise barriers to "amateurs" entering the ALPR business and use them indiscriminately.
Best results if that can also be done in the District of Columbia and Sacramento, CA so we can keep tabs on our lawmakers actions.
What about private companies? (Score:5, Interesting)
I am not saying, "So we should let LAPD scan license plates". What I am saying is whatever argument you use against LAPD is valid an order of magnitude more for private companies too. And any solution, change we propose should also prohibit such private companies from consolidating such data into some kind of national data base queriable by private detective agencies, repossession companies, divorce lawyers, etc.
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You don't still have Railway police there? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R... [wikipedia.org] Or the other varieties of private police that have "If they have attended the basic law enforcement officer's training academy in the state in which they work, they may be granted powers of citation, investigation, arrest or detention authority as long as it does not violate state law." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... [wikipedia.org]
They used to be much more common and seem to be making a comeback.
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They can't arrest you outright, but they can manipulate the financial and legal system in such a way that they can just get the police to arrest you.
There's been numerous articles on the shady practices of collections agencies who file bogus cases (unverified claims, inadequate documentation, falsified notification, etc) for debts as small as video rental late fees. Since they don't make an effort to notify you (using old addresses, etc) they are able to get default judgements, bench warrants, etc issued a
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The Constitution provides protection from action by the government, but not from private parties.
I suspect that the framers did not envision a time where private companies would have the ability to perform surveillance activities at or beyond the scale of what governments are capable of. At some point a real conversation needs to take place, and we need to determine if unlimited tracking/investigation of citizens by private organizations is in the best interest of the nation.
In case you haven't noticed... (Score:2)
This argument is completely counter to our criminal justice system
Law enforcement personnel don't think about these things the same way the rest of us do.
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Depending on the question that can simply be a training issue.
ARGUS... (Score:2)
I fail to see how this is any worse than ARGUS, which _HAS_ been deployed over US cities as well as foreign conflict zones. The limiting factor is currently the storage space, but its not hard to imagine one of these things flying over every US city in the next decade storing a couple months of video.
Really, this has been going on for years with spy Satellites too, and no one really seems to care because the exact capabilities are still classified, but i'm betting ARGUS is just complementary to what we alre
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Have you ever watched people in public? Lots of nose picking and self preening as if nobody was around. Most people are too self involved to have it affect their lives. The people 4sd's from the mean, the paranoid and the criminal, don't make up enough of the population to have any effect.
EFF bites Orwell (Score:2)
If the EFF really wants to take a bite of Orwellian ass, they should campaign relentlessly to have the phrase "identity theft" replaced by the phrase "credential theft".
FFS, no-one can steal my gosh-darned identity until they can call up any of my nearest and dearest family members and convince them that it is really me over the course of an hour-long phone conversation.
I'd count that as actual identity theft.
All we get for this careless throwing around of the phrase "identity theft" is taking the spotlight
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If the EFF really wants to take a bite of Orwellian ass, they should campaign relentlessly to have the phrase "identity theft" replaced by the phrase "credential theft".
It used to be that when someone convinced the bank to given them your money, it was called a bank robbery.
fight back already you pussies. (Score:5, Insightful)
i'm getting tired of this, is anyone else?
they want not just license plate cameras, but to track all of your movements. disable your vehicle if they want. UAVs with cameras now and guns later. wiretapping everything. they want complete tracking of what we buy, who we know, where we go, who we fuck, our entire genome.
all this personal private data in the grimy hands of people that we don't know, and dont trust, collected with our supposed consent because a few people signed a 'protect us from everything at whatever cost' bills after some terrorist fear mongering.
'public view is up for grabs' is a terrifying concept. there's a big difference between someone taking a picture of you on the street, and a cop taking pictures of everyone on the street all the time, so it can be harvested electrically for suspicious activities.
i won't live in a police state, and i wont move either.
we are the nerds. we are the ones that made this shit up! they're misusing our technology here
that also means we are the ones with the capability to destroy these electronic monitoring devices in the least damaging way possible
we also seem to form one of the communities with a very high percentage of people that have a gut feeling that this kind of thing is terribly wrong, and that realise how much it's going to get worse.
we dont need activists or guerilla armies to get ourselves out of this mess, the future is now. we need nerds to fight, not guns.
at what point do we save the power hungry morons and the whining fearful masses that keep signing off on all this stuff from screwing ordinary innocent people over?
at what point will it be necessary to destroy these implements of monitoring with technological means?
i hope this gets me on a terrorism list. this kind of stuff comes to my neck of the woods, i'm going to try my best to fuck it up.
Re:No expectation of privacy (Score:5, Insightful)
Thats a lie that has been repeated so often that you have started to believe it. In a civil society privacy is expected even when we are walking down the street. How you say? Because in a civil society we respect each other and respect each others privacy.
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There is a certain expectation of privacy while in public - and a cop who follows you around every time you leave your home and then repeatedly cites you for trivial violations would be found guilty of harassment. However, if you are suspected of significant criminal activities and investigators follow you to check those activities out - that's not harassment... it's like porn - the judge knows it when he sees it.
Privacy in Public is a New Concept (Score:3)
In a civil society privacy is expected even when we are walking down the street.
Not necessarily. Pre-industrial revolution most people lived in small enough communities that they would be recognised by many of the people they would meet in the street. The difference was that you would recognize the observers so it was a symmetric loss of privacy. With modern surveillance it is a one-way privacy loss: you have no idea who is doing the observing and yet they can look up all your details and track your every move which is a bit different from having the village gossip noticing your comin
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If a police officer followed you constantly throughout the day would you be alright with it? Because the courts are not, it requires a warrant, otherwise it's called harassment and is illegal. How does changing the surveillance to an electronic type alter the law. This falls under surveillance abuse, a form of harassment.
Surveillance abuse is the use of surveillance methods or technology to monitor the activity of an individual or group of individuals in a way which violates the social norms or laws of a so
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I don't know where you got your legal training, but you are plumb wrong on several points.
To wit: since the middle of the last century at least, police are prohibited from harassing individuals not suspected of a crime. They may *not* follow you excessively, even on a freeway in a marked car, waiting for you to make an error so they can charge you. Nor may they do similar in person. Case law substantiates this.
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And are all of the controls in place to prevent unauthorized use of the data, or can anyone with access browse at will? The police have already stated that release of the data violates privacy.
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I didn't ask what were lawful and unlawful uses of the data. I asked whether proper controls are in place to monitor access to the data. Who is recording the activity of the police?
Re:No expectation of privacy (Score:5, Insightful)
>When operating a motor vehicle on a public roadway, there is no expectation of privacy attached to your license plate number, or your location. A police officer can >follow you around all day without a warrant, and run as many checks on your plate number as he desires, and make a note of everywhere you go.
Actually no this would be called harassment and is illegal.
Re:No expectation of privacy (Score:5, Insightful)
The law also does not provide that the police officers can stalk you 24/7 without some sort of warrant.
The laws were originally written when there was no "Orwellian" state where you could anonymously watched/recorded in public everywhere. Lets no pretend incidentally stumbling onto a suspicious conversation is the same as monitoring EVERY conversation.
Re:No expectation of privacy (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no expectation of privacy when you are out in public
Stop repeating this nonsense; there is some degree of privacy even in public. The kind of privacy that's being discussed is privacy from being spied on by ubiquitous government surveillance devices that are installed in public places.
nor in anything that can be investigated with plain human senses (plain view, plain smell, etc).
The idea that hearing a conversation (or something similar) is the same as sticking surveillance devices everywhere in public places is simply absurd. I don't know why so many people are so stupid as to not be able to see that using humans to conduct surveillance on other humans would require massive manpower that machines don't require, or that this gives them a convenient and cost-effective way to collect all this data in a central location. The differences are absolutely huge; quit being an idiot.
You guys need to get over yourselves.
You need to get over yourself; your mentality literally ruins countries.
Your arguments have been debunked time and time again. I think you people are just willfully ignorant, or hate freedom and privacy.
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Expanding on an idea I posted above:
There are gunshot monitoring systems installed in many major cities - a network of microphones that can be used to determine where a shot was fired from. This is considered reasonable and not an invasion of privacy.
On the other hand, it would also be possible to install a network of microphones that monitor all conversations on the public street, with frighteningly good ability to zero in on individual conversations. The audio could be compressed and stored cheaply, and
Re:No expectation of privacy (Score:5, Insightful)
I love privacy and freedom, but not privacy to conceal criminal acts, and freedom to commit them.
If you want police to have the ability to infringe upon people's privacy and freedom to get at the 'bad guys,' then you don't actually love freedom or privacy.
The bottom line is that police are allowed to engage in general surveillance (it's called "patrolling") for the purpose of controlling crime.
Which has nothing to do with ubiquitous and automatic surveillance of public places. Stop trying to equate the two things.
Your expectation of privacy ends at the border of the public space.
Stop putting forth this nonsensical and incorrect (There is some degree of privacy even in public places.) argument as if it's a justification for automatic and ubiquitous surveillance. I do *not* believe for one millisecond that the government should have to the power to install surveillance devices everywhere in public places just to stop the big, bad bogeymen you're so scared of.
Having an expectation of privacy in the public space is antithetical to freedom, and is antithetical to a civilized society
It's antithetical to neither, and opposing ubiquitous surveillance of public places is certain not antithetical to either. Again, you fail at understanding the real issue.
I've never seen a bigger bunch of vocal kooks who don't want their rights protected, which is exactly what defines you and your ilk. You are the ones who hate freedom and individual liberty, because you want to make it impossible for those rights to be protected.
The government is supposed to be 'good'; it's supposed to respect people's rights. If we surrender our rights for 'safety' (Which likely doesn't even exist.), then we have tyranny. The government should be *better* than mere criminals. When it comes to these rights, you should be afraid of the government, not random bogeymen that the government claims it will protect you from.
I oppose this precisely because I want my rights and privacy protected. In a free society, individual liberties and privacy are considered more important than safety. That is why the TSA and NSA surveillance are evil, and would be evil *even if* they were effective.
If you're going to try to equate patrolling to ubiquitous surveillance again, don't even bother with a reply.
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The Constitution says no such thing.
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Unfortunately, the "expectation of privacy" in what people do in their daily lives is gradually being shrunk to the point where soon it will no longer exist. At that point, the brown stains being wiped across the US Constitution will completely obscure the words of 4th Amendment.
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A police officer can follow you around all day without a warrant, and run as many checks on your plate number as he desires, and make a note of everywhere you go.
Your whole life, for no reason? Nope.
Re: (Score:2)
The 4th Amendment's warrant requirement only applies when there is an expectation of privacy.
And if they can get the data, there's no expectation of privacy.
Circular reasoning at its best.
Re:No expectation of privacy (Score:5, Insightful)
The 4th Amendment's warrant requirement only applies when there is an expectation of privacy. There is no expectation of privacy when you are out in public, nor in anything that can be investigated with plain human senses (plain view, plain smell, etc).
When operating a motor vehicle on a public roadway, there is no expectation of privacy attached to your license plate number, or your location. A police officer can follow you around all day without a warrant, and run as many checks on your plate number as he desires, and make a note of everywhere you go.
An officer does not need a warrant to listen to a conversation you have with someone at a park, nor does he need a warrant to take a sniff of whatever it is you're smoking outside your office.
You guys need to get over yourselves.
In that case, taking a video of a police officer in a public place should not be a problem.
Re:No expectation of privacy (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, but this is BS. I have such an expectation of privacy. That you would deny it to me means that this is a political, not a legal, matter, and merely stating that an officer does not need a warrant does not cut it in political discourse. I would also note that there is nothing, not one syllable, in the 4th Amendment about expectations of privacy in limiting the search of your "effects" (i.e., your personal property, such as, e.g., your car). All of this is a later invention by the courts; being invented, it can be changed as conditions change, and they have indeed changed.
In the internet jargon, surveillance in a free society does not scale. It is one thing if a policeman walks down my street and happens to smell or see something. It is quite another if, say, I woke up to find that there are 20 policemen stationed just outside my curtilage, each trying to peer in my windows with binoculars, and they stayed in position all day, every day. To be blunt, one is reasonable, the other, tyranny. SImilarly, if every time I drove away from my house I was followed by a convoy of police cars tracking my every move, I would conclude that I was the victim of official harassment (or worse), and react accordingly (say, by going to a Judge and / or the newspapers with my complaints).
Now that is possible to obtain this level of surveillance without actually delegating 20 policemen to peer through my windows, or to follow me about, and without it being obvious to the victim, the legal system will simply have to expand the legal expectations of privacy, or we will find ourselves living in a Stasi-like tyranny.
Re:No expectation of privacy (Score:4, Insightful)
you are implicitly agreeing to be subject to all of the regulations of the state.
That might be how the law views things, but in reality, going about your business doesn't mean you implicitly agree to anything. Tyrannical governments love this sort of 'logic', though. It's like saying that you implicitly agree to have government thugs molest you at airports merely because you try to get on a plane; I believe that's been argued, but it's bullshit nonetheless.
Absolutely, because anyone can do that and in that respect you have no expectation of privacy.
The whole concept of "expectation of privacy" is garbage, because if the government violates people's privacy enough, any expectations of privacy will no longer be "reasonable." Rather, the question should be, "Should people have privacy in this instance?" The question of whether an individual can observe others in a public place is *completely different* from the question of whether the government should have the power to install surveillance devices everywhere in public places; they shouldn't have such a power.
This forum is a voice for lots of people who speak very loudly about something they claim to care about (constitutional rights) but know practically nothing about it.
It's also apparently a place for cretins to speak of laws in place of morality or ethics, and pretend that everyone else is talking about laws, even when some are talking about morality.
Re: (Score:3)
You speak of "the law" as if it were some decree from a tyrant.
I speak of the law as if it isn't the same as morality. I speak of the law as if bad laws can be created quite easily, even in countries like the US.
This isn't how "the law" sees this: this is how the population sees it.
That would be true if the population were perfectly informed and agreed with their representatives 100%. Otherwise, claiming that that's the case is just bad logic.
Without "the law" that you so resent, you'd be hunkered down behind a mud wall in your hovel trying to hold back the hoards. Law and civilization go hand-in-hand.
I don't know what nonsense you're trying to put forth, but it isn't working, cretin. Objecting to certain laws and such is far from advocating anarchy. What I have a problem with is when people start
Re: (Score:2)
What's next? Courts requiring an NDA before you're allowed participate in the justice system?
Re:Big Government (Score:4, Interesting)
But neither party is interested in ending the intrusive, ineffective "War on Drugs".
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
This is all about pretending the hippies lost.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
So...don't vote Republican?
Government is smaller under Obama, and the Bush tax increase was stopped by his continuation of the tax cuts for the rich.
WHAT
FUCKING
PLANET
DO
YOU
LIVE
ON?
US Government spending, 2008, (last budget sign by Bush II) [wikipedia.org]: $2.9 trillion
US govt spending, 2013 [wikipedia.org]: $3.8 trillion
What color is the sky on a planet where going from $2.9 trillion to 3.8 trillion in 5 years is smaller?
SMALLER!?!?!?!?!
Re:Big Government (Score:5, Informative)
You forgot, Iraq was off the books.
Re: (Score:3)
What? How was Iraq off the books? You mean like they funded it through private donations? Maybe they had a car wash to pay for it?
Re:Big Government (Score:5, Informative)
Have a look [theguardian.com]. Then Google.
Don't forget 'deferred costs'.
The same people who are happy to demand that the USPS save up for the retirement of employees not even born yet are also perfectly happy to not count any of the future costs we have committed to in the war.
But to the broader point, for the last several decades it's been the Republicans running the huge deficits (even while talking about 'small' government). Clinton actually got us to a budget *SURPLUS* briefly, but GW Bush took care of that!
Obama hasn't done as well, but then he inherited an economic disaster of epic proportions.
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Re: (Score:2)
Classifying logical fallacies on slashdot is assigned homework for IB logic students.
Re: (Score:3)
... police officers are also there to protect you from those who might want to take your money or otherwise commit a crime against you.
No. No they are not. They are there to fill out the paperwork concerning your dead body. They have no requirement to actually protect you AND you have very few legal options to protect yourself.
Obligation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W... [wikipedia.org]
Second Amendment rights being abrogated are evidence of the latter.
Enjoy
Re: (Score:2)
How about they only get to save data on "known bad" plates - expired, no insurance, stolen, warrants, etc.? That isn't so much data, and it isn't like there isn't CPU power to waste these days. The plate readers they use now on police cars are loaded with lists like that. You get a match, it gets saved. If not, it gets deleted.
Re: (Score:2)
... check them against their internal "hot list" which might be oh say... 5 to 7 items, ...
FTFY.
It's always best to be honest in your reportings and not make biased digs, people will be more understanding. You will still be attacked though...
Re: (Score:3)
The TSA is merely a trial program for a much larger notion. Yes, people are next. They just have to scale out the TSA's operation.