Federal Judge Rules a Flock Search Was ‘Indiscriminate Mass Surveillance’ and Unconstitutional: it’s one of the first times a federal judge has decided Flock searches can be unconstitutional.

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https://www.404media.co/federal-judge-rules-a-flock-search-was-indiscriminate-mass-surveillance-and-unconstitutional/

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Turns out »it’s on a public road« stops being a magic privacy waiver when police can reconstruct a month of your movements with a few clicks. Flock sold dragnet surveillance as a camera network, and a federal judge finally called it what it is: indiscriminate mass surveillance.

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And with enough data, you can morph it into any answer you want.

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I made a video that is tangentially related to this a week and a half ago. There isn’t a ton of reporting on it, but Flock is losing a ton of cash thanks to local privacy movements.

Just in September they lost 100+ contracts. They’ve lost almost 400 since June, in 36 US states.

Seeing the response is the first thing that’s given me a flicker of hope since the Patriot Act passed.

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It’s encouraging, but annoyingly, most startups operate at losses for years. Unless they lose venture funding or more of the rest of the 6000 contracts, that’s not going to stop them.

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That’s great, but the mass surveillance definition also fits Google, Meta, and so much of the internet.

The ALPR data is being collected and stored constantly. Does it only become mass surveillance if law enforcement searches it.? That is the next thing to consider IMO.

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I think we need stronger legal protections against searching our data, even when we put it into the custody of others.

For example, I would like to have security cameras that record to the cloud, but all the big NVR providers will cough up data to law enforcement upon request. That means that a Ring/Nest camera is effectively a police camera.

But that’s bullshit, because the best place to store security camera storage is somewhere other than the property you are surveilling, but I still want my goddamned privacy at home!

So I can either run Chinese network security nightmare cameras whose operators are outside of my jurisdiction, or I can run standard RTSP to my own cloud VPS and hope that it’s harder for the police to get their hands on that footage since I am the NVR operator and can encrypt my footage at rest.

The VPS option I chose is also the most expensive option, and it wasn’t easy to set up.

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What’d you choose?

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the constitution restricts the governments ability to conduct unreasonable searches, not people like google or facebook.

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This is good news, and gotdamn I’ll take my wins where I can get ‘em, but just to clarify, its a victory with caveats:

  • A warrant or probable cause is enough to use ALPRs
  • A subsequent Oklahoma legislative discussion over this matter did not put forth outlining repercussions for violating this new restriction.
  • And likely most difficult of all, the 30-day history was what considered it a search. All Flock would need to do is decrease the history to a few days, which is still just as useful for most investigations, for it to not be considered a search. After writing this out, I learnt Flock already had plans to reduce to a 7-day window.

So again, this is a good thing despite these flaws. I’d rather have some limits than none at all, but keep pursuing this. The fight has always been about whether this tech should be allowed or not, not whether or not you need to look suspicious. I can’t help but feel that until a large case at the supreme court happens, our best route is still via legislative endeavors. While its scummy that politicians are only now addressing it when they’re around an election time, it’s still gaining traction nonetheless.

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We have a thing in the constitution about this. It’s called"unreasonable searches and seizures”. But cops don’t care about that.

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So by extension the entire surveillance state apparatus

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Americans will never stand up for their own privacy because the vast majority of them thinks they’re talking about OTHER people - not them.

Even now, just like with the out of control law enforcement, they think somehow those cameras aren’t looking at THEM.

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Actually, you’re kinda wrong.

There’s not a ton of reporting on it, but Flock has lost 100+ contracts, just in September. They’ve lost 400ish since June. This has been across 36 US states.

People are standing up, we’re just not hearing about it because the vast majority are doing so via the boring, pedestrian democratic process. And to be fair, I didn’t know this either until I did research for a video I made about the Flock buyout a week ago.

This is also a good reminder that, while you have zero political power nationally, you have a ton of power locally if you’re willing to attend city council meetings and speak.

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“I have nothing to hide"
-Clueless morons

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Change is a slow process. We have a system to follow to reverse all this but it doesn’t happen overnight. We don’t want violence or property damage.

No one thinks cameras aren’t looking at them. It seems you are out of touch with real Americans and only get your information from social media.

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Comments in News@lemmy.world

Can this be used as leverage for a class action lawsuit to get these cameras removed?

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Hopefully it also applies to axon, Motorola and any others

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Even if it isn’t, this ruling makes flock effectively useless for its intended purpose so they’ll possibly just stop using them.

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more likely change the laws

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Not really.

“Alaniz then pulled his vehicle on the highway to follow the Mazda for no apparent reason other than the fact that it had a California license plate. Alaniz also ran a query on the Flock system for the California license plate number on the Mazda SUV,” Hill wrote. Alaniz then ostensibly pulled Kyle over for changing lanes without a turn signal.

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“The Court finds that because the ALPR systems Alaniz used to search Kyle’s historical location information intruded on her reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of her physical movements, it was a search under the Fourth Amendment. Based on the information in the record, the only reason Alaniz conducted that search was because he saw her license plate was from California.”

All this ruling means is that they’ll need to come up with a minor traffic violation to pull you over for first, and do the database search second once they have “probable cause.” The ruling doesn’t say they can’t use Flock, just that they can’t use it without some sort of offense being investigated. If this cop had waited until she did a lane change without signaling before doing a Flock search, then it seems like this judge would be okay with it.

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Was it the cameras that are unconstitutional, or the search derived from floc’s data/ai-shit?

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