Besides the obvious privacy concern: at the very least in my state (Illinois), it's not lawful for public bodies to disclose the license plate numbers read from ALPR cameras, so this data set is necessarily incomplete.
But, give it a year or two, and you can replace this whole website with a black background and 72 point white bold text "YES".
tptacek writes on here sometimes about their activity in local politics. This perspective (from my reading) is that it has a lot of strong support that is difficult to oppose, not that we should give up. Read "give it a year or two" as "give it a year or two of things going as they are".
I strongly suspect a neighborhood in Chicago composed of the kind of demographics the "nice" suburb's residents are worried about would have a very different take on the issue.
And by "strongly suspect" I mean "know because I live in that kind of neighborhood in a different city in a different state".
> strongly suspect a neighborhood in Chicago composed of the kind of demographics the "nice" suburb's residents are worried about would have a very different take on the issue
I live in Jackson Hole. None of my neighbours knew what these were. They’re getting taken out.
Don’t presume what folks are worried about without asking them.
I’m pretty confused by the innuendo in the posters comment to even get what they are saying, but I can report from the south side of chicago that surveillance cameras are largely popular across demographics.
You don't know anything about me or about Oak Park. We killed our Flock contract. I did a good bit of the policy lifting to make that happen, including co-writing our initial pilot ALPR police General Order to lock them down and set up the transparency reporting that enabled us to make the case for killing them. But, keep going, I'm interested in what else you can confidently state about my work.
Speaking as a person of color, the government Oak Park prosecuted me for reasons of my blackness which is racist. The controversey that followed, if you ask me, is why the cameras got shot down. Transparency and not being big brother is just a convenient excuse to put a positive spin on it, as politicians do.
Knowing in extreme and annoying detail exactly the series of events that led us to kill our Flock contract, I do not believe this is at all true. I don't think trolling is a good plan here.
There is already case law that makes the records collected by government through these methods no different than any other public records, especially since they are publicly visible license plate numbers.
That has its own problems because it shields/deflects from the bigger issue of being treasonous, i.e., grotesque violation of the law of the Constitution, through mass surveillance that has also already been abused for various kinds of criminal acts by law enforcement.
In New Hampshire, we banned both public and private ALPRs. You can see on the map that the only ones are at toll booths. Those got explicit exemptions in the law.
Isn't that the state with license plates that say "live free or die?" Unless, of course, you have a moral objection to that statement, cf. Wooley v. Maynard.
Do you see anyone claiming the opposite? The point is that they will not write the motto on your license plate if you object.
I get that HN attracts a certain amount of pedantry, but I can't figure out what exactly you're even trying to be pedantic about. There's not single comment here that could be reasonably interpreted as suggesting that "live free or die" isn't their motto
His pedantic point is that due to the way the original question was written, the answer is “yes” regardless if you object or not.
The question was “isn’t that the state with license plates that say ‘live free or die’?” And even if you get a license plate that doesn’t say it, NH is still the state with those plates
They're not that free about beer. Though, more free about beer than liquor. That's only allowed to be sold in state run liquor stores. It was a real head scratcher when I first encountered it.
Flock is a private company, right. That's the whole schtick. Like, Flock can retain records indefinitely for example, they may sell those records to the government but they're a private party.
Yeah, and as an ex-employee, that's something they heavily "rely" on, and push as an end run around laws.
Like in my state, LE can't collect this stuff directly. Then they started saying "Well, we can do this..." and started contracting for private companies to do the collection on their behalf. When _that_ was legislated away, they've now pivoted to "Well, if the company is doing it of their own accord, we can still purchase the data since it wasn't, technically, created for us."
Yes but: Privatization is an effective way to negate the public's right know.
eg Some companies have claimed trade secret protections to prevent public access. Infamously, election administration vendors like Diebold.
I imagine anyone trying to investigate govt activities conducted by Palantir (for example) will run into similar stonewalling. Even getting the fulltext of contracts can be challenging.
Not automatically. There's aleeady case law(0x1) that ruled that images captured by Flock ALPR cameras are public records, even though the data are stored by Flock (a private vendor), not directly by the city.
The court rejected the notion that “because the data sits on a private server, it’s not a public record.” Instead, it said that since the surveillance is paid for by the public (taxpayers) and used by a public agency, the data must comply with the state’s public-records law.
This shows that — in at least one jurisdiction — using a private company to run ALPRs doesn’t shield the data from public-records requests.
IANAL: That court's decision was based on the contract w/ Flock. It does not move the needle wrt public records.
I may read the decision, testimony, and any amicus briefs. During the 00's, Wash Citizen's for Open Govt had a prominent blindspot wrt tension between privatization and public records (in the shape of Tony Nixon). I'm curious if they were involved with this case, and if their positions have matured.
It's clear in context that they mean your background in computer security and political activism, I don't know where you are getting the idea that it's an comment on your ethnicity.
> at the very least in my state (Illinois), it's not lawful for public bodies to disclose the license plate numbers read from ALPR cameras, so this data set is necessarily incomplete.
They de facto are because they only place cameras in public places and on public land by contract with the government in one form or another; be it with a treasonous sheriff or a treasonous state executive and legislature. The public would not be talking about Flock if they had not worked to create a treasonous surveillance state and instead only did things like monitored truck movements in a logistics depot. The private contracts for things like HOA neighborhoods and corporations, e.g., big box store loss prevention and customer data tracking, but those’s are a totally different issue that have nothing to do with the use of public funds and power for mass surveillance.
at the very least in my state (Illinois), it's not lawful for public bodies to disclose the license plate numbers read from ALPR cameras, so this data set is necessarily incomplete
It's not a dataset of license plate numbers read from ALPR cameras. It's a dataset of license plate numbers that have been entered into search tools.
Enter a license plate to see if it's one of the 2,207,426 plates seen in the 27,177,268 Flock searches we know about.
I commented before realizing that someone else already made the same point earlier, and you already explained that the law covers more than what you mentioned in your first comment.
I have no doubt that local agencies are screwing up the law, which is very new, but in Illinois "ALPR information" means information gathered by an ALPR or created from the analysis of data generated by an ALPR (everything after the quotation marks is a straight excerpt of the statute), and is confidential.
Do not get me started on small public bodies screwing up FOIA.
I'll assume you're correctly citing the statute — someone entering a sequence of characters in a "Search" field doesn't mean that the search term was "gathered by" or "created from the analysis of" ALPR data.
But, give it a year or two, and you can replace this whole website with a black background and 72 point white bold text "YES".