To Google and apple's credit they have at the least made location history stored on device instead of dealing with the slippery slope of warrants that ask for all devices around a point. Google specifically decided after a court ruling to get out of the morass of server side storage. There is a lot wrong with how permissioning works on android and Google services but this is not one of them.
So the device should require very specific license plates to scan for—not the current dragnet. The software should only "ping" when there is a confident match with said license plate(s)—and merely log which license plate, time stamp a single photo, and note the confidence level of it being a match.
The frame buffer should be the only place (a frame of) video is ever stored at all (excepting the high-confidence match indicated above).
The only issue remaining would be whether we trust the device/software to have complied (and not have a backdoor) and of course there needs to be a legal warrant for every license plate uploaded (and it should expire fairly frequently, likely requiring a new warrant to continue canning for the plate).
That is a technical solution to a problem that has a far cheaper, and less easily abused solution: don't put up cameras at all.
Building a system with "safeguards" in place that require constant oversight is destined for either regulatory capture of the oversight, or slow dismantling of the oversight.
There seems to be a real reduction in property crime in some places with cameras. I don’t think it’s realistic to take these down everywhere. (I was in the camp that they should go down everywhere. I’ve relaxed that position recently.)
Cameras are great. Especially with diverse ownership.
Police can walk about, ask or order (warrant) for footage.
A network of AI powered cameras linked to the hive mind controlled by real life super mega evil corp inc run by real life super villains... not so great.
Also the 4th amendment is a thing. Mosaic theory is a thing.
I don't think that police should be allowed to ask camera owners to voluntarily hand over footage, even if they would be willing to. That just allows them to privatize the mechanism of surveillance, similar to using data brokers to get around warrant requirements. Instead, I think that even where camera owners would willingly hand over footage, the state should still be required to obtain a warrant for said footage in order to preserve legal safeguards around evidence collection.
I’m okay with them asking private citizens. I own my own cameras, and that video lives on my own NVRs, and all of that is 100% on my own property. And I get to choose if I want to share that with them, presumably to help solve a crime that has affected one of my neighbors. But they need to come ask me and talk to me in person.
I’m not okay with them using the third-party doctrine and going to a company like Amazon and having them do a dragnet for them.
And I’m really not okay with having a company like Flock make all that information publicly available to any bozo with a friend at a law enforcement organization who wants to make a little money on the side.
> And I get to choose if I want to share that with them
Are you sure about that?
Not sure where you are what laws specifically apply, but I believe you could be compelled to hand over footage, and jailed for obstruction or destruction of evidence if you didn’t.
Just a thought - you may have less control than you think.
I can't speak for everyone, but I've lived in countries where there are cameras everywhere, e.g. Singapore, China, where crime is almost zero compared to the US, and it is incredibly safe to be anywhere at almost any hour. Actual criminals are usually caught and apprehended very quickly. That part feels nice, that it is vanishingly unlikely to get mugged just for going out to get food at 2am.
What can make them suck is authorities abusing them to do enforce arbitrary, unpredictable ideals that are not part of the law, incompetent authorities targeting non-criminals and peaceful protesters, or traumatizing the wrong person because of an incorrect AI face match.
Key word: some. Look at London. We should not be giving up our liberties to corporations that would sell their soul for profit just so we can prevent property crime.
I wonder if that just displaces the crime to a different area, though. Depends on how organised the perps are. Although complete coverage would probably reduce it.
You're conflating "any camera" with cameras that are attached to a centralized data aggregation system.
Do you have any evidence that the massive centralized aggregation has had a real reduction in crime versus cameras that are locally controlled?
or are you just spewing poorly thought out horseshit in defense of the destruction of our liberty?
(though even this is through the borderline insane, and staunchly anti-american lens that a reduction in property crime definitively warrants the destruction of privacy and liberty)
> You're conflating "any camera" with cameras that are attached to a centralized data aggregation system.
It's an increasingly meaningless distinction: most consumer cameras now upload to the cloud and people like it. View from anywhere, AI magic, connect to cloud-based home automation, etc.
>but real Americans are not like you. Real Americans value liberty
Liberty also means living in an area free of crime, not in constant fear of it. What exactly is the better solution to handling areas plagued by high crime rates? If cameras in those public areas now means those residents living there can walk safely in public without fear of getting robbed or mugged, then good for them, it's a positive development.
Also, the part where you added what "real Americans" value, reads like a satire skit on SNL. I was expecting you'd add V8 big-blocks, AR-15s and grilled steaks halfway through reading it.
How will that deter someone wanting to break into your house or trying to rob you?
Do you turn around before they attack you and go "hey, good news, the city allocated some more funds to public services, no need to stab me" and the perp goes "ah shieet, thanks for the good news bro, let's hug and sing kumbaya"?
No matter how much money you throw at public services, criminals will still exist because bad people exist regardless of public services, otherwise you wouldn't need any law enforcement to exist if that was the solution.
And money for social services isn't infinite, you can't buy your way out of crime, if you live in a poor low income are that lacks money. What then? SHould they tolerate lawlessness and rampant crime without strong law enforcement?
And crime and lack of funds are often self reinforcing in a negative feedback loop. Nobody will come and open jobs and businesses in your area to pay the taxes your welfare system needs, if there's high crime without law enforcement and surveillance systems to catch or deter criminals that rob businesses.
No, instead i turn around and say “there’s a flock camera on the street and a ring doorbell, i am surveilled wherever i go! No need to stab me!”
We’ve tried increasing surveillance and policing, it does not prevent people from being robbed and stabbed. Could we try funding social services now? We’ve never really done that.
>No, instead i turn around and say “there’s a flock camera on the street and a ring doorbell, i am surveilled wherever i go! No need to stab me!”
The presence of cameras means a higher chance the perp will get identified and caught and locked up unable to harm another person. Scale these incarcerations up over time and streets can become free of crime again. No cameras, and that person can keep doing crime over and over unless there's witnesses all the time to identify him every time, which is a lot less likely.
>We’ve tried increasing surveillance and policing, it does not prevent people from being robbed and stabbed
Yeah, because soft-on-crime judges let out repeat offenders. That's how you see people who've been arrested 14 times still committing crimes in public, instead of being locked up in jail away from civilized society where they can't hurt anyone anymore. Policing means nothing if the legal system is fucked and just practices catch-and-release.
>Could we try funding social services now? We’ve never really done that.
Parts of Europe has some of the best most funded social services in the world, and crime is only increasing. When do we admit that some people are just bad people, and we can't pay infinity taxes as an extortion racket, to prevent the bottom worst 2% of society from harming us, just because we refuse to lock them up out of misplaced empathy.
And the fact is that you need both the carrot and the stick, you need functioning services AND a strict law enforcement. Having a welfare state without any deterrent against crime means you'll get people gladly exploiting both systems for personal gain, just because they can.
> and we can't pay infinity taxes as an extortion racket, to prevent the bottom worst 2% of society from harming us, just because we refuse to lock them up out of misplaced empathy.
You won’t find me disagreeing there are some people who are going to commit crime no matter what - i will argue its a lot less than 2%, but whatever let’s go with 2%. What I arguing about is treating the other 98% of people like criminals in need of constant watching, rather than giving them the tools they need to succeed.
>We're going to have supervision. Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there's a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on.
-Larry Ellison
This has been the plan of the oligarchs for a while.
Property crime skyrocketed during COVID largely because of intentional decisions around policing. We can easily police property crime without ubiquitous surveillance.
Most Americans know that a small reduction in property crime is not worth trading for constant surveillance by private corporations and the entire government.
If there are, say, ten thousand license plates of interest at any given time (which seems high), that’s what, 10KB? Not really that hard to update that every 15 minutes (or hell, every minute).
I don’t really see any drawbacks with storing them on the device, they should already be quasi-public knowledge (from warrants/etc) so it’s not like there’s a privacy/security risk there
There is a meaningful value in catching stolen vehicles and child abductors. Not high enough to justify capturing every single plate, but there's a value.
Bear in mind this is not meaningfully different than previous mechanisms of issuing BOLOs. Law enforcement widely distributes information about plates of interest. In my area, those plates are often on digital billboards already.
Describing these mass surveillance devices as "license plate readers" is a deliberate tactic to deceive people about their actual use and capability. Flock cameras record everything, not just license plates. They record the faces and bodies of the driver and the passengers that are visible through the windows. They record and analyze all the little dings, bumper stickers and other unique elements of a vehicle above and beyond license plates. They are regularly deployed and used in areas like footpaths where there is no vehicle traffic at all.
I have never seen TPMS ID trackers as they change relatively frequently and there are passive ones too; not to say they do not exists. Built-in BT ID of a vehicle or mobile phone rarely does.
Bluetooth and toll transponders (e.g, EZ-Pass, FastTrak) have been tracking things for decades.
First hand experience in operational rooms where both Bluetooth and the transponders are used for "traffic management" in Delaware and Washington DC. The readers are not at toll gates (only). they are sprinkled throughout highways and "high interest" areas. And, yes individual vehicles can be identified throughout their movements that is the very purpose of tracking so they can see the speed and flow of individual vehicles "to adjust intersection lights".
Sort of. The problem isn’t necessarily the speed but the range. But it could be used. Bluetooth and WiFi tracking would be more likely in most real world scenarios.
You could just mount them to a bunch of fleet vehicles [0]. Hopefully they don't pick up any stray signals from nearby vehicles moving at low speeds (relatively) around them or have any AI, API, or Cloud integrations to combine that data with other mobile and stationary telematics.
Honestly, I was shocked by how many of them were successfully decided by rtl_433 running on a cheap RTL-SDR inside my house. I don’t live on a busy street. It picked mine up first but snagged a bunch more through the evening
I want them offline. Plug in physically to download what’s needed. Or park in closest safe location. Either way, create a log with access + warrant. No warrant, no access (or legal penalties when logs are reviewed, if warrant can’t be a precondition on a technical level).
A cop with a cable to a camera pole would be a visible sign to the community that something happened. If someone’s there every day, maybe it’s one of those (rare but…) losers tracking his abused former lover. (Super sick that cop helped his cousin do this.)
I agree — but in practice, once data exists, it tends to become streamed, stored, indexed, searchable, and immortal. It’s the nature of data to want to be free which cuts both ways good and bad, and is why sometimes the only way to have privacy and freedom is to not record in the first place, unfortunately.
This is why anonymity is necessary for true freedom and privacy. If data _can_ be traced and connected, it will be. This aligns with a 1995 Supreme Court opinion (McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission), where Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that "anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority," noting that it "exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation... at the hand of an intolerant society."
I’m OK if lack of a panopticon means a relative’s murderer gets away (“…give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety…”) but hoped I could eat my cake & have it… good thinker for me
Govt. fund a new division of the EFF to address your concerns w/the new offline camera scheme? Unlike acceptable encryption backdoors, it seems possible. Somehow.
the legal standard is based off of the idea that a police officer could easily sit in a fixed location and take down license plate numbers that pass by
that and you don't have any legitimate expectation of privacy while in public because you are in public
the really strange part is the folks that are angry about flock cameras are often the same people who are angry that folks like elon musk want the movements of the private jets to be non-public information
i can get around my community without worrying one bit about flock cameras surveilling me. the bike trails i use generally don't have cameras and even if they did i'm riding a fairly generic bike and wearing neutral and unmemorable clothing.
even with actual dragnet surveillance in NYC they couldn't track a dude on a bike effectively.
Nor the dents and identifying marks, effectively. Nor within a realistic budget (24/7 * average officer hourly rate * # of Flocks nationwide + time spent sharing with desired other jurisdictions + cost to analyze).
Point driven in by fellow commenters this year: scale matters!
The real privacy problem is the requirement to display plates... a problem that exists only because of the government's mandate to do so.
I think it breaks the 'its in public so its public' argument. The state requires you to display plates-- its its responsibility to complete the law: e.g. make possession of a third parties plate number a serious felony outside of limited circumstances.
Yes, that's what they are. But does that mean are they breaking federal law or unconstitutional? I believe we've been told by the courts repeatedly that we should have no expectation of privacy out in public.
I agree that it's not clear that this breaks federal law. But I do think it's clear that this should break federal law.
There's an interesting analogy with copyright issues surrounding AI use. Both copyright laws and surveillance were created to (respectively) creative incentives for authors to create novel works; and to protect citizens for indiscriminate surveillance. The laws made sense given the technology available at the time: it simply wasn't feasible to put a cop on every street corner, or to ingest the ideas of every work ever written.
But the laws have been eclipsed by technology. Technology makes a mockery of existing laws, by clearly violating their intent. Much has been written to the effect of "why bother to create new, free materials on the internet when it will just get scooped up by an LLM with no attribution to me." Similarly, Flock cameras have the effect or violating privacy in the exact same way the original laws sought to prevent.
Unfortunately, laws are slow to change, and monied interests will fight tooth-and-nail to put their profits above the rights of ordinary people. It's going to be a difficult decade or so coming up.
> why bother to create new, free materials on the internet when it will just get scooped up by an LLM with no attribution to me
Can confirm. I've personally stopped releasing new open source code, and stopped contributing to projects.
Until copyright laws are updated to protect my work from being stolen and my labor exploited by AI companies, there's zero incentive for me to participate in open source.
Even OSI's cuck licenses are being cucked beyond reason. I didn't think that was possible.
AIs make short work of proprietary code as well. Reverse engineering has become trivial. Not releasing any code whatsoever is the only possible defense now. I've made my peace with that.
What worries me is the fact AIs render licenses irrelevant. What's the point of starting an AGPLv3 project when AIs can just study it and make a proprietary equivalent? The free software movement no longer has any leverage.
I also don't feel any sense of accomplishment anymore. Software is so trivial now. Even if I make some unique thing, others can just have an AI copy it. Nothing is special anymore. Feels like there's no point.
Indeed. I specifically decided to open-source my AI coding agent harness (coming later this month) because I felt like I was never going to be able to protect any the trade secrets due to how easy reverse engineering is now.
> But does that mean are they breaking federal law or unconstitutional?
I'd argue they break the fourth amendment:
> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
What are "unreasonable searches" if not being under "indiscriminate mass surveillance?"
The US constitution is silent on surveillance. I seriously doubt anyone from the 1700s would consider watching people in public spaces to be a search. Automating watching people doesn't seem like it transforms watching into to a search either.
People in the 1700s would not expect all of their movements to be tracked and watched at all times. They would definitely take issue with this. The issue of their time was general warrants/writs of assistance which let the British search anyone anywhere at any time and take their property. [1]
The key issue there was the scope of the British power, not the fact that searches and seizures could happen at all. We wanted warrants that were reasonable and limited.
The issue is not a single security camera from a private bank. The issue is not a single cop in a car investigating someone. The issue is a national and searchable network of cameras where agents of the government can track anyone at any time for no reason at all.
The judge says the police need probable cause and a warrant for a search against an individual.
> Freedom from persistent, dragnet-style surveillance while in public is not a foreign concept in our society, and it is a reasonable expectation that society already accepts. This is the same expectation of privacy that the Supreme Court has continued to recognize in cases like Carpenter and Chatrie. Cell phones also move in public places where people can see you in plain view. But it becomes constitutionally problematic when law enforcement can indiscriminately and passively catalog your whereabouts over an extended period of time and then use that information for any purpose whenever convenient. [2]
In the 1700s it was pretty easy to move into a private place and ensure nobody else was listening though too. We didn't have guard posts on every other corner writing down descriptions of every carriage and wagon that passes by.
Do you think the people in the 1700s would have approved of having police follow everyone around at all times in public spaces, taking notes? I think it’s easy to imagine how they would feel in principle, even if they couldn’t imagine the specific technology.
Watching people isn't the problem, it's the state requirement to be identifiable-- e.g. display plates (or, in some cases to not wear a mask in public) which is the constitutional issue. The privacy issue is downstream from that.
>What are "unreasonable searches" if not being under "indiscriminate mass surveillance?"
A police officer randomly entering your house and going through all of your belongings.
Indiscriminately searching a larger number of people is not necessarily unreasonable. Take for example the TSA at airports where you have to searched to enter and the airpots have a ton of cameras recording every single person there.
We never had Flock before, it's possible that some legal principles will be reexamined and reinterpreted because they were made around prior assumptions which have been upended by new technology. Who knows, maybe Congress will legislate something.
I’m no American but isn’t it a 4th Amendment issue, and the problem is how the various local, state, federal governments are using a private contractor (Flock) to do an end run around this by pretending that it’s no different from any private citizen recording another in a public space?
There may be a solid legal argument that since Flock is operating hand in glove with the government that they effectively are the government within the context of 4A. IMHO, it's not out of the realm of possibility that courts reexamine the government's ability to buy up private data which they would normally be precluded from collecting, and establish limits on their ability to do so.
This is a good point, especially since it appears that the access flock given is basically reserved for the government. For instance we can't buy from flock a boyfriend stalking pass. The offerings aren't really in line with what flock provides HOAs and private companies...
This provides an interesting avenue for getting the law changed. If there is no expectation to privacy in public, there should be nothing stopping someone from renting space to install cameras all around their town and selling access to "where are your representatives right now" data feeds.
Cell phones are kinda weird because they carry some of the elements that were built up around hardline phones (similar to how physical mail has a ton of protections that accumulated historically that make it distinct from other mediums).
This one generally gets treated legally more like any other data collection in a public space. Essentially, it's not a violation of your rights if somebody sits on a street corner and takes a picture of every car that drives by. There's a really interesting debate about whether there should be some concept of scale (Flock makes it really easy to effectively put somebody on every street corner), but the law generally hasn't changed to take that kind of thing into consideration.
You can see the same kind of thing in many of the AI training debates. Training AIs on bulk data has been found in a couple different cases to not be copyright infringement because they're drawing parallels to any other learning, even if the scale here is obviously several orders of magnitude apart from what was ever possible before.
For what it's worth: if I own a business in the US and have a camera pointed at the street, and the police ask me for footage, I don't need to require a subpoena. I can just choose to give it to them.
My understanding is they can get a current location with just a subpoena (not a warrant) already, but looking at a history of past locations to watch their movements constitutes a Fourth Amendment search requiring a warrant and probable cause.
Originally the Third-party doctrine[1] also would allow searches that were otherwise illegal, but recently exceptions have been made for GPS/location history in the courts in recent years (Carpenter and Chatrie).
"Digital effects" have always been a grey area for unreasonable search-and-seizure. This was an infamous moment for the late Antonin Scalia, who, iirc, argued that the constistution couldn't reasonably be addressing this matter, as the Founding Fathers had no concept of digital effects when defining "documents and effects".
From others. Not mass surveillance by a private corporation.
Otherwise maybe I'll just set up my own cameras in public locations. If the police want the data they can pay per minute of footage. I'll let them search for metadata and tell them if footage matches with no visibility to the footage until after payment. If they search for something and don't purchase but come back for it - it's then increased pricing. If this is all public space and we can all build these systems because there's no expectation of privacy then all is fair in access to public right of way along roads.
If someone set up their own camera and analytics platform outside of politicians and police officers homes and places of work, they would be taken down the next day. It's clearly biased towards people they see as not being able to fight back.
Aren't politicians pretty routinely followed by people with cameras doing analysis on all their movements?
Sure, if you strapped a camera to a light post without permission, I'd expect it to be taken down. The same way I can put a Ring camera on my door but I can't strap one to the traffic sign on my street.
I didn't give flock permission to put cameras all over my traffic infrastructure. Admittedly it jointly belongs to other taxpayers, but I don't think they gave that permission either. So as you say, they should expect them to be taken down. And from what I've been seeing around town, that's exactly what is happening to them. I wonder how long it will take Flock to stop putting them back up.
If your door films the street, this is something that should be considered an invasion of your neighbour's privacy. The fact that it isn't is... disappointing.
Especially given the networked nature of those cameras. The police can access them by asking amazon permission, they don't need to ask you. Are you comfortable with that? I am not.
When that corporation is performing contracted work for the government, they act as the government's agent, making them subject to the same restrictions regarding civil rights as the government itself.
The moral of the story is, if you want to make a mass surveillance tool that tracks your every movement and collects all of your most sensitive communications, make sure it has a great camera, a bright large screen and day long battery life.
No expectation of privacy does not mean you can follow someone around all day and keep a log of what they do, which is essentially what this thing does.
Over the course of a days/weeks, the places one visits, roads you drive on, etc. those things should definitely be private.
Isn't that exactly what a stakeout is? Or an undercover operation?
I didn't search for undercover, but I can find nothing about a warrant being required for a stakeout in the US (and numerous results saying no warrant is required).
Sure, and if the same level of effort were required to get the same amount of information, this probably wouldn’t even be up for discussion. But now we have technology to basically stake out every single citizen at any time with just a few mouse clicks. We can’t just pretend those things are equal.
I think you're greatly oversimplifying what courts have actually ruled on this over the years. Off the top of my head, the Supreme Court explicitly ruled that wiretapping a public pay phone in a booth is unconstitutional[1], and rulings from lower courts on using Stingrays without warrants are a mixed bag[2]. I don't think there's anything close to a broad precedent that the right to privacy evaporates the moment you go out in public.
My understanding of the rule that has emerged from prior decisions is that there is a twofold requirement, first that a person have exhibited an actual (subjective) expectation of privacy and, second, that the expectation be one that society is prepared to recognize as "reasonable." Thus a man's home is, for most purposes, a place where he expects privacy, but objects, activities, or statements that he exposes to the "plain view" of outsiders are not "protected" because no intention to keep them to himself has been exhibited. On the other hand, conversations in the open would not be protected against being overheard, for the expectation of privacy under the circumstances would be unreasonable.
For this case the guy was inside a phone booth rather than out in the open.
There's nothing from SCOTUS on stingrays, but I looked at one federal case and the data being collected was referred to as a document, so that's where the 4th was found to apply.
In turn I don't think I've greatly oversimplified anything.
> Thus a man's home is, for most purposes, a place where he expects privacy, but objects, activities, or statements that he exposes to the "plain view" of outsiders are not "protected" because no intention to keep them to himself has been exhibited.
And you think this applies to the inside of the woman's car that the article is talking about?
> In turn I don't think I've greatly oversimplified anything.
In this reply, no, you're not greatly oversimplifying. In your parent comment, you said that going out in public means no expectation of privacy, and I gave an example of a place in public that had an expectation of privacy, which you've defined as "not in public". I think that if you have to call a place that's available to anyone and not owned by an individual "not public" in order to make your original statement work, then your original statement was oversimplifying.
> The deputy then used the woman’s travel history in Flock as part of the justification for searching her car, where he allegedly discovered 91 pounds of meth.
That sentence does make this less of a win tbh, given that with it, it's just an actual example of the technology doing the job it is supposed to do.
Like this, it's almost a trojan horse of something pretending to be PR for A, but actually being effective PR for B.
A major issue with surveillance tech like this is that it actually works.
It does what it's advertised to do: it lets the police track and catch criminals easier.
This is especially meaningful in cases of crimes where either the information availability or the effort of tracking the criminal down often make enforcement prohibitive.
If Flock had better PR people, they'd have no shortage of shoplifters, joyriders, car window smashers, porch poachers, carjackers and drug mules that were caught using their tech to parade around.
It's just that this benefit comes at the cost of privacy being diminished for everyone.
The police is on the receiving end of surveillance too: body cams are increasingly expected and increasingly mandated. It's harder to get away with "stalking and harassing people" when you have a camera strapped to you, and any sufficiently pointed inquiry would result in footage getting looked at.
More often than not the police just turn those off or they "malfunction". Even the prison cameras "malfunctioned" when Jeffery Epstein "killed himself".
And they’ve carelessly put zero safeguards in place to prevent abuse and that is where all of their bad PR has come from. If a warrant were required for every query, it would be a completely different story
No, it would be the same story. "Warrantless surveillance" is just a thing for people to latch on to that might be actually illegal about Flock.
But people don't hate Flock because it's legally questionable. People hate Flock because they don't like a corporation spying on them and selling data to cops - regardless of how legal or illegal that is. The rest is downstream from that. People only ask "how is this legal" because they hate it already.
The root problem here is that we've got a government that has a hundred years of legal "litter" they can enforce on a whim.
No one bad law is too bad on it's own, like litter in the park. But you add it all up and it's disgusting. There's a law for everything but each one is defensible in abstract in a "my litter isn't responsible for this whole mess" way.
The prospect of all those laws potentially being enforced and cheaply on the whim of the government really lays bare how bad our laws are in their totality.
But people are not capable of confronting the tough compromise of giving up the laws for things they like so here we are screeching about this easy button that law enforcement has at its disposal.
The point it's not just people with 91 pounds of meth who are getting tracked; it does what it's "supposed to" by treating everyone as a suspected criminal. An exterminator who blows up your house to get rid of termites still gets rid of the termites, but that doesn't make it a good solution.
Still, that’s a lot to be tailgating like this lady was as shown in the court filing. Also, “[the arresting officer] told another officer that he ‘could see her
carotid artery in my car. That thing was about to pop out of her neck.’”
I don't think rolling out mass surveillance to get some meth is a "win". How many innocent people were tracked by the same cameras used to track this single woman?
"Flock is mass surveillance", say people who are posting Ring doorbell footage on Reddit for the 50th time, trying to gangstalk the guy who stole the mail order coffee beans off their porch.
"It's mass surveillance when law enforcement catches me breaking the law. When I catch and doxx other people breaking the law, it's justice being served."
Is there realistically a chance that we won't get total surveillance in the next decades? Unless something dramatically changes, I just don't see how it won't end any other way.
I don't know that I've ever seen such unified opposition from the public on both sides of the political spectrum as being against these cameras (and data centers). It gives me hope that for the first time in my life, it looks like we might pump the breaks on increased surveillance and create a permanent culture of resisting it.
Lately whenever I take a walk down a certain suburban street there's a security patrol vehicle and often I feel they're paying too much attention to me. Driving slow, flip light bar on. It's very disturbing. Not the first time it's happened, another private security company has seemed to be too interested in me. In each case I've resorted to making obscene gestures to them because it disturbs my peace. It's like a counter punch to a punch, but most would not see it that way. They're just doing their job, or a little more in the case of watching me on a public street. But when it becomes an expected part of a daily routine, it's too much.
No doubt erratic behavior gets me logged by that security team, if not escalated to local police, who may come to check up on me themselves later. Nobody knows what's happening with this footage. What their putting a wrapper in their pocket may look like in low res video.
Mass surveillance thru cameras and movement logging isn't so active but I 100% understand people who take action against the cameras. It's just as in a person's face every single day, in more and more places, and you don't know who is on the other end or what they're looking for or what you are doing may appear as.
Just the other day I got pulled over when a license plate reader false flagged my drivers license. It was an embarrassing traffic stop because it was all due to the automated system.
I think i'm like the last person who's still defending flock. This is as a result of living with very small women for years who were constantly attacked in the streets. This basically ended with surveillance. That being said, I would prefer actual police on every block with crime.
You should stop defending them if a single anecdote of any level of severity is your basis. Hundreds of millions have been placed under potential threat by police.
I don't think we can backtrack at this point but at least it should be heavily regulated and restricted (i.e. only run queries if there's a court order, etc).
“Federal judge rules” is a phrase whose impact has been dramatically reduced during the trump era. You know that all flock need do is donate a few mill to trumps idiotic ballroom project or buy some of his idiotic meme coin or hire one of his idiot sons as a consultant and the problem disappears. The US is a despotic kleptocracy.
The idea that law enforcement tapping into existing law enforcement knowledge constitutes as a search of "persons, houses, papers, and effects" does not logically follow for me. It is a search of law enforcements own property.
> It is a search of law enforcements own property.
The roads are not law enforcement's property and my private car on a public road is private property that requires a warrant to search. These things should be totally banned, but even your argument is wrong since Flocks don't mask just the road, they record everything in their field of view.
Given that the roads are not law enforcement's property, and in fact public property, they would require public approval and voted on legislation for the police to install cameras on them.
The point of these lawsuits is that they don't have the right to search the data they have now, and possibly don't even have a right to have that data. The law says they need a good reason to search not just your property, but for information about you that isn't necessarily your property. Searching where you go 24/7 is a search, just like searching the phone company for what phone numbers you call is a search. In each case they are looking for information about you that they don't have a right to have without a very good reason.
The wording here seems problematic. Why is law enforcement entitled to this degree of access to public surveillance as their "property"? That word strongly implies it is theirs to do with as they wish - I don't see how that would be a desirable state of affairs.
> Flock CEO Garretty Langley — who we’ll be interviewing on-stage at TechCrunch Disrupt — has called for a “compromise” between privacy and safety
Don't be fooled. Flock's CEO has stated multiple times that the purpose of his company is to intimidate people into thinking they will be caught if they commit any crime, in order for him to achieve a crime-free world. The only way to make people think they will always be caught, is if people believe their every movement is tracked everywhere they go. Intimidation via zero privacy. It's literally the surveillance part of Nineteen Eighty Four.
The fact that these aims are impossible (some criminals don't mind going to jail, many are stupid/hubristic, a criminal can spraypaint a camera, etc) should also indicate how disconnected the guy is from reality. He's called people who non-violently protest the cameras terrorists. He's backpedaling now so that he can convince enough people to let him continue installing cameras and doing the same things Flock did before.
Flock keeps hurting people and only tries to do the right thing after so much outrage that it hurts its sales. This is not a company anyone should trust.
Judges have a pretty direct role in whether or not Flock is able to be used effectively (e.g. the article's example of one granting a search warrant based on the data from it). The views of judges on Flock unequivocally do matter in our current system regardless of how their opinions are formed.
That's an entirely different claim than the one I responded to. If you don't think that judges matter at all, why are you not disagreeing with the parent comment that claimed that the issue is that judges are too political?
They are—since 2000 Presidents have appointed more polarized judges [1]. (The broader trend began in 1975 [2].) But they’re just as powerful. Their words are absolutely meaningful.
So the device should require very specific license plates to scan for—not the current dragnet. The software should only "ping" when there is a confident match with said license plate(s)—and merely log which license plate, time stamp a single photo, and note the confidence level of it being a match.
The frame buffer should be the only place (a frame of) video is ever stored at all (excepting the high-confidence match indicated above).
The only issue remaining would be whether we trust the device/software to have complied (and not have a backdoor) and of course there needs to be a legal warrant for every license plate uploaded (and it should expire fairly frequently, likely requiring a new warrant to continue canning for the plate).
Building a system with "safeguards" in place that require constant oversight is destined for either regulatory capture of the oversight, or slow dismantling of the oversight.
E.g. warrants -> fisa court warrants -> Xkeyscore
There seems to be a real reduction in property crime in some places with cameras. I don’t think it’s realistic to take these down everywhere. (I was in the camp that they should go down everywhere. I’ve relaxed that position recently.)
Police can walk about, ask or order (warrant) for footage.
A network of AI powered cameras linked to the hive mind controlled by real life super mega evil corp inc run by real life super villains... not so great.
Also the 4th amendment is a thing. Mosaic theory is a thing.
Enough of these flocking cameras.
I’m not okay with them using the third-party doctrine and going to a company like Amazon and having them do a dragnet for them.
And I’m really not okay with having a company like Flock make all that information publicly available to any bozo with a friend at a law enforcement organization who wants to make a little money on the side.
Are you sure about that?
Not sure where you are what laws specifically apply, but I believe you could be compelled to hand over footage, and jailed for obstruction or destruction of evidence if you didn’t.
Just a thought - you may have less control than you think.
And the guy at the Honda dealer says I should buy a CRV.
What can make them suck is authorities abusing them to do enforce arbitrary, unpredictable ideals that are not part of the law, incompetent authorities targeting non-criminals and peaceful protesters, or traumatizing the wrong person because of an incorrect AI face match.
Do you have any evidence that the massive centralized aggregation has had a real reduction in crime versus cameras that are locally controlled?
or are you just spewing poorly thought out horseshit in defense of the destruction of our liberty?
(though even this is through the borderline insane, and staunchly anti-american lens that a reduction in property crime definitively warrants the destruction of privacy and liberty)
It's an increasingly meaningless distinction: most consumer cameras now upload to the cloud and people like it. View from anywhere, AI magic, connect to cloud-based home automation, etc.
I wonder if there is a market for this.
All my shit is local with local AI.
Liberty also means living in an area free of crime, not in constant fear of it. What exactly is the better solution to handling areas plagued by high crime rates? If cameras in those public areas now means those residents living there can walk safely in public without fear of getting robbed or mugged, then good for them, it's a positive development.
Also, the part where you added what "real Americans" value, reads like a satire skit on SNL. I was expecting you'd add V8 big-blocks, AR-15s and grilled steaks halfway through reading it.
Investing in the community and public services?
Do you turn around before they attack you and go "hey, good news, the city allocated some more funds to public services, no need to stab me" and the perp goes "ah shieet, thanks for the good news bro, let's hug and sing kumbaya"?
No matter how much money you throw at public services, criminals will still exist because bad people exist regardless of public services, otherwise you wouldn't need any law enforcement to exist if that was the solution.
And money for social services isn't infinite, you can't buy your way out of crime, if you live in a poor low income are that lacks money. What then? SHould they tolerate lawlessness and rampant crime without strong law enforcement?
And crime and lack of funds are often self reinforcing in a negative feedback loop. Nobody will come and open jobs and businesses in your area to pay the taxes your welfare system needs, if there's high crime without law enforcement and surveillance systems to catch or deter criminals that rob businesses.
We’ve tried increasing surveillance and policing, it does not prevent people from being robbed and stabbed. Could we try funding social services now? We’ve never really done that.
The presence of cameras means a higher chance the perp will get identified and caught and locked up unable to harm another person. Scale these incarcerations up over time and streets can become free of crime again. No cameras, and that person can keep doing crime over and over unless there's witnesses all the time to identify him every time, which is a lot less likely.
>We’ve tried increasing surveillance and policing, it does not prevent people from being robbed and stabbed
Yeah, because soft-on-crime judges let out repeat offenders. That's how you see people who've been arrested 14 times still committing crimes in public, instead of being locked up in jail away from civilized society where they can't hurt anyone anymore. Policing means nothing if the legal system is fucked and just practices catch-and-release.
>Could we try funding social services now? We’ve never really done that.
Parts of Europe has some of the best most funded social services in the world, and crime is only increasing. When do we admit that some people are just bad people, and we can't pay infinity taxes as an extortion racket, to prevent the bottom worst 2% of society from harming us, just because we refuse to lock them up out of misplaced empathy.
And the fact is that you need both the carrot and the stick, you need functioning services AND a strict law enforcement. Having a welfare state without any deterrent against crime means you'll get people gladly exploiting both systems for personal gain, just because they can.
Instead let’s pay infinity taxes locking everyone up!
You won’t find me disagreeing there are some people who are going to commit crime no matter what - i will argue its a lot less than 2%, but whatever let’s go with 2%. What I arguing about is treating the other 98% of people like criminals in need of constant watching, rather than giving them the tools they need to succeed.
-Larry Ellison
This has been the plan of the oligarchs for a while.
Property crime skyrocketed during COVID largely because of intentional decisions around policing. We can easily police property crime without ubiquitous surveillance.
Most Americans know that a small reduction in property crime is not worth trading for constant surveillance by private corporations and the entire government.
Are you suggesting the set of all license plates of interest should be stored on the device itself?
I don’t really see any drawbacks with storing them on the device, they should already be quasi-public knowledge (from warrants/etc) so it’s not like there’s a privacy/security risk there
Bear in mind this is not meaningfully different than previous mechanisms of issuing BOLOs. Law enforcement widely distributes information about plates of interest. In my area, those plates are often on digital billboards already.
Bluetooth and toll transponders (e.g, EZ-Pass, FastTrak) have been tracking things for decades.
First hand experience in operational rooms where both Bluetooth and the transponders are used for "traffic management" in Delaware and Washington DC. The readers are not at toll gates (only). they are sprinkled throughout highways and "high interest" areas. And, yes individual vehicles can be identified throughout their movements that is the very purpose of tracking so they can see the speed and flow of individual vehicles "to adjust intersection lights".
Aren't they static for the life of the sensor which is ~10 years?
You don't need to look at all tires to make a match, but the more a car has, the more likely one will be broadcasting during the window for detection.
Sort of. The problem isn’t necessarily the speed but the range. But it could be used. Bluetooth and WiFi tracking would be more likely in most real world scenarios.
[0] https://www.revvo.ai/product/revvo-connect/
Even if you can’t, if you put enough of them by stop signs and traffic lights it’s a non-issue.
I’d be okay with a 24-hour on device store of scanned plates. That way a stolen car can be tracked ex post facto.
A cop with a cable to a camera pole would be a visible sign to the community that something happened. If someone’s there every day, maybe it’s one of those (rare but…) losers tracking his abused former lover. (Super sick that cop helped his cousin do this.)
This is why anonymity is necessary for true freedom and privacy. If data _can_ be traced and connected, it will be. This aligns with a 1995 Supreme Court opinion (McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission), where Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that "anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority," noting that it "exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation... at the hand of an intolerant society."
Govt. fund a new division of the EFF to address your concerns w/the new offline camera scheme? Unlike acceptable encryption backdoors, it seems possible. Somehow.
I'd guess probably 50-100.
Are we going to redesign them all to your specs too?
that and you don't have any legitimate expectation of privacy while in public because you are in public
the really strange part is the folks that are angry about flock cameras are often the same people who are angry that folks like elon musk want the movements of the private jets to be non-public information
i can get around my community without worrying one bit about flock cameras surveilling me. the bike trails i use generally don't have cameras and even if they did i'm riding a fairly generic bike and wearing neutral and unmemorable clothing.
even with actual dragnet surveillance in NYC they couldn't track a dude on a bike effectively.
Not on a busy road. And not while identifying the faces of the drivers.
Point driven in by fellow commenters this year: scale matters!
I think it breaks the 'its in public so its public' argument. The state requires you to display plates-- its its responsibility to complete the law: e.g. make possession of a third parties plate number a serious felony outside of limited circumstances.
There's an interesting analogy with copyright issues surrounding AI use. Both copyright laws and surveillance were created to (respectively) creative incentives for authors to create novel works; and to protect citizens for indiscriminate surveillance. The laws made sense given the technology available at the time: it simply wasn't feasible to put a cop on every street corner, or to ingest the ideas of every work ever written.
But the laws have been eclipsed by technology. Technology makes a mockery of existing laws, by clearly violating their intent. Much has been written to the effect of "why bother to create new, free materials on the internet when it will just get scooped up by an LLM with no attribution to me." Similarly, Flock cameras have the effect or violating privacy in the exact same way the original laws sought to prevent.
Unfortunately, laws are slow to change, and monied interests will fight tooth-and-nail to put their profits above the rights of ordinary people. It's going to be a difficult decade or so coming up.
Can confirm. I've personally stopped releasing new open source code, and stopped contributing to projects.
Until copyright laws are updated to protect my work from being stolen and my labor exploited by AI companies, there's zero incentive for me to participate in open source.
Even OSI's cuck licenses are being cucked beyond reason. I didn't think that was possible.
What worries me is the fact AIs render licenses irrelevant. What's the point of starting an AGPLv3 project when AIs can just study it and make a proprietary equivalent? The free software movement no longer has any leverage.
I also don't feel any sense of accomplishment anymore. Software is so trivial now. Even if I make some unique thing, others can just have an AI copy it. Nothing is special anymore. Feels like there's no point.
I'd argue they break the fourth amendment:
> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
What are "unreasonable searches" if not being under "indiscriminate mass surveillance?"
The key issue there was the scope of the British power, not the fact that searches and seizures could happen at all. We wanted warrants that were reasonable and limited.
The issue is not a single security camera from a private bank. The issue is not a single cop in a car investigating someone. The issue is a national and searchable network of cameras where agents of the government can track anyone at any time for no reason at all.
The judge says the police need probable cause and a warrant for a search against an individual.
> Freedom from persistent, dragnet-style surveillance while in public is not a foreign concept in our society, and it is a reasonable expectation that society already accepts. This is the same expectation of privacy that the Supreme Court has continued to recognize in cases like Carpenter and Chatrie. Cell phones also move in public places where people can see you in plain view. But it becomes constitutionally problematic when law enforcement can indiscriminately and passively catalog your whereabouts over an extended period of time and then use that information for any purpose whenever convenient. [2]
[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt4-2/ALDE_...
[2] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.oknd.76...
A police officer randomly entering your house and going through all of your belongings.
Indiscriminately searching a larger number of people is not necessarily unreasonable. Take for example the TSA at airports where you have to searched to enter and the airpots have a ton of cameras recording every single person there.
Never.
(bear with me, this all comes from random podcasting over the past decade)
Cell phones are kinda weird because they carry some of the elements that were built up around hardline phones (similar to how physical mail has a ton of protections that accumulated historically that make it distinct from other mediums).
This one generally gets treated legally more like any other data collection in a public space. Essentially, it's not a violation of your rights if somebody sits on a street corner and takes a picture of every car that drives by. There's a really interesting debate about whether there should be some concept of scale (Flock makes it really easy to effectively put somebody on every street corner), but the law generally hasn't changed to take that kind of thing into consideration.
You can see the same kind of thing in many of the AI training debates. Training AIs on bulk data has been found in a couple different cases to not be copyright infringement because they're drawing parallels to any other learning, even if the scale here is obviously several orders of magnitude apart from what was ever possible before.
For what it's worth: if I own a business in the US and have a camera pointed at the street, and the police ask me for footage, I don't need to require a subpoena. I can just choose to give it to them.
Originally the Third-party doctrine[1] also would allow searches that were otherwise illegal, but recently exceptions have been made for GPS/location history in the courts in recent years (Carpenter and Chatrie).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
Otherwise maybe I'll just set up my own cameras in public locations. If the police want the data they can pay per minute of footage. I'll let them search for metadata and tell them if footage matches with no visibility to the footage until after payment. If they search for something and don't purchase but come back for it - it's then increased pricing. If this is all public space and we can all build these systems because there's no expectation of privacy then all is fair in access to public right of way along roads.
Sure, if you strapped a camera to a light post without permission, I'd expect it to be taken down. The same way I can put a Ring camera on my door but I can't strap one to the traffic sign on my street.
If your door films the street, this is something that should be considered an invasion of your neighbour's privacy. The fact that it isn't is... disappointing.
Especially given the networked nature of those cameras. The police can access them by asking amazon permission, they don't need to ask you. Are you comfortable with that? I am not.
When that corporation is performing contracted work for the government, they act as the government's agent, making them subject to the same restrictions regarding civil rights as the government itself.
See Mosaic theory.
What is America's history with tyranny?
Over the course of a days/weeks, the places one visits, roads you drive on, etc. those things should definitely be private.
I didn't search for undercover, but I can find nothing about a warrant being required for a stakeout in the US (and numerous results saying no warrant is required).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katz_v._United_States [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_use_in_United_States_...
My understanding of the rule that has emerged from prior decisions is that there is a twofold requirement, first that a person have exhibited an actual (subjective) expectation of privacy and, second, that the expectation be one that society is prepared to recognize as "reasonable." Thus a man's home is, for most purposes, a place where he expects privacy, but objects, activities, or statements that he exposes to the "plain view" of outsiders are not "protected" because no intention to keep them to himself has been exhibited. On the other hand, conversations in the open would not be protected against being overheard, for the expectation of privacy under the circumstances would be unreasonable.
For this case the guy was inside a phone booth rather than out in the open.
There's nothing from SCOTUS on stingrays, but I looked at one federal case and the data being collected was referred to as a document, so that's where the 4th was found to apply.
In turn I don't think I've greatly oversimplified anything.
And you think this applies to the inside of the woman's car that the article is talking about?
> In turn I don't think I've greatly oversimplified anything.
In this reply, no, you're not greatly oversimplifying. In your parent comment, you said that going out in public means no expectation of privacy, and I gave an example of a place in public that had an expectation of privacy, which you've defined as "not in public". I think that if you have to call a place that's available to anyone and not owned by an individual "not public" in order to make your original statement work, then your original statement was oversimplifying.
Is warrantless wiretapping of open-air payphones legal? Based on the TV show the wire, it's not.
That sentence does make this less of a win tbh, given that with it, it's just an actual example of the technology doing the job it is supposed to do.
Like this, it's almost a trojan horse of something pretending to be PR for A, but actually being effective PR for B.
It does what it's advertised to do: it lets the police track and catch criminals easier.
This is especially meaningful in cases of crimes where either the information availability or the effort of tracking the criminal down often make enforcement prohibitive.
If Flock had better PR people, they'd have no shortage of shoplifters, joyriders, car window smashers, porch poachers, carjackers and drug mules that were caught using their tech to parade around.
It's just that this benefit comes at the cost of privacy being diminished for everyone.
But people don't hate Flock because it's legally questionable. People hate Flock because they don't like a corporation spying on them and selling data to cops - regardless of how legal or illegal that is. The rest is downstream from that. People only ask "how is this legal" because they hate it already.
No one bad law is too bad on it's own, like litter in the park. But you add it all up and it's disgusting. There's a law for everything but each one is defensible in abstract in a "my litter isn't responsible for this whole mess" way.
The prospect of all those laws potentially being enforced and cheaply on the whim of the government really lays bare how bad our laws are in their totality.
But people are not capable of confronting the tough compromise of giving up the laws for things they like so here we are screeching about this easy button that law enforcement has at its disposal.
Defos swiping this analogy for future use
[1] https://dancesafe.org/speed/
A survey found that average daily consumption was 0.9g and median 0.35g.
92lb=41.73 kg = 41730g / 0.9g / 365 =127.032 average-user-years. Or basically a month’s supply for a small town.
Like most consumption, the top 10% easily account for >80% of total consumption.
Still, that’s a lot to be tailgating like this lady was as shown in the court filing. Also, “[the arresting officer] told another officer that he ‘could see her carotid artery in my car. That thing was about to pop out of her neck.’”
Sounds like some wild decisions were being made.
[1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40385390/
No doubt erratic behavior gets me logged by that security team, if not escalated to local police, who may come to check up on me themselves later. Nobody knows what's happening with this footage. What their putting a wrapper in their pocket may look like in low res video.
Mass surveillance thru cameras and movement logging isn't so active but I 100% understand people who take action against the cameras. It's just as in a person's face every single day, in more and more places, and you don't know who is on the other end or what they're looking for or what you are doing may appear as.
I don't think we can backtrack at this point but at least it should be heavily regulated and restricted (i.e. only run queries if there's a court order, etc).
Yes you can - if the citizenry says no and mobilises/votes to that end, the cameras can be physically removed, whether in a city/state/nationally.
This isn't an instance of "the cat's out the bag, it can't be opt back in" - accepting that is a form of defeatism IMO.
The idea that law enforcement tapping into existing law enforcement knowledge constitutes as a search of "persons, houses, papers, and effects" does not logically follow for me. It is a search of law enforcements own property.
The roads are not law enforcement's property and my private car on a public road is private property that requires a warrant to search. These things should be totally banned, but even your argument is wrong since Flocks don't mask just the road, they record everything in their field of view.
Like all the millions of traffic cameras, dashcams, smartphones, and everyone's eyeballs?
I was referring data as the property. Accessing a public fact of your car is not the same as actually searching through a car.
>they record everything in their field of view.
And those areas are still part of the public.
> And those areas are still part of the public.
No, it's almost exclusively private land.
Just because the founding fathers 250 years ago couldn’t conceive of a panopticon doesn’t mean that we have to accept it today.
The wording here seems problematic. Why is law enforcement entitled to this degree of access to public surveillance as their "property"? That word strongly implies it is theirs to do with as they wish - I don't see how that would be a desirable state of affairs.
Don't be fooled. Flock's CEO has stated multiple times that the purpose of his company is to intimidate people into thinking they will be caught if they commit any crime, in order for him to achieve a crime-free world. The only way to make people think they will always be caught, is if people believe their every movement is tracked everywhere they go. Intimidation via zero privacy. It's literally the surveillance part of Nineteen Eighty Four.
The fact that these aims are impossible (some criminals don't mind going to jail, many are stupid/hubristic, a criminal can spraypaint a camera, etc) should also indicate how disconnected the guy is from reality. He's called people who non-violently protest the cameras terrorists. He's backpedaling now so that he can convince enough people to let him continue installing cameras and doing the same things Flock did before.
Flock keeps hurting people and only tries to do the right thing after so much outrage that it hurts its sales. This is not a company anyone should trust.
The people in power are just circumventing everything on a whim to get what they want.
They are—since 2000 Presidents have appointed more polarized judges [1]. (The broader trend began in 1975 [2].) But they’re just as powerful. Their words are absolutely meaningful.
[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w32920
[2] https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2022/04/political-pola...