11 ms·

License plate reader searches should require a warrant

644 points by apwheele 1mo ago

smalltorch 1mo ago
Monetization of public data for private profit is the heart of my qualms. Why should it be possible for my bits be scooped up and sold for profit against my will.
- john-h-k 1mo ago
  None of it is against your will. You have no obligation to own a car or drive. If you want to use the _shared_ resource that is public roads, funded by everyone, you have to agree to certain terms (eg a license, insurance).
  - smalltorch 1mo ago
    You act like it wasn't in place just five years ago. It's a new paradigm. Flock is the first to blatently collect and sell public whereabouts for private gain. Conflating this with insurance is a interesting take. Also, the notion that I have a choice to not have a car is absurd. I'd starve. And, even if I could walk around are traverse my town with only a bike or walking, I'm still sucked into a harddrive against my will by these cameras.
axus 1mo ago
The FISA court is a similar compromise.
malwrar 1mo ago
It frustrates me when people call them license plate readers. I guess you need to call them something, but they are general-purpose internet connected cameras. They will do whatever their firmware tells them to do, and could be reprogrammed at any time by anyone with access. No one expected doorbell cameras to join a mass surveillance network, but later the manufacturers added that feature. Why do we treat these cameras like they can do only one thing?
- alberth 1mo ago
  By that logic, should private citizens need a background check to buy a computer, since a computer could be programmed to run cyber attacks?
  - k4rli 1mo ago
    Computer isn't quite it, internet connection itself seems closer. Then again an Android phone with terminal emulator could also run attacks. Seems like a nonsense comparison either way. These cameras are in public places and provide surveillance intel for governmental entities.
- jameshart 1mo ago
  This amounts to an argument against ever using general purpose computing devices to accomplish anything. You could say the same about literally any privately operated device. ‘I don’t know why they call these things cell towers. They do whatever they are programmed to and can be reprogrammed by anyone with access’ Heck the same applies to non electronic things too ‘why do they call it a house? It’s a general purpose structure and could be turned into a shop or a factory or a crack den at any time by anyone with access’
  - woodrowbarlow 1mo ago
    i see it more like an argument against increasingly networked solutions. red-light cameras used to just upload when an incident occurred (or maybe required routine physical downloading?). the object itself did one thing. now it's cheap to feed continuous live feeds to a centralized processor... and once it's there, it's cheap to do a lot more.
    - jameshart 1mo ago
      Okay so is the argument that if a city wants to install red light cameras they must install analog film based systems because if they install a CCD camera with a raspberry pi and a network connection they could use it for other purposes? Obviously the electronic networked solution is going to be cheaper and easier to operate. It would be insanely wasteful to force government organizations to use expensive cumbersome processes just to ensure they can’t be misused. The solution is legislation and enforcement of rules that constrain what local governments are allowed to actually do with equipment they install and the data it collects, not regulation of what the equipment they install could theoretically be converted to accomplish.
cmiles8 1mo ago
Either it needs a warrant or it’s fully open and people can start creating websites showing the movements of local politicians. This middle ground that municipalities try to carve out where it’s fully open to police without a warrant but not subject to FOIL laws doesn’t appear tenable for much longer. There’s been too many cases of police officers stalking exes, poking around the data for fun and such so it’s clear police cannot be trusted with the data without better court oversight. It’s certainly a very powerful investigative tool, but needs solid 4th amendment protections. The Supreme Court’s recent ruling on geofence searches of cell phone records is a good indication on where the Supreme Court’s head is at on this sort of thing, where they said no you can’t just do blanket data dumps like that without a warrant.
- jasondigitized 1mo ago
  Good luck with this. These are used for auto insurance fraud and those guys that spend billions on TV ads will lobby hard against this.
- altcognito 1mo ago
  Obviously, letting everyone track everyone is not ideal. I assume this is the intent of your proposal.
  - glaslong 1mo ago
    Letting the police and government track everyone also seems not ideal. Worse even than letting everyone track everyone.
- kspacewalk2 1mo ago
  I don't understand why a police cruiser can sit in a public space (or even a private one) and write down licence plates and descriptions of passers-by with pen and paper, or record everything around them with dashcams and bodycams for later use, but when it comes to cameras on a pole this would require a warrant. Going back through police officers' notes or cruiser dash cam videos and tracking a car's movements by its plate is not an illegal search, is it? Just cumbersome, expensive and likely ineffective. Well, now it's not. A difference in degree (of usefulness and speed), not in kind.
AndersSandvik 1mo ago
[flagged]
- presbyterian 1mo ago
  Technology, privacy, and the legal issues related to them, have always been relevant to hackers.
- esseph 1mo ago
  One of the most important social and political problems with technology and digital rights isn't relevant to hacker news?
- gs17 1mo ago
  It's about technology, but also Flock Safety, a Y Combinator startup from the S17 batch.
- sophacles 1mo ago
  Because the people here upvoted it.
delichon 1mo ago
This is a hole in the Constitution that would be better patched, at least with statute, better with an amendment. The fourth amendment says The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects... Who is "their" here? In terms of property rights it's the people who own those digital "papers". The individuals who that data is about do no maintain or control that data, and could not destroy it, meaning they do not functionally have property rights over it. If I write in my notebook that you have blonde hair, the notebook is still my property. There isn't anything I could write about you in it that would make it yours (other than maybe "I hereby give this notebook to Joe Bloe"). Attempts to interpret the Constitution otherwise are, IMHO, attempts at good policy, but unstable as law. So we should fix it either by giving people property rights to that data (so that they can destroy or change it without permission) or to explicitly require warrants for access to PII owned by third parties.
- 1970-01-01 1mo ago
  ..."and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." It was an attempt to secure privacy. "Their" means an individual, a person. Essentially, you control what you control, and do not need to give up this control unless there is suspicion of crime.
  - delichon 1mo ago
    If you want to change "their" to mean "data about them" rather than "data owned by them" you have to not give precedence to the original public meaning. The result of that is that ordinary people are in a worse position to know what the law means, because it can fundamentally change by reinterpreting a word.
    - simoncion 1mo ago
      "data owned by them" is one's papers and/or effects, depending. "data about them" pretty much didn't exist in the late 1700's when we compare it to the enormous scale of that data today. A combination of the third-party doctrine and legal restraints that prevent it from being turned into dragnet surveillance is more or less what applies to that. There are also the rights of the people to peaceably assemble -both publicly and privately-, peaceably speak publicly, and peaceably bring their grievances to the various governments that govern them. All of those rights interact with regulation of the things we're talking about here... it's not just the 4th amendment that's relevant.
smalltorch 1mo ago
Hotlists imply that actual search takes place the moment you pass one, so really, the illegal search happens before. Even if warrants were required to manually search.
throw7 1mo ago
Good article. It's a sober look at where we are at. We lost a lot of strong privacy rights we had with landlines when we shifted to cell phones. We're actually slowly creeping into pre-crime territory. You could have AI searching for possible pre-crime candidates based on unknown identity in the area, disparate pattern to usually movements, etc.
- GrinningFool 1mo ago
  https://reason.com/2026/07/28/minority-report-fbi-seeks-ai-for-political-watch-list/ https://reason.com/2026/07/28/minority-report-fbi-seeks-ai-f...
Zak 1mo ago
I don't like the article's tone of inevitability: > I think cameras in all public spaces are going to happen. Imagine Ring comes out with a nicer camera system for homeowners.... Indiscriminately filming people in public places is illegal some places, e.g. Germany. Allowing the creation of large networks of cameras surveilling public places is a choice.
- thewebguyd 1mo ago
  It's a bit more of a gray area in the US, where expectations of privacy in public spaces has been ruled against many times over. When in a public space, you are allowed to film or photograph whomever you want. This likewise extends into private property, where you set the rules of your own property, and also is the only place where you have an expectation of privacy.
ihsw 1mo ago
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iamleppert 1mo ago
I am for having it be completely open to the public, or require a warrant. The police should not have special privileges of information lifted directly from the public. Privacy cuts both ways.
speak_plainly 1mo ago
A license plate is already publicly displayed information (and is in most jurisdictions not private property), and you're operating in a public space. I know it's unpopular but I went from not supporting these sorts of systems to embracing them after seeing the positive effects in China. For crimes that depend on anonymity, theft, assault, hit-and-runs, vandalism, illegal parking, etc., surveillance changes the calculation because the offender expects a higher or even a near certain chance of being identified/caught in China. I think this is a good thing. I also see no issue with someone breaking the law and receiving a ticket almost immediately. With all systems, it comes down to the design. What sort of oversight is there, how long is footage stored, can it be used for specific crimes or expanded later, and are there mechanisms to correct false identification. Done right, these systems work well. I would be happy to live in a society where street crime is rare enough that I can leave personal property anywhere, like a bike, without constantly worrying about theft. I think many fears about these systems come from dystopian science fiction and assume the worst possible implementation, rather than recognizing that technology can be designed with strong safeguards.
- thewebguyd 1mo ago
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- lokar 1mo ago
  The idea that these are needed, and deployed to address a crime problem is false. For example, Irvine, CA has been one of the safest large cites in the US for decades. Why did they need flock?
  - john-h-k 1mo ago
    > For example, Irvine, CA has been one of the safest large cites in the US for decades. Why did they need flock? Uhh, because getting safer is still better? Why the hell does the relative ranking matter?
  - stickfigure 1mo ago
    Because the residents of Irvine want it to be even safer? Automobile thefts still happen there, crime isn't zero. Who are you to say "stop complaining about your car break-in, it's worse in other cities". Reliable studies have shown that increasing the severity of punishment doesn't deter crime, but increasing the chance of being caught does. Cameras directly address the later. You'd have to be a total idiot to steal a car these days.
crimsoneer 1mo ago
Yeaaah for seeing Andy on HN. His stuff is always excellent.
CurbStomper 1mo ago
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wiseleo 1mo ago
Here's a case study of what happens when this information is public (it's linked as the "data-driven" series). This information should not exist unless the plate is flagged and the reason for that is sufficient to obtain a warrant. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/open-records-laws-reveal-alprs-sprawling-surveillance-now-states-want-block-what https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/open-records-laws-reve...
GuinansEyebrows 1mo ago
> Imagine Ring comes out with a nicer camera system for homeowners that has more comprehensive views around your house and is just as cheap. And we will ultimately be safer for it. I wonder if people who feel this way will feel safer? In this scenario, you have a Ring camera system observing your entire property. Do you feel safer if someone comes onto your property and triggers an alarm? What if it turns out it's just a kid coming over to grab a stray frisbee? What if your neighbor noticed something needed a quick fix (say you left a can of paint open or something similarly benign) and wanted help in a neighborly way without first checking to see if you were home? I guess we just take for granted that we live in a low-trust society. But we take that for granted at our peril, because the fear of a low-trust society is actively being exploited by people who want to sell individuals, businesses and municipalities the means to further erode that trust.
mlsu 1mo ago
There is a concept in safety called the hierarchy of hazard controls. There is a ranking of hazard mitigations from most to least effective. 1) remove the hazard 2) replace the hazard with something less hazardous 3) isolate the hazard (guards, cages etc) 4) administrative controls (procedures, training, warning, etc) 5) PPE Implementing some kind of judicial review for these panopticons is something like 4) in the hierarchy. It would be a good thing to have, but we can go far further. Why do we need this shit? Oh what so someone’s car doesn’t get stolen a few times per year? I think my values are in line with the founding fathers and most Americans when I say I would gladly give up a little bit of safety to not have a spy camera trained on me 24/7. I would like more removal and less procedural controls. The cops cannot abuse a system that does not exist.
cucumber3732842 1mo ago
My jaded opinion is that Flock's mistake was marketing to police departments. In matters of criminal law the accused has these pesky things called "rights". The police have long violated those rights so there are reams upon reams of precedent reinforcing people's rights. The accused has comparatively no rights when an bureaucrat is shaking them down and the accused is often a business rather than an individual it's easy to have sympathy for. Flock could've run their racket for many years, got much praise from the useful idiots, really gotten their system integrated and entrenched, if they'd have chosen that route. Their mistake was believing in their own bullshit. They thought they could make it cheaper to solve crimes (at great cost to everyone's rights of course, but they thought this was acceptable) and make things better (or at least their definition of it). If only they had been slightly scummier and instead set out to help municipalities collect civil fines they probably could have gotten away without scrutiny.
Watney-0717 1mo ago
[flagged]
tamimio 1mo ago
The best solution is to make your plate readable to humans but not cameras, now how would you do that I won’t reveal much else it will be abused, but think out of the pla.. box, I mean.
corsendonk 1mo ago
They're more than just license plate readers. Much more.
kotaKat 1mo ago
funny question I have to pose now because I haven't thought about it yet in all the ALPR discussions and the like. There are civilian enterprise uses of ALPR. Where do they fall in this? I don't even mean for mass data collection or even for parking enforcement. I'm thinking of like various car washes where they offer monthly memberships and their car wash portal system has plate recognition to tie your membership to your car. Or other enterprise access control applications where the ALPR pops the gates open instead of RFID tags.
Cider9986 1mo ago
A warrant is better than no warrant, but: A warrant requirement is not a reasonable bandaid to consider allowing mass spying. There should be no mass spying by default. A warrant requirement makes sense for something like the locations of customers on cellular networks, because, although it should be improved, it's been built into the tech. When you make the optional choice to create mass spying, safeguards do not make it acceptable.
- lern_too_spel 1mo ago
  This should be up to the citizens. If you're living in Oakland with rampant theft and illegal dumping, it's a reasonable trade-off to allow tracking down perpetrators with a warrant. Most people would not agree to allowing police to do arbitrary searches of that data without a warrant.
  - Cider9986 1mo ago
    That sounds like a somewhat reasonable temporary measure if they prove their efficacy.
thaumaturgy 1mo ago
There is another middle option that I would have liked to see the author discuss: requiring either a case number or a CAD ID, instead of a "search reason". In my conversations with law enforcement (mostly at management level, chiefs of police), all of them have had reasonable-sounding objections to a warrant requirement for a search, but zero of them have been able to come up with a reason why a case-or-CAD ID requirement isn't workable. Generally, they argue that in practice obtaining a warrant can be too onerous in time sensitive situations, and can be harder to obtain than the public realizes. Two popular examples are in kidnappings (time sensitive) and missing persons (difficult to obtain). A case number or CAD ID however simply requires that the details of either a public call for service or an active investigation are associated with the historical search. It closes the door on officers' hobby searching. Andrew's blog post does note the problems with oversight, which also match my experience, so this isn't a perfect fix. But it will go further in conversations with law enforcement for people that are trying to thread the needle on making "safe" mass surveillance. (I am personally opposed to mass surveillance in all its forms, but arguing only from that position pretty much immediately excludes me from policy discussions.)
- smalltorch 1mo ago
  Yeah but that is the exact purpose of the warrant. It's suppose to add friction so you can't do this exact thing, even if it's useful and faster not to.
- apwheele 1mo ago
  This is already the current status quo on paper. I bet the majority of the cases IJ identified of mis-use the PDs already had this policy. (That is the same standard when you do a background criminal history check in New York, need to put in a case number, FYI.) I did not want to go into too many technical details on the post -- I think you could do an AI audit at the point in time of the search query to prevent people putting in junk cases. That said I believe there will always need to be third party audits at a minimum. Part of the issue is policies on paper are not effectively enforced. So people saying "just have policy X to prevent abuse" is a non-answer. I wrote the post mainly because people arguing for limited data retention I think is bad for both sides -- it neither protects civil liberties and simultaneously makes it harder for long term criminal investigations.
metalcrow 1mo ago
I do wonder though if the data retention should be restricted at all. This brings up a very good point that even old data (months or more) can be vital to cases or to the defense, but is there any downside to it that would make it worth restricting? And how long?
- MrDrMcCoy 1mo ago
  I think it should. 7 days without a warrant to retain, and only for the specific purpose of an active investigation following an identified crime.
  - SchemaLoad 1mo ago
    This seems pretty logical. If a car is stolen, it's fair to allow fast access to it's live location. In the search request they can submit a form saying they are tracking the car after a report it's stolen. The requests can get stored in an audit log with penalties for abuse.
arjie 1mo ago
Warrants for historical search with warrant-free flags for ongoing issues seems like a nice middle ground. Convincing. Good article. It seems that would easily impede a lot of abuse and it’s straightforward to believe that historical data is rarely so urgent as to not require a warrant. A matter of defining historical as a sufficiently old enough thing but that seems feasible.
- gs17 1mo ago
  > warrant-free flags for ongoing issues Why couldn't they get a warrant if it's an ongoing issue? It should be really easy, and warrants like that wouldn't take a long time to get usually.
  - arjie 1mo ago
    Just for my own epistemic hygiene, would you mind clarifying your familiarity with applying for and receiving a similar warrant and the duration you envision when you say "wouldn't take a long time"? Very reasonable not to, of course, but it helps me adjust my understanding of things. And yes, if a warrant is a 10 min process at p95 from call receipt to warrant acceptance then that certainly allows for things like "this car was stolen in an armed robbery 20 mins ago; we'd like to track it through the city" without too much concern, and I would switch to requiring such an SLA[0] on warrants combined with a requirement on warrants that can be rescinded if the SLA is violated. 0: strictly nonsensical here, but I think you get the picture
    - gs17 1mo ago
      With electronic warrant systems and on-call judges, it can be 15 minutes or less, but that's typically for the simplest cases (e.g. DUI blood draw). However, given how non-seriously they take things currently I have little reason to believe "let me search Flock for this car reported stolen for the next week" wouldn't be a rubber stamp.
      - arjie 1mo ago
        If warrant requests are guaranteed accepted or rejected in t<=15 mins, then I think I support the idea that they should be required with the functionality that they are auto approved at some t+5 deadline. Just to clarify, the timelines you describe are from experience, knowledge, or theorycrafting?
Pxtl 1mo ago
There's a fundamental question: Is it legal for the government to blanket a public space in cameras and do whatever they want to the data that they collect from those cameras? Is it legal for a private entity to do the same with their owned space (like a plaza or mall or office tower)? Focusing on license-plate-readers seems like car-brain is causing the author to miss the forest for the trees.
giantg2 1mo ago
Collecting and storing the information is the real problem. The focus on warrants is a distraction. Access control (warrant) doesn't prevent a breach, and the system is not architected in a way to prevent internal abuse. The best way to prevent the abuse of data is to not collect or store it at all.
cm2012 1mo ago
A warrant is too much but strict audit logs and other protections like that I agree with.
gagan2020 1mo ago
You should raise your voices now. For Indians, its too late. Our Indian Government used facial recognition system at mass level in recent students protests and now police is showing up on their homes. It's better to raise the voice now for you guys than to say sorry later.
carefulfungi 1mo ago
A warrant isn't an effective safe guard unless you trust the government to only prosecute actual crimes. The US federal government has demonstrated, explicitly, that it is willing to use law enforcement for political ends and will charge private citizens for political reasons (like the reflecting pool case). Now is not the time to be giving more power to the executive or its policing functions.
throwaway85825 1mo ago
Wire tapping phones requires a warrant, except the chinese hacked into the lawful intercept system. Most Russian government databases are for sale on the dark web. If the data is collected no amount of legal protections will prevent misuse.
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
RyJones 1mo ago
I agree; however, here is my vibe-coded home ALPRS: https://github.com/ryjones/alprs https://github.com/ryjones/alprs Using more vibe code: https://github.com/ryjones/platescan https://github.com/ryjones/platescan The bar is low.
henryaj 1mo ago
Any idea why this is so much less acceptable to people in the US than in the UK? In the UK we've had ANPR for more than twenty years and AFAICT there's no mass controversy surrounding it. It catches people with no licence, no insurance, who are wanted in various serious crimes. I'm surprised at the difference in attitude. (I am aware that the UK has a less-than-stellar privacy track record... but nonetheless it's curious that for this particular technology, as opposed to the Online Safety Act, there's such a difference.)
- stronglikedan 1mo ago
  Because we value freedom above all else, thankfully.
  - HDBaseT 1mo ago
    That ship has sailed my friend. A man was arrested for clapping at a data center meeting. That is arguably worse "freedom of speech/freedom of expression" than most countries have. Speak ill of Israel and its over too. [1] https://www.404media.co/clapping-is-a-first-amendment-right-an-interview-with-the-person-arrested-for-clapping-at-a-data-center-meeting/ https://www.404media.co/clapping-is-a-first-amendment-right-...
- Cider9986 1mo ago
  It's mass surveillance that people can feel. Combined with ICE using it. Our police overlords are not so polite. In the UK there's severe limitations on freedom of speech, which would never be accepted in the US. The countries have very different values.
  - henryaj 1mo ago
    > In the UK there's severe limitations on freedom of speech Sure, but those are just as controversial here as in the US, in a way that ANPR is a non-issue.
- nrmitchi 1mo ago
  The US has (especially recently) shown that "community aligned behavior" and "what those in power do" are very different. The US has also shown that the probability of someone being held accountable for massive abuse of power is essentially 0. This also means that the main disincentive for abusing power (getting caught and punished in some way) is a moot point. People generally don't object to technology being used to fine mass shooters, or terrorists, or bank robbers. They do object to the same technology being used to stalk women that Texas thinks might be trying to get an abortion, or ensure that minorities stay out of the "white neighborhoods". One of these examples is a real thing, the other is what people are (reasonably) afraid of.
Glyptodon 1mo ago
I think we have the ability to get rid of license plates altogether and restore some privacy. It's not like license plates stop LEOs from shooting people, like when they were chasing Dornier and unloaded on a Blue Toyota Tacoma when they knew his vehicle was a Grey Nissan Titan.
exabrial 1mo ago
Let me fix that for you: License plate readers should require a warrant.
sandworm101 1mo ago
So... should cops require a warrant before reading a plate with thier eyeballs? There are lots of vids of people claiming that, generally low information sovcits. But it makes for great window smashes.
madrox 1mo ago
A warrant is not required for an AMBER alert, which amounts to poor man's mass surveillance of license plates. We're basically fine with an incredibly intrusive push notification to get people to do the work without hand-wringing about privacy. I think I would rather AMBER alerts take advantage of mass surveillance than require AMBER alerts to get a warrant, but obviously there's lots of nuance to it.
freediddy 1mo ago
Can you poison their database with ai-generated license plates on a screen? Maybe set up a van with a big screen in front of a Flock camera and start generating random license plate numbers?
sleepybrett 1mo ago
any camera dragnet should be controlled by the local government (not the police department) and all access should require a warrant. end of.
vzaliva 1mo ago
Imagine all licence plates being small screens and periodically showing numbers derived from a private key issued by the DMV. As they change, vehicles could not be tracked without knowing the private key, yet the DMV can verify the ownership because they know one. I am not a crypto expert, and the actual scheme may be a bit more sophisticated, but you’ve got the idea.
- krapp 1mo ago
  That would be more expensive, as it requires electronics and infrastructure, the screens would be hacked and vandalized constantly, short out in bad weather, etc. It would be more robust just using some kind of transponder, but that might fall afoul of FCC rules, IDK. Also the cops would just get the private keys from the DMV anyway. It's all the same government.
  - solidsnack9000 1mo ago
    Government agencies frequently keep each other in the dark, even when they are the same government -- and the DMV is not the same government as many of the agencies (in other states or at the federal level) that would want this data.
    - krapp 1mo ago
      >Government agencies frequently keep each other in the dark, even when they are the same government I don't think that's been the case since 9/11. It's naive to assume the CIA, FBI and NSA don't have root access to every device and every account in existence, or couldn't get it if they wanted it, legally or otherwise. I don't think your local DMV is going to be the hard line keeping the feds from knocking at your door.
      - solidsnack9000 1mo ago
        The limited number of people who attract the CIA's attention have data privacy concerns that go far beyond license plate readers. Warrants are not (and never have been) a solution for that.
evilDagmar 1mo ago
A judge would never sign off on a warrant for the kind of searches Flock facilitates. Similar opinions involving cell phones have been rejected by the courts multiple times. Folks desperately trying to workshop some line of reasoning by which everyone should apparently be okay with an Orwellian panopticon is pretty annoying.
shevy-java 1mo ago
Makes sense. Interesting to see how the judicial system allows the state to bypass that requirement.
butt_her_churn 1mo ago
let the butter churn! Y'all forget that USNORTHCOM is active and has been operating since 10/1/2002. It is a brave new world. In this post 9/11 world let us not forget that we voted away our right to privacy for the greater good! I for one welcome our robot overlords, how else will we survive?
nativeit 1mo ago
Yeah, because warrants have never been rubber stamped without proper oversight before. If we make these things normalized and routine, they will be abused. Don’t give them an inch.

644 points by apwheele 1mo ago

Monetization of public data for private profit is the heart of my qualms. Why should it be possible for my bits be scooped up and sold for profit against my will.

john-h-k 1mo ago
None of it is against your will. You have no obligation to own a car or drive. If you want to use the _shared_ resource that is public roads, funded by everyone, you have to agree to certain terms (eg a license, insurance).
- smalltorch 1mo ago
  You act like it wasn't in place just five years ago. It's a new paradigm. Flock is the first to blatently collect and sell public whereabouts for private gain. Conflating this with insurance is a interesting take. Also, the notion that I have a choice to not have a car is absurd. I'd starve. And, even if I could walk around are traverse my town with only a bike or walking, I'm still sucked into a harddrive against my will by these cameras.

axus 1mo ago

The FISA court is a similar compromise.

malwrar 1mo ago

It frustrates me when people call them license plate readers. I guess you need to call them something, but they are general-purpose internet connected cameras. They will do whatever their firmware tells them to do, and could be reprogrammed at any time by anyone with access. No one expected doorbell cameras to join a mass surveillance network, but later the manufacturers added that feature. Why do we treat these cameras like they can do only one thing?

alberth 1mo ago
By that logic, should private citizens need a background check to buy a computer, since a computer could be programmed to run cyber attacks?
- k4rli 1mo ago
  Computer isn't quite it, internet connection itself seems closer. Then again an Android phone with terminal emulator could also run attacks. Seems like a nonsense comparison either way. These cameras are in public places and provide surveillance intel for governmental entities.
jameshart 1mo ago
This amounts to an argument against ever using general purpose computing devices to accomplish anything. You could say the same about literally any privately operated device. ‘I don’t know why they call these things cell towers. They do whatever they are programmed to and can be reprogrammed by anyone with access’ Heck the same applies to non electronic things too ‘why do they call it a house? It’s a general purpose structure and could be turned into a shop or a factory or a crack den at any time by anyone with access’
- woodrowbarlow 1mo ago
  i see it more like an argument against increasingly networked solutions. red-light cameras used to just upload when an incident occurred (or maybe required routine physical downloading?). the object itself did one thing. now it's cheap to feed continuous live feeds to a centralized processor... and once it's there, it's cheap to do a lot more.
  - jameshart 1mo ago
    Okay so is the argument that if a city wants to install red light cameras they must install analog film based systems because if they install a CCD camera with a raspberry pi and a network connection they could use it for other purposes? Obviously the electronic networked solution is going to be cheaper and easier to operate. It would be insanely wasteful to force government organizations to use expensive cumbersome processes just to ensure they can’t be misused. The solution is legislation and enforcement of rules that constrain what local governments are allowed to actually do with equipment they install and the data it collects, not regulation of what the equipment they install could theoretically be converted to accomplish.

cmiles8 1mo ago

Either it needs a warrant or it’s fully open and people can start creating websites showing the movements of local politicians. This middle ground that municipalities try to carve out where it’s fully open to police without a warrant but not subject to FOIL laws doesn’t appear tenable for much longer. There’s been too many cases of police officers stalking exes, poking around the data for fun and such so it’s clear police cannot be trusted with the data without better court oversight. It’s certainly a very powerful investigative tool, but needs solid 4th amendment protections. The Supreme Court’s recent ruling on geofence searches of cell phone records is a good indication on where the Supreme Court’s head is at on this sort of thing, where they said no you can’t just do blanket data dumps like that without a warrant.

jasondigitized 1mo ago
Good luck with this. These are used for auto insurance fraud and those guys that spend billions on TV ads will lobby hard against this.
altcognito 1mo ago
Obviously, letting everyone track everyone is not ideal. I assume this is the intent of your proposal.
- glaslong 1mo ago
  Letting the police and government track everyone also seems not ideal. Worse even than letting everyone track everyone.
kspacewalk2 1mo ago
I don't understand why a police cruiser can sit in a public space (or even a private one) and write down licence plates and descriptions of passers-by with pen and paper, or record everything around them with dashcams and bodycams for later use, but when it comes to cameras on a pole this would require a warrant. Going back through police officers' notes or cruiser dash cam videos and tracking a car's movements by its plate is not an illegal search, is it? Just cumbersome, expensive and likely ineffective. Well, now it's not. A difference in degree (of usefulness and speed), not in kind.

AndersSandvik 1mo ago

[flagged]

presbyterian 1mo ago
Technology, privacy, and the legal issues related to them, have always been relevant to hackers.
esseph 1mo ago
One of the most important social and political problems with technology and digital rights isn't relevant to hacker news?
gs17 1mo ago
It's about technology, but also Flock Safety, a Y Combinator startup from the S17 batch.
sophacles 1mo ago
Because the people here upvoted it.

delichon 1mo ago

This is a hole in the Constitution that would be better patched, at least with statute, better with an amendment. The fourth amendment says The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects... Who is "their" here? In terms of property rights it's the people who own those digital "papers". The individuals who that data is about do no maintain or control that data, and could not destroy it, meaning they do not functionally have property rights over it. If I write in my notebook that you have blonde hair, the notebook is still my property. There isn't anything I could write about you in it that would make it yours (other than maybe "I hereby give this notebook to Joe Bloe"). Attempts to interpret the Constitution otherwise are, IMHO, attempts at good policy, but unstable as law. So we should fix it either by giving people property rights to that data (so that they can destroy or change it without permission) or to explicitly require warrants for access to PII owned by third parties.

1970-01-01 1mo ago
..."and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." It was an attempt to secure privacy. "Their" means an individual, a person. Essentially, you control what you control, and do not need to give up this control unless there is suspicion of crime.
- delichon 1mo ago
  If you want to change "their" to mean "data about them" rather than "data owned by them" you have to not give precedence to the original public meaning. The result of that is that ordinary people are in a worse position to know what the law means, because it can fundamentally change by reinterpreting a word.
  - simoncion 1mo ago
    "data owned by them" is one's papers and/or effects, depending. "data about them" pretty much didn't exist in the late 1700's when we compare it to the enormous scale of that data today. A combination of the third-party doctrine and legal restraints that prevent it from being turned into dragnet surveillance is more or less what applies to that. There are also the rights of the people to peaceably assemble -both publicly and privately-, peaceably speak publicly, and peaceably bring their grievances to the various governments that govern them. All of those rights interact with regulation of the things we're talking about here... it's not just the 4th amendment that's relevant.

smalltorch 1mo ago

Hotlists imply that actual search takes place the moment you pass one, so really, the illegal search happens before. Even if warrants were required to manually search.

throw7 1mo ago

Good article. It's a sober look at where we are at. We lost a lot of strong privacy rights we had with landlines when we shifted to cell phones. We're actually slowly creeping into pre-crime territory. You could have AI searching for possible pre-crime candidates based on unknown identity in the area, disparate pattern to usually movements, etc.

GrinningFool 1mo ago
https://reason.com/2026/07/28/minority-report-fbi-seeks-ai-for-political-watch-list/ https://reason.com/2026/07/28/minority-report-fbi-seeks-ai-f...

Zak 1mo ago

I don't like the article's tone of inevitability: > I think cameras in all public spaces are going to happen. Imagine Ring comes out with a nicer camera system for homeowners.... Indiscriminately filming people in public places is illegal some places, e.g. Germany. Allowing the creation of large networks of cameras surveilling public places is a choice.

thewebguyd 1mo ago
It's a bit more of a gray area in the US, where expectations of privacy in public spaces has been ruled against many times over. When in a public space, you are allowed to film or photograph whomever you want. This likewise extends into private property, where you set the rules of your own property, and also is the only place where you have an expectation of privacy.

ihsw 1mo ago

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iamleppert 1mo ago

I am for having it be completely open to the public, or require a warrant. The police should not have special privileges of information lifted directly from the public. Privacy cuts both ways.

speak_plainly 1mo ago

A license plate is already publicly displayed information (and is in most jurisdictions not private property), and you're operating in a public space. I know it's unpopular but I went from not supporting these sorts of systems to embracing them after seeing the positive effects in China. For crimes that depend on anonymity, theft, assault, hit-and-runs, vandalism, illegal parking, etc., surveillance changes the calculation because the offender expects a higher or even a near certain chance of being identified/caught in China. I think this is a good thing. I also see no issue with someone breaking the law and receiving a ticket almost immediately. With all systems, it comes down to the design. What sort of oversight is there, how long is footage stored, can it be used for specific crimes or expanded later, and are there mechanisms to correct false identification. Done right, these systems work well. I would be happy to live in a society where street crime is rare enough that I can leave personal property anywhere, like a bike, without constantly worrying about theft. I think many fears about these systems come from dystopian science fiction and assume the worst possible implementation, rather than recognizing that technology can be designed with strong safeguards.

thewebguyd 1mo ago
[dead]
lokar 1mo ago
The idea that these are needed, and deployed to address a crime problem is false. For example, Irvine, CA has been one of the safest large cites in the US for decades. Why did they need flock?
- john-h-k 1mo ago
  > For example, Irvine, CA has been one of the safest large cites in the US for decades. Why did they need flock? Uhh, because getting safer is still better? Why the hell does the relative ranking matter?
- stickfigure 1mo ago
  Because the residents of Irvine want it to be even safer? Automobile thefts still happen there, crime isn't zero. Who are you to say "stop complaining about your car break-in, it's worse in other cities". Reliable studies have shown that increasing the severity of punishment doesn't deter crime, but increasing the chance of being caught does. Cameras directly address the later. You'd have to be a total idiot to steal a car these days.

crimsoneer 1mo ago

Yeaaah for seeing Andy on HN. His stuff is always excellent.

CurbStomper 1mo ago

[dead]

wiseleo 1mo ago

Here's a case study of what happens when this information is public (it's linked as the "data-driven" series). This information should not exist unless the plate is flagged and the reason for that is sufficient to obtain a warrant. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/open-records-laws-reveal-alprs-sprawling-surveillance-now-states-want-block-what https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/open-records-laws-reve...

GuinansEyebrows 1mo ago

> Imagine Ring comes out with a nicer camera system for homeowners that has more comprehensive views around your house and is just as cheap. And we will ultimately be safer for it. I wonder if people who feel this way will feel safer? In this scenario, you have a Ring camera system observing your entire property. Do you feel safer if someone comes onto your property and triggers an alarm? What if it turns out it's just a kid coming over to grab a stray frisbee? What if your neighbor noticed something needed a quick fix (say you left a can of paint open or something similarly benign) and wanted help in a neighborly way without first checking to see if you were home? I guess we just take for granted that we live in a low-trust society. But we take that for granted at our peril, because the fear of a low-trust society is actively being exploited by people who want to sell individuals, businesses and municipalities the means to further erode that trust.

mlsu 1mo ago

There is a concept in safety called the hierarchy of hazard controls. There is a ranking of hazard mitigations from most to least effective. 1) remove the hazard 2) replace the hazard with something less hazardous 3) isolate the hazard (guards, cages etc) 4) administrative controls (procedures, training, warning, etc) 5) PPE Implementing some kind of judicial review for these panopticons is something like 4) in the hierarchy. It would be a good thing to have, but we can go far further. Why do we need this shit? Oh what so someone’s car doesn’t get stolen a few times per year? I think my values are in line with the founding fathers and most Americans when I say I would gladly give up a little bit of safety to not have a spy camera trained on me 24/7. I would like more removal and less procedural controls. The cops cannot abuse a system that does not exist.

cucumber3732842 1mo ago

My jaded opinion is that Flock's mistake was marketing to police departments. In matters of criminal law the accused has these pesky things called "rights". The police have long violated those rights so there are reams upon reams of precedent reinforcing people's rights. The accused has comparatively no rights when an bureaucrat is shaking them down and the accused is often a business rather than an individual it's easy to have sympathy for. Flock could've run their racket for many years, got much praise from the useful idiots, really gotten their system integrated and entrenched, if they'd have chosen that route. Their mistake was believing in their own bullshit. They thought they could make it cheaper to solve crimes (at great cost to everyone's rights of course, but they thought this was acceptable) and make things better (or at least their definition of it). If only they had been slightly scummier and instead set out to help municipalities collect civil fines they probably could have gotten away without scrutiny.

Watney-0717 1mo ago

[flagged]

tamimio 1mo ago

The best solution is to make your plate readable to humans but not cameras, now how would you do that I won’t reveal much else it will be abused, but think out of the pla.. box, I mean.

corsendonk 1mo ago

They're more than just license plate readers. Much more.

kotaKat 1mo ago

funny question I have to pose now because I haven't thought about it yet in all the ALPR discussions and the like. There are civilian enterprise uses of ALPR. Where do they fall in this? I don't even mean for mass data collection or even for parking enforcement. I'm thinking of like various car washes where they offer monthly memberships and their car wash portal system has plate recognition to tie your membership to your car. Or other enterprise access control applications where the ALPR pops the gates open instead of RFID tags.

Cider9986 1mo ago

A warrant is better than no warrant, but: A warrant requirement is not a reasonable bandaid to consider allowing mass spying. There should be no mass spying by default. A warrant requirement makes sense for something like the locations of customers on cellular networks, because, although it should be improved, it's been built into the tech. When you make the optional choice to create mass spying, safeguards do not make it acceptable.

lern_too_spel 1mo ago
This should be up to the citizens. If you're living in Oakland with rampant theft and illegal dumping, it's a reasonable trade-off to allow tracking down perpetrators with a warrant. Most people would not agree to allowing police to do arbitrary searches of that data without a warrant.
- Cider9986 1mo ago
  That sounds like a somewhat reasonable temporary measure if they prove their efficacy.

thaumaturgy 1mo ago

There is another middle option that I would have liked to see the author discuss: requiring either a case number or a CAD ID, instead of a "search reason". In my conversations with law enforcement (mostly at management level, chiefs of police), all of them have had reasonable-sounding objections to a warrant requirement for a search, but zero of them have been able to come up with a reason why a case-or-CAD ID requirement isn't workable. Generally, they argue that in practice obtaining a warrant can be too onerous in time sensitive situations, and can be harder to obtain than the public realizes. Two popular examples are in kidnappings (time sensitive) and missing persons (difficult to obtain). A case number or CAD ID however simply requires that the details of either a public call for service or an active investigation are associated with the historical search. It closes the door on officers' hobby searching. Andrew's blog post does note the problems with oversight, which also match my experience, so this isn't a perfect fix. But it will go further in conversations with law enforcement for people that are trying to thread the needle on making "safe" mass surveillance. (I am personally opposed to mass surveillance in all its forms, but arguing only from that position pretty much immediately excludes me from policy discussions.)

smalltorch 1mo ago
Yeah but that is the exact purpose of the warrant. It's suppose to add friction so you can't do this exact thing, even if it's useful and faster not to.
apwheele 1mo ago
This is already the current status quo on paper. I bet the majority of the cases IJ identified of mis-use the PDs already had this policy. (That is the same standard when you do a background criminal history check in New York, need to put in a case number, FYI.) I did not want to go into too many technical details on the post -- I think you could do an AI audit at the point in time of the search query to prevent people putting in junk cases. That said I believe there will always need to be third party audits at a minimum. Part of the issue is policies on paper are not effectively enforced. So people saying "just have policy X to prevent abuse" is a non-answer. I wrote the post mainly because people arguing for limited data retention I think is bad for both sides -- it neither protects civil liberties and simultaneously makes it harder for long term criminal investigations.

metalcrow 1mo ago

I do wonder though if the data retention should be restricted at all. This brings up a very good point that even old data (months or more) can be vital to cases or to the defense, but is there any downside to it that would make it worth restricting? And how long?

MrDrMcCoy 1mo ago
I think it should. 7 days without a warrant to retain, and only for the specific purpose of an active investigation following an identified crime.
- SchemaLoad 1mo ago
  This seems pretty logical. If a car is stolen, it's fair to allow fast access to it's live location. In the search request they can submit a form saying they are tracking the car after a report it's stolen. The requests can get stored in an audit log with penalties for abuse.

arjie 1mo ago

Warrants for historical search with warrant-free flags for ongoing issues seems like a nice middle ground. Convincing. Good article. It seems that would easily impede a lot of abuse and it’s straightforward to believe that historical data is rarely so urgent as to not require a warrant. A matter of defining historical as a sufficiently old enough thing but that seems feasible.

gs17 1mo ago
> warrant-free flags for ongoing issues Why couldn't they get a warrant if it's an ongoing issue? It should be really easy, and warrants like that wouldn't take a long time to get usually.
- arjie 1mo ago
  Just for my own epistemic hygiene, would you mind clarifying your familiarity with applying for and receiving a similar warrant and the duration you envision when you say "wouldn't take a long time"? Very reasonable not to, of course, but it helps me adjust my understanding of things. And yes, if a warrant is a 10 min process at p95 from call receipt to warrant acceptance then that certainly allows for things like "this car was stolen in an armed robbery 20 mins ago; we'd like to track it through the city" without too much concern, and I would switch to requiring such an SLA[0] on warrants combined with a requirement on warrants that can be rescinded if the SLA is violated. 0: strictly nonsensical here, but I think you get the picture
  - gs17 1mo ago
    With electronic warrant systems and on-call judges, it can be 15 minutes or less, but that's typically for the simplest cases (e.g. DUI blood draw). However, given how non-seriously they take things currently I have little reason to believe "let me search Flock for this car reported stolen for the next week" wouldn't be a rubber stamp.
    - arjie 1mo ago
      If warrant requests are guaranteed accepted or rejected in t<=15 mins, then I think I support the idea that they should be required with the functionality that they are auto approved at some t+5 deadline. Just to clarify, the timelines you describe are from experience, knowledge, or theorycrafting?

Pxtl 1mo ago

There's a fundamental question: Is it legal for the government to blanket a public space in cameras and do whatever they want to the data that they collect from those cameras? Is it legal for a private entity to do the same with their owned space (like a plaza or mall or office tower)? Focusing on license-plate-readers seems like car-brain is causing the author to miss the forest for the trees.

giantg2 1mo ago

Collecting and storing the information is the real problem. The focus on warrants is a distraction. Access control (warrant) doesn't prevent a breach, and the system is not architected in a way to prevent internal abuse. The best way to prevent the abuse of data is to not collect or store it at all.

cm2012 1mo ago

A warrant is too much but strict audit logs and other protections like that I agree with.

gagan2020 1mo ago

You should raise your voices now. For Indians, its too late. Our Indian Government used facial recognition system at mass level in recent students protests and now police is showing up on their homes. It's better to raise the voice now for you guys than to say sorry later.

carefulfungi 1mo ago

A warrant isn't an effective safe guard unless you trust the government to only prosecute actual crimes. The US federal government has demonstrated, explicitly, that it is willing to use law enforcement for political ends and will charge private citizens for political reasons (like the reflecting pool case). Now is not the time to be giving more power to the executive or its policing functions.

throwaway85825 1mo ago

Wire tapping phones requires a warrant, except the chinese hacked into the lawful intercept system. Most Russian government databases are for sale on the dark web. If the data is collected no amount of legal protections will prevent misuse.

deleted 1mo ago

[deleted]

RyJones 1mo ago

I agree; however, here is my vibe-coded home ALPRS: https://github.com/ryjones/alprs https://github.com/ryjones/alprs Using more vibe code: https://github.com/ryjones/platescan https://github.com/ryjones/platescan The bar is low.

henryaj 1mo ago

Any idea why this is so much less acceptable to people in the US than in the UK? In the UK we've had ANPR for more than twenty years and AFAICT there's no mass controversy surrounding it. It catches people with no licence, no insurance, who are wanted in various serious crimes. I'm surprised at the difference in attitude. (I am aware that the UK has a less-than-stellar privacy track record... but nonetheless it's curious that for this particular technology, as opposed to the Online Safety Act, there's such a difference.)

stronglikedan 1mo ago
Because we value freedom above all else, thankfully.
- HDBaseT 1mo ago
  That ship has sailed my friend. A man was arrested for clapping at a data center meeting. That is arguably worse "freedom of speech/freedom of expression" than most countries have. Speak ill of Israel and its over too. [1] https://www.404media.co/clapping-is-a-first-amendment-right-an-interview-with-the-person-arrested-for-clapping-at-a-data-center-meeting/ https://www.404media.co/clapping-is-a-first-amendment-right-...
Cider9986 1mo ago
It's mass surveillance that people can feel. Combined with ICE using it. Our police overlords are not so polite. In the UK there's severe limitations on freedom of speech, which would never be accepted in the US. The countries have very different values.
- henryaj 1mo ago
  > In the UK there's severe limitations on freedom of speech Sure, but those are just as controversial here as in the US, in a way that ANPR is a non-issue.
nrmitchi 1mo ago
The US has (especially recently) shown that "community aligned behavior" and "what those in power do" are very different. The US has also shown that the probability of someone being held accountable for massive abuse of power is essentially 0. This also means that the main disincentive for abusing power (getting caught and punished in some way) is a moot point. People generally don't object to technology being used to fine mass shooters, or terrorists, or bank robbers. They do object to the same technology being used to stalk women that Texas thinks might be trying to get an abortion, or ensure that minorities stay out of the "white neighborhoods". One of these examples is a real thing, the other is what people are (reasonably) afraid of.

Glyptodon 1mo ago

I think we have the ability to get rid of license plates altogether and restore some privacy. It's not like license plates stop LEOs from shooting people, like when they were chasing Dornier and unloaded on a Blue Toyota Tacoma when they knew his vehicle was a Grey Nissan Titan.

exabrial 1mo ago

Let me fix that for you: License plate readers should require a warrant.

sandworm101 1mo ago

So... should cops require a warrant before reading a plate with thier eyeballs? There are lots of vids of people claiming that, generally low information sovcits. But it makes for great window smashes.

madrox 1mo ago

A warrant is not required for an AMBER alert, which amounts to poor man's mass surveillance of license plates. We're basically fine with an incredibly intrusive push notification to get people to do the work without hand-wringing about privacy. I think I would rather AMBER alerts take advantage of mass surveillance than require AMBER alerts to get a warrant, but obviously there's lots of nuance to it.

freediddy 1mo ago

Can you poison their database with ai-generated license plates on a screen? Maybe set up a van with a big screen in front of a Flock camera and start generating random license plate numbers?

sleepybrett 1mo ago

any camera dragnet should be controlled by the local government (not the police department) and all access should require a warrant. end of.

vzaliva 1mo ago

Imagine all licence plates being small screens and periodically showing numbers derived from a private key issued by the DMV. As they change, vehicles could not be tracked without knowing the private key, yet the DMV can verify the ownership because they know one. I am not a crypto expert, and the actual scheme may be a bit more sophisticated, but you’ve got the idea.

krapp 1mo ago
That would be more expensive, as it requires electronics and infrastructure, the screens would be hacked and vandalized constantly, short out in bad weather, etc. It would be more robust just using some kind of transponder, but that might fall afoul of FCC rules, IDK. Also the cops would just get the private keys from the DMV anyway. It's all the same government.
- solidsnack9000 1mo ago
  Government agencies frequently keep each other in the dark, even when they are the same government -- and the DMV is not the same government as many of the agencies (in other states or at the federal level) that would want this data.
  - krapp 1mo ago
    >Government agencies frequently keep each other in the dark, even when they are the same government I don't think that's been the case since 9/11. It's naive to assume the CIA, FBI and NSA don't have root access to every device and every account in existence, or couldn't get it if they wanted it, legally or otherwise. I don't think your local DMV is going to be the hard line keeping the feds from knocking at your door.
    - solidsnack9000 1mo ago
      The limited number of people who attract the CIA's attention have data privacy concerns that go far beyond license plate readers. Warrants are not (and never have been) a solution for that.

evilDagmar 1mo ago

A judge would never sign off on a warrant for the kind of searches Flock facilitates. Similar opinions involving cell phones have been rejected by the courts multiple times. Folks desperately trying to workshop some line of reasoning by which everyone should apparently be okay with an Orwellian panopticon is pretty annoying.

shevy-java 1mo ago

Makes sense. Interesting to see how the judicial system allows the state to bypass that requirement.

butt_her_churn 1mo ago

let the butter churn! Y'all forget that USNORTHCOM is active and has been operating since 10/1/2002. It is a brave new world. In this post 9/11 world let us not forget that we voted away our right to privacy for the greater good! I for one welcome our robot overlords, how else will we survive?

nativeit 1mo ago

Yeah, because warrants have never been rubber stamped without proper oversight before. If we make these things normalized and routine, they will be abused. Don’t give them an inch.