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Lawsuit: City cameras make it impossible to drive anywhere without being tracked | "Every passing car is captured," says 4th Amendment lawsuit against Norfolk, VA
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- Published
- Oct 22 2024
- Word count
- 1708 words
Now everybody think about what this means when big tech companies get to do the same thing via a mass network of private residence cameras, and the power that gives them. Especially since they can correlate whther you have your device on you or not courtesty of BLE beacons. They can easily track movements reliably if there's a camera every 50m or so. Even with suburban spacing it's possible to do that. At city spacing they could probably calculate exactly which apartment every phone is in, especially if you happen to also have compatible smart devices they manufactured in the vicinity as well.
And that law enforcement gets to crawl through it with a few clicks and a rubber stamped request.
Yep. Laws were written when someone had to be at a public intersection to witness something.
Now we can pretty trivially (looking at a countries resources) record the majority of used public space 24/7. I can, arguably, fly a drone down the street at quite the height and record everything it can see from that height legally so long it’s not too heavy to violate FAA law.
The unfortunate reality is the intent of right to privacy and laws built on back of it has been hellishly ignored as tech has progressed, and will continue to until someone starts following cops and congressmen around using the same tactics and loopholes
At the same time, cameras are shown to deter crime. I'd rather a traffic cam write a ticket than a cop pull someone over on the highway.
Surveilance deters crime, but it also influences behavior in other ways. A harmless example I noticed today.
My town has a Halloween tradition where people anonomously (and harmlessly) mark a friend's house and leaves a treat basket with gifts and such. Having the camera kills the anonomous fun of it. Like a secret santa that begins with announcing who everyone got paired with.
While this is a tiny example, what happens to culture when this is the default state of affairs for everything? Here's a better post explaining this.
As for highway driving, that makes sense, especially since highway speeds are exponentially more dangerous to 'catch' rather than pulling over someone blowing throuvh a red light. Tracking broad moves is a far stretch from being able to track detailed moves block by block.
Maybe this explains even adults acting like teenagers who think they constantly have an audience judging their every action and mistep.
If you have a boss, odds are you do.
Don't friend coworkers on social media tied to your regular profile.
That's the age-old tension between liberty and security. Freedom to do what you want entails the ability to do the wrong thing. No one vocally condones speeding, much less burglary, murder, or sexual assault, but most of us value privacy, and are wary of people in government trying to enforce their own morality on others.
Furthermore, there are negative and positive liberties which can be in tension with each other in some ways. Negative liberty being the absence of constraint or coercion, like censorship and surveillance. Positive liberty being the possession of agency to realize one's self and purpose.
There is liberty in security, too. Pedestrians and cyclists want to enjoy the freedom of movement without fear of being killed or maimed by bad drivers. If drivers stopped going 30–40mph on a seemingly unbusy 15–20mph residential street because they knew there'd be certain and swift punishment, children would be more free to play in the streets.
I was just reading about how Singapore prosecutes its citizens for doing drugs abroad in countries where it's legal, which I find ridiculous and hard. But Singapore's model does give me pause: their system is draconian and stifling, but it also produces results: a clean, livable, transit-and-pedestrian-friendly city with virtually no crime or homelessness. My friends who live there experience the freedom to enjoy their lives without fear of being stabbed, shot, attacked, or run over.
That's not a dichotomy, though, and I don't think it accurate or useful to frame it as such. The absence of coersion is very often co-requisite with "the possession of agency to realize one's self and purpose," as you put it.
In a country like Singapore that places great emphasis on the security they believe limiting negative liberties provides, the individual only has the positive liberty for self-realization insofar as the self one wants to realize conforms to the image society–or more accurately, the powers that be–demands. "You're free to follow the path you think best, just so long as the path you choose is this specific one here." That's certainly an oversimplification, but it's not hard to comprehend that such a line exists, even if it is fuzzy and indistinct.
The queasy truth is that there's a calculus that must be performed that weighs the potential for harm inherent in respecting liberty against the freedom of the individual to direct their own path. These are fundamentally in opposition, because self-realization consists in the choices we make as individuals; any restriction in choice is at its core a restriction on the ability to make the right choice. That isn't to say that there should be no limitations on the ability of individuals to choose, because the consequences of some actions are too harmful for society to abide, but those limitations need to be considered and the trade-offs weighed.
One of the things that strikes me about the perennial gun control debate in America is how little attention is paid to this aspect. The inability of the electorate to reach a functional compromise on the right to bear arms is due in part to the fact that most everyone has, consciously or otherwise, already performed that calculus and reached different conclusions. To some, the ability a crazy person has to cause the death of innocents by his more or less unrestricted right to bear arms is unacceptable; to others, it is a grudgingly acceptable price to pay to preserve the ability to choose to use weapons in a way that everyone agrees is good and right. There's an ocean of nuance we could swim concerning just what each of us has based our personal calculus on, but underneath it all lies the potential that we fundamentally disagree about acceptable costs for that freedom.
I have to acknowledge that it's relatively easy for me to think about these things in the abstract. I'm privileged to be relatively secure where I am. My personal experience of threats to life and limb might be very different if I lived in an inner city, say, or were smaller, darker or more feminine. That's something that has to be acknowledged and weighed too.
80% of people living in public housing with many shelters that the government can legally corral homeless people into has probably helped that number thing more than criminalizing everything. Also mental institutions. Idk I guess incarcerating executing those that slip through the cracks of addiction and poverty probably cuts the numbers down too.
Yeah they provide more social support than the US housing being huge, but Camazotz was orderly too. It's a matter of at what cost.
Freedom includes me being allowed to do things you don't like, provided that I'm not infringing on your rights in doing so.
People do need to comprehend the difference between restricting rights and restricting the restricting of rights though.
And the trains ran on time in italy.
Traffic cams are also arguably WILDLY illegal as you have a right to face your accuser in court, and "random company X" is not a valid answer for that. And that's before you get into the obscene amounts of cases where they've been shown to knowingly ticket people who couldn't possible have committed the crime.
I completely agree a private business can have its cameras. I do not agree the government should be given the power to surveil people 24/7 "in case". Why not just have government cameras in homes them to further "deter crime".
And that's just on crimes people agree on. Let alone shit like weed.
Maine actually has no camera-based traffic enforcement for this reason. It's expressly illegal due to the right to face an accuser. (I believe it started as a court case, and an explicit law was later passed, iirc.) The exceptions carved out are toll plazas (automatic billing) and school bus cameras.
https://www.mainelegislature.org/legis/statutes/29-a/title29-Asec2117.html
Simple answer is to have an officer monitor the cameras. Officer on duty will verify all tickets. You can now face your accuser. All imagery collected will need to be logged and stored as evidence against you.
That's an easy solution right there.
But FUCK 'private' companies being allowed to surveil everything and then sell that info to PDs.
Pair the cameras with font-facing cameras to do facial recognition on the driver. Any that the monitoring officer verifies as speeding then get compared to the photo on the license of the registered owner of the vehicle to determine whether they were the driver or if it is someone else who was breaking the law and needs to pay.
So you want to give the police the ability to monitor basically everyone through facial recognition at all times while they’re in a vehicle?
No, I'd prefer against that.
I'm also against the fact that I have to wait three or so seconds at every light because inevitably two to four people will run the red light. I'm not talking "just missed it" I'm talking "the light has been fully red and my green is on and yet a semi and two Dodges have still blown this light."
Like, I guess I'm glad the cops are parked up over at the school zone to intimidate people into doing the speed limit over there but I see hundreds of cars every year zip through red lights and that's just on my commute and so on.
Red light cameras with active monitoring from a live person and mandated yellow light lengths is a better solution that twenty games of "will I get T-boned" a day.
Plus, honestly, I don't care about driver recognition cameras. It's your car, know who's driving it. Seriously, if someone goes and shoots someone with your gun, the cops will just assume it was you unless you say "here's evidence that I loaned the gun to Steve for his hunting trip. I didn't know he was gonna shoot someone." If you let your partner drive your car and they're blowing through red lights, throw 'em under the bus.
The other alternate is automated charging of owners instead of drivers.
The alternative is you don’t use automation for traffic tickets, one of the most minor infractions out there.
Breaking traffic laws isn't a minor issue. People just treat it like it's normal even though over a million people are killed by car crashes every year. Speeding is a significant contributing factor. The difference between following the speed limit in the neighborhood versus going 15 km/h over the limit is whether or not grandma dies when she's hit by a car.
It's also worth noting that, at least when they aren't using facial recognition, traffic cameras are generally less biased by things like gender and especially race when doling out speeding tickets than human cops. In large part because human cops tend to exhibit a lot of bias when giving out traffic tickets.
Adding to that point, this is why even small reduced-speed zones are important.
If a school zone drops from 25 mph to 20 mph, actually slow down to 20 mph. Suppose Kevin the Kindergartener bounces his ball into the street during recess. Being 5 years old, he chases after it without thinking. Suppose you could just stop in time if you were going 20 mph. Then, if you were going 25 mph instead, you wouldn't lightly bump into Kevin at 5 mph; you would be going 15 mph - the speed of an average young adult at a full sprint. If you wouldn't football tackle a kindergartener at full force, don't speed in a school zone.
Similarly, suppose construction drops the speed limit on an arterial road from 45 mph down to 40 mph. Connor the Concrete Layer knows better than to walk into traffic, but he slips on a wet spot of cement and falls into the traveled part of the road. If you had slowed down to 40 mph and slammed on the brakes, you would have just barely stopped in time to avoid hitting him. If you were still going 45 mph instead, you wouldn't bump into him at 5 mph; you would still be going 20 mph - the speed of an actual professional football player. If you wouldn't hire Lawrence Taylor to deck a construction worker, then don't speed in construction zones.
These two examples are when the speed limit goes down for a stretch of road, but the same concept applies for the general 5-over that everyone seems to drive everywhere in practice.
That's exactly why automation and crowdsourcing is most useful for it. If I went up to a cop and pointed out that a car was parked in a red zone, he'd brush me off rather than deal with it. But with automatic red light or speed cameras as well as citizen-submitted photographs of rule breaking, car owners can be fined for the behavior of their vehicles as is appropriate. So many people break parking and driving laws because they know that they're never going to be fined for it. That could change.
Yes lets turn normal people who are already horrendous in HOA's with bias and nonsense into rule enforcers.
To solve an annoying inconvenience you're going to cause a massive nightmare.
In New Jersey, I do have the right to file a moving violation against someone else in traffic court.
It's just that the cost/benefit is not there because it requires showing up in person for every offence.
I would love nothing more than to be able to automatically submit moving violations against people who drive 45 in the 25. I wouldn't even want paid... I just want people to stop driving through residential neighborhoods at borderline highway speeds. I'd be happy to fight it in court if I was paid reasonably for the time spent.
Sounds like something a non-profit could do.
Well you said reasonably.
Law school it is then
I'm not sure where HOAs are coming into this conversation from, but I agree they're atrocious. Is your logic that, because when people are in HOAs they get uptight about following and enforcing rules, that it would be bad to extend that to reporting illegal parking to the authorities?
I'm not proposing that any person can issue a ticket or enforce the rules, merely report it. We already have systems in place for people to report all sorts of issues. SeeClickFix or similar software lets people report graffiti, illegal dumping, potholes, property code violations, damaged city property, and so on. This isn't some sort of weird slippery slope. It's how people report issues to the city for the city to review and address.
I like that alternative.
That seems reasonable to me? People should have some consideration as to whether the person they're loaning their car to is going to operate it safely and legally.
To justify invasive and harmful policy like this by way of fearmongering about hypothetical crime would be to make for a society that treats people as evil by default.
Speeding isn't a hypothetical crime lol. Traffic cameras have huge amounts of experimental evidence showing they effectively reduce speeding and save lives by making people drive safer.
For privacy concerns, it'd be relatively easy to configure them to only point at license plates and keep no other records (there are problems with this approach, but it's possible).
The crime is hypothetical because you are not talking about any specific instance of it, but instead the general idea that speeding will occur, and then using it to justify furthering a surveillance state. Other techniques, such as traffic calming or public transportation, reduce dangerous driving far more effectively and need neither aggressive punishment nor the treating of drivers as inevitable criminals.
Tools like these are practically guaranteed to be abused, so you can expect the probability of responsible usage like this to be approximately zero.
Traffic calming and public transportation systems are expensive and take time. Everyone hates construction projects that disrupt their lives. Traffic cameras are cheap and extremely effective. Deaths from reckless driving are at truly insane levels that are somehow normalized and tolerated. Speeding fines can be easily scaled to income and have warning systems. If drivers are committing dangerous crimes that could kill people like speeding, laws should be enforced to keep people safe.
If traffic deaths are a crisis that we take seriously, we should use every tool available to protect vulnerable populations.
An expensive solution that takes time is still better than one that solves a problem by creating a bigger one, and if we're going to start arguing for preferred answers based on what people hate, then there sure is a lot to be said on speeding tickets.
But it all boils back down to the fact that you are stating preference for an option that works by hurting people and imagining an idealized version of it that would never occur, all while writing off safer and kinder options just because they're not as easy to slap down in a short time.
Unless recording someone is an immediate and direct harm, the harms of traffic cameras are just as hypothetical. If a city exclusively used cameras to write tickets and literally nothing else, ever. Not even retaining the data. The only risk is the slippery slope argument of "well hypothetically they could keep all the recordings and track people!"
A slippery slope that has time and again been proven to be a very real thing that happens when more cameras are added in more places. Suburbia in much of the U.S. has already become a surveillance state due to nearly ubiquitous doorbell cameras that cops are freely allowed to check whenever they want without a warrant.
I can't even leave my house without being on one of these cameras. And you want there to be even more of them. If both our arguments rely on hypotheticals, then at least mine's trying to advocate for kind solutions rather than an honest-to-god police state.
I'm out.
The drone weight thing is becoming somewhat trivial, things are getting lighter and lighter. I think there are now some FPV whoops that are sub-200 grams that carry HD DJI cameras now.
I have an analog one that is ~24 grams that gets ~10 minute+ flight times.
Yep. I’ve been dying for a tiny whoop I like forever so I follow it a little(and might get the DJI Neo as a compromise)
A heavier drone will still be better outside due to weight and wind and what not but it’s all beside the point since the hypothetical stands
The happy model moblite mobula 7/8 with an ELRS AIO is pretty fun. You can fly it outside fairly easily.
I wonder if it's possible to have a stationary solar-powered drone? Fixed-wing would be vastly easier, but can't hover in-place like a quadcopter can. Since you need the solar panels either way, maybe use them as giant rotors?
I have no idea. Maybe a larger drone with a low weight frame. I don't know how heavy solar panels are, but I would expect the materials might be too heavy to act as rotors too. Usually the props need to be pretty light so their inertia (and changes to it) doesn't burn out the motor.
Solar panels can be fractions of a mm thick, I don't think weight is a concern. 44w/g, that's crazy.
Perovskite cells really struggle with /degradability/durability. Not to say they won't get there, but for the present they don't have a long enough life. There's one company, Verde Solar, that apparently will be selling commercial panels, but it's still a 'wait and see' game to see how their panels actually perform.
With conventional silicone, the actual silicone wafer is pretty light. Unfortunately they're extremely brittle and usually encased in glass or plastic. They tolerate barely any bending without forming cracks. So most of the weight of a solar panel isn't from the actual photo-voltaic part, but instead is from the casing protecting the cells.
Very excited for lightweight PV, but I don't think we're quite there yet. Much closer than we used to be though!
Oh wow, I didn't know that, maybe it could work. Wiring would get complicated, to get from the props, through/past the motor and on to the flight controller, but probably doable.