Thread

1. JKCalhoun · 1791067032 · focus · HN ↗

   License plate reader?

   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).

   1. dataflow · 1791070304 · focus · HN ↗

      > The software should only "ping" when there is a confident match with said license plate(s)

      Are you suggesting the set of all license plates of interest should be stored on the device itself?

      1. ocdtrekkie · 1791070969 · focus · HN ↗

         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.

         1. qmr · 1791073547 · focus · HN ↗

            There's no difference between a BOLO and a panopticon dragnet of always on AI powered cameras?

            1. ocdtrekkie · 1791080201 · focus · HN ↗

               If they solely look for and record sightings of specific plates associated with active investigations? Not a lot, no.

               The core problem with Flock is that it tracks innocent citizens on the off chance it helps catch a criminal, when it could be designed to only track already known wanted vehicles.

               1. Spivak · 1791108377 · focus · HN ↗

                  You are committing the scale invariant fallacy where two things are the same if they only differ by scale. A chance encounter with a human who reports the sighting to be investigated isn't even surveillance, your massively watered down flock still turns a bolo into 24/7 surveillance of the vehicle going forward. Which if we use the test of could humans do this it would at minimum require a warrant.
      2. jmb99 · 1791072912 · focus · HN ↗

         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

         1. felixgallo · 1791079077 · focus · HN ↗

            You could just store it in a bloom filter, which would be non-public but also give you tunable accuracy. For 1 in a million false positives, a bloom filter would cost 28.8 bits per plate.
      3. JKCalhoun · 1791115615 · focus · HN ↗

         What is the problem with that?

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