I asked police to send me their public surveillance footage of my car

> probably has deep but subtle affects on our psyches

Many religions (basically all the big ones) forcefully indoctrinate members from childhood to believe that their deity is omniscient and is constantly watching them and judging them. It's generally agreed among members that this is a good thing.

The inability of people to go through the power process has deep psychological implications, described in depth in "Industrial Society and It's Future"

Like thinking the “elf on the shelf” Christmas toy is an acceptable thing.

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Don't need any special tech or geometry, just light. If it's relatively darker in the watched-from areas it's harder to see in than out.

"By Blinds, and other contrivances, the Inspectors concealed from the observation of the Prisoners: hence the sentiment of a sort of invisible omnipresence."

— Jeremy Bentham (1791). Panopticon, or The Inspection House

Something like "one way mirrors" should work.

They're really just glass with a partially reflective layer.

When one side is brightly lit and the other side isn't you get the desired effect.

a circular room looking out from a high point facing an exterior round wall of cells that look in

Something like a pinhole camera. If you have a piece of card with a pinprick hole in it, you can look through that hole and see a wide view, but a person in front of you wouldn't be able to see much of you through that same hole.

Prisons in the 1800s were dark

It's a metaphor mostly.

You just described my Catholic upbringing

the scarier thing is, prior to the AIs, even if they could get all this information, there was no one to sort through it, so they needed some actual reason to look.

Now they don't need any reason to look, they can just make a bunch of AI sift through it.

Root word comes from the Greek mythological giant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argus_Panoptes

Some years ago, the one in Arnhem, was up for sale, and the local hacker space, hack42, made an attempt to buy it and turn it into the largest hacker space of Europe. The plan did not work out.

Or the ever classic ‘caught in an affair’ [https://petapixel.com/2021/12/13/speed-camera-photo-sent-to-...]

And attempts to reduce the problem [https://au.news.yahoo.com/woman-believes-husband-cheating-sp...]

GPS trackers and immobilizers (aka "kill switches") have also made repo work a lot easier. If you buy from low/no-credit ("buy here pay here") lots, you probably have at least one (if not both) installed.

>There is an onus in the UK for the registered keeper of the vehicle to incriminate themselves or someone else for road traffic offences (confirmed by test cases).

That's not how that works. You, as the registered keeper of a vehicle, have a number of duties relating to the provision of information to the police or other relevant authorities upon request. This isn't a controversial provision, something similar exists in practically every jurisdiction in which cars have a unique identifier.

The s172 process avoids the situation where a speeding fine can be avoided by simply not saying who was driving. 172(4) provides a statutory defence which can be advanced by an individual who's vehicle was cloned:

>A person shall not be guilty of an offence by virtue of paragraph (a) of subsection (2) above if he shows that he did not know and could not with reasonable diligence have ascertained who the driver of the vehicle was.

And regarding the disclosure issue

> The core objective of the police is to assert your guilt, not to provide you with any help for your defence.

This is an incorrect statement - the police are obliged to disclose any relevant, unused material (eg material they have that they don't produce in evidence) that will either undermine the prosecution case or advance the defence.

However, if you are being prosecuted for failing to nominate, it is more likely that you have completely failed to return the form rather than returning the form with a note saying that your plate appears to have been cloned, in which case access to the ANPR database is irrelevant because you need to explain why you did not bother to furnish the information rather than police not believing that your vehicle had been cloned.

>Essentially you have to pay up or prove the cloning (and your innocence) yourself - very difficult because you do not have access to the surveillance database that would help you. The core objective of the police is to assert your guilt, not to provide you with any help for your defence.

At least in the US prosecutors are obligated to disclose any exculpatory evidence they find, even if they don't plan to use it in court.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brady_v._Maryland

The "revenue generation" argument works for the US but cannot be imported directly over, because cameras work differently here. The revenue goes into the consolidated fund. Rule changes removed them from revenue-maxing spots and made them bright yellow with advanced signage.

(also, the court case if you take it to court should include the photo showing the car, so cloners have to match the exact model of car from the plates they're cloning)

The decision to site a speed camera (and costs of maintaining the camera) and revenue from the camera end up at very different points in the system. The fixed cameras in my city have been off since 2012, because the local council won't pay for them. The "revenue generation" argument is very much overblown.

> very difficult because you do not have access to the surveillance database that would help you

Is the legal process of discovery not a thing in the UK? Finding evidence that might exonerate you is precisely what that process is for.

I'm not sure how a system would work that didn't auto issue the absolute maximum number of tickets possible. Random lottery to auto discard tickets? A max quota leading to a lawless time in the late evening?

But if that has parameters they've set to max because they really want that delicious revenue, why not detect cloned plates and charge those people more than the tickets?

and when this happens, it is proof of an illegitimate regime, not for the people, and as such it becomes morally and ethically justifiable to do ANYTHING and EVERYTHING one deem required to demolish it, and bring the responsible parties to justice

>btw anyone can check any car's annual mileage from the number plate using the MOT history lookup

Can this be done anonymously? Otherwise doing such a lookup creates a paper trail, which is generally bad if you're trying to commit any crime.

This does not sound like an egregious limiting factor at all.

> > historically we have exactly zero expectation of privacy in public spaces in the UK.

> True, but we also had zero expectation of permanent records being kept of so much of what we do in public spaces, or being under such constant surveillance in public spaces. I think that is a concern.

I've been watching a bunch of "auditor" videos from the UK. These guys are basically trolling by going around with a camera in public, filming stuff, and fishing for reactions that they can then post on Youtube or TikTok or Reels or whatever for views and engagement.

One thing that's very consistent across these videos is how many of their victims truly believe that you need permission to film people in public, or that they can walk up to the guy with the camera and demand to know who he is or that he deletes the footage. So a lot of people are acting as if they had much stronger rights to privacy than they really do, people think they're generally safe from being constantly surveilled, when the opposite is in fact true.

Another thing that's also hilariously consistent is when these auditors film businesses, and representatives of those businesses, usually the store manager, goes out and tells them they can't film the customers going in and out of the store because that's "against company policy" or "because of respect for our customers' privacy". At the same time, those stores have tons of security camera inside the store, recording every little thing every single customer is doing all the time.

The hypocrisy is blatant. Everybody wants to monitor everyone else, but no-one wants to be monitored by anyone.

There's a similar issue around phone metadata. If someone knows that you've made a particular call at a certain time, you wouldn't be concerned about them spying on you, but if they had access to all your phone call records, then they can put together a picture about you and your acquaintances.

That's part of my point, though: these cameras are basically never reviewed by a person. So you are reliably watched constantly, but never by a human.

This does lead to the problem that the post I replied to was pointing out, namely that people often get automated fines for cloned plates. It's kind of like the opening of Brazil, if you're familiar with that film, but obviously for much lower stakes.

The point of mandatory third party insurance is so that when you drive through the putative crowd of children waiting for the bus, the state and the victim's families are not on the hook for lifetime care costs which can easily be in the tens of millions of dollars per victim.

The social contract is really to fix the damage your (at fault) collisions cause.

At least in jurisdictions I've been in, the state requires evidence of financial responsibility as a requirement for driving. (Enforcement is a separate issue from requirement). A car insurance policy is evidence of financial responsibility, and the most common; but you can also post a bond of something like the minimum insurance amounts. Yes, if you don't have the money to post a bond, you're more or less forced into insurance or not driving (or driving illegaly), but that's we know you'll uphold the social construct of fixing the damages you cause. You don't need insurance to ride a bicycle, because it's not as easy to cause damages with a bicycle.

The alternative is that cars are prohibited because we've decided not to insure the risk and their owners definitely can't be relied upon to just happen to be able to cover the costs when, inevitably, they are incurred.

I'm OK with "all private motor vehicles are prohibited" but you need to be clear if that's what you want

> Insurance isn't a social contract, it's private business foisted upon you

so if you had an accident that caused damage to somebody else, and you didnt have money to pay for said damage, who makes the other party whole?

FWIW, there is such a thing as public-sector insurance. The required auto insurance in saskatchewan, for instance, is tied to your registration and administered by the same crown corporation, which doesn't have the profit motive that a private insurer has.

You can survive quite happily without a car, and thus without car insurance, in the vast majority of the UK. Vehicle ownership is not mandatory either in principle or practice.

"Obey the law" isn't part of the social contract? Hmm.

Because it's not particularly relevant. The term comes from the prison system, where there is no expectation of privacy, and is being applied to describe a public setting where there maybe _should_ be some expectation, because we're not prisoners!

In all fairness the highway code specifically says that you should not violate it to let ambulance pass. Might be down to sketchy council, but they normally place signs "new layout ahead" and the like when limits, lanes change.

They don't need access to your device. The Police can use records from the mobile operators to track device movements.

Although those searches are recorded, which should act as a deterrent for phishing expeditions.

"Road tax" is a widespread colloquial term, and that tax must be paid to be able to drive on public roads. So let's not lose ourselves in nitpicks, it brings nothing to the discussion at hand...

You’re absolutely right, I’ve edited my comment to say vehicle tax rather than road tax. It’s actually one of my personal bugbears as well, so I can’t believe that I said that.

There’s three main points here:

1. Don’t build systems that can be abused to start with, because they will be abused, but if we must build one then see point 2:

2. Put access to this sensitive information behind a judge’s signature. Because see point 3:

3. When it comes to this kind of data: There are no “good guys” and “bad guys” - we should assume that everyone is a potential bad guy.

Whenever you hear the “good guys” justification, immediately remind yourself of the ways the “good guys” have been found to be “bad guys” in sheep’s clothing.

Whenever you hear someone use the “nothing to hide” argument, remind yourself that none of the victims in these stories had anything to hide, nor had they done anything wrong. (Much like the thousands of women who die from partner abuse every year.)

I'm not worried about "any cop"

I'm worried that YouPeople(TM) (i.e. the reader, HN, some unspecified future group, etc.) will vote in some jerks who will decide that people like me ought to be scrutinized to the full extent of the law. And your cheerleaders will say things like "they shouldn't have broken the law" when it was never possible, by design, to comply with all the laws all the time in the first place.

Access logs are meaningless when police are only accountable to themselves and unions shield them from any disciple of their wrongdoings

And I am sure when they are caught the full brunt of the U.S. justice system holds them accountable for their wretched behavior. More likely they just move departments. Logging something is moot if those abusing the power are rarely held accountable for things ranging all the way up to murder.

I agree that we don't have an expectation of privacy on a public road, but I feel like we've been frog boiled in the US into equating that with being tracked everywhere, all the time -- or, rather, constantly surveilled by both private and public entities.

I agree with you on the judicial approval and data expiration, but I don't think the systems should be active until those rules are enacted.

From Justice Sotomayor's concurring opinion in US v. Jones:

'“cases involving even short-term monitoring … require particular attention” because the “Government can store such records and efficiently mine them for information years into the future …. GPS monitoring is cheap … proceeds surreptitiously, [and] it evades the ordinary checks that constrain abusive law enforcement practices: ‘limited police resources and community hostility.'” Id. at *11. Justice Sotomayor expressed concerns that the Government’s use of such technology might chill “associational and expressive freedoms,”'

https://epic.org/documents/united-states-v-jones/

I don't think the universal surveillance we have today is even recognizably similar to a citizen being concerned about a surreptitious GPS tracker.

Not just judicial approval, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_secret_sharing

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> Five years ago on HN stories like this would collect comments with general revulsion to this sort of surveillance.

I'm super skeptical that this is actually true. In fact, I'm pretty sure it isn't, and you're just projecting your own positions on "HN of five years ago".

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Most people on HN are highly networked with Big Tech which depends on surveillance data. Without it, their jobs and careers vanish. Defending surveillance doesn't come from a place of reason, it comes from a place of ignorance and fear.

Being a police officer doesn't even rank in the top 10 most dangerous jobs in America. Loggers, fishers, roofers, and delivery drivers all face higher fatality rates according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

The Supreme Court explicitly ruled in Castle Rock v. Gonzales (2005) that police have no constitutional duty to protect citizens from harm, effectively nullifying the "committed their lives to your safety" claim.

These "million+ hard-working officers" actively maintain the corrupt system by refusing to hold their colleagues accountable. The "few bad apples" theory falls apart when entire departments and unions systematically protect officers who abuse their power.

American police have earned their reputation through decades of documented misconduct, militarization, and resistance to meaningful reform. The institution works exactly as designed.

> who committed their lives to your safety

Federal courts, including the Supreme Court, have repeatedly held that police have no duty to provide protection to citizens in general.

If police were committing their lives to our safety, why would they use their limited funding pursuing court cases to affirm the opposite?

You're absolutely right, there are some good cops. But what happens to them? Here's one example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Schoolcraft

Consider that the guys entire management chain was involved in the attempt to forcibly institutionalize him, and numerous rank and file police officers as well. And not a single one of them spoke in his defense.

Based on this anecdote, what would you say the ratio of good vs bad cops is in NYPD?

THe "thin blue line" that keeps otherwise good cops from snitching on bad cops is the whole issue. You won't go far as a cop if your intention is to root out corruption.

Did you know, in the US it is possible to be overqualified to be a cop, if you are too smart? The system wants jackbooted thugs, rather than intelligent policing.

Awww the criminals in the largest gang of the USA might get upset?

Tough fucking luck.

It's frankly disgusting how many people in this thread are willing to embrace prejudice as soon as it's prejudice against a group they don't like. Turns out that the lesson people learned from years of social pressure to not pick on minorities wasn't "prejudice is wrong", but rather "ok we can pick on groups but just not these ones".

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If we haven't managed to stop them brutalizing and killing unethically yet, then I don't think we'll stop them violating privacy unethically any time soon.

Getting police to act ethically is a non-trivial problem. In fact, it's been a society-defining problem since the beginning of society.

There's SIGNIFICANT selection bias at play in such a setting.

(not that you're not correct in that the more equal animals never face the same consequences less equal ones do).

I’m sorry, is the proposal here that you remove your legally-required number plates and travel that way (in which case Flock’s “vehicle DNA” feature recognition will quickly reidentify you), or that you buy or rent other cars? I guess starting and ending somewhere other than your home?

Or did you have a different mode of travel in mind that compares favorably to wheeled transportation on public streets?

Instead municipalities have been known to tweak whatever variables they can to maximize their fees collected. In the city I live in, they illegally put speed cameras too soon after a speed change. The city fought against it and won, so the cameras stayed where they are. There is a 5mph drop right before one of the speed cameras and the road jumps up 10mph shortly after. This creates dangerous highway situations where locals aware of the cameras speed up to the camera point, slam on their brakes, and then speed off again after. There is no reason other than revenue for the speed to drop like that on a highway for such a short and straight section without abnormal entrances and exits.

Throw in red light camera setups where they reduce the yellow lights to dangerous levels for everyone in order to collect more fees despite longer yellow light times being one of the most effective ways to prevent collisions in intersections.

https://www.salon.com/2017/04/05/this-may-have-happened-to-y...

Or, you know, you could just speed less often?

> This just encourages police to put them where they know people are more likely to violate the law, like at the bottom of hills, where there's not really a danger, but it generates more revenue.

Judging by the number of accidents I've seen at the bottom of hills, I'm skeptical of your statement that "there's not really a danger" there.

I don't think posting up at the bottom of a hill is a revenue-generating thing, it's simply an exercise of going to where the crime happens. In this case, it's at the bottom of a hill that makes it easier for drivers to reach excessive speeds and thus are an increased danger to everyone else on the road.

This is exactly where you want to deter people from behaving dangerously, and where you want to punish the people who fail to pay enough attention to avoid getting a ticket in such an obvious scenario.

> I'd want speed cameras that are miles apart... and the determination that you get a speeding ticket is that you traveled several miles at high speed.

That's what SPECS does:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPECS_(speed_camera)

There are similar systems in other countries. Here in Belgium we have "trajectcontrole".

Yes. As soon as the automated traffic enforcement purpose is done with (the car wasn't speeding/wasn't running a red/so on) the data should be deleted.

If the police reach the data before it's deleted after they know it may have evidence of a crime that's ok (realistically this is rare, but I can imagine it happening with paired cameras that measure speed over a long distance of road. You could also get lucky where a false positive image happened to capture a different crime), but we shouldn't be storing surveillance data that tracks everyone's movements on the off chance that it has evidence of a crime. The harm outweighs the use at that point.

Thag entirely depends on the implementation details of the access controls to that data and if the police need a warrant to access that data.

No, it's not a side-effect, it's a deliberate decision. You used to be able to get an Oyster card anonymously and top it up with cash. I still have one, but they are not accepted now.

Presto is Toronto’s equivalent to London’s oyster card.

Actually there’s no tap off IIRC (unlike the Dutch chipkaarts) but still, I would assume the modern station where you enter is a veritable panopticon of CCTV, RF signal interception, etc

People have built that: - https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2024/10/03/metas-r...

Meanwhile, you can also wear these: https://www.reflectacles.com/home

The show's (or at least its protagonists') motivations change a lot over the years. As Finch's own motivations evolve, you can see him shift the blame from the government, to the people, to the machine itself.

There are some bouts of introspection, especially early on, which he uses as justification for installing the backdoor in the first place, but on the whole he's adamant that none of this is his fault.

That's probably exactly how it will play out in our world too, when a tech billionaire plugs a self-aware AI to our global surveillance network.

I'm not familiar with the show, but dystopian science fiction doesn't predict the future, it criticizes the present.

Ah, hadn't seen it. I was thinking Minority Report, but skimming Person of Interest summaries..yes, similar.

Yeah I’d agree with that as well

A recent event in midtown manhattan shows it’s pretty easy to evade surveillance if you can avoid using a car for a brief period of time.

Didn’t he get away on a bike into a park?

In that case the police had a Starbucks register photo with a face, but that kind of slip can also be easily avoided

I believe the parent poster was suggesting this as a joke. Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1105/

They frequently don’t work [1]. Again, we have a real-life example of someone using the reality of how surveillance is weighted to escape Manhattan, one of the more surveilled parts of the country.

[1] https://abc7ny.com/brooklyn-shooting-subway-cameras-7-on-you...

Where one could set up email would be fine as well.

It feels like a dystopian power play, hey citizen, we are watching you.

I'm a fairly active cyclist and do the same thing.

I also map water sources on OSM also, since one day I ran out of water and couldn't find anything local. Figured it would help someone else one day.

It's funny, I never noticed mine in the area until I read the deflock.me site. (Maybe it was posted here on HN?)

Regardless, since I like to provide updates to OSM, I have been cataloging them in my area.