Apparently the way to fight this is 1) vote and attend govt meetings and speak up, 2) start stalking anybody attached to govt and use a camera to record everything they do in public. Set up a govt shaming page on the net and publish photos in the paper. Copies to the media.

With proper writing skills, an innocent visit to the playground is a hunt for little boys, looking around while shopping is furtive behavior, walking down a street is engaging in gang behavior, and attending govt meetings becomes attacking civil rights. A polite greeting becomes support for criminal activities.

Innuendo, staging, selecting adjectives with unsavory connotations. The LA govt does it, it must be a good thing.

I originally thought you were promoting this. My apology. It may be legal, but barely. It is wrong and dangerous. Violates the idea that govt is responsible to the people, that the people are the power, and has the potential to cause real harm to innocent people. Circumvents the whole "innocent until proven" concept and tosses the legal check and balance system aside. Hopefully, a good law team can poke holes in the idea and find some way to make its' proponents financially responsible for any damages caused.

Chilling effect is a thing. And that's what this whole plot would have. It would have a chilling effect on the freedom of assembly and movement of the people of LA.

eelj wrote:People who were raised and educated as citizens of the USA during the height of the cold war hold the right to privacy very dear to their hearts, its part of our DNA.

But you have to recognize that currently there is no privacy right involved in this case. The fact that someone drives around in public is not protected by any privacy right. You may propose that it should become protected in the future, in which case a concrete proposal would be good. But again, beware of the unintended consequences. If you only restrict governments, you tilt the playing field towards the rich. If you make it a general privacy right, you restrict many other tasks that should not be restricted. Concrete example: I go on vacation in LA, take a selfie in front of the La Brea tar pit, and post it on Facebook. Unbeknownst to me there is a car in the back of the picture, and with the high-resolution camera of my iPhone 8 his number can be read in the picture. You should probably word your proposed law such that I don't go to jail.

A citizen of LA has the right to put up a big stone monument of the 10 commandments in their front yard even if they work for the city but the city does not.

Certainly there are restrictions on what government can do. The example you give is the establishment clause: the city of LA can not establish a religion, which implies that it can not preferentially advertise for any particular religion.

Doctrinally, the civil rights apply to people. For example, I'm a rabbit breeder, and I have the right to have opinions and to voice them. For example, if our state government here in South Dakota were to propose a law that prohibits the keeping of rabbits, I would fight against that, both in private and in public. You'd see me on soap boxes at the street corner, and handing out leaflets, and mailing out flyers to voters, and hiring lobbyists. If Governor Daugaard were to try to stop me from speaking my mind on proposed laws (or on any other topic I chose to speak on), he would be violating my 1A rights, and I would get very mean with him, or rather: I would let the courts get very mean with him on my behalf.

But civil rights don't vanish completely when people associate. The rabbit breeder club that I'm the treasurer of certainly has strong opinions on proposed anti-rabbit laws. As a club (legally registered and incorporated, with bylaws and articles of incorporation files with the Secretary of State) we have a right to free speech too. We can run a full-page ad in the Pierre Capital Journal, decrying the proposed law as unjust, and calling for the governor to be recalled, or even better: confined to a hutch. We can use our club's reserve fund (usually dedicates to buying trophies and ribbons for the animal show) to pay for that ad, and to hire lobbyists.

And this is where you have to be careful with any proposal that governments don't have civil rights too. Ultimately, government entities are nothing but associations of people. One could for example define the city of LA as being nothing but a club, the members of which are the residents or citizens of LA. The members of the club have chosen to do their business by electing certain people (mayor, police chief, dog catcher ...) to organize performing everyday functions. At another level, one could say that the city government of LA is nothing but the aggregate of all staff, employees and elected officials of that government. And each of those people (whether citizens or city staff) have a right to opinions, and to free speech in voicing those opinions. And just like the rabbit breeders of South Dakota, they don't lose their free speech rights by associating. If the governator of California were to propose making driving Hummers and Harleys mandatory, the city council would be free to pass a resolution stating that convertibles are more suitable for the PCH in Santa Monica, and sport bikes for Mulholland Drive. It could run full-page ads in the local fish wrap (the LA Times, I gather) opposing the proposed macho-car rule. It could hire lobbyists to convince the legislators from Shasta to San Bernadino to oppose the new law. The city has free speech rights. You want to curtail those? What do you think the citizens and staffers of LA will think about that?

What I'm getting at: The right way to attack this is not to believe that it is already illegal or unconstitutional (it isn't), nor to make free speech illegal (bad idea, because of unintended consequences and the slippery slope), but to convince the people and officials of LA (and similar cities) that privacy is important, and that they sometimes should voluntarily collect and store less data than they theoretically could. And convince them that shaming people for doing something that is legal (but frequently associated with illegal and discouraged activity, such as hiring prostitutes) is not a good policy, because of the occasional bycatch of innocent people. Use the carrot, not the stick. We need more common sense, not more restrictions.

Sometimes friends accuse me of being a libertarian. Makes me upset, and I point out that I'm a dyed-in-the-wool liberal (admittedly, with guns). But maybe my friends are right, after all.

dougb wrote:Apparently the way to fight this is 1) vote and attend govt meetings and speak up,

You get it!

2) start stalking anybody attached to govt and use a camera to record everything they do in public. Set up a govt shaming page on the net and publish photos in the paper. Copies to the media.

In this day and age, the media is everywhere. This site is part of the media. Publishing stuff is easy.

With proper writing skills, an innocent visit to the playground is a hunt for little boys, looking around while shopping is furtive behavior, walking down a street is engaging in gang behavior, and attending govt meetings becomes attacking civil rights. A polite greeting becomes support for criminal activities.

You don't even have to become that evil. Just set up an automated camera (like a trail or game camera) in front of city hall, and run Facebook's or Google's face identification algorithm. Them report exactly which lobbyists and business representatives are going in and out, and correlate their timing with the schedule of the legislators. With modern big data techniques, this is doable (although costly and time consuming). Publish the results.

But make it clear that you are not doing it because you are anti-lobbying, but because you're trying to demonstrate that common sense and restraint in dealing with public information (like who walks on the public sidewalk in front of city hall) is a value in itself.

P.S. I completely agree with your last paragraph of this circumventing a lot of legal protections. Unfortunately, it does, which is why we are upset about it.

KnightsFan wrote:Chilling effect is a thing. And that's what this whole plot would have. It would have a chilling effect on the freedom of assembly and movement of the people of LA.

Yes, but chilling effects are not in and of themselves unconstitutional. Example: The fire marshal puts up a sign in meeting rooms saying "maximum occupancy". That has a chilling effect on the freedom of association; if my rabbit breeders club were to merge with the local ferret lover society (fat chance!), we wouldn't be able to meet in the back room of the local pub, because the 7 of us and 9 of them wouldn't fit into a room that has only 15 seats, and no standing room because of the narrow fire exit. Having to leave our village and drive into town for a larger meeting space would have a chilling effect on the proposed merger, in particular in the winter (which is very chilly up here). Yet, the fire marshal is perfectly within his right to restrict the attendance in that room. That's because there is an interest balancing going on: while our society loves and supports civic clubs (OK, the ferret lovers are perhaps not universally supported), we also don't want our citizens to be fried to a crisp when fires happen.

We restrict the freedom of association all the time. The extreme example is restraining orders. Some chilling effect has to be tolerated. If publishing the names of Johns could be done accurately (no innocent bystanders in the drag net), if it were done with the usual due process guarantees (Mr. Doe would have his day in court before his name gets on the list), and that could be shown to have a good effect (if our society were serious about curtailing prostitution, which it isn't), then I don't think most people would have a problem with it. But this is not what LA is proposing.

No, a chilling effect isn't unconstitutional by itself. But in this case the observation and reporting of license plates is too broad. If it were a known brothel or a known drug house the cops could get away with publishing visitor records. But since we're talking about drivers on public streets it would make people avoid that area entirely. And if it were OK'd, it could be expanded to include other areas and prevent protests and peaceful gatherings.

SoftwareEngineer wrote:

bigstones wrote:So you would have no problem with the local popo publishing the names in the local paper of people whose cars were parked in front of the local:

As I have written several times already: Yes, I have a problem with that. It would be a bad idea. I have certainly not written anywhere that I endorse such a program.

But unlike several other posters I do not think that it is either illegal or unconstitutional.

Let me turn the game around: You seem to also think it is a bad idea, and you seem to think that it should be illegal and/or unconstitutional. So please make a concrete proposal for changing the law to make it such. But beware: any proposal you make will be checked for unintended consequences, and violations of constitutional rights. So anything that tries to restrict the first amendment rights to free speech of people, just because they happen to get a paycheck from the city of LA, would need some strong arguments for how it would survive an interest balancing test.

In all the examples I gave I think it is pretty much a slam dunk that the courts would find what the government did had a chilling effect on the constitutional right of association. I also do not believe that just because you are on the street, you have no expectation of privacy. The courts have not been as absolute as that. For example in United States v Delaney the court held that putting a GPS tracking device on the suspects car required a search warrant. They also said the Supreme Court has left undecided the issue of mass accumulation of data such as license plate readers.

But really you have two issues: can the government collect the data and having collected it can they then send letters or make public people's names. Even if they can collect the data, surely sending letters to the car's owner is an unconstitutional infringement on the right of association. Whether they can collect the data might be decided in the NSA cases. There is a good discussion here on license plate readers: https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/07161 ... pt-v05.pdf and current developments here: https://www.aclu.org/search/%20?f%5B0%5 ... ype%3Ablog

Among the more egregious abuses:

In mid-August 2015, officials in Boston were surprised to receive a phone call from journalist Kenneth Lipp, who informed them that the Boston Transportation Department’s entire license plate reader database was online and available to download for anyone with an Internet connection. There was no password guarding the database, which contained a million or so license plate reader records, the home addresses of every single person with a Boston parking permit, and lists of 2,500 people the police or FBI (it remains unclear which) have designated suspected gang members or terrorists, among other data. https://www.aclu.org/blog/speak-freely/ ... protection

There are several cities in California which have limited road access who are setting up scanners to record who comes into and who leaves the city. I find this incredibly troubling.

Unless it's been mentioned already ( it could have been, I'm just too lazy to reread the thread ), see United States vs Jones, 615 F. 3d 544, No. 10–1259. Argued November 8, 2011—Decided January 23, 2012

The feds stuck a GPS "device" on a suspected coke dealer's car then watched and waited. After a month they went on a round-up and Jones got a life sentence...overturned on appeal, whereupon Obama stamped his feet and demanded that "they" respect his authorita (to quote Cartman). "They" (the appeals court) told him to piss up a rope and he went crying to the supremes...

In one of the few unanimous decisions of this court.

"Justice Scalia delivered the Opinion of the Court, joined by Justices Kennedy, Roberts, Thomas, and Sotomayor, which held that "the Government's installation of a GPS device on a target's vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle's movements, constitutes a search" under the Fourth Amendment."

How a scanner differs from a GPS device is, I suppose, open for debate. I would like to think that the great thinkers of Los Angeles city government take the time to read the court's opinion before they strap the taxpayers of LA with hefty damage awards...

Link to the supremes PDF:
http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/11pdf/10-1259.pdf

If you are watching the news and a story comes on about obesity and they have several shots of fat people. Did you notice they didn't show their faces?

As for license plates if you watch the "reality TV" type shows and the "Stars" ( ) are in public. Notice the readable license plates on cars are digitally obscured?



ETA:
The above comment contains a personal opinion on Reality TV stars

I actually thought to use my experience anecdotally along a similar vein... my second career path having been in, loosely put, commercial/fine art/journalism photography.

At each turn of the screw I had to be absolutely certain that I had a valid release for each person/place/thing that appeared in a published image, unless that person/place/thing had done something that superceeded their, or its, expectation of privacy.

But I think the supremes said it better.

First: Using images of people or cars for for-profit commercial photography is different from passively observing. If I take a selfie in front of the Eiffel tower and upload it to Facebook, I do not need a release from the people in the background, even if their faces are visible. Nor do I need to blur out any license plate numbers which happen to be readable in the background. To see these distinctions in action, look at the recent court case about "Happy Birthday": Warner was collecting royalties for commercial use of the tune.

rolandson wrote:How a scanner differs from a GPS device is, I suppose, open for debate.

Well, in our legal and political system, everything can become open for debate in the future.

But it is not open for debate right now. The distinction between placing a GPS tracker on a suspect (in this case on a suspect's car), and observing the suspect (in the LA case, just the suspect's car's license plates) is obvious; so much so that the Jones case it not relevant to the discussion of privacy in the public sphere. In the Jones case, the police entered the suspect's protected sphere of control (his car), and modified it (by adding a GPS tracker). There are two important distinctions: first, it required modifying the state (in the computer science sense) of the suspect and his possessions, and secondly it required violating a realm (his car) over which he should have had control. It is that act of placing the GPS receiver that would have required a warrant, and without such a warrant, the data acquired such was inadmissible.

The case of passively watching people without modifying their state is very different. It does not require intruding on them, nor closely approaching or touching them, nor modifying them or their possessions.

I completely agree that this whole area contains troubling philosophical differences. Here is one constructed example: We all know that entering a suspect's residence and placing a listening device in there requires a warrant. Nobody would argue against that. On the other hand, it is possible to detect sound waves inside a residence by the fact that they cause window panes to vibrate, which can be measured by the deflection of light beams that reflect off the windows. Using invisible infrared light, this can be done non-invasively, without having to enter the residence, without even having to get near it, and without the suspect noticing. This technique was used during the cold war to spy on embassies of foreign countries. It turns out that with today's technology it is not even necessary to shine infrared light at the window any longer: Just use a good high-speed camera to observe reflections of stationary objects (like trees, buildings, or stars at night) in the window, and one can listen to conversations.

Should listening to conversations in a place where people have an expectation of privacy (such as their living room) require a warrant, if it is done as part of an ongoing criminal investigation? I don't know what the answer is, nor do I know what the answer should be. That's because it is not clear to me which fundamental right is protected by the prohibition of warrantless searches: Is it the inviolability of one's private sphere of control (keep unwanted strangers, like law enforcement, out of the house, off the body, and don't allow them to infringe into the liberty of moving oneself and one's possessions)? Or is it to prevent law enforcement from gathering information that is private in nature without? The answer isn't a clear either-or.

What is even more difficult to answer: Should private individuals be allowed to gather such information? For example, I'm perfectly free to look at my neighbor's house. If I can see his living room window from my place, nothing prevents me from sitting on my front porch and staring in that direction. If my neighbor wants to do something private in his living room without me seeing it, our society expects that he closes his blinds first. If my neighbor is stupid enough to do something illegal, immoral, or merely amusing in his living room with his blinds open, he has no recourse if he is seen. Concrete example: If I see him banging the maid in the living room, right after the maid took down the drapes to have them washed and ironed, I'm free to tell his soon-to-be ex-wife. And in the old days, when evidence of infidelity was required for divorces, I could have been called as a witness in the trial to testify that I saw him firsthand doing the deed.

So having established that I'm allowed to look at his living room window: Am I allowed to look at reflections of trees in his living room window? Am I allowed to use a high-speed camera to do so? Hook up a powerful image processing computer with complex analysis software to listen to what he says on the phone? Let's go all the way to the extreme example: If my neighbor were a Goldman-Sachs executive, and I "overheard" him (using high-speed camera, image processing and software) plotting to dodge taxes, could I testify to that effect in this criminal trial? By the way, I have no idea what the answer to that is in our legal system today. And I don't even have a ready answer to what it should be.

TrueTexan wrote:First they wanted to take your guns magazines. Now they want to scan your car's license plate, if you are just driving through an area that is suspect of having prostitution. Then they want to send you a letter saying that you have been in an area of having prostitutes and make it a matter of public records.

Talk about the nanny state.

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties ... ostitution

Would this scanning also include areas with the zip 90210?

Time to use the copier and make prints of license plates of people you dont like

I would guess they already track people by their cell phones - not necessarily the on-board GPS but which cell towers they are connected to. EMS already does this and can locate callers with decent accuracy. We are already pretty far down the rabbit hole on government surveillance.

Now if the police can track us with license plate readers we can do the same.

We now live in a world where if you have an IP-enabled security camera, you can download some free, open-source software from GitHub and boom—you have a fully functional automated license plate reader (ALPR, or LPR).
Welcome to the sousveillance state: the technology that was once was just the purview of government contractors a few years ago could now be on your own street soon.

For years now, specialized LPR cameras have been used mounted in fixed locations or on police cars. These devices scan passing license plates using optical character recognition technology, checking each plate against a "hot list" of stolen or wanted vehicles. The devices can read up to 60 plates per second and typically record the date, time, and GPS location of any plates—hot or not.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/12 ... -hot-list/

I'm sure the working girls and guys in that neighborhood would like to know which cars are undercover police. Just have a public reader by the station where the cars park and that unmarked car keeps showing up then you post it.

Thanks to modern technology, the govt can now track each person all day long. The tracking isn't the problem as much as the storage and data mining that the govt can do with all the random data. The auto license plate scanners mounted on police vehicles scan every plate and record where and when. If you have enough cameras, you don't need GPS trackers. If it was just matched to a list of stolen cars or criminal owners, then discarded, no problem. The problem is that storage is cheap and a hundred unconnected events get connected in the police mind. And it will be misused. In MN, we have cases of police accessing drivers license data for fun. Checking out the address of hot women is one unapproved activity. Even with the threat of fines and knowing that there is an electronic trail back to them, some of our finest indulge. They pay the fine, get their wrist slapped, and go again. The police have no need to keep data on law abiding people, but they like to just in case...

I still say, Print out copies of others plates, he camera probably wont know the difference. But copy the plates of the Mayor, the chief of police, Aldermen and others... then the camera silliness would stop ..

Eh. Living where I do, my plates are scanned nightly anyhow. When I'm back home a police cruiser drives all around the Hill with the plate scanners mounted on the rear. They kind of have to do it.

I did have a 9-11 premonition of sorts. I would dream that an airliner hit the Capitol Building and my house was crushed by the crown of stars around Freedom's head. And Russell Crowe was singing Les Misérables "Stars" in the background. This dream was like in 2000 so I interpreted it as the end of the millennium, end of the world kind of thing. I bolted upright sweating at the thought of Russell Crowe singing Les Mis and said what a nightmare!

Well, the first part of the dream with Freedom's stars crushing my house I really had.

Maybe so, but the embellishment made it worthy of the Coen brothers. Very, very good!

Here's a couple of articles on the subject. One of them mentions the ACLU thinks there are legal reasons this is wrong.

http://theantimedia.org/automated-polic ... rostitute/

https://medium.com/@nselby/los-angeles- ... .lbrr1z3gt

https://medium.com/@nselby/the-la-city- ... .t3n1hv4j2

I should credit that I was reading another subject here on the LGC and a link took me to "The Anti-Media" site and while perusing there I found the article and subsequent links to the "Medium" articles.



ETA:
So thanks to DispositionMatrix's post:

http://www.theliberalgunclub.com/phpBB3/viewtopic