Cameras Are Everywhere. Deal With It.

A typical event in the On Patrol: Live TV show involves a cop pulling a driver over for suspected DUI. The cop walks up to the driver's window and requests that the driver step out. All of a sudden, the driver notices there's a guy with a big camera filming the scene and realizes what this could mean: their face will be on national TV with a show that leads its time slot in the 25-54 demographic, which is another way of saying that by the next day, their DUI arrest will be all over town.

"I don't want to be filmed!" the driver protests. "I demand that you stop filming!"

"It's just a documentary," the officer usually replies. "They're just filming a documentary."

The other night, a driver protested more than usual, which had no impact. "Anyone can film out in public," the officer continued. "They can film you, you can film us. That's the law." Which is another way of saying cameras are everywhere. Deal with it.

This seems to bother libertarians more than just about anyone else, which is puzzling, since libertarians generally favor the fewest possible restraints on individual conduct. They'll argue all day for your right to film police activity, but they'll resist to the end the right of the police to film you, for pretty much the same reason a driver doesn't want anyone filming him failing a field sobriety test in front of a national audience.

Back in the day, local newspapers regularly printed the police blotter with news like "Mr Silas Murray of Sparta Center was booked Tuesday night for DUI", but apparently this wasn't the same thing as having your picture published, or maybe people seeing you on national TV falling over during the one-leg-stand test. The easiest way to prevent this, of course, is simply prudent behavior like not drinking and driving.

But now the long-standing libertarian objection to red light cameras has morphed into a more general panic over automated license plate readers.

The Associated Press is shocked, shocked, to discover that Customs and Border Protection has expanded their surveillance network beyond the “100 miles inland from every border” as authorized in the Patriot Act.

Worse yet is their stunned research showing license plate readers (APLR’s) are being connected to various other public and private sector mechanisms to identify travel patterns of U.S. citizens and collate them to facial recognition software applications.

. . . [Conservative Treehouse] has been writing about this surveillance issue for well over a decade. The introduction of Palantir facial recognition, to the overall database of social media information and private identity information, now makes it very easy for the government to simply point a camera at your face and get every scintilla of information about us [sic].

Almost all of the privacy advocates have given up trying to resist the outcome. However, I am not one of them. All it will take is a small mistake in the AI development programming, and people will see quickly just how dangerous this is.

A story at KPBS San Diego suggests the general level of panic:

The nondescript black cameras are mounted near each entrance of the Las Americas Premium Outlets, capturing the license plate, make and model of every car that enters the mall parking lot.

“As soon as you come in, it's in the system,” said a former worker with Simon Property Group. The company is the largest owner of shopping malls in the country, including Las Americas, the sprawling complex next to the San Ysidro border crossing.

At first, he embraced the automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras from Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based surveillance technology company. The former employee believed the ALPR system would help address shoplifting and solve serious crimes that occasionally happened around the mall, like robberies and vehicle theft.

And then he realized the power — and scope — of the license plate surveillance system. Flock can help users analyze patterns of movement and potential associations between drivers. And Simon Property Group gave several law enforcement agencies open access to search and receive notifications from its ALPR system.

“If people knew more about it, I would say people will obviously be pissed off,” he said. “Nobody wants big brother watching you on every single little thing.”

During the George Floyd riots, our neighbor put up a big WE BELIEVE BLACK LIVES MATTER AND ALSO BLAH BLAH BLAH sign in their front yard. I very briefly cogitated somehow spiriting it away in the dead of night until I almost immediately realized that, dead of night or no, my action would be caught by a minimum of three cameras from three different points of view, with my face clearly recognizable, and I thought better of any such project. Thus did cameras reinforce ordinary prudence.

Soon enough, the neighbors put the house on the market, and the realtor spirited the sign away in furtherance of making the property saleable. On camera or not, this was perfectly fine. It began to strike me that in almost any conceivable situation, cameras tend to enforce appropriate community expectations. If you think your actions will be on camera, you think twice. The KPBS story continues,

The use of license plate reader technology has long been a flashpoint between law enforcement and privacy advocates.

In recent years, California has established certain guardrails for ALPR networks owned by police departments and other public entities, including restrictions on how the data can be shared. The systems are also subject to public records requests.

But those safeguards don’t apply to the many private businesses — including Home Depot, Lowe's, the Southwestern Yacht Club, Fashion Valley mall and homeowners associations — that give police access to their license plate readers.

These private systems effectively serve as a wide-ranging extension of law enforcement's surveillance apparatus — even though the private businesses are not subject to the same public scrutiny and transparency requirements.

Wait a moment. Why would an upscale retailer, a big-box store, or an HOA want to install license plate readers? Almost certainly to deter theft, vandalism, or other potential crime. Should any such occur, store security or the HOA would indeed share such information with the police, along with other security video they have irrespective of the ALPR. If the video isn't clear enough to get a plate number, the ALPR could certainly help. It's possible that retailers could make other potential use of the information for marketing or whatever, but certainly the primary use would be to deter crime.

But why would an ordinary solid citizen be worrying about whether where he drove could wind up in someone's data base? Is he really worried that a trip to Home Depot could be used against him? They've already got his receipt and the card he used to pay, and they've already got video of him in the checkout line. This would only be a problem if the cops were trying to trace the shovel he used to bury a body, not if he were picking up some spackle.

The real problem we see often enough is that some solid citizens drive to the wrong part of town for the wrong reasons. They get caught at this often enough anyhow, but this could make tracking them just that much easier. Or they go to motels over a long lunch for trysts, or they say they're going someplace for a business meeting and wind up someplace else with someone else. I suppose license plate readers make these people nervous, but they really ought to recognize that technology has already been way ahead of them for a very long time.

Cameras are everywhere. It isn't Big Brother, it mostly just reinforces ordinary prudence.