Because the advancement of technology changes the impact of certain classes of surveillance and tracking. Existing law is based on a balance that no longer exists. Bruce Schneier has a nice essay on this and license plates:
In short, having a unique id and database of car owners may be okay when the police need to manually look up information. But when they can have every plate in the city regularly scanned by robots and the data fed to an AI to look for patterns, that's not even close to the same thing.
My point isn’t that pervasive surveillance is great. It’s that if you’re allowed to have cameras everywhere, why would you limit useful processing of the data?
How do you regulate it? If you can’t hire Amazon to do LPR or facial recognition, can you pay a guy to recognize people walking down the street and note their patterns? Do you license/permit camera placement?
The feds had thermal cameras hooked up to a helicopter, flew over some guy's house, saw thermal signatures looking a lot like someone growing marijuana.
Supreme court threw this out as a warrantless search because people are allowed an expectation of privacy against tech that "everyday people" don't have.
IANAL, but if you don't buy this logic, then search warrants are mostly limited by tech? Like if the gov't invented binoculars that could see through walls, does that mean they could just look into your house without a warrant?
The search warrant is about intent and expectations. And while "police officer checks records manually of a person" is kinda expected, "police officer x-rays an entire crowd instantly" seems a bit less so.
We _do_ put up signs about cameras, and there's rules about recording phone conversations too. It sure feels like there's case law around a lot of this.
> It’s that if you’re allowed to have cameras everywhere, why would you limit useful processing of the data?
So that a company doesn't end up doing mass surveillance.
During bad times, you'd see crackdowns and suppression caused by such a system. If you look in the present at the countries that are more authoritarian, you can get a picture. Places like China or Russia, where the internet is censored, monitored and mass surveillance is openly practiced. Russia recently passed Yarovaya law:
"Internet and telecom companies are required to store communications and metadata for 6 months to 3 years. They are required to disclose them, as well as "all other information necessary," to authorities on request and without a court order. It also requires email and messaging service providers to have cryptographic backdoors. The surveillance regulations will take effect on 1 July 2018."
It probably goes without saying that they use this tool to get a tighter grip on their population to maintain power.
Use vague words in the statutes like "reasonable" and have jurisprudence define how it can be used in practice. At least that's how the law already works.
Even though private surveillance is pervasive in the US, law enforcement is still sometimes rejected from using some of it when it flies in the face of the privacy standards to which we are accustomed[1].
>It’s that if you’re allowed to have cameras everywhere, why would you limit useful processing of the data?
Because what matters is what the result of that processing is. This is not some abstract concept; what's actually being done with the data matters.
>How do you regulate it? If you can’t hire Amazon to do LPR or facial recognition, can you pay a guy to recognize people walking down the street and note their patterns?
That's a silly analogy and I think you know it. Again, this is not some academic debate. The difference between being able to process TB order data automatically and hiring a guy to watch a corner and take notes is the difference between the Hubble telescope and me in my backyard with a pair of binoculars.
https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2007/01/on_police_s...
In short, having a unique id and database of car owners may be okay when the police need to manually look up information. But when they can have every plate in the city regularly scanned by robots and the data fed to an AI to look for patterns, that's not even close to the same thing.