The scaredy-trolls who support Flock spyware (and similar spyware from other companies) like to claim that there is no right to privacy in the Constitution.
Perhaps they forgot the Ninth Amendment.
Whether that’s the case or not, they are making two big errors.
Their first mistake: Unless the Constitution explicitly allows government to do a thing, it is prohibited for government to do that thing. They get this backwards, pretending that government is allowed to do anything not explicitly prohibited and that only those things specifically listed are your rights. This is where the Ninth Amendment comes in. They ignore that one.
The second huge mistake they make is that even if the Constitution explicitly allows government to do something which violates life, liberty, or property, it’s still wrong for government to do that, and the Constitution is wrong for allowing it. That is a counterfeit “law”; a rule with no ethical foundation whatsoever.
If the Supreme Court takes government's side, it is wrong.
If someone insists that you obey such a rule until it gets changed, just like you should turn in runaway slaves until it's no longer "the law" to do so, you know they are on the wrong side. They are the bad guy here.
This is how you can tell such a person is a government supremacist, and probably a Statanist.
You have the right to privacy because that right doesn't violate anyone else's right to life, liberty, or privacy in any way. That's the bottom line, not the opinions of political criminals who want to spy on you to find (or invent) a "crime" to use against you.
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Privacy is an effect that rights tend to produce, and a good one. And the specific rights the Constitution claims to protect, if those bans on government actions were observed, would do a pretty good job of protecting it.
ReplyDeleteBut there is no "right" to forbid other people from seeing, hearing, or knowing this or that about someone as such. If I violate someone's rights to find out about that thing, I violated their rights whether I found it out or not. If I found it out without otherwise violating their rights, me finding it out didn't violate their rights.
That's the difference between government doing a thing and non-government individuals doing a thing. And since the spyware cameras wouldn't even be doing their thing without government paying them to do it, they count as government.
DeleteWith the ALPRs, there are multiple interfaces of illegitimate government action. Government pays (with stolen money) for the cameras and the data, and government gathers and uses the data when it has no legitimate authority to do so even under the incredibly lax conditions set by the Constitution.
DeleteCould anything similar exist in the private sector? Suppose I develop or buy a camera and build a database that can use facial recognition, etc. (not government license plates) to identify people who enter/leave a particular store. Then I target those people for advertising of the kinds of things sold at that store.
That would be creepy and annoying, but it wouldn't violate anyone's rights if I didn't steal the camera, if I rented the location where it was mounted, etc. There is no right to not have me notice -- with or without technological assistance -- that you shop at Bob's Sporting Goods. Taking a photo of a location that you happen to be in doesn't violate your rights unless I break into your house to do it, in which case the breaking in, not the photography, would be the rights violation.
You’re right and it’s good to be explicit about that. A more likely motivation for ALPRs in a nongovernment setting might be a private highway company that required you to have a unique placard on your car to use their roads and who installed cameras to identify customers who violated their safe driving rules. Such a company might also store and sell your data to third parties, but there are a lot of tools like divestment and boycotts to discipline a private company that aren’t available for disciplining government or quasi-government institutions.
DeleteI can't seem to find it, but a long time ago I wrote a piece on how getting the government out of roads would work. Not TOO long ago, because I had already noticed that toll roads were using things like "EZ Pass" (I lived in Missouri at the time and had no experience with that, just read about it).
DeleteIn my little vision of the future, governments would auction off ownership of its various roads and the new owners would, of course, want to monetize that ownership, almost certainly and almost entirely by renting the use of said roads.
While a handful of big companies might buy the interstate highways, etc., smaller firms would pop up to buy, say, all the streets in Peoria.
Nobody would -- or would even be able to -- buy individual licenses to navigate each and every road, but most people would probably want to be able to be allowed to navigate any road they happened to need to go down, without obviously being able to predict what roads those would be.
So I suspect that a trade association of road owners, large and small, would come up with an "EZ Pass" system that would, for a basic recurring fee, cover all the roads within, for example, Florida, with the option for a national pass, or a short-term pass for Colorado if you happened to fly into Denver and rent a car (the car rental agency might just buy national passes for all its vehicles). And there would be some kind of formula, based on how much traffic each road got, for distributing that revenue between owners.
I suspect the system WOULD include a crap ton of ALPRs or other sensors to detect vehicles using the roads without paying. And that would in turn create privacy issues if the consortium sold data to e.g. advertisers ("here's everyone who drives past that particular store at least once a week"), and especially if it sold them to government.
But yes, the way to combat the unwanted privacy intrusions would be through boycott/buycott, etc. And not just of the road companies. If a store got 500 emails saying "you keep sending me emails and I'm pretty sure it's because you're using traffic data -- let me know when you stop, because until then I'll be shopping elsewhere," behaviors and incentives would change.
The desire for privacy isn't new, and there have always been intrusions on that desire. David Brin has, for years, asserted that most of the idea of privacy circa, say, 1970, is irretrievably lost, and he may be right.
Agreed. I had to look up David Brin - I really need to make an effort to read some sci-fi. It always contains some ideas I hadn't fully considered before. I'm impressed with the quality and speed of your response. I envy that ability.
DeleteI've often thought that businesses might subsidize roads in a particular area so that customers could easily reach them. If you have a choice between two shops, and one involves navigating a moonscape of potholes and the other is on a nice, smooth road, which one is likely to get your business if everything else is comparable? Shopping area A has nice roads, and shopping area Q has rutted mud and chunks of asphalt so which one is probably going to have the most customers?
DeleteThis assumes roads continue to be necessary, which isn't guaranteed.
Kent: I think you're likely correct on that. Shopping-dense areas will likely offer nice streets for customers for the same reason they offer free parking (and with the same limits -- if you're racing through twice a day five days a week and not stopping, you might get told to change your behavior or choose other roads).
DeleteGregL: Brin also writes, or at least used to write, quite a bit of non-fiction essay stuff. Not necessarily libertarian, although SOMETIMES libertarian-adjacent. His views on privacy are just a pragmatic "there doesn't seem to be any way to get back to the old standard short of something returning us to the Middle Ages, which would be worse." And what a very nice way of telling me I'm a mile-a-minute loudmouth!
Kent, your fourth para says it all: even by the low standard of the Constitution, government is empowered to do only the things listed. Everything else is forbidden.
ReplyDeleteFor good measure, Amendment Four requires the testimony of a sworn witness to apparent wrongdoing, before any government search is allowed. Flock cameras are fishing nets.
But as we know, government doesn't care a fig for such paper restrictions.
If someone were to wreck a camera, he could be charged with destroying government property. Never mind that it was bought with stolen money and therefore does not qualify as property (hence, ''government property" is an oxymoron) the judge will be deaf to such irrefutable reasoning.
Even so, some might run that risk. Maybe someone will design a stick or pole, able to hold a spray can at one end, whose button can be depressed using a trigger at the other. Camera lenses do not work well when covered with black paint.
My mind is busy trying to come up with a good solution to this problem. Good, as in, no martyrs.
Delete1rst clause of the 4th amendment reads... "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated..."
ReplyDeleteGovernment ignores that, as it ignores all limits on its own lust for power. Or "reinterprets" it to the point where it means nothing. Always in government's favor.
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