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

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Pervasive Surveillance and End of Anonymity

  • Many argue that between ALPRs, CCTV, phones, cars’ RF emissions, and future face/gait recognition, practical anonymity in public (especially while driving) is disappearing.
  • Others note that evasion is still possible in edge cases (e.g., public transit, bikes, short windows), but only with near-perfect “opsec,” so not scalable.
  • A recurring theme: the real change isn’t visibility in public, but cheap, permanent, searchable recording and aggregation.

Effectiveness, Limits, and Failure Modes

  • Some point out unsolved, highly surveilled crimes (e.g., U.S. pipe bomber) as evidence that mass surveillance is poor at stopping serious, planned offenses.
  • Plate cloning and stolen plates can cause innocent people to be swept into dragnets and auto-ticket schemes; clearing your name is hard when you can’t query the same databases.
  • Data retention patterns matter: cameras often delete images quickly but keep plate/metadata “forever,” enabling long‑term tracking.

Abuse, Selective Enforcement, and Power

  • Strong concern about selective prosecution, pretext stops, and “pre-crime” style inference from travel patterns.
  • Many worry more about misuse by police and other insiders (stalking ex-partners, doxxing, harassment) than by abstract criminals; several concrete abuse examples are cited.
  • Big debate over framing police as systemically abusive vs. “few bad apples,” with pushback against broad stereotyping but acknowledgment that accountability is weak.

FOIA, Public Records, and Legal Tangles

  • The piece’s core twist—that ALPR data is public record, FOIA‑able by anyone—alarms people who see stalking and private vendettas as an obvious next step.
  • Commenters highlight the oddity of agencies claiming that giving a person their own surveillance history would be a felony “gathering identifying information,” even though they already collected it.

Norms, Rights, and “No Privacy in Public”

  • One camp says there has “never” been privacy in public; another counters that scale changes the nature of surveillance (“scale-invariant fallacy”).
  • Distinction drawn between:
    • Being possibly seen by bystanders vs.
    • Being continuously tracked, recorded, and profiled by default, with data sold or queried later.
  • Comparisons to Saudi traffic enforcement, China’s social credit, and the panopticon metaphor underline fears about chilling effects on dissent.

Proposed Constraints and Countermeasures

  • Suggested safeguards: strict retention limits, warrant/judicial approval for queries, independent custodians of data, detailed access logs, public transparency portals, and meaningful penalties for misuse.
  • More radical positions: ban ALPRs entirely, or else make all the collected data public so citizens can scrutinize the state as much as it scrutinizes them.
  • Grassroots responses include mapping ALPR cameras (e.g., via OpenStreetMap/“deflock”) and advocating locally against installations.