First, the government did submit a search warrant to Google immediately after opening the case. Google didn’t just hand it over because they were asked nicely.
Even without a subscription, Google saves videos on their servers for 3 hours for free. This is part of the terms and conditions, and Nancy undoubtedly did give permission for the data to be saved even if, like most of us, she just skipped it all and clicked “accept”. The T&C will not have any guarantee about when data will be deleted.
The problem isn’t Google being evil by doing something secret, or doing something they said they wouldn’t do. They are telling people what they’ll do, and people are enabling the surveillance state willingly.
If you’re OK with license plates being read on public roads, how is it different for them to be read in a public parking lot? Or for that matter, if my car is parked on my driveway with the license plate visible from the street, how is reading it a privacy violation?
They’re obtaining your location without consent. (That’s assuming your somewhere close to the car.) A car in the driveway is private property.
We waive that right of privacy driving a car. Police used to call in plates they saw on the roads late at night. Warrant checks. I heard it on my police scanner in the 70’s.
Traffic stops are routine, but there’s supposed to be a legitimate reason like a broken tail light.
License plate readers are the updated way to do that.
It’s impractical for police to check every plate manually in a mall parking lot.
From a legal POV, your expectation of privacy while driving your car or parking your car elsewhere than your private property are exactly the same: zero. As is your expectation of privacy while walking down a public sidewalk or inside a public or private building open to the public. e.g. a library or a shopping mall.
I will certainly agree that as a practical matter, a lot of our rights as citizens were actually guaranteed not by the quality of our government but by the impracticality of them being violated wholesale for the many of us by the fairly few police employed by the government.
Now that the police have computers of many sorts, license plate readers being but one example, it becomes logistically feasible for a small number of police employees to violate the rights of large numbers of citizens. And once it’s logistically feasible it will happen. And has been happening for 2-3 decades now.
The only way not to have a surveillance state (or equally surveillance by self-interested corporations), is to ban the technology completely. Not try to regulate it or the use of it.
As an aside:
I live in a state where we only have rear license plates.
Over the last ~3 years I have seen an absolute explosion in the number of people backing into parking spaces in no-cost public or private lots. Where once it was one car in 100 now it seems to be one in 5.
There certainly are arguments that back-in parking is safer. But the public has never been good about altering their habits based on safety. I conclude that most of this behavior change is folks hiding their rear plate from passing plate scanners.
I watch the First 48. Witnesses will provide a description of the car that fled after the shooting.
The detectives will check traffic cams in that area. Sometimes thay can track the car across the city as it randomly appears on a few intersections with cameras.
They also get video from businesses that have cameras filming the street. Those cameras catch glimpses of the car as it drives by.
Nah… we’ve got front plates here in Texas, and we’ve seen the same thing, and for more than three years.
My pet theory is that as time has passed, the number of cars without backup cameras has dwindled to nearly zero, and many people have discovered that backing in is a LOT easier with a backup camera, and driving out is easier than backing out as well.
I don’t have a problem with them being in public places. But I noticed a couple Flock cameras at my local Lowe’s. Yea, private property, but… where does this end?
I had not considered that. Eyes opened. Thank you.
But the same backup camera that makes backing in easy also makes backing out easy.
And the better ones that are real wide angle means that in effect you have eyes at the ass end of your car that can see cars some distance away who’ll be driving across behind you as you reverse out.
But when pulling out forward there is no such wide angle camera, at least not on any car I’ve seen. You still need to lead blindly with your nose until you can see around the car next to you. In a world where many cars are tall pickups, that doesn’t happen until your driver’s position is beyond that truck’s nose. By which point your own nose is 5 to 7 feet further out into the driving lane.
About a year ago I finally got a modern vehicle with a backup camera and instantly noticed that backing into driveways, parking spots, and parallel parking became dramatically easier.
I’m guessing others agree, and for whatever reason prefer to pull forward, even if it’s not necessarily the logical choice.
What definition are you using for “public”? Do you mean “government owned”, or do you mean “accessible to any/everyone, not just specifically authorized people”?
I’m not trying to argue, just trying to understand your perspective.
AFAIK, there’s no legal or practical distinction between government owned property, such as a road or a parking lot at a public school or public library, and private property that is intended for use by the general public. E.g. a Lowes or commercial mall or free standing lot in front of a Mom n pop store.
He explained that investigators could have gotten the video from Google in one of three main ways: The feds could have gotten a search warrant from a judge to issue to Google; the family could have authorized the tech giant to conduct the search; or Google could have voluntarily opted to track it down.
So permission would be easy and a warrant could explain the delay.
Yeah, unsurprisingly it appears the NY Post is wrong. Evidently they didn’t attempt to talk to sources with actual knowledge, because Google did get a search warrant and served it last week. The delay was due to the technical challenge of recovering data that had been deleted.
Nest still saves around three hours of “event-based” video history for free before being deleted. That data lives in Google’s cloud and servers. Even if the data had been deleted from Google’s systems, it could still exist somewhere and be recoverable because even files slated for deletion can exist until they are overwritten by new data.
The footage and its underlying data could go through hundreds of thousands of servers and systems all over the world — increasing the chance of residual data being left behind.
…
“All those layers have code, and as data moves around to be processed and made available to the customer, it will move through different layers of sub applications, sub servers, sub storage components,” Malone said, speaking generally about application architecture and data handling.
Each of those components would present an opportunity for data recovery.
When they served the warrant, I doubt they knew whether she was paying for storage or not. It would just be standard practice to obtain a warrant in cases like this.
But if they did know, there must be at least one semi-competent person still at the FBI who would know about data recovery possibilities.
This isn’t “the FBI’s” first rodeo. Their forensic video folks know how Google, and Apple, and every other cloud security vendor’s actual TOS, actual retention policies, and the broad outlines at least of their technical stack, work to make vids recoverable. They also know how to write warrants and how to serve them to corporate HQ so they’re acted upon promptly.
Now are the senior leadership of the FBI being replaced by incompetent regime loyalists? Sure. Will that eventually destroy the mid-career middle layers. Of course. But not yet. Mostly.