Flock – Chilling Effects: Long Island's Emerging Open-Air Prison
11971.com"The Supreme Court held in Carpenter v. United States that the government may not track the whole of a person's movements without a warrant. This system tracks the whole of everyone's movements, every day, and no warrant is ever asked. "
~94,000 Cameras in the national Flock network that Southold officers had access to, never disclosed to the Town Board
0 Opt-in or opt-out decisions the Town made about any of this sharing, in its own words
> The list includes a school district near Syracuse, a casino's tribal police force in Connecticut, the Fort Worth, Texas police department 1,600 miles away, and Home Depot Corporation, a private company
Can any private corporation request/buy access? Or is Home Depot special?
Found this: https://corporate.homedepot.com/page/immigration-activity-ou...
> We do not grant access to our license plate readers to federal law enforcement.
That sounds very weasel worded, if they get license plate readers from someone who does.
Bingo. Local cop goes in, buddy-buddys with the loss prevention manager, gets access to run plates for the immigration folks outside. "Professional courtesy" strikes again!
Site fails to load without one heck of a lot of uMatrix unblocking.
The joy of Google sites, page itself, makes zero external requests, the container not so much - will deploy elsewhere.
Bear Blog maybe?
Thanks!
T
dropping here, again:
- Montana vehicle registrations give you privacy
- are not tax evasion, those straw mans and ad hominems are to scare you into giving away your privacy protections
- you can pay use tax still (consult a professional, I'm no attorney)
That will speak louder to your representatives who are voting in these cameras which violate your privacy.
BTW officials in California, Texas have a history of selling your persona info tied to your vehicle registrations to 3rd policies and have been fined before. Trust them to have changed? Hah.
This is not legal in California. If you are a resident in California you need California plates/registration. Even if you're a non-resident you need to register it here within a short period of time.
> Except as provided in Section 6700, 6702, and 6703, any vehicle which is registered to a nonresident owner, and which is based in California or primarily used on California highways, shall be registered in California.
The LLC’s ownership and Montana registration are not inherently tax evasion.
The appropriate party can pay California or New York use tax arising from the vehicle’s in-state use. Whether Montana registration may legally remain or California requires a registration from you for a vehicle you do not own is a separate question. Generally, the LLC registers it. Since this vehicle has had its use tax already paid, the tax evasion argument won't apply.
Now is vehicle registration evasion a real thing or something you made up to conflate your fear mongering with legality?
Care to explain how you can insure a car without the insurance selling your data to data brokers? All states with remotely private registration still require insurance, including Montana.
Sure. Insurance isn't asking for your vehicle registration though, and is not even getting your license plate. You are not being tracked by flock cameras and your license plate linked to your identity through your insurance registration.
You are though, through your state registration at the DMV.
Unless, of course, you have Montana registrations.
Insurance demands your vin and reports it to LexisNexis, and anyone with a Lexis Nexis account can turn a VIN into a Montana plate so long as they self-certify that their use complies with the DPPA (which includes enough reasons to drive two busses through, even if you want to assume bad actors don't lie).
So what's your argument or point here?
I am arguing that a Montana registration, with registration under an LLC and not you, with insurance even where the vehicle's vin is tied to your name, as a driver of the vehicle (not owner), is still more privacy protection and better for you in reference to Flock privacy-invading-cameras than an in-state registration where it's directly registered under you.
Seems your whole post may fall under my original "Straw Man" camp that I was referring to. edit: And the whole "bad actors lie" comment feels to me like a bad faith, Ad hominem style statement that attacks credibility rather than substance.
Sorry to offend, my point is that the necessity of auto insurance will stick your name (as the insured party for that vin) in a place accessible to flock (or at least flock's users). And as such I don't think it provides the results your post suggested "Montana vehicle registrations give you privacy".
I really wish it did and I hoped you had some solution!
Ah. I understand now. Thank you for clarifying.
And my bad too for assuming bad faith there and/or projecting onto you.
I don’t want to believe it’s true that you compromise privacy by registering a vehicle under your name, particularly in regards to flock. I admit you could be right, but I want to investigate this more. Do you think it’s possible there could be car insurance agencies that offer you privacy protection of some sort or that there’s another way to keep yourself private?
Some ideas I have: - get a cheaper vehicle and get it insurance coverage from the company or someone else - get yourself insurance for another car, and get the coverage for Liability ie to protect the other persons car if you hit someone else and don’t worry about your own car. For example; a $5k car pays for itself after 1-2 years of no significant claims and now you have what your insurance would have offered for your car anyway. (“The cost of privacy”.) - I am not convinced your insurance company would data sharing with flock or its subsidiaries if they only have your vin. What are your data sources for this?
Edit: as a legitimate need; perhaps the market will reveal itself large enough to surface an insurance company that offers privacy protection and refuses flock data sharing. However just because this could true that insurance companies would share with flock today, doesn’t mean it is.
Broad form car insurance might accomplish what you want:
https://www.policygenius.com/auto-insurance/what-is-broad-fo...
But I believe the intersection of states with highly private registration and where broad form is available is the empty set.
> I am not convinced your insurance company would data sharing with flock or its subsidiaries if they only have your vin.
Go pull your lexis nexis report.
Good ideas. These could work. Also, at least today, the solution to give ownership of any vehicle-properties to an LLC, and ensure it by vin may still work against flock as we haven't see any evidence they data-share between the insurance boundaries yet.
NY VTL § 250(1) says otherwise.
The LLC’s ownership and Montana registration are not inherently tax evasion.
The appropriate party can pay California or New York use tax arising from the vehicle’s in-state use. Whether Montana registration may legally remain or California requires a registration from you for a vehicle you do not own is a separate question. Generally, the LLC registers it. Since this vehicle has had its use tax already paid, the tax evasion argument won't apply.
I don’t think a shell LLC is gonna help you avoid the requirement to register a car you own as a New York resident. The law in New York requires that for the vehicle to be considered non-resident it be garaged at the out-of-state place of business. Taxes are irrelevant.
You are mistaking ownership and falsifying who owns the vehicle. Do you understand how ownership is defined, legally? How can you simultaneously own a vehicle, and the LLC too?
If the LLC owns the vehicle, you do not.
Good luck with that. It’s bad advice. But people will have to read the law and take risks as seems appropriate to them.
So you called my advice bad. Then ignored my questions before retreating. You stated something as thought it were fact earlier (ownership) and then didn’t back it up.
How can you own something that is owned by another company?
Or said another way, do you have any sound basis to say you are on the hook to register property in New York (you linked to a New York statue) that you do not own. Or is it the LLC’s responsibility. Genuinely curious as every state is a bit different.
“ A person, firm, association or corporation having a place of business in a foreign country, state, territory or federal district and owning a motor vehicle, motorcycle or trailer used in connection with and garaged at such place of business which such owner is compelled to register in such foreign jurisdiction shall be deemed a resident of such foreign jurisdiction”
In other words, the car’s owner is only deemed a resident of a foreign jurisdiction if the car is garaged at a place of business in that foreign jurisdiction AND compelled to register in that jurisdiction. It does not matter where the car’s owner is located. If it’s not garaged in that foreign jurisdiction, it is considered to be an NY resident vehicle.
Your workaround does not work according to NY law because your car is not garaged in Wyoming or whatever.
You keep inflating "your" car with someone else's car.
Who's car is it?
You seem to portray high confidence in your opinions and misrepresent your statements while fundamentally misunderstanding ownership. The moment the car legally becomes owned by another entity, it ceases being yours - this applies for all intents and purposes such as the NY statutes you share that require the owners to register the car.
Is this legal advice?
The flock discourse is slowly climbing the ladder to real discussion. We're at the "mostly intelligent people who are casually interested in the topic being confidently wrong about it" phase (and I know I'm going to get very angry replies accusing me of being one, hah caught you thinking about it!)
> log every trip
> This system tracks the whole of everyone's movements, every day
Funny, because current lawsuits over flock have hinged on the point that they DO NOT have total coverage of roads. Author seems to be talking about Long Island, which is an unusual case, and flock might have total coverage there. But special places need special laws, and an edge case isn't the model for the whole world!
> The Supreme Court held in Carpenter v. United States that the government may not track the whole of a person's movements without a warrant.
No, that court case established that the government needs a warrant to get, specifically, historical cellphone pings from a 3rd party (the cellphone companies).
And overly-emotional language to fool the more credulous:
> It is called Flock for a reason. We are sheep only if we let this happen
Oh please, it's named flock because it's perched on a pole, like a bird, not a sheep.
> feed a national database searched by 59 outside agencies nobody in this town chose
> 0: Opt-in or opt-out decisions the Town made about any of this sharing, in its own words
Well why not? It seems like a lot of the flock discussion takes a bizarre twist where people go "It's useless to try to limit it, we need to ban it outright". Like okay? Do we ban the police when one goes rogue? (I guess that's kind of a bad question to ask, given that "defund the police" was trending a few years ago)
Bad faith argument, borderline flaggable. But I’ll bite. Do you not see any issue with mass surveillance of people’s movements?
I’m an American living in Turkey at the moment. My airbnb host tells me that as a white collar software guy, he personally knows a large fraction of people who have been detained in prison for 1,2 or 3 months for having parties or fake traffic violations.
Of course i don’t love the ever-tightening shackles of algorithmic pricing, which is already well in place for insurance, finance and banking.
But the situation in Turkey reminds me that we are only one “national emergency” away from your freedoms being ripped from us with zero recourse. The chilling effect here is real.
The casually interested, confidently wrong argument can be summed up pretty easily. There is a risk v reward calculation with mass surveillance. What’s the reward? I don’t know the details, but apparently police love the tech because it makes catching bad guys easier. What’s the risk? Unfathomably and Immeasurably high, in ways that we won’t always get to know, or find out years later.
Any refutation of said high risk argument should be something like “relax, guy!” The corporations and state authorities are never gonna use their surveillance of innocents in ways that have any real consequences.
> Bad faith argument, borderline flaggable
Do what you have to do. shrug But when it doesn't have any effect, consider that maybe your bar for "bad faith argument" includes large swaths of completely legitimate differing opinions.
>No, that court case established that the government needs a warrant to get, specifically, historical cellphone pings from a 3rd party (the cellphone companies).
Flock is gathering far, far more intrusive data than "cellphone pings" including hoovering up bluetooth signals and other identifying information. The court may not have ruled on it yet, but it is absurd to think that the courts would think that the government needs a warrant to collect cellphone pings but doesn't need a warrant to collect far more blanket data, including facial recognition on a mass scale. Hopefully we will get a ruling on this sooner rather than later.
>Well why not? It seems like a lot of the flock discussion takes a bizarre twist where people go "It's useless to try to limit it, we need to ban it outright". Like okay? Do we ban the police when one goes rogue? (I guess that's kind of a bad question to ask, given that "defund the police" was trending a few years ago)
This is a bizarre take. Police are a necessary component for running a society. Blanket surveillance is not. This is self-evidently true because society still functioned before the recent past when they introduced blanket surveillance. Equating, or even comparing, a core and necessary function of society, like policing, with a new and completely optional and unnecessary blanket surveillance system is absurd (and that's the polite term).
>Do we ban the police when one goes rogue?
I mean worth a shot right? Do we need armed government funded domestic violence perpetrators? Can anyone make the case for the current situation from first principles?
Thank you, I'm upvoting you, because people need to realize that there's no discussing this issue. We probably need to return to state's rights and ask everyone to move to their preferred state based on if they're crypto-anarchists or believe that some government is okay.
I agree with every point
You’re responding as if those phrases were intentionally chosen, rather than the stochastic slop that they are.