It’s not like big brother was invisible, but it’s much more different in a hypercapitalist state where a private corporation tracks and sells and launder data for a shell government. I’d prefer uk to that any day, and that’s saying a lot
The difference is ANPR is that Flock is a private business, collecting data and stalking people across the US for commercial purposes, which sold this data to law enforcement - meanwhile law enforcement were using the private sector to bypass the checks and balances of court warrants.
In the UK, ANPR is an official tool, not private. Police need to get authorisation to use it, and it is not used for commercial purposes.
It’s still wank, but it’s not quite as wank.
It’s not used for commercial purposes
Maybe not in that way, but private car parks use ANPR all the time to fine you £70 for staying 1 minute over your allotted time
It’s the same technology, but it’s not the same network of cameras, is it? I’d assumed ParkingEye and the like would only have access to their own cameras that they had been contracted to set up by private land owners of car parks.
I was thinking on this when I wrote my comment above, and I’m not quite sure.
Either there’s a muddying of terms, where you have ANPR as a technology (which anyone could implement), and the police have their own, separate network of ANPR cameras. Then the police can obtain footage from private cameras as needed through warrants.
Or private entities submit their data to an ANPR database that the police maintain.Regardless, there’s not one big private network of ANPR cameras that the government have permitted to be installed on public land, and the police still have checks and balances in place to prevent abuse.
The UK has been saturated with CCTV cameras of all sorts for decades so the frog has been thoroughly boiled on public opinion on them.
Even as an American, I’m well aware of the history around surveillance in Britain. V for Vendetta was largely a commentary on it, Radiohead has made some references to government/corporate oversight in their albums, etc.
ALPR cameras were invented in the UK in the 80s and as a country they stopped caring about privacy around that time as well.
The US is mad about them because its police force is uneducated, untrained and murderous. Whatever flaws the UK’s police have, it’s not nearly as bad, and having surveillance (in public) is not likely to result in you or your dog getting shot for no reason.
The US is (also) mad about them because it’s a violation of the 4th amendment of our constitution against unreasonable search.
And because US law enforcement have been using the private sector to bypass the need for a warrant.
I don’t really know the legal arguments that make surveillance of public places into searches, but let’s assume they exist and are valid… I still don’t think people would be that mad about it if you thought you could trust your police to use the information half-way responsibly.
police are untrustworthy in any country on earth.
Great contribution, very informative
ding ding ding
Humans generally don’t mind guardrails and the like when they trust the people enacting them.
We’ve never really trusted the PO-lice in the USA, some have enthusiastically but many have never
The state song of Tennessee has a line about murdering two federal agents searching for a moonshine operation. Americans only like cops if they are brutalizing minorities or striking workers.
Americans only like cops if they are brutalizing minorities or striking workers.
Yes.
At very very least, UK police don’t carry guns.
And the ones that do have a load of training and physiological tests
Whatever flaws the UK’s police have, it’s not nearly as bad
The only major difference between the US and UK police is the numbers that are armed.
UK police are still full of the corrupt, racists, misogynists, rapists, child abusers and wife beaters.
The entire basis of policing in the two countries is different. This is reflected in their attitude and use of force, which is relevant when evaluating any new police power or tool.
I suppose it’s because there hasn’t been any stories about the police abusing their powers and following their exes around. I’m sure it happens there’s just not been any stories about it.
Other one thing I will say is this, I used to actually watch the road traffic cameras so we could report in accidents and breakdowns on the motorways and trust me no one can track you using those cameras you could barely tell what colour of the car was, make and model you had no chance. You wouldn’t have thought they would still make cameras with the resolution of 720i, but apparently they still do.
We don’t have “Flock-style” cameras at all. We have a statutory system with a strictly defined remit that was subject to years of argument, scrutiny and rewrites before it was turned on, not an invasive profit factory run by ruthless, messianic psychopaths. Secondly, our cops are all educated to degree level, they’re not just a bunch of otherwise futureless thugs who sit a three-week impossible-to-fail class and are given a gun. Neither the UK ANPR system nor police are perfect, far from it, but both are orders of magnitude better than what you have the Land Of The Free™.
I know enough about the ANPR systems on public roads that the UK police have access to. Firstly, it’s centrally managed through the PNC and every single query is logged: each query has to me made by an authorised officer who signs in with a federated identity and has to make the query in the context of an investigation - any query made without that immediately launches to an internal investigation and instant no-questions-asked dismissal is on the cards for anyone who makes a query without official justification. You know how American cops can shoot a protester and go back to full work after a two-week fully-paid break? Last month a cop in the UK was fired and blocked from ever working in the police, as a security guard or even as a doorman for the rest of his life without any possibility of appeal. He stole a reusable carrier bag from a supermarket.
Also, different people in different organisations have different levels of access. The DVLA can see if a particular license plate has been logged anywhere in a given month to see if an untaxed car is in use, for example, but they can’t see anything else. A traffic cop can see if a car has insurance, tax and an MOT certificate, but not the owner’s name or address. The biggest loophole at the moment is private car park owners who can ask the DVLA for the details of the owner of a car to issue parking fines, but that’s being clamped down on and, regardless, is nothing to do with public cameras.
Also, also: as a public, statutory systen the UK system is subject to FOI and GDPR: anyone can demand a copy of all of their own records from it. Highly recommended.
Policing by consent is what is different, in America police are often a private force for those in power
More specifically, Flock is a private company. Because it’s private and commercial, police can just purchase access and don’t need a warrant.
ANPR in the UK is run by police. Using it falls under the same rules as any other police investigation.
How exactly would one withdraw their consent?
Buy a boat.
If society decides they don’t want the police I am sure they would disband
Probably with guerilla tactics.
Honestly, they probably have better security. And there is probably less transparency about about usage.
Let the crumpets fly, rosbif!
there was some 20 years ago. not enough apparently, and not enough kids with slingshots.
The UK has surrendered their rights to a nanny state. They can’t even own pointy knives.
Oh no I’m not allowed a murderous weapon, what a restrictive country I live in I don’t know how I cope. The day I wasn’t able to randomly kill someone who cut me off in traffic. What an utterly appalling infringement on my freedoms.
That person is wrong anyway. We can carry a knife but there are restrictions. Some knifes are completely banned though, zombies, etc.
I carry a 3" non-locking knife with me often. Totally legal.
I’ve never really looked into it because I’ve never particularly felt the need to carry one around
You can also carry knives around for work, or various other reasons. It’s not like chef’s knives are illegal, and so long as you have a valid reason for moving it from A to B it shouldn’t be a problem. Unless you start brandishing it or something.
I know what you mean. I only carry one because when I go for a long walk I might meet some mushrooms, I carry a knife made for mushroom cutting. Prior to this I never had a need to unless it was a Stanley knife for working on stuff.
How do you stab another driver from a car?
You take a shortcut.
Americans idolise Europe and wouldn’t stop bitching about how great it is here and how easy we have it. But then they’ll go ‘No kings!, no government ID!, no mass surveillance!, no face scanning and fingerprinting everyone without them committing a crime!..’, like, do you lot want Europe style ‘democracy’ or not?
I’m an American living in Germany, and I’ve got warring feelings about how a country should be. That’s pretty normal for immigrants (I also teach integration classes and this comes up a lot). I prefer some things from the USA, and some things from Germany. On the whole, I prefer Germany, and while I’m very grateful and glad to be able to live here, it’s not a completely frictionless cultural transition.
For example, I really like that unions and guilds are respected and protected here and I love that people care for the environment more here, but I also enjoy changing my own oil (I don’t dump or spill it outside, nor do I dispose of it inappropriately- to answer the first question Germans always have). These are in opposition to each other, because even if I’m meticulous, a general population isn’t, and if most people changed their own oil, there would certainly be more small scale contamination events, and it would likely have an impact on the mechanics industry. If I have to choose between the environment and unions or changing my own oil, I choose the former, 100%. But it’s always going to chafe a little to pay someone else >50€ for an oil change.
At first, I didn’t understand the relationship between the environment, unions, and oil changes, so I was exclusively annoyed by the restriction. Once I learned, it became a lot easier to deal with.
It’s not really sensible to get annoyed at someone for not understanding a culture they don’t know. Obviously, it can get annoying when people completely ignore cultural unwritten rules, but just understanding half of the problem is pretty common for humans in general when talking about other cultures.
I’m 99% sure you’re allowed to change your oil at home, even in Germany.
There are restrictions about washing your car though.
You’re allowed, but you’ll probably get more hassle than it’s worth. Auto part stores don’t accept old oil, so you’d have to work something out with a mechanic. Your neighbors will be horrified, and depending on what type of place you live in, you might get some police who “casually” come by to make sure you’re being meticulous and have a plan for your oil.
I was hoping it didn’t come off like I was saying it was automatically illegal, it’s more just generally frowned upon. It might also be received differently from someone who seems like they really know what they’re doing: I’m a woman in my thirties, and while I grew up helping my dad do normal maintenance work on cars and can do all of the common maintenance tasks, I don’t fit the stereotype in Germany of someone who’s into cars.
Oh yeah, that’s fair then and totally me misunderstanding.
I don’t even have a car so the social ramifications of changing oil yourself are a little lost on me. All I know about car maintenance is what little I remember from driver’s ed - like how you’re not allowed to wash it outside of facilities with certain waste water filtering infrastructure and how to check your oil level.
Well said. I like your example, too.
Well there’s also the safety issue that the US actually does have, that a lot of people don’t perform basic maintenance on their vehicles and drive around in death traps, with bald tyres, rusted axles, and wheels that are the barely attached to the vehicle. It would be fine if they only killed themselves, but they often take a few other people along with them.
Well yeah, that’s a huge issue. What people outside of the US might not know is that it’s caused by people being unable to afford to maintain their vehicles and unable to afford living without a vehicle. People are trapped, and it puts them in the position of replacing their tires when they should or feeding their kids and trying to drive carefully enough to compensate for unsafe tires. On a population level, that obviously leads to less safe roads (as does the necessity of cars in the first place- a lot of people who aren’t great drivers would be able to choose not to drive, if they had alternatives).
Studded winter tires cost $135/piece for a twenty year old Camry at the cheapest auto parts place where I’m from, which is a little bit more expensive than in Germany (I’m very surprised, I figured Germany would be much more expensive), but owning a car in Germany is a luxury. In much of the US, people cannot reliably get to a suitable job without a car. I used to live in Connecticut, which is pretty densely populated compared to most of the country, and I had the options of retail work within walking distance (retail jobs tend not to hire or schedule employees for full time work, because then they’d have to offer benefits like access to discounted company rates for health insurance, but they generally require full availability, so it’s not easy to double up on part time jobs), or jobs in the area I did work at the time, which was 35 kilometers away and took more than two hours each way by bus.
In good weather, I would ride my bike, but only because my office had a gym with showers- otherwise I would not have been able to be presentable at work. I enjoyed doing it, but I also ended up cycling for about three hours a day, which is not sustainable for most people. Plus, I had to eat a full extra meal every day to maintain my weight after I started doing it.
I was actually even lucky compared to most people in the USA. I had a relatively short commute, a relatively good bus route (yes, really), and it was possible for me to ride a bicycle safely to work on roads with well marked, if unprotected, bike lanes. Many people have nothing available to them at all within walking distance and cannot afford to move to a more populated place.
That’s part of why I’m so grateful to be able to live in Germany- here it’s a lot more difficult to get to the point of isolation/poverty that’s relatively widespread in the USA. It’s not impossible and there are hungry people and people who fall through the cracks here, but almost half of Americans have less than $1k in savings, while needing to own a car. Of course vehicle maintenance falls to the wayside.
I think flock is a pretty egregious example though. The corrupt us police were using it for personal reasons most of which were nefarious.
I’m not sure if Americans can really articulate this because they’re kind of used to their police being the enemy, but I think the larger issue isn’t so much the cameras themselves, it’s mass surveillance by an organization that is barely one step above criminals.
Law enforcement in the US extensively use the private sector to bypass the courts and get around having to get a warrant.
Different people can have different opinions in America I think
