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> I don't understand why a police cruiser can sit in a public space (or even a private one) and write down licence plates and descriptions of passers-by with pen and paper, or record everything around them with dashcams and bodycams for later use, but when it comes to cameras on a pole this would require a warrant. Scale actually matters. Things that are generally OK at a small scale become problematic at larger scales. A single police cruiser writing down license plates isn't able to track you in the same way a huge surveillance network is, and the opportunities for abuse are much lower.
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> Scale actually matters. Things that are generally OK at a small scale become problematic at larger scales. A single police cruiser writing down license plates isn't able to track you in the same way a huge surveillance network is, and the opportunities for abuse are much lower. Not only this, this a precedented court opinion.
Note that they already don't write down license plates. They use LPRs attached to their cars, and tend to be automatically running every plate immediately through the database, which tends to catch people without insurance or expired registration. Is the line automation? Or 24/7 operation? (genuinely)
But then scale doesn't actually matter. If you have a problem with something that "everyone does" then you should have a problem with something only a few people do.
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