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Comment by humanistbot | Hacker News Reader

You have no ability to question your accuser, because your accuser is a machine. The source code is proprietary. The data chain is secret. You have no ability to meaningfully audit it to see if it actually works or is making a lot of false positives.

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What shitty red light cameras are these where the data is all secret? In my city, tickets from red light cameras include a video of the incident, which clearly shows the car and traffic light.

Is that really how it works elsewhere, they just send you a ticket saying "we caught you running a red light, please pay fine"? What happens if you show up to court to contest, can't you just point out they have literally no evidence?

it is extremely easy to edit a green light to a red light, just partially delay the feed. Data is meaningless.

That implies malicious intent rather than a bug causing a false positive.

> it is extremely easy to edit a green light to a red light, just partially delay the feed. Data is meaningless.

It is extremely easy to tamper with most evidence, and there are ways to detect tampering.

If they actually did it at scale they would run into conflicting dashcam footage very quickly, and the whole conspiracy would go belly up before bearing any fruit.

If you think data is meaningless we should also remove police cruisers' dashcams and stop the rollout of body cams, I guess? Those aren't conspiracy-proof either.

I'm not aware of governments just asking one to pay a fine. The thing that really bothers me is that it allows the state to perform legal action at scale. If a city, let's say Chicago, just started sending people ticket how many would just pay it? From what I've seen [0], my guess would be a lot.

[0] https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2021/07/29/chicago-speed-camera...

I agree red light cameras are problematic for other reasons, but parent's claim specifically was that they were unconstitutional because the evidence can't be inspected.

Regular speed-guns have the same issues, though.

You can face your accuser (the traffic cop) and you can challenge the calibration/accuracy of their radar/lidar gun.

If you challenge the accuracy they have to prove it was tuned recently (usually 6 months~) prior to issuing the ticket and tested the day of (usually).

There IS an audit trail for of certificates and logs of tuning for radar guns so they can prove it in court if challenged.

There is NOT an audit trail for traffic cams because the companies don't expose enough information to audit.

If you challenge a traffic ticket from a red light camera, you will usually win because they can't prove you guilty.

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