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Comment by hilux | Hacker News Reader

I live in Oakland. We're in the midst of a big crime wave. Oakland PD, the DA, and the Mayor, are all in varying degrees of denial. It's so bad that the Governor of California (eyeing his future Presidential bid) has stepped in, authorizing the California Highway Patrol to chase suspects into Oakland to arrest them. Apparently they're even setting up a parallel court system for prosecutions, since the current DA can't be trusted.

It's so strange to see OPD in the news because of something innovative(?) they're actually DOING!

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All that is fine, but towing a car which is personal properly is not a proper method to obtain evidence. See, they can look up license plates and contact the owner to lawfully provide footage. If they towed mine, I’d sue the department for illegal taking under the 5th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

“Nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”

So, buy my car from me above current value, including cost of obtaining a new car, and you can have your precious USB. Or just call me and I’ll send it to you for free.

I think we need a structure to allow LEOs to request and enforce a legal hold on data without having access to the data. Something that would allow a lower bar for the request, preserve any potential evidence, and allow the owner of the data to respond. We're entering an age of constant, massive, data collection. Video, audio, text, metadata, locations, and more being collected by every device we own and every device around us.

Law enforcement should have to constrain the request for information and the information provided to them should only be required to meet those constraints.

Of course it is a proper method to obtain evidence.

You can stop with the anti-intellectual rage bait at any time. That's not what this site is for.

They're not towing accused criminals' cars to obtain evidence. They're towing random civilians' cars to obtain evidence. That's like a cop coming to your house (without a warrant) while you're on vacation and running a stakeout from your upstairs bedroom because they think your neighbor might be running a meth lab.

No. It isn't. I strongly encourage you to engage in good faith. You can start by reading a very approachable lay summary of vehicles and the expectation of privacy. https://law.justia.com/constitution/us/amendment-04/16-vehic...

You can also read TFA: "have begun getting warrants for the footage captured by the vehicles"

It is tiresome beyond measure that every time a legal topic comes up, the peanut gallery has to chime in with your dishonest, narcissistic comments.

The law does not exist to enforce your personal policy preferences. It's fine to say that you dislike something, or that the law doesn't take into account changes in society and perhaps it should be changed. However, it is unacceptable behavior to presume that something isn't being done "lawfully" or that it isn't "proper" just because you don't like it. And it is a lie to compare this to warrantless searches of any sort.

HN is for intellectual curiosity. If you're not here to learn, perhaps you should consider using a different site.

I'm not the person you're debating, but I can't help noticing that every single one of your messages contains an insult or putdown - or several.

Are you aware that you're doing this? Is it really the best way to promote "intellectual curiosity"?

No. The closest I come to that is "peanut gallery." Every other criticism is directed at particular behavior, not to anyone's inherent worth as a person.

Being dishonest is bad behavior. Making false accusations is bad behavior. Engaging in rage bait to push ideology is bad behavior. Those actions need to be criticized, and sharply, or HN will become a shitty place.

It is utterly inappropriate for people to come in here and start spamming their anti-law enforcement biases.

The simple, unalterable fact is that vehicles do not get the same Fourth Amendment protection that homes get. It is also an inarguable fact that searches and seizures pursuant to warrants are not the same as warrantless surveillance, as one commenter argued.

It is not okay to come on here spewing cop-hate for ostensibly doing something unlawfully when the officers got a warrant. That kind of partisan political nonsense doesn't belong here, regardless of how popular it may be.

This “holier than thou” attitude doesn’t make your point any stronger. It isn’t rage bait, and it isn’t a personal policy preference.

“Have begun getting warrants” means that they were doing this before, without them.

This is personal property that is being commandeered, bypassing constitutional rights. If the cameras have something the police consider evidence, then the police can go to a judge and get a warrant and then wait until the owner (who can be easily identified with auto registration records) responds.

If a crime happened outside of a store that has security cameras, then the police don’t get to break into the store and try to retrieve the data off of hard drives. They have to go through the proper channels and wait. This is no different.

>“Have begun getting warrants” means that they were doing this before, without them.

Would "have begun buying widgets" mean that they used to steal widgets? At worst, it's an ambiguous phrase; but context and common sense tell us that the ambiguity resolves in the opposite way from how you're resolving it.

It doesn't bypass any constitutional rights whatsoever. There is no constitutional right against police search and seizure of property they have a warrant for. Go read a book.

My camera is not your camera. Just because I recorded something doesn't make you entitled to just take it. No LEA should be able to requisition my recordings as part of a fishing expedition. If you have evidence of a crime and that evidence indicates that my camera likely recorded it, you can ask me for that information and/or get a court order.

> you can ask me for that information and/or get a court order.

That’s what the article says the police are doing. They are asking the Tesla owner for footage, and if they can’t contact the owner, they are getting a court order (warrant) and towing the car to retrieve the data.

The first example in the original SF Chronicle report it seems like they did very little to get in contact with the owner, someone staying in the very hotel the vehicle was parked in. The owner only happened to catch them in the act of trying to tow his vehicle and volunteered the video.

Nothing in the report appears to indicate that they made any effort to have the owner(s) in the first two examples volunteer the information at all.

This is no different than police attempting collecting cellphones from bystanders at the scene of a crime/disturbance as evidence. I'd be happy to provide law enforcement with any evidence relevant to the crime that may have occurred which I have, I'll be damned if they're just going to take my phone/vehicle and rip the entire device. I know what the information they collect looks like, and how that information is ingested. Your contacts, text messages, photos, etc are all going to end up in a database and potentially cross-referenced with any other ongoing cases.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, I am definitely not defending the police in this situation. I was just pointing out that they did in fact get court orders after they couldn’t find the owners.

Whether they tried hard enough to find the owner, or whether the court should issue a warrant allowing a vehicle to be towed, is another thing altogether. Personally, I’d be super upset.

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