Police are using AI to pull over drivers for 'suspicious' behavior
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
This isn't traffic cops, it's federal police. And it isn't suspicious driving patterns, e.g. weaving, it's full-on movement tracking.
[1] https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/ai-driven-polic...
18 U.S. Code § 242 - Deprivation of rights under color of law
Whoever, under color of any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom, willfully subjects any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or to different punishments, pains, or penalties, on account of such person being an alien, or by reason of his color, or race, than are prescribed for the punishment of citizens, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both [..]
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/242Farting into a wind is about as effective with the difference of being free.
If someone wants to actually fight this, a dash cam streaming somewhere offsite and secure (cloud is fine) is a million times more effective. It provides direct, court-admissible proof of the claim in a way a personal diary entry, in a notebook or on a blockchain, never could. Barring that, an audio recording on your phone. (Would check your state and local laws first, however.)
The notary part is absolutely essential. Renowned Blockchains are the ULTIMATE for this use case. Sorry that you didn't already know this and the other part wasn't already obviously to be assumed by you.
I thought I was posting on a site called Hacker News, I was obviously being too assumptive. I'll spell things out more elaborately in comments in the future.
Courts have generally accepted proof of existence that is established by proper entries to robust distributed immutable ledgers.
More important than courts are the people. If someone many states over has a serious crime committed against them, and they want it to be known they have been wronged in some way, I and others have a moral right to know about it.
Those who know of an ill that has happened and choose to speak about it should be heard.
If someone provides testimony in the form of a video or a written statement, the files can be available over any medium such as torrent, R2 bucket, IPFS, what have you, but proof of existence on a blockchain for the authenticity aspect, "this exact thing identified by this sha512 hash submitted at this time" and unchangeable, is imperative.
The blockchain part is imperative so somebody can't "just go back and change something" post-facto.
If you want to see an example of a court action going a different way due to what was written to a robust distributed immutable ledger, do a web search for "Craig Wright is a fraud posted by private keys he said he owned".
That is the Satoshi Blockchain referenced to and swaying a court on a cosmic scale.
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>> A court could care less about blockchain hashes unless the society of lawyers and judges decide it is legitimate.
Facts are not determined by loose consensus decided by private societies. The standard is higher. Such private societies are also not a substitute for the legislature, nor could they be for determining a true fact.
Blockchains and their contents are rooted in math so they're not trivial to argue with. USA is rife with academia suitable to provide abundant expert witnesses for said math.
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>> A court could care less about blockchain hashes
In practice this would lead to the case being escalated to a higher court. Or worse a federal lawsuit could be filed against a judge, which is not unheard of.
Judges aren't cosmically ultimate arbiters, they take an oath and have a duty and like anyone else who does, they are subject to rules and regulations for which there are real consequences for failure to abide by.
It's already happened.
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>> Judges are only subject to the rules and regulations that other judges and prosecuters decide apply.
The last thing a state judge wants is a federal lawsuit against him where a federal judge reviews accusations that he/she didn't follow essential procedure.
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>> it's just random gibberish
The plentiful expert witnesses from math departments and computer science departments from Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and the like who will gladly show up to defend their fields (albeit will want to be paid), would say otherwise, if that were necessary, which it's not, because like has already been pointed out at least twice now
it already happened.However, there are many cases that DO use blockchain events. Transferring the blockchain event into court admissible evidence is not at all straightforward, but some jurisdictions have established standards for how to do it. This comes up especially often in inheritance cases.
See: https://truescreen.io/articles/blockchain-evidence-court-adm...
It has been an interesting rabbit hole. Notably, on-chain evidence is only one of many different kinds of evidence that courts will accept, so focusing entirely on this mechanism to the exclusion of all others is not so helpful. Transferring on-chain events into a winnable court case can be a fairly expensive way to establish facts.
<3?? just any random blockchain? In what way does that help? Also, how? Are you buying small batches of bitcoin to spell a message out using morse code or something? Or is this an Etherium contract that does...?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50264113It's really bizarre to watch those videos because they are very routine. They stop the person for marginal lawbreaking, ask them to step out and sit in the front of their cruiser, then the traffic violations turn into warnings, cop makes basic small talk while writing warning and pretty much ignores everything suspect says, cop asks about any contraband in the car and asks to search, suspect usually (stupidly) agrees to search, cops pretty much instantly find the drugs. And if the suspect says no to the search, the K9 unit is already pulling up behind them because they were called before the cop ever turned on their lights and siren.
It's incredibly obvious these are pretextual stops. There is definitely a national program tracking license plates because there's no reasonable explanation for cops getting this lucky on pulling over random people that are driving completely unremarkable.
I'm pretty sure that's how they caught that megachurch pastor smuggling drugs for the cartel, they look for travel patterns for license plates and especially look at rental car registrations. You can't pull over every car but you can definitely look for cars making repeated trips, especially those that are made to known trafficking cities.
I had a friend from highschool that got pretty involved with his mom with drug trafficking. They caught him at some Indian reservation that overlaps upstate NY and Canada. The arrest affidavit states the cops saw a car parked for a couple hours at a casino and then followed the car to the border of the Indian reservation. Then they waited for the car to leave and then pulled him over for crossing a line. Of course they found significant ketamine in the car. The cops already knew who they were looking for because a car parked at a casino for a couple hours is not suspicious and definitely not suspicious enough to follow.
p a r a l l e l c o n s t r u c t i o nImagine going to trial being charged with a crime and defend against a “pretend” investigation that could have theoretically happened.
Imagine that this passes legal scrutiny.
Mr. Smith after a long investigation and hundreds of hours of detective work we have evidence you are smuggling drugs and justice is served when we found you speeding on interstate 80.
Truth: we just illegally monitored you cell phone and later intercepted your direct conversation after using IMSI catcher to monitor all your texting patterns. An AI system detected an unusual pattern and alerted us to your activity.
Like, how often do people who live on that rez get pulled over?
The above is key to understanding that part, they KNEW who the smuggler was. They just needed a legal reason to pull them over.
Yes, I’m a local, and I lost my entire respect for that reservation as a First Nations myself for how they run their show of crooked corruption.
All they've got is nothing but pot dispensaries (both "legitimate" and "illegal" ones that they're chasing internally because of a power struggle between themselves), the casino, a failed attempt to own the Restasis patent, and endless billboards telling you to either not do drugs or not beat your wife. Oh, and all the 'under the table' drugs at the illegal dispensaries - I've heard from the college news network that they're lacing weed with coke and fent to some students they sell to.
Welcome to Awkwesasne!
Wouldn't you need to know how often random people are stopped for no reason?
People in poor neighborhoods and near e.g. reservations get stopped all the time for no reason at all.
They track everyone's phone. The plate cross reference is only needed to nab someone in traffic.
----
No illusions that I'm not also traceable. Tracked.
So, no need for a pretextual stop. You are giving them a real reason to pull you over at any time.
In Tennessee, the first two offenses for improper display of license plate are $10 & $20 fines, respectively (but obviously this allows them to initiate a traffic stop; a younger-me couldn't afford this risk). In the past year+, a dozen officers have ignored my plateless transgressions.
This has the side-effect of encouraging me to obey most traffic laws more rigorously (e.g: I speed less, am generally less-aggressive).
----
I am a middle-aged fat bald white dude in the US South – I'm practically invisible!
FYI: Halloween is officially "Drive without a License Plate Day" (to protest FLOCK cameras)
Sovereign citizen?
TPMS sensors: Modern vehicles have tire-pressure sensors in or near each wheel. Many transmit a unique sensor ID by short-range radio. Bartec describes diagnostic equipment being capable of displaying both the vehicle's VIN and TPMS sensor IDs.
Application from Tortured Genius Enterprises LLC, describes a system intended to:
intercept TPMS radio transmissions from passing vehicles;
extract the sensors' unique identifiers;
associate those identifiers with a particular vehicle;
determine vehicle location;
connect the identifier with outside databases;
potentially retrieve make, model, VIN and owner information;
maintain historical observations;
predict future locations/behavior;
direct law enforcement to intercept a vehicle.
https://networks.imdea.org/your-cars-tire-sensors-could-be-u...
Look up NextNav.
Point being is that if you drive there is a pretext for a stop.
A classic example of this is the eventual capture of Peter Sutcliffe, the "Yorkshire Ripper" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Sutcliffe#Arrest
Having ended up in the middle of a 5 car sandwich going to last years VCFMW, I've learned we all collectively fail to understand that the car in front of us can be stopped, in addition to using it's own brakes.
I said no so I'm not allowed to have remote start. I'm a bad cog. Punish me.
That's why I feel it's super important hardware developers get on board with open source OS support for mobile, much like some are for Linux already. It should be the norm to not be tracked by corporate entities and advert networks, it should be the weird option to opt into that.
> Tucked away neatly in Australian law is the concept that a phone that is not iPhone or Android is a criminal device, similar to owning lockpicks. Something like GrapheneOS.
My query:
> "is it illegal in australia to have a mobile phone that does not use iphone or android?"
> Owning, buying, and using an encrypted phone is legal in Australia, and so is installing a different operating system on a device you own.
Also, dumb phones are certainly not illegal. Plenty of old folks still use them.
Anyway, it's probably nothing. Let's ignore it until it becomes an issue.
I am aware that back a few years ago, 2018 iirc federal law was introduced which granted additional powers to law enforcement in regard to telecommunication equipment, though only skimming though the rules, but not greatly understood - I was left to assume if the device is discovered via a search, the law can view and copy data the device stores or accesses if they so desire.
I actually have an old pixel phone that given to me and has GrapheneOS ... but like the rest of my cheap phones, I only use them for phone calls, texts, photos, time piece, maybe once a year utilise GPS and a hotspot when the signal from the nearby towers are good enough to get some bandwidth. [Mobile networks as such that my usual location can be so iffy even receiving a simple sms in a timely manner can be a challenge]
I would hope that merely owning lockpicks is considered benign, but the carrying of lockpicks without good reason could be considered suspicious, though not criminal in itself. However, it would be amusing to see LockPickingLawyer being thrown into a cell and then the cops hearing "click on one, binding on two..."
I requested a copy of the data they harvest. They log EVERYTHING. GPS of course, but also when I turn on the wipers, turn signal... basically the total state of the car at all times.
And all I want is remote heating. Checking the battery is nice for monitoring charge progress, but I could do without it.
So what I do now is drive in privacy mode, and when I park I have to remember to disable privacy mode if I think I might need heating tomorrow morning.
The future is fucking retarded.
Cut it out.
https://dev.to/behruamm/uncensoring-ai-how-to-surgically-rem...
AI won't break encryption for you.
I can't believe we have such a low level comments on HN tbh.
Is there a database of car models that foist this bullshit on you so I can activly avoid ever buying them?
"Tesla never sells or rents your data to third-party companies. This includes your personal data and driving history."
Most manufacturers either sell this to brokers which cops easily consume, or only require subpoenas instead of warrants.
- Their own list of third-party cookies [1] has a laundry list of those associated with personalized advertising across a variety of providers.
- ConsumerReports and Northeastern [2] found the car directly connecting to 34 advertising domains (with similar results from many other such investigations from other parties), not even bothering to filter it through Tesla servers.
And so on. This isn't a grand conspiracy. Privacy invasions are a big part of nearly every modern, large company. I'm not singling out Tesla in this instance. Repeating my claim, if the ToS bothers to say that your information is neither sold nor rented and the lawyer who drafted it didn't bother to include "sharing" in that promise, that omission was intentional approximately 100% of the time.
Good? Bad? You decide. It's happening though.
[0] https://www.tesla.com/legal/privacy#how-we-may-use-your-info...
[1] https://www.tesla.com/legal/cookies
[2] https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics/personal-informa...
Although for me the concern is insurance getting data... My rate is so low based on whatever they have now, that I definitely don't see it going any lower :) perhaps I'd give them data if it was high.
Some criminal behaviors are somewhat correlated with skin color, age or gender. It would be extremely hard to train an AI to ignore those correlations. But would it even matter? Nobody knows why the AI flagged suspicious behavior, it usually can't tell even if you are able to ask follow up questions. So nobody could prove racial profiling.
I remember someone talking about AI detecting lung cancer from MRIs, and they discovered that it was assigning higher probabilities based on the age of the machine that took it (or maybe fMRI, and maybe it wasn't lung cancer, I'm forgetting the details). So those communities were poorer and had worse health and a higher incidence, or they'd have had the newer machine. You never really know how it's deciding anything (though in that case they did figure it out, it might not be impossible, but in the end, you probably end up figuring it out at a statistical level--I suspect the counter-factuals wouldn't be reliable), so you're introducing variables attempting to make a counter-factual, which makes me think that in the end, it'll come down to statistical analysis from real data/people/situations. Which is after you've let it loose doing the thing, unless you run it in parallel for a while before relying on it at all and statistically analyze that before relying on it. I'm not sure you can isolate a variable sufficiently except by statistical means on real data, because it looks at everything, and it might find a correlate to your correlate, and a correlate to that correlate, and reach the same conclusion based on your counter-factual not being able to sufficiently hide what it was looking at
I don't know, random thoughts
If a model is trained on data that shows some bias due to prior human decisions, it would continue to follow those biases while being a lot harder to prove/sue. There were examples of this with AI assisted resume screening & criminal sentencing for example.
For example, it is a common belief within the medical community that Black people have higher pain tolerance, and thus don't need as much or as strong of pain killers. People in pain sitting in beds in the ER will be delayed or refused pain killers because of this. This belief has been proven false, but it shows up in papers, notes, etc. and nurses and doctors still will treat their patients as if it's true.
This is just one example of many many things they test for. When training the model the data-science team actually tries to see if they can produce output that exhibit those identified biases/problems and block it from ever been used in production if they do.
I've had people internally tell me how frustrated they are that I or other people aren't letting them get their new-fangled AI-powered feature in front of customers fast enough... Without a lot of discipline and guardrails people would be using ChatGPT or Claude APIs instead.
My point is: I highly doubt that kind of care is being taken in many industries/companies. It's very concerning to me.
Nurses and doctors don't refuse giving painkillers because they enjoy seeing their patients suffer, painkillers come with side effects. So they are trying to find a balance between preventing suffering and long term health. We can look at the wrong idea that black people have a higher pain tolerance as causing black patients unnecessary suffering, but you can also see it as protecting the long term health of black patients more. That's the same thing, just seen from a different angle.
But now that we know of this bias, we can of course try to fix it, but how. Now that we also have data: do black people have less painkiller-related problems? If they do, maybe we should give the black treatment to others, if they don't maybe they could get some more.
Well, yes, because so is crime.
It's also worth noting that numerous crimes, the most egregious examples probably being cocaine/crack and marijuana, are explicitly racialized in their enforcement. Cocaine in rich white suburbs is a health issue. Crack in the ghetto is a crime wave. It's literally the same substance, the only difference is how it looks and who is taking it. (and if it was possibly supplied by the CIA...)
Meanwhile white offenders of pot abuse get off with a few months here and there, and black people caught with it frequently, you know, fucking die.
Oh, unless you mean the CIA thing. Then google "Contra CIA bloods crips" and you'll find everything on that.
And then this just reinforces the idea: "well, look at the crime statistics, black kids are more crime-prone, right"
The fact that this is the same kind of life event that can literally, without any hyperbole, cost a black person their life, fucks with me sometimes.
Anecdotes fall apart when we don't cherry-pick.
most of the violent crimes are from people with prior crimes, but the prior crimes themselves weren't necessarily violent, but just enough to marginalize that person from ability to participate in society with steady jobs
such as the possession of now-legalized substances, and the possession stop itself was based on flimsy pretexts that could have been fought, but it made more sense to take a plea-deal for that person or they were not aware of how to not engage with police and damned themselves without a lawyer present
This is not a personal story, not an anecdote. I'm reporting on a study that looked at incarceration rates for drug use vs the drug use itself.
Why is that important? Because the study itself is solid, and it shows that there is some sort of bias between police/policing and african-american communities.
Sure, maybe that bias doesn't show up in other areas like firearm-related crimes. Or: maybe it does, and we haven't yet figured out how. Or, maybe it plays an indirect role, further eroding the relationship between the AA communities and the police, gradually building up a mutual dynamic that subjects black people to an unhealthy chronic level of stress and despair and harassment while also "justifying" the prejudicial activities of the cops.
There are whole books written about this. But at a minimum, I can't imagine just brushing over a 4x higher arrest rate for the same level of crime. That's pretty damn big.
So, every police institution? I’m sure there are exceptions, but there’s enough of a preponderance to safely assume it and the data bears that out.
At the very least, this suggests that police in NYC and probably elsewhere were disproportionately singling out Black (and Latinos) for intrusive searches without evidence and on a pretextual basis.
What about the crimes happening in company boardrooms rather than on the street corners?
People often call crime, individual offenses and think of certain racial groups, while ignoring real crimes committed by corporations led by other racial groups.
The crazy thing is that the greatest harms are caused by people who are not target of surveillance technology .
If you work at a store and you take $100 from the register, you can be detained and jailed. Maybe prosecuted depending where you are.
If you work at a store and short five workers $20 each on their checks, and pocket it, they all have to individually pursue it as a civil matter, which itself costs money and time they probably don't have. It's fucking wild behavior.
I have to disagree though, it's not that crazy. Crime has always been a social construct much as that triggers a certain kind of person to hear, it just is. We decide the bounds of "good" behavior as a society and then determine punishments for those who transgress but at the same time, the law enforcement and justice systems are themselves systems made of people, and therefore inherit their biases. There have always been crooked cops, crooked judges, crooked prosecutors, etc. Like this isn't revolutionary shit I'm talking about, this is a standard plot point in movies going back to before movies had sound.
It's the same reason why Flock is so popular. It's just cameras, who cares right? Well Flock is popular for the organization, it's an accountability sink. The government can't just stand up a bunch of cameras, people will complain. Ahh, but Flock can. The entire economic value of Flock is purely the accountability laundering, the technology is just a footnote.
Really, many organizations in the US boil down to this. Producing value is hard, producing fake value is easy.
When I just came to the US, I got my car and started exploring Utah a lot. Just picking a random spot on a map and going there. Beautiful countryside.
There were several occasions when a police vehicle showed up right after I parked, made a circle around me and disappeared.
One time their cruiser parked 30 feet away and they were watching me. I had a slice of pizza with me, so I rolled down a window and let them watch me eating. They drove away after a few minutes.
Also, driving 60 miles one way to a lake for a swim once or twice a week is suspicious, apparently. And I was doing it even when the water was in 40s. One time K9 parked right next to me. Idk if they searched my car or not, but their drone followed me on a trail back and forth for over 5 minutes. And when I came back, they were packing up and leaving.
Never saw them during moonless nights when I was stargazing in the middle of nowhere or sleeping in my car on the side of a road. Fun times.
I traveled with friends on a road trip and they drove such a car in the top 10. When I told them that they told me that explained why cops were always turning on and off their sirens behind them.
These top 10 cars were likely to be cheaper sedans.
Your hearing will be done through Android Auto/CarPlay directly with GPT-17.2 StellarumThalamum.
Waymo reports teen riders for bad behavior and delivers them to the police (60 points, 1 month ago, 31 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48824010
As someone who walks on the streets / uses public transport, Waymo was 100% in the right there. Wish all taxi services were like that.
"Acceptable reason" for what?
The headline and anecdote do not match.
All the Waymo Driver did was pull over and wait for the Support Team and the law enforcement response. It was in a commercial parking lot. It did not "deliver them to the police". It did not lock the doors. The children would have been free to exit after pulling over. The car simply refused to take them all the way to their destination.
Seeing that they were illegally drinking alcohol as underage minors, and illegally targeting innocent bystanders with missiles, what sort of acceptable reason do you need to contact Support, and thereby have law enforcement involved? I think it was a perfectly acceptable reason for the Waymo Driver to refuse service to these customers who had broken their policies.
The given reason for being pulled over is something petty like following too close or not signaling at the right time. The real reason is the vehicle was flagged from some pattern determined by the ALPR networks.
I've had my car searched (I finally gave consent to search after over an hour of being detained waiting on a drug dog) because of a popular 'reasonably suspicious' pattern cops use. The loser let me off with a warning for speeding after finding nothing.
Of course they'll be more than happy to break the law themselves. They'll investigate themselves and find no wrongdoing. And I'm sure the officer will claim they smelled something giving them reasonable suspicion.
They must conclude the stop in a reasonable amount of time, without delay, and if the drug dog hasn’t arrived in the time that it takes them to write you a ticket, you can not be detained any longer.
Throw the book at her!
Just intimidation, pretty common.
...but if you want to have absolute power over your community, you become a cop or a mayor.
The cops are obsessed with all the shiney toys that let them surveil and kill people. They will buy literally any wildly unnecessary thing they can get their hands on if it tickles their sense of cool. That's why they're driving around in GWOT surplus MRAPs with GPS synchronized emergency lights (Google it) and complaining about not being able to buy the latest drones from China so loudly.
I actually did and whilst I can understand how ridiculous it sounds, to be honest it kind of makes sense. A large number of emergency vehicles at a scene at night can become it's own mini light show which can be really distracting / blinding.
https://standbygroup.com/uk/sync-breathe/
It does look kinda cool though.
It's all ironic when you see the same people claiming "anti communism" and "low or no government" but then proceed to happily install the boot on people's faces. The cognitive dissonance is chefs kiss.
the aclu post points out that the pretextual stop is the actual problem here. all that suspiciousness wouldnt matter to this woman if she hadnt been detained. the fbi dude could have been suspicious as hell. could have decided to follow her around or like done some other actual investigation to get actual evidence that would amount to probable cause and enable a detainment.
cops dont have a right to stop you so they can go fishing.
the article doesn't seem to mention what actual authority an fbi agent would have to enforce a local traffic law about "staying in the left lane".
it does seem like this was a pretty clear rights violation and i hope the aclu fights on her behalf.
-the officer, at least in his head if not out loud
Probably a public model, which is independently vetted against actual detentions, needs to show a 99% probability of an actual crime being committed for police to make a stop like this.
The opportunities for abuse are simply too high.
I've had plenty of encounters where the discretion of a police officer was of great benefit to me and my friends.
Technology like this is stuck in a no win situation.
Human police officers are allowed to take action based on reasonable suspicion.
AI, if it is worse than humans, will be criticized for false positives.
And if it is better than humans, without being able to explain why it will be criticized for that as well even if it is in general better than humans, it will be criticized for the false positives.
But as the saying goes, this is the worst it will ever be. At some point this thing or something like it will have a precision over 95%. At what point will the debate become awkward because the thing is superhumanly efficient at sorting out the baddies?
-Larry Ellison
The original view presented by the quote is a child's view of authoritarians: they force you to behave the way they want you to.
The other commenter is pointing out how they work in practice, how they'll work with this, is by making noncompliant behavior the accepted norm and then enforcing it selectively based on their changing goals and targets.
"There is no such thing as liberalism — or progressivism, etc.
There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy actually exists; by the political analogue of Gresham’s Law, conservatism has driven every other idea out of circulation.
There might be, and should be, anti-conservatism; but it does not yet exist. What would it be? In order to answer that question, it is necessary and sufficient to characterize conservatism. Fortunately, this can be done very concisely."
[0] https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progre...
But of course now that the tech of choice is AI and it's threatening everyone's jobs and status it's a bad thing.
There's a lesson about people there.
Could be. But it could also just be a Goomba fallacy.
George Carlin, “Airport Security” (1999)
The TSA exists because it
1. Made some people look good
2. Made some people money
3. Was thought necessary by some true believers
The incentive structures aren’t aligned in a way that any individual cares about reinforcing state power like that. Mostly the people in charge care about getting reelected, keeping their jobs, making money, or in some cases doing good.
TSA lines suck because you have a bunch of hourly workers directing a a crowd of clueless people through a multi step process.
I just got back from Disney World with the family. We flew out of an airport with TSA, went through dozens of security lines at the parks, and flew out of an airport that doesn’t use TSA.
There was no meaningful difference interactions with any of the security personal. Some were nice some were annoyed, some were bordering on mean.
Sooo, what we're seeing the early stages of in the US right now?
Vast majority of cameras in the UK are privately owned and not hooked up to the police thought crime system.
One must assume that the various "fusion centers" are pulling in all this data and connecting all the dots. Unless you are walking, with a face mask, and without your cell phone you have to assume they know were you are.
These claims really need to be more specific to be believable and actionable. Particularly given the law has been changed in reaction to prior fuckery.
§ 215 was fuckery. It was reformed [1]. (Though not repealed.)
> an industry of selling dossiers on individuals, groups, or populations
Agree. But buying reports from data brokers isn't "you scratch my back I'll scratch yours" agreement. That's fuckery again.
To be clear, I'm not denying fuckery is afoot. I'm criticising throwing it out there without an evidenced allegation. Because if we have evidence of fuckery, that’s the priority. If not, it’s the data brokers.
These cameras need to be banned federally. It shouldn't be legal to own or sell access to a network of these pervert cameras.
Somewhere along the way, tech stopped asking questions like that, and now, people are hostile to the suggestion that the question should be asked.
Folks who were on here praising Uber or Airbnb for skirting the law 10 years ago, this was part of the problem.
I do have some sympathy for the cab drivers who used to be able to earn a better living, but the only reason that was possible is that city government gave them a sweetheart deal, which isn’t fair. It makes exactly as much sense as having barber medallions or pharmacist medallions. If they had those, it might cost $85 for a basic haircut, and pharmacist and barber medallion owners might make a ton of money (remember, you can rent out medallions, so they became investment vehicles), but those are prices we’d all be paying for.
Regulations that just pick winners and losers, making most of us the losers, are stupid - and should be loopholed-around if it’s possible.
My area had no taxi medallion laws or system.
That's part of the problem. The excuses were always bullshit made up from generalizations of local problems. Uber wasn't needed to "Bust the taxi monopoly" because in most places there was no taxi monopoly, at least, not until Uber showed up and made one.
The excuse was never meant to be actually valid though. It was always just a simple "gotcha" that could be employed as a thought terminating cliche by people who had already made up their mind on which outcome they wanted.
Anyway, isn’t that a good thing for those areas? I think a lot of people just didn’t have any convenient way to get around besides walking or waiting an hour for a very infrequent bus.
[1] (I was going to say “couldn’t get a medallion,” but since they were rentable and thus served as investment vehicles, it’s really just a matter of not being willing to pay the price those things commanded on the market)
> Therefore a computer must never make a management decision
People never stopped asking this sort of thing, and you can find some people who are hostile to anything. 'Twas ever thus. Constructing a cherry-picked, wistful narrative is not very helpful.
We know why it's different of course: scale. But there was never a general principle about scale and automation articulated in the Constitution because it just wasn't a thing to worry about in the 1700s.
We're left to hope that courts agree that just because something is okay for one police officer in one place to do, that doesn't mean the police department can perform that same task a thousand times in a thousand places with a thousand machines and still have it be okay.
This is literally the definition of a police dragnet.
Or did Law and Order lie to us?
For criminal law, prosecutors have to prove beyond reasonable doubt. If they have a gun, search history for "how to kill someone and get away with it", blood in their car, and someone that's been missing for an extended period of time. They can and have gotten convictions based on that. Hans Reiser was convicted under pretty much those circumstances.
Maybe this is me being naive?
Since you mentioned secondhand information, I think you might be thinking of hearsay.
Your fingerprint at a crime scene or DNA on a victim is circumstantial evidence. It is weaker evidence in court than hard evidence, but still valid.
This circumstantial evidence is more than sufficient to search your house or car and find a body (hard evidence).
If we're doing the whole "the other team get to play lawyer too" thing, your logic can become dangerous when applied to other issues. For example, almost no one had the ability to protect their communication and personal files from warrants when the laws regarding that sort of thing were written and computers have now made that trivial. Would people here treat that as a valid argument against end-to-end encryption?
Pardon? We know that encryption was used at least as far back as the days of Julius Caesar. [0] Clever kids and adults have almost certainly been making their own ciphers since the invention of written language, and their own conlangs since the invention of verbal language.
I expect that -in the US- one could not be compelled to provide the decryption methods for one's papers and journals to the cops back in the 1700s just like cannot be compelled to provide one's passphrase to decrypt one's encrypted data today. Both are really obviously testimony, which cannot be legally compelled. [1]
[0] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar_cipher>
[1] ...abuse of contempt of court charges notwithstanding...
Nope! These methods were available to everyone who was literate as well as anyone who either maintained oral traditions describing how to perform them or just decided to make up a language for fun. Maybe you're forgetting that our ancestors were generally just as smart as we are today.
> The original point was about scale and the scale (and strength) of encryption available today was not possible for most people until the advent of computers.
This is completely irrelevant. Why? Cops have access to computers that can brute-force most everyday ciphers that would have been cooked up in the 1700s. The just outcome is for non-cops to have access to those same computers to create and use ciphers that restore the ability to keep one's private communications safe from the eyes of the police back to what it was hundreds of years ago.
This just outcome is -incidentally- what we have today because of a lot of tireless, difficult, thankless, ongoing work by some absolute heroes starting most visibly in the 1990s and continuing through today.
As a bonus, none of this has anything to do with the establishment of dragnet surveillance systems built and operated by private companies that are defacto acting as agents of The State. Dragnet surveillance is -at minimum- plainly antisocial and has no place in any civil society.
EPN3D's point stands despite your complaints: the only reason that the illegality of these dragnet surveillance systems wasn't immediately obvious to the courts is because the US Constitution doesn't explicitly mention that courts must always consider the expanded scale of what enhanced technology makes possible, so courts are very slow to incorporate it into their decision making process. Judges and lawyers rely heavily on tradition, so this slowness is only natural.
That's why it works as an analogy to mass surveillance. Surveillance was always possible, but now it is scaled up so a much higher percentage of our activity is surveilled. The commonality is that computers made these two things much easier to do. The purpose of my comment was to show that's not inherently good or bad by showing one example of when that's viewed as good and another when it's viewed as bad.
> We're left to hope that courts agree that just because something is okay for one police officer in one place to do, that doesn't mean the police department can perform that same task a thousand times in a thousand places with a thousand machines and still have it be okay.
There are multiple court cases that have done this exactly this. Carpenter v. United States and Chatrie v. United States are the ones you want.
I think it's more about abstraction. If someone is standing on the street corner taking down your plate number, you know they're likely up to no good. If there's a camera on the street corner, it may bother me, but the vast majority of people just go "eh".
We've had certain areas of technology get 5-6 orders of magnitude more efficient, which shifts the bottlenecks and introduces new possible abuses. Government hasn't caught up. The last time this happened (with the industrial revolution), we had 3 major waves of wars between 1861-1945 that finally refactored the governments of the world into a working state. I'm hoping this time around can be less bloody, but I don't have very high hopes.
I don't really agree. I think HN is particularly hostile to the likes of Flock cameras and other surveillance companies like Palantir.
But it's undeniable that spying on people along with other war/defense spending is very lucrative as governments love intel. All it takes is to be an amoral fonder to pitch to the amoral investors. It's a particularly easy pitch as well "We'll charge governments a lot of money and they'll happily pay because they love spying on their citizens".
One of the application questions for YC used to be (maybe still is) 'What is your HN username?'
There are also loads of caveats about whether or not intelligence information can be used in prosecutions of US persons, again for very good reasons. The idea that the NSA or CIA is magically spying on all of America is a tinfoil-hatted myth.
"War/defense spending" != "law enforcement spending" and if you conflate these, you're either being ignorant or deliberately disingenuous.
Arguably, a lot of the modern tech industry is built on this. AirBnB to sidestep hotel regulations. Uber to sidestep taxi regulations. There's a bit of "this is legal because a private company is doing it and not the government", too.
They're taking advantage of the same misfeature of our justice system that is being discussed here, notably that it's all based on individual personal responsibility and scales very poorly to lawbreaking at scale or cases where the negative outcome had many people responsible for it.
Corporate execs use this frequently to legitimize atrocious conduct. Have a pesky law (like the Freedom of Information Act requests that were discussed here yesterday) that you want to ensure is not complied with? Create a team whose job is compliance, but underfund them by a factor of 100, so that there is no possible way they can catch and address all of their legal obligations. The exec created a relevant team and delegated responsibility, so they're in the clear. The individual workers are falling down on the job and not responding to requests fast enough, but they're also falling down on the job and doing the best they can, so at worst they should get a bad performance review and no raise, they can't be held criminally liable. The people trying to get the law enforced are just outta luck, because it's another unfunded mandate and they don't hold the budget strings.
Or consider the case of cheating on emissions standards. No executive will tell their engineers "You should cheat on these" - that would be a crime, right? But instead, they might take the 20 or so employees that have the biggest disrespect for rules. And then they give each of them a small team and a budget, and have the teams compete to create the best engine on a variety of metrics that are important to customers, but notably not the emissions standards, because it goes without saying that everyone is going to follow the law, right? Then inevitably one of those teams will win and there's a good chance that it's one that cheated on emissions, but of course the exec had no knowledge of that and the team lead in question has been fired.
This has literally been defining the modern age since the 2000's or earlier. Basically every law that ever existed about targeting ads towards children has been WILDLY ignored (to everyone's profit) because of it.
Look at all the anti CSAM laws... "hey, we'll scan all the mail you get and send, and well check all your photo frames in your houses, just in case you have pedo stuff there".
Or the different chat control laws... "well put a mic on you and listen to every conversation, just in case you talk about something illegal".
Then you have the people defending this with "ok, that might be bad, but metadata is just metadata"... sure, every time you go to a bar, we'll record when you came inside, who you sat with, and record how much you talked with each person there.
It's kind of crazy how we went from nobody really had cameras in their homes unless they were wealthy, to now people have cameras as their doorbell, and all over their homes.
How is surveillance related to dragnets? A dragnet being an indiscriminate stop and search of suspects that sweeps up lots of people. Police have always been able to watch people and see their license plate. It's the wide-spread stop and search with no specific suspicion that makes something a dragnet.
This plate reader surveillance network, for better or worse, is the exact opposite.
The example they lead with in the article is the police pulling over a woman who spent too much time driving in the left lane. Stupid. But targeted.
Using it to fish for other violations is where it crosses into the fuzzy and sometimes outright illegal
The counter to this is demand that they write you the ticket for the moving violation, don't answer any questions other than providing the legally required license, registration, and insurance, and move on
If they don't have evidence of a crime, they can't detain you forever on the roadside
OK.
Where is the dragnet?
Flock is a dragnet. It allows police to coordinate around apprehending suspects, which is the definition of dragnet, if you look at any dictionary.
>I don't believe you are actually asking this is good faith.
Well assume it, those are the rules.
Apprehending suspects is most certainly not the definition of a dragnet. This is precisely my point. Apprehending people indiscriminately is the definition of a dragnet. Stopping a specific person for something that isnt a crime may not be legal but its not a dragnet.
Do you understand why flock is not a dragnet now?
Not all stock is publicly traded. I own stock that you can't buy on the exchange. It's quite common actually.
That said, to answer your question, you could own Flock stock. Private companies often offer stock to employees and others.
This isn't a case where they've identified a suspect using some specific investigative lead, reasonable suspicion, or probable cause.
Instead, they're using a widespread fishing tactic - a "dragnet" - to gather information in order to generate suspects without any reasonable suspicion. This kind of behavior has been found illegal in the past, because it clearly violates constitutional protections.
Nope. You need not stop everyone -or even anyone!- you search for it to be a dragnet search.
A search that is widespread and indiscriminate is a dragnet search... regardless of whether it's done by agents of the government or by the private sector. [0]
The thing being caught in the dragnet is not people, but information about with whom those people caught in the dragnet associate, where they spend their time, and other details about their private lives that -frankly- the government has no business knowing without either paying the cost to have a police follow those surveilled around, or justifying beginning and continuing the search of specific individuals to a court and receiving its approval.
[0] I'd love for the courts to start generally taking notice of the fact that a private sector company for whom the overwhelming majority of its customers are public-sector law enforcement is very likely to be defacto acting as an agent of the state. Private companies acting as agents of the state have far more strict regulations that apply to them, and it'd be really good for courts to catch up with the current situation on the ground regarding the public sector's "partnerships" with private-sector companies like Flock, Axon, and similar.
If you continue the argument that surveillance used to proactively rather than reactively find evidence is not a search, then with technology as it is today functionally there can be no expectation of privacy in public (somewhat fair) nor in private, given how widely distributed technology is - one could easily argue that technology's wide distribution is in part because of an expectation of privacy.
There must be a line for which people can expect privacy, or else privacy cannot exist. Its a fundamental value of liberty.
Citizens of the United States, which means the entire family, most of the definitions in the link below, have a right to use the courts.
Unfortunately so many among us are functionally illiterate (unable to read and write legalize) and not educated in law so far too often this essential right goes not exercised.
The more competent attorneys can fully comprehend this comment posted here. But the uncooth among that line of business tend to not like a comment like this being posted, it's not good business for them.
Existing case law sets precedent that only those who can claim with standing as one of citizens of one of the several states, and not only a federal citizen (but also not a state citizen), have absolute and unqualified right to the first eight amendments. Some later case law extended and elaborated enjoyment of the first eight amendments to those who are only federal citizen (and not also state citizen), but didn't overturn the earlier notion that only state citizens have the absolute and unqualified right to the first eight amendments.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1101In this case it leads off with "It’s sovereign-citizen pseudolaw" and then does a nice refutation. Apparently it's not really a novel argument.
> unable to read and write legalize
Did ya mean "legalese"?
Any detail or point shared in the previous comment is backed with citations of existing case law. If you have a pointed question about any of it, there is case law for it.
"That there is a citizenship of the United States and a citizenship of a state, and the privileges and immunities of one are not the same as the other is well established by the decisions of the courts of this country."
Tashiro v. Jordan, 201 Cal. 236 (1927)
"The only absolute and unqualified right of a United State citizen (federal citizen) is to residence within the territorial boundaries of the United States."
U.S. v. Valentine, 288 F. Supp. 957
"The governments of the United States and one of each of the several states are distinct from one another. The rights of a citizen under one may be quite different from those which he has under the other".
Colgate v. Harvey, 296 U.S. 404; 56 S.Ct. 252 (1935)
Claude is a service provided by a private company. Claude is not a king who can dictate to USA what its laws are.
Unless you are willing to do the necessary reading and comprehension yourself you aren't going to be equipped to meaningfully evaluate the substance of whatever "nice refutation". It's a lot of work.
I don't like people who describe themselves as "sovereign citizen" because the compound term is an oxymoron and those who self-describe as such universally are morons. But likewise, those who reach for such a slander (it's as nasty as calling someone the "N word") instead of presenting an argument of substance are just as bad or even worse in a way as one is foolishness and the other is bigoted insidiousness.
If you sincerely believe the "nice refutation" is true and correct, then sign a declaration under penalty of perjury for such. Otherwise all you have is piss in the wind.
.
>> Claude is getting pretty good with this kind of stuff
Given that you already wrote "sovereign citizen" without presenting any argument (and even to what, exactly) nor cited any case law in your previous comment, you're a long ways on your journey to being qualified to comment to Claude being "pretty good with this kind of stuff" one way or the other.
I have a driver's license too, but I only present it where having been pulled over in a car operated commercially (ie rented from a car company), but not ever in a car I actually own (not mere title to possess and occupy the property but lawful ownership of the property with the M.C.O.), and I didn't enter that simple contract through filling out the same forms you did but other government-provided forms.
You and I are not the same kind of American, not that there is anything wrong with that. The system is in harmony.
The term among lawyers for this is "you can beat the wrap but not the ride"
You can be convicted of resisting arrest, with no underlying crime.
Basically like pulling up a menu of possible victims and tracking their location down to the minute.
They know how to present themselves in a way that not only they appear liberal, but appear liberal under scrutiny
They are rolling out versions of this but doing it in poor neighborhoods of course - heaven forbid they roll anything like this out in the Berkeley hills
Obviously im over generalizing for dramatic effect, but if this stuff can get passed in the Bay Area, I hold little hope we will successfully challenge it elsewhere
These detentions, even for the majority who have documented in writing a full assent to adhere to vehicle codes under public policy, are not legal.
Those who aren't well-educated in law can stop reading here.
A custodial arrest of someone who went to sufficent lengths to opt for not assenting in writing to adhere to vehicle codes, based on reasonable suspicion, would be unlawful, and in addition to the involved false declaration of an emergency on the road (which is a felony) would ipso facto be criminal in nature.
Documentation of dishonor has value in the public space. Blockchains for the win.
hello sovcit. are you writing this from jail?
I am not whatever internet meme you think it is you're thinking about.
I am in harmony with "the system".
I am a national as defined in 8 U.S.C. § 1101(a)(22)(B).
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1101
My literacy is not an excuse for your bigotry.
You should have stopped reading at the line that indicated you should stop reading, as you are not well-educated in law.
So arrogant bigotry, at that.
"The governments of the United States and one of each of the several states are distinct from one another. The rights of a citizen under one may be quite different from those which he has under the other".
Colgate v. Harvey, 296 U.S. 404; 56 S.Ct. 252 (1935)
"That there is a citizenship of the United States and a citizenship of a state, and the privileges and immunities of one are not the same as the other is well established by the decisions of the courts of this country."
Tashiro v. Jordan, 201 Cal. 236 (1927)
"The only absolute and unqualified right of a United State citizen (federal citizen) is to residence within the territorial boundaries of the United States."
U.S. v. Valentine, 288 F. Supp. 957 https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-STYLEMANUAL-2008/html/GPO-STYLEMANUAL-2008-7.htm