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...
It'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.
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.
.
>> 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.
.
>> 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.
.
>> 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.
.
>> 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=50264113