Comment by MichaelCrawford | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MichaelCrawford | Hacker News Reader

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MichaelCrawford

This wouldn't work for me at all. Actually it would put me right into a psychiatric hospital - repeatedly.

I expect it would do that for lots of other folks.

The last little while I've been thinking of buying a car or maybe a motorcycle. For quite a long time I've enjoyed the fine public transit we enjoy here in Vancouver and Portland, but I'd like to go camping in the desert.

The reason I haven't already done so, is that I know from experience that when you drive a car, the police find all manner of reasons to pull you over. The cops don't always have evil intent in doing so; consider that Timothy McVeigh was pulled over for expired registration a few days ago after he bombed the Oklahoma City Federal Building. I expect everyone was getting pulled over back then.

I was appalled just a couple days ago to learn that the Feds have - or maybe they are working on - a nationwide license plate reader database.

Even were I completely law-abiding, drove my car legally, my physical location would be in that database. No matter where I travelled in my car or on my motorbike, my entire path would be in a computer file.

I've thought about that quite a lot; I am simply unable to tolerate such a thing, even today.

By contrast, one does not need a license plate to ride a bicycle. I'm rather out of shape but back in the day I used to ride my bike fifty miles on a regular basis.

I'm not dead certain but I might ride my bike from Portland to Burning Man this year. That's mostly desert, much of it mountainous. To do that wrong could be life-threatening but to do it right would be quite cool.

I lived on a bicycle for 13 months, and then I rode a motorcycle for a few years. Both are great ways to travel, and they do take you a little farther from mainstream society than a car does.

If you're careful, riding a bicycle through the desert and mountains is pretty safe. The most dangerous part are roads with narrow shoulders and lots of truck traffic. You can almost always find a lightly-traveled road to get you where you want to go. You should carry lots of water in the desert, but you should be fine if you run out and don't panic. I never ran out, but I was pretty confident if I did I could just sit still and wait for a passing motorist to share some water.

Motorcycles still have license plates, and I got pulled over more than once for speeding. But there seems less incentive for an officer to try and search a motorcycle than search a car. So you might deal with fewer overzealous police officers on a motorcycle than in a car.

"when you drive a car, the police find all manner of reasons to pull you over."

Over the last 20 years, I've put well over 220k miles in on a variety of cars, and have gotten pulled over exactly four times, all of which were for unarguably justified reasons.

(in fairness, I'm a white dude and they're not gonna pull me for 'driving while black')

The point of Brin's ideas is that the police and the government can (and should) be surveilled by ordinary every day citizens.

We have seen how keeping cameras on police moderates their behaviour. I wonder if that "reverse surveillance" could also moderate things like unjustified stops when one is driving?

>> We have seen how keeping cameras on police moderates their behaviour.

Apparently not in the most recent case in South Carolina where the officer's dash cam was running and didn't stop him from shooting a man eight times in the back, did it?

Also, the camera's are there for the cops sake, not for ours. I welcome having body camera's, but I think you'd be surprised at how many times a cop has justifiable means to use lethal force, and doesn't.

Sure, it helps us keep tabs on them, but I'm pretty sure the actual reality of what they put up with compared to how these situations are portrayed in the media, are going to be eye opening to a lot of people.

Apparently not in the most recent case in South Carolina where the officer's dash cam was running and didn't stop him from shooting a man eight times in the back, did it?

Sure, it's no panacea.

But in San Diego:

Complaints have fallen 40.5% and use of "personal body" force by officers has been reduced by 46.5% and use of pepper spray by 30.5%, according to the report developed by the Police Department for the City Council's Public Safety and Livable Neighborhoods Committee.[1]

And the ACLU tends to think they are on the balance, positive[2].

I think Brin's argument would be that we've tried policing without cameras, maybe it is worth trying it with lots more cameras.

It's worth noting in that case you mentioned above it was mobile phone footage that led to him being charged, not a dash cam[3]. That's an argument for more cameras, controlled by civilians.

[1] http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-body-cameras-201...

[2] https://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/police-body-moun...

[3] "the video, which was taken by a bystander" http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/08/us/south-carolina-officer-...

>>It's worth noting in that case you mentioned above it was mobile phone footage that led to him being charged, not a dash cam[3].

I do agree on your points, which are all well made.

Do you think he would have been charged had it not been for the civilian video? Or do you think it simply would've taken longer to charge him since they would have to get the video off his dash cam, review it, and then decide whether to take action.

I am very happy that police will often choose not to use lethal force, even if it would be allowed. The point is, however, that had such a thing happened without cameras, proving it (versus an officer's word, which is often treated as Truth in courts) is very hard.

Cameras' purpose is to allow gathering evidence in the (hopefully rare) instances of inexcusable behavior by officers, and to encourage them to do things "by the book" rather than stretching the truth (lying) about what actually happened.

In many countries public transport is now next to impossible with only cash. You need an NFC enabled device. Often, discounts or monthly subscriptions are impossible if you take an anonymous one. Recharging with cash is time consuming at best, and very hard if the machines do not accept bills. I tried, and eventually caved.

Please enjoy your anonymous public transport to the fullest for me. :(

Yeah that's starting to happen around here too.

There's not a whole lot one can do to prevent it.

My take is to convince a whole lot of people to swap their cards with each other. That is, you and I would each purchase a $20 card. Say you and I worked at the same company - when we arrived at work, we'd trade cards.

When I got home, I'd trade my card with my neighbor.

That would enable The Man to cut down on his cash handling expenses, which really are quite significant when you handle quite a lot of coin and currency. But it would make a total rat's nest of any attempt to track transit riders by tracking our payment cards.

I was very amused to realise that it was actually cheaper for me to buy a RFID ticket, run it into the debt limit of $1 and then dispose of it at the end of the trip. Talking to the station staff about it they acknowledged that they didn't like it but that it was perfectly within the law to continue doing so because after all it was still a valid ticket. There's probably room for doing a mix network in places where this loophole isn't possible though, even just a scheme when you see another person adding funds to a zero balance card and it becoming custom to swap your empty one for theirs would do the trick for privacy.

Not to change the topic, but I've been thinking about doing the exact same thing with advertising tracking codes (e.g. DoubleClick). CookieSwappers of the World Unite.

That could result in some fascinating ad combinations. It could really help in breaking the filter bubbles around the web too.

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