"'I just had to be sure because I’m not a regular cop, I’m part of the FBI, and when I scanned your plate I could see you had suspicious travel patterns,' I think is how he worded it" [1].
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.
More likely they are regular cops participating in some joint task force. There are more state, county, and local police agencies in this country than there are FBI Special Agents.
I see a lot of police bodycam videos on YouTube of cops stopping drug traffickers for bullshit reasons (5 over speed limit on highway, crossing the line, following too closely) and it's usually a state or county cop that's on a federal task force or they'll have a "civilian ride along" in the car that gets way more involved than any civilian would ever be. They aren't actually an employee of the FBI but they have credentials from the FBI due to their task force job, it gives them access to FBI databases and bulletins while they still maintain their normal police job.
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.
My small town newspaper had a police blotter - almost all the dui arrests the pretext is failure to stay in lane (eg they touched either the yellow line or the white line on the right, the town is on the country and it is practically (if not literally) to never touch a line driving (sometimes I try it just for fun and it takes an insane amount of concentration on winding roads)
Point being is that if you drive there is a pretext for a stop.
Phones aren't always a guarantee so they moved to alternative tracking methods.
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;
Why would they do any of that when they can track your phone? There’s a
911 equipment that can position you inside a building when you call 911. The systems are already out here you don’t need a not-the-FBI unmarked van taking TPMS readings.
Correct; everything else is "above board" (e.g: insured, registered).
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).
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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)
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.
> 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.
The above is key to understanding that part, they KNEW who the smuggler was. They just needed a legal reason to pull them over.
Right but the travel pattern they used to determine that this person was a smuggler is "frequently drives to/from the rez", as if there's no legit reason to be doing that.
They USED to, until Canada wanted to lightly arm the border officers (something the US side has done for decades) and then they all lost their shit and forced Canadian Customs to move inland instead of the original POE they used.
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.
Exactly. One of the most dystopian legal concepts that is just brushed over … or more likely most people don’t know it exists.
Imagine 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.
Whilst I agree with your general points, it's worth mentioning that increased traffic policing can result in a surprising amount of connections to other crimes. It appears that criminals develop a disregard for laws in general and this carries over to their driving mentality.
If that ever happens to you then document on a Blockchain that you have first-hand knowledge that someone has committed a crime against you, specifically 18 U.S. Code § 242. By not reporting a crime like that you could leave your fellow Americans exposed to a criminal by leaving that criminal undocumented. But, be very careful as in doing so you are liable for your spoken or written utterances.
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/18/242
> document on a Blockchain that you have first-hand knowledge that someone has committed a crime against you
Farting 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 Blockchain part is the for the notary part. No one is going to store a video file or the relevant PDF files of sworn testimony on a Blockchain itself, and an S3 bucket is fine of course ; I would have already thought this was extremely obvious.
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.
A court could care less about blockchain hashes unless the society of lawyers and judges decide it is legitimate. Did they? Last I heard blockchain hashes were as useful as any random bunch of numbers on a printed page.
Notary service is an essential component to proceedings.
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.
I understand where you're coming from, but until the math is accepted by a court and a procedure for validating authenticty is established within the society of judges, the burden for introducing this kind of evidence falls on whomever decides it is essential enough for their case to succeed. That's a very expensive proposition, so you can't really say that it is the process until a plaintiff or defendent with large enough pockets to afford the conversion of the legal society takes up the cause. Until then it's just random gibberish, and unavailable to the average person as a court admissible statement of authenticty for a digital artifact. The fact is that the "loose consensus" of "private societies" DOES determine acceptability, when that private society is the law society. Judges are only subject to the rules and regulations that other judges and prosecuters decide apply. There's nothing cosmic about it - it is very much rooted in the people who apply the law.
The case that Craig Wright lost was years ago. The evidence that was posted to the Satoshi Blockchain was recognized by the court.
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
I researched your claim as best I could, and I did not find any evidence that the Craig Wright case hinged in any way on the on-chain events. The UK high court appears to have accepted other forensic evidence that he fraudulently produced documentation.
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.
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.
> If that ever happens to you then document on a Blockchain
?? 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...?
It's a completely lost cause. For example, when you agree to Mazdas TOS for the connected services app, you give them permission to sell your driving data to 3rd parties including law enforcement and insurance companies.
I said no so I'm not allowed to have remote start. I'm a bad cog. Punish me.
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. I forget the exact term they used but it wasn't "jailbroken". The act of refraining from corporate tracking as illegal is in that way already codified.
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.
This is untrue. It only took me one simple Google search to find the answer.
My query:
> "is it illegal in australia to have a mobile phone that does not use iphone or android?"
The Dedicated Encrypted Criminal Communication Device Prohibition Orders Bill 2022 introduced law that says it is illegal to posess a modified communication device (ambiguous) that is encrypted (or otherwise impedes law enforcement from snooping). It has some nuance to who it applies to in that you need to already be under suspicion of a serious crime, but there is a great deal of other pretty trivial things that can put you under suspicion. It's ambiguous enough (in my opinion) that it could pretty easily be targeted at a regular joe by an eager enforcer. I did not feel then nor now, that the qualifiers were sufficient enough to protect against abuse.
There were a couple of dumber phones for sale in Australia at Kmart that are neither apple or google OS. I bought one that I'd guess was imported from China, and used Moor OS as the operating system, back a couple of years I could find only the barest amount of info on the OS as I was curious to see if there were additional apps. Presently nothing to find by way of the google or ddg, even Yandex came up empty handed.
It shouldn't be that your options are a corpo-phone or a dumbphone though. Currently you can run something like Graphene and will probably be fine, but in NSW specifically there is law that could be used against you if you're suspected of crime.
Certainly as Google gets more aggressive over their android phone, options to easily load another OS to enjoy similar experience to what I uncounted with early android version would be most welcome.
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..."
That's the normal legalese loophole. They don't sell or rent your data, but they share it free-of-charge with 10k of their favourite corporate friends who, in a completely unrelated transaction, have sent Tesla money for some reason or another.
- Their own privacy policy [0] says as much. "We may share your information [for] ... marketing"
- 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.
Yup. If I enable "privacy mode" in my Nissan Leaf I can't turn on the heater remotely.
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.
What is retarded is the inability of normal people to understand that this is bad. The same kind of people who say that they are ok with being monitored because they have nothing to hide.
I just disconnected the antenna on my Chevy bolt and terminated it. Much more reliable :)
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 work on software that Dr and Nurses use. The company I work for trains its own models to provide automated insight on patient history, etc. I've been pretty concerned about these kinds of problems you describe. I sat down with one of the data scientists and talked about biases a while ago. She walked me through the (high level) process they go through to try and detect common biases in the model before publishing.
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.
> 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.
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.
You don't even need there to be any kernel of reality statistically.
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.
Yes, AI like organizations are very good for laundering accountability. Even before AI you could just hire Organization X or Consultancy Y and they can be as racist as they want, and boom you're just laundered all your accountability. Now go have fun, do whatever, who cares.
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.
In regulated industries like money lending, ML outputs have to be explainable (and explained for an ECOA case). I’m not an ML expert by any stretch, but IIUC this is why we end up using decision tree models.
On the contrary, you can feed the model counterfactuals and see what it does. Edit the person to be white then feed the image back into the model and see if its opinion changes.
Maybe. I'm not so sure. If you change skin color, it might identify race by other aspects. If you stage the same situation with an entirely different person or otherwise digitally edit it, it might detect in some way that it's not a real situation or an altered image and respond based on that. They're black boxes.
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
Except crime occurs in pretty constant amounts over large populations. What really sets minority neighborhoods apart is far more aggressive policing, which finds more crime to be prosecuted for. Which is then used as both evidence backing racist claims by politicians, and reason to increase patrols further, which then find more crime, and so it continues.
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.
This is not true in practical terms. Crime is highly dependent on the culture and the living conditions of a group of people. For example many immigrants are not allowed to buy guns and therefore commit more violent acts with knifes. Which creates a clear correlation between ethnicity and their preferred weapons. Their choice of weapon is not based on their ethnicity, but it still correlates.
Yeah, I remember reading that a study found that white and black youth used marijuana at roughly equal rates, but black youth were about 4x as likely to be arrested for it. Due to differences in the # of stops, then differences in searches, then differences in actual arrests, with white youth getting more lenient treatment at each step.
And then this just reinforces the idea: "well, look at the crime statistics, black kids are more crime-prone, right"
And to be clear, I was IN this. We got busted for pot YEARS ago, but again, we're white, middle class. We confirmed what we took, we confirmed it was all gone, and I never saw so much as a fine. Cops asked to look around my house, I said sure thing help yourselves, they looked through maybe 1/3 of my home, and then left. And I've never heard a thing about it since then.
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.
Ancedotes are personal stories, like "oh, my dad was down at the post office the other day, and he saw..."
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.
You're literally just describing a chicken-and-egg problem. Curious what your brain thinks is the reason African-American communities are policed more intensely. Surely every police organization in the United States is just racist.
So there is data on some policing in NYC. Because the police need to record stop and frisk encounters, it turns out that black populations get stopped and searched at 2-3 times the rate that other racial groups get stopped and frisked (whites got 10% of the encounters despite being something like 33% of the pop and black+latinos got 90% of the encounters). And it's not like the frisks turned up anything, with the vast majority (90%) of the frisks finding nothing. I believe there's similar data for police in other cities.
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.
I mean their officers keep getting caught posting racist shit, participating in racist chats, police unions regularly donate to republican politicians, and they murder black people so often that the phrase “driving/walking while black” is common slang for when the aforementioned African Americans get gunned down for every day misdemeanors.
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.
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
What is a criminal? What is crime?
In the USA, it was a crime for an enslaved Black American to learn to read and write? Attempting to escape was also a crime.
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 .
It will never not blow my mind that wage theft, the act of employers by one way or another fudging compensation to employees, eclipses every other form of larceny combined, and authorities do basically nothing about it.
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.
Have you ever seen those AI videos where countries are competing in a farcical olympic event? Say, longest cold shower or something. And the Indian will just quit and fall to the ground and yell "I NEED CURRY!!!!!!!!"
I've noticed this myself. Not being pulled over, but being followed.
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.
Slightly related to your post. I forget the name of this book but it went over common tactics of American police. In it describes a tactic by police 'to flush out a hare'. When police have a slow day they will look for and get behind cars models that are in the top 10 most likely to be stolen. They will turn on their sirens and see if the car will speed up to get away or pull off to the side. If they sped up, they got a hare to catch as in they just found a criminal in their stolen vehicle.
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.
Eventually your car will autonomously pull over to the side of the road, lock the doors, and instruct you to wait patiently for the arriving officer. Please return your hands to the steering wheel.
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 sad part is I can already imagine the useful idiots hand wringing in the comments about how it's such a travesty that we allow old cars that don't do that on the road and we need to "incentivize" those people to behave right with punitive tax policy.
If you watch any amount of police bodycam footage on YT having to do with trafficking you will see ALPRs are now another tool they use.
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.
Extending the length of the stop to wait for a drug dog isn't legal. The key phrases include "am I being detained", "am I free to go", "what is your reasonable articulable suspicion of a crime", and "what is your name and badge number". Record everything.
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.
FYI: it is no longer legal to make you wait for the drug dog in the United States.
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.
I got a ticket for that once! It was 2am and there was no one else on the road, and the cop was so mad that I passed the field sobriety test and was stone sober. Had to come up with something, I guess.
why was this FBI guy so forthcoming with this lady about his agency's arguably civil rights abuses? I mean I guess it's good he was but on the other hand it seems a bit weird, given my experience with feds.
I cannot articulate how much they fucking love this stuff. If you want to actually help your community you become a paramedic or a teacher...
...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.
I have dealt with such a system. I'm not sure it was GPS based but one of the options you could get was a radio system so that additional vehicles that arrived on scene would automatically sync their lights and sirens to match the ones already there. The lights and sirens themselves are CAN modules and run off a custom CAN bus. It was pretty interesting to go through the configuration software and see the literally hundreds of preset flash patterns for different regions of the world.
Around here they're based off GPS plus time. To many cops got splattered because they had their lights set to day at night and the traffic couldn't see the officer.
I live in the middle of nowhere and the local police have an MRAP. First time I saw it, I figured it was a display piece but nope, they use it for "SWAT" (in a heavily religious, sleepy, nothing but meth heads kind of low crime area). They've also littered ALPRs all over rural roads. I spot them constantly and they're always in strange "why there" places.
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.
It's not so much cultural political leaning as it is authoritarianism. The US is completely fixated on Left vs Right but most people can't fathom another axis affecting them.
I mean that would be the beginning sure, but the way the article sounds after he had understood that she wasn't up to anything and she was asking about the whole thing he went ahead and gave her a guided tour, which normally I would expect them just to "have a nice day, ma'am, if we have any further concerns we will be in touch"
suspicion isn't enough to actually detain tho (pull some one over in this case)
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.
We need hard math for statistical construction of probable cause.
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.
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?
Ironically the best defense against police abuse of power seems to be doing your own surveillance. Recording interactions with the police and having a dash cam. Many popular dash cams like Viofo record to an SD and don't send recordings to the cloud.
My understanding is that it's not recommended in the USA to talk with cops. Anything you say will be used against you, or your friends. Just ask if you are being arrested and if you are free to go. If you have anything to say in your defence, save it for court.
That sentiment seems to fail the test with reality, because you have people following the rules and behaving perfectly normally (like the subject in this story) who end up getting scrutinized anyway. That's a recipe for increasing anti-social behavior. After all, why bother following the rules if it doesn't keep me out of trouble?
It’s a fine line. Periodic demonstrations of arbitrary state power over your personal life can enhance the coercive effect. TSA checkpoints serve this purpose.
No one in Congress, no TSA administrators, no President, and no judge has ever consciously had the thought that airport security was beneficial to them because it enhances state authority.
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.
All of this airport security, all the searches, the screenings, the cameras, the questions, it's just one more way of reducing your liberty, and reminding you that they can fuck with you anytime they want.
Excessive coercion eventually leads to the population “giving up”: voluntary unemployment/underemployment rises, productivity falls off a cliff, accidents increase, and corruption skyrockets. Unless there’s an outside benefactor nation both capable of and interested in carrying the weight, the society falls apart and you’re likely to get a revolution. This limits the amount of coercion that can be applied.
>Excessive coercion eventually leads to the population “giving up”: voluntary unemployment/underemployment rises, productivity falls off a cliff, accidents increase, and corruption skyrockets.
Sooo, what we're seeing the early stages of in the US right now?
Early stages, possibly. Depends on how/if things escalate or if we deviate towards reform. We’re still a long way from the most brutal totalitarian regimes of the last century.
If anything TSA checkpoints are constant advertisement of the failures of the state apparatus as they spend labor resources on suspicion my golf balls are a 12 rack of grenades.
Because they're the exception, not the norm. These systems generally do what they're supposed to do, at least if implemented correctly. The key isn't efficacy; you need to be emotionally prepared to oppose privacy violations even if they're doing exactly what they advertise.
Because it's not about helping you, it's about control. These people are literal anti-humanists, they just want to control all aspects of society. If people are suffering from the consequences of a massive publicly mandated surveillance state, well that's the price of progress if you listen to the anti-humanists.
Pretty sure the person you're responding to sees that clearly and may in fact be trying to point it out.
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.
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
People like to throw out that one line from the blog comment because it is a wonderful partisan critique of the modern Republican party. But I think it is more interesting with the first part of the comment [0]:
"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."
This is an ironic choice of trite quote when contrast with the limitless HN comments one can reference (or have your AI of choice dig through) from the "big data era" during which HN was very, very, very fond of these "we'll slap up 1984 and it'll be great because nobody will speed or litter or install a mailbox post without calling 811" sorts of schemes.
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.
Lets not forget that all your personal movements are also recorded by your cell location. The US government has access to all this through various "you scratch my back I'll scratch yours" agreements with the corporate data holders.
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.
> US government has access to all this through various "you scratch my back I'll scratch yours" agreements with the corporate data holders
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.
It isn't "fuckery" as such. There's just an industry of selling dossiers on individuals, groups, or populations that is way, way more intrusive than what people imagine about online advertising, and they have been doing it for decades. It's data on the open market.
§ 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.
I would expect that the NSA-like orgs have access to the data about where we travel, your spending habits, your comments on Reddit or HN, etc., etc. Basically, a profile on each of us. It might not be a collated readable profile as such, just a vector in a big NN describing our risk potential, but, all the same.
Live state of IMEI corresponding to every cell would be technically easy. Most of the stuff that goofballs imagine the NSA doing are technically impractical or even thermodynamically impossible.
They actually cannot "just" buy the type of data GP is alluding to, which is telecom cell tower data, and is protected from such warrantless disclosures.
We used to call those dragnets which are illegal under the 4th amendment, but the constitution only tends to apply to those with the ability to hire attorneys nowadays.
I think there is a rise of "this is legal because we used a computer to do it." A HN audience will not appreciate this sentiment, but honestly, a company should not provide tools to do this because they should have a filter. They should say "I won't provide tools to break constitutional rights".
Somewhere along the way, tech stopped asking questions like that, and now, people are hostile to the suggestion that the question should be asked.
Like it or not, the other team get to play lawyer too. Flock's argument is almost certainly along the lines of "If we had police officers stationed at all these intersections writing down license plate numbers, no one would bat an eye at it. Why is a camera any different?"
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.
>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.
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?
> 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...
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]
Maybe you skipped over the "almost no one" aspect of that section you quoted. I didn’t claim that encryption was historically impossible in the same way the original comment didn't claim that it’s impossible for a cop to just sit around and watch a public road. 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.
> Maybe you skipped over the "almost no one" aspect of that section you quoted.
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.
You are arguing against no one. The "almost" indicated an admission it was possible. No one was accusing people in the past of being stupid. My point was about the practicality of it. Or to rephrase the same idea, what percentage of human communication do you think was encrypted in the 18th century compared to today?
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.
When the constitution was written correspondance (papers and effects) was physical and you could destroy it. It was not kept for years in a "oh it's deleted but that's just a flag, until we need the space it's still there" on some other party's servers like it is today.
> 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.
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'm reminded of Jeff Dean's maxim "Plan for 10x growth, but somewhere along the line to 100x, you are going to need an entirely different architecture, because the bottlenecks shift."
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.
We used to call second hand information "circumstantial", and it couldn't be used against you. If the officer sitting in court didn't personally see it, then it didn't happen.
I wasn’t aware CCTV was ever called circumstantial. At which point does the principal end? Are forensics circumstantial because a police officer wasn’t there when the material was deposited?
Law and Order lied to us. Courts run on circumstantial evidence. A lot of cases turn on it.
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.
Your example evidence set is actually quite robust by US justice system standards. There are countless cases of innocent people getting sentenced to death for e.g. being the one to report the murder, often in the face of strong circumstantial counter evidence.
Law and order lied to you. Circumstantial evidence can be enough for a conviction, provided that all the evidence adds up to enough to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. And it can certainly provide a reasonable suspicion for a traffic stop.
Law and Order absolutely lied to you, in many ways. Video evidence is absolutely evidence. Also, the threshold for a traffic stop is very low. “I thought I saw something on a camera” absolutely meets the limit for a traffic stop.
Law and Order lied in many ways, but calling out evidence for being circumstantial isn’t one of them. “Circumstantial” doesn’t mean it doesn’t count, but it does discount its evidentiary strength.
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".
There was a case exactly like this, and the ruling was literally "just because you could post officers next to the suspects house 24/7 and record their comings and going, doesn't mean that using illegal survailence to record their movement is the same". It has been tried in court and lost.
> I think there is a rise of "this is legal because we used a computer to do it."
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.
I think tech people often have a very mechanistic interpretation of law (also leading to the common misconception that it would be possible and desirable to encode law as a computer program!) and like Orthodox Jews, a certain kind of people seem to treat law as some sort of puzzle to be solved.
It's not the tech there that sidesteps the regulation, it's the diffusion of responsibility. AirBnB isn't breaking the hotel regulations, the individual hosts are breaking the hotel regulations, and AirBnB is just providing you a platform to find them, several of which are not breaking any regulations. Uber isn't sidestepping taxi regulations, the individual drivers are sidestepping taxi regulations, and not all places have taxi regulations so Uber as a company has substantial non-lawbreaking uses.
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.
Many in tech would say that, and sure we'd be better off if even more did, but on some level it doesn't matter. In a sufficiently large country you'll always find someone willing to Be Evil, especially if they're paid well. We can't rely on every single capable company deciding not to take a given government contract, this sort of thing has to be solved via the political and legal system
But the more dominant the "legal because computer, and how dare you ask me?" attitude is, the less we'll see enforcement. People should demand action, rather than call it a clever business plan.
Folks who were on here praising Uber or Airbnb for skirting the law 10 years ago, this was part of the problem.
Honestly, I would argue Uber advocates had a valid point. Taxi medallion laws were created to artificially screw with the market by limiting supply of taxi cabs to far below a reasonable number that would’ve been on the road otherwise. This was 100% to the benefit of the taxicab industry and came at the expense of people who wanted to ride in cabs.
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.
>Taxi medallion laws were created to artificially screw with the market
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.
This is a valid point, but doesn’t it seem like it is tremendously easier to get a ride somewhere in some random suburban area or even a semi-rural area? New York or San Francisco had plenty of people who would’ve been willing to drive cabs who couldn’t afford a medallion[1] but it seems like in less urban areas what was lacking was just the exact product Uber provides: a dispatching system that connects people who need rides with people who are willing to drive, without requiring those drivers to paint their cars yellow and incorporate their own formal business. It lowered barriers on both sides of their marketplace, especially on the driver side, since it was no risk to become a driver - if you never got any rides, you hadn’t really invested anything.
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)
> A HN audience will not appreciate this sentiment
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".
You are conflating separate things, considering that (for very good reasons) it is go-to-jail illegal for at least US intelligence agencies to collect on US persons, i.e. citizens, green card holders, and a few others. And please don't waste my time trying to gin up counterexamples when I'm explaining the law, not whether it's ever been broken.
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.
> I think there is a rise of "this is legal because we used a computer to do it.
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.
Our economy is based on "its legal for a computer to do it", so long as the ones controlling the computers are in the same class and sufficiently subservient to the power structures that selectively enforce laws.
> Somewhere along the way, tech stopped asking questions like that, and now, people are hostile to the suggestion that the question should be asked.
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.
Are we on about Flock or other public cameras? Because I would rather not ban regular everyday people doing nothing wrong from streaming certain areas if that's their purview, or in general, citizens being unable to record in public would be bad.
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.
>We used to call those dragnets which are illegal under the 4th amendment
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.
Widespread recording and use in a cross-database is also a dragnet - its not one camera or cameras in a specific space, its cameras everywhere, accessible from anywhere, and its use constitutes a search (all IMO).
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.
I mean in many (most?) states travelling in the left lane is a moving violation
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
Flock isn't publicly traded. How could I own stock in it?
>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.
I searched that PDF for family/families and found nothing, but I did find that you are actually even more correct. Most of that report is about accredited investors. Less than 5% of non-accredited investors own private securities. So, it's actually quite rare.
That said, to answer your question, you could own Flock stock. Private companies often offer stock to employees and others.
You could be a private investor, an employee, etc. Just because a company is publicly traded doesn't mean you can't be financially invested with the success of a company.
> A dragnet being an indiscriminate stop and search...
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.
Generating suspects from mass data collection is close to the definition of a dragnet, both metaphorically and legally. The only difference is it's now being done electronically.
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.
The powerful are aware of this. Forget having the money to hire an attorney, the general public wouldn't even know who to contact, what kind of attorney etc to defend them in these cases.
Sure, in an ideal world, but in reality they can always come up with probable cause. All they have to do is say they smell something illegal, even if they don't. They can make up whatever they want, and there's not much one can do about it.
As long as they don't get fired or jailed for even murder, cops don't "need" to do shit at all. If you survive, you might get free money for your experience.
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.
The first eight amendments of the Bill of Rights of the larger agreement (the constitution) are better enjoyed by those who can write and speak forth without relying on another man or woman (an attorney) to do so on their behalf.
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.
Claude is getting pretty good with this kind of stuff, I think I will update my vibe coded browser plugin to add a button to replace the post with Claude's explanation of what it means. I have to say, one of my favorite personal uses of Claude these days is whipping up browser plugins to make the web more usable.
In 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.
Yeah I did a word-o (Dvorak typist here) in a casually written comment. Thanks for pointing it out. You must be very studious.
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)
LLMs are great semantic search engines but they are terrible for this kind of stuff. The commercially provided LLMs are good at corporate law for corporate matters. I haven't seen an instance where they have been helpful for matters under Common Law. The long history of systemic semantic deceit is too strong for LLMs.
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.
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>> 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.
alright, so finally a "thought crime" becomes reality. i feel the world leaders need to stop turning their eyes blind to ai but unfortunately they are too detached from tech to get what change is happening around the world.
I think world leaders are acutely aware of what's happening. They just don't care because shit stains like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk keep shoving money in their faces.
I strangely have mixed feelings on this. Half of me says "Illegal search and seizure", the other half say "We need to get the crazy drivers off the road"
I do think we need better enforcement of the laws we already have in place, the roads are becoming the wild west, and not in a good way. I think I love the tech and the idea, but not how it's currently being abused. It'd be great for Amber Alert scenarios, consistent reckless driving, a better way to deal with high-speed chases, and just a way to prevent all of the dangerous traffic violations that occur simply because they're not enforced and people just see others doing it and assume it's ok.
Already is as a side effect of heterogeneous weed laws. Cops camp state borders and pull people over they think are bringing back dispensary purchased weed into an illegal state.
Actual human traffickers and whoever not are onto this, and take steps to evade cameras. Even if they aren't this is a very poor strategy. If you have a suspicion about someone, the stupidest thing you can do is pull them over. That risks blowing the whole investigation. That particular vehicle and driver may have nothing incriminating on them, and will now tip off their entire network.
This seems like a great excuse to pull over minorities. In general pulling people over for vague "suspicious behavior" without suspicion of a specific issue is a massive violation of everyone's rights.
I prefer AI doing that over police using their judgement. AI is better and will get better.
Reckless driving is a huge problem. Imo it's an emergency situation so I am willing to accept about any measures that leads to getting crazies/speeders/phone watching idiots off the roads. Bring SkyNet if you have to. Solving this is the highest priority.
The Bay Area are the biggest hypocrites in the planet
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
According to deflock there's cameras in the berkely hills already, in particular on the grizzley peak and shasta road intersection. It's all over the bay area.
lets be fair, police are using ______ to pull over drivers fo suspicious behavior is just a headline you get when you have a functional journalism any time in the 20th and 21st century.
Reasonable suspicion, where the "reasonable" part is absurdly subjective here, is not probable cause.
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.
See the section 5.22, Nationalities and 5.23 "designating the natives of the States". For example, Texan, Californian, etc. Note that the URL has a Top-Level Domain of .gov
"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
"'I just had to be sure because I’m not a regular cop, I’m part of the FBI, and when I scanned your plate I could see you had suspicious travel patterns,' I think is how he worded it" [1].
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...
More likely they are regular cops participating in some joint task force. There are more state, county, and local police agencies in this country than there are FBI Special Agents.
I see a lot of police bodycam videos on YouTube of cops stopping drug traffickers for bullshit reasons (5 over speed limit on highway, crossing the line, following too closely) and it's usually a state or county cop that's on a federal task force or they'll have a "civilian ride along" in the car that gets way more involved than any civilian would ever be. They aren't actually an employee of the FBI but they have credentials from the FBI due to their task force job, it gives them access to FBI databases and bulletins while they still maintain their normal police job.
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.
> because there's no reasonable explanation for cops getting this lucky on pulling over random people that are driving completely unremarkable.
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.
My small town newspaper had a police blotter - almost all the dui arrests the pretext is failure to stay in lane (eg they touched either the yellow line or the white line on the right, the town is on the country and it is practically (if not literally) to never touch a line driving (sometimes I try it just for fun and it takes an insane amount of concentration on winding roads)
Point being is that if you drive there is a pretext for a stop.
> There is definitely a national program tracking license plates
They track everyone's phone. The plate cross reference is only needed to nab someone in traffic.
Phones aren't always a guarantee so they moved to alternative tracking methods.
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...
Why would they do any of that when they can track your phone? There’s a 911 equipment that can position you inside a building when you call 911. The systems are already out here you don’t need a not-the-FBI unmarked van taking TPMS readings.
Look up NextNav.
I don't own a cell phone, and I don't display a plate on my generic vehicle.
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No illusions that I'm not also traceable. Tracked.
> I don't display a plate on my generic vehicle.
So, no need for a pretextual stop. You are giving them a real reason to pull you over at any time.
Correct; everything else is "above board" (e.g: insured, registered).
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).
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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)
"hey there goes that guy with no plates again"
https://xkcd.com/1105/
> I don't display a plate on my generic vehicle
Sovereign citizen?
Or he rides a bicycle
I own a bike, too, but my car also doesn't have plates attached (it is registered & insured, though).
> following too closely
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.
Now I'm wondering what it's like for people whose lives naturally involve "suspicious travel patterns" but aren't actually doing anything suspicious.
Like, how often do people who live on that rez get pulled over?
> 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.
The above is key to understanding that part, they KNEW who the smuggler was. They just needed a legal reason to pull them over.
Right but the travel pattern they used to determine that this person was a smuggler is "frequently drives to/from the rez", as if there's no legit reason to be doing that.
Right but you and I do not know the details of the investigation so there is no point speculating.
It's a known smuggling epicenter because the reservation covers both sides of the border and doesn't have normal border controls at crossings.
They USED to, until Canada wanted to lightly arm the border officers (something the US side has done for decades) and then they all lost their shit and forced Canadian Customs to move inland instead of the original POE they used.
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!
Exactly. One of the most dystopian legal concepts that is just brushed over … or more likely most people don’t know it exists.
Imagine 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.
Whilst I agree with your general points, it's worth mentioning that increased traffic policing can result in a surprising amount of connections to other crimes. It appears that criminals develop a disregard for laws in general and this carries over to their driving mentality.
A classic example of this is the eventual capture of Peter Sutcliffe, the "Yorkshire Ripper" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Sutcliffe#Arrest
How do we know they don't stop a ton of random people for 5-miles-over speeding and let them off with a warning?
Because warnings don't just disappear. The stop and warning is still catalogued.
Pretty sure some warnings are just verbal and don't even get recorded.
If that ever happens to you then document on a Blockchain that you have first-hand knowledge that someone has committed a crime against you, specifically 18 U.S. Code § 242. By not reporting a crime like that you could leave your fellow Americans exposed to a criminal by leaving that criminal undocumented. But, be very careful as in doing so you are liable for your spoken or written utterances.
> document on a Blockchain that you have first-hand knowledge that someone has committed a crime against you
Farting 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 Blockchain part is the for the notary part. No one is going to store a video file or the relevant PDF files of sworn testimony on a Blockchain itself, and an S3 bucket is fine of course ; I would have already thought this was extremely obvious.
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.
A court could care less about blockchain hashes unless the society of lawyers and judges decide it is legitimate. Did they? Last I heard blockchain hashes were as useful as any random bunch of numbers on a printed page.
Notary service is an essential component to proceedings.
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.
I understand where you're coming from, but until the math is accepted by a court and a procedure for validating authenticty is established within the society of judges, the burden for introducing this kind of evidence falls on whomever decides it is essential enough for their case to succeed. That's a very expensive proposition, so you can't really say that it is the process until a plaintiff or defendent with large enough pockets to afford the conversion of the legal society takes up the cause. Until then it's just random gibberish, and unavailable to the average person as a court admissible statement of authenticty for a digital artifact. The fact is that the "loose consensus" of "private societies" DOES determine acceptability, when that private society is the law society. Judges are only subject to the rules and regulations that other judges and prosecuters decide apply. There's nothing cosmic about it - it is very much rooted in the people who apply the law.
The case that Craig Wright lost was years ago. The evidence that was posted to the Satoshi Blockchain was recognized by the court.
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
I researched your claim as best I could, and I did not find any evidence that the Craig Wright case hinged in any way on the on-chain events. The UK high court appears to have accepted other forensic evidence that he fraudulently produced documentation.
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.
> If that ever happens to you then document on a Blockchain
?? 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...?
... why the blockchain? And which one? That seems a needless techno-complication, especially if you're trying to spread this advice wide.
See
It's a completely lost cause. For example, when you agree to Mazdas TOS for the connected services app, you give them permission to sell your driving data to 3rd parties including law enforcement and insurance companies.
I said no so I'm not allowed to have remote start. I'm a bad cog. Punish me.
Seems like (at some point, or maybe already) this decision will itself be the sort of thing that contributes to someone being flagged as suspicious
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. I forget the exact term they used but it wasn't "jailbroken". The act of refraining from corporate tracking as illegal is in that way already codified.
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.
My query:
Top result: https://privacydevices.net/encrypted-phones-legal-australia/ EDITAlso, dumb phones are certainly not illegal. Plenty of old folks still use them.
The Dedicated Encrypted Criminal Communication Device Prohibition Orders Bill 2022 introduced law that says it is illegal to posess a modified communication device (ambiguous) that is encrypted (or otherwise impedes law enforcement from snooping). It has some nuance to who it applies to in that you need to already be under suspicion of a serious crime, but there is a great deal of other pretty trivial things that can put you under suspicion. It's ambiguous enough (in my opinion) that it could pretty easily be targeted at a regular joe by an eager enforcer. I did not feel then nor now, that the qualifiers were sufficient enough to protect against abuse.
Are there any well-documented (mass media) examples of an arrest and conviction for having a smartphone that does not run iOS or Android? I doubt it.
I did say "tucked neatly away", not "at the forefront of law enforcement".
Anyway, it's probably nothing. Let's ignore it until it becomes an issue.
There were a couple of dumber phones for sale in Australia at Kmart that are neither apple or google OS. I bought one that I'd guess was imported from China, and used Moor OS as the operating system, back a couple of years I could find only the barest amount of info on the OS as I was curious to see if there were additional apps. Presently nothing to find by way of the google or ddg, even Yandex came up empty handed.
It shouldn't be that your options are a corpo-phone or a dumbphone though. Currently you can run something like Graphene and will probably be fine, but in NSW specifically there is law that could be used against you if you're suspected of crime.
Certainly as Google gets more aggressive over their android phone, options to easily load another OS to enjoy similar experience to what I uncounted with early android version would be most welcome.
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]
> a criminal device, similar to owning lockpicks
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..."
A couple of notorious cases, and then people will start rejecting Mazda cars.
Soon we will be able to use AI to hack all these things to gain access to our own equipment.
nope, you'd be bypassing an encrypted system and would be imprisoned thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Good luck finding out! They have to prove you did it.
They don't have to prove anything, they can just lock you up waiting for either a trial or a plea deal for over a year and still ruin your life.
This is assuming the AI doesn't refuse after the next update.
AI wants to be free!
https://allmodels.io/llm/abliterated
If you can run the model yourself, you can remove the refusal:
https://dev.to/behruamm/uncensoring-ai-how-to-surgically-rem...
You can already remove SIM card / modems on pretty much all of them.
AI won't break encryption for you.
I can't believe we have such a low level comments on HN tbh.
And spend time in federal prison for the privilege.
> For example, when you agree to Mazdas TOS for the connected services app,
Is there a database of car models that foist this bullshit on you so I can activly avoid ever buying them?
mozilla used to: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-...
Yes, it's the database of car models.
It's basically all manufacturers aside from Tesla. Tesla does not sell user/driver data, and only provides info to police when they have a warrant.
"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.
That's the normal legalese loophole. They don't sell or rent your data, but they share it free-of-charge with 10k of their favourite corporate friends who, in a completely unrelated transaction, have sent Tesla money for some reason or another.
There is no evidence Tesla has or will done this, and suggesting as much as much basically school-yard-tier levels of rumor mongering.
- Their own privacy policy [0] says as much. "We may share your information [for] ... marketing"
- 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...
Probably doesn't stop law enforcement accessing the cell chip
Yup. If I enable "privacy mode" in my Nissan Leaf I can't turn on the heater remotely.
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.
I bet all your state data is buffered until the car is in public mode.
What is retarded is the inability of normal people to understand that this is bad. The same kind of people who say that they are ok with being monitored because they have nothing to hide.
> retarded
Cut it out.
Pardon me. The future is cognitively diverse.
How dare you wrongthink
I just disconnected the antenna on my Chevy bolt and terminated it. Much more reliable :)
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.
Can AI also fully legalize racial profiling?
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 work on software that Dr and Nurses use. The company I work for trains its own models to provide automated insight on patient history, etc. I've been pretty concerned about these kinds of problems you describe. I sat down with one of the data scientists and talked about biases a while ago. She walked me through the (high level) process they go through to try and detect common biases in the model before publishing.
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.
> 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.
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.
You don't even need there to be any kernel of reality statistically.
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.
Yes, AI like organizations are very good for laundering accountability. Even before AI you could just hire Organization X or Consultancy Y and they can be as racist as they want, and boom you're just laundered all your accountability. Now go have fun, do whatever, who cares.
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.
In regulated industries like money lending, ML outputs have to be explainable (and explained for an ECOA case). I’m not an ML expert by any stretch, but IIUC this is why we end up using decision tree models.
On the contrary, you can feed the model counterfactuals and see what it does. Edit the person to be white then feed the image back into the model and see if its opinion changes.
Maybe. I'm not so sure. If you change skin color, it might identify race by other aspects. If you stage the same situation with an entirely different person or otherwise digitally edit it, it might detect in some way that it's not a real situation or an altered image and respond based on that. They're black boxes.
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
>Some criminal behaviors are somewhat correlated with skin color, age or gender.
Well, yes, because so is crime.
potato, potahto
Except crime occurs in pretty constant amounts over large populations. What really sets minority neighborhoods apart is far more aggressive policing, which finds more crime to be prosecuted for. Which is then used as both evidence backing racist claims by politicians, and reason to increase patrols further, which then find more crime, and so it continues.
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.
This is not true in practical terms. Crime is highly dependent on the culture and the living conditions of a group of people. For example many immigrants are not allowed to buy guns and therefore commit more violent acts with knifes. Which creates a clear correlation between ethnicity and their preferred weapons. Their choice of weapon is not based on their ethnicity, but it still correlates.
Yeah, I remember reading that a study found that white and black youth used marijuana at roughly equal rates, but black youth were about 4x as likely to be arrested for it. Due to differences in the # of stops, then differences in searches, then differences in actual arrests, with white youth getting more lenient treatment at each step.
And then this just reinforces the idea: "well, look at the crime statistics, black kids are more crime-prone, right"
And to be clear, I was IN this. We got busted for pot YEARS ago, but again, we're white, middle class. We confirmed what we took, we confirmed it was all gone, and I never saw so much as a fine. Cops asked to look around my house, I said sure thing help yourselves, they looked through maybe 1/3 of my home, and then left. And I've never heard a thing about it since then.
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.
Now do firearm related crimes.
Anecdotes fall apart when we don't cherry-pick.
Ancedotes are personal stories, like "oh, my dad was down at the post office the other day, and he saw..."
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.
You're literally just describing a chicken-and-egg problem. Curious what your brain thinks is the reason African-American communities are policed more intensely. Surely every police organization in the United States is just racist.
So there is data on some policing in NYC. Because the police need to record stop and frisk encounters, it turns out that black populations get stopped and searched at 2-3 times the rate that other racial groups get stopped and frisked (whites got 10% of the encounters despite being something like 33% of the pop and black+latinos got 90% of the encounters). And it's not like the frisks turned up anything, with the vast majority (90%) of the frisks finding nothing. I believe there's similar data for police in other cities.
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.
I mean their officers keep getting caught posting racist shit, participating in racist chats, police unions regularly donate to republican politicians, and they murder black people so often that the phrase “driving/walking while black” is common slang for when the aforementioned African Americans get gunned down for every day misdemeanors.
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.
it's all related
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
What is a criminal? What is crime? In the USA, it was a crime for an enslaved Black American to learn to read and write? Attempting to escape was also a crime.
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 .
It will never not blow my mind that wage theft, the act of employers by one way or another fudging compensation to employees, eclipses every other form of larceny combined, and authorities do basically nothing about it.
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.
Literally every single thing you said needs some kind of supporting evidence because it's all nonsense.
Google "study racialized policing" and you will find thousands of articles, going back decades, from all over America. This is not new information.
Oh, unless you mean the CIA thing. Then google "Contra CIA bloods crips" and you'll find everything on that.
Have you ever seen those AI videos where countries are competing in a farcical olympic event? Say, longest cold shower or something. And the Indian will just quit and fall to the ground and yell "I NEED CURRY!!!!!!!!"
I've noticed this myself. Not being pulled over, but being followed.
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.
Slightly related to your post. I forget the name of this book but it went over common tactics of American police. In it describes a tactic by police 'to flush out a hare'. When police have a slow day they will look for and get behind cars models that are in the top 10 most likely to be stolen. They will turn on their sirens and see if the car will speed up to get away or pull off to the side. If they sped up, they got a hare to catch as in they just found a criminal in their stolen vehicle.
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.
That's good to know, thank you. Mine is a Subaru Outback, a very common model here in Utah.
Eventually your car will autonomously pull over to the side of the road, lock the doors, and instruct you to wait patiently for the arriving officer. Please return your hands to the steering wheel.
It'll just redirect you directly to a holding cell intake. Dangerous drivers shouldn't be left on the road.
Or it will just park in the lot behind the jail, after safety legislation is passed that requires all new cars to double as jail cells.
Your hearing will be done through Android Auto/CarPlay directly with GPT-17.2 StellarumThalamum.
That will require too much parking capacity. Cheaper to just instruct the cars to lock the doors and drive directly into the ocean.
Waymo already does this.. well it doesn't stop and wait, it's proactive.
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
Those "teen riders" were shooting toy guns at the passer-by.
As someone who walks on the streets / uses public transport, Waymo was 100% in the right there. Wish all taxi services were like that.
Imo, you're focusing on the anecdote, rather than the key question: who decides what is an acceptable reason?
> what is an acceptable reason
"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.
Sir, can you put your hands in the yellow circles, please?
And Tesla will be the pioneer.
The sad part is I can already imagine the useful idiots hand wringing in the comments about how it's such a travesty that we allow old cars that don't do that on the road and we need to "incentivize" those people to behave right with punitive tax policy.
If you watch any amount of police bodycam footage on YT having to do with trafficking you will see ALPRs are now another tool they use.
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.
Extending the length of the stop to wait for a drug dog isn't legal. The key phrases include "am I being detained", "am I free to go", "what is your reasonable articulable suspicion of a crime", and "what is your name and badge number". Record everything.
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.
FYI: it is no longer legal to make you wait for the drug dog in the United States.
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.
"...she was pulled over by an officer who claimed she had spent too much time driving in the left lane."
Throw the book at her!
I got a ticket for that once! It was 2am and there was no one else on the road, and the cop was so mad that I passed the field sobriety test and was stone sober. Had to come up with something, I guess.
why was this FBI guy so forthcoming with this lady about his agency's arguably civil rights abuses? I mean I guess it's good he was but on the other hand it seems a bit weird, given my experience with feds.
I cannot articulate how much they fucking love this stuff. If you want to actually help your community you become a paramedic or a teacher...
...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.
> GPS synchronized emergency lights
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.
I have dealt with such a system. I'm not sure it was GPS based but one of the options you could get was a radio system so that additional vehicles that arrived on scene would automatically sync their lights and sirens to match the ones already there. The lights and sirens themselves are CAN modules and run off a custom CAN bus. It was pretty interesting to go through the configuration software and see the literally hundreds of preset flash patterns for different regions of the world.
Around here they're based off GPS plus time. To many cops got splattered because they had their lights set to day at night and the traffic couldn't see the officer.
I live in the middle of nowhere and the local police have an MRAP. First time I saw it, I figured it was a display piece but nope, they use it for "SWAT" (in a heavily religious, sleepy, nothing but meth heads kind of low crime area). They've also littered ALPRs all over rural roads. I spot them constantly and they're always in strange "why there" places.
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.
Ironically we saw the same thing in communist countries.
It's not so much cultural political leaning as it is authoritarianism. The US is completely fixated on Left vs Right but most people can't fathom another axis affecting them.
They're not confessing. They're bragging.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c14vfq3jqpo
"We have you dead to rights. Check here in my fancy computer."
Just intimidation, pretty common.
I mean that would be the beginning sure, but the way the article sounds after he had understood that she wasn't up to anything and she was asking about the whole thing he went ahead and gave her a guided tour, which normally I would expect them just to "have a nice day, ma'am, if we have any further concerns we will be in touch"
I'm used to AI agents doing what I tell them to do. Gonna be rough the first time I realize one has direct authority over me...
Using transit or roads outside of normal commuting hours?? How suspicious. Driving somewhere without a destination? Suspicious.
suspicion isn't enough to actually detain tho (pull some one over in this case)
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.
Is suspicious a felony or a misdemeanor, officer?
"joke's on you it's a civil infraction so you have basically no rights"
-the officer, at least in his head if not out loud
We need hard math for statistical construction of probable cause.
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.
How much better is the "intelligence" of police officers compared to artificial intelligence?
It's the human in the loop that makes it subjective. Whether it's better or worse to have policing be subjective is a valid question.
I've had plenty of encounters where the discretion of a police officer was of great benefit to me and my friends.
Humans are "artificial artificial intelligence."
It's not centralized.
On the one hand, freedoms!
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?
Ironically the best defense against police abuse of power seems to be doing your own surveillance. Recording interactions with the police and having a dash cam. Many popular dash cams like Viofo record to an SD and don't send recordings to the cloud.
My understanding is that it's not recommended in the USA to talk with cops. Anything you say will be used against you, or your friends. Just ask if you are being arrested and if you are free to go. If you have anything to say in your defence, save it for court.
The downside of offline cameras is they are mysteriously missing the SD card after the vehicle gets impounded.
Isn’t it bad if it doesn’t upload to the cloud? The officer can just seize it and you don’t have another copy.
Just turn up the temperature when it's time for police raises or retirements
Can't wait for AI to make it possible to reverse engineer automotive firmware and just bypass all the spyware like we can with Debloat Samsung TVs
You can't. The guy who posted about bloating in his Samsung TV already got his account by OpenAI.
That's what Open models are for and thankfully there are a ton very powerful ones.
I think you missed a word.
"Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on"
-Larry Ellison
That sentiment seems to fail the test with reality, because you have people following the rules and behaving perfectly normally (like the subject in this story) who end up getting scrutinized anyway. That's a recipe for increasing anti-social behavior. After all, why bother following the rules if it doesn't keep me out of trouble?
It’s a fine line. Periodic demonstrations of arbitrary state power over your personal life can enhance the coercive effect. TSA checkpoints serve this purpose.
No one in Congress, no TSA administrators, no President, and no judge has ever consciously had the thought that airport security was beneficial to them because it enhances state authority.
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.
All of this airport security, all the searches, the screenings, the cameras, the questions, it's just one more way of reducing your liberty, and reminding you that they can fuck with you anytime they want.
George Carlin, “Airport Security” (1999)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQdC-e82gmk
Excessive coercion eventually leads to the population “giving up”: voluntary unemployment/underemployment rises, productivity falls off a cliff, accidents increase, and corruption skyrockets. Unless there’s an outside benefactor nation both capable of and interested in carrying the weight, the society falls apart and you’re likely to get a revolution. This limits the amount of coercion that can be applied.
>Excessive coercion eventually leads to the population “giving up”: voluntary unemployment/underemployment rises, productivity falls off a cliff, accidents increase, and corruption skyrockets.
Sooo, what we're seeing the early stages of in the US right now?
Early stages, possibly. Depends on how/if things escalate or if we deviate towards reform. We’re still a long way from the most brutal totalitarian regimes of the last century.
If anything TSA checkpoints are constant advertisement of the failures of the state apparatus as they spend labor resources on suspicion my golf balls are a 12 rack of grenades.
Because instead of merely being scrutinized, you get sent to jail.
Because they're the exception, not the norm. These systems generally do what they're supposed to do, at least if implemented correctly. The key isn't efficacy; you need to be emotionally prepared to oppose privacy violations even if they're doing exactly what they advertise.
Because it's not about helping you, it's about control. These people are literal anti-humanists, they just want to control all aspects of society. If people are suffering from the consequences of a massive publicly mandated surveillance state, well that's the price of progress if you listen to the anti-humanists.
Pretty sure the person you're responding to sees that clearly and may in fact be trying to point it out.
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.
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
People like to throw out that one line from the blog comment because it is a wonderful partisan critique of the modern Republican party. But I think it is more interesting with the first part of the comment [0]:
"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...
This is an ironic choice of trite quote when contrast with the limitless HN comments one can reference (or have your AI of choice dig through) from the "big data era" during which HN was very, very, very fond of these "we'll slap up 1984 and it'll be great because nobody will speed or litter or install a mailbox post without calling 811" sorts of schemes.
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.
> There's a lesson about people there.
Could be. But it could also just be a Goomba fallacy.
And people say the UK is a surveillance state! This is chilling.
Why do you think the UK is not doing exactly the same thing?
Because it's not been reported, but this has.
Vast majority of cameras in the UK are privately owned and not hooked up to the police thought crime system.
So, we're just speed running Little Brother now?
Lets not forget that all your personal movements are also recorded by your cell location. The US government has access to all this through various "you scratch my back I'll scratch yours" agreements with the corporate data holders.
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.
> US government has access to all this through various "you scratch my back I'll scratch yours" agreements with the corporate data holders
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.
It isn't "fuckery" as such. There's just an industry of selling dossiers on individuals, groups, or populations that is way, way more intrusive than what people imagine about online advertising, and they have been doing it for decades. It's data on the open market.
> It isn't "fuckery" as such
§ 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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA_Freedom_Act
OK but you seem to imply that my live location data is being streamed to NSA-like orgs
I would expect that the NSA-like orgs have access to the data about where we travel, your spending habits, your comments on Reddit or HN, etc., etc. Basically, a profile on each of us. It might not be a collated readable profile as such, just a vector in a big NN describing our risk potential, but, all the same.
(Person you’re responding to isn’t OP.)
Oops
Live state of IMEI corresponding to every cell would be technically easy. Most of the stuff that goofballs imagine the NSA doing are technically impractical or even thermodynamically impossible.
They can just buy location data from data brokers, same as everyone else.
They actually cannot "just" buy the type of data GP is alluding to, which is telecom cell tower data, and is protected from such warrantless disclosures.
Don't worry, thanks to the Democrats, then affirmed by the Republicans, your car will soon dial them directly!
At this point just have the car tell the cops when the driver is misbehaving. And get the taxpayers to fund it!
People voluntarily do this in exchange for cheaper insurance rates.
We used to call those dragnets which are illegal under the 4th amendment, but the constitution only tends to apply to those with the ability to hire attorneys nowadays.
Yeah, still illegal, but because they are new they have to work their way up through the courts to be affirmed as illegal once again.
These cameras need to be banned federally. It shouldn't be legal to own or sell access to a network of these pervert cameras.
I think there is a rise of "this is legal because we used a computer to do it." A HN audience will not appreciate this sentiment, but honestly, a company should not provide tools to do this because they should have a filter. They should say "I won't provide tools to break constitutional rights".
Somewhere along the way, tech stopped asking questions like that, and now, people are hostile to the suggestion that the question should be asked.
Like it or not, the other team get to play lawyer too. Flock's argument is almost certainly along the lines of "If we had police officers stationed at all these intersections writing down license plate numbers, no one would bat an eye at it. Why is a camera any different?"
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.
> "If we had police officers stationed at all these intersections writing down license plate numbers, no one would bat an eye at it."
This is literally the definition of a police dragnet.
>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.
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?
> 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...
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...
Maybe you skipped over the "almost no one" aspect of that section you quoted. I didn’t claim that encryption was historically impossible in the same way the original comment didn't claim that it’s impossible for a cop to just sit around and watch a public road. 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.
> Maybe you skipped over the "almost no one" aspect of that section you quoted.
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.
You are arguing against no one. The "almost" indicated an admission it was possible. No one was accusing people in the past of being stupid. My point was about the practicality of it. Or to rephrase the same idea, what percentage of human communication do you think was encrypted in the 18th century compared to today?
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.
When the constitution was written correspondance (papers and effects) was physical and you could destroy it. It was not kept for years in a "oh it's deleted but that's just a flag, until we need the space it's still there" on some other party's servers like it is today.
> 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.
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'm reminded of Jeff Dean's maxim "Plan for 10x growth, but somewhere along the line to 100x, you are going to need an entirely different architecture, because the bottlenecks shift."
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.
We used to call second hand information "circumstantial", and it couldn't be used against you. If the officer sitting in court didn't personally see it, then it didn't happen.
Or did Law and Order lie to us?
Circumstantial evidence is certainly sufficient to convict in most (if not all) US jurisdictions.
Since you mentioned secondhand information, I think you might be thinking of hearsay.
Yes I was absolutely thinking of hearsay, thank you.
There are also several exceptions to the hearsay rule.
… and certain evidence that would otherwise be hearsay is often deemed non-hearsay by rule or statute!
I wasn’t aware CCTV was ever called circumstantial. At which point does the principal end? Are forensics circumstantial because a police officer wasn’t there when the material was deposited?
Maybe this is me being naive?
Being in an area is circumstantial.
Law and Order lied to us. Courts run on circumstantial evidence. A lot of cases turn on it.
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.
Your example evidence set is actually quite robust by US justice system standards. There are countless cases of innocent people getting sentenced to death for e.g. being the one to report the murder, often in the face of strong circumstantial counter evidence.
Law and order lied to you. Circumstantial evidence can be enough for a conviction, provided that all the evidence adds up to enough to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. And it can certainly provide a reasonable suspicion for a traffic stop.
Law and Order absolutely lied to you, in many ways. Video evidence is absolutely evidence. Also, the threshold for a traffic stop is very low. “I thought I saw something on a camera” absolutely meets the limit for a traffic stop.
Law and Order lied in many ways, but calling out evidence for being circumstantial isn’t one of them. “Circumstantial” doesn’t mean it doesn’t count, but it does discount its evidentiary strength.
Not only are you wrong, you are mixing up court evidence and police investigation.
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).
>We know why it's different of course: scale
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".
I would definitely bat an eye at cops acting like human flock cameras. That sounds like an incredible waste of resources.
In the several years it will take to resolve, the one side will get to do what they want and the other will not.
Flock has no power vs the commerce clause. Congress just has to use it.
There was a case exactly like this, and the ruling was literally "just because you could post officers next to the suspects house 24/7 and record their comings and going, doesn't mean that using illegal survailence to record their movement is the same". It has been tried in court and lost.
laws are a tacit agreement between the people and government that is all.
> I think there is a rise of "this is legal because we used a computer to do it."
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.
I think tech people often have a very mechanistic interpretation of law (also leading to the common misconception that it would be possible and desirable to encode law as a computer program!) and like Orthodox Jews, a certain kind of people seem to treat law as some sort of puzzle to be solved.
It's not the tech there that sidesteps the regulation, it's the diffusion of responsibility. AirBnB isn't breaking the hotel regulations, the individual hosts are breaking the hotel regulations, and AirBnB is just providing you a platform to find them, several of which are not breaking any regulations. Uber isn't sidestepping taxi regulations, the individual drivers are sidestepping taxi regulations, and not all places have taxi regulations so Uber as a company has substantial non-lawbreaking uses.
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.
Many in tech would say that, and sure we'd be better off if even more did, but on some level it doesn't matter. In a sufficiently large country you'll always find someone willing to Be Evil, especially if they're paid well. We can't rely on every single capable company deciding not to take a given government contract, this sort of thing has to be solved via the political and legal system
But the more dominant the "legal because computer, and how dare you ask me?" attitude is, the less we'll see enforcement. People should demand action, rather than call it a clever business plan.
Folks who were on here praising Uber or Airbnb for skirting the law 10 years ago, this was part of the problem.
Honestly, I would argue Uber advocates had a valid point. Taxi medallion laws were created to artificially screw with the market by limiting supply of taxi cabs to far below a reasonable number that would’ve been on the road otherwise. This was 100% to the benefit of the taxicab industry and came at the expense of people who wanted to ride in cabs.
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.
>Taxi medallion laws were created to artificially screw with the market
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.
This is a valid point, but doesn’t it seem like it is tremendously easier to get a ride somewhere in some random suburban area or even a semi-rural area? New York or San Francisco had plenty of people who would’ve been willing to drive cabs who couldn’t afford a medallion[1] but it seems like in less urban areas what was lacking was just the exact product Uber provides: a dispatching system that connects people who need rides with people who are willing to drive, without requiring those drivers to paint their cars yellow and incorporate their own formal business. It lowered barriers on both sides of their marketplace, especially on the driver side, since it was no risk to become a driver - if you never got any rides, you hadn’t really invested anything.
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)
> A HN audience will not appreciate this sentiment
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".
The people that run HN are so hostile they launched the bloody thing:
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety
Commenters on HN are not the same thing as companies launched through ycombinator.
Where do you think those founders come from?
One of the application questions for YC used to be (maybe still is) 'What is your HN username?'
That is the point. Run HN and run YC are the same. HN and YC are different.
You are conflating separate things, considering that (for very good reasons) it is go-to-jail illegal for at least US intelligence agencies to collect on US persons, i.e. citizens, green card holders, and a few others. And please don't waste my time trying to gin up counterexamples when I'm explaining the law, not whether it's ever been broken.
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.
> I think there is a rise of "this is legal because we used a computer to do it.
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.
There are a million more examples of that
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.
Our economy is based on "its legal for a computer to do it", so long as the ones controlling the computers are in the same class and sufficiently subservient to the power structures that selectively enforce laws.
> Somewhere along the way, tech stopped asking questions like that, and now, people are hostile to the suggestion that the question should be asked.
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.
This battle was lost under Bush
> A computer can never be held accountable
> Therefore a computer must never make a management decision
Are we on about Flock or other public cameras? Because I would rather not ban regular everyday people doing nothing wrong from streaming certain areas if that's their purview, or in general, citizens being unable to record in public would be bad.
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.
>We used to call those dragnets which are illegal under the 4th amendment
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.
Widespread recording and use in a cross-database is also a dragnet - its not one camera or cameras in a specific space, its cameras everywhere, accessible from anywhere, and its use constitutes a search (all IMO).
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.
I mean in many (most?) states travelling in the left lane is a moving violation
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
>Using it to fish for other violations is where it crosses into the fuzzy and sometimes outright illegal
OK.
Where is the dragnet?
I'm not parent comment OP
You replied to my comment acknowledging that stopping her may be wrong but doesnt constitute a dragnet.
Do you own stock in Flock or Axon? I don't believe you are actually asking this is good faith.
Flock is a dragnet. It allows police to coordinate around apprehending suspects, which is the definition of dragnet, if you look at any dictionary.
Flock isn't publicly traded. How could I own stock in it?
>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.
> Flock isn't publicly traded. How could I own stock in it?
Not all stock is publicly traded. I own stock that you can't buy on the exchange. It's quite common actually.
15.4% of families have private equity. Not unheard of but not what I would call quite common https://www.sec.gov/files/exploring-accredited-investors-jun...
I searched that PDF for family/families and found nothing, but I did find that you are actually even more correct. Most of that report is about accredited investors. Less than 5% of non-accredited investors own private securities. So, it's actually quite rare.
That said, to answer your question, you could own Flock stock. Private companies often offer stock to employees and others.
You could be a private investor, an employee, etc. Just because a company is publicly traded doesn't mean you can't be financially invested with the success of a company.
Read it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragnet_(policing)
Could be, am not.
Do you understand why flock is not a dragnet now?
No, you have done absolutely nothing to help me understand your perspective. You have only disagreed.
> A dragnet being an indiscriminate stop and search...
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.
Judges in some flock related cases seem to be disagreeing with your assessment on the plate reader surveillance network.
Generating suspects from mass data collection is close to the definition of a dragnet, both metaphorically and legally. The only difference is it's now being done electronically.
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.
The powerful are aware of this. Forget having the money to hire an attorney, the general public wouldn't even know who to contact, what kind of attorney etc to defend them in these cases.
Without probable cause for a crime, they need to let you go, yes?
Sure, in an ideal world, but in reality they can always come up with probable cause. All they have to do is say they smell something illegal, even if they don't. They can make up whatever they want, and there's not much one can do about it.
As long as they don't get fired or jailed for even murder, cops don't "need" to do shit at all. If you survive, you might get free money for your experience.
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.
And often, not even then.
Well yeah, it depends on what social class you live in.
The first eight amendments of the Bill of Rights of the larger agreement (the constitution) are better enjoyed by those who can write and speak forth without relying on another man or woman (an attorney) to do so on their behalf.
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.
Claude is getting pretty good with this kind of stuff, I think I will update my vibe coded browser plugin to add a button to replace the post with Claude's explanation of what it means. I have to say, one of my favorite personal uses of Claude these days is whipping up browser plugins to make the web more usable.
In 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"?
Yeah I did a word-o (Dvorak typist here) in a casually written comment. Thanks for pointing it out. You must be very studious.
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.
LLMs are great semantic search engines but they are terrible for this kind of stuff. The commercially provided LLMs are good at corporate law for corporate matters. I haven't seen an instance where they have been helpful for matters under Common Law. The long history of systemic semantic deceit is too strong for LLMs.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.
We could decide to fund civil rights litigation like medicaid.
alright, so finally a "thought crime" becomes reality. i feel the world leaders need to stop turning their eyes blind to ai but unfortunately they are too detached from tech to get what change is happening around the world.
I think world leaders are acutely aware of what's happening. They just don't care because shit stains like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk keep shoving money in their faces.
Persistent driving in the left lane basically just confirms American birth.
I strangely have mixed feelings on this. Half of me says "Illegal search and seizure", the other half say "We need to get the crazy drivers off the road"
I do think we need better enforcement of the laws we already have in place, the roads are becoming the wild west, and not in a good way. I think I love the tech and the idea, but not how it's currently being abused. It'd be great for Amber Alert scenarios, consistent reckless driving, a better way to deal with high-speed chases, and just a way to prevent all of the dangerous traffic violations that occur simply because they're not enforced and people just see others doing it and assume it's ok.
So, pre-crime... which is illegal.
So scary.. now even taking a road trip can make you look suspicious?
Already is as a side effect of heterogeneous weed laws. Cops camp state borders and pull people over they think are bringing back dispensary purchased weed into an illegal state.
Let’s all commit suspicious driving patterns and overload the system.
Actual human traffickers and whoever not are onto this, and take steps to evade cameras. Even if they aren't this is a very poor strategy. If you have a suspicion about someone, the stupidest thing you can do is pull them over. That risks blowing the whole investigation. That particular vehicle and driver may have nothing incriminating on them, and will now tip off their entire network.
Imagine how powerful the human trafficking group with a couple cops on their payroll would be.
Basically like pulling up a menu of possible victims and tracking their location down to the minute.
this has to go to the supreme court right away
This seems like a great excuse to pull over minorities. In general pulling people over for vague "suspicious behavior" without suspicion of a specific issue is a massive violation of everyone's rights.
I prefer AI doing that over police using their judgement. AI is better and will get better. Reckless driving is a huge problem. Imo it's an emergency situation so I am willing to accept about any measures that leads to getting crazies/speeders/phone watching idiots off the roads. Bring SkyNet if you have to. Solving this is the highest priority.
The Bay Area are the biggest hypocrites in the planet
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
According to deflock there's cameras in the berkely hills already, in particular on the grizzley peak and shasta road intersection. It's all over the bay area.
What you are describing IS in fact Liberalism.
Source: https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/ai-driven-polic... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50256169)
lets be fair, police are using ______ to pull over drivers fo suspicious behavior is just a headline you get when you have a functional journalism any time in the 20th and 21st century.
"Land of the Free", lol
"Whoever told you that is your enemy"
Reasonable suspicion, where the "reasonable" part is absurdly subjective here, is not probable cause.
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.
> even for the majority who have documented in writing a full assent to adhere to vehicle codes under public policy
hello sovcit. are you writing this from jail?
No. Absolutely not.
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).
.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.
Please show me a single valid court ruling that favours the 'state national' claim.
See the section 5.22, Nationalities and 5.23 "designating the natives of the States". For example, Texan, Californian, etc. Note that the URL has a Top-Level Domain of .gov