"'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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
most of the violent crimes are from people with prior crimes, but the prior crimes themselves weren't necessarily violent, but just enough to marginalize that person from ability to participate in society with steady jobs
such as the possession of now-legalized substances, and the possession stop itself was based on flimsy pretexts that could have been fought, but it made more sense to take a plea-deal for that person or they were not aware of how to not engage with police and damned themselves without a lawyer present
This is not 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.
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!!!!!!!!"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
I think it's more about abstraction. If someone is standing on the street corner taking down your plate number, you know they're likely up to no good. If there's a camera on the street corner, it may bother me, but the vast majority of people just go "eh".
We 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 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.
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.
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.
> 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".
> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
"'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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
> 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
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.
And spend time in federal prison for the privilege.
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...
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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!!!!!!!!"
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.
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.
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.
And Tesla will be the pioneer.
Sir, can you put your hands in the yellow circles, please?
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.
"...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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Just turn up the temperature when it's time for police raises or retirements
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?
Don't worry, thanks to the Democrats, then affirmed by the Republicans, your car will soon dial them directly!
"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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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?
> "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.
> 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 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".
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 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).
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.
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.
I would definitely bat an eye at cops acting like human flock cameras. That sounds like an incredible waste of resources.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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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.
>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.
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...
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.
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.
Judges in some flock related cases seem to be disagreeing with your assessment on the plate reader surveillance network.
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.
We could decide to fund civil rights litigation like medicaid.
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.
So, we're just speed running Little Brother now?
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.
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.