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?
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 absolutely lied to you, in many ways. Video evidence is absolutely evidence. Also, the threshold for a traffic stop is very low. “I thought I saw something on a camera” absolutely meets the limit for a traffic stop.
Law and Order lied 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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. I haven't seen an instance where they have been helpful for matters under Common Law.
Claude is a service provided by a private company. Claude is not a king who can dictate to USA what its laws are.
Unless you are willing to do the necessary reading and comprehension yourself you aren't going to be equipped to meaningfully evaluate the substance of whatever "nice refutation". It's a lot of work.
I don't like people who describe themselves as "sovereign citizen" because the compound term is an oxymoron and those who self-describe as such universally are morons. But likewise, those who reach for such a slander (it's as nasty as calling someone the "N word") instead of presenting an argument of substance are just as bad or even worse in a way as one is foolishness and the other is bigoted insidiousness.
If you sincerely believe the "nice refutation" is true and correct, then sign a declaration under penalty of perjury for such. Otherwise all you have is piss in the wind.
.
>> Claude is getting pretty good with this kind of stuff
Given that you already wrote "sovereign citizen" without presenting any argument (and even to what, exactly) nor cited any case law in your previous comment, you're a long ways on your journey to being qualified to comment to Claude being "pretty good with this kind of stuff" one way or the other.
I have a driver's license too, but I only present it where having been pulled over in a car operated commercially (ie rented from a car company), but not ever in a car I actually own (not mere title to possess and occupy the property but lawful ownership of the property with the M.C.O.), and I didn't enter that simple contract through filling out the same forms you did but other government-provided forms.
You and I are not the same kind of American, not that there is anything wrong with that. The system is in harmony.
>We 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
"'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.
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
> 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...?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!!!!!!!!"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That sentiment seems to fail the test with reality, because you have people following the rules and behaving perfectly normally (like the subject in this story) who end up getting scrutinized anyway. That's a recipe for increasing anti-social behavior. After all, why bother following the rules if it doesn't keep me out of trouble?
It’s a fine line. Periodic demonstrations of arbitrary state power over your personal life can enhance the coercive effect. TSA checkpoints serve this purpose.
No one in Congress, no TSA administrators, no President, and no judge has ever consciously had the thought that airport security was beneficial to them because it enhances state authority.
The TSA exists because it
1. Made some people look good
2. Made some people money
3. Was thought necessary by some true believers
The incentive structures aren’t aligned in a way that any individual cares about reinforcing state power like that. Mostly the people in charge care about getting reelected, keeping their jobs, making money, or in some cases doing good.
TSA lines suck because you have a bunch of hourly workers directing a a crowd of clueless people through a multi step process.
I just got back from Disney World with the family. We flew out of an airport with TSA, went through dozens of security lines at the parks, and flew out of an airport that doesn’t use TSA.
There was no meaningful difference interactions with any of the security personal. Some were nice some were annoyed, some were bordering on mean.
All of this airport security, all the searches, the screenings, the cameras, the questions, it's just one more way of reducing your liberty, and reminding you that they can fuck with you anytime they want.
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."
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.
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.
These cameras need to be banned federally. It shouldn't be legal to own or sell access to a network of these pervert cameras.
Somewhere along the way, tech stopped asking questions like that, and now, people are hostile to the suggestion that the question should be asked.
We know why it's different of course: scale. But there was never a general principle about scale and automation articulated in the Constitution because it just wasn't a thing to worry about in the 1700s.
We're left to hope that courts agree that just because something is okay for one police officer in one place to do, that doesn't mean the police department can perform that same task a thousand times in a thousand places with a thousand machines and still have it be okay.
If we'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?
This is literally the definition of a police dragnet.
Or did Law and Order lie to us?
Maybe this is me being naive?
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.
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.
Folks who were on here praising Uber or Airbnb for skirting the law 10 years ago, this was part of the problem.
I do have some sympathy for the cab drivers who used to be able to earn a better living, but the only reason that was possible is that city government gave them a sweetheart deal, which isn’t fair. It makes exactly as much sense as having barber medallions or pharmacist medallions. If they had those, it might cost $85 for a basic haircut, and pharmacist and barber medallion owners might make a ton of money (remember, you can rent out medallions, so they became investment vehicles), but those are prices we’d all be paying for.
Regulations that just pick winners and losers, making most of us the losers, are stupid - and should be loopholed-around if it’s possible.
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".
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety
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.
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.
> Therefore a computer must never make a management decision
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.
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.
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"?
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. I haven't seen an instance where they have been helpful for matters under Common Law.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.
How is surveillance related to dragnets? A dragnet being an indiscriminate stop and search of suspects that sweeps up lots of people. Police have always been able to watch people and see their license plate. It's the wide-spread stop and search with no specific suspicion that makes something a dragnet.
This plate reader surveillance network, for better or worse, is the exact opposite.
The example they lead with in the article is the police pulling over a woman who spent too much time driving in the left lane. Stupid. But targeted.
Using it to fish for other violations is where it crosses into the fuzzy and sometimes outright illegal
The counter to this is demand that they write you the ticket for the moving violation, don't answer any questions other than providing the legally required license, registration, and insurance, and move on
If they don't have evidence of a crime, they can't detain you forever on the roadside
OK.
Where is the dragnet?
Flock is a dragnet. It allows police to coordinate around apprehending suspects, which is the definition of dragnet, if you look at any dictionary.
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...
?? 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...?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, yes, because so is crime.
It's also worth noting that numerous crimes, the most egregious examples probably being cocaine/crack and marijuana, are explicitly racialized in their enforcement. Cocaine in rich white suburbs is a health issue. Crack in the ghetto is a crime wave. It's literally the same substance, the only difference is how it looks and who is taking it. (and if it was possibly supplied by the CIA...)
Meanwhile white offenders of pot abuse get off with a few months here and there, and black people caught with it frequently, you know, fucking die.
And then this just reinforces the idea: "well, look at the crime statistics, black kids are more crime-prone, right"
Anecdotes fall apart when we don't cherry-pick.
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.
Throw the book at her!
One must assume that the various "fusion centers" are pulling in all this data and connecting all the dots. Unless you are walking, with a face mask, and without your cell phone you have to assume they know were you are.
These claims really need to be more specific to be believable and actionable. Particularly given the law has been changed in reaction to prior fuckery.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c14vfq3jqpo
Just intimidation, pretty common.
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.
I've had plenty of encounters where the discretion of a police officer was of great benefit to me and my friends.
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
Basically like pulling up a menu of possible victims and tracking their location down to the minute.
-Larry Ellison
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.
George Carlin, “Airport Security” (1999)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQdC-e82gmk
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.
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.