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 mean that would be the beginning sure, but the way the article sounds after he had understood that she wasn't up to anything and she was asking about the whole thing he went ahead and gave her a guided tour, which normally I would expect them just to "have a nice day, ma'am, if we have any further concerns we will be in touch"
I 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 have dealt with such a system. I'm not sure it was GPS based but one of the options you could get was a radio system so that additional vehicles that arrived on scene would automatically sync their lights and sirens to match the ones already there. The lights and sirens themselves are CAN modules and run off a custom CAN bus. It was pretty interesting to go through the configuration software and see the literally hundreds of preset flash patterns for different regions of the world.
I live in the middle of nowhere and the local police have an MRAP. First time I saw it, I figured it was a display piece but nope, they use it for "SWAT" (in a heavily religious, sleepy, nothing but meth heads kind of low crime area). They've also littered ALPRs all over rural roads. I spot them constantly and they're always in strange "why there" places.
It's all ironic when you see the same people claiming "anti communism" and "low or no government" but then proceed to happily install the boot on people's faces. The cognitive dissonance is chefs kiss.
It's not so much cultural political leaning as it is authoritarianism. The US is completely fixated on Left vs Right but most people can't fathom another axis affecting them.
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?
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 great lengths to avoid 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.
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 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
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.
> A dragnet being an indiscriminate stop and search...
Nope. You need not stop everyone -or even anyone!- you search for it to be a dragnet search.
A search that is widespread and indiscriminate is a dragnet search... regardless of whether or not it's done by agents of the government or by the private sector. [0]
The thing being caught in the dragnet is not people, but information about with whom those people caught in the dragnet associate, where they spend their time, and other details about their private lives that -frankly- the government has no business knowing without either paying the cost to have a police follow those surveilled around, or justifying beginning and continuing the search of specific individuals to a court and receiving its approval.
[0] I'd love for the courts to start generally taking notice of the fact that a private sector company for whom the overwhelming majority of its customers are public-sector law enforcement is very likely to be defacto acting as an agent of the state. Private companies acting as agents of the state have far more strict regulations that apply to them, and it'd be really good for courts to catch up with the current situation on the ground regarding the public sector's "partnerships" with private-sector companies like Flock, Axon, and similar.
Widespread recording and use in a cross-database is also a dragnet - its not one camera or cameras in a specific space, its cameras everywhere, accessible from anywhere, and its use constitutes a search (all IMO).
If you continue the argument that surveillance used to proactively rather than reactively find evidence is not a search, then with technology as it is today functionally there can be no expectation of privacy in public (somewhat fair) nor in private, given how widely distributed technology is - one could easily argue that technology's wide distribution is in part because of an expectation of privacy.
There must be a line for which people can expect privacy, or else privacy cannot exist. Its a fundamental value of liberty.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
I work on software that Dr and Nurses use. The company I work for trains its own models to provide automated insight on patient history, etc. I've been pretty concerned about these kinds of problems you describe. I sat down with one of the data scientists and talked about biases a while ago. She walked me through the (high level) process they go through to try and detect common biases in the model before publishing.
For example, it is a common belief within the medical community that Black people have higher pain tolerance, and thus don't need as much or as strong of pain killers. People in pain sitting in beds in the ER will be delayed or refused pain killers because of this. This belief has been proven false, but it shows up in papers, notes, etc. and nurses and doctors still will treat their patients as if it's true.
This is just one example of many many things they test for. When training the model the data-science team actually tries to see if they can produce output that exhibit those identified biases/problems and block it from ever been used in production if they do.
I've had people internally tell me how frustrated they are that I or other people aren't letting them get their new-fangled AI-powered feature in front of customers fast enough... Without a lot of discipline and guardrails people would be using ChatGPT or Claude APIs instead.
My point is: I highly doubt that kind of care is being taken in many industries/companies. It's very concerning to me.
> For example, it is a common belief within the medical community that Black people have higher pain tolerance, and thus don't need as much or as strong of pain killers. People in pain sitting in beds in the ER will be delayed or refused pain killers because of this. This belief has been proven false, but it shows up in papers, notes, etc. and nurses and doctors still will treat their patients as if it's true.
Nurses and doctors don't refuse giving painkillers because they enjoy seeing their patients suffer, painkillers come with side effects. So they are trying to find a balance between preventing suffering and long term health. We can look at the wrong idea that black people have a higher pain tolerance as causing black patients unnecessary suffering, but you can also see it as protecting the long term health of black patients more. That's the same thing, just seen from a different angle.
But now that we know of this bias, we can of course try to fix it, but how. Now that we also have data: do black people have less painkiller-related problems? If they do, maybe we should give the black treatment to others, if they don't maybe they could get some more.
Except crime occurs in pretty constant amounts over large populations. What really sets minority neighborhoods apart is far more aggressive policing, which finds more crime to be prosecuted for. Which is then used as both evidence backing racist claims by politicians, and reason to increase patrols further, which then find more crime, and so it continues.
It's also worth noting that numerous crimes, the most egregious examples probably being cocaine/crack and marijuana, are explicitly racialized in their enforcement. Cocaine in rich white suburbs is a health issue. Crack in the ghetto is a crime wave. It's literally the same substance, the only difference is how it looks and who is taking it. (and if it was possibly supplied by the CIA...)
Meanwhile white offenders of pot abuse get off with a few months here and there, and black people caught with it frequently, you know, fucking die.
This is not true in practical terms. Crime is highly dependent on the culture and the living conditions of a group of people. For example many immigrants are not allowed to buy guns and therefore commit more violent acts with knifes. Which creates a clear correlation between ethnicity and their preferred weapons. Their choice of weapon is not based on their ethnicity, but it still correlates.
Yeah, I remember reading that a study found that white and black youth used marijuana at roughly equal rates, but black youth were about 4x as likely to be arrested for it. Due to differences in the # of stops, then differences in searches, then differences in actual arrests, with white youth getting more lenient treatment at each step.
And then this just reinforces the idea: "well, look at the crime statistics, black kids are more crime-prone, right"
What is a criminal? What is crime?
In the USA, it was a crime of 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 screen 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 harm 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!!!!!!!!"
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.
Yes, AI like organizations are very good for laundering accountability. Even before AI you could just hire Organization X or Consultancy Y and they can be as racist as they want, and boom you're just laundered all your accountability. Now go have fun, do whatever, who cares.
It's the same reason why Flock is so popular. It's just cameras, who cares right? Well Flock is popular for the organization, it's an accountability sink. The government can't just stand up a bunch of cameras, people will complain. Ahh, but Flock can. The entire economic value of Flock is purely the accountability laundering, the technology is just a footnote.
Really, many organizations in the US boil down to this. Producing value is hard, producing fake value is easy.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"'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.
18 U.S. Code § 242 - Deprivation of rights under color of law
Whoever, under color of any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom, willfully subjects any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or to different punishments, pains, or penalties, on account of such person being an alien, or by reason of his color, or race, than are prescribed for the punishment of citizens, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/242
> document on a Blockchain that you have first-hand knowledge that someone has committed a crime against you
Farting into a wind is about as effective with the difference of being free.
If someone wants to actually fight this, a dash cam streaming somewhere offsite and secure (cloud is fine) is a million times more effective. It provides direct, court-admissible proof of the claim in a way a personal diary entry, in a notebook or on a blockchain, never could. Barring that, an audio recording on your phone. (Would check your state and local laws first, however.)
The Blockchain part is the for the notary part. No one is going to store a video file or the relevant PDF files of sworn testimony on a Blockchain itself, and an S3 bucket is fine of course, I would have already thought this was extremely obvious.
The notary part is absolutely essential. Renowned Blockchains are the ULTIMATE for this use case. Sorry that you didn't already know this and the other part wasn't already obviously to be assumed by you.
I thought I was posting on a site called Hacker News, I was obviously being too assumptive. I'll spell things out more elaborately in comments in the future.
A court could care less about blockchain hashes unless the society of lawyers and judges decide it is legitimate. Did they? Last I heard blockchain hashes were as useful as any random bunch of numbers on a printed page.
Notary service is an essential component to proceedings.
Courts have generally accepted proof of existence that is established by proper entries to robust distributed immutable ledgers.
More important than courts are the people. If someone many states over has a serious crime committed against them, and they want it to be known they have been wronged in some way, I and others have a moral right to know about it.
Those who know of an ill that has happened and choose to speak about it should be heard.
If someone provides testimony in the form of a video or a written statement, the files can be available over any medium such as torrent, R2 bucket, IPFS, what have you, but proof of existence on a blockchain for the authenticity aspect, "this exact thing identified by this sha512 hash submitted at this time" and unchangeable, is imperative.
The blockchain part is imperative so somebody can't "just go back and change something" post-facto.
If you want to see an example of a court action going a different way due to what was written to a robust distributed immutable ledger, do a web search for "Craig Wright is a fraud posted by private keys he said he owned".
That is the Satoshi Blockchain referenced to and swaying a court on a cosmic scale.
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>> A court could care less about blockchain hashes unless the society of lawyers and judges decide it is legitimate.
Facts are not determined by loose consensus decided by private societies. The standard is higher. Such private societies are also not a substitute for the legislature, nor could they be for determining a true fact.
Blockchains and their contents are rooted in math so they're not trivial to argue with. USA is rife with academia suitable to provide abundant expert witnesses for said math.
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>> A court could care less about blockchain hashes
In practice this would lead to the case being escalated to a higher court. Or worse a federal lawsuit could be filed against a judge, which is not unheard of.
Judges aren't cosmically ultimate arbiters, they take an oath and have a duty and like anyone else who does, they are subject to rules and regulations for which there are real consequences for failure to abide by.
I understand where you're coming from, but until the math is accepted by a court and a procedure for validating authenticty is established within the society of judges, the burden for introducing this kind of evidence falls on whomever decides it is essential enough for their case to succeed. That's a very expensive proposition, so you can't really say that it is the process until a plaintiff or defendent with large enough pockets to afford the conversion of the legal society takes up the cause. Until then it's just random gibberish, and unavailable to the average person as a court admissible statement of authenticty for a digital artifact. The fact is that the "loose consensus" of "private societies" DOES determine acceptability, when that private society is the law society. Judges are only subject to the rules and regulations that other judges and prosecuters decide apply. There's nothing cosmic about it - it is very much rooted in the people who apply the law.
The case that Craig Wright lost was years ago. The evidence that was posted to the Satoshi Blockchain was recognized by the court.
It's already happened.
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>> Judges are only subject to the rules and regulations that other judges and prosecuters decide apply.
The last thing a state judge wants is a federal lawsuit against him where a federal judge reviews accusations that he/she didn't follow essential procedure.
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>> it's just random gibberish
The plentiful expert witnesses from math departments and computer science departments from Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and the like who will gladly show up to defend their fields (albeit will want to be paid), would say otherwise, if that were necessary, which it's not, because like has already been pointed out at least twice now
I researched your claim as best I could, and I did not find any evidence that the Craig Wright case hinged in any way on the on-chain events. The UK high court appears to have accepted other forensic evidence that he fraudulently produced documentation.
However, there are many cases that DO use blockchain events. Transferring the blockchain event into court admissible evidence is not at all straightforward, but some jurisdictions have established standards for how to do it. This comes up especially often in inheritance cases.
It has been an interesting rabbit hole. Notably, on-chain evidence is only one of many different kinds of evidence that courts will accept, so focusing entirely on this mechanism to the exclusion of all others is not so helpful. Transferring on-chain events into a winnable court case can be a fairly expensive way to establish facts.
> If that ever happens to you then document on a Blockchain
?? just any random blockchain? In what way does that help? Also, how? Are you buying small batches of bitcoin to spell a message out using morse code or something? Or is this an Etherium contract that does...?
The way it helps is you can prove that a specific exact file identifiable by one or more hashing algorithms like SHA512 existed at a specific time. It's called Proof of Existence and it's been in real-world practice for over a decade now.
Essential in an era where deepfakes are no longer novel.
One of the "low hanging fruit" applications was eliminating title fraud in real estate.
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>> Are you buying small batches of bitcoin to
Satoshis, specifically. There are 100,000,000 satoshis in one bitcoin. This is Bitcoin 101.
And yes I have spent many pennies of USD on this.
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>> just any random blockchain?
You would want to use the big renowned ones, obviously.
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>> Also, how?
I used to use a Python script for Proof of Existence, just with blockchaind on one of my own machines. Then later on projects I was on APIs were used. These days there are many APIs and web-ui for this application.
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>> to spell a message out using morse code or something?
It's called a SHA512 hash or a SHA256 hash. You're posting on a site called "Hacker News", if you aren't already familiar with SHA512 and or at least SHA256 you should probably be just a little bit embarrassed.
Do a web search for "proof of existence blockchain" and you'll find many answers. Below is the first result I saw come up.
Prove Any File Existed. Forever.
Independently verifiable evidence. No notary required.
https://satohash.io/
> It's called a SHA512 hash or a SHA256 hash. You're posting on a site called "Hacker News", if you aren't already familiar with SHA512 and or at least SHA256 you should probably be just a little bit embarrassed.
lmao the absolute nerve of saying I should be embarrassed for not already knowing about some weird side purpose you're using a blockchain for.
Has this ever actually been used for anything legal? This feels like it'd be tossed out of court for being too ridiculous. "It's proof because I said it's proof, and you have to trust me on that mr judge"
I had difficulty understanding the point of that new account's long-winded comments, but they might be referring to using a blockchain for timestamping purposes.
I could be projecting, but I think a lot of people here don't have a deep understanding of blockchains because the past 15 years has been full of crypto scams and would rather put their time, energy, and attention into better technologies. Proof of existence is the first real utility for bitcoin besides as an investment vehicle or decentralized transfer of money, so I think it's fair that other's would want to know how it works.
More likely they are regular cops participating in some joint task force. There are more state, county, and local police agencies in this country than there are FBI Special Agents.
I see a lot of police bodycam videos on YouTube of cops stopping drug traffickers for bullshit reasons (5 over speed limit on highway, crossing the line, following too closely) and it's usually a state or county cop that's on a federal task force or they'll have a "civilian ride along" in the car that gets way more involved than any civilian would ever be. They aren't actually an employee of the FBI but they have credentials from the FBI due to their task force job, it gives them access to FBI databases and bulletins while they still maintain their normal police job.
It's really bizarre to watch those videos because they are very routine. They stop the person for marginal lawbreaking, ask them to step out and sit in the front of their cruiser, then the traffic violations turn into warnings, cop makes basic small talk while writing warning and pretty much ignores everything suspect says, cop asks about any contraband in the car and asks to search, suspect usually (stupidly) agrees to search, cops pretty much instantly find the drugs. And if the suspect says no to the search, the K9 unit is already pulling up behind them because they were called before the cop ever turned on their lights and siren.
It's incredibly obvious these are pretextual stops. There is definitely a national program tracking license plates because there's no reasonable explanation for cops getting this lucky on pulling over random people that are driving completely unremarkable.
I'm pretty sure that's how they caught that megachurch pastor smuggling drugs for the cartel, they look for travel patterns for license plates and especially look at rental car registrations. You can't pull over every car but you can definitely look for cars making repeated trips, especially those that are made to known trafficking cities.
I had a friend from highschool that got pretty involved with his mom with drug trafficking. They caught him at some Indian reservation that overlaps upstate NY and Canada. The arrest affidavit states the cops saw a car parked for a couple hours at a casino and then followed the car to the border of the Indian reservation. Then they waited for the car to leave and then pulled him over for crossing a line. Of course they found significant ketamine in the car. The cops already knew who they were looking for because a car parked at a casino for a couple hours is not suspicious and definitely not suspicious enough to follow.
Exactly. One of the most dystopian legal concepts that is just brushed over … or more likely most people don’t know it exists.
Imagine going to trial being charged with a crime and defend against a “pretend” investigation that could have theoretically happened.
Imagine that this passes legal scrutiny.
Mr. Smith after a long investigation and hundreds of hours of detective work we have evidence you are smuggling drugs and justice is served when we found you speeding on interstate 80.
Truth: we just illegally monitored you cell phone and later intercepted your direct conversation after using IMSI catcher to monitor all your texting patterns. An AI system detected an unusual pattern and alerted us to your activity.
> The cops already knew who they were looking for because a car parked at a casino for a couple hours is not suspicious and definitely not suspicious enough to follow.
The above is key to understanding that part, they KNEW who the smuggler was. They just needed a legal reason to pull them over.
Right but the travel pattern they used to determine that this person was a smuggler is "frequently drives to/from the rez", as if there's no legit reason to be doing that.
They USED to, until Canada wanted to lightly arm the border officers (something the US side has done for decades) and then they all lost their shit and forced Canadian Customs to move inland instead of the original POE they used.
Yes, I’m a local, and I lost my entire respect for that reservation as a First Nations myself for how they run their show of crooked corruption.
Since it's unfathomable that two or more parties with related interests might collude to achieve common goals--that's conspiracy theory and is antisemitic or whatever--there's no harm in admitting it: policing is fraternal. You'll make friends across agencies, especially as you have to work with feds at the FBI, DHS, and various DA's offices and through mandatory federal training for counterterrorism, or participation in DIB and other programs.
Me and a buddy at ICE would routinely exchange intel on suspects to make our respective quotas. I'd tip him off when we cited illegals so they could be picked up leaving the courthouse. He'd give me intel on illegals known to be in the area so I could write citations. Win-win. Not gonna be a popular take around here because we sent home a bunch of the Democrat voter base, but everybody here shamelessly exploits anyone they can for a living so I don't want to hear it.
There was no "national program tracking license plates." We just crushed it at immigration enforcement by cooperating.
> 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.
Of course they knew; someone in DEA tipped them off lol. That's how it works.
This has to be a troll account. You're admitting to cooperating with ICE so that both of you could meet your quotas? You collaborated to have ICE pick up people at the courthouse, where they were because they were presumably trying to obey the law?
And no, illegal immigrants aren't voting in US elections, stop that.
Phones aren't always a guarantee so they moved to alternative tracking methods.
TPMS sensors: Modern vehicles have tire-pressure sensors in or near each wheel. Many transmit a unique sensor ID by short-range radio. Bartec describes diagnostic equipment being capable of displaying both the vehicle's VIN and TPMS sensor IDs.
Application from Tortured Genius Enterprises LLC, describes a system intended to:
intercept TPMS radio transmissions from passing vehicles;
extract the sensors' unique identifiers;
associate those identifiers with a particular vehicle;
determine vehicle location;
connect the identifier with outside databases;
potentially retrieve make, model, VIN and owner information;
My small town newspaper had a police blotter - almost all the dui arrests the pretext is failure to stay in lane (eg they touched either the yellow line or the white line on the right, the town is on the country and it is practically (if not literally) to never touch a line driving (sometimes I try it just for fun and it takes an insane amount of concentration on winding roads)
Point being is that if you drive there is a pretext for a stop.
Whilst I agree with your general points, it's worth mentioning that increased traffic policing can result in a surprising amount of connections to other crimes. It appears that criminals develop a disregard for laws in general and this carries over to their driving mentality.
Having ended up in the middle of a 5 car sandwich going to last years VCFMW, I've learned we all collectively fail to understand that the car in front of us can be stopped, in addition to using it's own brakes.
Ironically the best defense against police abuse of power seems to be doing your own surveillance. Recording interactions with the police and having a dash cam. Many popular dash cams like Viofo record to an SD and don't send recordings to the cloud.
My understanding is that it's not recommended in the USA to talk with cops. Anything you say will be used against you, or your friends. Just ask if you are being arrested and if you are free to go. If you have anything to say in your defence, save it for court.
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.
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[ 0.28 ms ] story [ 90.3 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c14vfq3jqpo
Just intimidation, pretty common.
...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.
https://standbygroup.com/uk/sync-breathe/
It does look kinda cool though.
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.
-Larry Ellison
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 great lengths to avoid 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.
hello sovcit. are you writing this from jail?
How is surveillance related to dragnets? A dragnet being an indiscriminate search for suspects that sweeps up lots of people.
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
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.
Nope. You need not stop everyone -or even anyone!- you search for it to be a dragnet search.
A search that is widespread and indiscriminate is a dragnet search... regardless of whether or not it's done by agents of the government or by the private sector. [0]
The thing being caught in the dragnet is not people, but information about with whom those people caught in the dragnet associate, where they spend their time, and other details about their private lives that -frankly- the government has no business knowing without either paying the cost to have a police follow those surveilled around, or justifying beginning and continuing the search of specific individuals to a court and receiving its approval.
[0] I'd love for the courts to start generally taking notice of the fact that a private sector company for whom the overwhelming majority of its customers are public-sector law enforcement is very likely to be defacto acting as an agent of the state. Private companies acting as agents of the state have far more strict regulations that apply to them, and it'd be really good for courts to catch up with the current situation on the ground regarding the public sector's "partnerships" with private-sector companies like Flock, Axon, and similar.
If you continue the argument that surveillance used to proactively rather than reactively find evidence is not a search, then with technology as it is today functionally there can be no expectation of privacy in public (somewhat fair) nor in private, given how widely distributed technology is - one could easily argue that technology's wide distribution is in part because of an expectation of privacy.
There must be a line for which people can expect privacy, or else privacy cannot exist. Its a fundamental value of liberty.
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"?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nurses and doctors don't refuse giving painkillers because they enjoy seeing their patients suffer, painkillers come with side effects. So they are trying to find a balance between preventing suffering and long term health. We can look at the wrong idea that black people have a higher pain tolerance as causing black patients unnecessary suffering, but you can also see it as protecting the long term health of black patients more. That's the same thing, just seen from a different angle.
But now that we know of this bias, we can of course try to fix it, but how. Now that we also have data: do black people have less painkiller-related problems? If they do, maybe we should give the black treatment to others, if they don't maybe they could get some more.
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"
What about the crimes happening in company boardrooms rather than on the screen 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 harm are caused by people who are not target of surveillance technology .
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.
It's the same reason why Flock is so popular. It's just cameras, who cares right? Well Flock is popular for the organization, it's an accountability sink. The government can't just stand up a bunch of cameras, people will complain. Ahh, but Flock can. The entire economic value of Flock is purely the accountability laundering, the technology is just a footnote.
Really, many organizations in the US boil down to this. Producing value is hard, producing fake value is easy.
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
-the officer, at least in his head if not out loud
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.
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.
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...
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 notary part is absolutely essential. Renowned Blockchains are the ULTIMATE for this use case. Sorry that you didn't already know this and the other part wasn't already obviously to be assumed by you.
I thought I was posting on a site called Hacker News, I was obviously being too assumptive. I'll spell things out more elaborately in comments in the future.
Courts have generally accepted proof of existence that is established by proper entries to robust distributed immutable ledgers.
More important than courts are the people. If someone many states over has a serious crime committed against them, and they want it to be known they have been wronged in some way, I and others have a moral right to know about it.
Those who know of an ill that has happened and choose to speak about it should be heard.
If someone provides testimony in the form of a video or a written statement, the files can be available over any medium such as torrent, R2 bucket, IPFS, what have you, but proof of existence on a blockchain for the authenticity aspect, "this exact thing identified by this sha512 hash submitted at this time" and unchangeable, is imperative.
The blockchain part is imperative so somebody can't "just go back and change something" post-facto.
If you want to see an example of a court action going a different way due to what was written to a robust distributed immutable ledger, do a web search for "Craig Wright is a fraud posted by private keys he said he owned".
That is the Satoshi Blockchain referenced to and swaying a court on a cosmic scale.
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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.
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
However, there are many cases that DO use blockchain events. Transferring the blockchain event into court admissible evidence is not at all straightforward, but some jurisdictions have established standards for how to do it. This comes up especially often in inheritance cases.
See: https://truescreen.io/articles/blockchain-evidence-court-adm...
It has been an interesting rabbit hole. Notably, on-chain evidence is only one of many different kinds of evidence that courts will accept, so focusing entirely on this mechanism to the exclusion of all others is not so helpful. Transferring on-chain events into a winnable court case can be a fairly expensive way to establish facts.
?? 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...?
Essential in an era where deepfakes are no longer novel.
One of the "low hanging fruit" applications was eliminating title fraud in real estate.
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>> Are you buying small batches of bitcoin to
Satoshis, specifically. There are 100,000,000 satoshis in one bitcoin. This is Bitcoin 101.
And yes I have spent many pennies of USD on this.
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>> just any random blockchain?
You would want to use the big renowned ones, obviously.
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>> Also, how?
I used to use a Python script for Proof of Existence, just with blockchaind on one of my own machines. Then later on projects I was on APIs were used. These days there are many APIs and web-ui for this application.
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>> to spell a message out using morse code or something?
It's called a SHA512 hash or a SHA256 hash. You're posting on a site called "Hacker News", if you aren't already familiar with SHA512 and or at least SHA256 you should probably be just a little bit embarrassed.
Do a web search for "proof of existence blockchain" and you'll find many answers. Below is the first result I saw come up.
lmao the absolute nerve of saying I should be embarrassed for not already knowing about some weird side purpose you're using a blockchain for.
Has this ever actually been used for anything legal? This feels like it'd be tossed out of court for being too ridiculous. "It's proof because I said it's proof, and you have to trust me on that mr judge"
See https://opentimestamps.org/
Both for technology and law.
Illiteracy is rampant.
Critical thinking is oddly uncommon.
It's unfortunate and unsustainable.
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.
Imagine going to trial being charged with a crime and defend against a “pretend” investigation that could have theoretically happened.
Imagine that this passes legal scrutiny.
Mr. Smith after a long investigation and hundreds of hours of detective work we have evidence you are smuggling drugs and justice is served when we found you speeding on interstate 80.
Truth: we just illegally monitored you cell phone and later intercepted your direct conversation after using IMSI catcher to monitor all your texting patterns. An AI system detected an unusual pattern and alerted us to your activity.
Like, how often do people who live on that rez get pulled over?
The above is key to understanding that part, they KNEW who the smuggler was. They just needed a legal reason to pull them over.
Yes, I’m a local, and I lost my entire respect for that reservation as a First Nations myself for how they run their show of crooked corruption.
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.
Since it's unfathomable that two or more parties with related interests might collude to achieve common goals--that's conspiracy theory and is antisemitic or whatever--there's no harm in admitting it: policing is fraternal. You'll make friends across agencies, especially as you have to work with feds at the FBI, DHS, and various DA's offices and through mandatory federal training for counterterrorism, or participation in DIB and other programs.
Me and a buddy at ICE would routinely exchange intel on suspects to make our respective quotas. I'd tip him off when we cited illegals so they could be picked up leaving the courthouse. He'd give me intel on illegals known to be in the area so I could write citations. Win-win. Not gonna be a popular take around here because we sent home a bunch of the Democrat voter base, but everybody here shamelessly exploits anyone they can for a living so I don't want to hear it.
There was no "national program tracking license plates." We just crushed it at immigration enforcement by cooperating.
> 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.
Of course they knew; someone in DEA tipped them off lol. That's how it works.
And no, illegal immigrants aren't voting in US elections, stop that.
They track everyone's phone. The plate cross reference is only needed to nab someone in traffic.
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No illusions that I'm not also traceable. Tracked.
Sovereign citizen?
TPMS sensors: Modern vehicles have tire-pressure sensors in or near each wheel. Many transmit a unique sensor ID by short-range radio. Bartec describes diagnostic equipment being capable of displaying both the vehicle's VIN and TPMS sensor IDs.
Application from Tortured Genius Enterprises LLC, describes a system intended to:
intercept TPMS radio transmissions from passing vehicles;
extract the sensors' unique identifiers;
associate those identifiers with a particular vehicle;
determine vehicle location;
connect the identifier with outside databases;
potentially retrieve make, model, VIN and owner information;
maintain historical observations;
predict future locations/behavior;
direct law enforcement to intercept a vehicle.
https://networks.imdea.org/your-cars-tire-sensors-could-be-u...
Point being is that if you drive there is a pretext for a stop.
A classic example of this is the eventual capture of Peter Sutcliffe, the "Yorkshire Ripper" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Sutcliffe#Arrest
Having ended up in the middle of a 5 car sandwich going to last years VCFMW, I've learned we all collectively fail to understand that the car in front of us can be stopped, in addition to using it's own brakes.
Basically like pulling up a menu of possible victims and tracking their location down to the minute.