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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

I would much rather they chalk my tires than store my car's license plate and location in a database...

I find it strange we the people for the people by the people don't just straight up outlaw things like this with an amendment.

The constitution is a great document that lasted far longer than expected. And surprisingly holds up extremely well to modern era technological change.

But I suspect the founding fathers would be down right horrified by the loss of privacy and liberty that has taken place in the name of safety.

Why do they need chalk or a location database? Find a better solution that doesn't require loss of privacy. It's not hard even with tech from 50 years ago.

We are supposedly at the pinnacle of civilization and knowledge. Yet we are not yet wise or skilled enough to question and alter that which governs us?

I mean a lot has changed since then our understanding of the reasoning may have been loss but I suspect non breaking improvements may be a viable course of action.

The sad answer is that the great majority of voters are ignorant and/or apathetic about privacy - at least in comparison to things like taxes and health care. The population that is willing to vote against party lines for privacy is trivial, whereas the government (at every scale) is heavily incentivized to invade privacy.

Before we can change the government, we need to make people care - and while recent debacles (see: Facebook) have helped, there's a long way to go yet.

The not sad answer is that the great majority of voters understand that there has to be a tradeoff between the ability of the police to detect and enforce the law and our personal privacy.

Generally, transparency, rather than privacy, could be reasonably said to be the driving function of government -- things like arrest records, court records, marriage records, real estate transactions, are all public records, with exceptions being made only for cases where the harm of the record itself exceeds the public benefit. To facilitate credit markets we've even gone so far as to make personal credit information semi-public.

If you want something to be private, it's your responsibility to keep it private. And all privacy goes away in the face of a lawful search and seizure, accompanied by probable cause. The (very wiggly) privacy line is only crossed when another party goes to unreasonable lengths to violate situations where you have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

If only we could devise a system under which all voters wouldn't have to be informed about every topic. A system of, say, representatives to whom the citizens would delegate their power. These representatives would then use their proxy and be responsible for learning and implementing policy about whatever topic comes up.

A populace which is passionate about a topic is more likely to see legislation about it. But it's not the only way.

Corporations and their largest beneficiaries will use their media companies and donation/lobbying dollars to spread propaganda within one or more parties to create enough doubt that nothing will happen. That's what needs to be attacked. They got a lot right in the early 20th century around media consolidation and antitrust.

Try to mentally write the amendment, then attack it like a security researcher/lawyer would.

It's really hard to write such a provision without an "unless it's for a reasonable use" clause large enough to drive a truck through, and you can't just leave that one off either.

It's not a bad exercise to try, though.

(I fear opening the amendment process at this point, to be honest. I'd give good odds Amendment 28, no matter what it is, will be longer than the entire rest of the Constitution, with the way legislation has gone lately.)

See, the thing is, and why I wish we had more like the original Bill of Rights, was they weren't legalese. They were intentionally broad constructs that the courts could interpret to the modern day. I want a Constitutionally-protected "right to privacy", so that courts can determine how x, y, or z weighs against that right.

> See, the thing is, and why I wish we had more like the original Bill of Rights, was they weren't legalese.

Yes, they were; they may not seem that way because in many cases they have shaped common usage and understanding of terms beyond the legal space, but they absolutely leveraged existing specialized legal terms of art.

Better yet, try and rewrite it from the perspective of an 18th century white man and see how it deals with over 200 years of technological progress.

ocdtrekkie's response is a pretty good response to your post, too. When you write in broad statements of principle, even someone from the late 18th isn't completely lost. It wasn't at all news to them that invasions of privacy represented power over the one being invaded, and given that they were already concerned with the degree of privacy invasion possible in the 18th century, it's not like there's any chance they would suddenly go "Oh, well, a little primitive 18th-century invasion by a government is an unacceptable assertion of power over people, but when you can do it at a large scale with technological precision I never dreamed of, oh, that's totally OK."

Or is the suggestion that because 18th century white people would consider the modern day Facebook an atrocity, it is incumbent upon us to submit to their privacy invasions because otherwise we're like privileging old dead white people or something, which we are far too sophisticated for in this here 21st century?

Adding amendments went out of favor when the federal government misinterpreted the commerce clause so hard that it completely flipped the government power structure; the modern hip way to govern now is to use unelected buercratic committees to determine people's fundamental rights

Congress keeps ceding more of its power to the executive, since it can't seem to accomplish much of anything any more. It does allow stuff to get done, but the only oversight is whatever the voters decide to do every four years.

I'd expect much of that whole prohibition thing also had some effect.

My gut says this is ridiculous and I can kind of rationalize how putting chalk on something might be like GPS tracker but not really. This is akin to a stamp on your hand at a bar or concert and the only way it violates your privacy is by communicating to people other than law enforcement that you parked publicly.

I'm assuming the marks are put on the tread of the tire and if that's the case then it only reasonable violates your privacy for a short duration. This is akin to being seeing in the local strip club parking lot however far less scandalous.

The fact of the matter is that all cars have a unique identifier clearly visible on at least one outward facing surface. It can just as easily be used by LOE to determine how long you've been parked in a spot with a simple app that snaps a photo and logs GPS coordinates.

The differences being that chalk is temporary and can communicate to interested parties that you've parked recently in local vecinity, where as a license plate requires instance observation to track your movements.

> My gut says this is ridiculous and I can kind of rationalize how putting chalk on something might be like GPS tracker but not really

The legal issue isn't that it is like a GPS tracker, it is that it is a physical trespass (a fairly well-defined legal concept) for the purpose of establishing information to be used against you by the government.

Now, this is also a feature of the GPS tracker case, but it's not the comparison back to the GPS tracker case that is the main issue, but the same underlying principles that have governed the GPS tracker case and a wide range of others.

I have issue with the trespass part as well. If marking chalk on a car is trespassing then wouldn't throwing a newspaper in someone's driveway also be trespassing? So to would leaving a hand print on someone's car if you happened to touch it.

They aren't illegally entering the car, they're putting chalk on the outside of it.

> If marking chalk on a car is trespassing then wouldn't throwing a newspaper in someone's driveway also be trespassing?

Yes, without permission, dumping on someone's property is a trespass.

> So to would leaving a hand print on someone's car if you happened to touch it.

It is a trespass, yes. Probably not on its own an actionable one (or at least not one worth civil action) because of the lack of harm, but whether a trespass would be actionable or worth action as tort is irrelevant in the case where you are looking at a Fourth Amendment violation where any trespass by givernment for gathering information to be used against a person (as a violation of legal property rights) is, ipso facto, a violation of an expectation of privacy, triggering the requirements associated with a search.

Nonsense. Trespass is deliberate interference with another person's property right. Does a hand print or chalk mark prevent someone from making use of his car? The answer is obviously no.

So you can vandalize my car with chalk all you want as long as it doesn’t violate my possessory interest?

If you want your car to remain in pristine condition, keep it in your garage. Don't park it in a public space. In a shared space undesirable things happen. Just because you object to something doesn't make it a crime. Guilty mind plus guilty deed make something a crime.

Isn't vandalism different from trespass?

Vandalism is a form of trespass.

I find it hard to fathom any issue where there would be enough consensus in the US currently or in the foreseeable future to pass a constitutional amendment.

But I suspect the founding fathers would be down right horrified by the loss of privacy and liberty that has taken place in the name of safety.

The local governments will just subscribe to a private sector service that does the same thing without having to deal with all that pesky constitutional bother. Just like they do with DNA searches.

That doesn't prevent constitutional challenges. Georgia's laws were paywalled until someone took the state to court.

https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/court-tells-georgia-it...

I don't really understand. I don't think most people find chalk on their tire objectionable, except in the case that the chalk is used as evidence to ticket them. This is clearly what happened here. It seems like you're advocating that we solve a problem that for most people doesn't exist…

And let’s not forget what happens if we don’t give out parking tickets.

Assholes park for as long as they please. The rest of us obey the rules for a while, until we realise the assholes are getting one over on us, then we think ‘screw this’ and gradually we also start parking for as long as we please.

Now nobody can ever park, but freedom! What a world.

If they're doing it right, they probably only store an integer foreign key to your existing license plate record. :D

I think this sets a broader precedent about what evidence gathering practices are acceptable.

What do you mean? Aren't license plates already stored in a database? How else do they know who owns a plate?

Yes, but now there's a record of every time and place you've ever parked.

It's not your license plate.

I'd rather they do neither because it's a nuisance that is more trouble than it's worth.

I'm neither a lawyer nor american, but couldn't you use this case as precedent that looking up the numberplate in a database is also "gathering information to ultimately impose a government sanction"?

The "trespassing upon a privately-owned vehicle" seems pretty relevant, and I doubt it would apply to reading the plate.

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