Cars and the Fourth Amendment
newramblerreview.com
newramblerreview.com
The 6th circuit recently ruled that is an unconstitutional search[1]: a government agent is physically intruding on a private area (your car) and searching it for information (how long it's been there).
Neat stuff.
[1]http://www.patc.com/articles/2019_taylor_v_saginaw_chapman.p...
> Rather, we hold, based on the pleading stage of this litigation, that two exceptions to the warrant requirement—the “community caretaking” exception and the motor-vehicle exception—do not apply here. Our holding extends no further than this.
From the court's order[1]:
> Because we chalk this practice up to a regulatory exercise, rather than a community-caretaking function, we REVERSE.
[0] https://www.sixthcircuitappellateblog.com/recent-cases/sixth... [1] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca6/17...
Also:
>>Because we chalk this practice up to a regulatory exercise
It should not be legal for judges to make puns like that.
(Edited to add substantive remark that belonged here as well.)
> Alison Taylor, a frequent recipient of parking tickets, sued the City and its parking enforcement officer Tabitha Hoskins, alleging that chalking violated her Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable search. The City moved to dismiss the action. The district court granted the City’s motion, finding that, while chalking may have constituted a search under the Fourth Amendment, the search was reasonable. Because we chalk this practice up to a regulatory exercise, rather than a community-caretaking function, we REVERSE
The sixth circuit has reversed the district court's dismissal that the search was reasonable. Both the sixth circuit and the lower court agree that marking the tire is a search; the lower court dismissed and held that the search was reasonable.
The amended decision says that once the case advances the city can argue that their actions fall under 4th amendment exceptions, but that their current motion did not sufficiently make that argument.
The chalking may be found OK during further proceedings, depending on how the city argued, but at the time that decision was issued it was not.
I was [lightly] researching this a few weeks back and am pretty sure I found that the net effect of the final ruling was that for the purpose of enforcing regulations [any] city could mark tires, and that because it the outside of the vehicle on public property it was not trespass...
1) Illegal: Placing a mark on your tires that will quickly fade with time and invades your car just enough to reveal whether you adhered to the limits.
2) Legal: Monitor the area with video surveillance and take pictures of every license plate that ever parked there, with timestamps and a photo of the occupants, and store that information for eternity, to be shared with any LEO who wants it.
(2) feels a lot more invasive than (1), but courts consider (2) okay because it just uses stuff visible to the public, while (1) actually physically modifies your car.
Edit: See also the conflict with the long-standing, uncontested practice of leaving a fingerprint on a car's tail light at the beginning of a stop before observing any wrongdoing that warrants such a "search": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19730452
But if we take things one by one, we could see that some real restrictions could be put on the use of this technology, even in the context of existing laws.
For instance, "video surveillance is allowed because everything it sees is public."
But then you can go like "Okay, but..."
1) A regular person wouldn't remember everything it saw in public a year from now, a month from now, or even a day from now.
2) A regular person wouldn't try to build all sorts of automatic connections between various identities it sees in public over longer periods of time (say more than a few hours)
3) A regular person wouldn't be able to take punitive action with the might of the government and taking up weapons against crimes it sees happen in public (so perhaps someone like a government entity needs to be more restricted than regular people when doing certain monitoring activities, because of their inherit potential for abuse?)
Suddenly when you consider all three of these ideas, and there are probably more like them, we can realize that public surveillance doesn't have to be the "free for all" governments would like us to believe that it should be (because the more true that becomes, the more power they have against each individual, way before there's even a hint of a case against someone).
To add: I'd personally much rather local LEOs use the chalk method than the camera method.
Edit:
>To add: I'd personally much rather local LEOs use the chalk method than the camera method.
Me too!
The chalk is only illegal because they have to mark your car before you've overstayed, and at that time, the search is unreasonable, since they're just assuming that you're going to overstay.
As I just recently commented elsewhere: There is a right to travel and a right to engage in interstate commerce. Sure, you can argue there is no right to drive a car, but only inasmuch as there is no right to operate a printing press and distribute leaflets.
This is why sovcits who are “traveling in commerce” without license and insurance always lose their “legal” arguments. Because the issue is settled - there is no constitutional right to drive a car.
Nothing is ever truly settled. Pointlessly respecting jurisprudence without regard for time and society is a recipe for contempt of the law.
So far I’ve seen driving:traveling::printing:speech. Not only is that not an argument, it conveniently overlooks that we have restrictions on speech today - libel and slander, incitement, etc.
What is your thesis? Driving should be completely unconstrained by the state? Why? Or is it that we should have national IDs? Why?
Also scary to me is the ability to use a self driving car as a slow moving cruise missle. They have a much longer range than drones. It seems only a matter of time before someone decides to use one in that way or other scary ways.
To what, hit a person?
86 people were killed, 458 hurt.
This is a reasonable adaptation to self-driving cars, though.
I think this is an unavoidable and perhaps unintended consequence of having self-driving cars because the alternative will be deemed unacceptable.
I'm also willing to bet on a system to locate any self-driving car at any time, which the police and emergency services will have access to.
In the US, there's no way that could pass.
When that becomes a reality I'm sure everyone will want a tracker.
I wouldn't worry about the spread of level 4/5-automation changing the calculus here on a small actor basis. VBIED's are already a serious threat, and require no significant technical innovation, but outside of conflict zones we don't see a ton of them.
Assuming we don't require physical failsafes though and truly airgap driving systems from any network connectivity (which we won't, I guarantee it) there's definitely a worry on the state level actor front.
I can totally imagine the first salvo in WW3 being the utility grid, cell networks, and crashing all the rooted cars, but that horse has likely already left the stable.
I think it's quite plausible that any autonomous vehicle will have something akin to a big red STOP button, just like most other automated machinery.
And talk about being abused, cars are already being abused. They kill 40,000 people every single year, and injure or disable 2.5million in the USA alone. Somehow this is acceptable to people.
> Also scary to me is the ability to use a self driving car as a slow moving cruise missle
No different to now.
While not legal advice, it's pretty much exactly what the GP was describing
Edit: corrected clip to the correct scene