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Comment by asperous | Hacker News Reader

Emotionally, when I hear things like this I think unconsciously I secretly want companies not to give data over ever. And really the companies shouldn't collect it (hackers also exist)..

However rationally I think there is a balance. Investigators need to do their jobs and chase every lead they can to catch criminals. I wonder if google could have complied with a query that simply grabbed the users in the areas during the 3 time periods combined.

Maybe we just need laws that limit how much data can be returned per warrant, to encourage more limited warrants.

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I would be okay with it if the court system actually bothered to protect people's rights and police didn't abuse their power. But abuse of power is now industry standard. In all likelihood the data will be keep beyond what is necessary to collect the necessary evidence. In all likelihood this data will then be used as a springboard for indiscriminate civilian surveillance. I don't even trust that the excuse given for the collection is in any way true. Our government has shown a willingness to enforce secret laws, put people in secret prisons through extrajudicial processes, torture them in secret, lie about it repeatedly, lie about evidence. And at no point has our justice system seen fit to hold anyone accountable for it.

What balance is there when one side operates without limits or consequence and can use gag orders and the ability to classify information to operate in secret?

One issue is that if the police find evidence of a crime during the investigation of another crime, then they are bound to pursue the newly found crime too [0]. Under such dragnets, which you can nearly 'grep' for crime, many more totally innocent people can be found to be felons without their knowledge. 2011's Three Felonies a Day by Silvergate and Dershowitz [1,2] is a good launching point into issues with the US federal justice system. If you'd like to learn more, Ken White's twitter is a great place to start the learning process into law's foibles [3].

[0] Under many complex and often conflicting legal codes, this is admittedly a dubious statement. Add in budget issues and whoo-boy, might as well throw dice. But, in general, this is mostly true. Also, I am not a lawyer, consult your own lawyer.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00505UZ4G/ref=nosim...

[2] https://www.popehat.com/2018/12/18/alan-dershowitz-is-lying-... The book is HOTLY contested and Dershowitz may or may not be an insane person

[3] https://twitter.com/popehat

I agree with the points you're making, but I should mention that now that I clicked on your Amazon link, Amazon is recommending me nothing but Sovereign Citizen nonsense and anti-Semitic ramblings. Like, Amazon's recommendation system decided it was suddenly going to form a completely different opinion of the sorts of books I'm interested in.

Holy cow! That's strange. Derchowitz is a Harvard Prof. and though he may lean right, he's not that crazy of a person. Try clearing your cookies?

Guilt by association, I suppose.

His behavior since Trump’s election puts your latter claim into serious doubt. I am not surprised that now he is being associated with what flows from Info Wars, etc.

> I would be okay with it if the court system actually bothered to protect people's rights and police didn't abuse their power.

This country was founded on the principles that all governments decay, and all legislation should take this into account. We can't give the government power which could be abused to public detriment with a simple change in leadership.

How does your argument about secret data collection apply to the case of non secret data collection?

It's not an argument over secret, or non-secret data collection. It's an argument over abuse of power, secret data collection being one of the examples of abuse of power.

Just so I understand, do you include this particular incident as an abuse of power? AFAICT, as long as they end up only using the data for the stated purpose, and not to charge random other people with random crimes, it would be a correct use of power, at least by my judgment.

Once you have data, how can I tell you what you're using it for? Parallel construction is a thing.

That is correct. In his first sentence he made the assumption that this will not be the case. As such I do not see a discrepancy here.

They do get warrants and they do serve subpoenas just because they are awarded them under a pretext that you don’t like does not mean there is an abuse of power. If you are to make a claim as huge as that you can at least back it up with some sort of data.

> I would be okay with it if the court system actually bothered to protect people's rights and police didn't abuse their power.

The court system does a pretty good job, in fact that's why the police want to bypass it so often. It's much easier for the police to catch real criminals if they don't have to worry about due process (it's just that due process is what removes the false positives).

Conversely, if someone smashes into my parked car and flees, most major cities won’t investigate. Whereas they could use stop light cameras and a few hours of work to potentially identify the suspect.

Likewise, if live in SF and someone breaks in your car, the police won’t investigate it unless you’re A-Rod.

Isn't that just a cost/benefit calculation? How many projects have you worked on where someone suggested spending X hours on something only to have it shot down for minimal ROI? Obviously it matters more to you personally, and you'd like to have a sense that "justice is done" but really it's just an insurance claim. Of course it's also frustrating if the thief has only gotten some random junk out of your car - if it wouldn't lead to endless extortion I personally would be happy to hand him or her $10 to not break my window, even if there's no deductible, just to spare me dealing with it.

Unlike company, law is equal to everyone.

I respect the law, and the lawmakers should work for me. The ROI calculations are to be budgeted and accounted for, otherwise why am I being taxed?

>law is equal to everyone

I understand the goal of this sentiment, but this is not how most societies work. Equality under the law is the proper ideal, but it's not at all how things work. There are a lot of reasons for that, from bias to lack of resources. But whatever the particular reason may be, most people only notice and complain about inequality when they are its losing side.

Make no mistake about it though, from the police at the bottom of the stack, all the way up to how the judges rule on cases at the top of the stack, the legal system has never been equitable.

Laws and budgets are set on different time-scales; there is never 100% alignment between the cost of enforcing the law and the availability of the budget required.

In fact, most of the time, there's very little alignment, because there's no incentive to have those things be aligned. Sometimes even disincentive: there are laws on the books nobody wants enforced, and a culture in policing of enforcing the letter of the law, not the spirit—but one can always choose to not enforce a law one doesn't agree with by just making an informal agreement that certain crimes (of basically equal severity) take enforcement priority, such that those crimes nobody sees as crimes just get "de-prioritized" to the point that they're never enforced at all.

No, the law does not and should not use maximum resources for everyone. It is clearly beneficial to not send whole teams of people looking for weeks for your stolen wallet like they would for a missing person.

>The ROI calculations are to be budgeted and accounted for Often this would require you to pay more in tax than the value you would get back from it. Are you ok paying $1000 to track down the person who smashed your window when you will likely never get any money from them or will you just pay the $100 it costs to get a new window which doesn't happen very often.

Personally, I would vastly prefer cops focused on minor property crimes. That’s not to say the need a statewide manhunt, but something approaching 1:1 of property damage vs police respond quickly adds up to several hours of investigation.

Generally, a tiny fraction of the population commits the vast majority of such crimes. People will do 500$ worth of damage to make 30$, work out what it takes to make useful amounts of money and these people end up destroying a lot of property. So, the ROI calculation needs to account for windows not smashed.

> People will do 500$ worth of damage to make 30$

A good example is copper wire thieves. They pull up to a house and access the electrical panel in the garage which they turn off. Using a winch, they pull out all the copper wire in the house that's directly connected to the box (there's also many branch lines left behind). They then sell the wire as scrap for $20 or so and presumably use the money to buy drugs.

Fixing this damage can run $30,000 to $100,000. The whole house can have to be torn apart from the inside to reinstall all the electrical.

> It is clearly beneficial to not send whole teams of people looking for weeks for your stolen wallet like they would for a missing person.

A massive miscalculation -- stolen wallets, cell phones etc are individually small-ticket items, but the criminals who make a living stealing them do hundreds per month and thousands per year. Taking the perpetrator of a thousand muggings or pickpocketings off the street is a job worth doing, possibly more so than chasing small time drug dealers or runaway teens.

> but the criminals who make a living stealing them do hundreds per month and thousands per year.

You got a source for that claim? At least in the US, it’s significantly higher than any number I’ve ever read in a study / report.

San Francisco doesn't want the law applied equally to everyone: that would preserve existing structural injustices. We want the law applied towards equality, cutting down the rich and lifting up the poor.

Punishing an already poor and marginalized person is counterproductive to that goal, so we try to avoid it as much as possible. And that's probably who you're going to find on the other end of a car break in. So why bother looking?

Law may well be the same. However, the question everyone has to answer is not about law per se, but:

"How much justice can you afford?"

There is an intangible to living in a place where cars are regularly broken into vs. living in a place where they aren't. Think of the kinds of attitudes that people develop towards others in the two places. Trust vs. distrust, comfort vs. unease, open vs. closed. There's also the second-order effects of having a class of people going around committing those kinds of crimes with impunity. Many become emboldened and move on to other malfeasance. Order breeds order and chaos breeds chaos.

Your words bring to mind my experience with gentrification in a few cities: one person's order is another person's chaos. If you ask a longterm resident in a gentrifying neighborhood how they feel about what the new developments are doing to their social fabric, you might find your simple truism gets wierded <3

It's often that crimes restore lost order and stability for some people. Not saying it's moral on one side or the other, but it certainly doesn't feel like a neat little package.

I know that moral philosophy is a complex matter, but I should hope we can agree that being upset that your car was broken into is significantly different than being upset that there’s a hip coffee shop in your neighborhood.

I think its that not affording rent leads to higher demand for crime.

> Many become emboldened and move on to other malfeasance. Order breeds order and chaos breeds chaos.

Why does SF have a sizable increase in property crimes over the past 10 years but a drop in violent crimes? I'd imagine if chaos did truly beget chaos, then rates of crime across the board would be going up.

So true. Reminded me of Swiss towns in the Alps where houses, bikes in the shopping street and cars in general are unlocked. Really refreshing and makes you feel safe. The bigger risk to a car is when it is locked and the lock mechanism freezes over.

At the far other extreme of the spectrum, in blighted urban neighborhoods, everyone also leaves their cars unlocked. If you let the junkies inspect the contents of your car freely, they won't smash the windows to do it.

Living in a place with breakins is fine for people who don't have expensive things lying around.

The thieves don’t leave crappy old cars alone.

San Francisco has about 30,000 car breakins per year, largely because there is no enforcement. How much does that cost?

This is a great boon to the repair shops of San Francisco and I cannot for the life of me think of a parable that would indicate insidious downsides.

For those reading

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

Last car I owned in SF somebody broke a window and rifled through the inside. I didn't fix it, except to tape some plastic over the broken window. Shortly later, somebody broke another window (instead of just ripping off the tape, WTF!). Eventually sold the car and had to replace the windows, costing about $1000.

Similar here. Both back side windows. Fortunately they were on hinges and could be cracked open so I was able to get used ones at a junkyard for $60 each and replace them myself. Then the rear window got smashed in. $200 at the junkyard for that one and a lot harder to DIY. Then the trunk got jimmied, breaking the lock. I can't remember what that costed to fix, I had to have it keyed by the dealer, I think it was fairly expensive. Stolen radio (value approximately $300) I didn't replace. Stolen technical manuals and books (maybe $300 as well) I replaced some. I doubt they were able to even sell those.

It's one of many reasons I moved away from there and do not entertain any job offers from that region, regardless of how much they are offering. At a certain point one needs to write off these cities. That or accept being a victim with no legal recourse knowing your car's going to be vandalized damaged and stolen on a regular basis and you are going to be hassled by guys with guns when walking down the street.

How much is the cost of a break-in?

Truly spitballing an answer to this. A car window replacement is probably a few hundred bucks ($200-500), I imagine there are some instances with some really high value (greater than $1k USD, think a laptop) takes but there's also probably a ton of small hauls (loose change, stereo) or unsuccessful takes. I'd guess the average probably couldn't be more than a thousand bucks a break in, on average. This means this back of the napkin math puts car break-ins in that area costing probably not more than $30M, not including some insurance overheads and what not.

So judging by off the napkin math on costs and optimistically assuming stronger enforcement would lead to 50% less car break ins, if strong enforcement costs more than $15 million is it worth it? When does the cost of enforcement become inconsequential to the results? A good question to debate on either side IMO.

Even if a single police officer costs $1M a year all-in (which I'm significantly high-balling, I hope), I imagine 15 police officers hired specifically to work on car break-in cases would make a huge dent. The car thieves keep doing what they're doing because they know the police won't track them down. Even some minor efforts to start tracking them down could act as a powerful deterrent.

That's not really the point, though. It's not just a simple monetary calculation. Even if the true value of repairs and stolen items was $30M, I would allocate several times that of taxpayer money just for the quality of life benefits, assuming it would do some good.

Problem here is, if person #1 can do something, and gets away with it, then person #2 does that, and gets away with it, many more people will do the same.

Spending more on the crimes with negative ROI, makes the total ROI higher because it acts as a deterrent for future would-be criminals.

Reddit was full of video of really trashy kids, driving their bicycles through malls and stores harrassing random people there, and "nobody could do anything" about them. If those kids were arrasted, sent to juvie, given community service (or maybe even just shown on tv crying in court, instead of acting all badass on their bikes), that would sure stop many others from repeating what they did.

There’s many things wrong with the US and police, but a big one is this; The cops shouldn’t be doing cost/benefit analysis; They should be prosecuting every crime they feel they can win (have enough evidence for).

Oy. If we're going to deploy scary tech against criminal behavior, let's pls not rally for it to be used for petty crime committed by desperate ppl. If our liberties are getting flayed, let's at least see it used against ppl at the top -- suspected inside traders, etc. At least that way we'll get the powerful backlash and safeguards we all deserve ;)

Of course all of this feels gross, but as someone who was homeless in SF for a bit, going after people on the outs feels really backward.

Yes, but real crime in the US is relatively rare. So folks are going to go from real crime to "crimes of people whose existence annoys me".

That's a really unfair characterization of people's anger at getting their property stolen and destroyed.

It's not that the police _won't_ investigate; it's that the punishment isn't enough deterrent.

"We can only give them a citation, and the thieves know that, so they don't care," said officer Pete McLaughlin (retired) to me.

Admittedly, this was in regards to stealing bikes and not into breaking cars, but I suspect the punishment is the same.

I just recently got my window smacked in a mid size city. Was very pricey, but I wouldn't want to give my state permanent location data in exchange for the possibility of catching some random perpetrators. On the contrary, I would perhaps become a criminal because I would try to smash the cameras to protect my privacy.

Surveillance still is one of the most uncreative and probably also one of the worst forms of crime prevention/reduction.

I think you're missing the point of the parent comment. They aren't suggesting more surveillance, they're pointing out that right now the status quo is that even when there's already surveillance footage that could be used to identify a suspect, all too often the police can't be bothered to do any "good old fashioned police work".

We don't need draconian surveillance measures enacted to solve this type of crime. We need police resources to actually follow up and prosecute petty theft for all victims, not just corporations and celebrities. A couple of years ago my father was involved in a hit and run when a man in a red late model corvette turned out of a small subdivision right in front of traffic. This was during morning rush hour on a weekday, there's only about a dozen houses on that road, and only one red late model corvette parked in the driveway of one of those houses. That single red corvette was also parked with a car cover on it afterwards. Even though there were numerous witnesses to the hit and run given that it was during morning rush hour traffic, and even though it is pretty obvious what happened and there are plenty of ways to get evidence to support it, the police couldn't be bothered to do anything about it. As far as I know, they didn't even so much as question him about the hit and run.

We're currently paying the privacy tax with existing surveillance yet people like you and me cannot benefit from that surveillance.

Stop light cameras do not record contiounsly. And cities often have no access to them as they are run by third party companies that get a cut of the tickets they issue on the cities behalf (complete with city paying them if they don't get enough tickets to write) They only need the relevant clip for the ticket.

> if someone smashes into my parked car and flees, most major cities won’t investigate

I've had three home break in and robberies. In no case would the police even show up to take a report. In the case where my cameras identified the perps and I tracked down and documented them trying to fence my property, and worked with other neighbors to document an actual crime syndicate that was taking orders for specific things to steal, the police would do absolutely nothing. Police are about collecting fees from "in" drug dealers in return for looking the other way, while protecting their turf against incursion from rival drug gangs. They are also involved, along with judges in the USA, with child sex trafficking. The idea we need to give up freedom and be surveilled by these people is unrealistic.

I think we have reached a point where your analysis no longer holds up. I used to agree, but:

- The laws that govern legal search and seizure have departed dramatically from the protections afforded by the bill of rights.

- There have been multiple incidents of companies not disclosing extralegal "cooperation" with state actors such as the US government (and others)

- Warrant canaries are legal, yet big tech refuses to use them. Why not? Because using legal methods to improve user privacy and security are not considered "cooperative" enough.

- We have no reason to believe that governments are following the laws, even in the US. The recently revealed CIA scandal illustrates just how out of control things are.

- There is now a revolving door between big tech and state intelligence agencies, and big tech is becoming increasingly sympathetic to authoritarian candidates and hostile to third party or far left candidates.

"The laws that govern legal search and seizure have departed dramatically from the protections afforded by the bill of rights."

That, right there, is the problem. That should be illegal and should have been shot down every single time such a law was challenged in court. The fact that it wasn't says something about the status of the 4th amendment. And the lack of citizen revolt over this is disheartening.

Thank Bush family friends the osamas for 9/11. Patriot act normalized sweeping search and surveillance. Just like a lobster in boiling water average citizen has became more complacent with their rights being taken away. Smh

This is the truth, and the fact it is downvoted speaks volumes as to the tech communities apathy and complacency in systems that are part of the violation of our rights.

"Fuck you I got mine" might just be the death of the enlightenment.

I'm honestly starting to contemplate how hard it would be to setup on Mars and breakaway from all current earth governments. Maybe the only hope is freedom of space travel.

It's much easier to maintain a living space in international waters than on Mars.

> However...

I upgrade infrequently. Recently I was alerted my 3G phone is not going to work after December 31 as 3G networks are being shut down in the US nationally and all bandwidth reallocated to 4G only.

So, I've bought and returned 4 phones since then because I very carefully read and analyzed the terms of service and privacy policy that I couldn't read until buying them. All were totally and completely unacceptable in every way to me. But obviously not to others.

As a result come the new year I'm going phone less. I literally could not find a single contract that was not morally reprehensible.

I know of not a single other person sharing my concerns. Some say I am a mad man or unreasonable or unrealistic, or a potential terrorist ne'er do well. But I'm none of those. I just read the contract. Something they, and no one else in the entire USA, has done.

Which network is that? 3G on At&t will continue to work until 2/2022 https://www.rvmobileinternet.com/att-plans-to-shutdown-its-3...

What have your specific concerns been?

Situation: Investigators can perform dragnet surveillance with the assistance of google

> Investigators need to do their jobs and chase every lead they can

That's circular reasoning. What they can and cannot do is defined by the rules we set.

I think the devil is in the details with this type of data hand off. If there's no PII in the first batch of phones, just location and a unique ID, it doesn't seem intrusive compared to the benefit. Law enforcement would need to make a second request to de-identify a few specific numbers. If PII is handed over during the first request, then it's a lot more intrusive

the unique id is probably the phone number or the device id

Phone number is definitely PII and can easily be used to de-identify. Mac address is better, but still not great. A Google or dump specific id would be best

I'm not sure if MAC addresses are used in cell network negotiation, and they are easily spoofed, but the cellular network provider could certainly link an IP address to a device id. then again, most criminal "burner" phones are not internet enabled anyway

IMSI, IMEI, MSISDN, etc.

Systems to associate 'burner' phones to individuals, with patterns of metadata, have been commonplace for decades

https://github.com/kimgr/asn1ate/blob/master/testdata/public...

yes those can be used as device ids and in network negotiation. harder to spoof as they're a lower abstraction layer than MAC addresses

I read in an earlier NYT article about geo-fencing that the initial response involves unidentifiable tags.

Why phone number? My phone number has no association with my google account lol. I swap sims and phone numbers on a whim. My email address is the most constant thing about me.

it's not about linking you to a specific google account, it's about personally identifying you with a unique phone number at any given time

You say dragnet searches are rational, but your only rationalization was that "inveatigators need to do their job." That seems like remarkably lazy thinking. We have limitations for a reason, everything from separations of powers such as judicial review/warrants, to natural rights such against use of physical of force, property seizure, to privacy rights, etc.

Just saying this is rational because investigators must do their jobs seems entirely ignorant of the obvious, implicit balance of powers issue here between free peoples and government authorities.

In short: There are, in fact, good reasons most civil liberty organizations fight against dragnet searches. It is not an emotional hunch.

If this becomes more common, won't criminals just turn their phones off or leave them home as an alibi? The practice is a dead end. Using this for such a thing as fire vandalism and two dead dogs is a real waste here (I realize that sounds heartless). How about tracking terror suspects? Law enforcement is showing their hand here.

Well, you presume that I should worry more about criminals than the overreach of the “justice system”.

So rationally you're for corporations collecting your data under the caveat that they don't use it until it matters?

> Investigators need to do their jobs and chase every lead they can to catch criminals.

Do they really though? This is the question.

Is there no other way to live peacefully and be good to one another without an overarching busy-bodied state apparatus causing perpetual fear even among the innocent?

Do you have any suggestions for this "other way"?

I consider myself an anarchist in the sense that I believe that we should strive not to need government, taking responsibility for our own actions.

I do not currently believe we as a society have found a way to make that a reality :(

Implementing proper UBI and reducing poverty would cause a similar reduction in crime. It's not the end-all solution, but as societies build more safety nets, shift towards rehabilititive instead of punitive justice, and generally increase the "collective" wealth, crime will continue to fall.

The proper laws are already in place and on the books and work remarkably well.

There is a crime, you get a warrant or subpoena and you act on it. As long as it’s transparent it works. This idea that percolates particularly from the very left of the software community is dangerous as you pointed out.

They are so anti law enforcement they’d prefer to never help law enforcement do their job but at the end of the day, an overwhelming majority of the crimes they investigate are in support of actual crimes and not some oppressive government overreach.

It’s ok to not trust law enforcement, the US is built on distrust of government.. But then don’t cry bloody murder when nothing gets done because now you’ve tied their hands so much that they can’t investigate properly .

There is an excellent podcast called intelligence matters where an FBI chief went on to talk about end to end encryption and said something along the lines of yes e2e encryption hinders their job but if the public wants and supports that. Then they’ll have to work around it as long as the public understands reaction to crimes will be slowed drastically or go uninvestigated due to lack of evidence.

> However rationally I think there is a balance.

There is a balance. I know this is Hacker News and we're all supposed to be progressive technical vanguards fighting against The Man, but genuine bad guys exist out there. And we need to protect ourselves from them.

This isn't a case of an innocent man going to prison just so we can jail a hundred criminals. This is giving up a modicum of privacy in order to make the world safer for everybody. I think that's entirely reasonable.

The feds were able to do police work just fine before everyone had a tracking device in their pocket. They'd do just fine if Google would stop storing this data and there was no way to get it.

> And we need to protect ourselves from them.

This isn't rational, this is purely emotional. This could be a statement from a police officer that did see some awful criminals, but that would be filed under being emotionally compromised.

If you look on large scale threats to the general population, this kind of surveillance poses a much bigger risk.

> genuine bad guys exist out there. And we need to protect ourselves from them.

I doubt this is about protecting people or preventing crime. Justice comes after the fact and is all about retribution. Depending on the crime, the damage done by perpetrators can never be undone.

> This is giving up a modicum of privacy in order to make the world safer for everybody.

How far will you go? Would you give up all privacy for safety? What if society's idea of safety doesn't align with yours?

HN does have a lot of fellow libertarians (and leftists) who oppose surveillance states. But you make a good point, that authoritarian violence has always been popular, all throughout history.

It is no surprise that people like you still romanticize the notion of state violence and greater authoritarian power. Fascism is always popular amongst certain types.

This boy crying wolf bullshit of accusing everyone of being a fascist means that when it really happens here no one will believe it.

Is our government getting increasingly Authoritarian and Repressive? Yes. Are we anywhere near fascism? Fucking no

"well he was warning that there was a wolf, but in fact it was just a few wolf cubs. Nobody ever could've foreseen that they'd grow into wolves!

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