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Comment by rtrunck | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what the implications would be should a citizen or group place tracking devices on police vehicles. Though I'm sure they'd have some law in their arsenal to call that a crime.

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Some states have a law in their arsenal if you take a video recording of an officer. Even if they don't, some pissed off cop can just slap on the usual "disturbing the peace" or "resisting arrest" nonsense on you. There is too much hero worship for law enforcement and they need to be more accountable and held to higher standards.

So this would have been a great comment if you just left it at the first sentence, because it's true that there's an ongoing legal battle in a bunch of states about the right to record police officers doing their jobs. My home state of Illinois is one of the worst offenders here. I note, happily, that the police are tending to lose these fights in court.

The rest of your comment saps your credibility.

"Some pissed off cop can just" &c &c &c --- well, let's not discuss what the police should be able to do at all then, because this is logic that inevitably ends up with us throwing up our hands. Or, because we're on Hyperbolic News, having a debate about whether the citizens of a truly free society need police at all.

I added the "pissed off cop" bit because it is true, go search around if you don't think so. The rest of it shows what I think is a part of the problem. God forbid we express our opinions and try to have a discussion without someone making a meta-comment about hn itself as if they are above it all.

The problem isn't that you're expressing an opinion; it's that you're making an assertion that isn't falsifiable. Of course it's possible some police officer somewhere is going to act inappropriately. Now what?

Ha! I know someone who did that. Built transmitters and attached them to police cars in their small town. He could get a warning when a police car was approaching. Not a GPS device or anything -- just a simple proximity alert. And that was in the mid 90s.

That's a really interesting idea. The article says

"The administration, which is attempting to overturn a lower court ruling that threw out a drug dealer’s conviction over the warrantless use of a tracker, argues that citizens have no expectation of privacy when it comes to their movements in public so officers don’t need to get a warrant to use such devices."

I don't immediately see why that wouldn't apply to law enforcement cars in public, as well. It would be a boon to criminals, though, unfortunately. (Hm, which now makes me wonder if it could be happening already by more advanced criminal organizations?)

> It would be a boon to criminals, though, unfortunately.

Only if it were real-time. If there were a 7 day lag on the data being publicized it would prove the point without giving the possibility of using the data to evade police in the moment.

Yeah, I had a similar thought. And along with that, I think we need to get some people together and start a new "Government Information Awareness"[1][2] project. Turnabout is fair play, ya know?

[1]: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2003/gia.html

[2]: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1011439/mit-launche...

And on this note... does anybody actually know what happened to the original GIA site? Did they just get bored with the idea, or were they pressured into shutting it down, or what?

I've always wanted to put a camera outside my house and record all the cars that pass on the street, maybe do some license plate detection "vision" stuff. Basically have my own citizen's traffic cam. I'd love the idea of a citizen held Government Information Bureau where you could publish such information.

That's the best idead I believe I've ever heard. Is there any open source computer vision software that's designed to read license plates?

In Illinois, the consequences would probably include the felony charge of obstruction of justice. The state has an obvious interest in ensuring that criminals cannot track the location of patrol cars in real time; this is part of the implied social contract that recognizes that citizens aren't paying the price to put a police car on literally every city block, but rather pursuing spot enforcement.

The main implication would presumably be the discovery of an optimal travelling-salesman solution between all the donut shops in the city

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