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Comment by dealuromanet | Hacker News Reader

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How is enforcing the law to not make loud noises that make everyone else's life around you worse a bad thing?

What justifies someone suffering from PTSD, with a sleeping baby in their home or just enjoying life being put through noise pollution just because someone wants to make loud noises?

Police officers can pull those people over and issue citations for vehicles that are too loud. You could create similar justifications for using these systems for monitoring Wrongspeak in the same way by citing PTSD, the children, or people who just want to enjoy life without being put through thought pollution when someone's thoughts are contradicting the Cabinet's thoughts.

It's better to not have this technology deployed in the first place. It's very easy to have an officer pull someone over if their vehicle is too loud, issue a hefty citation in place, and then let word get around that you will get pulled over for exceeding the local decibel limit for your vehicle.

Sure you could which is why your society should have strong protections for content of speech. Technology should not and will not be the limiting factor on enforcement of laws, the laws and the constraints we place on them are.

I don't trust the Party to care about protecting speech. Or to steward this technology properly. Or to be honest about what they're doing with the hardware. What the Party says publicly and what it does internally are two different things.

What are you going to do if they abuse the power? Protest and try to raise awareness? They'll just bankrupt the entire group of protestors for being too loud.

If you want your concerns to be taken seriously, I think I’d steer clear of using terms like “the Party.”

It just doesn’t seem worth it to try to have a serious conversation (and no it’s not because The Party is conspiring to dismiss you).

Do you prefer the Cabinet? Anyway if all you have are qualms about the allusions, then that’s just the same as saying you don’t like what I said because it makes you uncomfortable. It doesn’t invalidate what I said. Notice how you ignored a legitimate question to gripe over allusions and words.

I don’t know, are you talking about the Cabinet? And no, it has to do with imprecision and lack of seriousness. For example I never would’ve guessed that “the Party” was meant to refer to “the Cabinet.”

So your claim is that in the US, where there are strong protections for content of speech, the Secretary of Defense, Transportation Sec, Secretary of Interior, etc, will bankrupt protestors?

Seems like a laughable claim but I’m interested to see your evidence for it.

I'm not sure that adding a layer of human discretion into this is going to make it more palatable to the affected people. For something like traffic stops, being able to make a convincing argument that you're not picking and choosing who to cite for prejudiced reasons is probably useful. Whether that's a good equilibrium, I'm less sure, but I get why a government might pursue it.

To argue in court that a vehicle is too loud, they'd need a meter in their cars similar to how they measure speed to be able to argue in court that you were speeding. So in effect, you'd have the exact same thing except it would be mobile.

As the article said, several microphones are required to pinpoint the location of sound. Location and distance are very important to measuring sound.

I forget what city recently tried to enforce vehicle noise, but I recall reading that virtually all tickets were thrown out under argument that the distance, angle of meter, nearby materials weren't perfect enough to measure adequately.

Furthermore as far as I've seen, measurements are with a handheld meter after the vehicle is pulled over, not when the driver is wide-open-throttle and over the speed limit.

It makes much more sense to measure from a fixed location while the vehicle is in motion.

You'd need police officers in police cruisers waiting for the sign of trouble. The officers would communicate with one another when they notice a loud vehicle pass by. Then they can use a noise gun to get a decibel reading. This is an intentional physical bottleneck placed on the surveillance apparatus so that it is limited to only identifying and pursuing those cars that are too loud. You would have the same end result if the fines are hefty enough without needing to build and deploy a surveillance dragnet that you won't be able to escape from once it exists.

A town or city would do better with a few police officers in cruisers keeping an eye on things than with these boxes deployed on every streetlight listening 24/7.

We're very much stopping "thought pollution" all the time, we're not too great at it but the equivalent to someone forcing sound on you is someone forcing thoughts on you.

We have laws and automatic tools (again, not great ones) to find propaganda and lies and try to stop them. We absolutely should let people decide what information to be exposed to better.

Several cities in the US are way ahead of you. There are cameras and microphones on LED lamp posts being used for "big-data" whatever that means. Here [1] is just one of the cities and I suspect that once the lawsuits started being flung the other cities buying these likely kept it quiet. There are no federal or state laws banning these so it is up to cities to decide if they want to ban/permit this data ingestion. There are a myriad of other articles if one wants to go down this rabbit hole.

[1] - https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/news/san-diego-faces-lawsuit...

I do not support this technology being used anywhere. It is not surprising to me that cities in California would be the ones interested in this. I do not trust most of these cities to be responsible stewards in general, least of all when it comes to surveillance equipment. California's politicians have lost track of reality and priorities.

If I were to walk around in public blasting airhorns in strangers' ears and shining laser pointers in their eyes just for fun, would you be outraged when a police officer tells me to stop exercising my free speech?

Key words: when a police officer tells you

Those things are not free speech and your examples are disingenuous. If you need to reach for disingenuous examples in defense of the Cabinet's chosen machinery, you don't have an argument worth standing on.

Comparing road noise to wrongspeak is also disingenuous.

There was no comparison between road noise and wrongspeak. That was a warning. The Cabinet wants boxes that hear things with precision 24/7 and can issue fines. Of course they'll justify it however they can.

It's a warning because the power will be abused. You have 1984 in your username - I recommend re-reading that book if it's been a while since you read it.

How often are you discussing your political dissension in the middle of the road?

I’m appropriately paranoid about abuse of power in other areas, like for example monitoring personal telecom.

It's not about what I do. Your response is similar to people who respond to privacy advoates with "what do you have to hide" or who brush aside their concerns with "I have nothing to hide."

One thing to consider is the trend of expected speech or compulsory speech. There are people who would want to see if other people are saying what they want them to say, rather than just not saying what they don't want them to say. There are people who weigh someone's words to see how dedicated they are to a cause or to an idea or to a movement.

These technologies empower language police even in cases where someone would otherwise choose to say nothing. And they establish a precedent.

I’m firmly not in the “I have nothing to hide” camp.

I am firmly in the “pick your battles” camp.my

Worrying about cameras on the road picking up your speech when 99% of the population willingly carries smartphones doesn’t seem like the right place to pick a fight.

Every law written can be abused. That doesn't mean we shouldn't have laws. And of all the differences people have, most people agree with the laws that protect people from intentional and indiscriminate harm.

People with loud exhausts are injuring people intentionally and indiscriminately.

Usually it's through a stress response that turns into PTSD if a person has to endure it for too long.

Another injury comes from sleep deprivation. Going days/weeks/months/years without reliable and uninterrupted sleep is an actual torture method that permanently damages people in both mind and body.

Other times it's tinnitus from being exposed to noise levels far, far above safe ranges. Even "quiet" bikes are allowed to be well above safe noise levels. Tinnitus doesn't heal.

Hiding behind your freedom of expression to justify intentionally and indiscriminately injuring people is low.

Nah, what's low is to pretend that the solution to any of those is surveillance deployed at scale. Police officers in cruisers with radar and noise guns coordinating amongst one another to pull over and fine some drivers with very loud cars accomplish the same result without empowering abusive centralized authorities with boxes that hear everything 24/7.

> That doesn't mean we shouldn't have laws.

Nobody said we shouldn't have laws.

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