Police Seize Teslas That Witnessed Crimes [video] | Hacker News Reader

Police Seize Teslas That Witnessed Crimes [video]

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22 pointssbuttgereit31 comments

What's the summary here? Is there a reason they can't obtain the video without taking the entire car? (court orders for surveillance video is hardly a new idea, and in today's world, and rarely involves taking the device, but instead goes to the service provider)

Sergeant Ben Therriault, president of the Richmond Police Officers Association, told the Chronicle that these activities aren’t uncommon among police today. He said offers often seek out video from Tesla vehicles for potential evidence, and while he says they often make direct contact with owners and get the evidence voluntarily, a warrant — and a tow — sometimes prove necessary, should contact not be established in a timely manner. (Therriault acknowledged to the Chronicle that a tow is "the most drastic thing you could do.”)

https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a62044621/teslas-being-tow...

For an analogous situation, think about what the police would have to do if they believed a crime was recorded in surveillance footage from a building's security system and they couldn't get consent from the owner to go and download the footage. If a judge thinks there's probable cause, the police will get a search warrant to enter the building, seize the equipment, and make copies as evidence. Obviously it looks a little different when the recording equipment is inside a car, but the legal analysis would be pretty much identical. But woe to the police department that goes around towing Teslas without getting a judge to sign an order/warrant.

I am honestly not sure where this stands. If I am a third party and my equipment witnesses a crime (say, camera recording a murder in an alley), how keen are judges to force me turn over my equipment? What if I encrypt all of the footage? Can they also compel me to unlock it? That seems like 5th Amendment problem, but you are not self testifying and not under investigation.

Interesting questions that (to an an extent) are still being worked out in U.S. case law. You're right that there's no 5th Amendment problem if you're not a suspect and likely also because surveillance footage isn't "testimonial" evidence (have fun going down that case law rabbit hole when you have a few days to waste).

How keen are judges to sign off on a search warrant to make you turn over the equipment? Pretty keen as long as the equipment itself or information on the equipment is evidence of the commission of a crime.

Whether they can compel a third party to decrypt footage stored on their equipment is a little thorny as a legal issue [see here for a short discussion: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/can-the-government-force-...]. It's not a perfect analogy, but think of a person who keeps evidence of some crime (say some stolen documents) in an unbreakable (for hypothetical purposes) lock box with a (hypothetically unbreakable) combination lock. The lock box contains the evidence, but isn't evidence itself. Similarly the combination isn't evidence of a crime. In general a court won't order the disclosure of something like the combination though they might order a person to use the combination to open the box so the police can seize the evidence. So depending on the court and the judge, some investigators might find a judge who would be willing to sign an order to compel a person to decrypt surveillance footage, though I'd also expect someone who's determined to fight such an order would have a doozy of a constitutional law question on his hands.

> What if I encrypt all of the footage? Can they also compel me to unlock it?

Yes, they absolutely can. Well, they can put you in jail until you agree to, anyway.

Guess I need to watermark all of my footage with screen caps of me stealing gum.

Tesla can detect the vehicle being towed. They could provide an option to wipe the USB drive locked in the vehicle's glovebox if this event is detected. This would make police attempts to tow potentially not worth the effort.

But it wouldn't stop the cops from towing the car in order to make the search. There would still be a good chance that you didn't wipe anything, and they won't know if you did or not until they look.

The fifth protects against self-incrimination, which has been interpreted to encompass one's family. As far as I know (IANAL) you don't have a right to withhold evidence regarding an unrelated party.

I'm assuming these aren't even uploaded to "the cloud" somewhere, and even so, its probably a limited time window.

I assume the same thing. But even if they were, police (for the most part) get to choose how they want to search for evidence. If they can get your iMessages (for instance; I'm just making a hypothetical) by sending a subpoena to Apple or by seizing your phone and copying the messages directly from it they can do either one of those things (even if one would be much easier).

The recordings are stored on a usb stick in the car. The time window is quite long.

>and in today's world, and rarely involves taking the device, but instead goes to the service provider)

I thought sentry mode footage is stored locally rather than on cloud?

Yes, hence why the police just arrive with a warrant and a tow truck when they "can't get the voluntary consent of the owner in a timely manner"

I wonder what do they do next? Break the window and trash the glovebox with a crowbar? Or is stealing the car a strategy to force the owner to give the voluntary consent in a timely manner?

Presumably take it to their garage/lockup, get a locksmith (or someone similar on the police force) to hook through the window to open the manual door release, open/pick any remaining barriers to entry, and collect the video, I assume.

Yep, seizing the car is crazy.

All they need is the usb stick that's plugged inside the car (or a copy of it).

Having dealt directly with search warrants for a number of years I can say that it's not quite as crazy as it seems (at least as a legal matter). Just because the police can get the evidence one way doesn't mean that they're required to. My comment above describes a similar situation.

I actually think the legal issue that might end up hanging San Fran PD (or others) up is that a search warrant must provide facts that would let a judge determine that the place to be searched (in this case the stored memory of the car) is likely to contain evidence of the commission of a crime. If I correctly understand how the Tesla Sentry Mode works then it's not literally always recording everything. And if that's the case then the PD will have to show not only that the Tesla was near the scene of the crime (or near something else that would be evidence, e.g., suspect leaving home at a certain time), but would also have to show that they have good reason to believe that the Tesla was actually recording at the time. Whether they can make that showing seems likely to vary considerably between particular courts, but I guess we'll find out.

> Just because the police can get the evidence one way doesn't mean that they're required to.

I'm not American, but I would hope that when they have a choice between taking somebody's usb stick away or taking somebody's car + usb stick away, they should be required to do the former. Especially when that somebody is an innocent bystander.

> If I correctly understand how the Tesla Sentry Mode works then it's not literally always recording everything

I can clarify this part. The sentry mode records a short clip when the car is parked AND it has over 20% battery AND it detects some movement around car. The dashcam is recording when driving, but only the last hour or so is kept around.

Of course both sentry and dashcam can be turned off or the usb stick might not be inserted or there can be a technical issue, but in general drivers usually keep them on in public.

So based on what you are saying the police have to convince the judge that it's likely that something interesting happened very close to the parked car (triggering sentry mode recording).

> I can clarify this part. The sentry mode records a short clip when the car is parked AND it has over 20% battery AND it detects some movement around car. The dashcam is recording when driving, but only the last hour or so is kept around. Of course both sentry and dashcam can be turned off or the usb stick might not be inserted or there can be a technical issue, but in general drivers usually keep them on in public.

Thanks for the clarification. Confirms my hunch that this practice is in for legal challenges the first time a lawyer with a little more technical knowledge runs up against it.

Here a factual re-enactment of the cop thought process when deciding to tow a Tesla

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToIyDSRSN5g taken from a documentary Zoolander (2001)

I understand the legal precedent has been set via building security systems and warrants to enter but in my opinion towing a car because “contact could not be established in a timely manner” is not remotely ever an excuse for towing someone’s vehicle. Something tells me they’ll even invoice the owner for the tow and storage.

>Something tells me they’ll even invoice the owner for the tow and storage.

That's going to depend on the department, but given my experience it's a distinct possibility.

>not remotely ever an excuse for towing someone’s vehicle.

The average person absolutely is going to agree with you here. United States case law, however, doesn't. The police don't have to choose the easiest or most convenient way to seize evidence once they get a warrant.

Same thing (I believe) was discussed recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41409882

Looks like the same news, though a different story about that news.

Even this video is a commentary on a story largely discussing the original Chronicle story.

What I like about this take is that Lehto is a lawyer and often discusses these things from a legal perspective that wouldn't be the kind of exploration taken in the original.

I think he makes a good point in the video that when your only tool is a hammer every problem starts to look like a nail. The police get vehicles towed so often that doing it in this situation didn't seem strange to them at all.

Agree completely. It's one reason I'm weary of the police. What for them is just the daily grind, not unlike fixing a software bug is for many in this audience, is for others very possibly negatively life-impacting or even negatively life-changing.

I have to imagine it's all too easy to let routine and normalcy blunt consideration of the impacts of that routine or allow you to ignore the responsibility that such power over others rightfully demands.

To be clear, I'm not necessarily talking about an individual officer carrying out assigned duties (though it may all still largely apply)... I'm really speaking about low and mid-level policy decisions that are just out-of-press-scrutiny... the indifference of a bureaucracy to the power it wields over others but to which society simply doesn't care enough to make a stink.

Do the people whose cars get towed have to pay for it? Towing and storage can get really really expensive really fast. After a short while, it would make sense to walk away from the car, as the fees would exceed the value of the car. Is this what happens to the Tesla owners who don't voluntarily hand over the video to the police when asked?

Does a Tesla owner (I am not) have any control over the video data? In other words, can an owner configure the vehicle to only retain the last 60 seconds of video data - something like that? Does an owner have any access to the video data? For example, can an owner view the video data from past, like with a Ring camera? Just curious. Thanks.

The recordings are stored on a local usb drive. There is no configuration beyond turning the feature on/off. (You can set it to automatically turn off on some locations, e.g. in your own garage to conserve battery.)

The owner can view the recordings either in an app inside the car or by taking the drive out and plugging it somewhere else. There is no wireless access, there is no first-party cloud backup.[1] Tesla might have some over-the-air access to the recordings based on the privacy settings, but these are not shared with the users.

The owner cannot set their own retention, the car erases the oldest recordings when the drive is full. Maybe one could use a very small drive to limit it, but that would also limit the dashcam.

The owner can view live stream from 7 of the cameras in the Tesla phone app. When this happens, the car flashes lights and displays a message on the screen. They can also enable/disable sentry mode in that app.

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I would guess that the owners will be eventually able to view/manage the past recordings remotely as well. The cars are getting regular updates with new features, it just takes time.

[1] - there is a project that let's you plug a rpi into the usb port and emulate a drive, then backup the files over the air once you get to home wifi: https://github.com/milesburton/teslacam

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