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Comment by smoser | Hacker News Reader

Toyota was working on a feature for its cars that would report license plates from amber alerts to authorities. https://x.com/SteveMoser/status/1493990907661766664?s=20

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That would frankly be a narrow, reasonable application.

The problem is the database building. Law enforcement queries should all be forced to be 1. Require a warrant or an active emergency and 2. Be strictly real-time, for a set duration, and store no information about cars that are not subject to the warrant.

If either of those is not hardcoses into the technology, I don't want my local police department to be allowed to use license plate scanners whatsoever.

Okay now, how do you show that it's not being abused? FOIA? Good luck.

Exactly. Witness how Texas has failed to provide emails between Musk and the governor... Well, they released them, but they were redacted 99.99%.

immediate public disclosure of all tracking requests

That's even harder than FOIA.

practically it's simpler, and more obvious when violated.

and i figure as long as we're legislating we'd better shoot for the moon

I'm with you on shooting for the moon, but there are many, many, many little wins that need to happen before then. But it's not work that'll happen on its own. If you want to have your hand in poking at the problem, the best place to start is to start submitting FOIA requests to the places you'd want disclosure from and hold them accountable (ie, sue them) when they inevitably don't give you what they're legally required to give.

I mean frankly if the police had to put in the work to make parallel constructions for all the evidence they're gaining by abusing this system that would be a pretty solid start.

Friend, you should try actually submitting some FOIA requests or bumping up against the "open data" stuff out there. What you're suggesting works in a perfect world where government agencies actually want to disclose information. They do not. Saying this as someone who's been in constant FOIA litigation for ten years.

No, I'm saying if when using said data to charge people with crimes, if cops/feds had to put in the work of parallel construction to have their evidence be admissible in court or risk their entire case vanish in a puff of tainted evidence, it would at the very least dramatically slow down the abuse and would also reduce the incentive for said abuse.

Basically, target demand as much as supply.

I've looked at many, many criminal court cases with these questions in mind and it really isn't that simple in court. Judges and prosecutors very often and truly don't give a fuck. Or the prosecution will just nolle the case if issues of facts come up. That happens with a lot of technology oriented cases, eg shotspotter and stingrays, where 4a issues are dropped. See [1].

Please realize that defense counsel is fighting an uphill battle while their client is stuck in pretrial limbo. The issue of parallel construction, with some exception, will not really come up. As many lawyers have told me -- what matters to them is getting their client out of jail/pretrial. And because that's the concern over all else, the publicly available information about these abuses simply don't come up in the public eye. So these problems go and go and go.

Really, a lot of what you hope happens in court just... really fucking doesn't. All that'll happen is people will be in jail longer because so many people were arrested under 4a-violating arrests and the defense attorneys get more work load.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2290703-chicago-pd-f...

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