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Comment by charcircuit | Hacker News Reader

This information can be critical for understanding the movement of vehicles and can benefit law enforcement giving them more evidence and knowledge to work off of. As long as these systems are accurate and not being maliciously tampered with it keeps everyone accountable to their actions.

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Corrupt government officials use this data to kidnap people. Not criminals, just people they don't like. Do you really think that's worth tolerating just because it'll help us catch more actual criminals?

Helping solve kidnapping cases is a direct and straightforward application of vehicle intelligence data.

Enabling state sponsored kidnapping is also a direct and straightforward application of vehicle intelligence data.

We should only allow its use if the cases solved is likely more than the cases caused.

Yes, I think it's worth tolerating and I think all queries should be logged and monitored for abuse. Kidnapping already is not legal to do.

But if persons in power are already not being held accountable, what the heck is a log file going to do?

If people in power can freely get away with kidnapping than there are bigger problems to fix to restore law and order.

And giving those same people more power makes it more difficult to fix the core problems.

It doesn't. It's just as easy / hard to vote such a person out.

The people they're having abducted are the people that speak out about their misbehavior. Enabling those abductions very directly makes it harder to vote them out.

Exactly my point and you’re describing giving those people more power and suggesting an unenforced audit log is all we need to keep check.

I never suggested an inenforced audit log.

Who enforces checking the log for overreach then? The cops/pols that can’t be trusted to use it?

We're already seeing that federal agents are finding clever ways to access this data while hiding the fact that they're federal agents: https://www.404media.co/floridas-wildlife-cops-are-searching...

And that's right now. They don't currently own the infra. If you think they're going to be better behaved once they do, you're delusional.

I have to wonder if the two who've replied to you are bots. Neither of them seem to have noticed what you meant by "kidnap people".

I am not a bot and I understand that kidnap people can also mean to abduct people which is the age independent term.

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