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Comment by jameshart | Hacker News Reader

This amounts to an argument against ever using general purpose computing devices to accomplish anything.

You could say the same about literally any privately operated device. ‘I don’t know why they call these things cell towers. They do whatever they are programmed to and can be reprogrammed by anyone with access’

Heck the same applies to non electronic things too ‘why do they call it a house? It’s a general purpose structure and could be turned into a shop or a factory or a crack den at any time by anyone with access’

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Interesting perspective.

As others have noted, I believe the brightline is less “general purpose computer…” and more “…that is remotely accessible & modifiable effectively anywhere in the world”. I worry not just about OEMs and cops, but also criminals, foreign intelligence agencies, etc. Honestly potentially anyone at this point, now that folks have figured out you can use LLMs to do analysis.

This is a sound foundation for concern by itself, don’t you think?

I think that’s a very different concern - your take is more ‘governments shouldn’t deploy these things because they are incompetent’ whereas the original concern seemed to be ‘governments shouldn’t deploy these things because they are malicious’.

Neither philosophy seems to have a good limiting principle for what they mean governments should be allowed to do to efficiently enforce traffic law

Don’t get me wrong, governments putting these things up for one purpose and then using them for another (my read on your use of “malicious”) is a major concern I have.

It is broader than that though, and is the distinction I sought to capture with “anyone with access” in my original post. They are connected to the internet, and to a cloud no less! Anyone could be the NSA now, from anywhere in the world. I bet we’ll see these used to collect marketing data too.

Perhaps a limiting principle can be that we simply do not use ALPRs or other surveillance tech, or at least that we don’t connect them to the internet and require a warrant to access and use their data? Personally, I’d just prefer cops enforce traffic law the old fashioned way.

The old fashioned way cops enforce traffic law is, typically: unevenly, ineffectively, expensively, and with a large dose of racism.

So we’re talking about trading off your concerns over potential abuse and misuse of technology vs concerns about potential abuse and misuse of police powers vs just allowing traffic to kill more cyclists and pedestrians.

The nihilistic libertarian says ‘precisely - government doesn’t work - we can’t hope to make things better by concentrating power’

An optimistic democratic-institutionalist says ‘we can constrain governments at the ballot box and with constitutional limitations’.

I suspect our disagreement lies somewhere in the chasm between these world views.

I think the point is these aren't just license plate readers. For example, are they recording fingerprintable bluetooth or other wifi signals of occupants of cars that are going by?

Best cover your car in tinfoil then.

(To be clear: the government requires you to display a license plate on your car. They do not require that you broadcast an identifiable Bluetooth signature as you drive around. If you happen to do so - something you have a choice to avoid - it seems disingenuous of you to say ‘I don’t want anyone to take any notice of the Bluetooth and WiFi signatures I choose to broadcast’.)

i see it more like an argument against increasingly networked solutions. red-light cameras used to just upload when an incident occurred (or maybe required routine physical downloading?). the object itself did one thing. now it's cheap to feed continuous live feeds to a centralized processor... and once it's there, it's cheap to do a lot more.

Okay so is the argument that if a city wants to install red light cameras they must install analog film based systems because if they install a CCD camera with a raspberry pi and a network connection they could use it for other purposes?

Obviously the electronic networked solution is going to be cheaper and easier to operate. It would be insanely wasteful to force government organizations to use expensive cumbersome processes just to ensure they can’t be misused.

The solution is legislation and enforcement of rules that constrain what local governments are allowed to actually do with equipment they install and the data it collects, not regulation of what the equipment they install could theoretically be converted to accomplish.

the argument is that they should be called traffic surveillance cameras.

for the record: whatever they're called, and in fact even if they just POSTed txt license plate numbers, i'd still be opposed because they're collecting info about people who've done nothing wrong (unlike red light cameras).

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