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Comment by pj_mukh | Hacker News Reader

But also, I dont understand all this hand-wringing. EFF has a clear easy solution [1]: Put all the data behind a Warrant. Problem solved. No trust required.

Wanna look up where a murderer drove? Go get a warrant

Wanna look up where a robbery suspect drove to? Go get a Warrant.

Divorce case hinging on one party's whereabouts on a certain date? Warrant.

Speeding tickets are automatically filed anyways.

[1]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/08/too-little-too-late-fl...

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There are plenty of exceptions police can get to bypass warrant requirements. Think for example of stingers and other cell spoofing systems or the license plate readers they have on the front of their cruisers. Even if they do have to get a warrant judges are far more likely to simply grant any warrant request if it has to do with digital surveillance. Carpenter v. United States and Chatrie v. United States have outlined this behaviour, and in the wake of their rulings created the bias towards what are basically automatically approved warrants for such data.

The EFF is wrong. The clear solution is NOT COLLECTING THE DATA.

There is no reason or justification for us to live in a surveillance state, "protecting" the data with a warrant doesn't cut it.

Cutting down and destroying mass surveillance equipment is a patriotic action and should be applauded.

It should be a criminal act to attempt to build a mass surveillance apparatus, whether it's for law enforcement or private use.

Would Ring be considered a mass surveillance apparatus? Accuweather? Facebook? Google? The Internet?

So long as it is configured to be a mass surveillance apparatus, then yes. It is possible to have lots of data without organizing it in a way to enable mass surveillance. Google, Facebook, and recently Ring, are excellent examples. I don't know what AccuWeather is to comment on it, but I would say your ISP (what I'm assuming is what you mean when you say "the internet" since "the internet" is not any single entity) is likely not a mass surveillance apparatus, since with the implementation of https, the spying they can do is superficial at best

* The NSA has backdoored core routers of the Internet, to gather traffic and metadata. The metadata is not superficial, but since the Internet is no longer decentralized, the useful surface for spying has moved into the applicaiton domains. This is what I mean by "The Internet". * And FISA warrants do allow large-scale spying. * Not only is Facebook explicitly a mass surveillance (and mass influence) device, but there are multiple vectors into it for law enforcement.

I mean ALPR's have worked wonders in my town [1]. So I'll keep supporting them until we restructure all our cities to drastically reduce car speeds. Plus post 2020 police backlash, detective work has basically disappeared and clearing rates have cratered [2]. Police are now no longer able to (or are refusing to) solve crime "the old fashioned way", and the public has no real leverage to "make them do it".

So I get it, we're in the middle of a populist uprising against it, and it's nice to ride that wave of support. But behind the scenes, these two factors are driving adoption, and we'll keep coming back to it when the backlash eventually fizzles.

I say we should just use this backlash to put in the protections EFF suggests or fix the two underlying causes. Those are the options.

[1]: https://www.oaklandca.gov/Public-Safety-Streets/Traffic-Safe...

[2]: https://stateline.org/2025/11/24/why-clearance-rates-dont-te...

Issuing tickets doesn't require retaining any data on vehicles you aren't ticketing, you're conflating issues.

I'm not. There are two issues in my comment.

> I mean ALPR's have worked wonders in my town [1]. So I'll keep supporting them

With flock, citizens are concerned by the privacy implications of the state keeping a dossier of each citizen’s movements.

But once we assure citizens the flock cameras have already issued 500,000 speeding fines in a single town this year, no doubt they’ll come to support the cameras.

Perhaps the cameras could also automatically issue parking fines, to garner even more popular support!

Yes we should just always give in to populism’s demands and it’ll have no negative consequences ever /s

…oops [1]

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/18/headway/motor-vehicles-fa...

Have you driven 7th St. between Adeline St. and Linden St? I wonder if maybe the speed limit is too low. One good thing about not having automated systems like this is it allows natural breaking of rules that are poor rules to begin with, and there is effort in manually enforcing, eventually leading to change

“I wonder if maybe the speed limit is too low”

Super curious how anyone could think this. It’s not a highway, and there's pedestrians crossing. The buildings aren’t dense and the setbacks are large so maybe it “feels” like you should go faster but doesn’t mean it’s safe to.

And Oakland especially has really bad driving culture so I’m glad for this automatic enforcement.

Did clearing rate crater because there was a change or because the police is throwing a toddler tantrum strike and refuses to work?

Since outright refusal to do their jobs is more common than any real difficulty.

"I mean ALPR's have worked wonders in my town"

Among those wonders being nearly 200,000 tickets.

There are claims of safety improvements but strangely zero actual statistics about improved safety, measured speed is a proxy for safety but it has to be matched with actual casualty numbers and it is quite suspicious that these don't exist. Did the accident rate go down? Number of deaths or serious injuries?

>Police are now no longer able to (or are refusing to) solve crime "the old fashioned way"

This is pathetic, and I don't want to be controlled by robot overlords because local governments can't get their ducks in a row.

What happens when say FBI gets a warrant for "foreign actors" and sends it to a FISA court in secret?

> Speeding tickets are automatically filed anyways.

Not in States with coherent Constitutions.

The problem is that the fourth amendment at least for the US has been filled with so many exceptions it might as well not exist. And even if an officer does violate your fourth amendment rights, good luck getting them punished for it, because qualified immunity.

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