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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Are there documented cases of that happening?

It's one thing for an SOD tip to put a cop at the right place at the right time to observe a transaction or pull over a car driven by a guy with warrants out.

It's another thing entirely for an SOD tip to be the totality of probable cause, and for the police to lie to prosecutors or prosecutors lie to a judge about it.

The latter case sounds much less likely to me, given the effort these slide decks show of LEOs trying to stay within the confines of the law (I don't happen to agree with where those confines are, but the evidence we have shows the DOJ paying at least lip service to it).

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Unbelievable. Yes, we know they do this. We had this conversation a couple months ago and it was attached to an article describing exactly what they do. They don't just put cops "in the right place at the right time", which is your favorite and flawed analogy. They tell cops to pull someone over at the right place and the right time and make up a reason to pull them over.

This should be illegal. It should be illegal even if something perfectly analogous has existed in that past. The extensiveness of a technique and the power that it allows matters.

I'm not going to go back and find this conversation because I shouldn't have to. It's not my job to follow you around and make sure you are being intellectually honest. It's pretty frustrating that someone as well-respected as you are here, and someone who is such a prolific poster, refuses to update his model of the world when new information is introduced into it. You are mind-bogglingly tenacious in trying to quell the outrage over civil liberties abuses and apparently go as far as selectively forgetting relevant information.

No, that's not your job. It's weird that you think it is.

Could you cite a link to the case you're thinking of, where evidence from SIGINT surveillance was used directly as probable cause for a search?

Also, could you yourself update your mental model of what's happening on HN? You obviously think I'm a tenacious foe of civil liberties causes. The opposite is true. I've done as much in the real world to support civil liberties causes as most anyone else on HN has. I contribute to candidates who I believe support a strong fourth amendment. I've canvassed for candidates like them. I donate to civil liberties causes.

What I have a problem with are batshit conspiracy theories, which is something HN is rife with. People should stop pretending that conspiracy theories are helpful when they're of the right valence. They aren't.

If you've actually followed me around HN, you know that I'm not at all unwilling to acknowledge when I'm wrong, as a cursory look at HNSearch will show. So, instead of yelling at me, why not show where I'm wrong?

Personal anecdote: riding as passenger in friend's vehicle, LEO pulls over, friend says 'oh, not again.' LEO advises '... license plate lamp out ...' Friend says, 'no it isn't,' exits vehicle, examines lamp -- in good working order. LEO says, 'must have made a mistake'. Friend says, 'no, I have a name similar to someone with an active warrant', cop says 'uh, huh'. Runs license. Free to go.

Lawful stop? No. Remedy? No.

The core issue is that the judiciary's (and your) presumption of reliable and trustworthy law enforcement behavior is not valid. This is a LEO 'company culture' problem which has always existed (formerly a racial problem, but now everyone's problem now that we're not doing that any more).

I'm not sure what the answer is, other than people need to learn what has happened in the ghetto for the last 200 years, then accept that they're next.

I'm confused about the exact details here -- does he believe there is an auto plate tracker which shows the name the vehicle is registered to (him) which gets a false-positive on a secondary search for name? It would seem more reasonable to have a list of suspects/warrants, and then a list of their own vehicles, and just pop it up then. You'd also want to find cars the suspect was known to drive, since it's pretty common for a "criminal" to register his property in someone else's name to protect from seizure.

I think it would be more plausible that he was profiled for race/location/type of vehicle/etc., rather than his name, but maybe there are more specifics?

Your theory does not coincide with my anecdote. This name confusion scenario was familiar to the driver.

Warrants are issued by a court. Courts are imperfect and may not have correct date of birth or other identifying information beyond a name.

Automated license scanners make the story more plausible; the officer could have received an automated alert on his in-car laptop.

Yes, I just don't see how an automated license plate scanner would get confused by a similar name -- I assume those have access to DMV database, so it would pull up 5DES800 and see it's registered to Marcus Walters of 1 Crypto Way who has 5 open warrants for overthrowing the state; it wouldn't say "this is a car registered to Marcus Walter" which the officer would then confuse with the open warrant for Marcus WalterS.

I suppose it's possible the ALPS could be configured to just ID every single car, and the officer had in his mind (or using another system) the name of a specific suspect who he matched (erroneously) to the ALPS results of the victim here.

> If you've actually followed me around HN, you know that I'm not at all unwilling to acknowledge when I'm wrong

HAH!

Sorry, continue.

Could it be that this is the closest you've come to ever acknowledging you were wrong about anything?

I don't think there are documented cases of the SOD information being used as probable cause (in the sense that it was presented in court as justification for a search). Much of the point of the program is to avoid that happening.

It seems likely there are cases of the SOD information being used to target people for abusive traffic stops (the agent in the Reuters article says And so we'd alert the state police to find an excuse to stop that vehicle, and then have a drug dog search it).

With the tactics being top-secret I doubt there would be a lot of documented cases of it happening that could prove it exists - that would kind of defat the whole purpose of it being secret. It would probably take another Snowden to get any evidence on it.

>It would probably take another Snowden to get any evidence on it.

And I think that the possibility of another Snowden for this requires that there be some functioning mechanism by which requests to do this are centrally cleared, or even recorded, which I don't think is a sure thing. I see it just as likely that different agencies and departments within them are operating under a lot of different standing blanket orders in the form of legal interpretations, and that once a parallel construction is created, the records of any alternate explanation are destroyed (or were never created.)

Not necessarily - some policeman or policewoman doing this or seeing her peers do that can one day wake up and say - I had enough with violating rights of Americans, I'm just going to document everything we're doing that is wrong and then publish it, and be whatever it will be. Fat chance, I know, but who thought it could happen in NSA before it did? You never know. And after that happens, of course higher-ups will deny that happened, but once the cat is out of the bag and the attention of the society has been captured that would be a different story altogether than now. It would move from "those crazy libertarians are breaking out their tinfoil hats again" to "omg omg police is really doing it right under our noses! It could even happen to me!"

For once, somebody could get and publish all those training manuals - unredacted, with all the juicy details. With it being this entrenched, something must be written down - you can't rule system this vast on lore alone.

Oh, you're going to enjoy this read. A story that happened just recently:

http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/LAPD-Los-Angeles-Pol...

LEOs and DAs have no problem paying for false testimony, whether it's to cover SOD or not. They can use taxpayer money and there's no real repercussions for getting caught.

Innocent people are routinely murdered by police in my area, with no justification or repercussion. The lucky ones who survive get million dollar settlements in taxpayer money. The cops never face serious punishment. We had a group of LEOs literally beat a defenseless man to death, captured in full audio and video, and they got off scot free. Look up Kelly Thomas.

I know that police here in Australia will lie about where a tip came from, including to a Judge -- solely because one of my best friends is a cop and we've discussed it before. The thing is, that could be an isolated incident, I've no idea whether that happens a lot. That said, yesterday there was the article on HN about the Kings County police officer who indeed tried to lie about what had actually transpired, only he was caught out and fired(! Holy crap how good is that). I think none of us have enough info to really know what goes on, so I personally withhold my judgement about it in general, unless in a specific case I have seen credible info to lead me to believe otherwise. Hard topic, tbh.

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