chaps

Next time try to make yourself easier to talk to and maybe you'll get better answers. When responding to you it felt like all you were trying to do was "own the left" instead of approach it with actual curiosity and interest. The sort of thing where nothing I say will ever, ever, ever satisfy you. Have a good one.

The documents I'm talking about didn't come from FOIA. They came from printing them at the clerk of courts' office. They aren't redacted.

But yes, these documents should be FOIA'able and I shouldn't have to redact them. It's one of the reasons why I'm involved in advocating for masking the judicial branch FOIA'able in Illinois.

I don't know what to tell you besides yes, it's really that bad. A lot of it is just people passing the buck down the road, a lot of it (at the time) was covid, a lot of it was the difficulty of people on EM to publicly talk about their situation. Defense attorneys just want to get their clients out of jail and a lot of the EM stuff is a distraction to that. It's very much a, "we'll put in a ticket" sort of situation across many moving parts.

Lawyers began telling their clients to film themselves in their homes at all times so that they could prove to judges that they were in their homes when the devices went off. That's advice they give because the risks of not doing that are going back into jail. And to prove all that, you still have to go through all that process, filming yourself, etc. It's truly bad.

It happened with both RF and GPS! The Cook County Sheriff's Office moved between the two at one point so it was possible to see the effects over time as folk moved over. Some people got more false alarms when moving to GPS, some got fewer. IIRC it was about even.

It wasn't easy to find, heh. Lots of FOIA requests to even get to a point of where I could go through court records at the Clerk of Courts. Obstinate lawyers for months and months. But after all that, I can find the court documents at the Clerk of Courts. I printed them there and I don't have them anymore. I would need to redact even if I had them. But they were all the same form, but with the actual violations largely hand-written notes written by a prosecutor in a hurry. It was usually a list of like, ten instances that they seemingly picked from random of the GPS rlogs. The best glance I had into what was by FOIA'ing the GPS records of someone who died much later but had a lawyer who fought tooth and nail to show he didn't leave his home. GPS is truly all over the place in these logs. I validate a lot of that against call center records that themselves took months to get but show when alarms and calls are made to the devices, plus when dispatch is done.

A lot of this stuff is hard to talk about because it's about real people in real pending (at the time) cases.. and I'm also not a criminal defense attorney by any means. There's a reason the first article I posted had their identity completely removed. There's weird liability and believe me I want to say more.

Very honestly, I wish I could have done more reporting on how fucked up those devices were. I put a lot of time and effort into reporting that couldn't make it to print, largely because I was doing freelance work at the time. The first offer I got for that piece was $50. Wasn't sustainable.

Do you have any questions about these EM programs?

Yes, everyone on the devices received false alarms. It's why there was a call center that managed the false alarm flows. I highly suggest you read the articles I've shared.

I fought tooth and nail to get access to the data showing how often devices reported "invalid" status (where the device's specs said it was something like, within 150 feet of inaccuracy it reported "invalid"). They initially told me they couldn't get me that data because it'd crash their database running that query. Basically threatened to sue them and over the next 6mo or so I got two 100GB MSSQL dumps. Hundreds of millions of rows of devices reporting back that their GPS signal was invalid. It would take a lot of time to make it sharable because they included the actual GPS location infos.

That might be true for a place in the middle of nowhere with no features, the same device model managed by the same company and the same call center person and same sheriff and judges and prosecutor. But with GPS in an urban environment where many homes are over 100 years built from many different materials, 33 feet is a lot.

They did, yes. I hope you have a better day.

"You've essentially claimed police/judges are doing something rather stupid and terrible."

Yes, yes I am. You really need to realize just how unbelievably fucking arbitrary the criminal courts are. At every level. They're not tech people.

To answer your question, I have examples of motions by prosecutors to suspend people from the EM program where they specifically cite specific data points just barely out of their homes, where video footage provably shows they were inside the whole time. They're not mine to share.

Btw, the courts are public and you should try some criminal courts watching. Pick a random day and just go.

That's totally fair, I shouldn't have said it like that!

Ah. That's probably just a result of the pasted article being part of a series.

To be explicit: yes, many, many, many people were reinarcerated because of faulty GPS.

If someone's home is 30' by 30' feet, yes, that person's device will report them having left their home and they'll get a visit if GPS suddenly shifts 30 feet to the left.

I'm talking about the class of problem. It happens in normal weather conditions and things like this exacerbate the problem.

Really not sure what the hostility's about.

Not sure where your confusion is coming from. Have you never used GPS in a place with bad signal? Where it gets confused and you miss your turn? It's the same failure mode. Just the repercussions are getting arrested instead of getting off on the wrong exit.

Also wrote this one, hopefully it helps your confusion: https://chicagoreader.com/news/false-alarms/

This is exactly the sort of thing that leads to people getting reincarcerated after their electronic monitoring devices mistakenly report them leaving their homes.

Some reporting I did on the topic a few years back: https://chicagoreader.com/news/many-on-house-arrest-in-cook-...

At the risk of callousness, why is this article on HN? AFAIK, that's not exactly a major or notable position in the bank because of how BofA inflates their titles.. super strange that their title's mentioned.

Thinking of it more as a generic environment enumerator (that definitely works without any caveats).

Tried solving solving a similar abstraction after getting annoyed with infrastructures that didn't have lsof installed consistently, or had different versions strewn about: https://github.com/red-bin/lsofer/blob/master/lsofer.sh

That doesn't make it any less important to recognize when it happens.

Same. Was thinking the other week what would be the smallest llm one could make that is able to figure out tooling in its local environment and build something that can then expand out to other hosts, build more of itself, etc.

1MB?

who's you?

Summarized happened.

One that wants to teach Greek mythology but can't because no child left behind forced teachers to teach the standardized tests over all else.

There's a lot of truth to this, but....... fuck they did a great job disincentivizing it.

In high school we had to read and annotate this 900p Greek mythology book during our summer break. Our grade reflected how well we annotated it. I didn't do any of it (thanks Ultima Online).

The very first in-class assignment we had that year took about an hour and had about a 25% bigger impact on our grade than annotating did.

Not saying that grades are the end goal but it felt like a slap in the face that the exploration of such a deep topic just.. didn't matter.

Are you okay?

Fucking yikes, bro.

You literally said, "It's also important to note that Flock is just a license plate reader."

You're spreading misinformation about what these things are and aren't. It's fucked up. But I'm hopeful that you can do better.

Also, please, for your sake -- submit a FOIA request for footage taken from a public camera. It'll get denied because public records laws consider this sorta information private. Your oversimplification is intellectually silly.

Friend, even after listening to that interview you still insisted on saying that flock ONLY does ALPR and only now that you've been given an example of where you were wrong, you suggest that I listen to the thing that clearly didn't inform you enough?

Your goalposts are quite mobile.

Flock is not just a license plate reader. They have many products. Here's an article today that includes a decent deep dive into the code of one of its new projects that's... definitely more than just license plate reading.

https://www.wired.com/story/flock-safety-os-investigate/

Everybody should submit FOIAs. If that makes me an advocate for public records, then sure, I'm an advocate.

And of course those things count, but it's arguably only focused on your immediate surroundings. I've done some pretty significant cleanup of parks in my area. It's very rewarding.

Are you interested in being less antagonistic about basic civics?

You're being needlessly antagonistic and it makes me think you haven't actually explored local options. Let's start elsewhere: what sort of civic engagement are you involved with? Have you ever submitted a FOIA request? Been to a community advocacy group?

It does matter and you're lying to yourself if you think it doesn't.