I don't think there should be an expectation of anonymity for the specific case of operating a car on a public road. It's a lot of responsibility, so you should be scrutinized when you do it.
That's part of my grievances against the urbanism of the U.S.A. When the only viable option to get around is cars, there is no privacy.
It's important to advocate for public places to be livable for everyone, not just drivers.
The problem isn't that you're visible, or that what you're doing should be private, it's that any cop can access your location history for any reason, at any time, with no scrutiny. Cops are known to be abusive, violent thugs, and giving them this ability is definitely a dangerous route.
IMO these recordings should be kept by a third party, and cops should need to appeal to that third party to access it. Going before a judge to get a warrant would be preferred.
From having worked on systems like this, anything that allows a cop to look into people's whereabouts will have extensive logs of queries being performed because abuses are one of the first problems you run into. They happen _all the time_. They'll look up their romantic partners, an ex's new boyfriend, ...
I am of the opinion that automatic gathering of the travel history of a plate should be locked behind judicial approval, and that the data should have a lifetime. But I'm 99.99% confident that the searches are at least logged because we got complaints, like, 1 month in.
I'm worried that YouPeople(TM) (i.e. the reader, HN, some unspecified future group, etc.) will vote in some jerks who will decide that people like me ought to be scrutinized to the full extent of the law. And your cheerleaders will say things like "they shouldn't have broken the law" when it was never possible, by design, to comply with all the laws all the time in the first place.
This happened with the IRS and ICE. Illegal immigrants were told to pay taxes because the IRS didn't reveal their address to ICE. And it didn't. Now the new regime has fired and replaced the people at the IRS responsible for that policy, and the IRS will now report all data it collected about illegal immigrants to ICE.
And the same people crying about that trap (dox yourselves to us, or be guilty of tax evasion) are mostly the same people who think nailing Al Capone for tax evasion was a step forward for policy/government. Drives me up the f-ing wall that people won't take a step back and think about the big picture of policy.
Or a scenario where an arbitrary cop deliberately leaks the information to a nominally private group (perhaps named like the "${Color}${Clothing}s") whose violent activities are ignored or pardoned by the law.
_will_ vote in some folks? see this is what confuses me about the trump is a fascist crowd, aren't we concerned about giving the state this much power because of the people who have already been voted in?
I mean, it's too little too late but likewise it's amazing to me that the same people who are trying to convince me that the current government is fascist is also at the same time still campaigning on behalf of the same government to disarm its citizens.
> it's amazing to me that the same people who are trying to convince me that the current government is fascist is also at the same time still campaigning on behalf of the same government to disarm its citizens.
Why is that amazing? It doesn't really matter if civilians in the US are armed and trained and organized. If the US government decides to violently oppress people, the US government will win. Sure, it'll hurt more fighting against armed civilians, but they'll still win. The idea that the 2nd Amendment creates a populace full of people who could win an engagement against the US military is hilarious.
The ability of the citizens to resist the government's ability to enforce compliance of unpopular stuff is a defense in depth thing.
Not having pervasive surveillance is one layer. Due process that gives huge veto power to whatever the minority on the issue is is another. Being able to decide you'll take an enforcer with you rather than spend life in prison (and the pause and increased resource expenditure and scrutiny that causes the enforcers) is another layer.
The fascism is consolidating power in the executive branch by having a billionaire gut the federal bureaucracy while trying to intimidate judges who rule against the administration and critical news agencies, among other things. Gun restrictions are a separate topic, and there is no serious chance that ordinary citizens are gong to form a militia to take on the US Military.
First of all, you have a point - Trump is a great object lesson for why its probably not a great idea to have a huge, powerful, monolithic state and a commander in chief that can launch nuclear weapons. I don't think anyone would dispute that.
But most people see that the government as currently comported isn't going anywhere, even acknowledging the dedicated if incondite attempts of the current administration to "tame administrative bloat," as they might describe it. Thus your average "liberal" thinks first that government should be executed carefully by professional policy makers that respect the power of the state and second it should "take people's guns away."
But I will say that almost no liberal wants to totally disarm the public, anyway. That is a cartoon position which charitably could be attributed to loud voices on social media or something, but not a real policy position held by typical "libs". Most liberals just want guns to be properly regulated (perhaps even restricted to well regulated militias, to recall a phrase from somewhere). There might be some quibbling about precisely where the line between proper regulation and enabling oppression go, but I'd wager a majority of Americans are in favor of some version of the right to bear arms.
As evidence of this I proffer this pew research poll (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/24/key-facts...) which indicates that more than half of people who do not own guns could see themselves buying one in the future. 32% of people own guns in the U.S.
And I am sure when they are caught the full brunt of the U.S. justice system holds them accountable for their wretched behavior. More likely they just move departments. Logging something is moot if those abusing the power are rarely held accountable for things ranging all the way up to murder.
I agree that we don't have an expectation of privacy on a public road, but I feel like we've been frog boiled in the US into equating that with being tracked everywhere, all the time -- or, rather, constantly surveilled by both private and public entities.
I agree with you on the judicial approval and data expiration, but I don't think the systems should be active until those rules are enacted.
From Justice Sotomayor's concurring opinion in US v. Jones:
'“cases involving even short-term monitoring … require particular attention” because the “Government can store such records and efficiently mine them for information years into the future …. GPS monitoring is cheap … proceeds surreptitiously, [and] it evades the ordinary checks that constrain abusive law enforcement practices: ‘limited police resources and community hostility.'” Id. at *11. Justice Sotomayor expressed concerns that the Government’s use of such technology might chill “associational and expressive freedoms,”'
Why is it so hard to understand this? Five years ago on HN stories like this would collect comments with general revulsion to this sort of surveillance. Today there is a troubling sentiment that "we can't have a society without unlimited time history of every person's movements available for scrutiny."
> Five years ago on HN stories like this would collect comments with general revulsion to this sort of surveillance.
I'm super skeptical that this is actually true. In fact, I'm pretty sure it isn't, and you're just projecting your own positions on "HN of five years ago".
Most people on HN are highly networked with Big Tech which depends on surveillance data. Without it, their jobs and careers vanish. Defending surveillance doesn't come from a place of reason, it comes from a place of ignorance and fear.
It's funny how your, and the other sibling replies, all got downvoted without anyone refuting it. They know you're right, they're just angry about being called out.
Although I agree with your sentiment on data privacy, I don't know where you live but in the United States this is a gross [and potentially dangerous] overgeneralization of a million+ hard-working officers who committed their lives to your safety in spite of regularly encountering life-threatening situations.
Being a police officer doesn't even rank in the top 10 most dangerous jobs in America. Loggers, fishers, roofers, and delivery drivers all face higher fatality rates according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
The Supreme Court explicitly ruled in Castle Rock v. Gonzales (2005) that police have no constitutional duty to protect citizens from harm, effectively nullifying the "committed their lives to your safety" claim.
These "million+ hard-working officers" actively maintain the corrupt system by refusing to hold their colleagues accountable. The "few bad apples" theory falls apart when entire departments and unions systematically protect officers who abuse their power.
American police have earned their reputation through decades of documented misconduct, militarization, and resistance to meaningful reform. The institution works exactly as designed.
This made me remember a news story out of Mississippi last year of hundreds of graves behind a jail with no accountability of whose body is placed there.
It only came to light after much struggle from people searching for missing family members. Basically people in police or jail custody who died were dumped in there under a blanket assumption that no family had claimed them, but no attempts to notify or find family members was made.
That's what the ruling implies, yeah. The response to the Uvalde school shooting bears that out. Police get all the power and none of the responsibility.
In a legal sense, yes. That police can't be held legally liable if they fail to protect someone from harm. They might lose their job, if their boss actually cares about officers putting their lives on the line to protect people, but they are under no obligation to do that. And in practice, most won't ever punish an officer for failing to protect someone when they could have done so.
Personal experiences don't override statistics or legal precedent. I don't need to "hang out" with officers to understand the well documented patterns of police misconduct or the Supreme Court rulings about their lack of duty to protect citizens.
The "just meet some nice cops" argument is precisely how institutions avoid accountability for systemic problems. Individuals, and how nice they might be, are irrelevant when discussing institutional failures.
And yet you're letting your own personal experiences override statistics, yourself? What's the prevalence rate of abuses of power among law enforcement officers?
"Well-documented patterns of abuse" are not statistics! But, if I'm mistaken and they are, please let me know what percentage of police officers engage in abuse of power in their career. I'd love to see those kinds of statistics!
Allowing cops to get away with abuses is also an abuse. So, for example, if a cop murders a citizen and gets away with it, not only is it that cop that has abused their position of authority, but every other cop at that precinct who knows what happened is abusing their position of authority.
I'm not sure that sort of thing is something you can tie up neatly into a bow and present as some set of statistics. But it's a phenomenon that's very real.
This is yet another deflection. If you cannot do anything other than wave away your lack of evidence, I'm forced to conclude that you actually have no idea what you're talking about.
Tons of people have seen things they can't explain, and are convinced that ghosts and the supernatural exist. Those phenomena are "very real" to those folks, too.
To be clear, I agree that police abusing their power is a "real phenomenon", in the sense that it certainly happens. But until you can provide ample evidence that these behaviors are thing a significant minority of police officers take part in, then your generalizing them to all police officers is just about as "real" as ghosts.
I don't care if they're "good people" individually. Every atrocity in every history book was committed by "good people" working together (though people tend to obscure that either for comfort or because they want to repeat history). The system is rotten.
Well, you should. Saying "cops are thugs" because some cops are thugs is no different (morally speaking) than saying "black people are criminals" because some black people are criminals. It's wrong to judge an entire diverse group of people by the actions of a few, period.
Cops have the protection of the law and a government granted mandate for violence. They're not a bunch of individuals deciding to act in a particular way. They operate in a system that will protect them for thuggish behaviour. If they happen to be "nice people" as individuals, they still have the option to be a thug without penalty. They still choose to implicitly support wide spread inequality and consequence free violence.
If, as an individual citizen, I'm aware of a serious crime being committed, I have an obligation to report it. If a "good" police officer has knowledge of crimes committed by "bad" police officers and they don't report it, then they are no longer a "good" police officer.
They are categorically thugs. It is literally their job to enforce literally anything with up to lethal violence. It is dressed up in due process and whatnot but it is still thuggery. The difference between, idk cops in France or whatever, and cartel enforcers or a medieval lord's men at arms is mostly one of process, available money and social norms.
A non-criminal black person has no control or responsibility over a random criminal black person.
A police officer absolutely can speak up, speak out, and blow the whistle when one of their fellow officers does awful things. But most will just keep their mouths shut and help (actively or passively) with whatever coverup the institution decides is appropriate.
We're not talking about guilt by association, here. We're talking about guilt by failing to speak up; their silence makes them complicit.
you're right i have changed my opinions about my father, my brothers, my cousins, and many of my friends, because of a hacker news dismantling. i have now realized they are of course statistically thugs who have no interest in protecting citizens.
My cousin successfully sued because he suffered constant racist treatment and was passed over for several promotions that went to less qualified and less experienced white men. He subsequently had to move out of the county because the harassment only escalated after he quit. I'll be sure to let him know that he just ran into a few bad apples, but for some reason he was not keen to try again elsewhere.
I know some cops in Seattle PD who routinely refer to people in the (minority) communities they police as "subhuman scum" and wish they wouldn't have so many limitations of use of force.
They seem to be doing pretty well career-wise, too, so it seems that this is not an uncommon sentiment there.
It's also funny to me that police apologists use the "few bad apples" theory, when the full saying is "a few bad apples can spoil the barrel". The saying is about how having a few bad people will usually corrupt the rest.
And the "circling the wagons" phenomenon you mention is exactly an example of this. The so-called "good cops" rarely speak up when their colleagues are doing horrible things. It's disgusting. Those who are silent are complicit.
Consider that the guys entire management chain was involved in the attempt to forcibly institutionalize him, and numerous rank and file police officers as well. And not a single one of them spoke in his defense.
Based on this anecdote, what would you say the ratio of good vs bad cops is in NYPD?
THe "thin blue line" that keeps otherwise good cops from snitching on bad cops is the whole issue. You won't go far as a cop if your intention is to root out corruption.
Did you know, in the US it is possible to be overqualified to be a cop, if you are too smart? The system wants jackbooted thugs, rather than intelligent policing.
I don't think some larger system wants cops ignorant, as much as it's the dynamics of corrupt self-preservation.
If corrupt sheriff Moe Carpaio is accepting bribes or selling drugs out of the evidence locker, Moe needs to hire juniors who are less likely to blow the whistle. Much of that involves in trapping them into the perpetuating cycle of crime, and that's easier when they don't have lots of other employment options.
It's frankly disgusting how many people in this thread are willing to embrace prejudice as soon as it's prejudice against a group they don't like. Turns out that the lesson people learned from years of social pressure to not pick on minorities wasn't "prejudice is wrong", but rather "ok we can pick on groups but just not these ones".
We shouldn't pick on minorities because the attributes that make them a minority have nothing to do with anything worthy of scorn or... well, anything negative at all.
Police extensively abuse their power, and even the so-called "good" cops rarely speak up against their fellow officers when they do awful things. It's not prejudice to state established facts and patterns of behavior.
it's that any cop can access your location history for any reason, at any time, with no scrutiny
Surely that's the problem to resolve? We could make it as ethically unacceptable for the police to look up irrelevant private records as it is for someone in the medical profession to do so, and fire people for misuse of these tools (indeed, in my country police officers do get fired for this sort of thing).
If we haven't managed to stop them brutalizing and killing unethically yet, then I don't think we'll stop them violating privacy unethically any time soon.
I'm a volunteer court observer for DV court and some days it feels like half of the cases are someone misusing state surveillance tools to stalk or abuse women. The victims are almost always women. The abusers aren't always cops, probably a slight majority of them are other workers with access to these systems. I don't find out what happens to them afterwards but I never seem to hear about police getting fired for this.
What's the bias I don't really understand. That I only see the ones that get caught and had a victim willing to show up in court over it? So this is actually probably a much bigger issue than I think it is?
Only cases with easy to prove paper trails are worth taking to court, straightforward cases where the result is all but guaranteed get settled outside court, etc, etc.
Not sure how that refute the GP's point. You're just saying that what the GP has seen is a smaller part of all the bad stuff that really happens. Which they acknowledged.
My point is don't draw conclusions from what you see in court. Just because probate court is packed doesn't mean most heirs can't figure it out amicably.
Just because you're seeing the cases that create prosecutable paper trails doesn't mean anything about what fraction of that type of crime they are.
> it's that any cop can access your location history for any reason
This requires the assumption that your location and your car's location are always one and the same.
If you care about your privacy consider leaving the vehicle with tracking numbers on it at home sometimes. It's not just cops that have ALPRs and you cannot prevent this technology from existing.
I’m sorry, is the proposal here that you remove your legally-required number plates and travel that way (in which case Flock’s “vehicle DNA” feature recognition will quickly reidentify you), or that you buy or rent other cars? I guess starting and ending somewhere other than your home?
Or did you have a different mode of travel in mind that compares favorably to wheeled transportation on public streets?
Billions of people all over this planet take trips every day without the use of personal private automobiles.
It's fascinating how, to me, my comment was very clearly "don't use a car if you care about privacy" but that interpretation didn't even occur to you. Car dependency runs deep.
While billions of people do operate without cars (I’m one of them!), I feel like there’s a conditionality kind of constraint here: of the set of people who would normally be operating cars on local US arterial roads—that is, of the set of people whose privacy this technology impacts in the first place—what proportion seem likely (or able) to do whatever privacy-implicated things they need or want to do without said cars?
If it doesn't already exist, it should be pretty simple to build the software so that a hobbyist can point a cheap camera at the road outside his window and record every license plate passing by.
You can ban cops from doing it, I guess, but I think someone will record all public spaces quite soon. I don't love it either...
Then don't make the 3rd party a for profit private company. Make it a new branch of the government. Make it part of the DoT or which ever company is responsible for collecting taxes in your locale. Intra agency operations would still be possible while removing direct access to LEOs. If you want your own information, pay your $25 type fees after proving who you are for printing/research/etc that are typical when requesting official gov't records. If you're another gov't agency, provide the warrant granting access to civilian records.
We already do that. Government has strict firewalls to access DMV data, so DMVs sell the stream of data to various parties, and the government buys it back from the third party or any non-police purpose.
A company like ID.me basically performs a function that any state government could do itself or through a contractor at lower cost and without the privacy issues of providing the data to third parties.
The law has failed us here - privacy attorneys basically focus on providing notification on a “take it or leave it” basis.
> Then don't make the 3rd party a for profit private company. Make it a new branch of the government.
Who is this directed at? The company wasn't started as a branch of government. What exactly are you proposing? That the government create its own network of cameras for surveillance? Have government-created solutions never been abused by law enforcement in the past?
The argument is not that this theoretical 3rd party would be a for-profit company, but that there's already existing for-profit companies that exist and could serve that purpose, and that the new 3rd party wouldn't see much use because of that.
They almost certainly are willing to buy hordes of data off of google/facebook/etc.; it's useful data that they're already negotiating to get. Why, then, would they be want to put in the effort for a warrant on cctv footage when the suspect's google search and maps history they're alreaty getting contain the same info and more? At best, your creating a small amount of competition for data brokers, and I question if it's that much.
Not to mention we have constitutional restrictions on what law enforcement can do, in recognition that such abuse has been a problem even hundreds of years ago.
Generally agree with what you said, but "Cops are known to be abusive, violent thugs" is a terrible thing to say completely unqualified like that.
If you don't understand why, consider that crime rates are known to be higher among the black population in the US but generalizing that to "black people are known to be abusive, violent thugs" would be equally wrong and hateful. You can make a point about the potential for abuse without name-calling an entire group of people like that.
That's exactly why I didn't use Republicans as an example; because I know there's lots of people on the Democrat side who consider that perfectly acceptable rhetoric as long as it's not targeting them.
I maintain that this sort of vitriolic language is unacceptable no matter what group it's targeting, unless your goal is to start a flame war (or a real war) rather than actually solve problems.
So your position is that it's also unacceptable to say "cartel members are violent, abusive thugs"? I don't think I agree with that.
I do think it's a bit strong to say police are all violent, abusive thugs.
But there are many police officers who share unfortunate characteristics with violent, abusive thugs, and nearly all of their fellow supposedly-good officers are unwilling to call them out and enforce any sort of consequences for being violent, abusive thugs. That's nearly as bad, in my book.
So maybe let's stop policing (heh) people's specific language, and instead talk about the actual issues.
Well for one thing, I don't think "starting a war" against the cartels would necessarily be a bad idea.
And my concern isn't with the language used, but the casually hateful attitude being expressed. It's not constructive, and probably actively harmful to just be casually demonizing your neighbors like that.
Great question! I wouldn't call it acceptable (thought it sure seems to be widely accepted), but I would argue it's certainly not equally bad. Put differently: I take issue with your specific example but agree with your larger point.
I think bringing race into it conflates separate issues. On the other hand, I really like the "cartel members" vs "[opposing political party]" example! It feels like these obviously shouldn't be equally bad, but explaining why is harder than I expected...
> Generally agree with what you said, but "Cops are known to be abusive, violent thugs" is a terrible thing to say completely unqualified like that.
That's true, it should be qualified “within a subculture of violent thuggery, in organizations which lack any unifying focus other than the application of force, and which both protect them from and are themselves insulated from effective accountability for abuses.”
"Black people are abusive, violent thugs, within a subculture of violent thuggery, in cities which lack..."
Maybe a bit better, but you're still overgeneralizing in order to demonize an entire group of people.
If you want to talk about systemic issues in our policing system, then talk about those issues. Calling people groups derogatory names isn't constructive.
And honestly, given the struggles police forces in the US are having with staffing, it does appear that cops are becoming increasingly marginalized. Especially since the primary driver behind the decline in recruitment seems to be the risk of social stigmatization.
Or maybe there's something to the idea of police being a corrupt, rotten profession, full of people who either a) do violent, thuggish things, b) help cover up the abuses, or c) stand by quietly, too cowardly to ensure the awful ones among them face consequences for what they've done.
I think police as a job, as it currently exists, absolutely should be socially stigmatized. They have the ability to clean up their act, and show that they are worthy of the power and authority we give them, but they choose not to.
Or maybe people like you just hate authority and will always portray anyone in positions of authority as being corrupt?
Except if it was you in charge, of course?
Like I asked you in a different reply: what's the prevalence rate of these bad behaviors? "Full of people" seems to imply that you think it's a majority? I can confidently state that you cannot back this up with evidence, because it appears the only evidence you have is anecdotal, and likely anecdotes you actively select for in order to feed your confirmation bias.
I'll note that you didn't answer my question, either. Coordinated deflection like this is not a sign that you have a well-formed argument
define "anecdote" as it pertains to your argument - because i have literally hundreds of videos of police misconduct, from just 2020-2022. I stopped collecting them because i can't move the needle.
here's where people go "oh but there's 800,000+ uniformed law enforcement in the US, and you have 100 videos, big whoop". How many videos would it take? We've only been able to really easily record the police doing misconduct for 15-20 years, depending on how you parse "easily record." So how many videos would it take? And of those videos, how many would i have to listen to someone say "the victim of police misconduct should have just [...]"?
How many lawsuits against cities and departments would you need to read before it made a dent?
because using mean words to talk about the police isn't punching down. There's a difference between punching down on marginalized groups, compared to speaking against / badly about authority figures.
That doesn't really answer the question. Perhaps I should rephrase:
You were replying to someone who stated this, I believe:
> Maybe a bit better, but you're still overgeneralizing in order to demonize an entire group of people.
To which you responded:
> Cops aren't a marginalized group.
Why does being a marginalized group matter in this context? Why does not being a "marginalized group" mean it's okay to overgeneralize and/or demonize? What is a "marginalized group" in this context? Why is one not allowed to overgeneralize and demonize a marginal group, but one is allowed to for groups that do not hold this status?
The more meta question is: Why is overgeneralizing in order to demonize a group of people acceptable in any circumstance? I don't think it is, because once you start carving out exceptions, all you end up doing is just justifying and reinforcing your own biases.
Nope, doesn't clear anything up. Redeclaring your statement doesn't really answer any questions that arose from your original statement.
I still have these questions: What is a marginalized group, and why is that important? Why does being an "authority figure" mean it's okay to overgeneralize?
You're declaring these to be important factors in whether or not it's "okay" to overgeneralize specifically for the purposes of demonizing an entire population. I'm arguing that generalizing like this is never acceptable. In fact, I'm arguing that doing this is actively harmful to the goal you ostensibly are serving by demonizing this group in particular (unless you have ulterior motives, I suppose).
You have yet to explain why it's acceptable, and what makes it acceptable. Further, you should explain why overgeneralizing like this is useful, and how it actually furthers your goal.
Actually, I'm not sure what your goal is, other than to spread hate?
this is a really poor comparison. mentioning crime rates by race is considered highly racist because it's a dog-whistle to frame it as "this person is more likely to do this because of their race" instead of framed in a socioeconomic context and the result of long-term systemic racism and oppression.
cops are not a race. cops have extremely high levels of problematic behavior across all ages, races, etc. it's a good thing to call out the problematic nature of cops as a group since they have a literal monopoly on violence and are massively unaccountable for the use of that violence.
the argument "you can't call black people violent, therefore you also can't call cops violent" makes absolutely no sense to me
There's a difference between "black people in x city are y% more likely per capita to commit violent crime" and "black people are violent thugs". One is a statistical reality that can be used in a constructive context. ("Okay, so what can we do to reduce this crime rate? Better education? Community outreach? Etc.") the other is probably just bigotry.
The same goes for the difference between "Police departments in the US have y% higher rate of excessive use of force than other countries" and "police are violent thugs".
No black person chooses to be born black. Casting judgement on any individual black person for the actions of other black people is unethical for that reason.
Every single cop chose to be there, chooses to continue being a cop every day despite constant and repeated examples of blatant corruption, bad behavior, literal thuggery, planting evidence, and the Good Ol' Boys network endemic to the institution. They are culpable for that choice. Continuing to be a cop in this environment (specifically where there is zero chance to "reform it from the inside" due to structural problems). Ask any ex-cop why they left. The system is completely broken and designed to empower cops to be thugs without consequence.
"Good cops" don't stay cops because they get bullied by literal cop gangs to either become a bad cop and do thuggery or to get the fuck out. There are no Good cops.
> No black person chooses to be born black. Casting judgement on any individual black person for the actions of other black people is unethical for that reason.
Casting judgement on any individual for the actions of other individuals who share characteristics with them is generally unethical, period. The individual's ability to choose the particular identifying characteristics shouldn't be relevant.
I'm pretty sure you don't want to be making the argument that it's ethical to judge people based on elements of their identity, so long as those elements have been selected by that person's choice!
> I'm pretty sure you don't want to be making the argument that it's ethical to judge people based on elements of their identity, so long as those elements have been selected by that person's choice!
That's a strange argument to make. If the chosen identity element is associated with negative characteristics, then it stands to reason that it's, well, reasonable to judge them based on those characteristics.
If it quacks, it's probably a duck. If it wears a police uniform it probably a) does bad stuff, b) enables cover-ups of that bad stuff, or c) lacks the courage to speak out against the bad stuff. This isn't because of their identity, it's because this is a characteristic that is widely documented to be incredibly common among cops.
People can choose to not adopt identity elements that have bad reputations. People can't choose not to be black.
So, someone who chooses to undergo gender reassignment therapy can be judged based on the characteristics of all people who have made the same choice?
Someone who chooses to wear heavy makeup and revealing clothing while standing on the street waiting for their Uber can be fairly judged to be a prostitute?
I don't think this is the argument you're making, but this is how the standard you are setting can be applied.
I don't think the element of choice in identity elements makes a difference either way. I think you should just avoid overgeneralizing, period.
Instead of, you know, inventing reasons why is fine to overgeneralize when you want to, but not when you don't want others to.
> If it wears a police uniform it probably a) does bad stuff, b) enables cover-ups of that bad stuff, or c) lacks the courage to speak out against the bad stuff.
"Probably"? Based on what prevalence rate? What percentage of police officers engage in each of these behaviors? You're making a wild assumption here, likely with nothing more than your own anecdotal understanding of these issues.
I think it's more likely you just have a media diet that is high in examples of these behaviors happening, but without the context that explains exactly how often they're actually happening.
I'm not denying that these things happen, and happen frequently! But there are a lot of police officers in the US alone, and even 1% of them doing each of these things is a large number of absolute cases. But a rate of 1% isn't sufficient to generalize to the entire population. At a rate of 10%, I would probably still refrain from extrapolating to the whole, but would start to question individual interactions, and would start to be sympathetic to this kind of generalization.
But due to the lack of evidence around prevalence of bad behavior, I'm skeptical of anyone who generalizes to this degree, especially given the poor quality of information anecdotally collected from the Internet.
> People can choose to not adopt identity elements that have bad reputations. People can't choose not to be black.
If people never adopt identity elements that have bad reputations, how can those reputations ever be improved? If you want the quality of policing to improve, the last thing your want to do is convince everyone who wants to make a difference that they shouldn't even try. If you want policing to improve, you should be encouraging the best people you know to join up and to force out the bad behavior through reform.
People cannot choose to be black, but they can choose to make an effort to destroy the negative stereotypes associated with their race.
You seem to be arguing that generalizations are always externally imposed and immutable, neither of which is true. Your argument is actively damaging to any efforts to improve the perceptions of both groups.
People don’t choose to have gender dysphoria, and you can’t judge someone for receiving healthcare to manage their well-being. If you want to make the argument that gender affirming care isn’t healthcare then kindly don’t respond because I’m not trying to invite hate and transphobia.
I really cannot be bothered to respond to the rest of this because you’re starting from a place of not being familiar enough with this topic at all for this to be a meaningful exchange. I really hope you make time to educate yourself better on this topic and do so with an open mind and compassion
> People don’t choose to have gender dysphoria, and you can’t judge someone for receiving healthcare to manage their well-being.
I phrased what I said much more precisely than this. I said nothing about gender dysphoria, and was instead specifically talking about a therapy one might choose to undergo as treatment. Medical treatments should always be a choice, right?
But no, instead you decide to completely misrepresent what I said, and used then use that single misrepresentation as basis to dismiss my entire argument.
You claim to want a meaningful exchange, but this is how you choose to do it? This makes me skeptical you're interested in "meaningful exchange" in the first place.
Always, before making generalising statements like this, ask yourself: Would I think it's okay if the word was replaced with another, in this case, say "blacks"? And then you'll probably see that you shouldn't talk like that.
I think this is a pretty terrible litmus test for the "okayness" of a statement. There are plenty of reasons one word might make lots of sense in a statement, while another would absolutely not. For example: estimates of the prevalence of domestic violence perpetrated by police officers in the US range as high as 40%. This is an objectively true statement. Replacing 'police officers' with, say, 'kindergarten teachers' produces a statement which is NOT objectively true.
Are you familar with the concept of "omitted variable bias"? This paper only takes it up once (AFAICT), but there's a pretty critical variable that they otherwise generally ignore:
> Once socioeconomic status was considered, the results failed to indicate racial differences between the offending but not arrested drivers and the arrested drivers.
As far as I've seen, there is not a similar explanatory factor with the statistic I've cited.
You cherry-picked one sentence that supports your position out of an entire paper that repeatedly makes the case (with ample evidence!) that race is a meaningful factor in the rates of various types of crime (mostly violent crime). You also picked the one example that's referring to a non-violent crime (drunk driving), when the GP was specifically highlighting violent crime. The rest of the paper continues to make his point, and it's clearly been examined a large number of ways but a ton of highly-motivated people. The burden of putting forth a better explanation is much larger than "one sentence I picked out of a paper that reviews dozens of papers that contradict my explanation".
I don't think this is an "omitted variable bias" thing. This is a "confirmation bias" thing on your part.
Every paper I have ever seen on the subject has concluded that controlling for SES explains racial variation in crime rates. This paper touched on it in one location but otherwise didn’t bring it up, so that’s the part I mentioned here. Feel free to check around and see what you can find, I’ve got better things to do on a Friday night.
I really don't understand what that's supposed to explain, then. Your explanation doesn't change the overall data: some racial demographics are overrepresented in violent crime statistics. If controlling for socioeconomic status eliminates the racial variation, all that really says is that the demographics that are overrepresented in the violent crime statistics are the same demographics that are overrepresented among lower socioeconomic statuses.
So... There's a correlation between lower socioeconomic status and violent crime? I don't think that's surprising. What it does not do is explain why those demographics are overrepresented in either category.
I also am highly skeptical of "every paper", unless you're specifically going out of your way to only read the ones that confirm your bias.
I think you're missing the point. If, when we control for socioeconomic status, we find that there's little to no difference in crime rates between races, then what that means is that, while yes, we can factually say "black people commit more crimes than white people", we cannot say that it's intrinsic in "being black" to commit more crimes.
That is what "$GROUP is a bunch of violent thugs" implies: that members of that group are intrinsically more likely to be violent and thuggish than other type of people, specifically because of the trait that $GROUP embodies. That statement does not hold true for black people, but I believe it does for police.
It's important to understand the root causes of things. Black people commit more crimes, because black people are overrepresented when it comes to lower socioeconomic status, because of century-spanning systemic racism and the reduced opportunities that brings.
Police tend to be more violent and thuggish because the profession selects for people who want to have (and inevitably abuse) power over others, and because it's systemically set up as an institution to enable that behavior and not hold members accountable for it.
I would hope from those two descriptions it's reasonable to say that one group's failings come from a sympathetic cause that is often out of their control, and the other group's failings are intentional and by design.
> I think you're missing the point. If, when we control for socioeconomic status, we find that there's little to no difference in crime rates between races, then what that means is that, while yes, we can factually say "black people commit more crimes than white people", we cannot say that it's intrinsic in "being black" to commit more crimes.
But we cannot say that it's not intrinsic, either! All we can tell is that there's a correlation between "being black" and "being poor". Like the person I was responding to pointed out: there's the potential for a hidden variable that connects these two things. Alternatively, one causes the other. Given the available evidence, it does not seem clear that the arrow of causality points in either direction.
This is the point that you're missing. You assume that "being poor" causes people to be "more violent", when it's equally plausible that being "more violent" causes people to be "more poor".
And if being "more violent" is something that is intrinsic to certain demographic groups, then the latter interpretation would fully explain the overrepresentation in both lower socioeconomic classes and in rates of violent crime.
I fully agree that there has been systemic racism that contributes to lower socioeconomic status for some racial demographics. However, I refuse to accept that as the only explanation for those same demographics being highly overrepresented in violent crime statistics. This is not a simple problem with a two-dimensional answer. The "systemic racism" argument may be necessary, but it is not sufficient, because it attempts to remove any kind of agency those same demographics have over their own behavior, culture, and identity.
This is both wildly disempowering and enabling. You're essentially excusing every individual in that demographic from the consequences of their violent criminal actions by putting the blame entirely outside their control, which is bullshit.
> I don't think there should be an expectation of anonymity for the specific case of operating a car on a public road.
Technology allows surveillance at scale, and that attacks privacy in a new and deeply unintuitive direction.
In the pre-information era, people still didn't have a reasonable expectation of privacy in public, in that everything they did could be noted. However, that notice was far from automatic, and people were only remembered if they were memorable. That could happen from doing something or appearing out of the ordinary, or it could happen from specific interest (e.g. being followed).
Nowadays, the surveillance is automatic, and hard drives don't forget. The technology allows aggregators to answer retrospective questions about the target's ordinary behaviour. People now need be concerned about how their actions today will be viewed weeks, months, or years from now if they later attract scrutiny.
This technology is here today for cars and license plates, but it's only a matter of scale before it's applied to pedestrians with face, gait, or other individual recognition modalities. We don't have the social scripts to properly deal with it.
> Part of Flock’s proprietary tech determines the make and model of the vehicle and also notes if there are bumper stickers, bike racks, any other unique markings that would help identify that vehicle. That generates a “vehicle fingerprint” for every car or truck, which none of the agencies I FOIA’d would provide me.
Fingerprinting gets into unlike-at-scale.
At this point, we're not just talking about license plates but obvious tracking.
Yeah; the risk was lower because the implementation costs were higher.
Take a speeding ticket, for example. If the fine is $400, it's created with the knowledge that it'll only be triggered occasionally, and it's created as a deterrent. If I speed 50 times and get caught one time, I pay $400. If you setup a bunch of speed cameras all over town, the fine should go down to have the same impact.
Instead municipalities have been known to tweak whatever variables they can to maximize their fees collected. In the city I live in, they illegally put speed cameras too soon after a speed change. The city fought against it and won, so the cameras stayed where they are. There is a 5mph drop right before one of the speed cameras and the road jumps up 10mph shortly after. This creates dangerous highway situations where locals aware of the cameras speed up to the camera point, slam on their brakes, and then speed off again after. There is no reason other than revenue for the speed to drop like that on a highway for such a short and straight section without abnormal entrances and exits.
Throw in red light camera setups where they reduce the yellow lights to dangerous levels for everyone in order to collect more fees despite longer yellow light times being one of the most effective ways to prevent collisions in intersections.
> Technology allows surveillance at scale, and that attacks privacy in a new and deeply unintuitive direction.
Technology also allows for influencing the world at scale, and that attacks a lot of assumptions about what is "public" and "private" in new and deeply unintuitive directions, as well.
The cameras are central to the privacy aspect, not the cars.
A car can be identified by its plates, while a pedestrian can be identified by their face or other features. Perhaps not today by some legal or technical difficulty, but the infrastructure to do so is in place.
There is a reasonable expectation of privacy in public places. One might not reasonably expect that one's photograph should not be taken in public, but one may reasonably expect not to have one's every move recorded, profiled, indefinitely stored and shared with various third parties, or to have one's every conversation on the phone or with other people recorded with sophisticated cameras or sensors, and for that to be attached to one's detailed profile.
What is described is a surveillance state, which anyone who values some degree of personal freedom will reasonably object to. The installment of sophisticated cameras capable of tracking one's movement throughout an entire country provides the means for such surveillance state, and should be strongly objected by anyone who values one's personal freedom.
Those in favor of such installment for the facilitation of criminal persecution should at the very least require strong guarantees about its usage, such as storage limits and regular public audits of such implementation, closed circuits instead of publicly networked solutions, etc, and strongly oppose any arrangements that do not fulfill stringent privacy requirements. Unfortunately I am yet to see any real person advocate for this with any real political strength.
I'm all for automated traffic law enforcement via camera, but I think it's very reasonable to say that if the camera doesn't detect a violation of the law, the data needs to be deleted not warehoused.
I personally agree, but there has to be a time frame allowed...
e.g. cameras at an intersection that had an accident: It probably would take 'a day or two' at least for such a request to get to the camera operators to request they send a copy.
I'd also personally prefer speed cameras that are not point-in-time records. This just encourages police to put them where they know people are more likely to violate the law, like at the bottom of hills, where there's not really a danger, but it generates more revenue.
I'd want speed cameras that are miles apart... and the determination that you get a speeding ticket is that you traveled several miles at high speed.
> I'd want speed cameras that are miles apart... and the determination that you get a speeding ticket is that you traveled several miles at high speed.
> This just encourages police to put them where they know people are more likely to violate the law, like at the bottom of hills, where there's not really a danger, but it generates more revenue.
Judging by the number of accidents I've seen at the bottom of hills, I'm skeptical of your statement that "there's not really a danger" there.
I don't think posting up at the bottom of a hill is a revenue-generating thing, it's simply an exercise of going to where the crime happens. In this case, it's at the bottom of a hill that makes it easier for drivers to reach excessive speeds and thus are an increased danger to everyone else on the road.
This is exactly where you want to deter people from behaving dangerously, and where you want to punish the people who fail to pay enough attention to avoid getting a ticket in such an obvious scenario.
So you would be against storing the data for a few days so if a non-traffic crime is detected later (a murder for example), the traffic recordings can be used to help in the investigation? I think that's useful too.
Yes. As soon as the automated traffic enforcement purpose is done with (the car wasn't speeding/wasn't running a red/so on) the data should be deleted.
If the police reach the data before it's deleted after they know it may have evidence of a crime that's ok (realistically this is rare, but I can imagine it happening with paired cameras that measure speed over a long distance of road. You could also get lucky where a false positive image happened to capture a different crime), but we shouldn't be storing surveillance data that tracks everyone's movements on the off chance that it has evidence of a crime. The harm outweighs the use at that point.
Public surveillance should come with certain guarantees, though. Like being transparent about what data is collected and how/where it's stored. And purging the data after a fixed time unless it's involved in a case.
I think that's more of a technicality of billing you for a service than something by design
("the tap on - tap off Oyster/Presto card " => Google sent me to "List of public transport smart cards" so I assume you're refering to some branded public transit system)
No, it's not a side-effect, it's a deliberate decision. You used to be able to get an Oyster card anonymously and top it up with cash. I still have one, but they are not accepted now.
Thank you. It seems like I was misinformed. Last time I was in London my old Oyster card wouldn't work and I was told I couldn't top it up (which is probably true) and I couldn't get a new card without ID (which seems to be false).
Presto is Toronto’s equivalent to London’s oyster card.
Actually there’s no tap off IIRC (unlike the Dutch chipkaarts) but still, I would assume the modern station where you enter is a veritable panopticon of CCTV, RF signal interception, etc
The great thing about democracy is that we can debate subtleties and choose a path between extremes.
So we can say that while the extremes of this argument are either total surveillance or no surveillance at all, we can instead opt for a more balanced approach. We can recognize that guaranteeing privacy in public or when using a publicly provided service is silly, but also that some forms of automation and data mining elevate simple observations into a level of surveillance that we are not comfortable with.
I'm not confortable with a tradeoff, we saw during the pandemic how many amongst us are closeted authoritarians and i don't trust them to choose freedom over safety as per the founding principles of the USA
The problem is that they do all this but don't use the cameras to enforce speed limits or red lights. We get all the surveillance but none of the road safety.
You can watch me in public and you can even record things like my license plate number if you like.
When you start following me around to all my destinations and making a detailed log of everything I do you are stalking me. That would be a crime if you did it physically. Why should it be different if you are doing it digitally?
Should be police be able to walk behind you down the street everywhere you go just waiting for infractions? What's the difference?
Sure. If you got a very well behaving (and systematically scrutinized) executive and a legal system that protects the rights of each individual.
The reason states shouldn't be given every power over their citizens just villy nilly is because power in a free society is given by the citizens. And if the state can target those indiscriminately without due process that is no longer the case.
So it can make sense to withold certain powers from the state, even if with trustworthy leadership and actors these powers would be useful to keep the people in the state safe. And that is because untrustworthy leadership can come around at any point and then you don't want to give them an operational surveillance structure that would have given any authoritarian in history the shivers.
It sounds like you have never needed to organize against a government which threatens your safety, or that you haven't found yourself engaging in any activities that were well-protected at the dawn of the US Constitution but are now considered to be felonious, whether for self-medication, as an act of protest, or as an act of survival.
This means that you have a lot to be grateful for, but your perspective is privileged and may not take into account that not every life is like yours. You don't feel the chains of oppression until you need to break them. I would recommend considering what kind of person might not benefit from mass surveillance in this current political climate where students are disappearing just for protesting against a religious genocide.
You could definitely argue that surveillance is inevitable as a technology; but the government is supposed to serve its people, and without strong guarantees of established freedoms and protection from the negative effects of mass surveillance, the people should not allow the government to engage in such surveillance. Especially not the dragnet style of surveillance that is common today, and especially in the wake of modern analysis tools where prejudice can be automated.
This is a great comment marred by the “students disappearing” statement. An earned but short jail sentence or deportation is quite distinct from a one-way ticket to the gulag, unfortunately implied.
But in general, corporate and state-sponsored surveillance of students and protestors goes back many decades, and we have seen enough witch hunts over things like Communism, Vietnam protestors, psychedelic users, etc. that we simply cannot allow our local, state and federal governments in their current shape to wield mass surveillance, because they will not do it ethically.
There has been though - it wasn't perfect, but there was the expectation that people generally forgot about enough that in practice you were private so long as you were not obvious. Now computers/cameras can store data on everyone as opposed to just people acting "abnormal".
That’s just simply incorrect. There are plenty of expectations of privacy in public. For example, it is illegal to look up a woman’s skirt, and it is illegal for police to arbitrarily search someone, etc.
Now, what is reasonably expected in public is less than what is reasonably expected in private, but it certainly isn’t zero privacy.
It is true that one might expect, if they are driving around, that someone might see them. But is it expected that they might sometimes be followed? Is it expected that they are always followed? Is it expected that everyone is followed and those locations are cataloged indefinitely for anyone to FOIA? These are all very different questions.
While technically correct, it also wasn’t possible to invade people’s privacy this discreetly at this scale.
It’s one thing for a subject of an active investigation to be tailed by a cop. It is an entirely different thing for the entire population of Roanoke to pass through what are essentially checkpoints logging your location a dozen or more times in a day.
I care less about public privacy than about how these things are also invading private spaces. Surveillance piggybacked on all the modern tech that we allowed into our homes.
There’s never been an expectation of our whereabouts and activities continuously recorded in detail and stored in perpetuity, for purchase and later use against us. Even the Stasi did not achieve surveillance to this extent.
This is the "scale invariant fallacy." When you're in public you can be casually observed by people or followed by police if they happen to be interested in you. And so therefore observing every person's movements in public 24/7 with perfect detail
and memory must be also okay like these aren't two very different things.
Scale can change the fundamental nature of a thing: walking down the street while being pissed as your government is one thing, but if you get 1000 friends to do it with you it's a march.
Most of the comments on this article regard the privacy of the individual against the police or other state authorities, but a main point in the article is that this license plate/vehicle fingerprinting data is public information subject to FOIA requests, and thus any citizen can use FOIA requests to track any other citizen. The article touches briefly on the implications of that for jealous lovers or people motivated to stalk others. That's a bit different from scrutinizing the operation of (potentially dangerous) vehicles on a public road. At some point US society really needs to have a debate about how FOIA and the surveillance state intersect.
That's part of my grievances against the urbanism of the U.S.A. When the only viable option to get around is cars, there is no privacy.
It's important to advocate for public places to be livable for everyone, not just drivers.