Police are using AI to pull over drivers for 'suspicious' behavior

In Tennessee, the first two offenses for improper display of license plate are $10 & $20 fines, respectively (but obviously this allows them to initiate a traffic stop; a younger-me couldn't afford this risk). In the past year+, a dozen officers have ignored my plateless transgressions.

This has the side-effect of encouraging me to obey most traffic laws more rigorously (e.g: I speed less, am generally less-aggressive).

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I am a middle-aged fat bald white dude in the US South – I'm practically invisible!

FYI: Halloween is officially "Drive without a License Plate Day" (to protest FLOCK cameras)

Courts have generally accepted proof of existence that is established by proper entries to robust distributed immutable ledgers.

More important than courts are the people. If someone many states over has a serious crime committed against them, and they want it to be known they have been wronged in some way, I and others have a moral right to know about it.

Those who know of an ill that has happened and choose to speak about it should be heard.

If someone provides testimony in the form of a video or a written statement, the files can be available over any medium such as torrent, R2 bucket, IPFS, what have you, but proof of existence on a blockchain for the authenticity aspect, "this exact thing identified by this sha512 hash submitted at this time" and unchangeable, is imperative.

The blockchain part is imperative so somebody can't "just go back and change something" post-facto.

If you want to see an example of a court action going a different way due to what was written to a robust distributed immutable ledger, do a web search for "Craig Wright is a fraud posted by private keys he said he owned".

That is the Satoshi Blockchain referenced to and swaying a court on a cosmic scale.

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>> A court could care less about blockchain hashes unless the society of lawyers and judges decide it is legitimate.

Facts are not determined by loose consensus decided by private societies. The standard is higher. Such private societies are also not a substitute for the legislature, nor could they be for determining a true fact.

Blockchains and their contents are rooted in math so they're not trivial to argue with. USA is rife with academia suitable to provide abundant expert witnesses for said math.

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>> A court could care less about blockchain hashes

In practice this would lead to the case being escalated to a higher court. Or worse a federal lawsuit could be filed against a judge, which is not unheard of.

Judges aren't cosmically ultimate arbiters, they take an oath and have a duty and like anyone else who does, they are subject to rules and regulations for which there are real consequences for failure to abide by.

See https://opentimestamps.org/

See the cases by/against Craig Wright who falsely claimed to be the originator of Bitcoin and not a mere contributor (and whether he made contributions that made a real impact is also in question). The Blockchain provided mathematical proof that Craig Wright is a fraud. The very private key Wright claimed to own was used to post on the Satoshi Blockchain: "Craig Wright is a fraud" which absolutely nuked Wright in court.

So, yes, in the biggest way possibly possible on a cosmic scale.

Proof of Existence has been used for evidence in courts for much less interesting things. It's been old news for a while now.

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>> "It's proof because I said it's proof, and you have to trust me on that mr judge"

This objectively tells everyone reading this you don't already comprehend what SHA256 and SHA512 are, which is what you should be embarrassed of.

Not the part that these hashes posted alongside filenames of their respective files on the Satoshi Blockchain has been used for real-world applications for over a decade, which you should have uncovered in a web search I suggested you do in my previous comment, which you obviously did not do.

It's fine, everyone has to start somewhere. And you learned something today, unless this discussion has rustled your jimmies such that this opportunity for your learning and improvement is self-blocked, which given this is "Hacker News" and not Facebook, and we are total strangers to each other, would be even more embarrassing...

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I will save this thread as a PDF and put the PDF's sha512 hash on the Satoshi Blockchain so that everyone for all eternity can know at around this time you posted dumb things in an arrogant manner on this thread.

You are living in a Blockchain era. This is how powerful Blockchains really are. Neat how that works innit.

Both for technology and law.

Illiteracy is rampant.

Critical thinking is oddly uncommon.

It's unfortunate and unsustainable.

I am aware that back a few years ago, 2018 iirc federal law was introduced which granted additional powers to law enforcement in regard to telecommunication equipment, though only skimming though the rules, but not greatly understood - I was left to assume if the device is discovered via a search, the law can view and copy data the device stores or accesses if they so desire.

I actually have an old pixel phone that given to me and has GrapheneOS ... but like the rest of my cheap phones, I only use them for phone calls, texts, photos, time piece, maybe once a year utilise GPS and a hotspot when the signal from the nearby towers are good enough to get some bandwidth. [Mobile networks as such that my usual location can be so iffy even receiving a simple sms in a timely manner can be a challenge]

- Their own list of third-party cookies [1] has a laundry list of those associated with personalized advertising across a variety of providers.

- ConsumerReports and Northeastern [2] found the car directly connecting to 34 advertising domains (with similar results from many other such investigations from other parties), not even bothering to filter it through Tesla servers.

And so on. This isn't a grand conspiracy. Privacy invasions are a big part of nearly every modern, large company. I'm not singling out Tesla in this instance. Repeating my claim, if the ToS bothers to say that your information is neither sold nor rented and the lawyer who drafted it didn't bother to include "sharing" in that promise, that omission was intentional approximately 100% of the time.

Good? Bad? You decide. It's happening though.

[0] https://www.tesla.com/legal/privacy#how-we-may-use-your-info...

[1] https://www.tesla.com/legal/cookies

[2] https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics/personal-informa...

This is not a personal story, not an anecdote. I'm reporting on a study that looked at incarceration rates for drug use vs the drug use itself.

Why is that important? Because the study itself is solid, and it shows that there is some sort of bias between police/policing and african-american communities.

Sure, maybe that bias doesn't show up in other areas like firearm-related crimes. Or: maybe it does, and we haven't yet figured out how. Or, maybe it plays an indirect role, further eroding the relationship between the AA communities and the police, gradually building up a mutual dynamic that subjects black people to an unhealthy chronic level of stress and despair and harassment while also "justifying" the prejudicial activities of the cops.

There are whole books written about this. But at a minimum, I can't imagine just brushing over a 4x higher arrest rate for the same level of crime. That's pretty damn big.

most of the violent crimes are from people with prior crimes, but the prior crimes themselves weren't necessarily violent, but just enough to marginalize that person from ability to participate in society with steady jobs

such as the possession of now-legalized substances, and the possession stop itself was based on flimsy pretexts that could have been fought, but it made more sense to take a plea-deal for that person or they were not aware of how to not engage with police and damned themselves without a lawyer present

"There is no such thing as liberalism — or progressivism, etc.

There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy actually exists; by the political analogue of Gresham’s Law, conservatism has driven every other idea out of circulation.

There might be, and should be, anti-conservatism; but it does not yet exist. What would it be? In order to answer that question, it is necessary and sufficient to characterize conservatism. Fortunately, this can be done very concisely."

[0] https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progre...

But of course now that the tech of choice is AI and it's threatening everyone's jobs and status it's a bad thing.

There's a lesson about people there.

Pardon? We know that encryption was used at least as far back as the days of Julius Caesar. [0] Clever kids and adults have almost certainly been making their own ciphers since the invention of written language, and their own conlangs since the invention of verbal language.

I expect that -in the US- one could not be compelled to provide the decryption methods for one's papers and journals to the cops back in the 1700s just like cannot be compelled to provide one's passphrase to decrypt one's encrypted data today. Both are really obviously testimony, which cannot be legally compelled. [1]

[0] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar_cipher>

[1] ...abuse of contempt of court charges notwithstanding...

Since you mentioned secondhand information, I think you might be thinking of hearsay.

Maybe this is me being naive?

For criminal law, prosecutors have to prove beyond reasonable doubt. If they have a gun, search history for "how to kill someone and get away with it", blood in their car, and someone that's been missing for an extended period of time. They can and have gotten convictions based on that. Hans Reiser was convicted under pretty much those circumstances.

Your fingerprint at a crime scene or DNA on a victim is circumstantial evidence. It is weaker evidence in court than hard evidence, but still valid.

This circumstantial evidence is more than sufficient to search your house or car and find a body (hard evidence).

I do have some sympathy for the cab drivers who used to be able to earn a better living, but the only reason that was possible is that city government gave them a sweetheart deal, which isn’t fair. It makes exactly as much sense as having barber medallions or pharmacist medallions. If they had those, it might cost $85 for a basic haircut, and pharmacist and barber medallion owners might make a ton of money (remember, you can rent out medallions, so they became investment vehicles), but those are prices we’d all be paying for.

Regulations that just pick winners and losers, making most of us the losers, are stupid - and should be loopholed-around if it’s possible.

>I don't believe you are actually asking this is good faith.

Well assume it, those are the rules.

Apprehending suspects is most certainly not the definition of a dragnet. This is precisely my point. Apprehending people indiscriminately is the definition of a dragnet. Stopping a specific person for something that isnt a crime may not be legal but its not a dragnet.